Angel Square by Brian Doyle

Author:Brian Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV039120
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd

5 Something Ice Cold

SATURDAY MORNING I was sitting with my sister Pamela at her window trying to show her how to make shapes on the glass in the frost with her hands.

I made a moon shape and a sun and some stars but they weren’t very good and she didn’t understand. She wouldn’t have understood anyway, even if I had made them better. She was having fun though, mostly because of how the frost made her fingers cold.

I made a shape of a duck on another part of the window just to see if she’d remember. She looked at it for a long time and pointed at it once and looked at me but then she forgot about it and started to hug me a little bit.

I think she was trying to remember but she couldn’t.

Through the duck I could see Chalmers Lonnigan standing out there. He was standing on the snowbank, way up, his face up to the sky, his tongue out, catching snowflakes.

Since I didn’t have enough money yet to finish my Christmas shopping and I had nothing to do until Gerald came over, I went out to have a little talk with him.

“Thinking about heaven, Chalmers?” I said.

“Do you want to go and hurt some Jews?” Chalmers said.

“No, I don’t. No, I don’t want to go and hurt some Jews, Chalmers,” I said.

“Why not?” Chalmers said.

“Because,” I said. “Why don’t you go uptown or something or go to the show or read some comics or something?”

“I don’t want to,” Chalmers said.

“Well, I don’t want to either,” I said.

“Why don’t you want to?” Chalmers said.

“Because my best friend Sammy is a Jew and he lends me his cap gun whenever I want and I lend him my cap gun every time he wants and I even sort of like his cousin Shirley from Toronto. I tried to kiss her once.”

The last part was a lie but you had to tell Chalmers something to try and make him understand.

“Okay,” Chalmers said, “let’s go and get some Pea Soups then. There’s some behind Brébeuf playing tunnel right now, I think.”

“I don’t feel like it,” I said. Then I changed the subject.

I said: “How’s your father?”

“Let’s get some Protestants then,” he said. Chalmers was really looking hard for something to do. I tried again.

“They’re not easy to find,” I said. “I don’t even think there are any Protestants around here anymore.” Poor Chalmers. How was he going to get to heaven this way? “Is it true your father works at the museum?”

He left a big silence. Then he started talking again.

“There used to be lots of them all over the place. My father told me that they used to kill them with streetcars.” He had a sound in his voice like somebody was talking about their favorite cat that got lost or their brother who was kidnapped or something.

“There was only one or two,” I said, “and I think they moved away.”

“Where did they move to?”

“Uptown somewhere.”

“There’s lots of Dogans. Let’s go get a few Dogans.

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