Twelve little kids tied together with a rope. Their keeper is a girl with shorts on and hiking boots. The kids are driving her crazy. She has a stick that she uses to keep the kids from walking off the sidewalk. They’re lined up at my wagon. Their keeper is trying to figure out their orders.
Every kid wants something different. One wants a small order with vinegar in the middle and no salt. The next one wants a medium with salt in the middle and no vinegar. The next one wants a large to split with his friend but he wants salt and vinegar and his friend is not allowed to have salt or vinegar because his doctor said. Another kid wants a small order with salt and vinegar on the bottom, salt in the middle and vinegar on top. The next kid wants only half a small order with no salt and no vinegar but is there any ketchup? Another kid is sulking because there’s no Pogo Sticks.
Now the keeper wants to know about the calories in each chip. She’s on a diet. What kind of fat do I use? Is there cholesterol?
Now the kid who wanted a small order with vinegar in the middle and no salt changes his mind. Now he wants a medium order to go halves with his buddy and now they’re arguing about ketchup even though I’ve told them about fifteen times that there is no ketchup! Now the keeper is telling them that’s it, they’re only allowed small orders so the ones who ordered medium and large have to order again, start figuring it out all over again.
Now, because these kids are changing their orders, some of the other kids decide they’ll change their minds too and we’re almost back to where we started.
All the time I’m trying to decide if I’m going to tell Mr. Fryday about what Dink and I know about Dumper Stubbs. I’m also wondering what Dink is finding out at the Regional Environmental Office. Dink is doing research. It’s two days since his camera got smashed. He’s already got a new camera from the warranty. These cameras are supposed to be unbreakable under normal use.
Is kicking your camera around the pavement to keep it away from a crazy man normal use? I guess so.
Dink has also read two books on grease already. Used cooking grease gets recycled and is used to make soap, pig food and lipstick. Lipstick! My mom wears lipstick. I wonder if I should tell her what it’s made from. Hey, Mom, that stuff you’re putting on your mouth? It used to be in a barrel in the back of Dumper Stubbs’s truck! Hey, Mom, when you put on more lipstick, what happened to the lipstick you put on before? You what? You licked it off and you swallowed it? Gross!
She’ll laugh at that.
I look at the keeper. She’s wiping her lips with a serviette. The kids are tangled up in their rope and fighting and dumping chips on the sidewalk and squirting vinegar on each other. The keeper uses the side mirror of the truck and takes out a tube of lipstick. She smears it on her upper lip first, then she stretches her lower lip flat and drags a thick layer of lipstick on there. Then she presses her lips together and fixes her hair a bit. The lipstick she had on before. What happened to it? Did she kiss all these little kids and use it all up that way? I don’t think so. I think she hates these little kids.
“What happened to the lipstick you had on before?” I say to her. I’m feeling very sarcastic. My mouth is going to get me in trouble. I can feel it.
“Pardon?” says the keeper.
“What happened to all the lipstick you had on before?”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t you have lipstick on this morning or an hour ago or something? What happened to it? I mean, how come you have to put more on? Where does it go? Where does lipstick go?”
“What are you, a smart ass?” says the keeper.
“Do you know what lipstick’s made of?” I say. “Do you know it’s made from recycled rancid grease from chipwagons? And you probably licked it all off and swallowed it. How many times a day do you put that stuff on anyway. About ten times a day?”
“None of your business, you creep! What do I owe you for this mess?”
“Let’s see, thirteen small orders of fries will be $19.50. Would you like a small cup of grease to go? No extra charge. Take it along with you? Where’s the next stop for your act? Do your little animals do any other tricks?”
All of a sudden I hear Mr. Fryday’s voice coming from around behind the truck where the propane tanks are strapped on.
“Put your money away madam. These chips are on the house. On the wagon, I should say. No, no, I insist. There is absolutely no reason that you should be treated with such rudeness. I apologize on behalf of my employee here. My, what cute kids! Day camp is it? You’re doing a wonderful job. Think nothing of it. My name is Fryday. Everyday is Fryday as they say. Have a nice day! Goodbye.”
I have a feeling I’m going to be fired. It’s the same feeling I had just before I got kicked out of school. Well, if he’s going to be mad at me and maybe fire me, he might as well be good and mad at me. I’ll tell him about Dumper.
I’ll tell him right now, before he starts this speech that he is just going to start.
“Mr. Fryday, the other night I followed Dumper Stubbs home and I watched him pour a whole barrel of cooking oil down into the sewer where he parks his truck. Here’s a picture I had taken.”
I show Mr. Fryday the picture of me standing, pointing at the sewer grate.
“And I went out to the grease depot where you say he takes the stuff. They never heard of him. Those receipts he gives you must be forgeries. My friend Dink and I are going to prove he’s doing it and report him!”
For a long time he stares at the picture. A picture of a kid pointing at a sewer. What does that prove?
“We got a picture of him doing it but it didn’t turn out,” I say.
Then for a long time Mr. Fryday looks at me. Then he rips the picture in half. Then in half again.
Then he speaks.
“You’re just like your father. You Abos are all the same. Making stuff up about pollution. Your father was kicked out of his job at the paper plant across the river for the same thing! When will you ever learn?”
He looks at me, shaking his head.
“Get out of my chipwagon, Spud Sweetgrass,” he says quietly.
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the Second Movement, the Allegretto, is playing in the background while Mr. Fryday fires me.
