Home from the Vinyl Cafe (17 page)

“I don’t care what he does with the money,” Morley said. “He doesn’t take it if he doesn’t need it. Sometimes he won’t take it.”

Dave wasn’t listening. He had suddenly remembered why losing Emil’s books bothered him so much—remembered the object that had been gnawing at the edge of his consciousness. He had bought a lottery ticket the weekend the prize had gone over ten million dollars. And he had no idea where he had put it. He had read that it was not unusual for winning tickets to go unclaimed because people lost them. In the middle of his conversation with Morley, he abruptly turned and went downstairs and rummaged through the laundry hamper, knowing he was never going to find the ticket, wondering if it was one of the winners and exactly how much money he had thrown away.

And that was why Morley felt so let down last month as she stood on the Schellenbergers’ lawn at three-fifteen in the morning—that of all people it would be Emil standing there with the Schellenbergers’ gold-flame spirea at his feet.

Instead of getting angry, she said, “Is that for your garden, Emil?”

Emil said, “Did you know the moon is a hotbed of hostile alien activity?”

Morley wasn’t falling for that. She said, “That’s crazy talk, Emil. I want to know what you’re going to do with that plant. Do you have a garden?”

Emil looked up at her, and for an instant he was clear and she could see him—the real person.

“Yes,” he said softly.

“I want to see your garden,” she said. “Will you show me your garden tomorrow?”

Emil blinked and said, “Oh.” Then he hung his head and said, “Yes.”

Morley drew her robe tighter around her and said, “Good night,” and turned to walk across the street, noticing for the first time that she wasn’t wearing shoes.

The next day at lunch, Morley went to the stairwell beside the Heart of Christ Religious Supplies and Fax Services.

“I have come to see your garden, Emil,” she said.

“There,” Emil replied.

He was pointing at one of the large concrete boxes lining the street. Sure enough, nestled around the trunk of the stunted ginkgo tree that the city planted, and occasionally watered, were Morley’s hens-and-chickens.

“I have another box,” said Emil.

“Near the TV store,” said Morley.

“At night I take the plants with me,” said Emil.

“You can keep your eye on them that way,” said Morley.

“So no one can touch them,” said Emil.

At supper that night, Morley told everyone what had happened to her plants.

“What would you do about that?” she asked.

Sam said, “Call the police. Call the police and send him to jail. He stole.”

Stephanie said, “He’s retarded—just take the plants back.”

Dave said, “What
did
you do?”

Morley said, “The ornamental cabbages have aphids. I took him stuff for the aphids.”

All June, Emil kept busy with his garden—moving his plants back and forth among various concrete boxes around the city. He moved the smoke bush twelve times. He carefully noted each move in his book.

The garden, however, was not the biggest thing that happened to Emil that spring. The biggest thing happened on the last Saturday of June, when Emil won the lottery, not the big prize, but big enough—ten thousand dollars.

Emil went to the lottery offices on Monday morning with Peter from the Laundromat where he had bought his ticket. But they wouldn’t give him a check because he didn’t have two pieces of identification.

“I don’t want a check,” said Emil. “I want the money.”

It took several weeks for Emil to get a social security number. When he got it, he took it to the lottery office, and they gave him the check.

When he took the check to the bank, the teller, Kathy, took him into the manager’s office and tried to talk him into opening an account. She said maybe it was not a wise decision to walk around with that much cash. “Why don’t you take forty dollars?” she said. “You could come here anytime you wanted and get more money.” All the time Emil was in the manager’s office, the assistant manager was watching warily from the door.

It took Emil half an hour to convince them to give him his
money—they said they were worried that people would take advantage of him. He said he knew what he was going to do. He left at noon with ten thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills. They put it in a vinyl burgundy pouch.

He took it to his spot in front of the Heart of Christ Religious Supplies and Fax Services, and he gave away seven thousand dollars—actually, he misplaced two thousand five hundred dollars, so he ended up giving away four thousand five hundred dollars. He had three thousand left at the end of the day.

He didn’t hand the money to just anyone who walked by. He gave it to his regulars—people who gave
him
money. Or stopped to talk to him.

They were awkward transactions. Emil tried to slip them the money surreptitiously, the way you might tip a headwaiter who had led you to a good table. Most people didn’t like being that close to Emil, and as he tried to give them the money, they would back away. When they realized what he was trying to do—
he was trying to give them money!
—every one of them tried to refuse it … backed away as if he were offering them a religious tract. But Emil was persistent.

He gave Morley five hundred dollars.

“It would have been patronizing not to take it,” she told Dave. “It would have been an insult.” They were across the street in the record store. “I had to take it. But I know what I’m going to do with it.”

“What?” asked Dave.

“I’m going to give it back to him,” said Morley, “bit by bit.”

“It’ll just go back to the lottery,” said Dave.

