“What a coincidence. I just saw you yesterday, coming out of Cresswell’s,” I said, shaking Duff’s hand. He was doing a great job of acting as if we’d never met before.
Duff winked at Dad, the way you do to the parent of a precocious child — trying to show that he had me all figured out.
“There are no coincidences. I saw your father’s apartment rental sign at Cresswell’s,” he said.
“I hope you’ll join us for breakfast,” said Mom, and she set a place for Duff, right beside Linda. She smiled at him but showed no signs of recognizing him as the man who had argued with Billy at the Halloween party.
When Nonna Peppy toddled into the kitchen with Pepé the Seventh behind her, Dad formally introduced her to Duff as “Mrs. Pitalunga, your landlady.” Nonna peered up at Duff through her bifocals, shook his hand and said, “Pleasure to meetcha,” but didn’t sound pleased at all, until he said, “You sound like you learned English in New York City. Lower East Side, if I’m not mistaken.”
Nonna Peppy raised her eyebrows and smiled. “You’re psychic. That’s right, I’m a New York City girl, but I still like a quiet house.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Pitalunga, I’m the bookish type,” said Duff.
Mom cleared her throat. “Why don’t you tell us about yourself, Mr. Duffy?”
“Call me Duff. Not much to tell. I’m from Concord, Massachusetts. Did an undergraduate degree at Notre Dame.”
“Good Catholic university,” approved Dad.
Duff acknowledged this with a nod and continued, “I was doing research in graduate school at MIT when my birthdate came up in the draft lottery for the Domino Wars, so here I am in Canusa.”
“What kind of research?” asked Linda. I was beginning to notice how intently she watched Duff. Like a beauty pageant contestant mentally undressing the host.
He hesitated. “A little hard to explain, Linda. I was working in a new field, an offshoot of biology and engineering. Robotics, essentially.”
Dad waved a hand in the air. “Robots! Hell, St. Dismas Collegiate would snap you up, with or without teacher’s training.”
“Absolutely,” agreed Linda, looking at Duff adoringly.
I sat back in my chair and observed my family. It was as if Duff had put a spell on them. My mom, usually suspicious of strangers until she knew them a decade or two, spooned another serving of fried potatoes and bacon onto his plate without even asking.
“Now we’ll have to figure out what to do about those wine barrels in your living space,” said Dad. “My father-in-law had about three years’ worth of wine stored in them. Bottling it would take weeks, but I hate to just pour it down the drain.”
Duff put down his fork and knife and made a little tent with his hands. “Simplest way would be to automate the process: pump the wine out of the barrels and across the yard into your basement for bottling. It’s all physics, really. All we need are a few hoses and a pump. We’ll need to fill and cork the bottles assembly-line style. It’ll probably require at least five of us.”
Dad nodded at this. “You, me, Debbie, Linda . . .”
“Don’t look at me,” said Mom. “The fumes alone would knock me for a loop.”
I waved my hand in the air. “John Kendal’s looking for work.”
“How much would he want?” asked Dad.
“Carlo!” my mother protested. “Don’t encourage her.”
“Five bucks ought to do it.”
“Okay, done. See how fast he can get here,” Dad said and looked at Mom. “We need the help. And, frankly, I wouldn’t mind having that boy where I can keep an eye on him.”
* * *
Kendal borrowed a bike from a neighbour and rode over that afternoon. Even though Dad and Mom had met him at the door many times when he was collecting for his paper route, I made formal introductions.
Dad shook Kendal’s hand, glancing at the mutilated one.
“Sure you’re up to this? Not sure it’ll be easy to bottle one-handed.”
I winced at Dad’s blunt reference to Kendal’s handicap. Kendal just shrugged.
“Long as no one asks me to play the piano, I can use my hand just fine for most things.”
Dad laughed. “I remember your father from the plant. I didn’t agree with his rabble-rousing, but he was a good guy. Now let’s get to work.”
Duff got down to the business of emptying the wine barrels using a pump Dad had scavenged when a local machine shop had closed. Linda and I collected as many garden hoses as we could find and screwed them together to make a long rubber snake that would gulp down and regurgitate wine.
Linda and Duff stood at the pump end; Dad, Kendal and I waited at the workbench under the window in our basement with an army of empty wine bottles and Nonno’s old corking machine.
“Kendal and I will fill. You cork, Debbie,” ordered Dad.
When the wine started flowing, we quickly discovered the problem with Duff’s plan — even with two of us bottling and one corking, we couldn’t keep up. Within minutes, our clothes were soaked and the thick purple wine overflowed onto the floor, puddling around our shoes. The fumes were making me dizzy.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” shouted Dad. “Debbie, run next door and tell Duff to shut it down.”
“He should try closing off the flow every few minutes so we can catch up,” suggested Kendal. “And maybe we should empty the hoses into cooking pots first, then into bottles — we can’t work fast enough this way.”
Dad nodded. “Just what I was thinking, son.”
Son?
I ran next door to tell Duff the new plan. When I returned, it was obvious Dad and Kendal had kept up a stream of conversation, Dad pumping Kendal for information about what he wanted to do with his life. As I clattered down our basement stairs, I heard Kendal say, “I’m thinking of journalism, but my mom wants me to go to law school.”
“Law is a good trade for a man,” nodded Dad. “You could always write books on the side, like Earl Stanley Gardner.”
“Perry Mason? I’d rather write stuff like Fail-Safe.”
Dad nodded. “I’m not one much for fiction but Fail-Safe was a page-turner. Scared the hell out of me.”
“Think it could really happen? I mean, some glitch causing an accidental nuclear war?” asked Kendal.
“Sure it could happen,” says Dad. “More a question of when than if.”
I stood on the stairway, listening. It was a conversation Dad had never had with me. We’d never discussed my career ambitions — never got further than him telling me to keep my marks up.
Once the last bottle of wine had been corked, and we were all sitting around the table in Nonna Peppy’s kitchen, Dad poured out glasses for each of us, a bottle of ginger ale handy to cut the sour taste of the local Canusa grapes. The vines were a tough northern variety whose only quality for winemaking was hardiness.
“Saluté,” said Dad, raising his glass. “It isn’t up to Sparkling Sparrow standards, but not bad for backyard wine, eh?”
Dad took Duff’s first- and last-month’s rent and headed next door to give Nonna Peppy and Mom a taste of Nonno’s final vintage. Meanwhile, Duff, Linda, Kendal and I went downstairs to Duff’s new flat, walking from one dark, cramped, airless, earthy-smelling room to another while Linda told Duff about her program at the University of Toronto, where she had just completed her second year.
Duff tipped his head back and cracked his spine the way I’d seen him do at Cressie’s. “I miss the academic life. Before my draft card arrived, I was doing a double PhD in genetics and bioengineering.”
Linda wrinkled her forehead. “Wow. I’m not even sure what that is.”
“I’m not surprised. It won’t exist as a course of study ’til the 1980s,” said Duff, running his hand through his hair. “You see, Linda, I’ve come from the future.”