The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  I took them back to my workshop, to show them where I was looking from and what I could see, and besides, why have the cops getting Evelyn all worked up and everything? She wouldn’t have seen anything anyway—I could see the light from the television in the living room when I was on the phone, and once she’s sunk deep into the TV, there’s not much that’s going to get her attention short of another world war.

  The cops wanted to know a lot of stuff, like the make of the car and what the guy was wearing, but they just sort of stopped when I said, “It’s the Collins kid from Superior Pizza,” and after that it was like they weren’t even taking notes anymore. It was almost as if they were deflated or something, as if they were working up to solve a case that turned out to be all too easy in the end.

  After the cops walked back across the street, I went into the house to tell her, ready for her to think that I did the right thing, but also that I could have done it a little quicker. They’d got the lights all set up at 35 McKay like it was a movie set or something, so bright that the edges of the window ledges on the front of the house were casting sharp shadows as dark as smudges of soot. Grown men down on their hands and knees, sifting through the snow like kids playing in the sandbox, with their cars shunted in next to the curb even though we’re on a snow route and there’s not supposed to be any parking there anyway. Cops make their own rules when they want to. It’s supposed to be a tow-away zone—not that they’ll be towed away—and the plows will end up making a mess of the whole street because of it.

  Evelyn was in her chair in the living room, like always. Bob Barker and The Price Is Right is her favourite, and she was watching it on the Edmonton station. Thank God for cable.

  I can’t stand that show, but she’s been watching since before Barker’s hair turned white, and she’s settled away in there like she always is, her chair almost square in front of the television, the sound up on bust. The world’s not right now, not with Price Is Right on all hours of the day and night. With the different time zones, you could be watching the afternoon soaps right up until you go to bed, and watching them all over again the moment you got up. It’s just not the way it’s supposed to be, that’s all I can say.

  She didn’t even hear me come in, and I could see the white hair on the back of her head, the hair on the top lit by the changing colours of the television, and her hand still flicking the switch back and forth, back and forth, and I knew that out in the shed it must look like some kind of carnival show, only the one light left in the place and it keeps going on and off, on and off, like a ringing phone that no one ever picks up. And all at once I think back to the shed, of how I must have been silhouetted there, that flashing light drawing attention the way flashing lights always do. A bald, bent old man, caught in the act of lifting up a corner of a curtain like some nosy spinster aunt. And I realized that the Collins kid probably should have known that I could see him out there.

  Evelyn’s legs aren’t as strong as they were—sometimes her knees just buckle and she goes down in slow motion, her housecoat out all around her like the petals of a flower, her muscles trying to take the weight and just fading away. So I help her up and down the hall, like to the bathroom or the bedroom—the house is all on one level, at least there’s that, and I think like I always do that we’re like the blind leading the blind.

  Except she’s not blind at all, she can see as well as anyone. She just can’t speak is all, and hasn’t since the stroke—I imagine the words are all in there, piling up on themselves like people at a dance club trying desperately to get away from a fire through a locked exit door. Doctors say she’s deaf in one ear, too, but I’m darned if I can tell how they figured that out, because she’s always angled her head at you when you’re talking, like a parrot trying to figure out what two words will make its owner hand it a cracker.

  And I don’t know why, but I feel guilty. I think it’s because I always thought it would be me—I’m the one with the bad habits, the one who drank more, who didn’t even give up smoking until the doctor and Evelyn got together and gave me an ultimatum seven or eight years ago. Still, she’s the one who needs the shoulder to lean on going up to bed, and now that I’m thinking about cigarettes again, I remember the pack I’ve still got tucked away out in the shed for when I just gotta have one, when it feels like my skin is just going to crawl right off me, and I wonder what it is I think I’m saving my health for now, anyway.

