Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

by Stuart McLean

  The train wasn’t going to stop there, so he knew he’d have to move fast.

  “Ten minutes,” he said to the empty seat beside him.

  He sat for an unbearable seven. With one eye on the fields rolling by his window, and the other on his watch. After seven minutes he could sit no longer. He stood up and swayed to the end of the car. When he got there, he checked to see that no one was looking. The coast was clear, so he opened the vestibule door and stepped out into the rattle.

  They were coming up on the edge of town already. And they didn’t seem to be slowing. He thought they would slow. He stepped close to the door so that he wouldn’t be seen from either the car ahead or the one behind. He reached up and unlatched the top lever. It was exactly the way he remembered it. The door swung open and a gush of cool air rushed in. He stepped back, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out a manila envelope—the kind you might be handed if you had a job that paid in cash. On the front of it, in a neat blue hand, someone had printed Jimmy Walker, Foggy Bottom Bay, Newfoundland.

  Dave opened the envelope and looked in.

  The train’s whistle blew. It startled him and he almost dropped the envelope.

  He stuck his head out the door. For a moment he thought he was on the wrong side of the train. For a moment he thought he had remembered it wrong.

  And then he saw the red-tiled roof, the grey wood building. The Brockville Station. It was just as he had remembered.

  The whistle blew again.

  “Okay, Jimmy,” he said. “Here goes nothing.”

  He leaned out, and he shook the envelope empty. Then he let it go. He watched the brown paper rectangle disappear—flying away like litter from a car window.

  “See you,” said Dave.

  Jimmy Walker. Foggy Bottom Bay, Newfoundland.

  Dave was still a kid the night he and Jimmy met.

  They were both still kids.

  They had met on that very train. Well, almost that very train. They’d been heading in the opposite direction. They were heading east the night they met. On the Montreal train. Dave had been going home. In Montreal you got the Ocean Limited. Left at supper, arrived in Halifax the next night. Twenty-four hours, more or less. Jimmy? Well, whenever they got together and started reminiscing, neither of them could remember where Jimmy was going or what he was up to. No good, probably.

  It was a long time ago, of course. Neither of them was married yet. Though Dave was already touring. Jimmy was working construction in Toronto. Maybe on the CN Tower, maybe something else. Dave wasn’t sure. Something high, anyway.

  The point is that they were both young, and they both had money burning holes in their pockets.

  The moment they saw each other they knew they were kindred spirits. They could just tell. Two boys from the East Coast. One from Cape Breton, one from Newfoundland. Before they knew it, they were sitting in the dining car together. This was in the days when there still was a dining car on the Montreal train. Prime rib and linen tablecloths. Waiters in white jackets. And the two of them sitting there like big shots—clattering by the same towns, the same fields, the same marinas, with the sun going down and the tables cleared and a fresh round in front of them. How often in your life are you aware that you’re making a new friend while it’s actually happening?

  As he closed the window, Dave remembered that long-ago train trip as clearly as if it were yesterday. How perfect it had been, perfect as a moment could be, sitting there with Jimmy.

  Now, in those days, when the train got to the Brockville Station it used to stop so that it could be split into two trains. The front half would continue to Montreal. The back would peel off to Ottawa. Somehow Dave and Jimmy, who had both taken this train many times before and should have known better, missed the announcement. And you’ve got to know, there was more than one.

  So when they finally got up and tried to walk back to their seats, they got about four cars along, opened the door, and instead of their car, all they could see was a mile of empty track. Their half of the train, the front half, the Montreal half, had left without them.

  Neither of them could see any benefit in going to Ottawa. The only thing that seemed to make sense was to get off—there in Brockville—and that’s what they did. They got off, and they went into the station.

  It was nine o’clock. At night.

  The stationmaster told Dave that the next train to Montreal, which was the overnight train, wouldn’t be along until four in the morning. He said he was going home to bed, but Dave and Jimmy could sleep on the waiting-room benches if they’d like. He would lock them in.

