come on, she’s still doing stuff, he says. I bet she’ll smoke another cigarette soon. Look, she has sawhorses in there. You think she might saw something up? Maybe she’s got one of those circular saws.
I have to go home, Mullen. Seriously.
Since when does it matter when you go home?
I stand up and hand him his comic. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Yeah, tomorrow.
I walk down to the end of the block and turn around. Mullen’s still sitting there, pretending to read his comic, watching the woman in the window.
An old man with patches on his elbow leans on McClaghan’s counter, looking at the lighters in the rotating shelf. One of those flat hats on his wrinkly old head, all covered in buttons. Annual Rotarian Convention, and Legion Number 19, and Vets Get Set. He takes a scratchy old Zippo lighter out of his jacket. A flint, he says to McClaghan, I need a new flint for this.
Where’d you get this? McClaghan takes the lighter, turns it over. Mail order?
Antwerp, says the old man, I got it in Antwerp. Pressed into my hands out of gratitude.
McClaghan spits in his jar.
McClaghan’s jar is the worst thing in town. You always have to go to McClaghan’s hardware store after school, though, for model-airplane paint or thirty-five-cent gum or hockey tape, so you always have to see the jar. He leaves it on the counter right beside the hockey cards, this beet-pickle jar two-thirds full of old-man phlegm, brown tobacco juice, stubby toothpicks. He takes it everywhere. Any time you walk by, there’s McClaghan out on the step, under the 40% OFF sign, listening to his radio, spitting. But spitting on the sidewalk is bad for business I guess, so he spits in the jar. You can hear it all up the street, the hack and plop of old-man spit landing in that beet-pickle jar.
McClaghan rummages in his drawer. Pulls out envelopes, paper boxes. Opens them, frowns, puts them back. The old man puts all his nickels on the counter, one at a time, lining them all up and trying to get them all straight, but his hands shake and push the nickels all over the place.
In McClaghan’s hardware store they’ve got everything you could ever want. Table saws and new bicycle chains, and four-man tents and car batteries, rubber boots, fishing rods, pickaxes and wheelbarrows – everything. Stacks of plywood and two-by-fours, router bits, camping stoves and jerry cans. They’ve got a paint-shaker, just about the loudest thing I ever heard, shakes so fast you can’t read the label on the can. And all that stuff is great, but the best part about McClaghan’s is fireworks.
So, McClaghan, Mullen says, pulling his elbows, his chin, up on the counter. McClaghan’s counter is way taller than it needs to be. How about some of those roman candles you’ve got back there? I bet those pack a whole bunch, yeah?
McClaghan wraps his fingers around the jar. Out. Both of you, beat it.
How much does one of those big boxes cost, anyway?
Split, kid! McClaghan barks. We scoot outside. Sit down on the sidewalk. People sure get worked up about stuff, says Mullen. Hey, you want to come for dinner with the Russians? Me and my dad are going over, well, pretty quick I guess.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good, I say. We walk past the Lions Club playground. Two kids crouch on the teeter-totter. Neither one wants to go up because they know the other will hop off and crash the hard seat down on the hard ground. They just bob up and down, glaring at each other, never quite leaving the ground.
Hey, Mullen, what’s Solzhenitsyn’s real name? I don’t know, he says, I thought Solzhenitsyn was his real name. I saw some other guy on TV with that name, I say, some famous Russian from history. Mullen throws a rock out across the street. They can’t both have the same name? Course they can’t have the same name. You never met anyone named Benjamin Franklin, did you? Or Genghis Khan? I met a Benjamin once, Mullen says. Back in Winnipeg in the second grade. When his front teeth fell out no new ones grew back, so he had fake teeth. He could take them out. You can’t name your kid after somebody famous, I say. It’s not allowed. That’s why you have to get a birth certificate when you’re born, to make sure that you’ve got an allowed name. I don’t know what Solzhenitsyn’s real name is; that’s what my dad always calls him, Mullen says. All the other Russians call him Solly. Is that an allowed name?
Mullen’s dad comes out of his house carrying a bunch of TV trays tight against his chest. Closes the door with his hip. Walks out onto the sidewalk, past Deke’s. Pushes open the little wooden gate with his hip. The Russians’ lawn is about as dead as everybody else’s on the block, except for Mrs. Lamp-man’s maybe. In the summer she always digs little patches along the path, plants sweet peas. Everybody else on the street is doing pretty good if they keep their lawn cut. Pavel and Solzhenitsyn sit in their lawn chairs around the barbecue, their heavy jean jackets buttoned all the way up in the cold, brown beer bottles tight in black gloves. Vaslav sits on the step, his belt undone and his big stomach pushing the bottom of his sweater up over his belly button. He’s working on his novel. Drinks beer and scribbles on a huge pile of paper in his lap. He scratches his forehead with his pen, leaves a blue line.
Hey, you ever torn the corset from the heaving chest of a kidnapped virginal millionairess?
The kids, says Mullen’s dad. Starts to unfold TV trays.
The kids have never torn the corsets off anything. I’m trying to get the facts straight. So as to be historically accurate.
They’ve got a lot of buttons on them. Those corsets. It would take some tearing.
Right, says Vaslav, it sure would.
Does the virginal millionairess have a name? asks Mullen.
Well, I’ve got it narrowed down to a short list of about eighteen. Has to have the right tone, see. I’ve left it blank so far in the manuscript. He holds up the top few pages and, sure enough, the pencil script is full of blank spaces. It’s got to go well with all the other words, see, he says, especially the ones I use a lot. And it’s got to evoke the proper balance of Victorian restraint and bottled passion. Voluptuous without being lusty, see. Owing to the virginalness of the character.
Pavel takes the lid off the barbecue and starts to turn chicken legs with his black-ended tongs. He squints with his one eye, making sure he gets the legs okay with the tongs. His glass eye looks off somewhere else, never quite in line with the real one. Solzhenitsyn goes back and forth to the refrigerator inside, bringing out all kinds of food: jars and jars of all kinds of pickles, and plates with different coloured strips of fish, covered tight in plastic wrap. A bowl of hard-boiled eggs. Him and Mullen’s dad talk all serious-like, in between bites of pickled beets and anchovies, lots of big serious words, like newscasters on television.
Vaslav reaches across them for a pickle. Hey, he asks Mullen’s dad, is there hot water in your house?
Hot water? Sure there is.
Vaslav sticks the pickle in the side of his mouth. Wedges a beer bottle against the arm of his lawn chair, hits it with the flat of his palm, pops the cap off. I called McClaghan three times last week about the hot water, he says through a mouthful of pickle. Each time he tells me to leave it alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, he says. I told him an ounce of prevention is the whole cure and he hung up on me.
Our hot water is fine, says Mullen’s dad.
Our hot water is fine too, says Pavel. Vaslav makes a
