How Loveta Got Her Baby (16 page)

That night, over fish and chips down the street at Al's, he said to her, “What's the names of all those friends of yours back home?” He was so casual, he still had food in his mouth. And Meta Maud said to herself, Why that's nice, he's never asked much. She could overlook the food. She said, “Well there's Eunice Cluett who's my best friend, and Eunice, her friend is Henry, and then there's Aaron Stoodley.” “What's he like?” said Harold Butts. “Who, Aaron?” said Meta Maud, “he's just Aaron, he's nice, makes you laugh. That's all.”

Dear Meta Maud
, he wrote the second time.
Things are good
here. There's lots of rain, which is no big surprise. Clyde's first paycheck,
he's happy. There's a waterpipe broken on Barter's Hill, it made a real
mess downtown. You'd have to wear your boots to keep dry.

Aaron.

Now what did Aaron Stoodley mean by that? Aaron didn't know and neither did Harold Butts, who read it. But if you knew Aaron better than either of them did, that's a love letter for sure. Barter's Hill was the road he walked on with Meta Maud Grandy every day, down to where she worked. Nights he'd meet her again, walk her back up the hill no matter when. Just friends they were, and Aaron said he liked the workout. They'd talk up and down the hill, mostly about Clyde. He sure had problems, Clyde did. Aaron never wrote one letter to Meta Maud without putting in it, somewhere at least, Barter's Hill, and Clyde.

Harold Butts steamed this second one open too and read it five times. Whoever this Aaron was, the letters didn't make much sense. Sure wasn't longwinded. He never said
I love you lots
, or
Your passionate friend
, or
Miss you
. There was nothing there like that, flat-out nothing at all. Harold knew who Clyde was, he didn't worry a second about Clyde, her no-good brother, the twin who couldn't do much. The deep-sea diver went down to the basement and put the second letter into the same bag. Those letters to Meta Maud, they cozied up in the dark against the picture magazines he had hidden in there. No harm to that, everybody had their magazines. Anyway, lucky for him, he had the kettle trick down pat, kept it on low and real quiet. Got real slick at it. Meta Maud, why he liked her lots. She read books, she talked up a storm, she made friends easy.

Dear Meta Maud Grandy
, this was Aaron's third letter.
I hope
you don't mind these, all the letters. Everything's still fine and dandy
here. Eunice and Henry, they're fine, they don't know I've taken my
pen in hand. They'd laugh. No letters from you but don't worry,
one-way's fine. Clyde's okay at the bakery, but they've moved him down
near the coffee machine. That might be a mistake. I'll walk him down
to work, remind him what we said about the job he blew, back at
Tim's, with the coffee. Hey Meta Maud, Barter's Hill looks the same,
still up one way and down the other.

Harold Butts put the kettle on low again. That way, the whistle never came on and wouldn't wake her up but what the heck, she slept deep anyway, you could shout and dance most of the time. Then he steamed open the envelope. First he laid the steam at one edge and moved along. The hard part was by the stamp. If there was too much steam put there, the stamp crinkled up and you could tell. Thirty seconds was all it took, he was fast. He wondered what the world record was, anyway, for steaming letters on the sly. Then he laughed at that and thought to himself, Never see that one in the Guinness Book.

Then, after he read through the whole thing, it didn't take long, he thought, that silly Clyde Grandy? Hopeless case, you ask me. Why bother writing about a loser like that? Worst thing about the letters, it was boring. Hey wait a minute, wait a minute, maybe they're after pulling a fast one here, maybe there's a secret message.
Yours
, that was new. He didn't like that. Maybe there's a K-I-S-S-E-S or a S-E-X in there, only she could see. The first letter in each word maybe, check it out. Harold laid the letter from the retard flat out and looked for clues. Then oh my, he heard the bed creak upstairs and there were footsteps. “Hi there, honey, the kettle's on, you're up too early, go on back to bed, you need your sleep, there's nothing here, I just got the bills.”

Jeez, that was close I must say. Always have a spare tank Harold, when you go down deep like that. There's no buddies down here. Now. There we go, take the first letter each line. He picked up his pen with the purple ink and he circled the first letter in every line and he did that to all the old letters too. Now at least they looked good, full of colour.

