Home from the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  “Not unusual,” said an older man near the end of the day. Dave recognized him as one of the group who had been standing in his driveway the morning it rained. He was wearing sneakers and a rumpled canvas hat. He gestured over his shoulder where the limousine had been.

  “We call them twitchers,” he said. “When they get close to whatever bird it is they’re trying to add to their list, and they aren’t sure if they’re going to see it or not, they start to twitch.”

  It was getting chilly. Only this man and Dave were left in the driveway.

  “They can pretty much tell as they drive up the street,” said the old man. “If everyone is looking through their binoculars, then they know they’re all right. They can relax. But if people are walking around … that’s when they start to twitch. Because they know as soon as they get out of their car, someone is going to say, ‘She was here two minutes ago, but you missed her.’ ”

  “You watch her long enough,” said Dave, “and you get to know her habits.”

  “She likes to fly in from the right,” said the old man.

  “Out of the hedge,” said Dave. “She comes every fifteen minutes or so.”

  As they stood watching, the little bird flicked out of the hedge and landed on the feeder. She looked around rapidly, knocked back a few worms, and flew off.

  “She feeds more in the morning,” said Dave.

  The old man nodded.

  The bird flew back.

  “This is a crippling view,” said the man.

  “Would you like to come in?” said Dave. “Have a coffee?”

  The man held out his hand. “My name is Norm,” he said.

  It was like that for three weeks. But instead of trailing off, it got worse. Someone from one of the television stations did a feature on Dave’s bird. The following weekend, when Morley was coming home from grocery-shopping, she was stopped by a policeman a block from her home. “You can’t go down that street,” said the cop. “Some idiot put up signs all over the place about a rare bird.”

  “But I live down there,” said Morley.

  The cop waved her through. There were cars parked everywhere and people walking in the middle of the road.

  Sam was standing at the front door. He was wearing a pair of oven mitts that made his hands look ridiculously large.

  “We dropped a pot of hot chocolate on the stove,” he said. “It put the flame out, and the stove won’t go on again. It smells of gas.”

  That was the weekend when people who weren’t even interested in birds started coming. They wanted to be there because they had heard a lot of other people had been there, and they didn’t want to miss anything.

  One of the men who had come in from the suburbs chewed Dave out. “It doesn’t look so special to me,” he said. “I drove all the way from Brampton. It’s not like it’s an eagle or anything. I’ll bet that bird has never killed anything in its life.”

  The second time that happened, Dave called the hotline and said, “The bird has gone. Could you take it off your list, please.”

  Then he went outside and took down Sam’s sign and put up a new one. THE BIRD HAS GONE, it read.

  That was at the end of March. The bird hadn’t left, of course. Dave continued to feed her three times a day. He spent over two hundred dollars on mealworms during the winter. He came to know her well.

  She was a woodland bird in the middle of the city, way off course, and she had landed at his feeder. He felt proud that he had seen her through the frigid months, that he had kept her alive. He felt affection for her. He felt that she belonged to him somehow. He knew this was sentimentality. He knew the bird didn’t feel anything about him. If anything, he was just another intruder in the backyard, and God knows there were enough of those.

  But on that fresh, soft morning in May, when Dave slipped into his backyard and counted the worms and found none missing, he knew she was gone, and he felt sad—although he realized the bird had probably migrated and that was the best thing for her.

  Some of the birders told him they thought she had been blown north in a storm. But the old guy, Norm, who had come in for coffee, said he didn’t accept that theory. He said sometimes something happens to a bird’s wiring and it shows up in the wrong place. He said that birds who show up in wrong places have a way of doing it again.

  So Dave sat in bed with the unread paper beside him early on that quiet Saturday morning and wondered if maybe he would see his bird again in the fall. He imagined that whatever else she had felt, she had felt a sense of home. She could have left anytime she wanted. And now she had. Just like everyone who has ever had a home, she had followed that universal urge to leave.

  Dave picked up the paper. Then he put it down and got out of bed and stared out the window. He was thinking of the mysteries of migration. He was thinking that of all the mysteries, maybe the one true thing we know and share with the animals was this sense of seeking, finding, leaving, but above all, of returning home.

  Emil

  It was the mulberry spring. The spring the mulberries were fatter and juicier than anyone remembered. The sidewalk under the mulberry tree on the corner was stained deep purple for weeks. The birds got fat. Three times, Morley sent Sam out with a chair and a bowl. Three times in two weeks, she baked mulberry pie, the juices bubbling over the piecrust like wine.

  It was the spring when rain only came at night. The spring of damp earth and blue skies. The spring of fat worms.

  It was the spring when gardening became so popular that even criminals got into it.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Morley, standing on her front lawn, waving at her garden. “They took two ornamental cabbages, my hens-and-chickens, and the smoke bush. I loved that smoke bush.” She was pointing at the hole between the forsythia and the Siberian iris. “It was purple. My aunt Muriel has a huge one in her backyard.”

  Each plant had been excised with medical precision. Morley kicked the only thing that the thief had left behind, a melon-sized pile of earth on the edge of the lawn where the roots had been shaken clean. Whoever it was had made off with everything, roots and all.

