Extreme Vinyl Café

by Stuart McLean

  He turned suddenly, went into his old clothes closet and reached up behind the door frame. There was a hole in the plaster the size of a grapefruit. He stood on his toes and reached into the hole, searching with his hand. He smiled and pulled out a purple Crown Royal bag. He took the bag to his bed, reached into it and pulled out his complete set of Parkhurst hockey cards: 1957 to 1958.

  He lay on his bed and thumbed through the cards.

  There were only two teams in the set. The Canadiens and the Leafs. Fifty cards in all. He took the thick brown elastic band from around them. Doug Harvey, the great Montreal defenceman, was card number 1; then the man who invented the slapshot, “Boom Boom” Geoffrion. Jean Beliveau, who could have been Governor General, was next; then Henri Richard, followed by his brother, card number 5, the great Maurice “The Rocket” Richard.

  The texture of the paper, so thick it was almost cardboard, was unlike anything they use today. And the inks—the primary blues, the dramatic reds and the vibrant yellow accents—were like a whisper in his ear: the siren song of his boyhood calling him, down the kaleidoscope of memory, to the schoolyard, a-bustle with boys, all of them trading and flipping cards like carnival barkers.

  Yo-yos and chestnuts. Stems and strings. Frogs in the creek. Tadpoles in a jar. Red-winged blackbirds and squirrels. His old red bike.

  He sat up and put the cards on his bedside table. He spent the next ten minutes unpacking his bag. He put everything into the empty top drawer of his old bureau. It was like settling into a hotel room. Another chance to start again. Another chance at a life where you hang up your shirts and fold everything neatly. When he had finished unpacking, he put the hockey cards back in the liquor bag and the bag back in the wall.

  When Dave went downstairs, Smith Gardner was washing his hands in the kitchen sink. Dave saw him glance at the empty towel rack beside the fridge. Dave, still on the stairs, made to fetch a towel, but before he took even a step, Smith reached for the second drawer to the right of the stove, pulled out a fresh towel and shook it open. This was clearly not the first time Smith Gardner had washed his hands at that sink.

  Dave glanced at the kitchen table. It was set for three.

  “I invited Smith to stay,” said Margaret.

  Margaret sat down in the chair where she always sat, the chair close to the stove. For the last few years Dave had been sitting in the spot where his father, Charlie, used to sit, to Margaret’s right. That chair had a place set in front of it. But so did the chair where Dave sat when he was a boy. Dave saw Smith glance at the table, and it occurred to him he didn’t want to sit in his boyhood chair, not if Smith Gardner was in his father’s.

  He didn’t actually run across the kitchen. But he did lurch. He lurched across the kitchen, beat Smith to the table, sat down in his father’s place and then looked at Smith, half stood up again and said, “I’m not in your seat, am I?”

  Smith said, “I don’t have a seat.”

  But Dave didn’t miss the glance that passed between his mother and this man.

  Dinner, as always, was plentiful. There was chicken and mashed potatoes, and a bowl of peas (canned), and a bowl of squash (fresh), and a plate of bread, and butter, and a cabbage salad.

  As they passed things around, Smith said, “My son and I were trying to work out if he had played hockey against you.”

  “Against me?” said Dave.

  “He played for Port Hawkesbury,” said Smith. “Right wing.”

  Dave said, “I don’t think we had a town team.”

  He looked at his mother.

  “You weren’t on it,” she said.

  “What about baseball?” said Smith, reaching for the butter. “Didn’t the Narrows win the provincial cup a couple times back then?”

  Dave shrugged. “Not when I was on the team.”

  There was an awkward silence. As if it was obvious that that was no coincidence.

  Margaret raised her eyebrows. Margaret said to Smith, “Tell David about your house.” She turned to Dave. “He built it himself,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Dave. He was remembering his disastrous attempt to rewire a kitchen outlet. Maybe a whole house was easier.

  Soon enough dinner was over. Soon enough the dishes were done, and Smith was standing by the back door.

