Boy O'Boy by Brian Doyle

Author:Brian Doyle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2014-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

15

Buz

PHIL IS asleep.

Lots of Horseball Laflamme’s family are snoring through the wall. Mr. Laflamme is coughing.

It’s quiet next door at Mrs. Sawyer’s. You never hear anything from there. Before Buz went to fly planes in the war there used to be lots of noise from there. Mr. Sawyer always had lots of visitors over and there’d be singing and laughing. And Mr. Sawyer had an accordion and sometimes he’d play it and you’d hear people dancing.

But then he got sick and died in the hospital.

And Buz always had lots of friends coming over to visit him. Buz was friends with everybody. Even us kids. He’d make lemonade sometimes and we’d all play cards and he’d turn up the radio really loud when there was music on like Don Messer’s Islanders or Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye.

And once Buz took Billy and me and some other kids up to Lindsay’s record store on Sparks Street and we played on records in the little booths there where you could pretend you were going to buy one of the records until they kicked you out.

And once a friend of his from Sandy Hill came over in his convertible car with the top down and Buz got me and Billy and a bunch of other kids and some Laflammes to pile in and we went for a drive all the way out to Britannia and we all went swimming.

And once we got to go with him and his friends to the Auditorium to see the wrestling.

Yvon Robert vs The Mask.

Yvon Robert ripped off The Mask’s mask and tried to make him eat it and then The Mask threw Yvon Robert out of the ring and then jumped down and hit him over the head with a chair and the crowd was going wild and Yvon Robert chased The Mask up the aisle where there was a guy selling hot dogs and The Mask knocked down the hot dog guy and stole a big bowl of mustard off his tray and poured mustard all over Yvon Robert’s head and then they got back in the ring and Yvon picked up The Mask’s mask and choked The Mask with it until he fainted and Yvon Robert was still the champion.

Later that night, after the wrestling, we saw Yvon Robert and The Mask walking together down Argyle Avenue and laughing.

And once, Buz fixed a tough guy from New Edinburgh named Tomato. His real name wasn’t Tomato. His real name was Percy Kelso. Buz told us all about him. His nickname was Tomato because his face was so red.

And he had a lisp. Buz told us that when he and Tomato were kids everybody teased Tomato by calling him Perthy Keltho. “Hey, Perthy Keltho, you got a head like a tomato!”

But when he got older he got real tough for some reason and everybody was afraid of him. Afraid of what he would do to them.

Once, Buz told us, Tomato picked a guy he didn’t like off

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