The Saturday Night Ghost Club: A Novel

by Craig Davidson

  My lungs throbbed for air. I pushed off the bottom and kicked. Dove and Billy did the same. Our bodies speared the water’s surface. I floated, breathing raggedly, shards of prismatic light in my eyes.

  “Well?” my uncle said.

  My eyes met Dove’s, synced, and we came to an immediate understanding.

  “It’s a car,” Dove said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Just a car.”

  The tension fell from my uncle’s shoulders. He laughed and held his hand out.

  “Case closed, then. Good job, ghost hunters.”

  One by one, he dragged us on board the dinghy. We lay in the bottom, side by side by side like smelts on a drying rack. Although the day was still hot, cottony clouds had massed to the west and beyond them the sky had darkened, chain-lightning flickering like pale brass. Whippoorwills called from the shore maples and the sound stirred something in me, a lightness of body, though it was probably just the nitrogen releasing from my blood.

  Uncle C lounged, eyes closed. He’d taken his shirt off and I saw the ugly scars on his chest. Each was a few inches long, arrayed in a haphazard pattern from his belly button up to his pectorals. When I’d once asked Mom how he’d gotten them, she’d said, “Just an old accident.”

  I cast my gaze across the water, worried for reasons I couldn’t name. I spied a van idling on the shattered roadway near the eastern remains of the bridge. I could just make out Lexington Galbraith standing in front of it, with his arms crossed. I waved to him, but Lex got in his van and backed out of sight.

  By now the shoreline was dotted with fishermen and families. The storm clouds had moved south towards the cursed city of Buffalo. I slumped over the side of the dinghy on my stomach. Dove did the same beside me and I felt the most thrilling thing—the pressure of our hips touching, ever so lightly.

  A turtle paddled around the dinghy. Its head telescoped from its shell as it swam between our hands. Dove set her fingertip on its red-dappled head. The turtle’s neck arched to feel her touch. Dove’s finger trailed lightly over its shell.

  We floated aimlessly, wordlessly, savouring the day.

  iv.

  July wore into the dog days of August. The heat fell like a guillotine blade at first light. By noon you felt as if you were breathing through boiled wool.

  The kids of Cataract City took to their basements—most of them unfinished, with bare cement walls weeping moisture. We did what Canadian kids do on unbearably hot summer days: watched reruns of The Beachcombers and Danger Bay on the CBC, played endless games of Clue, Monopoly and Stratego, chucked darts at old corkboards, read Archie comics on sofas that had been displaced from the living room to dodder out their days as basement relics. Every so often we’d hoist ourselves up to the basement window, get a lungful of broiling late summer air and go back to our subterranean existence.

  On Civic Day, the first Monday in August, Dove and I found my father’s old Playboys.

  We didn’t hang out much that summer, just the two of us, but every so often Dove would drop by unannounced and attach herself to me for a few hours. One time she went into the bathroom the minute she showed up and stayed in there half an hour. Soft weeping ebbed under the door, but when she came out she was fine. Nobody would get her to admit it, but Dove was lonely. I remember her walking up to a group of girls standing outside Paula’s Elegant Bride, admiring the gowns in the window. Dove said, “If Miss Havisham had gone with that sassy taffeta number instead, hey, who knows, maybe it would’ve been all peaches and cream.” There was something poisonous in those girls’ expressions. They had no clue what she was talking about, and held their own stupidity against this stranger who’d exposed it.

  One of them said, “You wear boy’s shoes.”

  Dove looked at them, said, “They’re Chuck Taylors. Good for all species.”

  The girl said, “There’s a weird boy down my street who wears them.”

  “I hope the boy down the street wears your skin for Halloween,” Dove told her evenly.

  Thing was, I could tell Dove wanted those girls to like her. Dove wanted everyone to like her. Uncle C accepted—more than that, embraced—Dove exactly as she was, but he was one of the few. Living in Cataract City shrank Dove, because it asked her to be so much less. Hanging out with me must have swelled her back to her rightful size, which I guess was why every few weeks she’d stop by for a top-up.