Twenty minutes later Harold Butts gave up. There was no secret message. No darlings, no kisses that he could find, and the way that Aaron Stoodley wrote, he was like a simpleton with no brains. Like that twin brother of hers, that Clyde, they made a fine pair. Down he went to the basement and put the third letter in the dark bag. He was a fox all right, he was a deep-sea diver and there was no telling how far down he could go. That's what he thought to himself on the way back upstairs.

Dear Meta Maud
(letter number four)
I don't know about your
brother now. Down the hill I went to the bakery, and there was Clyde
making coffee. He had the sweat popped out all over him. Then he
poured all the coffee out at once, all of it down the drain. Right away,
he made a new pot. It was like at Tim's all over again. He looked
around, down the drain it went, surreptitiously. I was the only one
who saw it, I'm pretty sure. Then he made up a third pot right away.
That's no good for Clyde. He hasn't overcome that fixation of his. They
find out, he's gone. Maybe answer me this time please, Meta Maud.

Best as always,

Yours,

Aaron.

Fat chance she'd ever answer, thought Harold Butts.

Three weeks later, he and Meta Maud went out to The Keg.

They had a special dinner for what they called their two-month anniversary. By then he must have had twenty letters from Aaron Stoodley, all of them sequestered in the diving bag. That night at The Keg, he had a lot more wine than he was used to, but what the heck, she had the keys to the car, she could be the driver. Steak and baked potatoes and after that it was apple pie. What a time they had. “Remember the dance we met,” he said, “you was so shy back then.” And Meta Maud smiled and agreed and then the waitress came by and she said, “You folks want coffee?” and Harold laughed and said to Meta Maud, “Hey, honey, why not? Maybe your crazy brother Clyde fixed it up.” And Meta Maud said, “Fixed what up? What did Clyde fix up?” “The coffee, the coffee,” he said with a big laugh, “Clyde fixed up the coffee!” So Meta Maud laughed, sort of, and they drove home and at 2 a.m. she woke up with a chill in the middle of her heart and said, “Whoa, wait a minute, I never said anything at all to Harold about Clyde and coffee. Where'd he get that idea from?” “Harold,” she said, “wake up. Harold, where'd you get that about Clyde and coffee?” He was half-asleep. “You told me, you told me about the coffee. Meta Maud, go back to sleep.” So she did go back to sleep, and in the morning, first thing, she poured the orange juice for him and off he went down to the harbour. “Some big steel rods fell off the barge,” he said, “seventy dollars an hour for me. What's twelve times seventy? See you in eight hundred and forty dollars.” Off he went and Meta Maud Grandy sat there. What the hell, what the hell, what the hell, she thought. Then: let's figure it out. Phone home.

Back on Fitzpatrick Avenue, Eunice Cluett and Henry Fiander were already in a bit of a funk when they heard the phone ring. The problem Eunice and Henry had, and they'd had it for some time, was none other than Aaron Stoodley himself, and the problem with Aaron Stoodley was that he'd turned into a zombie. Always on the couch. He lay there like a washed-up giant squid. Every time they walked by, they had to say, “Move those tentacles please, move those tentacles.” Then he'd shift a bit but otherwise, when they said, “What's wrong with you, Aaron Stoodley?” he couldn't seem to muster up an answer. He seemed to have no strength. This was a big change, because up till then he was a house on fire all the time. More likely they had to say, “Close the damper down some, Aaron, you'll wear out like one of those supernovas.” Now, with Meta Maud gone a couple months or more, there he was, a zombie on the couch. Paralyzed. They had no idea that he'd sent twenty letters off to Meta Maud, and received none back at all.

The phone rang.

“Get the phone, Aaron, please,” said Eunice.

She had Queenie in her lap, and a book.

“I can't. I'm de-oxygenated.”

That was the word he used for the disease he figured he had, the one that made him tired all the time. A big medical book lay on the floor by the couch, and when Henry picked it up one day, it fell open to the page that said
Leukemia
. “This what you got?” he asked Aaron. “That's it, I got it all.” Henry read a bit more and said, “You got loss of appetite, weight loss, sweats in the night and chest pains?” To that Aaron said, “I don't have every single one of those, Henry, but I got most of them. And I'm deoxygenated. My oxygen bubbles are way too few. My muscles are thus starved of life-giving oxygen. It's leukemia, I'm almost sure.” Then Eunice went over to the couch and snapped up the book from the dying man. She leafed through it a bit, gave it back and said, “Aaron, read this, right here. Where it says
Depression
.” “Depression?” “That's what you got, you poor guy, but that's all you got. You're pining away. I've seen it lots of times. Jump up and live.”

