Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (6 page)

As soon as everyone left, which was two in the afternoon, Brenda locked the doors and checked the windows. She made her supper—Kraft Dinner—and went to bed at nine o’clock, which was really ten o’clock her time.

It was unseasonably warm for late September. It all seemed surreal to Brenda—the leaves were gold and orange, the days short, yet the air in the bedroom was almost clammy. She got up to open the window, but as she stood in front of it with her hand on the latch she stopped and shook her head. Who knew what might happen if you did that? She went downstairs and made sure the stove was off. She got up a half-hour later to check the back door and then she lay in the stuffy bedroom with her eyes screwed shut and her fists clenched, following each police siren to see if it was heading her way, monitoring all the strange noises of this strange house.

She fell into a restless half-sleep shortly after eleven. Just after midnight she woke up with a start, her heart pounding, when—
the toilet flushed!

Brenda had read how some burglars leave unspeakable things behind them before they flee the crime scene. She had never read about burglars who used the toilet before they began. Just her luck to get a weird one.

She lay in bed motionless—so rigid she was barely touching the mattress anymore. Maybe he would go away. Maybe he didn’t know she was there. If he came in her room she would start snoring. She would try to sound like a man.

The toilet flushed again.

Suddenly Brenda understood what was going on. Of course he knew she was there. That wasn’t a burglar in the bathroom. It was a killer. He wasn’t going to the toilet. He was sending her a message. He was going to kill and dismember her. Then he was going to flush her down the toilet.

Brenda did the only sensible thing she could think of doing under the circumstances. She jumped out of bed, clamped her eyes shut and leapt out the bedroom window.

Dave’s neighbor Jim Scoffield, who happened to be sitting in his backyard, smoking a cigarette and enjoying the warm evening, looked up when the window exploded. He said it was the most remarkable thing he ever saw in his life.

“At first I thought it was Morley,” he said. “I was sitting there and all of a sudden out she flew. I thought it was a gas explosion. I thought maybe I was next.”

Brenda landed on the roof of the gardening shed in Dave’s backyard. She landed on her feet, like a cat, and stood there, looking around. She had a few cuts on her arms, a big bruise on her shin, a sprained ankle, but nothing serious.

Jim looked at her across the fence. They made eye contact, and then they both looked up at the same time at the broken window she had sailed through. Galway was standing on the window ledge flicking her tail at the moon. Jim and Brenda looked at the cat and then back at each other.

Still they hadn’t said a word.

It was Jim, who comes from the Annapolis Valley, who spoke first.

“Nice night,” he said.

He came over and helped her down from the shed roof. She was wearing a pair of flannel pajamas she sometimes wears when she takes the cab out in the middle of the night, so she didn’t feel completely uncomfortable to be out in them.

They went inside together to look for the burglar but only got as far as the kitchen. That’s when Brenda mentioned the toilet flushing. That’s when Jim told her about the cat.

“Do you want a cigarette?” he asked.

She thought,
Do I ever,
and said, “Sure.”

Jim went to his place to get his cigarettes and came back with a sweater for her, a beer for each of them and a plate of cheese and crackers. They sat in the backyard for almost three hours—found out that they had both dropped out of Mount Allison the same autumn. By the time they said good-night Brenda had decided she liked the way the Toronto sky didn’t get night-black, didn’t mind the river of faraway voices and car sounds that played constantly in the background.

When Dave and Morley got back on Sunday afternoon Brenda was sitting in the backyard, Arthur at her feet and Galway in her lap. She said she was extending her visit by a week.

To no one’s surprise Jim announced in November that he was going home for Christmas for the first time in years.

“It’ll be good to see everyone,” he said. “I’m planning to get out to the island for New Year’s. Maybe visit Brenda.”

For her part Brenda told everyone in Big Narrows that Toronto wasn’t so bad. That it’s easy enough to meet people in Toronto.

As long as you go out at night.

The Fly

The small pleasure of going home at lunchtime is one of the welcome dividends that comes with owning a second-hand record store. When you choose to paddle in the backwa ters, people don’t get too bent out of shape when you pull to shore from time to time.

Dave closes his store and goes home for lunch a couple of days a week. It is the one time he can count on being home alone. Which—being the father of a teenage daughter—is a small pleasure he is thankful for. Most of all Dave enjoys getting to the mail before anyone else—sorting and reading it while he eats a sandwich or a bowl of soup.

Dave keeps a collection of smudged notes, handwritten on cardboard, taped to the inside of the front door of the Vinyl Cafe, which he uses whenever he closes during the day: “Back in fifteen minutes”; “I’m at Kenny Wong’s” (that’s Wong’s Scottish Meat Pies, five stores along the street); “Gone to the bank.” He has been using some of these notes for years—and a few of them are so smudged that Dave is the only one who can read them anymore. He sticks them up, nevertheless, and customers who find the store locked when they thought it would be open peer at the black smears taped to the glass, and often try the door several times before they wander away.

