Читать книгу Sunday Drive to Gun Club Road - Marion Quednau - Страница 6

“I’ve seen some wacky things, but this beats them all,” Harold said. He was looking out their front window at the man across the street. The new neighbour.

The man had a few years on them—that’s what Kate thought. She was better at guessing these things: the size of a shirt just by looking at it, or the number of carrots needed in a stew for twenty family browsers. So if she guessed fifties, late, Harold would tend to believe her.

He supposed she thought so because of a receding hairline, largish brow, slightly stooped shoulders—but of course the fellow was looking down. He was looking at the fresh covering of snow in his front yard, several inches of the white stuff, smooth as a linen tablecloth. But apparently not smooth enough. For the man was prodding at the snow, reaching and pulling back gingerly, with a rake. He was raking the snow.

“What do you think? The absent-minded professor type?” Harold asked. Despite the sub-zero weather, their new neighbour was wearing only a thin trench coat, the sort worn to a business luncheon.

He didn’t have a clue what this fellow was up to, but Kate did. “He’s looking for something,” she said. To Kate it was obvious.

The house had stood empty for months. It was one of those fake-Tudor suburban fantasies dreamed up by some developer in the seventies, stucco and fake beams, and all the wrong shape. Harold thought it probably leaked. He had said so several times over the months the For Sale sign had beckoned potential buyers.

“I know what he’s lost,” Harold muttered as he reluctantly turned away. “His marbles, that’s what.” He couldn’t stand there all day watching a cracked neighbour.

“Maybe it’s a family heirloom, his grandfather’s fob, that sort of thing,” Kate said. She watched as the man thoroughly criss-crossed the yard in a rigorous pattern. She said she could feel the man’s regret.

“Yeah, he’s misplaced his family jewels,” Harold said, sputtering at his own bad taste. “Right.”

They were having a Christmas party. The incoming snow had slowed to a nice drifting flake or two, just enough to make people arrive early and not drink too much before venturing home. That’s what Kate hoped.

Friends they’d known for as long as they’d lived in the small town adjoining the city had all shown up. Their children were mostly teens and off doing their own thing, but a few late starters had brought a child or two with them. Sitters were hard to find at this time of year.

Food was abundant, wine and hot toddies in hand, conversations bright and sassy with annual teasing. “Yeah, well with the girth of a horse, all you need is sleigh bells, my King of Shortbread.” “It takes one good nag to know one,” was thrown back. But it was all in good fun. No one here meant harm, or would take offence.

Kate knew these people almost as well as Harold, and she knew Harold extremely well. Almost down to the latest whorl of reddish hair sprouting in his ears, the pine-tar scent of him when he’d been jogging, the sweet nature of a normally blunt man. He was a lapsed Scot, he always said. With no offended clan to speak of and no kilt to wear at family occasions. No plaintive pipes to blow. If sometimes he seemed standoffish or gruff in nature, he was more bluff than bite.

Someone was staring out the dark picture window and asked, “Hey, who moved in there, anyway?” Lights were springing on in the house across the street.

“Some lunatic,” Harold said promptly.

“What, are you having trouble with rampaging dogs or loud rap music already?”

“No, not that sort of thing,” Harold said, because Kate had given him a thoughtful look. As in, it was Christmas and everyone on earth should be kind. That sort of look.

“He’s just a bit odd,” Kate said, to help Harold out. “Performs peculiar rituals.”

“A devil-worshipper? A sacrificer of small children?” Nicole stammered out. She was always so dark right off the bat. She worked in the film industry, set design for schlocky horror flicks, so it made sense.

“Not as far as we can tell. But the other day he was out there in broad daylight, as broad as it gets at this time of year, and raking his lawn,” Harold said, as though that should be the clincher.

“Maybe he’s an avid gardener,” Cam offered. Cam was always pruning and planting the right bulbs at the right time in properly turned soil.

“No, Cam, no. You don’t get it. This was a couple of days ago, right? He was raking the snow,” Harold said. “Are you getting a picture here? Raking the snow.”

Cam considered for a moment what sort of late-season gardening chore this might be, and then smiled. “Okay, that’s weird, I’ll admit.”