“Dust to dust,” said Morley. “It’s his money.”

As soon as Morley left, Dave phoned Dorothy.

“He gave me five hundred dollars,” said Dorothy. “Kenny Wong got seven hundred and fifty.”

Dave hung up and headed across the street. He was sure Emil would offer him money, too. After all, he had known him as long as anyone else. By the time he was out the door, he knew what he was going to do with his share. You could still find things that paid eight percent. If everyone did that, Emil could have fifty or sixty dollars a month.

Emil was standing in the middle of the sidewalk looking around as if he was supposed to meet someone; as if this person were late.

“Congratulations, Emil,” said Dave. “I hear you’re a big winner. When do I get my share?”

He meant it as a joke, but Emil took him seriously.

“No share for you, Dave,” he said. “You still owe your library fine.”

Dave and Morley aren’t sure what happened to the money Emil didn’t give away. They know he had a haircut and a shave. He looked great for a week. So good that Dave didn’t recognize him the first time he saw him. Emil bought himself a portable battery-powered television and a chair, and all July he sat on the chair in his stairwell and watched his TV. The chair was eventually stolen, and he lost the TV, or someone took it from him. Or maybe he gave it away.

Emil wasn’t sure, when Morley asked him about it. “It’s okay,” he said. “The battery was going anyway, and it only got Canadian channels. You can’t get cable on those small sets.”

It was all gone by the end of July. Well, not all gone. Because Morley still had four hundred and twenty-five dollars that belonged to him. She kept it in a glass in the kitchen, in the back of the cupboard behind the canned soups. She had already given him fifty dollars in cash. Spent twenty on sandwiches and coffee, which she left on the newspaper box on
the corner. And she bought some feverfew and gave it to him to plant in his box. It’s an herb that looks like a daisy, and people say it can cure fevers—it’s a pretty plant, and the leaves smell good when you work around them, and best of all, it seeds itself, which means it will grow again next summer. It would need to be tough to live in a concrete box all winter—along with the Coke bottles and the straws—but the feverfew is a tough little thing and not without dignity.

On the last weekend in September, Morley will spend another five dollars while she is grocery-shopping. She’ll buy a box of grape hyacinth bulbs, and she will plant them one night when Emil has left—thinking as she scrapes at the hard dirt in Emil’s box that they will sprout in the spring and surprise him.

When she finishes, she will lift the watering can she has carried all the way from home and drain the last of it onto the dry soil. Then she will button her sweater and set off down the street, savoring the thin chill of the night air, the feel of earth on her fingers.

               
O
n Thursday morning, on his way to work, Dave passed Emil standing in the doorway of the Heart of Christ Religious Supplies and Fax Services. Emil was rocking back and forth with a vacant expression until Dave said, “Hello,” and Emil stopped rocking and cheerfully said, “Morning.” Dave was headed across the street to his store. He was halfway there when he remembered he was supposed to buy a bottle of wine. He frowned and slowed down as he tried to remember why—there was an occasion, but he couldn’t remember what it was. All he could remember was that he wanted to buy something special.

This had been happening frequently to Dave. Often in the morning as he was about to leave for work. One moment he’d be standing by the front door; the next, galloping up the stairs on some vitally important mission, the purpose of which escaped him once he was standing in the bedroom. All he could do was stand by his bureau like one of those poor dumb moose who wander into subdivisions, moving his eyes woefully around the room, looking for a clue to the urge that had sent him there.

The moose end up in the suburbs when a parasite moves into their brain. As far as Dave could figure, whatever had moved into
his
brain had been marching around with a clipboard and a ladder unscrewing lightbulbs. More than once,
in the evenings, Dave had stood up abruptly—right in the middle of a television commercial—and walked into the den because … well, that was the problem. He couldn’t remember why he was in the den. The dog followed Dave around at night—in case it might be time for a walk—so the two of them would stand there, Dave and the dog, both of them staring at Dave’s desk with the same perplexed expression.

It was five past ten when Dave saw Emil and remembered that he was supposed to buy the wine. He hesitated in front of his record store. He couldn’t remember what the wine was for, but maybe, he thought, he should go and buy it before he forgot altogether.

It was a fifteen-minute walk to the wine store. It was a beautiful morning. The idea of staying outside pleased Dave. The walk would do him good.

There were no other customers when he got there. Just three clerks leisurely restocking the shelves and chatting among themselves.

Dave was feeling pretty leisurely himself as he wandered around the aisles. He still couldn’t remember why he wanted wine, so he read a lot of labels and, to be safe, chose four bottles—two white and two red. Two Canadian, a Californian cabernet, and an Australian merlot.

There were four cash registers at the front of the store, but nothing to indicate which one was open. There wasn’t a clerk at any of them and no signs or gates to suggest a course of action. Dave chose the cash register nearest the door.