Of all the notes, Dave’s favorite is a sign he
didn’t
make himself. It’s a sign Morley gave him when he opened the Vinyl Cafe—a cut-out of a raccoon wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette. The raccoon has movable arms that you set like the hands of a clock. It’s wearing a sweatshirt that says “Back At!” You position the raccoon’s hands to tell when that will be. Dave uses the raccoon when he closes at lunch.

Dave came home for lunch one day in the middle of the week and found an envelope of the kind he is always hopeful of finding. The sort of letter that is the reason he bothers to check the mail. An ivory envelope of fine quality. Best of all, it was addressed to him.

As he carried the envelope into the kitchen Dave dropped the rest of the day’s mail absentmindedly on the coffee table. A handwritten personal letter is not the sort of thing that you see every day of the week. It gave him pleasure just to hold it. So much pleasure that instead of opening it right away he set it aside while he made himself a sandwich—grilled cheese. Dave is old enough to know that the jackpot of anticipation is always a grander prize than truth affords.

As he cooked his sandwich he kept glancing at the ivory envelope. He didn’t recognize the handwriting. There was no return address. He had no idea who might be writing him like this. Whoever it was had used a fountain pen. It was a touch that implied intimacy, a kind of extravagance—something an old girlfriend might do. Dave carried his sandwich to the table, ate half, wiped his hands carefully on a napkin, picked up the letter and slit it open.

The salutation had been handwritten in the same ink as the address on the envelope, but the body of the letter was typed. Printed actually. It appeared to be a form letter.

There is no disappointment as painful as the fall that comes from great expectations.

The letter was unsigned. Dave examined the envelope again. The handwriting looked vaguely familiar, but Dave couldn’t place it. He got up from the table and carried the envelope and letter across the kitchen and dropped them in the garbage can. He washed the dishes and went back to work.

But the thought of the letter tugged at him all afternoon. Dave knew perfectly well that making five copies and sending them to his friends wasn’t going to bring him good luck. It was the bad luck he was worried about. England
had,
after all, been eliminated from the World Cup. Dave didn’t want to wake up one morning speaking a language no one understood.

That night he pulled the letter out of the kitchen garbage and flattened it and folded it and stuck it in the pocket of his pants.

It’s a hard world. You can’t be too careful. It’s not such a big deal to make five photocopies. And even at forty-six cents, a stamp is still a bargain. Dave went to bed feeling better—so good that he completely forgot about the letter until he found it, a week later, when he reached into his back pocket looking for his wallet.

The same frustratingly familiar handwriting. But Dave’s forty-eight hours of grace were up. He
had
broken the chain—there would be no letters from him.

The lingering urge to pass the letter on was a defensive urge—an evasive action. Dave knows he is never going to win the lottery and live in Miami Beach. He is comfortable with that, with the knowledge that he is
not
a winner. But he is also just as determined not to be a loser.

Dave was on his way to work when he found the letter in his pocket. And it was with some anxiety that he walked to the corner and dropped it into a garbage can by a telephone pole. As he did that, Dave sighed; it was a deep sigh of resignation, followed by a long deep breath. Which was, as far as he can remember, the moment he inhaled something.

Something that wasn’t air. Something bigger than air. Something big enough to drive every thought out of his mind and send him reeling across the sidewalk, coughing. Tearing. Sputtering. Pedestrians were gaping at him as if he were having a heart attack. Surely not now, he thought. He was not even fifty. But for a moment, for a minute, for a couple of minutes—minutes he spent wheezing and coughing, minutes that he couldn’t remember anymore—for this eternity, until he could breathe again and was able to wave everyone off
(No, no. I’m all right),
for this lifetime, Dave thought he was about to die.

Something had gone down his throat. Something big. Something like a watermelon. Except watermelons are smooth. This was . . . rougher. More like a coconut. Except bigger than a coconut—this thing that nearly killed him.

When he was able to collect his thoughts, when he had collected himself, reassured the people who stopped to help him and wiped his eyes on the tail of his shirt, Dave tried to work out what had happened. The last thing he remembered, he had dropped the letter into the garbage can on the corner. He looked over at the metal container. At the garbage spilling over the top. At the flies buzzing around.

I just swallowed a fly, he thought.

His hand flew up to his chest involuntarily. He took a few tentative steps away from the garbage can. Everything seemed to be working all right—his legs were working. He coughed gently. He took a few more steps. He shrugged and began to sing softly to himself.

That made him feel better. He smiled, and started to walk a little faster. Still somewhat unsure, but the unsureness was now joined by the giddy relief that descends upon the survivors of major disasters.

He had almost died. He was alive.

This event, this brush with death, had happened not far from the Vinyl Cafe, almost in front of Kenny Wong’s restaurant. Dave thought maybe he should get a pop. Rinse his mouth.