Home from the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  He had both speakers stashed behind the counter and was standing in the store with his hand on the light switch when a big guy in a wool toque stuck his head in the front door. “Are you open?” he asked.

  “Just closing,” said Dave.

  The man was wearing gray sweatpants and a Road Runner T-shirt. He had about ten albums under his arm.

  “I was wondering if you wanted to buy these?” he said, holding up the records.

  Dave had already flicked off the lights in the back of the store and was about to say “I’ve already closed the till” when he spotted the album on the top of the pile. It was the original RCA Victor Living Stereo copy of the sound track from Casino Royale.

  His hand stopped in midair on its way to the last light switch. He invited the guy into the store with a wave of his hand, locked the door behind him, and said, “What else have you got there?”

  What the guy had was the motherlode: Harry Belafonte Live in Concert at the Carnegie Hall. A sealed copy of Simon and Garfunkel’s Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., and best of all, the Bonanza sound track with Lorne Greene singing the theme.

  Dave whistled. “Where’d you get this stuff?” he asked.

  The guy pulled a crushed package of Camels out of his pants pocket and looked at Dave questioningly. Dave nodded. “Go ahead,” he said.

  The guy said, “My brother used to collect them. But he’s been in Australia for eighteen years, and I’m getting tired of having his stuff filling up my apartment. He said I should just sell them.”

  Dave had been looking for the Simon and Garfunkel album for a year. He had never even dreamed of seeing a sealed copy.

  “How many?” Dave said. “How many records in all?”

  “There are hundreds,” said the guy.

  Dave said, “I can give you two dollars for each album and four for Simon and Garfunkel. That’s what? Ten albums? Twenty-two dollars. I’ll make it twenty-five.”

  The guy looked disappointed.

  Dave said, “Look. I’ll sell these for about six dollars each. I’ll come over to your place tomorrow and look at the rest. If there are five hundred albums, that’s good money.”

  He glanced at his watch as the guy thought it over.

  Dave had thirty-four dollars left in his wallet when he finally locked the store.

  As he walked by Emil, he considered asking for a loan. Instead, he found a toy store downtown that took a check for the Bat Cave.

  He stopped at a phone booth and called his friend Kenny Wong. He said, “Tonight is Sam’s birthday party. There are kids coming over, I need food.”

  Kenny said, “You got it.”

  Dave got home at five-fifteen. Stephanie was in the living room watching The Simpsons. Dave said, “Please turn that down.”

  “There’s a note on the refrigerator,” said Stephanie.

  The note said, Birthday party instructions. Dave glanced at it.

  He said, “Stephanie, I want you to go and get a movie.”

  Stephanie said, “When this is over.”

  Dave said, “Now.”

  Sam emerged from under a piece of furniture and said, “I want to go and get the movie.”

  Dave said, “No way.”

  Sam started to argue. Stephanie was still glued to the television.

  Dave said, “Stephanie. Go and get a movie for the party.”

  His daughter stood up slowly and held out her hand. Dave said, “I don’t have any money. Do you have money? I’ll pay you back. Tomorrow.” Stephanie rolled her eyes. Before she left, she made Dave sign an IOU. On her way out the door, she looked at Sam and said, “I’m going to get The Little Mermaid.”

  Sam screamed, “I hate you.”

  When Dave came into the room to see what was the matter, Sam screamed, “I hate you, too. I don’t want a party.” He ran upstairs. His bedroom door and the front door slammed in unison.

  It took Stephanie almost an hour to return with the movie. Unfortunately, she didn’t get The Little Mermaid. She got Night of the Zombie instead.

  The kids had arrived and were bouncing off the basement walls. Dave was trying to ice the cake, something he had never done in his life. He was trying to spread icing from the fridge onto a cake he had just taken out of the microwave. He was too busy to ask about the movie. The cold icing was ripping hunks of cake the size of golf balls away from the surface. When he finished, the cake looked like it had been iced with a chain saw.

  Dave stared at what he had done and poured himself a drink.

  Which was when Kenny Wong arrived. Kenny was wearing a pair of green tartan pants and a bright yellow T-shirt. The red letters across the front of the T-shirt read, WONG’S SCOTTISH MEAT PIES—GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT!

  He threw two plastic bags of meat pies onto the kitchen table.

  Dave said, “There’s only ten kids.”

  Kenny said, “It’s a party. They’ll be fine. I’ll be right back. I’ll have Scotch.”

  When he came back, Kenny was carrying a large cardboard pastry box. He set the box down on the table and motioned at Dave to open it. “What do you think?” he said.

  Dave peered in the box. It looked like an order of fried fish.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Deep-fried Mars bars,” said Kenny. “There are two dozen. I made them myself.”

  Dave frowned.

  Kenny pointed at the lumpy cake on the counter. It looked like a grade-five geography project—a papier-mâché model of a mountain range. “What’s that?” Kenny asked.

  “The cake,” said Dave. “I made it myself.”

  The kids took one look at the meat pies and rolled their eyes.

  “I thought we were having pizza,” said Sam.

  “They were out of pizza,” said Dave.