  The cops told me they’d pick up the Collins kid, so I’ve got nothing to worry about even if he did see me. At the same time, I can’t help but hope he has a little while out there, still on the run. I picture him running, looking back over his shoulder, mouth open, sucking in big gulps of air, young and strong and fast and alive. Out on the run while he can still run. I don’t know why I even think about it.

  Later, in our bedroom, lying on my back, I can see through a small gap in the curtains that the snow is coming down again, gentle and light and orange in the street lights, falling the way that snow’s always supposed to fall. The room is quiet, and everything—the pictures, the plants, the few little pieces of jewellery I’ve been able to afford to give her over the years—is in the right place, each one in the place where Evelyn decided it should go.

  And there is no 35 McKay Street, there’s just this room and the ticking heaters and the way things are supposed to be.

  And Evelyn’s rolled over on her side, back on to me.

  I can put a hand between her shoulder blades, her lying there, and she shifts back against me and I know she’s the same Evelyn she’s always been. You can look at her and not realize it, but like I’ve always said, people look at a lot of things and then don’t remember anything about them either.

  Eventually, her breathing goes long and even, with the familiar hint of a half snore that’s been bothering me for more years than I can count, and I know she’s asleep.

  Then, I can sleep too.

  35

  McKay Street

  RON COLLINS

  FEBRUARY 11, 2006

  HOURS EARLIER, when the snow hadn’t really started in earnest yet, Ron Collins watched the tall girl kicking the other one in front of the Supreme Court—kicking the one who was down on the ground shrieking, the swear words carrying easily through the closed windows of the car.

  “I get up, I’ll fucking pound ya,” the one on the ground was yelling. “I’ll show ya, ya fucking skank.”

  He watched, half interested, half bored—but the pizzas were getting cold. So Ron reached down to put the Tercel into gear, and Liz reached across from the passenger seat and held his arm just above the wrist, stopping him. “No,” she said, her voice strangely eager, almost breathless.

  It was almost fully dark by then, the big stone court building looming over the girls and throwing long, inky shadows. The snow was coming down in thin scrims in front of the street lights, softening all the angles, smoothing lines.

  It wasn’t softening the sight of the two fighting girls. Across from them, two teenaged boys were sitting on a low wall next to the courthouse steps, watching too. Probably the boyfriends, Ron thought, although neither of the two was doing anything to break up the fight. He had been startled at how wild the two girls had been when it started, hands and feet going, both of them beyond caring how it looked. The one in the long coat had gotten tangled up and had fallen flat on her back before the kicking started. But Ron knew he couldn’t stay, no matter how much Liz wanted him to. The car didn’t like idling, not on cold nights. The beaten-up Toyota was running rough and threatening to stall already. Then there’d be the trouble of getting it started again, the pizzas would be cold, and Louis would be right in his face, telling him, “There are plenty of people looking for work in this city,” and his favourite, “I can replace you just like this,” followed by a snap of his flour-covered fingers.

  Before they’d stopped at the courthouse traffic lights, Liz had been drawing happy faces on the condensation on the side window. The car heater seemed to have a
mind of its own, and most of the time the air coming out of the vents was as cold and damp as if it had come straight in off the harbour. Ron watched her out of the corner of his eye, trying to remember the next address without opening the pizza bag and letting any of the heat out, trying hard not to be conspicuous as he looked across at her. Liz was beautiful, he thought. Beautiful in a strange way, really, a narrow face with a thin, small nose and overfull lips, at the same time with a pronounced underbite that could make her look feral and somehow slightly dangerous. She had never mastered wearing her feelings on the inside instead of bare across her face, and Ron knew there were a thousand things right there that would tell him how she felt, long before she ever got around to telling him in words.

  Like the way it was all right when she was drawing happy faces. If she got bored enough, the happy faces would turn their lips down, sad at first, then angry-looking, and he knew from experience if she started drawing handguns or round-looking spaceships—jagged space rays shooting outwards from their noses—there wouldn’t be any chance that later he’d get to slip his hands inside the tight top of her jeans. If she got bored enough, she’d turn inwards first, and then start lashing out. How she couldn’t believe how stupid he was, how she couldn’t believe she’d ended up stuck with someone like him, that she’d wound up tooling around through the cold of a St. John’s winter in a junky pizza delivery car.

