Maclean (10 page)

11

MACLEAN TRAMPED BACK
again to the square. The crowds were thinning out now, and lines of cars and trucks with their headlights on were crawling up and down the hill on their way out of town. Maclean imagined them as they might appear to some high-flying nightbird. Tiny swatches of light fanning out across the darkened countryside, along winding country roads, down deep, little valleys, through the black mass of the forest. And behind them, the lights of the town strung out along the river with the brighter band of light that was Main Street running down the middle to this square, where he was picking his way through the traffic, an angular scarecrow in a cloth cap and somebody else's old suitcoat, and somebody else's old trousers, and a pair of somebody else's old boots that weren't going to last him through the winter.

A mud-coloured mongrel tied to the slats on the back of an old half-ton truck bared its teeth and growled at him as he passed. Maclean spat at it out of the side of his mouth, and the dog started to bark. At the top of the square, a loudspeaker outside a music store began playing “Deep in the Heart of Texas.”

As he walked up Main Street, he thought hard about the watch. He recalled what Pickle had said about its being silver and how keen Leveret had suddenly been to get hold of it, and he decided to take it to MacClewan's jewelry store and find out what it was really worth, so he wouldn't end up being cheated this day as well as robbed.

At the corner where the Salvation Army band had been playing, a fat policeman was directing traffic. He gave Maclean a long, hard look, as if wondering if he couldn't think of something to arrest him for. Maclean pretended he didn't see him and concentrated on walking straight and steady.

He stopped in front of the jewelry store and looked into the brightly-lit front shop with its showcases full of rings and necklaces and watches and its wallful of clocks with wagging pendulums all telling him it was twenty-five to ten. At the counter, Mr. Marathon MacClewan was talking earnestly to a large, gray-haired woman in a coat with a collar of red-fox fur complete with the head and glass eyes. As the woman moved, the fox stared out over her shoulder, now at the wagging clocks, now at the traffic outside, now straight at Maclean.

Marathon MacClewan was a tall, cadaverous man with thick glasses, who looked as if God had really intended him to be an undertaker. He was leaning on the counter now, gesturing rhythmically with one hand as if conducting an orchestra, and as he talked and gestured, he looked past the woman and caught sight of Maclean standing in front of his window. He glared at him suspiciously through the thick glasses, which magnified his eyes and made it seem to Maclean as if the fox staring at him over the woman's shoulder had been joined by a Madagascar monkey.

Maclean turned away.

What the hell was he thinking about anyway, he asked himself. If he took his watch in there, MacClewan would think he had stolen it and call the police the minute he was out of the store, and they would throw him in the jug just on the off-chance. What god-damned difference did it make what the watch was worth if he was just going to pawn it? He was wasting time, and if he didn't get a move on, he was going to find Joe Meltzer closed. Leveret would have cheated him. Leveret would cheat his own mother. But Joe Meltzer wasn't going to cheat him. Joe Meltzer was an honest man. That was why he lived upstairs over his store instead of in a big house.

The store was still alight, and in the middle of the great clutter of furniture and lamps and dishes and brasswork and all, Joe was seated at a battered, old dining-room table reading a newspaper. A little bell over the door announced Maclean's entrance, and Joe got up and came towards him in his slow, gently-stepping way, like a man walking around perpetually in a house where someone has just died.

“Hello, Pinky,” he said. “Can I do something for you?”

“I need a little money,” Maclean said, “and I got this here watch.”

He came away from Joe Meltzer's with another two dollars in his pocket. He and Joe had looked over the watch front and back, and Joe said he could loan him five dollars on it, but Maclean didn't want that much because he knew he would spend it and never get the five dollars together to pay Joe back. He had started to ask for just one, then changed his mind and got the two.

Now he walked slowly along the aisles of the five-and-ten-cent store. From behind the cash register, a bald-headed little man with teeth like a groundhog watched his every move, obviously convinced that he had come to steal something, clever shop-lifter that he was, arriving just before closing time when he would be the only person in the store.

