Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page

by Stuart McLean

  But he knew better. He could hear them scurrying around—in the walls, or ceiling, or wherever it was they were scurrying.

  They made their first sighting a week later. Another Sunday, just before supper. They were in the kitchen. Dave was sitting at the table going through old mail. Morley was standing by the stove.

  Something grey and peripheral scurried along the baseboards.

  “Did you see that?” said Dave.

  “I’m not sure,” said Morley.

  “I am,” said Dave. And he stood up and reached for the car keys.

  “No napalm,” said Morley.

  “What about traps?” said Dave.

  “Humane traps,” said Morley.

  John Wayne once said that courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway.

  Morley said, “Since when did we start quoting John Wayne?”

  Dave said, “Since things got serious.”

  It was the next night.

  It was bedtime.

  Or it was bedtime for Morley. Dave wasn’t going to bed quite yet. Dave was saddling up.

  Instead of pyjamas, Dave had slipped into black jeans and a black shirt. He had a flashlight clipped to his belt and a pair of night-vision goggles on his forehead.

  “You want to catch a mouse,” said Dave, “the first thing you have to know is where to put your traps.”

  He leaned over and kissed Morley on the forehead.

  “Go to sleep,” he said.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  Dave nodded earnestly.

  He’d completely missed the sarcasm.

  He sat at the kitchen table like a marine on perimeter duty. He breathed softly, but made no other movements. He knew that if he sat long enough he would vanish and things would appear. Sure enough, they did.

  The first thing came from under the radiator. He didn’t spot it right away, of course. It came too quietly. A whisper, a twitch; a suggestion of grey, a shadow of movement. But he sensed it. He saw it a few moments later. Scurrying along the wall by the window. Little staccato bursts of movement. Its tail was sticking up in the air, its bulging eyes gleaming in the green glow of his night goggles.

  And so it was confirmed.

  They had mice.

  He watched it make its mousey way across the kitchen—hugging the baseboard, under the window, behind the fridge, right to the cat bowl. Of course. The cat bowl. It was so obvious he had completely missed it.

  Five minutes later, it was back again. But now there were two of them. The mouse from behind the radiator had been joined by a mouse from behind the stove. The stove, and the radiator, and now a third from the pantry. Three at once.

  Two more in the basement. A sixth in the upstairs bathroom. They were infested.

  At four o’clock Dave crawled into bed, exhausted and shaken.

  He set up traps the next morning. He caught three on the first night. Catch and release.

  “Where did you release them?” asked Morley.

  “The Turlingtons’,” said Dave.

  He was kidding.

  He had taken them to the park.

  But the trick to getting rid of mice, of course, isn’t getting them out. The trick to getting rid of mice is figuring out where they’re getting in.

  “We have to seal up the house,” said Dave, who had spent the morning crawling around outside.

  “Where are they getting in?” said Sam.

  “Dryer vent,” said Dave. “They chewed through the mesh.”

  The thing is, a mouse can wiggle through the most unimaginably small space. All a mouse needs is a slit the height of a couple of dimes. Dave got a caulking gun and caulked every crack and crevice.

  “Tight as a drum,” said Dave to Sam.

  “Of course you know what that means,” said Sam, unhelpfully. “It means you haven’t only sealed them out, Dad. You’ve sealed them in. It’s like a horror movie.”

  “We’ve done this in math,” said Sam that night at supper. “It’s called a progression. You start with one pair. And they have six babies. Assume half of them are female. And assume they each have six babies. There is a formula.”

  He ran upstairs and came back with a calculator.

  He sat down and began to happily punch in numbers.

  Sam said, “Roughly speaking, all things being equal and rounding things off, we are talking, in six months …”

  Sam frowned.

  Sam said, “Wait a minute. That can’t be right.”

  He began again.

  “You start with a pair. They have six babies.”

  A minute later he looked up and grinned at his father.

  “Roughly speaking,” said Sam, “in six months we should have over ten thousand mice.”

  So there they were—middle of September. One month, give or take, into Sam’s progression. Sealed into their house with who knows how many breeding mice.

  And the mice were getting increasingly bold.

  They had begun to see them during the day. Something out of the corner of their eye—after dinner or just before bed—flashes of grey, sometimes real, sometimes imagined. It was impossible to tell the difference.

  They gave it a name. PPMS. Phantom peripheral mouse syndrome.

  It was beginning to feel as if they were under siege. As if mice were parachuting into their home.

  They’d be having breakfast and one of them would stop mid-bite and point at a tiny head popping out of the toaster, or through one of the burners in the stove.

  They found stashes of Cheerios and cat food in their shoes and pockets, slippers and drawers.

  Morley was the first to find a body. It was in the lint trap of the dryer. Only the tail was showing. She thought it was a hair elastic. It took a couple of firm tugs before she discovered that the “elastic” was attached to a mouse.

  One day she came home and found Dave crossing the kitchen on two kitchen chairs, moving one and then the other.

  “Get me my cat,” said Dave.

  But Morley had her hands full of groceries.

  Galway was in the living room, curled on the couch.