  Only Terrence was interested in the pies. Terrence, the smallest kid at the party, with a little round face and dark grubby hair hanging to his shoulders, said, “Please, can I have two?”

  The other kids disappeared into the basement with hunks of cake and two Mars bars each.

  Terrence was back in five minutes. He said, “Could I have two more pies, please?”

  Ten minutes later, Terrence was back for a third helping. He had ketchup all over his hands and T-shirt. He said, “These pies are good.”

  Kenny reached out and rumpled Terrence’s hair. When he removed his hand, it was streaked with ketchup.

  When Morley came home at eight-thirty, the front door was open and the house was deadly quiet.

  She walked into the kitchen and saw Kenny heading out the back door with a garbage bag.

  “Be careful,” said Dave from under the kitchen table. “We’ve had a little ketchup accident.”

  Morley looked at the meat-pie crusts piled on the counter.

  “I thought you were getting pizza,” she said.

  “They were out of pizza,” said Dave.

  Morley stared at him for a moment and then said, “What did you give Terrence?”

  Dave looked at her.

  Morley said, “The O’Connors are vegetarians—it’s on the note—Terrence has never eaten meat.”

  Dave looked at Kenny.

  Kenny grinned at Morley. “He has now,” he said.

  Morley was hoping things would be cleaned up by the time she got home. However, it wasn’t the state of her kitchen that was bothering her. What was bothering her was the silence.

  She looked at the basement stairs. “It’s awfully quiet down there,” she said. “Are they watching TV? I thought they were going to play baseball.”

  Dave said, “We got a movie.”

  “What movie?” said Morley.

  Dave crawled out from under the kitchen table holding a red sponge. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Stephanie got the movie.”

  Morley went downstairs.

  The kids were on the floor, a mound of goggle-eyed nineyear olds, their faces bathed in the eerie glow of the television set.

  No one moved as Morley stepped into the ro
om. She could see that some of them were already in their sleeping bags. “I thought you guys were going to play baseball,” she said.

  “Sshh,” said ten boys as one.

  They were on another planet. They didn’t want to have anything to do with her. She was from the wrong planet. If she persisted, they would turn on her. The last thing they wanted to see was the light of day—not when they could see real life on a screen.

  As she turned to go, Morley stepped on an unopened bags of chips.

  “Sshh,” said the boys again.

  Her eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom. She noticed that the floor was littered with empty chip bags, half-filled glasses of pop, candy wrappers, and popcorn. There was popcorn everywhere. Arthur, the dog, was over by the sofa licking at the floor. Morley stepped over the boys to see what he was eating. When she got within a few feet, Arthur turned and bared his teeth and growled. The basement felt like one of those abandoned warehouses full of squatters. She had been gone only a few hours. Could things fall apart that fast? It was bad enough that she would be pulling food out of the basement for weeks. She didn’t have to stay and watch the accident in progress.

  Morley wanted to leave, but she began to feel herself sucked into the movie.

  It was night. A young mother was putting some children to bed. She seemed to be at a cottage.

  Morley noticed some of the kids were gripping onto each other.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “Sshh,” said Sam.

  “The zombie is coming,” said Terrence. “He has an ax.”

  There was a chilling scream.

  Walter Colbath emerged from a sleeping bag and crawled over to Morley. “I’m scared,” he said.

  Later, Dave worked out that everyone had been enjoying Night of the Zombie until the zombie started losing limbs. First a finger fell off, followed by his left ear, which Walter earnestly explained had been devoured by a Jack Russell terrier before it hit the floor. Apparently, every time the zombie lost a body part, it left a gaping sore that began to pulse and ooze some sort of material that Sam said looked like melted cheese. Within a few scenes, the zombie had been transformed from a mild elementary school teacher to a waddling sore, with arm enough still for what Dave referred to as “the knife scene.”

  Except it wasn’t really a knife scene; it was more of a cleaver scene. It was the moment when the zombie lodged the cleaver into the skull of the young scientist—the man all the kids had assumed was going to stop the zombie from doing what he’d done to the kindly old crossing guard.

  It wasn’t just the violence of the scene that had upset the kids, but the morality of it.

  “Why did he do that to the crossing guard?” whimpered Scott at midnight, as Dave tried to coax him from behind the sofa.

  As Dave reached for Scott, he rested his knee in something greasy. It slid out from under him, and he fell forward and hit his chin against the arm of the sofa. While he lay on the floor wondering when this was going to end, the dog began to lick his knee. Dave reached out and fingered his pants—the remnants of a half-eaten Mars bar. When he stood up, the dog began barking.

  “Excuse me,” said Bill. “I have a headache. I want to go home.”

  Timmy said, “My tummy hurts. I want to go home, too. Please could you phone my parents, please?”

  Phoning a family at two in the morning to ask if they would mind dropping over to pick up their child because you have just shown him Night of the Zombie is not the easiest thing in the world to do. But Dave had no choice. It didn’t take longer than fifteen minutes for the parents to begin to arrive. Everyone was polite, but Dave knew what they were thinking. They were thinking their kids would never come to this house again. Certainly not on a sleepover.

  When Terrence’s parents came, Terrence said, “I ate meat. I ate meat. They made me do it.”