“Maybe he has OCD,” Cheryl offered. She was a psychiatric nurse, and neuroses always came first to her mind. Most people aren’t serial killers, she liked to point out, just nervous as hell, with bad families, bad habits and bad attitudes.

“You know, obsessing? Like what you’re doing about the fellow across the street?” Kate was clearly getting ready to end the subject.

“I think we should stop analyzing the poor guy,” Linda said.

Her husband, Randy, nodded and brushed cracker crumbs from his beard. “And get over there and really find out what makes him tick.”

Everyone laughed. They had gathered in a semicircle around the window and were staring out beyond the snow-lined street to the newly occupied house.

“No, seriously. Why don’t we offer him some food? Invite him over?”

“It’s the neighbourly thing to do,” Cam said. He was what Kate’s father used to call a good egg.

“Okay,” Kate said, taking charge, “here’s what we’ll do. I’ll take him a plate of goodies, a gesture of welcome. And then ask him if he’d like to join us. That way he has a choice, doesn’t feel pressured. Can just shut the door in my face if he wants to and continue on with his—”

“Indoor raking,” Harold said, ducking his head in a fake-ashamed way.

“You’re terrible,” Kate said.

She was already arranging smoked salmon and pasta salad, cheese and crackers on a plate. Covering it with saran wrap and heading out the door, with a scarf around her head and just a sweater, nothing more.

Harold watched her footsteps leave neat prints down the shovelled sidewalk newly dusted with snow. Her feet were small and pointed slightly outward, like a ballet dancer’s. He hoped the guy wasn’t a psycho or something.

Kate rang the bell and there was a hovering shadow in the light behind the glass transoms on either side of the door. A tallish man appeared then, bending toward her as if he might be hard of hearing.

Harold could see her small shoulders bob up and down as she spoke and then pointed across the street to their party. The man accepted the plate of food; when Kate turned to wave goodbye, the door had already closed.

“It was obvious he was shy,” Kate said, shaking a few sprinkles of snow from her shoulders. “A little overwhelmed.”

“Yeah, we’re such a kind bunch,” Nicole whispered. “Don’t let it out of the bag.”

“Does he have anyone living with him? A significant other?” Gretchen asked. She was once again between relationships.

“Well, the house—at least what I could see of it, front hall open to the living room—had that sort of unlived-in aspect when a man lives alone and doesn’t have the faintest about hanging a painting or placing a chair,” Kate said.

The subject of the new guy on the block had almost fizzled when Harold blurted out, “So did you slip in a little hint about raking his yard, what he was doing the other day?” He was clearly still bent out of shape about that, had to know.

“Well, actually I did ask him whether he’d lost something. Mentioned that we’d seen him—looking—in the front yard.”

“Well, what did he say?” Harold asked. As if the explanation had to be good or else he just wouldn’t buy it.

“He said he was looking for his dog’s Frisbee,” she said. A smile was playing around her mouth, as though she were admitting Harold had been right. The guy might be kind of loopy.

“His dog’s Frisbee?” The room sprang, like a coiled cat just waiting to pounce, into sharp laughter.

They moved on to other topics. Business, the new shopping mall down the highway, recipes for Christmas desserts using champagne and fruit in tall, fluted glasses. “Sort of like a float,” Linda said. “With raspberry sherbet, sliced kiwis on top. Yum.”

But Harold wasn’t happy. He was still thinking about the stranger across the way who now had a plate of food, offered by his wife’s hands. Carried there in good faith. For as many weeks as the man had lived across the street, Harold had never once seen a dog. Not a sign of one. No barking, no chasing after thrown fetch toys. He very much doubted whether the man even had a dog. Whether he had told the truth. That bothered Harold. That bothered Harold a lot.

Harold was still ticked off a few days later when he went across the street, allegedly to talk shop. The fellow was fiddling with some sort of mid-sized car, an older model, maybe eighties. It was beginning to rust around the wheel wells.

The guy was wearing that trench coat again, like some sort of child molester or laid-off detective. Only pretending to work on his car, the hood raised at a suspicious angle. Not really up, not really down.

Harold shook the man’s hand. He said his name was Walter Bagin. “An old Welsh name,” he added, when Harold arched an eyebrow. As though even the name might be made up.