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Second Movement, is perfect music when you’re getting fired.
As I’m walking down Rochester Street, Dink catches up to me. He’s so excited he can hardly talk. Under his arm is a long roll of paper. He’s also carrying books and pamphlets and charts and photographs. He’s telling me all about all this stuff he got from the Department of Physical Environment.
We go into my place and spread the big roll of paper out on the floor.
I put one corner of the huge map under a chair leg. Dink and I lean on the other two corners of the map while we’re studying it and talking. There’s only one corner of the map left to hold down.
My mother stands on it for us.
It’s a map of all the sewers in Ottawa. There’s two kinds of sewers. Sanitary sewers and storm sewers. The sanitary sewers are shown by a solid line. The storm sewers are marked with a broken line. Little arrows show what direction the sewers flow in.
While we’re doing this I tell my mother how Mr. Fryday fired me and why.
“It figures,” she said. “The man is threatened somehow. You must be on to something.”
With a yellow highlighter, we trace along the broken line from the “catch basin” on Woodward Avenue where Dumper parks his truck. The line goes along for a few blocks then under the Queensway, down Broadview, a few more blocks, across Carling to Tilbury, eight blocks along Tilbury to Wavell, four blocks down Wavell, across Richmond Road, under the Parkway and out into the Ottawa River.
Not far down the river from that pipe outlet is a bay. And guess what? Right! Westboro Beach is in that bay.
The grease from Dumper’s barrels travels about twenty blocks under the city, out the seventy-two-inch pipe at the end of Wavell, then slides down river to get caught in the bay. And to poison the beach.
But there’s something Dink and I can’t figure out. Where is all this grease right now? How come the beach is open? Is the grease caught somewhere?
It says on this map that the pipe at the Wavell outlet is seventy-two inches. That’s a big pipe.
I double ride Dink over to his place to get his bike. We ride to the Wavell outlet.
The pipe there is as high as I am. There’s water running out of it. I dip my finger in the stream of water running out of the high pipe into the river. It doesn’t feel greasy. In fact the water doesn’t even seem dirty. It doesn’t even smell bad. Is our map wrong? There’s an iron gate covering the opening of the pipe. The gate is locked with a padlock. No Ninja Turtle games please. We pull on the gate but it’s solid. No sewer walking for Dink and me today.
I tell Dink that we’ve got to find out where all this grease is.
We get back on our bikes and ride to the corner of Holland and Wellington to the offices in the Holland Cross where Dink got the map and the other stuff.
Inside, on the wall, is a huge framed-in-glass copy of the map that Dink and I have at home. I run my finger up and across the glass, tracing the route of Dumper’s grease.
Behind us, a voice.
“Can I help you boys?”
I explain.
“We know a guy who dumps a barrel of used cooking grease down a catch basin every night. We know it pollutes Westboro Beach but we can’t prove it.”
This is a man who is so tall that he has to duck when he takes us into his office. He has a pile of bushy gray hair and his eyebrows are also gray and they move around like giant fuzzy caterpillars when he talks. His hands are as big as baseball gloves and his ears are big and pasted on like Spock’s.
I tell him everything.
His eyebrows are going crazy when he says, “This is a very serious charge.”
He specially wants to know if we know where the substance is kept each day before it is illegally dumped.
Yes, we do. In the back of a truck outside the Elmdale Tavern.
He shuts his office door.
He says he’s not supposed to do what he’s going to do. He seems excited, like a little kid. Dink and I are looking at each other. We’re both thinking that it’s funny, watching a big man like this squirming around, being excited like a little kid.
He goes into a cupboard and pulls out a box. He takes out of the box a plastic pill that looks like a cod liver oil pill only about three times as big. The liquid inside is clear, like water.
“Don’t tell anyone about this. This is a dye capsule. You drop one of these in your man’s barrel every night before he goes home to dump. One capsule per barrel. That’s all you have to do. Wait till it’s dark. Don’t get caught, don’t take any chances. Don’t tell anybody. Just walk by the truck and flip the capsule into the barrel. Has the barrel got a lid? No. Good. Just walk casually by, whistle or something, minding your own business, and flip one of these babies into his barrel. This will dissolve and it will mark the grease and everything the grease touches. This is a tracer dye. It will be red. Your man’s river of rancid grease will be red! Do this every night.”
He was pretty excited, making a flipping move, like he was flipping a coin, when he told us to flip the capsule into the barrel.
“Why doesn’t the grease come out the pipe?” I say. “Like it did before?”
“We’ll have to wait for that,” he says. “We have to wait for Mother Nature,” he says.
He takes us out of his office to the map on the wall. I trace my finger over the glass for him, showing him the route the grease is supposed to be taking.
“Perfect,” says our man. “Your grease will come pouring out that Wavell outlet, bright red, red as blood. And then we’ll charge him!”
Dink and I are still waiting.
“But in the meantime,” he says, looking around like he’s telling us a secret, “meantime we’ll have to pray.”
“Pray?”
“Pray! Pray for rain! You need a nice, big rain storm to make it happen. We had a good one a couple of weeks ago. That’s why your beach was closed. That grease is heavy. All that grease is just waiting there to be flushed out. We need a nice big storm. Then, bang!, we’ve got him! But God will have to flush the toilet for us first.”
There’s an idea that my father would like. Praying for rain.
To God, or the great Spirit of the Abos!