  “It was textured vegetable protein,” said Dave glumly. “It just looked like meat.”

  Everyone was gone by two-thirty.

  All except Walter Colbath.

  Walter was a thin boy with a perpetually runny nose. He was always worried that someone was breaking the rules.

  Walter Colbath’s parents weren’t home. Or if they were, they weren’t answering the phone.

  “Maybe they turned the ringer off,” said Dave. “You just stay. They’ll be here in the morning.”

  Walter said okay, and Sam and Walter, the last remaining warriors, headed off to bed together, Walter chewing his nails. Finally, the house was quiet.

  Dave had just drifted off to sleep when Sam appeared by his side, poking him, saying, “Walter is crying. He thinks there’s been a fire at his house and his parents are dead.”

  At three-thirty Dave agreed to drive Walter by his house so he could see that it hadn’t burned to the ground.

  “You don’t have to get dressed,” said Dave as he struggled into a raincoat. “We’re not going to stop. We’ll just drive by. Just put on a sweatshirt over your jammies. And your sneakers.”

  It was chilly outside. Dave had to turn on the wipers to clear away the dew.

  “Please, God,” he said quietly as they rounded the corner. “See?” he said. “Your house is still standing. No fire.” He still didn’t know why the Colbaths weren’t picking up the phone.

  “Maybe they’ve been murdered,” said Walter. “By a zombie or something.”

  “Your mom and dad are up north,” said Morley to Walter softly. He and Dave had woken her when they got back. “They’re coming home tomorrow.”

  “I know,” said Walter. “But I’m afraid that the zombie got them.”

  Morley looked at Dave. She put her arm over Walter’s shoulder and said, “You come here with me. You can sleep with us in here.”

  When Dave woke up at six-thirty, it was with Walter Colbath’s feet sticking in his back. Walter was sleeping diagonally across the bed, his feet drilling into Dave’s kidneys, his head where Morley’s should have been. Morley was nowhere to be seen.

  Dave got up and went downstairs. Morley was snoring softly on the living room couch.

  Dave went into the kitchen and put some coffee on. He went to the front door and picked up the morning paper.

  He looked at Arthur, who still had chocolate smeared around his mouth, and said, “What was the point of all that?”

  The dog seemed to shrug.

  “Pride before a fall,” muttered Dave as the coffee began to sputter. If he had only gone back for his credit card, none of this would have happened. He wouldn’t have had to send Stephanie for the movie …

  Was that what he had learned? Or was it simpler than that? Maybe the lesson was supposed to be … don’t put your credit card down anywhere.

  Arthur shook, and the jingle of his tags echoed in the quiet morning. Nothing else stirred.

  Dave carried his coffee to the table.

  He opened the paper.

  Then got up and took a meat pie out of the fridge and dropped it in the dog’s dish.

  “Happy birthday,” he said.

  Summer

  Driving Lessons

  Morley was telling her friend Nicky about her mother’s accident. They were both fixing supper as they talked on the telephone.

  “Just a second,” Morley said. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Shoot.”

  There was a crash as the receiver snapped off Morley’s shoulder.

  Nicky winced. “What’s the matter?” she asked. It sounded like the phone had fallen into the blender. “What’s happening?”

  What was happening was that the receiver was snaking across the kitchen floor. The dog was chasing it.

  “Morley?”

  There was another clatter. Then Morley came back on the line. “Sorry,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “The potatoes were boiling over. Where was I?”

  “Your mother.”

  “She rear-ended someone. It wasn’t her fault. Someone jumped out in front of the guy, and he slammed on his
brakes.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  “No. No. She’s okay.”

  “What about the other guy?”

  “No. Everyone was okay. It was Friday night. She came here after it happened. Dave and I were supposed to be going out. She got here the same time as the babysitter.”

  “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How’d she get there?”

  “She drove.”

  “Did you go out?”

  “Yeah. It was her second accident since Christmas.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What do you mean what did we do?”

  “Where did you go?”

  “We went to a movie. I’m worried she’s going to kill someone.”

  “I wish my mother could still drive. What did you see?”

  “I don’t remember. Damn. What did we see? The one with the guy and the bomb. Where the father gets blown up. You know, that’s the problem. Everyone is so impressed because she’s eighty-two years old and she still has her mind. She also has cataracts. She can hardly see, Nicky. She’s going to kill someone.”

  “Don’t they have to take the test when they’re over eighty?”

  “She took the test. She’s waiting for cataract surgery, and you know what the guy said? He said, ‘I am going to retire in seven years, and if I can drive as well as you can when I’m sixty-five, I’ll be happy.’ ”

  “He passed her?”

  “Yeah, he passed her.”

  “So don’t worry.”

  “She’s had two accidents since Christmas.”

  “You said it wasn’t her fault.”

  “Still.”

  “If you’re so worried, why don’t you call the police?”

  Morley and Dave were lying in bed.

  “She’s my own mother. How can I turn my mother in? I can’t rat on my own mother. What if I call and she finds out about it?”

  “What if you don’t and she kills someone?”

  “Thanks, Dave. That’s a big help. Thanks a lot. Why don’t you call the cops.”