  When Dave walked back to Jimmy and tried to explain that to him, Jimmy pointed at the guy he was talking to. “This is Roy. We’re going to Roy’s house.”

  Roy happened to be at the station buying a ticket for the next day. While Dave was dealing with the stationmaster, Jimmy had made friends with Roy, and Roy had invited them over. “You can watch TV in the basement,” he said.

  They ended up in the kitchen. Roy’s wife fed them chili. They drank beer, ate chili, and talked until just after three, when Roy poured them into a cab.

  As they slid through the sleeping town, Jimmy said, “That was just like home. All the parties are in the kitchen in Foggy Bottom. And the best ones are like that one. When some fellow’s boat breaks or something and he just shows up.”

  That sort of thing happened all the time when you were around Jimmy.

  You made memories.

  As I mentioned, or more to the point, as it was written on the envelope that Dave threw out the window, Jimmy was from Foggy Bottom Bay. Which is to say, Jimmy grew up as a bayman.

  His daddy was a bayman too. And his mother. They were baymen all the way down in Jimmy’s family, which meant Jimmy grew up loving the grey salt smell of seaweed and the grinding crash of the surf on gravel. That’s how he used to describe it to people from away, the grinding crash of the surf. Jimmy had a way with words. He would tell you all about the bay, and all about the town, and the meals his mom would feed you if you came home with him. Fish and brewis, moose and brewis, jiggs dinner, and turr.

  “Oh,” Jimmy would say, “a turr in the oven is such a sweet thing.”

  Which, of course, is something only a bayman could say. Because if you’ve ever been in a house when there’s a turr in the oven, you know it is not a sweet thing at all. It is a gamy thing. Nothing like a turkey. A turr does not fill your house with thoughts of Thanksgiving.

  “Well, it fills my heart with thanksgiving,” Jimmy used to say. “Not to mention my stomach.”

  Jimmy was a bayman to the core. And though he did move around some, he loved nothing better than to sit down at a table with a Black Horse in his fist and tell stories.

  “Now,” he would say. “Did they learn you about the margarine war in Upper Canada?”

  Jimmy thought of himself as a student of history, but like everything about him, Jimmy’s take on history was not from the mainstream.

  Jimmy loved his history from the margins.

  “The ting is …” According to Jimmy, anyway.

  Well, the thing is that margarine was outlawed across the Dominion of Canada soon after Confederation.

  “In 1886,” Jimmy would tell you.

  Except for a spell during the butter shortage of World War I, you couldn’t make or sell margarine in Canada from 1886 until pretty much the 1950s.

  “Because they wanted to protect your dairy farmers,” Jimmy would say. “But we didn’t have no dairy farmers to protect at home. So we didn’t have no margarine laws.”

  And then Jimmy would sit back and tell the story of his two uncles who used to smuggle margarine into Halifax.

  Eversweet or Good Luck or whatever the popular brands were back then.

  “And when we comes into Confederation, are we going to give up our Eversweet? Not on your life,” Jimmy would say. “Not on your life, my son.”

  So the business of margarine became part of the terms of Confeder
ation.

  “It’s right there in the Newfoundland Act. Term 46, if you care to check.

  “We could make it, but we weren’t allowed to sell it to the mainland. And that was some good margarine, my son. It was made of fish oil, that margarine.”

  Jimmy, like many people who have a thing for history, had a thing for trains, too. It was Jimmy who, long after it had stopped running, hatched the plan for taking another ride on the Newfie Bullet.

  The Bullet was the narrow-gauge railway that ran across Newfoundland and was shut down, torn up, and replaced by the hated Roadcruiser.

  “Roadcruiser,” Jimmy would say, rolling his eyes. “That’d be a bus in English.”

  Then he’d cock his head, take a pull of his Black Horse, and say, “You know, you can read all about the Bullet in the Bible.”

  He’d leave that hanging there for as long as he thought he could (Jimmy had excellent timing), and then he’d smile slowly and add, “Yup. Right in the Bible. Right there where it says, The Lord made all things that creep and crawl.

