Spy in the Alley

by Melanie Jackson

  She, in the meantime, was thawing toward Jack. He was explaining how he’d graduated from high school in June, but was taking a year off before he went on to university. He wanted to work on his photography. And to volunteer for an anti-smoking organization.

  “My mom died of lung cancer, so I’m sort of dedicating this year to her,” he said. “I’m organizing volunteers for public workshops and rallies against smoking. Y’know, at schools, community centers, libraries … ” He grinned. “Whoever will host us, basically. I’ve already got a list of college-age kids who want to help. I’m going to get to know them over the next little while, and I’m also looking to recruit more.”

  He smiled, a nice, kind of lopsided, shy smile. “I figure getting involved in helping people beats sitting around moping about Mom. I did that for quite a while. I think she would have liked what I’m doing now better.”

  Our dad had died in a car accident — of his own fault, because he’d been driving drunk, and had hit a tree instead of, thank goodness, a person. Though Madge never talked about what had happened to Dad — namely, that he’d been an alcoholic — I could see she was moved by Jack’s words.

  She was just telling him that our family, too, knew about the effects of substance abuse when we noticed that the front door was ajar.

  “Hey! I didn’t leave it like that,” exclaimed Jack.

  The three of us — or four, to include Wilfred, still hanging by the scruff of his neck — peered out. “Betcha Buckteeth ran in the back and out the front,” I said. “He must’ve used this house as an escape route.”

  “You were right.” Jack looked at me with chagrin. “I will never doubt you again, Ms. Dinah Galloway.”

  “I will doubt you, often,” Madge informed me. Then she smiled. “But not today.”

  Jack closed the front door and fastened the long row of sliding bolts and chains his brother-in-law had installed. “So some creep was spying on you,” he exclaimed. “If you see him again, just phone me, and I’ll — ”

  “I think we’ll start by putting a new lock on our back gate,” Madge said. She did not, however, look displeased by his promise of protection. I was delighted. Maybe the dweeby Roderick would be edged out of the picture.

  “Why don’t you come over for dinner?” I invited. I felt Madge’s suspicious glance on me, but I kept my eyes widely and innocently on Jack.

  “That’d be great,” he exclaimed. “I mean, if it’s okay with your mom — I wouldn’t want to — ”

  “It’ll be fine with her,” I assured him, trying to keep the glee out of my voice. Jack could start edging Roderick out this very evening! “Mother always encourages us to bring people home for dinner. ‘The more people, the merrier,’ she says.”

  I felt Madge’s gaze harden. I couldn’t really blame her: I was making our extremely shy mother sound like Old King Cole.

  “Well, if it’s okay … ” Jack looked uncertainly at Madge.

  Madge was pretty decent as people go, much as it pains me to compliment my sister. She wasn’t about to make Jack uncomfortable because of her annoyance at me. “We’d welcome you,” she said, in such a nice tone that I knew she was planning, later at home, to kill me.

  “I sure appreciate it,” he said gratefully. “My own culinary specialty, toast and peanut butter, gets boring after a while.”

  Madge laughed. “So this is your work?” she asked, strolling over to look at some photos he’d spread out on the table.

  Black-and-white, they showed scenes of nature. In one, paths wound between fir trees to disappear in a mysterious patchwork of shadow and light. You couldn’t quite tell if the paths were visible again farther along, or whether these were rays of sun. In another photo, a seal was poking out its whiskered, bright-eyed face just beyond a wave off Prospect Point in Stanley Park. If you stepped back, you’d think his bright eyes were a mere flash of sun on the water, and he wasn’t there at all. That was the thing about Jack’s photos: they made you want to keep looking at them.

  “This is beautiful work,” said Madge admiringly, as I separated the lace curtains and glared up and down the street for signs of Buckteeth. She said, “It’s as good as a lot of the work I’ve seen by professional photographers.”

  “You know something about photography?” asked Jack.

  “Well, I — ”

  “Madge models. Most often for Bonna Terra Sports,” I called back helpfully.

  Buckteeth had either jumped into a car and sped off, I decided, or jumped on to a bus on 1st Avenue. He was wilier than I thought.

  I turned back, prepared to share this information with Jack and my sister. Then I saw that Jack was staring, slack-jawed with dismay, at Madge.

