Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

That is when the ferret sneezed. Or as far as Helen was concerned, her fur stole sneezed.

  Helen looked at her stole. Her stole was looking back at her.

  Helen blinked. Her stole blinked back.

  And Ralph, who could see the brooch heading toward her belly, scrambled down Helen’s leg and ripped out of the room like a bat out of hell. She didn’t come back all night.

  But there was only so much Arthur could do to placate the quartet of mewling ferret babies. Ralph sulked back to feed the kits the next day.

  They were all happily ensconced in the crate in the basement. Dave took the lock off the door and Ralph was free to come and go as she pleased.

  —

  ON THE TUESDAY morning after New Year’s Day, Morley will drive Sam to school. The family of ferrets will travel in a cardboard box in the back seat.

  When they arrive, Sam will carry the box regally into his classroom. Morley will see him on his way, but by the time he is opening the box, she’ll be sitting on the bench outside the principal’s office.

  When she’s finally ushered in, Morley and Nancy Cassidy will have a heated discussion about ferret gestation periods. After they are finished, Morley will make her way to Sam’s classroom, but she will find the door closed and she will not knock.

  So she will not know what an impression Ralph and her three babies made on the grade six class.

  She will go home and spend most of the morning at her desk, and only after lunch, when she goes upstairs to get a sweater, will she notice the sign on Sam’s closed door:

  DO NOT ENTER

  TOP SECRET

  THIS MEANS YOU

  LATE ON THE NIGHT of December 23rd, not far from the town of Rivière-du-Loup, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, on a black and largely lonely stretch of Highway 132 between the villages of Saint-Germain and Notre-Dame-du-Portage—at the point where you must make your choice to continue along the St. Lawrence or drop southeast out of Quebec on Highway 2 into the dark pine forests of New Brunswick—sometime before midnight, but after eleven, Eustache Boisclair stood in the empty parking lot of the motel he had owned for twenty-seven years, La Vache Qui Rit, took the last drag of his home-rolled cigarette, looked up at the sky and found the Big Dipper, La Grande Casserole, the only constellation he knew by name, flicked his cigarette into the air, and reached up to the big lever on the outside wall of the motel office.

  He muttered, “Sapristi.” Then he pulled the lever, and the lights on the motel’s road sign flickered, dimmed, and snapped off. Except for the ringing in Eustache’s ears, the night was suddenly and profoundly quiet.

  There were no guests left in the motel except for a trucker from Pisiquit in room nine, who had the flu and whom Eustache hadn’t seen for thirteen hours. Anyway, the trucker was paid up and would probably leave sometime in the night, unnoticed. Good riddance. Eustache didn’t want any guests. He had turned off the heat in all the empty rooms.

  Eustache was bracing himself for a long and lonely Christmas. Ever since his wife, Marie-Claire, had passed on—God rest her soul—Christmas had been a long and lonely time. As usual, Eustache was going to do his best to avoid it. He had a case of beer and a case of Cheezies on the floor by the kitchen door. He was going to go on the internet and play poker until it was safe to come out.

  He wasn’t going to Mass, and he wasn’t going to watch television. He wasn’t going to watch Roch Voisine sing “Silent Night” one more time. Tabarnouche.

  If he got bored with poker he would start a Paint by Numbers. He had done 437 since Marie-Claire died. He had the best 200-odd hanging in every possible nook of his nine-room motel. Last year at Christmas he had completed twelve. Sometimes he did his best work at Christmas. It was Christmas two years ago that he did his first picture using only black and white paint. An effect that pleased him.

  Eustache pushed his wool hat back and scratched his head vigorously. He looked up and down the highway—so shiny it looked more like ice than asphalt.

  He breathed in deeply through his nose and turned to go inside.

  —

  LITTLE DID HE know what was heading his way.

  Coming from the east, from le Labrador, blowing already over le Golfe du Saint-Laurent, a winter storm of a magnitude that hadn’t been seen around Saint-Germain for over a decade.

  And from the west, heading toward the motel and into the storm, a dark-blue station wagon a day and a half out of Toronto.