  It was worse because it was February, and the snow was always coming, lashing down for a few minutes in angry little warning flurries that disappeared as soon as they arrived, whipping out of side streets in curling, tight bursts. Always waiting to just rush down on you out of any one of a row of leaden-grey days. It was February, right in the guts of winter, he thought. Not enough had gone by, and there was still so much to come—the inevitable March wet, the April snowstorms, the heavy, sticky spring snow that packed tight like concrete under the car. No, Ron thought, February was the worst of it, when you’re tired of it already and there’s not even one scrap of light at the end of the tunnel.

  It had been all right in the summertime.

  They’d been going out seriously for a few months then after a couple of years of on-and-off, and it had all been a laugh, driving all hours of the warm nights with the windows down. Summer, when, if you were lucky, the last order on the run was a four a.m. house party where nobody minded if a pair of strangers stayed on and partied too.

  Once, he and Liz had fucked on a bath mat in someone’s huge bathroom, the door locked, bladder-swollen beer drinkers on the other side trying the doorknob again and again. Inside, both of their heads kept banging against the side of the bathtub, and they couldn’t stop laughing. Later, they’d turned down slices of the same pizza they’d delivered, having lost their appetite watching Louis sweating over the pizza an hour earlier, hard at work with almost his whole upper body over the outspread dough. And when they’d left, they’d both talked about the bathroom, the taps, the huge hot tub—the way the bathroom alone was big enough to cover half of their entire apartment.

  Even coming home after daybreak wasn’t bad, the heat having fallen away, so that they could wake up in the middle of the afternoon, still twined around each other like tree roots. He could remember falling asleep with the liquid burble of the robins loud in the brightening dark, the sky shifting up from black into a rich, deep and promising blue.

  But the winter was harder, working all the time with the headlights on, a whole shift of unremitting night. One headlight had blown in the third week of January and there wasn’t enough money to buy a replacement, so that driving the car was like driving with one eye closed. The colder it got, the more Liz sank into her seat and the door on her side of the car, wrapping her arms around her chest. Ron kept telling her that she could stay home in the apartment, but she wouldn’t. “We’ll get turned all around,” she said, arms moving, hands pulled back into the sleeves of her sweater. “I’ll be sleeping nights, you’ll be sleeping days, and pretty soon it will only be breakfast, dinner and sleep. And what’s the point of that?”

  It made sense—he had to admit it. But she looked wretched in the car, especially in the big snowstorms. Ron loved the big snowstorms, when everyone was wishing they’d bought that expensive four-wheel drive, when cars were being abandoned on the crosstown arterial by drivers with shit for brains. In whiteouts and deep fresh snow, he loved how the Tercel kept chewing its way along, the tires as bald as they could be, the car moving only because he knew it so well, because he could feel the wheels starting to slip and knew when to hit the gas and when to back off. Delivering pizzas to the stormbound, to houses with buried cars and new snow tires and not two ounces of common sense to rub together. It was as if he were shouting out at the windows that he didn’t need their money, that he could get by just fine without it.

  Snowy nights, and the sky would turn matte orange and flat with the reflected glow of the street lights. The streets would lie empty and quiet, and even if it was cold, he’d run with the windows down sometimes to clear the condensation, looking for the blue flickering reflection of the snowplow flashers rumbling up the side streets, trying to hook up with a city plow going in the same direction. It made Ron feel like he should have one hand out the window, waving to the passersby struggling through the snowbanks on foot. Like he was the featured attraction in a parade. It wasn’t the same for Liz: often he’d come back with the tip money and find her sound asleep against the door like some hypothermia victim on the very edge of icy death. He always wanted to shake her awake, just to be sure she was all right, but also so she wouldn’t miss the way they were suddenly the centre of it all. Instead, he’d slide the car into gear gently and try to get it going and back into the middle of the street without the tires slipping, so the car wouldn’t lurch or buck and wake her up.