  “Margaret,” he said, “that was delicious.” He turned to go, but before he was out the door, he turned back and said, “Are we going to the church thing tomorrow night?”

  Dave picked up a crossword book from the coffee table and pretended he wasn’t listening.

  Dave is not by nature a morning person. He wakes up slowly and, almost always, later than he would like. The long flight east, the shift in time zones, the bed of his boyhood—all of these things worked on him that night. He meant to be up at seven. It was 8:30 when the slap of the ladder on his bedroom window jerked him awake. When he opened his eyes, there was Smith Gardner at the window, peering in at him.

  He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up stupidly. Smith was struggling with the outside storm window.

  “Morning,” called Smith cheerily.

  Dave felt humiliated. He had planned to be up long before this. He staggered to the window. The window appeared stuck.

  “Let me help,” said Dave.

  He gave the window a mighty thump.

  Smith’s eyes bulged as the window flew toward him unexpectedly. And then, propelled by the suddenly loose window, the ladder tipped back ever so slightly.

  Smith, who now had one hand on the ladder and one on the window, hovered there for a moment, and then, just like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, in exquisite cartoon slow motion, Smith tipped back and vanished from view, clutching the storm window as he disappeared.

  Dave galloped downstairs and flew out the back door.

  The ladder was on the ground. But Smith and the window were nowhere to be seen.

  “Smith?” called Dave.

  Dave heard a rustle above him, like the flapping of bird wings or a moth buffeting a lamp. He looked up.

  Smith was dangling above him, one hand clutching the eavestrough, the other still holding the unstuck storm. His legs were windmilling wildly.

  Dave wrestled the ladder up and shoved it against the side of the house. Smith managed to get his feet onto it. Then, with one hand still gripping the window, Smith shimmied down the rungs. When his feet hit the ground, Dave apologized. Smith stared at him, handed him the window and headed for the kitchen door.

  “No problem. Thanks for the help,” he muttered as he disappeared inside.

  That night Dave set the bedside alarm for 7:30. He woke the next morning at 7:15, to a percussive thumpa! thumpa! thumpa! He squinted at the clock and groaned. He swung his feet over the bed and staggered to the window. Smith Gardner was standing at the edge of the garden with his back to Dave. There was a pile of one-by-threes on the ground beside him and a sledgehammer at his feet. He was using a nail gun to erect a fence around the vegetable patch.

  “We want to keep the deer out this summer,” said Margaret when Dave struggled through the kitchen.

  We? thought Dave as he headed out the door, doing up his belt on the fly. We want to keep the deer out?

  Smith and Dave worked together for most of the morning, Dave fetching and holding pickets for the fence, Smith driving the nails. At noon Smith surveyed the sky and said, “I think we could paint it this afternoon.”

  Dave said, “Why don’t you go get the paint and I’ll finish it off.”

  Dave held his hand out for the nail gun. But Smith didn’t move. He stared at Dave, the gun dangling beside his thigh. Dave reached for it. Smith tightened his grip. Dave, who now had his hand on the gun, gave it a little tug. Smith looked at Dave with reluctance. He could see the scene unfolding—two little boys wrestling over their favourite toy. Smith let go. But he didn’t leave. He stood there.

  “Go on,” said Dave. “Get the paint.”

  Dave held the nail gun up, the long plas
tic strip of nails dangling down to his knees.

  He ran his hand along the gun. He had never actually used a nail gun before. He wanted to say, This is the trigger, right? But he didn’t want to appear stupid. So he didn’t ask. Unfortunately.

  Instead Dave hefted the gun and touched the trigger tentatively. The gun went off. Three quick rounds. Thumpa! Thumpa! Thumpa!

  The volley of nails flew across the lawn.

  “Woah,” said Smith. “Careful.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Dave. He turned toward Smith, smiling with what he hoped was benign calm. He was feeling anything but calm. He was shaken by the explosion, so shaken, in fact, that he forgot that his finger was still squeezing the trigger. He turned toward Smith to reassure and apologize. Smith threw himself to the ground and covered his head, just as the next barrage of nails exploded from the gun. The nails whizzed across the yard, barely clearing the white wisps of hair on Smith’s head.