  “Come on, old girl,” said Dave. “The game’s afoot.”

  Dave carried Galway into the kitchen and placed her on the floor so that her nose was against the baseboard. And he waited.

  “Soon,” said Dave.

  He and Morley were sitting at the kitchen table, each with a cup of tea.

  Fifteen minutes became twenty.

  “Come to mama,” said Dave.

  And come the mouse finally did.

  It skittered along the baseboard until it saw the cat—and came to a skittering halt, as if it were a cartoon mouse. As if it had just skittered up to the edge of the cliff. It stopped skittering and it stared.

  Galway lifted her head and stared back.

  Everything in the kitchen ground to a halt.

  No one was moving. Not Dave. Not Morley. Not the cat. And certainly not the mouse.

  “Stalemate,” whispered Dave.

  “I’m not sure I like this,” whispered Morley.

  Then the mouse ran between the cat and the baseboard. Actually brushed Galway’s nose. And Galway didn’t move. Not a whisker.

  “Did you see its ears?” said Morley.

  “Like Prince Charles,” said Dave.

  Suddenly one of their mice had a name.

  Prince Charles.

  It took another week before Dave called for help.

  And of course of all the exterminators in all the world, he got the one who loved mice.

  Duane.

  Duane, who brought his homemade picture book and sat them down at the kitchen table. Duane in his blue sweater vest opened his picture book and said, “You need to understand a mouse’s life.”

  As if he’d been sent by the mice. As if he worked for them.

  “What no one seems to understand,” said Duane, “is that you could easily remove some of the big players off the top of the food chain—and I’m not suggesti
ng this would be a good thing—but you could let them go, let them go extinct, and the world, the natural world, wouldn’t notice. The world would continue pretty much as it is.”

  Duane flipped the page of his book. A picture of a polar bear. A picture of a panda. Then he flipped again. Now he was holding up a picture of a mouse. A mouse that looked strangely like Prince Charles.

  “But rodents,” said Duane, “you remove all the rodents from the world and there would be problems. Big, big problems.”

  Duane snapped his fingers.

  “Things would starve. And I am talking about things that are more lovable than mice. Feathered and furry things. Things like foxes and owls.”

  “But there are no owls in this house,” said Dave.

  Duane wasn’t about to concede his point.

  Finally, however, Dave was able to persuade him to sell them some poison.

  “You don’t have to put it down,” Duane said as Dave walked him to the door.

  “Stockholm syndrome,” Dave said to Morley when he came back.

  Morley was peering at the box of poison.

  “Don’t worry,” said Dave. “It’s humane poison. I checked.”

  Things improved, albeit slowly.

  The scurrying diminished. The nibbling stopped. And one by one the mice disappeared. Until there was only one mouse left.

  One that seemed to have a resilience the others lacked.

  “Prince Charles,” said Morley.

  Prince Charles, who had read Galway so perfectly that night and would now perch on her bowl and help itself to her food while the cat held back and waited her turn.

  Prince Charles, who seemed to be there to stay.

  Everyone seemed ready to accommodate the mouse. To accept it as one of the family. It seemed to have earned its place.

  Dave said, “I’m okay with that.”

  It was just the one, after all.

  It became clear a few nights later that he was not okay with it at all.

  They were finishing dinner when he leapt from the table and began swatting his thigh.

  “Help me!” he screamed. “Help me.”

  There was a mouse running up his leg.

  He could feel it under his pants.

  He was standing there, in the middle of his kitchen, tugging at his belt with one hand, squeezing the mouse so hard with the other that he couldn’t believe it was still struggling.

  “Help me,” he screamed again.

  His pants were at his ankles.

  But now he’d kicked his pants off and was gripping them in his fist, the mouse trapped in the folds of one leg.

  It was like that night so long ago, when he was a boy in bed, calling for his parents, except now he was standing in his kitchen, a grown man in his underwear, struggling with his own pants. Driven by terror and instinct, he did the same thing he’d done when he was a young boy. He hauled his arm back and threw the mouse as hard as he could.

  As the mouse (and his pants) sailed away from him in one tangled mess, he realized what his horrified wife and son had already realized. That it wasn’t a mouse at all. It was his vibrating cell phone.

  They all watched as the bundle of pants and phone arced across the kitchen, over the island and over the counter, exploding through the window and sailing out into the yard.

  He put out the traps again that night.

  Prince Charles had clearly been able to resist the peanut butter that had been the downfall of so many of his brothers and sisters. Dave had read somewhere that mice love chocolate.

  So he gave chocolate a try.

  When he got up the next morning, Prince Charles was sitting blissfully in the bottom of the trap, his little whiskers covered in hazelnut-caramel truffle.

  No one else was awake.

  Dave made coffee and pondered his next step. He put the trap on the windowsill and stared at it. When Morley came down she stared at it too.

  Dave said, “They say drowning is the most humane death.”

  Morley looked horrified. She’d been thinking they should get a little mouse cage, with a drinking bottle and a little dish for cat kibble.

  Dave said, “Give your head a shake.”

