Home from the Vinyl Cafe (27 page)

Arthur was the first to react.

He growled, and as everyone turned to look at him, the growl changed to a bark. He jumped into action, his feet windmilling on the hardwood floor; barking, growling, he chased the orange cat once around the dining room and then out the front door.

It happened so fast no one had a chance to say anything.

Before anyone moved, Arthur was back, wagging his tail.

Galway jumped down from the bookcase, and Arthur wagged up to her and licked her face.

“That’s so cute,” said Stephanie, turning back to the mail.

“They’re happy to see each other,” said Morley.

It was only Dave who noticed Galway’s ears flattening ever so slowly; Dave who recognized the look of despair descending on Arthur as he tucked his tail between his legs and loped toward the kitchen, his dark woeful eyes glancing back over his shoulder at Galway as he went.

               
T
he guinea pig was losing hair. Not shedding it; losing it. Morley said, “You better take her to the vet.” Dave said to his wife, “I know.”

The neighborhood vet said she didn’t do pigs. She told Dave he’d have to take her to a clinic that specialized in small animals. Dave wasn’t sure how to move a sick pig across the city. He settled on the bus and a wooden fruit basket filled with wood chips. The pig didn’t seem to mind the excursion. Neither did Dave.

The pig was Dave’s job. He cleaned her cage, he fed her, and since she was sick, he accepted that it was up to him to make her better. The pig was his son’s pet, but when he bought her, Dave knew that caring for her would eventually fall to him. He didn’t enjoy cleaning the cage two nights a week; often he resented it, but he never expected it to be any other way. The pig, after all, was his idea. Why shouldn’t he look after her? Once it occurred to him that he did a better job caring for the guinea pig than he did for anyone else in his life—not that he cared for the pig more than his wife or kids; just that looking after her was clearer. He could see when her cage was dirty, and when it was, he knew what to do about it.

When he got to the vet, a young receptionist asked him
questions and typed his answers into her computer. When she asked for the pig’s name, Dave said, “Doesn’t have a name.”

Not liking the look that crossed her face, he added, “We call her, the Pig … sometimes just Guinea.” Dave, who had always felt naming animals was a questionable practice, thought naming a rodent was foolish, and he hadn’t encouraged the idea. But standing in front of the receptionist, he felt shabby about owning an unnamed pig. As if that told her all she needed to know about him and his family and the way they cared for animals. As if it were suddenly obvious why the pig was sick.

Dave is foggy about the rest of the visit. But he can remember snatches of it. He remembers the receptionist ushering him into another room. He and the pig. He remembers being left alone until another young woman walked in. In his memory, she is wearing a white lab coat. She looks much too young to be a doctor. When she plucks the pig out of its basket and holds her up confidently, he thinks, Must be just out of school.

The young woman is asking him questions. She is poking the pig, petting her. She is taking her away. Dave waits in the front room with the receptionist.

When the young vet, whose name is Dr. Percy, calls Dave back into the examining room, she tells him that she suspects the pig has a tumor. Suspects. She can’t be sure. Not without tests.

“We don’t see a lot of guinea pigs,” she adds.

Then she hands Dave a yellow piece of paper that he still has in his wallet. He has been showing it to everyone who lingers by the cash register at his store. At the top of the page it says:

ESTIMATE
GUINEA PIG—UNNAMED

What seized Dave’s attention the moment Dr. Percy handed the estimate to him, and why he has been showing it around, is the figure at the bottom of the page.

ESTIMATE TOTAL: $563.30

The ESTIMATE is carefully itemized:

The figure that galled Dave was the $21.50 a day for hospitalization. How could it cost $21.50 a day to feed and lodge a guinea pig? He himself had stayed in motels for under $21.50 a night. How much could a guinea pig eat, especially after surgery?

At first he thought the estimate was a joke. Or maybe a mistake. Then he realized it was neither, and he felt trapped. If he signed the estimate and handed the pig over to the vet,
he could imagine what they would have to say about him at closing time. What kind of person, he could hear the receptionist ask, would spend five hundred dollars on a guinea pig? A four-year-old sick guinea pig. A guinea pig that was going bald and could soon look like a worm with legs. A pig that was clearly playing on the back nine of pigdom. On the other hand, if he were to walk out, wouldn’t that confirm everything that the receptionist had thought about him?

He asked if he could phone his wife. She wasn’t home. “I have to speak to my wife,” he said as he left with the pig. “I’ll phone you tomorrow.”

