Photo by Jens Lelie
I knew him only as “Sarge.” He answered to that moniker because he was a sergeant in the Thibeault Falls police force, and, I learned much later, a sergeant in the Canadian Armed Forces during the Second World War. Like other cops, he’d come to the Panama Café for coffee breaks and often the daily luncheon special, even late evening supper when working different shifts. Sometimes, my father would give him and other policemen free coffee if they drank it at the counter. Police presence did a lot to calm occasional boisterous customers, especially after supper hours.
Sarge, though, frequented our establishment more often than others, and so he was privileged to have lunch or even supper in the large kitchen when there was a lull in business usually in the evenings. In his dark blue uniform, brown belt with a holstered revolver, Sarge looked quite striking and official to a young boy of ten.
He liked eating in the kitchen with the smells of food being prepared, like grilled steak, bacon, hamburger, French fries, and, of course, Chinese food like chow mein. He didn’t even mind the noise of the dishwashing machine and of the cooks repeating loudly orders back to the waitresses. He took it all in.
“So, Hardy. How’s school?” he asked one day as he forked the sweet and sour pork.
“S’all right,” I answered noncommittally. I was helping out in the kitchen, sorting the piles of dirty dishes and silverware. It was part of my duty as a son of a small restaurant owner to do his bit for the family. Also, the 25 cents a week I earned from such jobs paid for my Saturday movies and the popcorn.
“You don’t look too chipper,” he observed. “Something happened at school?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” I replied with false bravado.
“Been teased again, eh?”
I scrunched up my lips and gave a short nod. I didn’t want anyone to know, and I certainly didn’t tell my parents about these episodes. My father would rush to the principal’s office and demand that those kids be punished. The problem was that most of the boys in Grade Five were doing the teasing mainly in the school playground, and sometimes when going home. According to the principal, those areas were not in the classroom and part of school property. A lot of these guys were also in the earlier grades with me. It had not changed much over those years: Chinky, chinky Chinaman, sitting on a fence, trying to make dollar out of fifteen cents. When I first asked my father about the hurtful rhyme, he said that those words were said to him back in the Twenties when he first came over to gum san, the golden mountain—Canada.
“Things have not changed,” he sighed then. “And they won’t.”
In short, the lesson was that I was to endure the pain and suffering—in silence. That made me mad, but there was nothing I could change.
One Friday evening, Sarge dropped by for a late snack during his late shift. He walked past the teenagers eating French fries in the dining room and plopped down at his usual spot at the prep table in the kitchen. The cook handed him a plate of chow mein. I sat next to him and told him about the upcoming double feature: one with Roy Rogers and the other a Lone Ranger movie.
“So you like Westerns,” he commented.
“Yeah. The heroes use guns!”
“You like guns,” he observed.
“Yeah. Pow, pow, pow! Gotcha!” I pointed my imaginary gun around the kitchen. Then I showed off all I knew of the six-shooters in the cowboy movies, how the hero draws a Colt 45 and shoots the bad guys’ guns out of their hands before these bad dudes could use them on Roy or the Lone Ranger. I showed him my imaginary six-shooter being drawn fast with my right hand and being fanned on the hammer with my left.
Sarge smiled broadly. “Have you ever held a real gun, Hardy?”
“No,” I said sadly.
Sarge came to a decision when he saw the wistfulness in my face. “Would you like to?”
It was Christmas, Chinese New Year’s, my birthday—all rolled into one. Gifts, presents, lai-chi (gift money). In the past, when Sarge was in the kitchen eating lunch or some snack, I wondered about the holstered revolver he wore. I wanted to ask him if he had ever used it to shoot bad people, a real shoot-out like on TV or the movies. Secretly, I wanted to hold and shoot that gun. Wow, that would certainly make my schoolmates jealous!
“Yes, yes, yes!” I could not contain myself. I was bouncing up and down, staring at his hand as he went for his holster. Was he going to fast-draw from his holstered gun like Hopalong Cassidy, Audie Murphy, Wyatt Earp? Was Sarge going to—
Sarge took his gun out slowly and carefully. He placed it on the table. He did something to unlock the cylinder and took out the bullets. He checked the revolver, rolled the cylinder, closed it, and checked the gun again. He handed me the weapon carefully.
The policeman’s gun was heavy, unlike the toy cowboy pistols my father bought for me at Woolworths. I needed two hands to hold this real one steady. I felt the hard steel of the chamber, rolled it, cocked the hammer, and pulled the trigger. The gun made a satisfyingly loud click. I was in heaven.
I went about pointing the gun at objects and shouting “Bang, bang! I gotcha! Bang!” When waitresses came in to order or get a dish, I went bang, bang, aiming the revolver at them. A few humoured me and pretended to be hit.
My father came in from the dining room when he heard the commotion. Instead of a smile or a laugh, like those of the cooks and the waitresses, he frowned deeply. His serious face told me to stop whatever I was doing. I was going about the dishwashing area and playing with the gun. My father called out my name, and I stopped in my tracks. His hand was extended towards me, and I knew what he wanted—the policeman’s pistol.