  “Surely,” she said, “surely, you would notice someone walking down the street with a smoke bush. Do you think we should call the police?”

  When someone you love is upset enough to suggest calling the police over a missing smoke bush, you have two choices. You can, if you don’t care how the rest of the day goes, say, “The plant police? We should phone the plant police? Are you out of your mind?” Or you can muster as much affection as possible and say, as Dave did, “You stay with the plants. I’ll call the police.” Then you go inside and stand in the kitchen for what feels like the appropriate amount of time before you come back outside and lie. You say, “They are sending out a car. And if they see anyone with a smoke bush, they are going to stop them. On the spot.” Dave considered adding something about how they were going to check the florists in the area, but the thing about a successful lie is not going too far.

  That night, as she sat in bed with gardening magazines fanned around her like playing cards, Morley said, “I’m going to get him.” She meant the thief.

  It took her three weeks.

  She got lucky one night. She woke up at three-fifteen A.M. and couldn’t get back to sleep. It was hot, and she was restless, and because she didn’t want to wake Dave, she got out of bed and wandered absentmindedly to the window. It was a beautiful night. The moon was shining, and the white flowers of the nicotiana held her eye. The small fragrant petals, outdone in the light of day, were radiant in the moonlight.

  “To every thing,” said Morley.

  She frowned. Something was bothering her. Gradually, she became aware of what it was. There was movement across the street. Someone was on their hands and knees in the Schellenbergers’ garden. And it wasn’t Betty Schellenberger.

  When you witness a crime in progress in the middle of the night, the only thing to do is to phone the police. Unless, of course, instead of being in t
he hands of reason, you are in hands that control more satisfying emotions—like rage and revenge. If you are being moved by hands of rage, you grab your robe, and one of your socks, and one of your husband’s socks, and you pull on the mismatched socks as you hop-skip toward the stairs, and you race out the front door in the frayed robe that you would never, under ordinary circumstances, wear outside, and you dash across the street into your neighbor’s yard without stopping to think.

  Morley stormed into the Schellenbergers’ garden. When she saw the man on his hands and knees digging up Betty Schellenberger’s gold-flame spirea, she stopped dead. She thought, I should have woken Dave.

  The man must have heard her, because without warning, he stood up, whirled around, and gasped. He looked frighteningly like Rasputin—bearded and dirty, wild and crazy. He took a step toward Morley, but she stood her ground, her hands folded across her chest, holding her robe closed.

  “Hello, Emil,” she said. “I see you’re doing some gardening.”

  Emil began breathing rapidly, panting almost. Wringing his hands as if washing them. “I am going on vacation,” he panted. “I am going to … Greece. Have you ever been to Greece? They have castles there. I am going on a charter flight, but it will be safe because they line the planes with lead. Before, they didn’t, and the rays got you and that’s how you got cancer. Did you know that? Eh? Did you know that?”

  Morley had met Emil three years before. He showed up one morning in front of her husband’s record store wearing a pair of ripped pants and slippers and stood on the sidewalk for two weeks.

  “He’s making me crazy,” said Dave. “He’s driving away business.”

  “He is not driving away business,” said Morley.

  “I’ve asked him to go somewhere else,” said Dave. “But he’s back every day. He can’t just stand around on the street like that.”

  Morley looked at her husband carefully. “Why not?” she said.

  Emil had appeared at a bad time. He had appeared only a week after the notorious Flick Lady had disappeared from the neighborhood.

  The Flick Lady had marched into Woodsworth’s bookstore out of the blue one day, gone to the history section, and begun flicking the covers of all the political biographies, snapping her finger on the jacket photos and making her disgust clear with each flick: yech, yech, yech. After two minutes she walked out of the store. She did this every afternoon, usually between two and three.

  Dave tried to convince Dorothy, who owned Woods-worth’s, that the Flick Lady was harmless. And probably politically sophisticated. He held his position until she added the Vinyl Cafe to her afternoon rounds. The Flick Lady came into Dave’s record store one afternoon and picked up an album and held it to her chest as she sang a tuneless rendition of “Downtown.” After three months of these daily visits, she stopped as mysteriously as she had started. Disappeared. But now there was this man. Standing in front of his store like a rain cloud.

  * * *

  One morning at breakfast, Morley said, “What is his name?”

  Dave was holding up a jar of peach jam, squinting at the list of ingredients. He said, “What?”

  Morley said, “The man on the sidewalk with the pants. What’s his name?”

  Dave said, “I have no idea. What is pectin, anyway?”

  Morley was pouring herself a cup of coffee. “Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s natural.” She reached out and took the jar from Dave and made him look at her. “You can’t expect him to listen to you if you don’t even know his name, Dave. You should introduce yourself.”

  And that was how Morley came to know the name of the man in the Schellenbergers’ garden. Emil.

  After Dave had introduced himself, Emil had moved across the street. For the past two years, he had sat in the stairwell next door to the Heart of Christ Religious Supplies and Fax Services. The stairwell had become his place in the world. And slowly, he had become part of Dave and Morley’s world, too. They didn’t know where he slept, but they knew before he slept, he went to Beaver electronics and watched television on the set in the store window. He liked baseball games. He owned a universal remote control and could change the channels. And he would raise the volume loud enough to hear the games through the window.

