The Blue Helmet Read Free Page A

in.
    Reena had given me the room on the third floor, up a narrow flight of creaky stairs from her apartment. There was space for a bed, a night table that was really an upended wooden box, an easy chair that was older than me, and one of those rugs made from one piece of material that spiralled out from the centre. No TV . No sound system, unless you counted the digital clock radio that read 10:00 a.m. all day. The ancient radiator thumped and gurgled at night.
    I had my own bathroom with a shower, and the room was bright. The front window looked out over Lakeshore Boulevard and the park. If I craned my neck, I could glimpse the lake. From the side window I could see 18th Street and the run-down hotel where Carpino had parked the day he delivered me to Reena. It was an okay place to stay until I figured out my next move.
    I carried my coffee to the booth nearest the counter. It was one of five that Reena had keptwhen she renovated the place a few years before. Why she hung onto them, she never explained. They were covered in red vinyl pimpled by cigarette burns. A glass-fronted console attached to the wall above each scratched and pitted table allowed you to flip through a dozen panels and choose tunes by pushing buttons labelled with letters and numbers. The consoles had once been wired to a juke box, but the juke was gone, leaving orphaned songs like “A White Sports Coat and a Pink Carnation,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” and “Hand Jive.”
    The restaurant hummed with what Reena called the morning crowd—students from the college beside the park, stuffed with self-importance and thirsty for a caffeine fix, and regulars from the neighbourhood, sitting at the small tables and yakking or reading the paper while they sipped coffee and nibbled on muffins. Outside, the sun glinted off rush-hour windshields, and a streetcar rumbled and screeched to a stop at the traffic lights.
    Behind me I heard the two-tone squeak of the swinging door to the kitchen. Reena slid into the booth across from me, an unfiltered cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She was wearing an almost-white apron, double-wrapped high aboveher waist, and a hairnet. I glanced at the “Absolutely No Smoking” sign above the console.
    I still felt like she had cooked things up with my father to keep me away from home. But Reena didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of her, including me, so she didn’t play the role of the kindly, caring aunt. She hadn’t tried to reform me. I had my room and a job in her restaurant, busing tables, sweeping up, lending a hand in the kitchen. She paid me, after deducting for “room and board.” And she talked to me the same way she talked to everyone else, by showing respect and demanding it at the same time. It was understood that if I screwed up I would be gone.
    We had reached that understanding one night about a week after Carpino dumped me at Reena’s place. I had lain awake for hours after I climbed the stairs to my room, staring at the illuminated digits on the clock radio. A one, a zero, a colon, two more zeroes. And beside the little tail that hung off the upper left corner of the one, the tiny white letters, AM , with a red dot glowing next to them. I focused on those numbers for a long time, knowing they would never change.
    I got out of bed and pulled on my clothes. I sneaked down the back stairs, threw on my coat,and closed the door carefully behind me. I ran across the deserted road and into the park, skirting the darkened buildings, heading for a stand of evergreens by the lake. I planned to stay there, more or less out of sight, until the trains started up early next morning, then head west toward Hamilton.
    Maybe “planned” isn’t the right word, because I hadn’t worked out what I’d do when I got home—and I hadn’t paid any attention to the weather. Gusts of freezing rain swept in from the lake, and within an hour my teeth were chattering, my hair was a helmet of ice, and every few seconds a