Home from the Vinyl Cafe (13 page)

He couldn’t see a release button. He pulled his arm again. Still nothing. He didn’t know what to do. Collect your thoughts, Dave. What is the worst thing that could happen?

Someone could see him. Someone he knew could see him.

No. The store could catch fire.

He wondered if he could stand up and hump his way out of the store with the chair attached to him. He imagined getting as far as the checkout counter and then getting wedged in the aisle by the cash register. He thought of dying of smoke inhalation by the cash register, with a blood-pressure chair attached to his back like a tortoise’s shell. It was the kind of trivial death that Dave had always feared. Like being hit by a diaper truck. The kind of death after which his friends would gather quietly in some solemn funeral parlor until someone started to giggle. He didn’t want people giggling at his funeral. He wanted a death with dignity.

He began to struggle so violently that the chair started rocking.

He heard a man’s voice say, “What’s going on over there?”

Dave looked at the screen. The red numbers were blinking
like the clock on a broken VCR. Except they were ascending. His blood pressure had sailed through borderline and was now firmly entrenched in hypertense: 160/93.

Dave looked up and saw Doug Lawlor, the pharmacist, heading toward him.

To his horror, behind Doug, he saw Debbie Anderson.

He felt his heart accelerate.

He glanced at the screen: 172/90.

This was a nightmare. He had the blood pressure of a seventy-five-year-old man.

He twisted desperately in the chair and reached for the screen with his left hand, trying to cover the blinking red numbers the way a man caught outside his house with no clothes on might cover his groin. He felt naked, exposed, humiliated. Debbie and Doug Lawlor arrived at the chair at the same time.

“Hi,” said Dave, smiling weakly, still trying to cover the screen. “I’m stuck. I can’t get my arm out.”

Doug was staring at Dave as if he had asked for spare change.

“See,” Dave said, rattling his arm. “It won’t come out.”

He could feel the blood pounding in his ears.

He felt like he was going to faint.

I am not going to faint, he said to himself.

“Hi, Dave,” said Debbie cheerily. Then she said, “Your nose is bleeding.”

Dave’s left hand involuntarily flew away from the screen. He brought it up to his face, and when he took it away, he saw blood on his fingers.

And then everyone turned simultaneously from his red hand to the red numbers blinking on the now uncovered screen. The numbers reminded Dave of the digital displays
in an elevator. Sadly, the elevator was going up. The three of them watched the screen blink from 172 up to 181.

“Geez, Dave,” said Doug Lawlor. “Are you okay?”

“I can’t get my arm out,” said Dave for the third time.

He felt a drop of blood land in his lap.

“I’ll get you some Kleenex,” said Debbie.

The fire department arrived forty-five minutes later. By then Dave’s blood pressure had settled at 178/95.

“Geez,” said the fire chief, looking at the screen. “Are you okay?”

The drugstore had taken on the festive feel of an accident scene. There were about fifteen people standing in a circle around the chair. Every few minutes someone new arrived. There was a blush of whispering as they asked what was going on.

After twenty more minutes of fiddling with the chair, the chief sent a man out to the truck to get the jaws of life. They were going to cut Dave out.

“Wait a minute,” said Doug Lawlor. “You’re going to wreck the chair.”

“For Pete’s sake, Doug,” said Dave. “I’ll pay for it. Just get me out of here.”

It took five minutes. Everyone applauded when Dave stood up. He rubbed his arm carefully and said he was fine and looked at his watch and said he had to go. People slapped him on the back as he pushed through the crowd, as if he had just won a race or something.

Debbie Anderson said, “I’ll see you Wednesday.”

Dave’s family came back two nights later. He drove out to the airport to pick them up. He left the headlights on in the parking garage, and by the time they had corraled their suitcases
and gone to the washroom and gotten out to the car, the battery was dead. It took Dave half an hour to find someone to give them a jump.

After they got the kids to bed, Dave said to Morley, “I have something to tell you. Something you better hear from me.”

He never took Debbie Anderson out to dinner. He still liked her, but he felt old whenever she was around. The red blemish on his face disappeared a week after Morley got home. He never mentioned it.

               
E
arly on a Saturday morning in May, Dave slipped out of his house while his family was still asleep. He was wearing a faded green sweatshirt, jeans with a rip at the right knee, and sneakers with no laces. He hadn’t shaved. He closed the door carefully behind him so he wouldn’t wake anyone and surveyed his backyard. The morning light was soft and silky, lending a yellow wash to the greenery of the garden. But Dave was more interested in the hedge in the shadows than he was in the rest of the garden. He stared at the hedge for a few minutes, and then he walked toward the bird feeder in the center of the backyard. When he got to the feeder, he stood on his toes and peered over the lip. There was a yogurt lid in the far corner. He brushed the birdseed away from the edge of the lid. Then he picked up the lid and carried it carefully to the picnic table by the fence. He dumped the contents of the lid onto the table and sat down. He was looking at a pile of mealworms about the size of a hockey puck. He frowned as he pushed at them with his finger. He counted the worms carefully … thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six. The exact number he had put out the night before when he came home from work.