  “You model for Bonna Terra Sports?” he exclaimed. “That SUCKS!”

  Chapter Three

  Dweeb at the dinner table

  Oh no. Obviously I couldn’t leave these two un

  “Excuse me, do you have a problem?” Madge demanded icily.

  “It’s just that Bonna Terra organizes sports events with Fields Tobacco,” said Jack. “Don’t you see a slight contradiction there? Like that Walk for Health that Bonna Terra and Fields organized last weekend. On the one hand, they’re encouraging people to walk. On the other hand, with the Fields logo on billboards, magazine ads and T-shirts, they’re encouraging them to become the walking dead.”

  “I personally am not encouraging people to do anything,” Madge returned, hoisting Wilfred higher with such vigor that he was woken from the nap he’d been settling into.

  Madge then addressed me: “I’m going home — that is to say, to the house with the brand-new roof that evil Bonna Terra enabled us to buy last winter. See you later.”

  Jack looked after my departing sister ruefully. After a moment, his contrite features lapsed into an admiring grin. “She definitely knows how to make an exit,” he observed.

  Jack may not have been impressed by Madge’s modeling, but Mother viewed it as a godsend.

  It had happened like this.

  Last summer, a year after Dad’s death, Madge and some friends entered a modeling contest put on by Wellman Talent. Funnily enough, her friends had been much more enthusiastic about the idea — Madge had just wanted to stay home and draw, but they convinced her to go along and keep them company.

  You guessed it. It was Madge who won. Soon she was posing for fashion flyers and billboards. Eventually she became the official Bonna Terra girl.

  Which was a bit of a laugh, because Madge, posing in hiking gear, tennis duds, etc., was in real life totally unathletic. She liked mooning about in the Vancouver Art Gallery, or in smaller, funkier galleries on Granville Island or on Commercial Drive.

  Madge said the secret to modeling was never to look at the camera straight on. You tilted your head somehow, so you had to slide your glance a bit in order to meet the camera’s eye. Um, lens.

  Of course, being slim, with porcelain skin, brilliant blue eyes and a naturally remote expression didn’t hurt.

  “A godsend,” our mother said fervently about the modeling.

  It was true. Madge’s earnings helped us just at the time we needed it. Dad hadn’t bothered setting money aside in life insurance or any kind of pension or savings.

  “Truly a godsend,” Mom would repeat, crossing herself thankfully.

  Mom had a clerking job at the local library. She was taking courses toward getting a librarian’s degree. Once she had that, she could get a job as a genuine, certified librarian. (Sometimes, when the “godsend” stuff got too much for me, I’d think she was already a genuine, certified nut — but then, that’s how daughters are supposed to see their moms. It’s practically a rule in kidville, if you know what I mean.)

  On Sundays, the three of us would walk beneath the rows of crabapple trees down to mass at St. Cecilia’s. In my prayers, as well as apologizing to God for having jumped up and swiped a lot of crabapples, I would ask that in heaven Dad be allowed to unwrap himself from the tree he’d smashed into, a
nd live out a happy, unalcoholic eternity.

  The thing was, Dad had been a pretty happy guy to be around, most of the time. It wasn’t like he spent his whole day staggering around with a whisky bottle or whatever. He was lively and fun, with sparkling black eyes that snapped with energy, crisp black hair that crackled when he ran his hand through it, and a laugh that could warm you up on the coldest, darkest, rainiest night.

  Dad believed that everyone should find their creative side, and make the most of it. He encouraged Madge in her drawing, “You’ve got talent, kid — it’s your duty to yourself to bring it out and nurture it.” He was always signing Madge up for art courses and buying her extravagant art supplies.

  Not that Dad could always pay for them. Dad went from job to job, and back to university for this or that course in between. He was very bright. He just wasn’t very practical. Least of all about himself. I could never get over the fact that while he urged others to reach to the limits of their potential, he couldn’t follow that advice himself.

  Anyhow, as I made my prayers, I would sooner or later hear Mom, next to me, murmur the word “godsend,” and I knew she was offering up yet more thanks for Madge’s modeling.

  I would have offered some up, except that I didn’t see how God, who was good, would have included in His gift not only the modeling, but the young man who unavoidably came with it, the ultra-dweeb, Roderick Wellman.