Everyone he has asked says he did the right thing. Brian, who opens the Vinyl Cafe on Saturday mornings, said so. Morley said so, too. “Are you crazy?” she asked. At supper she made hair-replacement jokes. She said if the pig lost all its hair, she would knit her a little sweater.

Dave’s friend Al suggested he take the pig for a walk in the rain. “That’ll fix her,” Al said.

Dave didn’t try to explain what he was feeling. He knew it was crazy to spend $563.30 on a balding guinea pig that had cost $30. But when you are standing in a vet’s office holding a life in your hands, it is easy to imagine yourself spending the money. It was, after all, a life. And it was, after all, in his hands.

The next evening, after everyone else was in bed, Dave poured himself a beer and sat down at the kitchen table. He began writing a list of animals whose deaths he had already caused.

1. One hamster. Not really his fault. She had died from chewing the wood in her cage. Dave’s grandfather
   had built the cage. And it was his grandfather who had painted it yellow. It was the lead in the paint that had killed the hamster. Dave remembers the night the hamster died. He remembers his mother feeding his hamster brandy from an eyedropper. What he can’t remember is whether the hamster had a name.
   
2. Frogs. Too many to count. He had never actually killed a frog himself. But he had been present when frogs were killed. He must have been twelve when his friends had found the swamp. They went there and killed frogs in all sorts of fiendish ways. They tied rocks to the frogs’ legs and threw them into the water so they drowned. Dave remembers watching one frog, weighted down, its front legs pawing at the water, trying desperately to swim to the surface. He couldn’t remember whether he had said anything. Whether he had stood up for the frog or not.
   
3. Years later, he went to Honolulu and toured the wreckage left from the attack on Pearl Harbor. The guide explained that the destroyer the glass-bottomed boat was gliding over had flipped during the Japanese raid, trapping hundreds of men in air pockets when it sank. The guide said that for one week, rescuers could hear the trapped men tapping on the hull of the sunken boat. The guide said there was nothing anyone could do for them. Dave squinted into the Hawaiian sun and remembered the way the frog’s front paws had worked the water.
   
4. Starlings. When he was duck hunting. He went duck hunting only the one time. All morning there were no ducks. Nothing in the water. Nothing in the sky. Just heavy gray clouds, a smudge of sun at the end of the lake. Just before dawn, a flurry of starlings flew
   overhead. Dave can’t remember who was the first to shoot into the flock. He remembers lifting his borrowed rifle. Remembers the wonder he felt as the starlings tumbled out of the sky. They hit the water like stones.
   
5. One groundhog. It was summer. He was a university student. He was working on a dairy farm in the Ottawa valley. He loved the job. He was driving tractors and cows. Every night after supper, he took a .22-caliber rifle and walked through the fields. He watched the sun go down and smoked an Old Port cigarillo. He had the gun because he was supposed to shoot groundhogs. They dug tunnels in the fields, and the tractor might tip into the tunnels. It made Dave feel important. The evening he saw his first groundhog, she must have been a hundred yards away. She was sitting up in her hole like a prairie dog. The sun was behind him. He dropped to his knees and brought the rifle up to his shoulder. He squeezed the trigger. He was mortified when the groundhog dropped out of sight. She was lying on the ground when he walked up to her. There was a small red puncture in her side as if someone had driven a nail into her. Every time she breathed, an awful sucking sound came out of the hole. Dave fumbled with the rifle. The bolt jammed. He couldn’t get another bullet into the chamber. And the groundhog wouldn’t die. Dave started to cry. “Die, dammit,” he yelled as he turned the rifle upside down and hit the groundhog with the butt. It was the last time he had ever shot a rifle.
   
6. One baby raccoon. Maybe two. It was night. He was driving his family back from a week’s vacation by
   the ocean. They had just crossed the Appalachian Mountains. They were in a valley, on a two-lane highway. He was driving too fast. He saw the eyes glint in the darkness well ahead of him.
   
7. “Watch out,” his wife said in the seat beside him.
   
8. “I see it,” he snapped, impatiently.
   
9. Saw with plenty of time to slow down. Instead, he veered to the right. He still remembers the surprise, the shock, when he heard the thump on his right bumper.
   
10. He had seen the flash of the mother’s eyes in his headlights; what he hadn’t seen were the babies following her across the highway. He plowed right into them. He wanted to stop, but his wife told him to keep going. The kids were in the backseat.
    

That was as far as Dave got on his list. It was after midnight. Everyone was asleep except for the pig, who, not accustomed to having the lights on at this time of night, began to whistle from her cage on the counter. Dave got up and took a carrot out of the fridge and dropped it through the door on the top of the cage. The pig sniffed the carrot and settled down to it.