Chapter 5
There’s always a scene in those old Coyote and Road Runner cartoons where something heavy like an anvil or a piano or the CN Tower is falling towards that old Coyote’s head and he takes the time to open up a teeny-tiny umbrella and squint his eyes like he knows it’s going to hurt and there isn’t a thing he can do about escaping that hurt except hold up a teeny-tiny umbrella and wait—which was how I felt knowing that Ottawa was about to drop on my head. Only I didn’t even own an umbrella.
Dad unlocked the cell door.
“Go on home,” he said.
Granddad Angus picked up his saw, re-pocketed his bow, and walked through the kicked-down door, not saying a word.
Neither of them looked at each other.
Now who was moping?
Then Dad spoke to me.
“I guess I can’t hold you here,” was what he said, which, translated, means “Mom wins again.”
Mom always wins. That’s how she went from being a schoolteacher to being the mayor of Deeper Harbour. That’s what happened when she told Dad that they needed a divorce, just the same way she might have said that they needed a new can opener. Mom always wins—and as much as I love her because she is my mom, right then I also hated her just as much as a fourteen-year-old could hate anything in his life.
Feelings are a little like an ocean that way.
They are deep and can flow in a whole lot of directions.
“You probably ought to go home,” Dad told me. “This police station is apt to be a little drafty until I get this door patched up.”
I thought about that.
Actually, I had been thinking non-stop since Mom laid down her news.
I knew I ought to stay here and help Dad clean up the mess. I knew there was no way on earth that I wanted to see Mom right now, much less join her for breakfast, but I kept thinking about how she’d said there were no tourists and no future in Deeper Harbour. I kept thinking about how she’d said there was nothing to see here. I kept thinking about how Granddad Angus had said we’d given Deeper Harbour something to look at when we wrecked the dory and I kept thinking about Warren’s radioactive mutant vein and I kept thinking about how that caber looked, poking out of the boat.
I kept thinking there had to be something I could do about this mess—but “Okay, Dad,” was all I said.
And then I ran for home, following the distant compass of my mother’s footsteps, which had vanished down the same street that Granddad Angus and I had run along just an hour earlier with a clothesline-pole caber. I ran, feeling the spring of the dirt that slept beneath the pavement of the street. I ran, allowing my sneakered feet to beat the street as if somehow I could run all of my problems to death.
I ran, full out, all go, with no stop, kicking one foot out after the other, following a trail that only my toes seemed to know—hoping that somewhere between the right-now of my dad and the we’ll-see of my mother, I would run myself into some sort of a plan.
And halfway home I tripped over an idea.
I was standing in the halo of the hardware store sodium lamp. A big fat garter snake slithered out from under a bush and slid directly in front of my feet. You see a lot of those snakes that time of the year so it didn’t scare me. I stopped and watched it move towards a puddle. I think the snake believed that if it could get into the water it would be safe from the dangerous, looming, fourteen-year-old predator that was casting a sodium lamp shadow over it—namely, me.
I watched the snake slither through the puddle like a tiny escalator set on its side, its flat, wedge-shaped head poking up like a periscope. The snake’s green and grey and yellow scales rippled and bulged and then it turned and looked up at me as if it was deciding whether to eat me or greet me.
It stuck its tongue out at me at exactly the moment that the idea that had been sneaking around the basement of my imagination jumped up and smacked me directly between the eyes.
I knew just exactly what I needed to do.