  “Twenty-seven hours and twenty-three minutes,” said Jimmy. “St. John’s to Port aux Basques. Averaged twenty miles an hour.”

  It was Jimmy who discovered that when the Bullet was mothballed they sold the engines, the cars, and even some of the rails to a scattering of South American dictators—in Bolivia, Chile, and Nicaragua. It was Jimmy who organized the trip down there. Although in typical Jimmy style, something happened along the way, and they ended up on a cattle ranch in Argentina and never even saw a train. But that’s a whole other story.

  “Yeah,” said Jimmy. “There was a misunderstanding at the border.”

  Which border was never clear.

  Anyway, Foggy Bottom, the bay where Jimmy was born and raised.

  If you haven’t been there, you’ve no doubt been to places like it. It is no more than a handful of houses strung along the shore road—the odd lane drifting into the hills on the right, or down to the water on the left, each lane connecting a few homes and then doubling back to the road along the way. There are no sidewalks or numbers on the houses. In the phone book everyone has exactly the same address: Foggy Bottom.

  Half the houses are the square, flat-roofed, two-storey cottages you see on postcards; the other half are new bungalows.

  When Dave met Jimmy on the train that night, Jimmy had just bought a lot from one of his smuggling uncles. For a dollar.

  That’s what you’d do in those days. Get a cheap lot from someone in the family and then build your bungalow bit by bit—as you could afford it. Soon as it was finished, you got married. You might have a kid or two before, but you got the bungalow finished before you walked down the aisle. Getting married before the bungalow was built would be a sin.

  They were still fishing in the bay when Jimmy was a boy. Everyone worked with the fishery—the men in the boats, and the women and kids in the plants. Anyone who grew up in Foggy Bottom could clean a cod so fast you’d swear the fish had zippers.

  So Jimmy built his bungalow, and married Rhonda, and had a couple of kids. Jimmy and his family lived pretty much like his grandfather had lived: they put moose into the freezer, snared rabbits, and went berry picking with the neighbours—bakeapples and partridgeberries. They fished in the summer and cut wood in the winter. You don’t need a whole lot more.

  And if times were hard, if the fishing was poor or you needed extra cash, you could work at one of the American bases.

  And then the Americans disappeared. And so did the cod. And soon after that, all the men did, too.

  Jimmy went to Toronto and worked construction. He and Dave would collide from time to time.

  One night they were sitting outside a little club when Jimmy waved his beer in the direction of the street.

  “Reminds me of Newfoundland,” said Jimmy.

  Dave stared at the stream of cars pelting past them. “The traffic?” he said.

  “The roar,” said Jimmy. “The roar of traffic. Sounds like the sea.”

  “Really?” said Dave.

  “Well, not as peaceful, for sure,” said Jimmy. “But still.”

  After Toronto, Jimmy headed west. I don’t want to say that Dave and Jimmy lost touch, because there is a certain kind of friend with whom you never lose touch. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you last saw them, could be years, you’re still in touch—because you’re connected by something that is more fundamental than sight, more basic than conversation. But there was a stretch, maybe ten years, when they didn’t see each other.

  And then one day out of nowhere, they ran into each other at the airport.

  “Alberta?” said Dave.

  “Just for a year or two,” said Jimmy. “I’ve been working at Fort McNewfoundland.”

  He was driving a truck in Fort McMurray. If you want to call it a truck. Jimmy’s rig was more than two storeys high and weighed a million and a half pounds fully loaded. More like driving a house than a truck.

  “Still boggles my mind,” said Jimmy. “Every day.”

  Jimmy worked twenty days on and ten days off. The company flew him home to Newfoundland and back for his time off. He was bused from camp along with everyone else to a private airstrip. You had to wait on the bus until your number was called. Once you heard your number, you’d walk, not run, walk across the tarmac to the plane. There were no assigned seats, and no one wanted to sit in the middle for the eight-hour flight to the Rock. So even though everyone on the bus was an adult, there were rules: no running on the tarmac, no pushing, no shoving.