  The first time Morley gave Emil money—she gave him five dollars—Emil said, “That’s too much.” He gave her two dollars’ change.

  Other times he wouldn’t take her money. “I don’t need it,” he would say. “I have enough. I have enough.”

  Sometimes he was too agitated to speak. Morley would see Emil standing on a corner somewhere, his shirt out, his belly showing, the bottom of his pants ripped and grubby. He would be lost in some world, staring at his feet, talking to himself. He wouldn’t even notice her. Other times he would see Morley coming and would brighten and say hello as if they were old friends, as if he had been waiting for her.

  When Morley tried to give Emil food, he wouldn’t take it. The first time he said, “I can’t take your sandwich.”

  Morley said, “Well, I’m not hungry.” She put the sandwich she had bought for him on top of the newspaper box on the corner. When she came back an hour later, it was gone.

  One day Emil showed up at the Vinyl Cafe with a shopping cart full of books. They were old library books he had bought for twenty-five cents each at a library sale: math texts, novels by unknown authors, books of language instruction, romances.

  “If you want to take out a book,” said Emil, “you have to take out a membership.”

  Dave had been spending the morning slipping 45-rpm records into plastic envelopes that said VINYL CAFE on them in large red letters. Underneath, in blue lowercase, it said, “We may not be big, but we’re small.” Dave had thousands of 45s, and normally, he didn’t pay much attention to them. He sold them like vegetables. There was a roll of plastic bags on the wall near the bin of records. You would put five 45s in a bag for ninety-nine cents. But he had been slowly working his way through the bins, pulling out the good ones, struck by the wonderful artwork on the labels: the flowing silver script on the Mercury label, the fat happy letters on the Dot.

  When Emil walked in, Dave had just picked up “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas. The moment he saw the record, he remembered that he owed Denny Doherty three hundred dollars. He was wondering if Denny remembered the weekend he had lent Dave the money. They had gone to Jamaica with Carl Wilson. Or was it Mustique with Al Jardine? Carl or Al? That was what he was thinking when Emil walked in and said, “If you want to take out a book, you have to take out a membership.”

  Dave slipped the record under the counter, separate from the others, and said, “How much? How much is a membership in your library, Emil?”

  Emil shook his head and laughed. “Don’t be crazy, Dave. Everyone knows libraries are free.” He said it as if he were talking to a child.

  Dave wrote his name and address on a piece of paper Emil tore out of his book. Dave picked three books out of the shopping cart, and Emil said, “You can’t take out more than two books at once, Dave.”

  Dave settled on a western and a high-protein cookbook called Liver with Love. He put the books in a drawer under the counter—or thought he did.

  He forgot all about them until Emil appeared a month later and said, “Did you know your books are overdue? You owe five dollars in fines, you know.”

  Emil then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the piece of paper Dave had signed when he had joined his library. Dave stared dumbly at the paper, wondering where Emil had kept it for the month.

  Dave said he was still reading the books and would pay the fines after he finished. He said, “Come back in a few days, Emil.”

  He looked for the books at home and again at the store, and then he had to admit to himself that he had probably lost them. It bothered him that Emil could keep track of the scrap of paper, and he couldn’t keep track of the books. What bothered him even more was the disturbing feeling that he had lost something e
lse—something he couldn’t even remember losing.

  Emil came back two more times, each time pushing the shopping cart. The first time he told Dave his fine was up to seven dollars; on the second visit, he said it was up to ten; and then, just as Dave had hoped, Emil forgot about the books and the fines.

  Dave didn’t believe in giving Emil money. He had argued with Morley about this.

  “If he gets money,” he said, “he buys cigarettes and lottery tickets. And I’m sure he loses the tickets. Why would you give someone money so he can throw it away on lottery tickets he’s going to lose?”

  “I don’t care what he does with the money,” Morley said. “He doesn’t take it if he doesn’t need it. Sometimes he won’t take it.”

  Dave wasn’t listening. He had suddenly remembered why losing Emil’s books bothered him so much—remembered the object that had been gnawing at the edge of his consciousness. He had bought a lottery ticket the weekend the prize had gone over ten million dollars. And he had no idea where he had put it. He had read that it was not unusual for winning tickets to go unclaimed because people lost them. In the middle of his conversation with Morley, he abruptly turned and went downstairs and rummaged through the laundry hamper, knowing he was never going to find the ticket, wondering if it was one of the winners and exactly how much money he had thrown away.

  And that was why Morley felt so let down last month as she stood on the Schellenbergers’ lawn at three-fifteen in the morning—that of all people it would be Emil standing there with the Schellenbergers’ gold-flame spirea at his feet.

  Instead of getting angry, she said, “Is that for your garden, Emil?”

  Emil said, “Did you know the moon is a hotbed of hostile alien activity?”

  Morley wasn’t falling for that. She said, “That’s crazy talk, Emil. I want to know what you’re going to do with that plant. Do you have a garden?”