  One shattered the back window of Smith’s gleaming pickup. It lodged in the dashboard like an arrow. Another punctured his rear right tire. Then the gun, blessedly, was empty.

  As the air hissed out of the tire, Smith scrambled to his feet. He looked over at his ruined truck and then back at Dave. Smith reached out his hand and snatched the gun back from Dave.

  As Dave let go of the gun, he tried to look thoughtful.

  “It’s really quite responsive, isn’t it?” he said.

  Everyone tried their best to be upbeat at lunch, but there was no denying the tension at the table. When Dave came into the kitchen, Margaret and Smith were standing by the sink whispering. When Dave made tea, he saw Smith sniff it suspiciously.

  After lunch the two of them went outside and settled into separate jobs. Smith went at the new fence with a paintbrush. Dave used his father’s old axe to attack the cord of wood by the shed.

  He was out of practice and, as the afternoon wore on, he became painfully aware that Smith was outpacing him. He was determined not to fall behind. So Dave sped up. Soon Dave was cracking away at the wood like a maniac.

  Smith glanced over at him, anxiety creasing his brow. Smith sped up too, working his way down the fence as fast as he could, trying to paint his way out of range of Dave’s flying axe.

  Before long they had worked each other into a frenzy: Smith slopping paint on the fence, while Dave, his shirt off, bobbed up and down in front of the woodpile like a mechanical woodpecker.

  “Oh my goodness,” said Margaret when she came out with tea.

  The two of them stopped and stared at her dumbly, both of them panting like sweaty weasels.

  “Tea?” said Margaret.

  Safe upstairs, Dave leaned against the bathroom window and tried to pull himself together. Below him in the yard, a worried-looking Smith Gardner was saying something to Margaret. She reached out and patted his arm gently. The same way she used to pat Dave and his sister Annie when they were upset.

  He couldn’t believe this was happening to him—his own mother, in his own house, with another man.

  The next morning, Saturday, Margaret put the question of Smith on the table.

  “This is silly,” she said. “At my age. It’s a mistake. I can’t change things around at this stage of my life.”

  Dave, who had never been in the position of giving his mother dating advice, didn’t know what to say. He froze up and a silence fell between them.

  Dave said, “I’ll do the dishes.”

  He was muttering to himself as he scrubbed intensely around the inside of a pot. He should have said something.

  On Sunday morning Dave said, “I think I’ll go for a walk.”

  “It’s chilly,” said Margaret.

  “I’ll be okay,” said Dave.

  He took a black sweater off a peg in the mud room. The sweater used to be his father’s. He went out the back door and stood on the lawn. It was one of those perfect spring mornings, a morning that would make anyone who had gone away and come back wonder why they had left in the first place.

  Margaret was right, it was chilly, but the sun was shining and it would warm up soon enough. He headed down the hill toward town.

  Little rivers trickled into the ditch beside the road. Dave missed the sogginess of spring. He watched a hawk circling over the creek. As he rounded the corner just before his cousin, Colm McDougall’s, place, a red-winged blackbird flapped off a telephone pole and coughed its way toward Macaulay’s maple bush. The dust of summer, like the dust of days gone by, seemed far away.

  When he got to town, Dave stopped in at the Maple Leaf Restaurant for a coffee. It still came in a white porcelain mug with a matching creamer. He sat at the counter, thinking about nothing at all. Pretty soon he was remembering the times he had sat there with his father; he and Charlie sharing an order of french fries after a ball game, a movie or, don’t tell your mother, dinner. Oh Charlie. When Dave finished his coffee, he chatted to Alice at the cash, and then wandered along Railway Street.

  He passed Art Gillespie’s old laundromat and ice plant, and Kerrigan’s Foods. He remembered the year he had built the one-sided float for the Narrows’ Christmas parade. Dave had been trying to impress what’s her name—Megan Lorius. He hadn’t thought about her for years; he was so stuck on her. She was so stuck up.