  The Playboys were stashed in a cardboard box secured with packing tape. Dove found it behind the Nautilus machine my father had taken to working out with a few winters ago. We were goofing around, trying to heave up the weight stack. We had collapsed onto the bench when the box caught Dove’s eye. She picked up the stack-topper. Monique St. Pierre, Miss November 1978, graced the cover. Dove paged through to the centrefold and let the fold-out flip down.

  “ ‘Turnoffs: hypocrites, phonies, litterbugs.’ ” Dove blew a fringe of hair off her eyes with a short, hard puff. “Deep, man.”

  The Playboys had the feel of racy antiques. Their covers were sun-bleached and abraded with age, full of advertisements for cars that were no longer manufactured—Test-drive the new General Motors Corvair and drive the FUTURE!—and obsolete products hawked by bygone pitchmen—Victor Kiam says, I loved the Remington Electric Shaver so much, I bought the company! Each page trumpeted the “Playboy Lifestyle,” which involved spinning “platters,” buying bubble-shaped furniture and wearing a smoking jacket in public.

  There was also the ticklish matter of all the flesh on display. Discreetly draped in mosquito netting or not, the women were still naked, so leafing through the pages with Dove made me feel weird. She seemed fascinated by the way the Playmates held their bodies, in poses suggestive of unspoken and unspecified pleasures.

  “What do you think?” She leaned back on the weight bench, simpering, one leg stretched out. “This about right?”

  Upstairs, I heard the front door open. Oh, God. It must be my mother, home from her holiday half-day at work.

  “Jake, what did I tell you about leaving your dirty shoes in the hall?”

  Dove and I were shovelling the magazines back into the box as my mother’s heels hit the top step of the basement stairs. Dove slapped the flaps shut and sat on the box with her legs crossed. When Mom saw us, her chin tucked.

  “Jake, you haven’t introduced me to your friend.”

  “I’m Dove,” Dove answered for herself.

  “Ah, yes. Jake’s told me about you.”

  “Only good things, I hope.”

  My mother eyed Dove sharply. “He told me you chew tobacco.”

  I cringed. “You smoke cigarettes,” I reminded her.

  My mother’s eyes narrowed at me. But bringing up Dove’s chewing habit was dirty pool, I told myself; not to mention out of character for Mom.

  “I don’t chew it, Mrs. Baker, I pouch it right here.” Dove pulled her bottom lip down to display her gums, then let it snap back.

  “Shopkeepers shouldn’t be selling you that stuff. You’re far too young.”

  Dove winked. “I’m older than my years.”

  I could tell my mother didn’t like that wink. “What were you two up to down here?”

  “Just hanging out, Mom. We’re going for a bike ride if that’s okay.”

  My mother nodded, her head moving in a slow up-and-down like an oil derrick. “So long as you’re home before dinner.”

  After bouncing on the box-flaps to make sure they were flattened down, Dove stood.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Baker.”

  “And you, Dove,” Mom said.

  Dove and I pedalled out of my subdivision. Other than us, the only things that moved were the clouds drifting across the hazy sky and the foil streamers fluttering on window-mounted A/C units. We caught the odd kid staring at us from basement windows. Their eyes were round, wondering. We slogged it through the Lion’s Club park, our tires raising rooster-tails of dust that hung suspended in the air.

  “My mom’s working the holiday,
” Dove said. “The hospital’s air-conditioned.”

  A blast of cold air met us as we walked into the emergency room of the Niagara Falls General. The waiting room was occupied by a man in a tank top with a surgical patch over his eye and another man with a goitre the size of a Brazil nut on his neck. Dove led me up a flight of stairs to the main-floor cafeteria with its steam trays of powdered eggs, then down a terrazzo-tiled hallway—we wended between patients in their hospital johnnies taking their glucose drips for a walk—to the dialysis ward on the fourth floor, where her mother worked.

  Dove explained the dialysis procedure to me. “Our blood cleans itself, right? The kidneys and liver and other organs, they pull the gunk out. Like, when I chew tobacco, some of that crap gets in my blood. But my body cleans it, right? Some people, their blood doesn’t do that. The gunk swims around, making them sick. So, they come here to my mom. She hooks them up to this machine that cleans it for them.”