He looked at a showcase with boxes of candy. Thanks to the war and the submarines, it would all be sweetened with saccharine instead of sugar and would taste like buttered sawdust. Then there was a showcase of the kind of trashy jewelry a teenager might buy if she was poor and stupid. And a case of little doo-dads like ashtrays with pictures on them of Lake Louise and Mounties on horseback. He stopped at a counter piled with sweaters. She always felt the cold, even in summer, the way he himself had begun to do, as the furnace of life began not to burn too well, except when stoked with some rum.

The bald-headed man came over as soon as he stopped.

“Yessss?” he said, his breath whistling through the groundhog teeth.

“I want to buy a sweater for my mother,” Maclean told him.

The clerk looked at him as if searching for some devilish plot behind this.

“I ain't sure about the size.”

“Mrs. MacPhedran will look after you,” the man said.

He gestured grandly to a woman on the other side of the store and went back to his cash register.

“Hello, John,” Mrs. MacPhedran said. “What can I do for you?”

Mrs. MacPhedran was the wife of one of the boys from the war, but her husband was off now in the Veteran's Guard at a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere. Between them, they found a sky-blue sweater that should fit, and Mrs. MacPhedran got a box and wrapped it up in brown paper and decorated it with some ribbons she found lying around in the back shop.

The sweater cost a dollar and twenty-nine cents. This was more than he had spent in a long time, but it still left him with nearly a dollar. He felt the familiar thirst at the back of his throat, but first before any more calamities befell, he would deliver the present. Then the quenching of his thirst would be all the sweeter.

“A joy deferred,” Miss Audrey was fond of saying, “is a joy enhanced.”

His parcel hanging loose in one hand, Maclean stood in the entrance to the Carleton Hotel, cursing to himself the bad luck, in this day of bad luck, that had brought him there just at that minute. On the sidewalk, not six feet away, Willie Campbell, Junior Tedley, and two of Willie's pals from across the river stood with their backs to him looking up and down Main Street. He had heard them at the very last second coming around the corner and had just managed to get in here out of their way.

He watched them thread their way through the crawling lines of traffic and make the sidewalk on the other side of the street. They were all drunk, Willie especially, weaving one leg over the other, tossing his shoulders around, rolling his head from side to side like a scavenging bear. Once across the street, they stopped again at the entrance to an alley, evidently trying to decide where to go next. Finally, after a lot of talking and waving around of arms, while they leaned on each other and shuffled back and forth to keep their feet underneath them, they set off into the alley, and Maclean began to think that he was out of it without any more trouble—not that Willie was in a shape to cause much trouble to anybody.

Then, as if the chicken-brained son of a whore had eyes in the back of his head, Junior turned around and looked straight at him. He peered as if making sure he was seeing what he was seeing, then shouted for Willie. Willie got himself turned around, and Junior pointed, his whole arm outstretched like a lookout in a movie who has spotted land or a whale.

Willie looked along the outstretched arm and got Maclean into focus.

“Pinky, you bastard!” he bellowed. “You son of a whore, you pull a knife on me,”

He stormed back out of the alley, waving his fists like a madman. His other two pals took in what was happening and went blundering after him. They caught up with him at the edge of the sidewalk. Groping around, like men in a pitch-dark cellar, they managed to fasten onto him, one to an arm, one to the back of his collar and got him stopped. While he roared and shook himself half out of his coat, they shouted into his ears and pointed down the hill at the fat policeman in the middle of the street directing traffic.

They scuffled back and forth, scattering pedestrians and looking every second as if they were all going to fall down in a heap. Then Willie got loose and staggered out between two parked cars. His face was as dirty as if he'd been working all day in a ditch, and Maclean could see the thick foam of spittle at the corners of his mouth.

“Pinky, you bastard,” he shouted through the traffic. “I'll get you, you pig-fucking son of a whore. I'll get you.”

