The blue helmet, p.12
The Blue Helmet,
p.12
“How so?”
“It’s a long story. Look, I want to start over,” I said. “But I want to pay my bills first, you know?”
“So you came here to be arrested. To turn yourself in.”
“If that’s what it takes, yeah.”
He lit a fresh cigarette off the old one, dropped the butt onto the pavement, and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. One of the pigeons strutted over to investigate. Stuffing the pack of smokes into his shirt pocket, Carpino looked me straight in the eye, his lips a thin line.
“I don’t know nothing about any assaults or a B and E,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
He stood and pointed toward the nearest intersection. “See that sign for the city bus?”
“Yeah.”
“When number 52 comes along, you get on it. It’ll take you right to the GO station.”
He turned and walked back along the street, toward the police station.
FOUR
ON THE SATURDAY OF the July 1 holiday weekend, I steered the tank into the driveway of the house on 13th Street, parked and locked it in the garage, and walked around to the front, carrying a bag of books I had picked up at the library. Clancy had gotten me onto the Rebus detective novels, and I was reading them in order.
Reena was sprawled on a chaise longue in the shade of the verandah, smoking and reading a movie magazine, a beer on the table beside her. Patch the One-Eyed Dog lay beside her snoring.
Cutter’s mailbox had been removed, the surveillance camera taken down, and the verandah freshly painted. Reena had put in a flower garden across the front of the house, with a cedar tree at each end. Patch peed on the trees whenever he could.
I mounted the steps, plunked my bag down on the table, and took a swig of her beer. It was icy cold.
“Ahh,” I said. “Boy, it’s hot out. Abe says we’re going to have a banger of a thunderstorm later.”
“Tell that to the hired help,” she said, waving toward my father.
He was on his hands and knees beside a wheelbarrow, smoothing the veins of new cement between sections of the flagstone path. His T-shirt and jeans were smeared with mortar. He had re-sodded the lawn and it stretched green and weedless to the sidewalk.
“Do you think he’ll ever stop working?” I asked.
“He’s never owned a house before,” she said. “He’s bubbling over with enthusiasm. Watching him makes me want to go and lie down for a while.”
“You are lying down,” I said.
“Good point.”
At the beginning of the summer I had gone to Lakshmi and asked her to transfer the house to my father’s name. When all the paperwork had been done, I had mailed it to him with a note saying, “Now you have to move to New Toronto.”
“Be patient,” Reena had advised me. “He’s a proud man. He has to get used to the idea of being given something.”
He had quit his job at the department store by then, but couldn’t tear himself away from the apartment where he and my mother and I had once been a family. It had taken a few weeks and a lot of phone calls, with Reena helping me nag, to persuade him to move to 13th Street. It wasn’t long before he found a job at a local garage. His old employer had given him a good reference.
Together, my father and I had repainted every room in the house. He moved into Cutter’s old bedroom, and I took the “crazy room,” after we had replaced the painted-over window and papered the walls. I had moved up the computer equipment I wanted and given the rest away. I held onto two of Cutter’s aluminum disks and hung them in my window, for old time’s sake. Cutter’s office was our living room. We kept the big TV, but got rid of the satellite dishes.
My father and Reena were pushing hard to get me to go back to school, but so far I had resisted. “I don’t have time,” I said. Which was true. The Lee Mercer Courier Service was busier than ever and I still helped Reena at the café. “Maybe I’ll take a correspondence course or something,” I told them, mostly to keep them off my back. But when I thought about it, it wasn’t such a bad idea.
I went inside the house, pulled a cold beer from the fridge and took it back to the verandah.
“Dad,” I called. “Time for a break.”
He stood, wiped his brow, dropped the trowel into the wheelbarrow, and joined my aunt and me. He was tanned from working outdoors and his eyes had lost their beaten-down look. He dropped into a chair, took a long pull from the bottle, and sighed.
“You know,” he said. “We oughtta plant perennials in the back yard. Less maintenance.”
“Annuals are better,” Reena said lazily.
While they argued good-naturedly, I sat on the steps and looked up and down 13th Street. Between the houses opposite I caught a glimpse of the lawns and maple trees in the big park that used to be a mental hospital, and I remembered Cutter telling me he liked to visit once in a while and commune with the ghosts of the patients who used to live there. He had gone to a violent, far-off place to make peace, and he had brought the war home with him, in his mind, a bloodless wound deeper than any bullet could go. I looked at our new grass and stone path, breathed in the odour of fresh paint, and tried to remember him, not as I had last seen him, but as the guy with racing cars on his pajamas and a stack of printouts in his filing cabinet, beside his blue helmet. My friend, who showed me that I had to face the war inside myself before I could find peace.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Blue Helmet is a work of fiction, and all characters are products of my imagination. Any resemblance to real persons is entirely coincidental. The firefight between Canadian UNPROFOR forces and elements of the Croatian army in the “Medak Pocket” on September 16,1993, is a matter of record. I have made certain changes in the details of that action and the subsequent events in order to serve .my narrative.
I found the following useful in researching background for this story:
Carol Off. The Ghosts of Medak Pocket. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004.
Lee A. Windsor. “The Medak Pocket.” www.cda-cdai.ca/library/medakpocket.htm
John R. Lampe. “Ethnic Politics and the End of Yugoslavia,” the final chapter of his Yugoslavia as History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Readers who are skeptical of Bruce Cutter’s reluctance to fire his weapon even in the heat of an attack are invited to consult Gwynne Dyer’s War, Toronto: Random House Canada, 2004, pp. 54–7, and pp. 5–39 of Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Toronto: Little, Brown, 1995.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to thank my publisher, Maya Mavjee, for supporting this project; my editor, Amy Black; and my friend and agent, John Pearce.
As always I am grateful to my support group, Dylan, Megan and Brendan Bell; and especially Ting-xing Ye for her encouragement and inspiration.
Special thanks to Sloba Golubovich-Bray for advice in cultural matters.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Bell’s young adult novels have been translated into nine languages and have won many awards, among them the Ruth Schwartz Award for Excellence, the Belgium Award for Excellence, the Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award, the Mr. Christie’s Award, and the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book of the Year Award. William Bell lives in Orillia, Ontario with author Ting-xing Ye.
Copyright © 2006 William Bell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Seal Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.
THE BLUE HELMET
Seal Books/published by arrangement with Doubleday Canada
Doubleday Canada hardcover edition published 2006
Doubleday Canada paperback edition published 2007
Seal Books edition published February 2009
eISBN: 978-0-385-67230-6
Seal Books are published by Random House of Canada Limited.
“Seal Books” and the portrayal of a seal are the property of Random House of Canada Limited.
Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Part One - Lee
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Two - Cutter
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Three - Mootwa
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Part Four - Peacekeeping
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
William Bell, The Blue Helmet