  The patients in the dialysis ward were of all ages: old men and women, people my folks’ age, a girl younger than me. Blood flowed up a tube in that little girl’s arm, feeding into a machine the size of a dishwasher with a glass window. Her blood cycled behind the glass like red flags in a clothes dryer.

  “What are you doing here, my girl?”

  Dove’s mother had appeared behind us. I was reminded how she had an uncanny way of popping up in your blind spot.

  “What, I can’t visit my mamma?”

  Mrs. Yellowbird cast a withering gaze over Dove. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Is my daughter telling the truth, Jake?”

  I couldn’t say for sure, but nodded anyway.

  Mrs. Yellowbird said, “Since you’re here, you may as well make yourselves useful.”

  She led us to the storeroom, walking with the limp I’d noticed before. For the next hour, Dove and I stacked dialysis mixture. It looked like syrupy club soda. I asked Dove if the patients could feel the bubbles fizzing in their veins. She said no, the machines burst the bubbles before they got inside, because a bubble in your blood could be carried to your heart, get lodged in a ventricle and kill you. Once the boxes were stacked we returned to the ward, where Mrs. Yellowbird gave Dove a precise peck on the cheek. The little girl we had seen before was asleep on a cot in the day room. Dove put a cookie on a Styrofoam plate for her to eat when she woke up.

  We left the hospital and biked up Valley Way. I followed Dove as she headed towards the Greyhound depot. She locked her bike to a rack and stepped through the front door. By the time I had locked my own bike and entered the station, she was consulting the out-of-town fares, which were tacked to a corkboard near the ticket wicket.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Blowing this pop stand.”

  She pulled a crumpled wad of bills from her pocket. “Cashed in my salamander stash yesterday. Those bastards at Pick of the Critter lowballed me—five bucks a head, when they promised ten—but hey, bygones.”

  Dove had about fifty dollars. She seemed deathly serious about hopping a Greyhound.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away.”

  “Away where?”

  She chucked her chin at the corkboard. “Plenty of options.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s time.”

  Twenty minutes ago, her mother had given her a kiss. A goodbye kiss, sure, but not Goodbye forever, daughter of mine, and may the road ease your troubled mind.

  Dove stepped up to the wicket. “I need a ticket. One-way.”

  I wanted to grab her arm, the way you’d do with someone perched at the edge of a cliff. I prayed the guy behind the glass would say it was illegal for a fourteen-year-old to board a bus without supervision, but he only stared through the grey corona of cigarette smoke enrobing his head.

  “You don’t have clothes or a toothbrush or anything,” I said to Dove. “Shouldn’t you tell someone? Your mom or—”

  “They’d just try to stop me, duh.” She addressed the guy. “How far can twenty-five bucks take me, one-way?”

  The guy sucked on his cigarette. “East, west, south, north?”

  “Wherever the action is.”

  “Twenty-one’ll get you to Windsor.”

  “When’s it leave?”

  “Five minutes.”

  Snatching my elbow in a pincer grip, Dove marched me over to the corner of the station. We stood next to a vending machine whose coils hung empty apart from the bottom-tier items: Eat-More, Big Turk, some cinnamon-flavoured toothpicks.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you do. You think I’m looney-tunes.”

  “No.”

  “I’m crackers. Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Spun, screwball, crazypants—”

  “I think you’re like the sun.”

  Dove bent forward as if she’d been stabbed in the stomach. She quickly straightened, but not before I saw the strange wound I’d delivered, the pained twist to her lips.

  “Who told you to say that?”

  “Nobody. I just—it was my own—”

  “You’re lying.” Dove said so with a sigh, as if she’d already forgiven me. She slung her arm over my shoulder.

  “It’s okay. Could be I am a bit crazy. The possibility’s crossed my mind. But I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to do what I do.”

  In that moment, her desire made sense to me because with her arm around my shoulder, the insistent squeeze of her fingers, she made it make sense.