  35 McKay Street—the architect—must have been looking out of his window, Ron thought. Big blue house, clapboard, all tricked out with multicoloured trim. Ron hadn’t even touched the doorbell when the door started to open. That’s when people usually yell at you, saying you’re late, Ron knew. And he thought, like he’d been thinking all night, that he shouldn’t have stopped to watch the fighting girls at the court, because the lectures just weren’t worth it. But it turned out the guy was just eager.

  “Gotta pay you in coin,” he said. “All I’ve got. It’s twenty-one dollars, right? Here’s twenty-six.” He had both hands full of loose change, quarters and dollars all tumbled in together, like he was daring Ron to stop and count them.

  “Pizza delivery guys and taxi drivers, we all like change,” Ron said, and he could feel himself grinning for no reason. It made him angry, wondering if 35 McKay was looking at his teeth. Ron could feel his lips tightening, pulling closed again—he wanted to tell the guy that they had met before, wanted to ask him, “Don’t you remember me? Don’t you remember?” but he didn’t.

  35 McKay was grinning back, with his own two rows of even white teeth. Ron thought he could feel Liz’s eyes on his back, and he wondered if she was comparing the two of them somehow. Ron knew he was taller and fitter: 35 McKay was a dumpy soft guy with a big gut and an expensive-looking haircut. 35 McKay smiled too fucking much, too.

  Ron could feel the muscles tensing in his arms. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. It felt like it was too late to still be on the road, and it was altogether too cold. Maybe it was the fight they’d seen earlier that had him all shaken up—the strange sense there was about it, out in the open and with no one moving a muscle to stop the girls from hurting each other. Or maybe it was just something like an exhaust leak in the back of the Tercel—maybe that was what was making his head feel the size of a watermelon.

  He went back to the car and reached over to Liz’s window without stopping to count the money, knocked on the glass with two knuckles. Liz rolled the window down and he handed her the change. Her hands were white and cold-looking when he dropped the loose change into them, but she didn’t drop even one coin. He liked that—she
was always ready, ready for anything.

  But suddenly there was something he didn’t like: perhaps it was the way she was looking past him, her eyes level with his hip. Maybe she likes this end of McKay Street, he thought. The expensive end. Maybe she liked something about number 35, about the solid, warm yellow light that hung on the dark blue clapboard next to the glass front door, about the long, warm yellow hallway stretching back. He could hardly imagine what it would be like in there. But Liz could. He saw she had found a distant, almost sleepy smile as he walked around the front of the car to climb back in. He turned towards her as he closed his door, and he noticed her hips were just settling back into the seat. Pulling away from the curb, he threw the car too quickly into gear and the back wheels dug down and hit asphalt. And then Liz brought up one white hand and wiped all the condensation away from the side window with one quick sweep, happy faces and all, and she turned in her seat and looked back towards the house until they took the next corner.

  The pizza shop was hot and damp and spare: Louis had never bothered to put anything up on the walls, because there were only the three small red tables, and nobody ever sat at them unless they were waiting for takeout or buying a single slice. Down-in-the-mouth guys looking for a little warmth, the big pizza oven’s heat going right into their cores until Louis pointed at the No Loitering sign and yelled at them to “shift their ass.”

  Ron dumped the change onto the counter, spread it out. And it was not twenty-six at all—eighteen dollars, no tip, in fact three dollars short for the pizza in the first place.

  “That’s money you’ll make up,” Louis shouted from the other side of the counter. Louis was a big man, all in white, and he had patches of flour on his forearms and his face. Ron knew from experience that the flour gathered anywhere Louis sweated. Winter or summer, Ron knew, Louis sweated—only more in summer.