“Damn,” he said. He shoveled the worms onto the ground with the lid. One of them landed in the V between two seat
planks. He tried to pick the worm out and then, thinking he might squish it, he went back inside and got a pencil and used it to work the worm carefully along the groove. He didn’t want squished worm on his hands.

He went back inside, made coffee, and took the newspaper upstairs to bed. Arthur, the dog, who was splayed out on the couch, opened one eye to watch him pass and then fell back asleep.

Dave and Morley gave the bird feeder to Stephanie last Christmas. Who knows? They thought it might distract her—get her involved in the greater world around her. It was an unqualified failure. When she opened it on Christmas morning, Stephanie squinted at the bird feeder, frowned, then checked the gift tag. “Is this a mistake?” she asked, without a trace of enthusiasm.

So it was Dave who ended up assembling the feeder and it was Dave who filled it each day. Every day through the dark mornings of January and February, when the snow and ice were piled up in all the provinces, it was Dave who beat the path from the back door to the bird feeder on the pole in the center of his backyard.

At first the only birds interested in his efforts were a thuggish gang of sparrows. They flung Dave’s birdseed onto the ground, where it was pecked over by a bunch of pigeons. The pigeons had begun to hang out under the feeder like a squad of squeegee kids.

“It’s more like a shelter for the homeless than a bird feeder,” said Morley.

The only member of the family who displayed any real passion for the feeder was the cat. Galway spent hours perched on the kitchen radiator, her face against the back
window, her tail twitching in frustrated concentration. There were not only birds to lust after but squirrels, too.

The squirrels appeared on Boxing Day, an hour after Dave got the feeder up. They spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s trying to shinny around the squirrel guard. They would get halfway up the pole and then drop to the ground like plates of china. One by one they gave up, leaving the only squirrel who was not a quitter. If anything, its determination grew. Having failed from below, it shifted strategy and began hurling itself at the feeder from rooftops, the fence, a tree, and Dave’s television antenna.

Dave would be washing the dishes, and there would be a blur of gray in his peripheral vision, and he would turn just in time to see the squirrel ricochet off the barbecue. Galway studied each of its attempts with the intensity of a general studying military history.

One afternoon Dave and Galway watched the squirrel haul itself, upside down, along the clothesline—paw over paw to within a few feet of the feeder before it lost its grip, hung from the line for a moment by one leg like a doomed mountain climber, and let go, its tail flailing in the air as it tried to right itself for landing. As it dropped, Galway, who was sitting in Dave’s lap, dug her claws into his leg. Dave flew out of the chair, unsure if Galway’s reflex was in sympathy for the squirrel or out of the forlorn realization that this, too, was a lost opportunity.

“Wouldn’t it be simpler,” said Morley one lunchtime as the squirrel bounced off their compost bin, “to take the winter off? Isn’t hibernation an option?”

In the New Year, Dave added a blue jay and a Junco, and then a gang of chickadees and some birds who seemed to be traveling with them. But the vast flocks he had imagined filling
his backyard were avoiding it. Short of amusing the cat, the feeder seemed to be filling no real need in the universe—and certainly none in the bird universe.

Then, on a chilly gray Saturday in the middle of the month, something came. Dave pointed it out to everyone at lunch.

“Over there,” he said. “See. In the Lowbeers’ pine tree.”

No one was particularly interested.

It was not a big bird—not as big as a robin—with olive green above its wings and dull yellow below. It seemed to favor the evergreen hedge that bordered their backyard. It would flick out of this thicket and peck at the seeds in the feeder tray, then vanish into the hedge again.

Dave watched it for a week before he asked Gerta Lowbeer if she knew what kind of bird it was. Gerta brought over her three bird books and her binoculars. She said, “It looks like a tanager. A female summer tanager. But a summer tanager is not supposed to come this far north.” Gerta’s finger was moving along the small print of her bird book. “In January a summer tanager is supposed to be on a beach in Mexico or Brazil.”

Dave was watching his bird through Gerta’s binoculars. He had never seen it so close. It had a stubby bill, almost swollen—not pointy, like a robin’s.

“And it shouldn’t eat seeds,” said Gerta. “A tanager eats insects and wasps. It’s a carnivore.”

When Gerta left, Dave put out a few pieces of tangerine. The sort of thing you might expect to eat if you were used to wintering in Brazil. Then he drove to a pet store to see if he could buy his bird some insects and wasps. He settled for a bag of crickets.

The bird fell on the crickets as if she hadn’t seen a decent meal in months. That bird was starving, thought Dave. For
two hours straight, she flicked back and forth from the hedge like windshield wipers. But as happy as she seemed with the crickets, Dave could see that they weren’t going down easily. She was having trouble with the shells.