Home from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart Mclean Page A

bicycle.”
    There were maybe fifty motionless men lined up in the shadows behind his house—strung out along the alley, leaning over his back fence, and scanning his backyard with large binoculars. Dave inched forward and peeked out again. Then he pulled the curtains shut and sat on the edge of his bed.
    “Houston,” he said softly, “we have a problem.”
    Morley mumbled and rolled over. Dave said, “Don’t wake up. I need a plan before you wake up.”
    He wasn’t saying these things out loud. He was saying these things in his head. It was the closest he had come to prayer since last Christmas morning when he defrosted the turkey with the hair dryer.
    He needed to wake up. “Coffee,” he said prayerfully.
    It was only when Dave was downstairs, standing in the middle of the brightly lit kitchen, scratching, that the enormity of his problem struck him. As far as the fifty men in his backyard were concerned, he was standing on a spotlit stage. He stopped scratching. Then he turned off the kitchen light.
    It was six-forty-five A.M .
    Fifteen minutes later, Sam’s clock radio snapped on. Here we go, thought Dave. Liftoff. He was sitting at the kitchen table, not sure what he should do. Before he could do anything, the phone rang. It was Carl Lowbeer.
    “Dave,” he said. He was whispering. “There is something terrible going on outside.”
    Not as terrible, however, as what was going on at the Turlingtons’. Two doors down, at the Turlingtons’ house, Mary, Bert, and the Turlington twins were lying on the floor of Mary and Bert’s bedroom with their hands over the heads.

    At six-fifty-five A.M. , Rachel, one of the twins, had looked out her bedroom window to see if it was good snowball snow. When Rachel saw the men with the binoculars, she ran to her parents’ bed and said, “The house is surrounded by police. I think it’s the swap team.”
    Bert, who is not what you’d call a morning person, nearly stroked out when he saw the men in the dark jackets with their binoculars trained at his kids’ window. His first thought was the carpet installers who had been accidentally shot dead through their motel-room door by overzealous police in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. It was a case of mistaken identity—as this obviously was, too. Bert dropped to the floor and crawled around his house, waking everyone up.
    “We’re surrounded,” he said. “Get into our bedroom. Fast.”
    And now the whole family was there except for Bert’s fifteen-year-old son, Adam, who had locked himself into the upstairs bathroom. Bert wormed his way into the hall and pounded on the door.
    “What are you doing?” he howled.
    Adam, who had never gotten up so fast in his life, was desperately trying to flush the first marijuana he had ever bought down the toilet. He had bought it three weeks before from a kid at school. Afraid to smoke it, he had hidden it in an old pair of sneakers in the back of his closet. Now the marijuana kept floating to the top of the toilet. And the police were here to arrest him.
    Bert inched his way back to the bedroom and pulled himself up to the window to peer over the sill. There were carseverywhere, parked on both sides of the street and pulled up onto the sidewalk. Bert’s heart was pounding. There were men who looked like they were carrying telescopes running down Dave’s driveway toward his backyard.
    High-powered rifles, thought Bert.
    The Lowbeers’ dog was barking.
    A man came running out of Dave’s yard and pointed directly at Bert’s house. Bert gasped and dropped to the floor.
    “Blessed Mother of Mercy,” he said. “We are going to die.”

    Twenty minutes later, Dave was still trying to explain things to the neighbors standing on his lawn.
    “It was announced on some birders’ hotline,” Dave was saying, when there was a sudden commotion at the Turlingtons’ house.
    Dave stopped talking, and everyone turned just as the Turlingtons’ front door flew open and the entire Turlington