Walter’s hand was dry and seemed frail for such a tall man. Then Harold couldn’t help himself any longer. “So, did you ever find your dog’s Frisbee?” he asked. “Or for that matter, your dog?”

Walter looked startled. Frowned and swallowed a couple of times like a baby starling getting too big a mouthful. “My dog is dead,” he said finally. “My dog died,” he repeated.

Harold’s first reaction was to think how sly a man this must be. To invent something like that so quickly. Harold could never do that, so he had to admire the guy a little. Had to give him credit.

“Sorry about that,” Harold said. He didn’t sound very sorry, or feel it either. “How’d he die?” He wasn’t letting him off the hook so easily. No sir.

A painful look had fallen on Walter’s face. “It was a slow death. Gruesome, really,” he said. Then added, “So you’re a dog lover then?”

That was the first inkling Harold had that the man might be telling some sort of half-truth. And that he, Harold, might look a little shamefaced. Harold had never liked dogs and didn’t want to say so. So he flinched and said, “Yeah, I like dogs. They’re real people. Good companions.”

“Exactly,” Walter said, dropping his head again into his Chevy-something engine. But Harold could see he didn’t have a clue what he was looking for. Was aimlessly pulling at wires and polishing his battery connections.

Harold would have stayed to help the poor fellow, but he couldn’t handle the heavy weight that had fallen like a big wrench into the mood of tinkering with the car. When Walter had raised his head again, there had been a tear in his eye. A real tear. And he said, “I’m just trying to keep busy. You know, grieving.”

Harold didn’t know how a grown man could be so torn apart about losing a dog. And then admit it to a virtual stranger. Well, he was an oddball all right, just as Harold had thought all along.

When Harold told Kate, she looked concerned. “That’s sad,” she said. He had almost forgotten that women liked that sort of thing, men displaying their feelings. Men acting more like women. Because that’s what it amounted to, didn’t it? Men like some sort of mirror image of the female agenda, of women letting things fly out of them. Feelings, intuitions, regrets. Hurts, hatreds. So he just shrugged off her look of motherly or sisterly concern, whatever it was that skittered over her slightly freckled face. He could picture her bringing Walter some comfort food. Maybe mashed potatoes with nutmeg, plates and plates of it, while Walter wallowed and waited for Kate to arrive at his door.

That’s exactly what Kate did, for eight days and eight nights, as though she had Walter on a feeding schedule like an infant. She was “checking in on Walter,” is what she said, before she almost tiptoed across the street, as though she might be disturbing him.

Harold couldn’t take it one more day and said so. “Is he off the bottle yet?” he asked sullenly. “Taking solid foods?”

Kate looked astonished. If there was such a thing as “pleasantly surprised,” this was a case of “unpleasantly.” She looked plainly disappointed. It was the flip side of her amazement when he’d given her the engagement ring, years ago. She had looked almost too surprised, he had thought then. As though she hadn’t really believed in the gesture, or at least not coming from this particular man. Maybe she’d wanted to make Harold happy by acting a little over-the-top, a little golly-gosh.

If he hadn’t liked her astonishment then, he liked it even less now. With Walter just across the street and somehow involved. Something intimate flashed in Harold’s imagining, something in half darkness, perhaps an image of Kate’s breast. Walter feeding there where Harold liked to fasten on.

Kate felt it too. The tugging between them. She sensed Harold’s envy. It seemed to her an almost childish fear, the way little ones liked to hang on and make a fuss. She wondered whether to laugh, but thought that might belittle the serious thing cropping up between them. She had never seen Harold act like this, overly attached to her, or, despite his blunt outbursts, seem mean-spirited.

“You don’t like Walter, I gather,” she said finally.

“I just don’t know why you’re treating him like a child,” Harold said.

“When you want to be the child?” Kate snapped. She thought he was pouting.

Harold only sounded more exasperated. “Okay then, like some long-lost hero. Brother or father returned from the war, or Olympic champion. Why don’t you build him a shrine for his so-called suffering? Made of mashed potatoes. And chicken soup.”

A shrine made of chicken soup should have made them laugh. But it didn’t.

That evening Kate stayed longer than usual at Walter’s house. Harold tried not to care. Tried not to count the minutes passing, one by one, between 6:15 and 7:45.