  A dark-blue station wagon pulling out of a doughnut store near Trois-Rivières, a station wagon overloaded beyond belief, with a dog shimmied into the luggage compartment, three teenagers in the back seat all wearing headsets, all leaking sound, so whenever anyone wanted to talk they had to shriek at each other, and a roof carrier, which someone had dug into not five minutes earlier and hadn’t closed properly. Coming from the east, a storm, and from the west, a station wagon that was about to deposit much of the contents of its roof carrier along thirty miles of Highway 132.

  Hurtling in from the east, the mother of all winter storms.

  Hurtling in from the west…Dave and his family.

  —

  THEY HAD LEFT Toronto in a last-minute panic. They had left as a result of an alarming series of telephone calls from Dave’s mother in the Cape Breton town of Big Narrows. The first call was about Christmas gifts.

  “I was thinking, David,” she said, “of getting some of those Beanie Babies that Stephanie likes so much and a pair of jumpers for Sam.”

  Stephanie, who is in second year at university, hasn’t shown an interest in Beanie Babies for over a decade.

  Dave phoned Morley as soon as his mother hung up.

  “It was horrifying,” he said. “It was like she had lost track of time. Like she thought the kids were still babies.”

  There was a second conversation a few days later.

  “It’s getting weird,” said Dave. “She was talking about my father as if he were still alive. She said she was cooking cod cheeks for supper and he was going to have a fit. My father hated cod cheeks.”

  When he got home that night, Dave said, “I want to go there. For Christmas.”

  Morley said, “Yes.”

  It was too late to think about plane reservations.

  “We’ll drive,” said Dave.

  Stephanie said, “But Tommy and I were going to spend Christmas together.”

  So Dave rented the roof carrier.

  —

  PACKING WAS A nightmare.

  Dave was standing in the driveway with a pile of boxes and suitcases stacked around him. None of the boxes would fit into the roof carrier. He made everyone unpack. He made everyone put their things into plastic bags. He stuffed the plastic bags into the roof carrier, as if he were stuffing a turkey.

  The turkey, however, went in the back. With the dog. On ice, in an oversized cooler.

  It took two of them to close the roof carrier.

  “You don’t think that it’s going to, like, pop?” asked Tommy. But Dave was already slipping into the driver’s seat. They were three hours late.

  When they pulled out of their driveway, the car scraped the curb. They looked like refugees fleeing a war zone. But they were on their way.

  “At least we got the turkey in,” said Dave to no one in particular.

  It was a twenty-seven-pound, organically raised, free-range turkey. It had cost him over $135. He wasn’t about to leave it behind.

  What he didn’t mention was what he had left behind.

  When the roof carrier was full, and it looked as though there mightn’t be room for the turkey in the car, Dave had removed what he believed to be a non-essential item from the back. Steph had brought it out to the car at the last minute.

  “Is there room for this?” she had asked, nonchalantly holding up a blue athletic bag.

  Dave had assumed the blue bag was extra Stephanie stuff. When no one was looking he’d carried it surreptitiously back into the house.

  They wouldn’t notice t
he bag was missing for hours.

  —

  FOR NOW, THEY were on their way. The kids in the back. Stephanie in the middle between her brother, Sam, and her boyfriend, Tommy Nowlan. Stephanie had been dating Tommy Nowlan for over a year.

  Tommy is an only child. He had never been on a family road trip. He climbed into the back seat with great expectation.

  “I love this,” he said.

  As soon as they were out of the city, as soon as they were on the highway, Dave barked “Highway,” like this was important news.

  “Highway,” barked Dave again, and Sam slapped the back of the seat and said, “Highway!”

  Morley said, “Okay, okay,” and reached under her legs and started passing out bags of junk food. Chips, Cheezies, pop.

  Tommy chose Cracker Jack.

  “I hate Cheezies,” he said quietly.