  “Some squash, Roderick?” asked my mother.

  “Thanks, but I prefer to play squash, not eat it.” Smiling at his own wit, Roderick passed the steaming bowl heaped with buttery, cinnamon-sprinkled butternut squash to Madge, who helped herself, then to Jack, who helped himself liberally, and then to me, who piled on as much as both of them combined.

  We were seated at the round cherrywood dining table Mother had sat at with her parents. Around us, the mostly windowed walls of the dining room looked on to the stunning mountain view we enjoyed, thanks to our position at the top of the Grandview-neighborhood hill. In the winter these ancient windows, only single-paned, made the dining room brutally cold, but in summer you forgot all that. You felt as though you could step right out on the Coast Mountains and ski down to Burrard Inlet.

  My gaze descended from the shining blue-violet of the mountains to the shining, slicked-back and somewhat thinning locks of Roderick’s head.

  “We’ll put a security guard on your house for the next couple of weeks,” he was assuring Madge and my mother. “Just in case this geek comes back. Now that Madge is getting known from billboards, magazine ads and so on, it’s only natural that the odd geek with nothing better to do will show up to gawk at her. That’s the downside of fame.”

  “Gawking geeks?” I said.

  He frowned, then went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I’m making Wellman Talent responsible for your well-being,” he assured Madge. “We’ll ward geeks off.”

  “I don’t really like the idea of having to be guarded,” Madge objected.

  Mother said, “If Rod thinks it’s a good idea, dear, perhaps we should agree. After all, I suppose he’s an expert on geeks.”

  Dotty, bookish Mother, whose pronouncements so often came out wrong — yet hit the mark exactly. I smiled delightedly down at my squash.

  Jack said smoothly, to cover the uncertain pause that had greeted Mother’s remark, “I’m around most of the day. I can keep a watch out for geeks bearing binoculars.” He grinned at Madge, who gave him the slightest of smiles in return.

  Roderick examined Jack from beneath raised eyebrows, as if a particularly negligible piece of furniture had just started talking. “My company is quite able to provide professional security.”

  “What’s your company?” Jack inquired, passing me the pepper, which I’d been craning my neck to find after salting my squash and green beans. I’d also mixed these two veggies together, to resemble a plum pudding. Eating should be an art.

  Glancing distastefully at my plate, Roderick replied to Jack, “The Wellman Talent Company. Since I graduated from high school in June, I’ve been working in place of my dad. He’s been taking time off, traveling with Mom.”

  “Your father is so nice, Roderick,” Mother interrupted. She gave him a faintly puzzled look, as if she couldn’t quite get the genetic connection.

  Roderick gave a smug little smile. “Oh, Dad’s nice, all right,” he agreed, in a rather patronizing way. “Nice doesn’t succeed big time, though. Aggressive does. I’m trying to bring some aggressiveness to Wellman Talent that it lacked under Dad. I’m looking to sign contracts with big, international companies, like Bonna Terra and Fields Tobacco.

  “If,” he continued, ignoring Jack’s sudden grimace, “I can get those two to sign a long-term contract, we’ll break into the big time. Wellman Talent will be on the map, and I will have put us there.”

  Then Roderick shook his head sadly. “Poor Dad,” he sighed. “He always set his ambitions so low. He worked so hard, long hours at the office and all that. But he never looked beyond Vancouver for clients.” Roderick waved a dismissive hand at the vista of mountains and oceans outside the window, as if our city were a minor speck on the map he was so anxious to conquer.

  Mother moved aside a vase of flowers that Roderick’s hand was in danger of smacking into. “But Rod, you’re talking about your dear father in the past tense,” she noted worriedly. “He’s not — not — ”

  “Dad is alive and well,” Roderick snapped, an annoyed flush filling his face and even the balding parts of his head visible under his thinning hair. He disliked being interrupted, especially when he was boasting. “The last time Dad phoned, he and Mom were peering into the Grand Canyon.” Roderick shrugged, implying such an activity to be an absurd waste of time.

  Then, realizing he’d been a bit testy with Mother, he grinned apologetically. “Sorry, Mrs. G. Making a success of Wellman Talent is my chance to prove myself to Dad. Heck, if I can work with Dad from now on, I’ll actually see him!” He laughed — but he was the only one. It was really a sad kind of joke, if you thought about it.