  After breakfast he put the trap in his backpack, intending to bike over to the park where he’d left all the others. But when he got there, all he could think of was—

  “Duane,” said Morley when he came home. “His name was Duane.”

  The exterminator.

  If mice were nature’s daily bread, setting Prince Charles free in the park was like opening the pantry door. Dave had sat on a bench with the backpack beside him and (not for the first time) wondered about his moral inconsistency. The way he would indulge his cat but would eat a cow. Kill mice, and coddle a hamster. Fret over his kids, and not the children of others. The only thing that explained any of it was the most irrational thing in the world. Love. Or if you wanted to slide it down a notch, compassion. And when did he start loving mice? Where did that come from?

  It came from the law of proximity, of course. We love the things that are closest to us.

  But if you love the one, must you not love the many? And where would that leave you? What would that mean?

  Today it meant that he picked up the pack and put it on his back. Then he went home and got his car. He stopped at the store and put a sign in the window. open at noon, it said. And he drove out toward the airport.

  He went to the racetrack—as rural a place as he knew in the city. They still let you walk around in the barns. And so he wandered around, past all the sleek horses, past all the spiffy stalls.

  He was waiting for the moment when he’d be alone. When that moment finally came, he opened the little trap and gave it a shake.

  Prince Charles fell from the cage, landed on the concrete floor, ran around in an almost circle, started toward the door, turned and skittered into a stable, and disappeared under the straw.

  Dave stood there, the trap in hand, half expecting Prince Charles to come back and wave or something. But of course he didn’t come back.

  The law of proximity had come and now it was gone. The spell was broken. The mouse was in the straw, and Dave was just another guy late for work.

  He shrugged and put the cage back in the pack. He nodded at a stable boy as he headed out of the barn, back to the car and the uncertain world in which he lived.

  JIM’S SUMMER TRIP

  A summer night can settle on the city with the softness of snow—the rustle of leaves, the chunking of sprinklers, the humming of insects—summoning neighbours to do what suits summer best. Absolutely nothing.

  One early summer night, Dave’s neighbour Jim Scoffield was sitting on his front porch with nothing to do.

  Dave wandered by.

  “Beer?” called Jim from the shadows. “Tea?”

  It is Jim’s habit, on summer evenings, to sit out there like that.

  He knows it’s unlikely that anyone will see him through the shadows of the railings and ivy. Mostly he sits and watches the summer parade. Occasionally he waves it in.

  “Not sure I have time,” said Dave. Meaning for a tea or a beer. But he wandered up the walk nonetheless.

  “Sam is going to the movies,” said Dave. “I said I would drive him.”

  Once on the porch, however, the idea of summer conversation overtook him and Dave sat. “Let me check,” he said. “Let me see what time he wants to leave.”

  Jim picked up the phone from the arm of his chair and lobbed it softly across the porch. Dave caught it and dialed a number.

  “It’s me,” he said softly.

  Then something that Jim couldn’t hear.

  Then, with plenty of volume and some surprise, “But I said I would drive him.”

  A pause. “Okay. Okay. I know.”

  And Dave shrugged and threw the phone back to Jim.

  Sam had already left.

  “Took the subway,” said Dave. And then he said it again, “I said I would drive him.”


  And so with a second shrug Dave settled on the railing and Jim said, “I’ll get the tea.”

  It had been happening more and more often—these moments with Sam.

  Dave hadn’t noticed them at first, but now that he had, it was clear to him that the moments were adding up.

  One morning, in the spring, right out of the blue, Sam had said, “Don’t make my lunches anymore. I would rather make my own lunches.”

  “Why?” said Dave.

  Dave and Morley had been making Sam’s lunches for years.

  “You don’t know what I like,” said Sam.

  And then, exactly the same with the laundry.

  Dave was wandering around collecting clothes for a load. And Sam said, “I don’t have anything.”

  “You must have something,” said Dave. “I am doing darks.”

  “You shrunk my T-shirt last time,” said Sam. “I’ll do my own.”

  Which left Dave on Jim’s porch. Fretting. Thinking that he should have said something right at the start. If he’d said something right at the start, maybe he could have nipped things in the bud.

  “Nipped what in the bud?” said Jim, who had reappeared carrying a couple of glasses.

  “Your tea,” he said, handing one to Dave.

  A shot of Lagavulin. Sixteen years old. Neat.

  Dave fell into the chair opposite Jim, took a sip of whisky, and sighed. He wasn’t planning on mentioning it. To anyone. Least of all to Jim. He’d decided against asking for advice. He’d already made up his mind anyway. He didn’t want anyone changing it.

  But there they were. Night was settling. And Jim was not the advice-giving type. Jim didn’t have kids of his own. He once told Dave it was his one big regret.

  Jim would be neutral. Dave could tell Jim, and there would be no advice to take, or worse, to ignore.

  So he took another sip and said, “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Sam’s idea. I’m pretty sure it was his friend Murphy’s.”

  Jim cocked his head.

  “Murphy,” said Dave. “The kid with the glasses and the ears.”

  Of course it didn’t matter whose idea it was anymore. The important thing was to put a stop to it.