  Before he opened his Cracker Jack, Tommy took out a little black notebook from his jacket pocket, and at the top of a fresh page, he wrote “Things I love about this trip.” He wrote “Cracker Jack” and labelled it “Number 1.” He wrote “Number 2: You, sitting beside me.” Then he nudged Stephanie so she could see what he had written.

  Five and a half hours passed before he started his second list.

  “Things I hate about this trip.”

  Number one was “Dog farts”—Tommy had underlined “Dog” and written “I hope” in the margin.

  It had begun just outside Cornwall. The air in the back seat had suddenly become frowsty and unpleasant, so thick Tommy almost gagged.

  He had reached for the window instinctively, but then his social side had asserted itself and his hand froze in mid-air.

  If he was the first to acknowledge this event, it might be misinterpreted as an admission of guilt.

  He couldn’t believe he was the only one who had noticed this. But no one else had reacted. Maybe it happened all the time in this family. It certainly didn’t happen in his family. His family didn’t even have a word for it.

  In search of fresh air, Tommy began to inch toward the door. Soon his face was pressed flat against the cool glass. He began to tug at his turtleneck, pulling it up over his chin until it was covering his nose.

  Everyone else seemed so oblivious that he began to doubt himself.

  Maybe, he thought, it was him.

  He almost said, Excuse me.

  He almost said, Excuse me, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. I’ll open the window.

  That was when it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t the dog.

  He studied the car carefully: Dave in the front seat, scratching. Morley dozing restlessly beside him. More likely Sam, he thought. Grubby little Sam, stuffing himself with those greasy Cheezies. And then, with horror, he looked at Stephanie. Impossible, he thought. Sam maybe, but not Stephanie. Please God. Not Stephanie.

  The car, which had less than an hour ago seemed like such a boisterous, happy, family kind of place, was beginning to disturb him.

  There were chip wrappers all over the back seat. And Cheezie crumbs. And empty pop cans on the floor. There were CD cases everywhere. The whole thing seemed unpleasant and crude. His head sank lower into his turtleneck. He looked like a ninja.

  “Garbage,” he added to the list of things he hated about this trip.

  —

  THE NEXT THING Tommy knew, they were standing on the edge of the highway—the entire family forming a circle around some sort of rodent, though it was hard to tell exactly what kind of rodent because it was a flattish sort of rodent—flatter than it ought to have been, anyway. It might have been something from the hedgehog family. Whatever it was, it was flat and furry and…dead.

  Stephanie was in hysterics because she had been driving when the thing had bolted out in front of their car. That’s what she’d said, anyway. “Bolted, like it was trying to commit suicide or something.” At least that was what she’d said when she could still talk. Now she was just sobbing uncontrollably. All Tommy understood was that she wanted to give it a decent burial. But her father was pointing at the frozen ground.

  She made him take it with them.

  “We can bury it later,” she said.

  Dave double-wrapped the flat, furry little corpse in a plastic bag. Then he placed it in the only sensible place he could think of. In the cooler with the turkey.

  When they were back in the car, Tommy added “Road kill” to his list.

  When Stephanie leaned over to try to read what he had written, he closed the book and slipped it in his pocket.

  —

  IT WAS AFTER nine when they pulled into a motel on the far side of Montreal.

  “Boys in one room,” said Dave, “girls in the other.”

  As soon as they had settled in, Dave called his mother.

  “She sounded so excited,” he said when he hung up. “She said she put a tree up. For the first time in five years. She was baking shortbread. I’m so glad we are doing this.” Five minutes later, Morley knocked on the boys’ door. “Have you seen my stuff?” she said. “I packed it in a blue athletic bag.”

  When Tommy caught the look on Morley’s face, he reached for his notebook.

  —

  THE SNOW BEGAN the next morning at midday.

  It was the second day of Arthur the dog’s upset tummy. Everyone had their window cracked, and it was cold as well as rank in the car.

  At first it was just a scattering of snow—nothing at all, or nothing worth mentioning. Thin trails and strands of snow wisping and dancing on the blacktop like powder. But an hour later Dave was hunched over and gripping the wheel, peering at a road that was all white except for the two black tire tracks that he was following—the snow driving at him, almost on the horizontal.