  On the other hand, he was a dweeb, and therefore should be insulted at every possible opportunity. I added a few radish slices from the salad to the top of my squash-plus-beans, and said, “Roderick has been working so hard for his dad that he had to do most of his grade twelve credits over again. Now that’s commitment to the company,” I finished, straight-faced and wide-eyed.

  Oblivious to scowls by Madge and Roderick, Mother told Jack, “The nice thing is that Madge got to attend two proms. Roderick took her to the prom this past June at his school, a lovely private school perched on the cliffs of Point Grey — oh, I do hope it doesn’t tumble into the ocean, Roddy. Have they done an earthquake-preparedness check? And, of course, to the prom the previous June, with the young people from the class that Roderick, um, that he — ”

  “Failed,” I supplied helpfully. I poured ketchup over my squash-plus-beans-plus-radishes. “I bet you did well in school,” I said to Jack.

  He shrugged and looked embarrassed. In other words, he had done well. “I might start a couple of university courses this fall,” he said. “I’d like to be a teacher eventually. I had one or two teachers who made all the difference to me after my mom died, and I was in an emotional slump.

  “Not that I have a monopoly on bad things happening,” Jack amended, with an apologetic look at Mother. “I’m sure your family went through a rough time, too.”

  Madge answered for Mom. “I guess you could say it was our family priest who got us through Dad’s death. Unlike you, though, I can’t go into the same profession as the person who helped us.”

  Everybody laughed, though Roderick only managed a grimace. He wasn’t used to having a conversation switch away from himself. “University,” he jeered. “Wow. Talk about avoiding the real world.”

  What a bore. Changing the subject, I asked Jack, “You didn’t leave a girlfriend back east, did you?”

  “Dinah,” said Mother reprovingly. Jack, who was sittin
g beside me, gave my ear a tweak and replied, “Nope. Lots of friends, but no girl in particular, kid. Why? You want to go out on a date?” he teased.

  “Oh, not me,” I assured him — and immediately caused an uncomfortable silence on Madge and Roderick’s side of the table. I took my time chew ing and swallowing a large mouthful, thoroughly enjoying myself. “I mean, an attractive, eligible bachelor like yourself,” I resumed, waving my fork for emphasis. “A girl would be crazy not to set her sights on you.”

  Throwing her napkin on the table, Madge glared at me. I couldn’t blame her. I was at the top of my form that evening.

  Mother was even more confused than before. She was much more at home in the quiet library world of book cataloguing and soft-voiced inquiries about obscure titles. Sisterly trench warfare was totally beyond her. “Are you a Catholic?” she asked Jack. “There’s a nice youth group at our church. Madge belongs, and I’m sure she would be glad to — ”

  “I’m sure he couldn’t care less about that,” Madge interrupted, quite rudely for her, and not looking at Jack. She likes him, I thought in satisfaction.

  Roderick, meanwhile, was giving me the evil eye. Evil dweeb eye, I should say.

  “There are at least three baked potatoes left,” he said. “Why don’t you have them, Dinah? I’m sure you could easily tuck them back.”

  “You have them,” I invited. “I hear they’re good for preventing hair loss.”

  After that I got sent from the table. I didn’t mind: I usually was, when Roderick came to dinner. Sometimes I lasted to dessert, but not often.

  Chapter Four

  Jack tackles a goon

  Mother and I were trudging up the long 3rd Avenue hill. Atop our heavy bundle buggy of groceries was the Vogue we’d bought at Madge’s request. I’d laid it face-down because the rouged young woman pursing her lips on the cover was too much for me. I mean, she looked like a fish.

  From the back cover, a male model in a tank top regarded us soulfully — and, it seemed at that moment, rather scornfully. We continued to push our groceries up and up, seemingly forever. Like the myth of Sisyphus and his rock, I thought. Always and always, Sisyphus had to keep pushing it up a hill. I giggled. I remembered my friend Pantelli, who had an ear infection the day we learned about the myth of Sisyphus in school. Misunderstanding the teacher, Pantelli assumed that Sisyphus had a rock band. Since Pantelli prided himself on knowing everything about pop music, he demanded to know if Sisyphus was new. “New?” the teacher had scoffed. “He’s ancient,” which had mixed Pantelli up even more.