Reluctantly, sadly, I handed over Sarge’s gun to my father, who in turn gave it back to the policeman. “Please, don’t encourage him further,” my father said calmly. Sarge got the message. The policeman nodded slightly and glanced at me apologetically.
I was told to go to bed, even though it was a Friday night. From the corner of my eye, I saw Sarge reload his weapon and put it back in the holster, slowly and deliberately. Sarge returned to work, patrolling the autumn streets of Thibeault Falls.
I understood that I could not have fun in the kitchen—a place of work, not play. In the playground, I could go “bang-bang” with my toy guns, but I sure missed the weight and feel of a real six shooter.
One day, as I was busy cutting onions and green peppers in the kitchen, I realized that Sarge had not appeared for quite a while. I asked the cooks about the missing policeman.
“He got fired from the force,” Ling told me, not taking his eyes off the chow mein he was flipping in the wok as flames flared up. “Got caught taking graft.”
“What’s graft?”
“Money from people who do illegal stuff, so they won’t be arrested and charged.”
“Is that bad?”
Ling chuckled heartily at my innocence. I was young; I didn’t know the world. I thought cops were always the good guys as portrayed in TV dramas. “It is illegal. He was lucky. He could have gone to jail.”
“So where is Sarge now?”
“Who cares?” Ling said and went back to preparing orders.
A few months later, I saw Sarge in the restaurant basement. This place was used for prep work and cold storage. A professional butcher’s block showed its age and constant use. Beside it was a long wooden table with slots at either end to place the knives and cleaver. Against the wall, three aluminum bins held discards of bones and fat. A massive walk-in fridge containing sides of beef and pork took up the rest of the space.
Sitting in a corner, Sarge was peeling buckets of potatoes by hand. He was still recognizable as the man I knew but I noticed little differences: he looked defeated, slumped in thought, mechanically doing work. He worked the graveyard shift, when all the drudge work like peeling potatoes was done. What a comedown from the Sarge I had known in a dark blue police uniform and hard-brimmed patrol cap. I felt so, so bad for him.
It seemed that after his dismissal from the Thibeault Falls Police Force, Sarge went on a binge. He drank a lot. He wasted whatever goodwill he had with friends and acquaintances, who tried to help him. He was a mess. That was when my father, pitying him, gave him lowly menial work. I felt sorry for Sarge. He didn’t have his gun.
A week or two later, my father ordered locks installed on the doors to the storage areas in the basement. These areas had never been locked for as long as I roamed the basement, whether I was playing cowboys and Indians or helping stock the cartons and cans. Now my father wanted security.
One day when I was helping Ling stack the shipments of canned goods, I overheard loud voices between my father and Sarge. I looked around the corner to see what was happening.
“Why are you putting locks on everything, Joe?”
“This is my restaurant, Sarge. I can do what I want.”
“You don’t trust me enough to leave me alone on the graveyard shift,” Sarge said in a flat manner.
“It’s not that—”
“In these past weeks since I’ve been here, have you had anything missing from your larders and fridges?”
“No—” my father conceded.
Sarge threw down the potato peeler. It clanged on the cement floor. It was just a noise, but to me it sounded thunderous. “I’ll save you the trouble. Joe, I quit!”
“Who else will hire you, Sarge?” my father countered, reminding Sarge that he wasn’t trustworthy and that he had been hired out of pity.
I saw Sarge’s face sink, and then he became positively furious. He had always been a kind, friendly soul—calm and collected. This was a different Sarge. He tore his apron off and flung it to the ground. He faced my father with his fists clenched. For a second, I thought that Sarge would punch my father. My heart was racing. What would I do? What could I do?
But Sarge merely turned and strode out of basement and up the stairs. I could hear him muttering profanities and curses.
“Fuck all of you, Chinks!”
His voice was loud, clear, and forceful. The cooks, the waitresses in the kitchen, and maybe some of the customers in the dining room heard him.
That was the last I saw of Sarge, the policeman who let me handle a real revolver. I did hear though that sometime later he left Thibeault Falls for the big city. For years when I watched Westerns, I thought of Sarge and the thrill of handling a real revolver.
It took me a few—quite a few—years later with more experience and understanding to make the connection between the prejudice of my school classmates and what my father did to Sarge. Acceptance is an illusion. Everybody shows prejudices regardless of race, ethnicity and class.
I still wonder whether I have learned that lesson of life.
Garry Engkent is Chinese Canadian. He has taught at various universities and colleges, and co-authored three college writing texts. Currently, he writes literary stories. e.g. “Why My Mother Can’t Speak English,” “Acceptance” and “Two Tins of Dried Smelts.” He dabbles in the SF / horror genre, e.g. “I, Zombie: a Different Point of View,” “Immigrant Vampire,” “Merci” and “Vampiress.”