  Dave, lost in thought, was no longer paying attention to where he was going. Didn’t know he was going anywhere.

  He wandered past Kerrigan’s and out the south end of town. He stopped on the Thamesville Bridge and leaned on the rusty green rail and watched the current, picking out bubbles on the water surface and following them as far as he could.

  It was the very same spot where Charlie and he had stood the summer he was eleven years old. The afternoon Charlie had taught him how to jump. All his friends had already done it, but Dave was afraid.

  They were on their way home from church, dressed in their Sunday best.

  “Hold my hand,” said Charlie. “We’ll go together.”

  “Mom’s going to kill us,” said Dave when they surfaced.

  “I know,” said Charlie, splashing toward the riverbank. “Isn’t it grand?”

  Charlie always had believed in his son. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Charlie had believed Dave could do anything.

  Dave came to, standing by the stone gates of the Big Narrows Union Cemetery.

  The Union Cemetery is in a little square clearing where the Gillespie Road ends in a T-junction with the road to the Macaulays’ place. If you are in a car, you have to turn left or right at the stop sign, but if you are walking, like Dave was, you can keep going and walk straight into the graveyard. Which is what Dave did.

  He walked into the graveyard and along the gravel path about halfway to the back, and then he left the path and cut across the grass.

  He didn’t go to his father’s grave first. First he went to the far corner of the graveyard, where the hill dips away and the trees are old and big. To where the graves are shaded, and there are pine needles instead of grass.

  There was, unbelievably, still a mound of snow by the fence. This was the corner where the old graves were. As Dave wandered among them, his fingers brushed absentmindedly against the stones.

  Many of the inscriptions, worn by winter wind and rain, were too faded to read anymore. Some of the stones barely poked out of the earth, as if the ground was rising up to swallow them.

  For dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.

  He walked across to a newer section and found his father’s stone and stood in front of it, wearing the black sweater his dad used to wear when he worked in the yard.

  Hey, he said silently. How are you doing?

  Then he said, Mom has a boyfriend. I mean. I think she has a boyfriend.

  Yeah, she has a boyfriend. And I don’t know what I am supposed to think about that.

  I was wondering what you were thinking. I am assuming you already know.

  Dave looked over at the old trees.

  I keep thinking of you
up here by yourself. I keep thinking of you all alone. I don’t want you to be lonely. And I wanted to know that you were, you know, I don’t know. Are you okay? Are you okay with this?

  Maybe, he said, if you had looked after yourself, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

  Then he said, Sorry. I love you.

  He was still standing there, feeling sorry, when a green pickup pulled onto the gravel by the gates. When he looked over, Dave saw Smith Gardner step out of the cab and walk through the gates. He was carrying a weed whacker.

  When Smith saw Dave he stopped abruptly. Dave was by the grave, Smith by the gates. Dave looked awkward. Smith looked … nervous?

  “Hey,” said Dave. “It’s okay.” Did Smith think he was going to injure him here?

  Smith walked over.

  “I didn’t expect to run into you,” said Smith.

  “I didn’t expect to come,” said Dave.

  Smith looked down at the stone. “Is this Charlie?” he asked.

  Dave nodded.

  “I’ve never been here,” said Smith. “I mean I’ve been here plenty. Too often these days. But never to see him.”

  He held up the weed whacker and motioned at the grave.

  “Doesn’t seem to need it.”

  The two of them stood there for a moment and then Smith said, “I never met him.”

  “He was a good guy,” said Dave. “He liked music.”

  “I know,” said Smith. “So does your mom. They used to sing.”

  Dave smiled. “She told you?”

  “Oh,” said Smith. “She’s told me all about him. All about him.

  “I don’t know anything about music myself. I got the lowest score in music in all of Port Hawkesbury when I was a youngster. The opera? I don’t know even a little bit about that. I haven’t the foggiest how to talk to her about it.” He shook his head. “So I just listen and nod.”

  He was wringing his hands. Then he cleared his throat and said the most stunning thing. He said, “I thought of asking her to marry me, but I’m terrified she would make me dance with her at the wedding.”