“I left your supper in the warming oven,” Kate said breezily, when she finally shut the front door hard, as though keeping out a strong wind. “Didn’t you find it?”

Harold was shocked. She had eaten dinner with Walter. Had left Harold’s plate in the oven.

“Do you even know what kind of dog Walter had? Do you?”

They were lying like Egyptian mummies side by side, perfectly sealed up. Trying to stay intact and not crumble to dust.

“Maybe a miniature schnauzer,” she said. And sighed conspicuously, as if she were not only tired, but tired of Harold to boot.

“A what?”

“A serious little soldier of a dog,” Kate said, in a curt tone. “Or maybe a blond, happy-go-lucky retriever. Always in the water, with that wet-dog smell.”

Something in Harold snapped shut. She could hear it. She lay in the darkness long after his snoring had started, dreaming up types of dogs. Short-legged ones and spaniels with floppy ears, stoic French bulldogs with bulging eyes, giant mastiffs lying about the hearth, Maltese lapdogs always so effervescent, and churlish terriers with lots of spring to their step.

She hadn’t the faintest idea what kind of dog Walter had loved and lost. It had been his wife’s dog, that’s all she knew. Some sort of fancy pedigreed dog or just a plain faithful mutt that had seemed like the last remaining piece of his wife. Walter had said so in the cluttered small kitchen.

“Like a rib,” he’d said. “You can see the ribs of a sick woman you love. And after a while, that’s all you can see, the rise and fall of her ribs. Still breathing, you think. Still alive.”

His wife had liked the dog on the bed in the mornings—only to greet them, not to sleep there. But he had never allowed it, he confessed. Too many hairs. And the dog would try to squeeze between them, of course.

And then when she got ill, he hadn’t allowed it either. She seemed too fragile and the nurse was always trying to keep things clean. But now he wished he had let the dog on the bed. Now he had regrets.

She had died of cancer, Walter told Kate. And that’s when he had sold the old house and moved. Of course he had brought the dog along. Wanted to start letting it sleep wherever the heck it wanted to hunker down. Wanted to make it up to his wife.

The dog had been hit by a car the first night in the new house, he said. The gate to the yard didn’t close properly, and the poor thing had probably been confused. First losing a person, then a house. Had probably gone looking for anything familiar. The dog was still alive, whining, when Walter had found the poor beast, its back grotesquely twisted. The driver had just left him there.

Walter had been steeping tea for about twenty minutes, speaking slowly and prodding the tea bag with a spoon now and again. Kate took over.

“Had your wife been sick long?” she asked. She knew that’s what Walter really wanted to talk about, not the dog.

Walter had visibly slumped. “It started with a lump in her neck,” he said finally. “Then they found a tumour—in her brain. It was terrible, the pain she endured.”

He had tried to bury the dog in the backyard, he said, but the ground was too frozen. He had felt so helpless.

Kate took Walter in her arms while he sobbed wet gurgles on her shoulder.

She tried to imagine Harold losing her to something unseen between them. Something grown huge seemingly overnight.

The next morning Harold seemed in better spirits. Said maybe Walter might like to play cards sometime. Join his lackadaisical poker group. “It’s not like we’re cutthroat or anything. We don’t exactly play hard. Or for keeps.”

“It’s a thought,” Kate said. She looked kind of vague and pale, as though she hadn’t slept well. “I don’t think Walter can afford to lose much more right now. Not the shirt off his back, that’s for sure.”

Harold looked pleased that a truce might be rearing its tired head between them. He pulled Kate close and wrapped his arms around her small form, which resisted him somewhat—he could feel it.

From somewhere in the middle of them both, Kate’s muffled voice said, “I want a dog. How ’bout we get a dog?” She sounded wary and edgy, didn’t want Harold to refuse her this one thing.

He hated to admit it, but he’d been thinking along the same lines. Of getting a dog. But first they had to decide what kind, and who would do all the walking and picking up of messes. An elegant greyhound, perhaps, or black and white spaniel? It had to have a little cachet, he said, look good while getting underfoot.

Kate was laughing now, he could feel her ribs inflate and then ease, like small bellows inside his hands. He supposed it would be mainly Kate’s dog. That she would want it on the foot of the bed or asleep with her on the couch some nights. He guessed he wouldn’t mind.