Boy O'Boy by Brian Doyle Page A

bathed it gently with soap and rinsed the flesh some more. Phil was staring straight ahead. No sounds.
    “He’s in shock,” she said. “We have to wrap him up warm. We’ll get the doctor tomorrow.”
    We wrapped Phil's arm in clean cloths and I made him some warm cocoa and we put him gentle into his iron bed and my mother lay down with him and held him and he sobbed some and my mother sang him a song:
    Old Mother Hubbard
    Went to the cupboard
    To give her poor dog a bone
    When she got there
    The cupboard was bare
    And so her poor dog had none.
    After Phil was asleep, she whispered to me, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Then she noticed my knee. “You’ve cut your knee,” she said. “Put some iodine on it and I’ll look at it tomorrow…and maybe you should have a bath. You’re filthy. What have you been doing anyway? I thought you were at choir. I hope you haven’t been misbehaving.. .remember.. .the one we’re counting on…”
    Soon she was asleep too. Mother and Phil cuddled up.
    I had a bath, put on the iodine, went to bed and had this awful dream. A boy (me) is swimming in the Rideau River at Dutchie’s Hole, near where my granny used to live. Another boy (Phil) is standing on the shore. The water around the boy is full of floating pigs’ heads and guts and turds from the slaughterhouse. The boy spits in the water. The boy on the shore yells, “Stop spitting in the water, you’re spoiling everything for the other swimmers!” My granny, who is standing on an iron train bridge, is calling out to the boy not to listen to this foolishness. The boy in the water yells, “Phil, you’re ruining everything, not me!”
    On the steps this morning I’m reading things from the Ottawa Journal to Cheap while I’m hugging my knees. The enamel basin is on the sidewalk in front of Lenny Lipshitz’s place three doors down. I’ll get it after.
    I read to Cheap that so far, 45 million people got killed in the war that is just about over. I wonder where they put all the bodies. How many big black cars came.
    Eh, Granny?
    I read to Cheap about my father’s razor blades. Blue Gillette Blades — the sharpest, smoothest finished edges ever honed. That must be why my father cuts himself all the time. Little pieces of white toilet paper stuck to his face with a spot of red.
    I read to Cheap about the Carnation Milk Baby. His picture is on every can of Carnation Milk. The most beautiful baby in the Dominion of Canada.
    My granny said I could have been that baby but there was no picture of me to send.
    I read about the atomic bomb. A new bomb that is very small but could blow up a whole city and everybody in it. Kill everybody.
    Will the whole world blow up eventually, the paper says. They can drop the bomb from 6 miles up in the air where it’s always very cold.
    That’s it! The answer to the riddle in Ripley’s Believe or Not!
    I read my horoscope to Cheap who is asleep beside me.
    My father calls it horrorscope. “ LEO. You will, in the next few days, come into a large bounty .” Bounty means money or riches. I read that in the National Geographic about the Aztecs. Next I’m reading about a crazy millionaire who comes to Ottawa sometimes from Merrickville and goes to the Union Station when the soldiers come home from the war on the train and gives out fifty-dollar bills to the heroes coming home…
    Oh, no! Here come the ketchup lady and the turkey lady.
    “There you are! Good morning, Martin. How are you?” says the turkey lady.
    I don’t answer but I say this, “I’m thinking of a riddle. Where is it so hot where you are that you could fry an egg on the sidewalk but there is a place only six miles away that is 60 degrees below zero. Where is it?”
    “Mmm,” says the turkey lady, “how fascinating. Let me see…” The ketchup lady is looking at my shoes. My shoes are filthy from last night. They don’t look new anymore.
    “You got the shoes,” says the ketchup lady. “Good. Where did