  “Don’t try to save me, Jake. You’ll just let yourself down.”

  Half an hour ago we’d been stacking dialysis mix and now she was hopping on a bus and lighting out for parts unknown. The whiplash effect made me sick.

  “I’m going to tell someone, Dove.”

  “Okay. Maybe that’s why I brought you here.”

  She walked back to the wicket. When she saw I hadn’t budged, she flicked her hand: Shoo, fly. I slunk outside. A bus was queued in the corral. People were stashing suitcases in the luggage compartment. I unlocked my bike and pedalled down to the pay phone outside Mac’s Milk. Unlacing one shoe, I peeled my tube sock off and shook out the sixty-five cents stuck to the pad of my foot. I deposited a quarter in the slot and dialed the Yellowbird house. The answering machine picked up.

  “This is Jake…uh, Jake Baker? I wanted to tell you that Dove, she’s at the, at the bus station? Not a city bus. To another city. Maybe you told her that was, uh, okay or something?”

  I kept the phone pressed to my ear in the hope that Billy would pick up, until the machine made a beeeep. When I returned to the depot, both the bus and Dove were gone.

  v.

  The sun had begun to sink behind the trees by the time I got home. I caught my mother and father in the midst of a blistering argument.

  “I read the articles,” my dad was saying as I stepped through the door. “Vladimir Nabokov has published stories in Playboy.”

  “Yeah, the second-rate ones he couldn’t convince the New Yorker to publish.”

  “It was an intellectual magazine, once upon a time. Tasteful nudes, yes? You could put the magazine on your coffee table.”

  “At what venue?” my mother wanted to know. “A car-key party at a swingers’ pad?” Her anger was shot through with genuine hurt. “Why would you keep those things around?”

  “They’re no different than my old bowling trophies. They’re just there.”

  “Were you still buying them when we started…?”

  “Go check the dates, Cece. You won’t find a single issue once we started going steady. I figured they were valuable. Collectibles, y’know?”

  “Were you planning to leave them in our will? Jake’s inheritance?”

  Seizing his opportunity, my father made a wild stab at levity. “I was, but our son screwed it up.” He jabbed his finger at me: “You’re out of the will, Jake. No more Playboys. I’ll donate them to science, same as my organs.”


  Mom rolled her eyes. “What would science need with your Playboys?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” Dad said magnanimously, “but science is welcome to them. Grind them up to pulp and create a cure for some grave ill.”

  “How about a cure for terminal boyhood,” my mother suggested.

  One fire doused, at least partially, my father wheeled on me. “And what the hell are you doing poking around in boxes that don’t concern you?”

  “Don’t blame him, Sam. He was just doing what a boy does. Besides which, I’m not sure it was his idea. Our son had a girl in the house today.”

  A flush crawled up my neck. “Did Billy call?”

  Mom tapped her watch. “He did not. You’re late, too. I said before suppertime.”

  “I’m sorry. I just—”

  “You’re grounded for a week.”

  Mom hadn’t grounded me in years. And this sentence felt particularly unfair, seeing as I’d spent but a small and pointless fraction of the day looking at smutty old magazines. The lion’s share had passed at the Greyhound station, with me in a state of dread.

  My father said, “You don’t think that’s a tad harsh?”

  She shot him a you-stay-out-of-this look, but he wasn’t to be cowed.

  “You can’t force the kid into isolation. Lord knows he manages that pretty well on his own. He’s found some friends. Why take that away?”

  “I’m not taking anything away. I’m punishing him. Fairly.”

  “Ahhh, Cece, come on…”

  My father’s “come on” wasn’t a plea for leniency. Rather, his tone indicated that my mother was hiding her true reasoning, maybe even from herself. “You can’t bubble-wrap him,” he added.

  “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  “Head to your room, sport,” Dad said to me. “Your mom and I ought to talk.”

  The events of the past hours had left me too confused and defeated to protest, so I slouched upstairs. My folks’ discussion lasted nearly an hour. I recall one thing my father said, his voice rolling up the staircase.