His two pals squeezed between the cars and got hold of him again, and Willie wrestled and swore. But Maclean could see that it was now all just show, so that afterwards he could tell anybody who would listen that if it hadn't been that the boys held him back, by Jesus, he would have gone across that god-damned street, and to hell with the god-damned cars and to hell with the god-damned policeman, and he would have beaten that bastard Maclean, by Jesus, right there in front of the whole town, and he wouldn't have given a shit if they'd put him in jail for a year for it because that, by Jesus, was the kind of man he was.

After one last scuffle, arms and legs flying everywhere, he let himself be herded off, half-walking, half dragged along, roaring and cursing, into the alley.

“Pinky, you yellow-bellied bastard. You pull a knife on me. You rotten piece of dog-shit…”

Maclean stopped by the ruins of the stone gate-posts at the foot of the drive. He had walked fast the whole half-mile uphill from downtown, and he was breathing hard, his heart pounding heavily as if it were being slapped back and forth like a roll of bread dough. There was a pain under his breastbone. (It isn't just the lungs, Mr. Maclean. These things put a strain on the heart too, so don't overexert yourself. Avoid excitement.) He coughed hard and started to take out the five-pack of Turrets he had bought at a filling station at the foot of the hill. But they wouldn't let him smoke inside, and he didn't want to ruin a good tailor-made by stubbing it out and lighting it up again, and he didn't want to take the time to smoke it out here. That too could wait, then both together, a cigarette and a glass of rum, in a snug, warm refuge he already had in mind, safe for a while from everything inside and out.

He turned up the drive. The house stood back from the street in the centre of a sloping lawn bordered by a line of old oak and maple trees. The house was old too, as old almost as the trees, and large and grand with stone front steps and bay windows upstairs and down. It had been built by a family that once had lots of money, but they had lost it all somehow sometime after Confederation, and then they had all died or got killed in the war or moved away, and the house was sold to someone, who sold it to someone else, who sold it at last to a woman who made it over into a “Home”—which is to say, one of Dr. Death's waiting-rooms.

Maclean climbed the stone steps, pushed open the heavy door, and stepped inside into the sour smell of sickness and age. There was no one around, and only two lights with low-watt bulbs were burning in little brass brackets on the wall. To the right, a staircase with ornamental oak banisters ran up to a higher zone of twilight, where those still able to climb stairs did their waiting. To the left, a corridor ran off towards the back of the house, lined with doors like the corridor of a hotel, where the dining room and parlours of the old house had been cut up to make rooms for the ‘guests.'

Half way along the corridor, a shrunken, little old man was pushing a four-legged, wooden walker ahead of him. Maclean recognized him behind this hideous disguise as a man, once very brisk and dapper, who had worked in a bank. Brisk and dapper no more, he would push the walker an inch or two ahead, then with immense effort push first one foot, then the other, after it, his eyes fixed fiercely ahead of him, like the eyes of a soldier, dying and demented, crawling back through the mud to the trench he had just climbed out of.

Unnoticed, Maclean sidled past him and found the door of his mother's room open. She was sitting in her rocking chair in a padded dressing gown, her back half-turned to him, her eyes closed. Her hair was so thinned he could see the shape of her skull through it. Her face was white, her cheek bony, her hand on the arm of the chair skeletal.

He walked around the chair, and she started and opened her eyes. Behind her glasses, they had a strange, transparent look. Dark brown once and large, the brown now looked as if it had faded, like old cloth in the sun.

“John, I didn't hear you come in. Have you been here long?”

“No, Mamma. Just now. Just this minute. I came up to bring you your birthday present.”

He held out the box.

“Oh, John, you shouldn't spend your money on presents.”

“It isn't anything expensive.”

She hefted it in her hand, then passed it back to him.

“Not heavy. Must be something nice. Why don't you put it over on the table by the window. I'll open it in the morning. My grandfather used to say that it meant bad luck for the whole year if you opened your birthday present before your birthday.”

He put the parcel down on the table in front of a cluster of old photographs like the ones he had seen at Alice's and drew a chair over beside his mother and sat down.

“It's been a long time since you were here,” she said. “How have you been keeping?”