But he lay on the couch anyway, he didn't believe her.

Eunice put Queenie down and ran for the phone herself.

“Hello,” she said, and then she laughed out loud. “Why girl, you fell off the earth.”

Then Eunice was real quiet, listening.

Finally she said, “Things aren't so good here right now, Meta Maud. Clyde's gone and messed up and lost the job at the bakery. Aaron's dying on the couch. Otherwise, we're fine and dandy.”

Aaron Stoodley stood up.

“Talk to Aaron, though. He's right here. He's the one who really knows about Clyde. He kept an eye on him, for all the good it did.”

She held the phone up in the air like it was a prize and waved it and said, “Aaron, oh Aaron, it's Miss Meta Maud Grandy all the way from the big city of Halifax, just for you.”

All of a sudden the man with the fatal De-oxygenating Leukemia Disease jumped up from the couch and came into the kitchen and took the phone from Eunice Cluett.

“Meta Maud? It's you?”

He was so weak from Leukemia that his hand and his voice trembled.

“It's me all right. Aaron, what's up with Clyde?”

“He didn't make it, Meta Maud, he didn't pull it off.”

“The coffee again?”

“That's it. Fixated on making it. It'd be laughable under other circumstances.”

“Aaron, you should've let me know, we probably could have done something.”

“I wrote you the letters, Meta Maud. There was nothing else I could do.”

“Letters?”

“Twenty letters.”

“You did? That was sweet of you. But I didn't get any.”

They checked the address and there was no mistake there.

“Well, we'll deal with that later,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

“Simple enough. The first few days Clyde was fine. He made the coffee right, he walked away. He swept up the floor. He cut the bread. He tied on the little tags for the jam. Just like we showed him. But then he started to watch the coffee all the time, a bad omen. Like he did at Tim's. I warned him over and over. But you know Clyde, he's weird now and then. That was it.”

“That was it?”

“Pretty much. One day he made twenty pots of coffee five minutes apart, pouring most of it down the drain, when he thought no one was looking.”

“He did that on purpose.”

“Maybe.”

“He didn't want that job.”

“Maybe.”

“I don't know what we can do.”

“It's nice to hear your voice, Meta Maud.”

“He still seeing the doughnut girl?”

“Yes he is. That's going fine. How's your diver, Meta Maud?”

Aaron knew she had a deep-sea diver now because, in the one post card Meta Maud sent to Eunice, she said so. It wasn't easy to ask.

“I'm not so sure about him, the diver,” she said.

Then Meta Maud, before she hung up the phone, said something like, “It's nice to talk to you again, Aaron Stoodley.”

That's what he remembered of the phone call.

“You sent Meta Maud Grandy letters, Aaron Stoodley, you fox, all behind our back?” asked Eunice.

“Someone had to keep her up to date. But she didn't get them.”

“My, who's in love with who, I wonder now,” said Eunice.

She said it real softly so no one could hear, but later on that day, when they were all alone, she said to Henry Fiander, “Aaron's in love.”

“Meta Maud?”

“That's the one. He's been sending her letters, and he can't breathe or move when she's away.”

“Too bad he's got the fatal De-oxygenating Leukemia Disease, beyond the help of doctors. That's bad timing for him.”

“You saw him run out of here after that phone call?”

“I did, he had his tentacles going in the right direction, for the first time in weeks.”

“Oxygenated. I tell you, he's cured by a miracle.”

After she hung up the phone, Meta Maud Grandy sat there at the kitchen table in Halifax. Nice condo they had, that's for sure. Harold Butts, he was gone for the full twelve-hour shift. He was probably, right now, pulling on the wetsuit and putting on the big helmet before he pushed off backwards, off the Zodiac. She'd watched him do it. Down he went with the big chains. He said you could hardly see down there, in the murk of the harbour. That's what he called it, the murk of the harbour. “Like going down into a dark basement, honey, you can't see zip down there. Mostly you hear yourself breathe in and out, and you feel your way around a lot with the gloves, they're big and thick.” Apparently, they lowered lights down there to penetrate the murk of the harbour. Hours, it took hours to wrap the chains on whatever they had to pull up, to do it right. Today it was iron bars. You had to be a certain kind to do that, and that's why they paid him so well.