  At first Rhonda would come and pick Jimmy up in St. John’s, and they’d drive home to the Bay. But that was crazy—an eight-hour flight across the country and then another five for the drive. Jimmy would be curled up in the backseat fast asleep while Rhonda was blinking away behind the wheel.

  So they moved to St. John’s.

  “It’s not so bad,” said Jimmy.

  But Rhonda was lonely when Jimmy was away. And she wouldn’t go down into the basement at night even though that’s where the TV was. Said she felt scared down there. It was different in the city than in the Bay. In the Bay she knew the neighbours. They were her friends.

  Jimmy put in a security system and that made her feel better.

  “I’m only working out West for the money,” said Jimmy.

  He could make double what he could make at home.

  Jimmy tried to stay on Alberta time during his week off. He said it made the transitions easier—living in Newfoundland and Alberta at the same time.

  Rhonda would go to bed and Jimmy would stay up, walking around the neighbourhood at midnight, taking the dog down by the water. He’d stop at the Tim’s, hook the dog outside, and go in to have tea or a bun. There was a girl there who’d slip him a muffin for the dog.

  That’s what Dave and Jimmy talked about the last time they met. About the travelling back and forth, and how St. John’s was prospering. They also talked about how it was getting harder and harder for Jimmy—to have one foot here and one foot there.

  Sometimes, he said, on those long nights he’d head up to Signal Hill for the sunrise.

  “It can be awful pretty,” said Jimmy. “The sun coming out of the sea. Everything turning orange.”

  Then Jimmy said, “You know what surprised me?”

  Dave shook his head.

  Jimmy said, “The northern lights. I thought they’d be some show up there in Fort Mac. But they’re better at home. At home they dance around like crazy. Up there they’re just streaks in the sky.”

  That was one of the last things they talked about: the northern lights.

  Because then Jimmy died. Two months ago now. Dave didn’t even know Jimmy had been sick.

  Dave went to the funeral. He’d been to Newfoundland before, but that was the first time he’d been out to the bays.

  He arrived in the afternoon and went for a walk all around. There was an iceberg in the harbour. It was the first time he’d seen an iceberg, and it was more
beautiful than you could imagine—not only for all the huge angles of it, but for the colour—it was as much blue as white—like a sculpture from a modern museum, just floating there. He walked down to the stone beach and stared until he got cold. The waves on the beach were just as Jimmy had described, the rattle of stone in the water, the grinding surf.

  He thought it was going to be unbearably sad. But these things are never as sad as you imagine.

  There was a gathering at Jimmy’s house the night before. Someone had a guitar, and there was music and stories and, eventually, laughter. He told the story about the night he and Jimmy met and how Jimmy found them a place to go when they were abandoned in the station.

  “That was Jimmy,” said Jimmy’s wife, Rhonda. “Always turning everything into a party.”

  He got Rhonda to draw him a little map, and the night before he flew home—which he spent in St. John’s—he set his alarm for five a.m. and struggled up and went for a walk, headed down Water Street, stopped in at the Tim’s on Duckworth and then up to Signal Hill for the sunrise.

  He thought it would be a way to get close to Jimmy—to say goodbye—but it all felt a little flat. The neighbourhood was just another neighbourhood. The Tim’s was just another Tim’s. Without Jimmy’s infectious enthusiasm, it turned out to be the saddest part of the trip.

  “What about the sunrise?” asked his friend Kenny when he got home and was telling him about it. “Was it all molten and gold and pouring out of the sea the way he said?”

  “Yeah, that part was right,” said Dave. “It came up slow and beautiful, just the way he described it. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Or I imagine it was. It was pretty foggy, so I couldn’t actually see it. But I imagine it was.”

  It was while Dave was in Foggy Bottom that Jimmy’s wife gave him the envelope he would carry on the train. After the service. Everyone got one. Well, not everyone. But Dave saw more than a couple of guys with them. The little manila envelope came with a regular-sized white one—a letter-sized envelope.

  “Open the white one first,” said Rhonda. Then she said, “But wait till later.”