You can start at the Arts Center, at the downtown end of the canal, and you can skate up the canal all the way to Dow’s Lake. You can take off your skates there and get a free bus back, down Colonel By Drive along the canal, to where you started at the Arts Center. If it’s not too cold, you can hang around Dow’s Lake and look at all the snow and ice sculptures before you hop on the free bus.
Or you can do the whole thing the other way around.
Connie Pan is planning this for a group of E.S.L. students. It’s part of a project she started to make new Canadians feel better about being stuck in a strange country all of a sudden.
Last summer she organized a volleyball game on Westboro Beach which was a big hit. The best part of the game was Connie Pan made them play the whole game without a net and without a ball. Everybody enjoyed it.
While she’s telling me about the skating trip she’s planning, I start asking her how you say the word “canal” in Vietnamese. She’s showing me how to say “canal” and I’m putting my face right up to hers and I’m touching her philtrum, very gently, with my finger. I’m trying very hard to say it like she says it but it doesn’t sound right.
Then I say Colonel By in front of the word. Colonel By was an Englishman, an engineer, who built the canal more than 150 years ago. The driveway that runs along his canal is named after him. They should have named his canal after him, too. He built it, didn’t he? Instead, they call it the Rideau Canal.
Did he ever dream, in his wildest dreams, that a boy, half Abo and half Irish and half a whole lot of other things, would be teasing a girl, who was half Chinese and half Vietnamese, about how to say what his canal was?
“Colonel By sông dào,” I say very slow.
Then Connie says it again, very slow.
I press my finger gentle on her upper lip and say it very slow.
She has her two perfect hands on my face and she’s pressing my cheeks together so my lips pout out. I must look like a fish.
“Spuddy,” she whispers, “I like you.”
We’re standing outside the guidance office at Ottawa Tech. Connie Pan has walked me down here. The Cyclops wants to see me for some reason. Usually I only have to see The Cyclops once every two weeks. If you get kicked out of school you have to report to guidance every two weeks and get guided. It’s sort of like being on parole. They check on you, see what you’re up to. See how long it’s going to be before you’re hoofed out again.
See what further horrible crimes you’re committing these days.
In the display case outside the guidance office, The Cyclops has pinned up my picture from the newspaper last summer. Under the picture is the headline about John “Spud” Sweetgrass, hero. It’s nearly half a year ago that was in the paper. Every time I go by the guidance office I see it there.
Every time I go to see The Cyclops I ask him will he please take that picture down.
But he won’t. It’s still there, locked inside the display case, pinned up on the board.
Now, while Connie Pan and John “Spud” Sweetgrass, hero, have a hold of each other’s faces right outside the guidance office, out comes The Cyclops.
His eye is like a laser beam on me.
I think he means it’s time to let go of Connie Pan’s philtrum and go into his office.
Here I go. What now, I wonder.
The police called. A Detective Kennedy. She was asking about Sweetgrass. What kind of a kid is he, she wanted to know. Reliable? Honest? Ever been in trouble?
The Cyclops goes on.
“The police — she — told me you were the one who called in that gang murder on Rochester Street. Did that happen very near your place?”
“Right next door.”
“And you saw...”
“I saw a van. A brown van. I told the police.”
“And you saw a rifle...”
“Yeah, I told her that.”
“And you didn’t see anything else...”
“No.” What’s going on here? Is The Cyclops working for the cops now?
Looking into The Cyclops’ eye and lying is almost as bad as telling lies into the big blue eyes of Detective Kennedy.
“Why does she think you saw more than what you told her? Why does she think you’re holding something back?” says The Cyclops.
“I don’t know...”
If you look beside the one eye, look at his ear, for instance, it’s quite a bit easier.
Or at the sign he has on his desk. “Same-Day-Service-Sullivan,” the sign says. The Cyclops’ real name is Mr. Sullivan. The sign means that when The Cyclops says he’ll let you know about something soon, he’ll let you know that same day. This is true about The Cyclops. If he says he’ll do something, he’ll do it. Not like a lot of teachers. A lot of teachers say they’re going to do something for you and the next time you see them, they don’t even remember your name.
“I have a theory,” says The Cyclops. “The police are desperate to solve this string of underworld crimes. They’ll put pressure wherever they think...they’ll squeeze anybody and everybody they can, where there’s the slightest hope of new information...”
It sounds like The Cyclops is on my side. This is a switch.
“That was courageous of you to phone in what you saw. It must have been terrifying. Seeing someone gunned down in cold blood like that. You know, many people would have chosen silence, would rather not have been involved...leave-it-to-the-other-guy type of attitude...”
“I guess so. I don’t know,” I say, feeling a load of compliments coming on. Another big number to build up my self-esteem. That’s the way they work. They blow you right up and then tell you what they really wanted to tell you in the first place. Which is usually that you’re doing something wrong.
After this build-up, he’s going to tell me that I’d better tell the rest of what I saw, because they’re going to find out anyway and then it will be worse for me, etc., etc.
Here it comes.
“I just wanted to see you to tell you that they — she — called and that I gave them — her — a very positive report on you. That’s all I wanted to share with you. Keep me posted, as they say, that is, if you wish...and if you need any help, anybody to talk to, everything is, as they say, confidential here. Thanks for dropping by...”
Is that it? Is that all? Where’s the part where he tells me that what I’m doing is wrong?
I get up to leave. This is the easiest guidance visit I’ve ever had.
This Cyclops, this Same-Day-Service-Sullivan, guidance guy with the one eye, he seems all right. It almost feels good, the way he’s talking.
Now, some more.
“My grandfather,” he says, “was Métis. Part Cree Indian, as it were. He used to say that if you had a secret and you were stuck with it and it was burning inside of you, so to speak, he used to say that you should dig a hole in the ground around where you live and say the secret into the hole, at midnight, and then replace the earth into the hole exactly as it was. And if you did that, the old people used to say, you’d feel a whole lot better... whole lot — no pun intended, Spud, my boy!”
I guess I’m standing there with my mouth open.
Now I guess I’m back out in the hall.
There’s nobody around. Connie Pan’s gone somewhere.
The Cyclops has Abo blood! And that thing about the hole. Why didn’t I remember that? My father told me that once. And I completely forgot about it until now.
In fact, The Cyclops, for a second or two there, almost sounded like my father. “If you had a secret and you were stuck with it and it was burning inside of you...” That’s the kind of way my father would put it.
On the way home I’m thinking about my father’s ax. I think I know where it is, under all that old furniture in the back shed.
I turn off Wellington and head up Nanny Goat Hill which is Booth Street. It’s so cold, it’s hard to breathe. Maybe Dink the Thinker is right. Maybe this year we will win the championship as the world’s coldest capital city. Beat out whatsit, the capital of Mongolia. Or is it Libya? No, that’s the hottest. Dink told us that last summer.
The cold makes you sleepy.
A homeless man drops spit in a long string from his mouth. It’s frozen by the time it hits the ground!
I have a short chat with my mom about the old guy who won’t come out from under his bed, and then I tell her I’m tired and I’m going to bed early. She gives me a funny look.
I’m getting to be a pretty good liar. Or, am I?
The tired part isn’t a lie because I am tired, but that’s not why I’m going to bed early. I’m going to bed early because I have to get up early. Real early.
I set my clock for eleven-thirty.
I have to be wide awake by midnight.