  It was as if he were driving his way across a snow planet, through a snow galaxy. He had the feeling that it was going to go on for a while.

  He turned to Morley. “It’s snowing,” he said.

  Morley grunted.

  Morley was in an unspeakable mood. Finding herself without clothes of her own, Morley had had to borrow clothes from Stephanie. She was wearing one of Stephanie’s tummy T-shirts and a pair of underwear that was too small in every way you could imagine. She had been scratching and tugging all morning.

  Tommy had spent the morning trying to keep his eyes off Morley, but it was like driving by the scene of an accident.

  He began a new list: “Ten reasons why you should never see your girlfriend’s mother in your girlfriend’s clothes.”

  Number one on the list was “Genetics.”

  Stephanie was no longer sitting beside him. After lunch, Stephanie had announced that she was feeling too squished in the middle. She had grabbed the other window seat. Tommy didn’t mind. In fact, Tommy was happy for the privacy. This way he didn’t have to shield his notebook from her view. It would not have been a good thing for anyone if Stephanie had read Tommy’s latest list.

  He had started it that morning after Stephanie and Sam had begun to squabble.

  The squabble, which had begun over the last bag of barbecue potato chips, had escalated into all-out war.

  Tommy had been sitting by his window like a United Nations peacekeeper, watching in horror as his beautiful girlfriend morphed into a whiny, snit-fitting, foul-mouthed, finking twelve-year-old.

  Tommy had pulled out his notebook and divided a page into two columns. He wrote “Pros” at the top of one column and “Cons” at the top of the other. At the very top of the page he wrote “My Relationship with Stephanie.”

  —

  IT WAS DECEMBER 23rd. They were supposed to arrive in Big Narrows that night.

  By four in the afternoon they were still in Quebec, and it was apparent to everyone that getting to Cape Breton in a hurry was out of the question. It was getting dark. You could barely see the forest on the side of the road. Just the blackness of the night. The white snow. And Dave driving and driving. They had just passed a huge transport lying on its side in the ditch, flares burning pink aro
und it. They were down to thirty kilometres an hour.

  A heavy silence had fallen on the car.

  Tommy was working on several lists at once, flipping among them as new thoughts occurred to him.

  “Ten reasons why you should always spend Christmas with your own family.”

  “Ten things to do if I don’t die on this trip.”

  “Last Will and Testament of me, Tommy Nowlan, killed tragically in a car wreck on this the 23rd day of December…dead emotionally two hours before.”

  And then Dave said, “I haven’t seen a car coming toward us for over an hour.”

  Dave knew they were going to have to stop.

  They all knew they should have stopped already.

  “Do you know where we are?” said Dave.

  It didn’t matter where they were. They were going to stop at the next place they saw.

  And if that wasn’t soon, they were going to end up in the ditch—like the transport they had passed, however long ago that was.

  And that’s when they came upon Eustache Boisclair’s motel. It was Tommy who spotted it. Only the office light on.

  “That was a motel,” said Tommy desperately.

  —

  EUSTACHE BOISCLAIR WAS sitting at his kitchen table rolling cigarettes when he heard voices in the motel parking lot. He rolls a week’s supply at a time—thirty-five cigarettes, five a day.

  Eustache uses a turquoise plastic rolling machine he has owned since 1978. He sent away for it after he saw an advertisement during a wrestling match he was watching on television. It arrived in a cardboard box from Winnipeg—a town Eustache has thought fondly of ever since.

  As he stood up and walked across the kitchen, Eustache put the empty paper sleeve he was holding into his mouth and sucked a lungful of air through the filter. When he got to the kitchen door he leaned one hand heavily on the doorknob and used the other to ever so slightly part the venetian blinds.

  There was a car pulled up in front of the motel office. As he watched the family tumble out of it he began to count.

  Un, deux, trois, quatre—câlique—cinq. And then, to add insult to injury, Arthur jumping out the back. “Un chien,” muttered Eustache. “Merde.”