George & Rue by George Elliott Clarke Page B

pert—-pretty.
    Blondola was authoritatively everything Georgie wanted: her deep laughter reminded him of the scary gaiety of Cynthy’s laughter when she was sweaty-happy with Asa.
    Georgie study Blondola close.
    He ask, “How ya get that name, Blondola? Ya a secret movie star?”
    She be bashful: “Nah, Ma’s name be Cassie and ma aunt’s Ann, so my middle name’s Cassandra.”
    Georgie get avid: “And Blondola?” Blondola just laugh and go on her way, gigglin with the other maids. They tease Georgie fierce.
    One joked, “Men peacocks are more colourful than girl ones.”
    Blondola yelled, “If only it were like that with our men!”
    Blondola looked a super good woman, with her plaid lumberjack shirts and jackets, her stories based on recipes, her country blues radio curing tobacco. She was partial to a house with sun in the living room and smelts drying on the roof; to a dunga-reed Romeo. Like everybody in Three Mile Plains, she’d grown up with blues gossip bout lethal booze; bout buttoned-down, open-flied preachers; bout leathered-down cowboys mangled by gypsum-mine dynamite. She’d be happy to go along with a man, a man goin somewhere, somewhere far.
    Courtin Blondola should’ve been easy for Georgie. She liked his drawl, his laugh, his fearless—and sober—hard work. But he was hindered in his interest because he had no place to bring Blondola. The big drafty, stinky barn he slept in was no site forwooin a swell young gal makin dove’s eyes at him. Georgie’d’ve to pull down better than ten bucks a month to be an effective Casanova.
    He found a dream solution. He saw a newsreel about khaki-clad Canucks crossin the Atlantic to cross swords with Hitler, boys clearly no taller, bigger, or older than him. They appeared on the movie screen, silvery and sunny, smokin on the Halifax docks, waitin to board ships, and kissin on two delicious gals each. All Georgie knew of war was what funny books showed: a lot of rat-a-tat-tat and pow and splat and whammy. But maybe he could ship overseas, kill a clutch of Krauts, bulk up into a he-man, lift gold rings off married corpses, juxx some British quim, then return, swaggering, and marry Blondola with much hoopla—with their wedding pix in the
Hants County Register.
He’d seize his future this way.
    So George told Blondola he was goin to the Boches-Hun War, and he ask, “Will ya wait for me?” He’d enlist, return, keep her glad. Blondola was playful, gleeful, but found Georgie spellbindingly earnest. She nodded; they kissed.

XII
    E IGHTEEN now, George didn’t have to lie about his age to get into the Canadian Active Army, but still he ask a black woman—Naomi Jones, who was as blind as water—to go to the recruiters and claim to be his mother and vouch for his age. George told recruiters he was born in the United States, Massachusetts, Boston. (Because Naomi knew about Georgie’s sorry childhood, she never interrupted with any truth.)
    So George pressed himself on the service and—after he was stripped and checked for lice—got pressed into service at once, peelin tatoes, slingin hash, scourin honey buckets. Yessum, he then wondered if he’d die like Cynthy, scrubbing latrines. The valiant cook and heroic janitor endured the rigmarole of “bastard training” up in Sorel, P.Q. (by the Historic Murder Site of Kamouraska), where Frenchies dubbed him Joe Louie, and he’d have to cook em all hash after, like them, he’d run five miles (fully geared up), crawled through mud, hurled himself past barbed-wire barricades, and dug foxholes. But white boys got to play cards and harmonica after; the Indian and the Coloured, well, they still had to fry eggs and swab barracks. Still, though George was Grade-A Infantry meat, when all his comrades got shipped out—to slog up and through Italy and hand out maple syrup as well as copies of
Anne of Green Gables
in Italian—George’s name weren’t in that number. No,his weapons would be a mop, a broom, a paring