The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  “You’ll make it up, ’cause he shorted you, not me,” Louis said, shrugging, and he turned to put another pizza into the big oven. “Mebbe now you learn to count.” The heat roiled out of the open door of the oven in a wave.

  But Ron had already turned his back, was already on his way out the door.

  The Tercel fishtailed in the snow, going downhill too fast. Liz was huddled tight against her door, as if forced there, a tight dark bundle of winter jacket, not talking. He could only see the back of her head, the fine hair above her collar, hair he knew was impossibly soft to the touch. He didn’t reach across to feel it.

  And then he was banging on the door of 35 McKay. That pretty glass door, he thought, that door with the frosted design over part of the glass. And there were still lights on in the back of the house: he could see a sliver of kitchen down the long hallway, a white coffee maker, and he could see someone coming towards him, backlit and black against the kitchen lights. And he could feel himself winding up tight like a spring, so that his hands—bundled almost without thinking into fists—felt oddly heavy hanging down by his sides.

  “You stiffed me, smartass.” Ron said it as soon as the other man opened the door. “Twenty-six dollars, you said. Like there was enough there, like there was a five-dollar tip in there.”

  “There was twenty-six dollars,” 35 McKay said, looking puzzled.

  “There was, was there?” Ron knew he was smiling now, not caring about his teeth, a wild, broad grin as the architect dug himself in deeper. “Think I can’t count, do you.” He said it flat, so that it wasn’t a question, so that there wasn’t any sort of possible answer.

  But 35 McKay tried anyway. “Of course you can count . . .” he started, his voice falling, calming, trying to mollify. He stepped out though the door, but Ron wasn’t waiting anymore. He grabbed the man by his shoulders and pushed him hard back against the clapboard. “I’ll get you fired,” 35 McKay said, trying to twist out of Ron’s hands.

  “Like I care about that,” Ron said. “Like I’m not almost fired every night.” He wasn’t letting go, and the snow had started to fall more heavily, coiling around and flattening sounds. Ron was thumping the man softly, rhythmically, against the front of his own house. A car came down the street, cautious, its headlights probing out ahead. But the car didn’t slow down, just kept going on its way.

  In the Tercel, Liz was keeping a circle of glass carefully clear with the sleeve of her jacket. 35 McKay pointed over Ron’s shoulder. “Her,” he said, still trying to squirm out of Ron’s grip. “Maybe your girlfriend took it,” he said, looking over Ron’s shoulder at Liz’s face, round and white and indistinct behind the glass.

  The man’s voice was high now and shrill, because 35 McKay Street was obviously frightened. And for a moment a thin shadow of a memory ran through Ron’s head: he was walking around the front of the car, looking through the windshield as Liz arched her hips upwards from the seat, straightening her body as if she had been pushing something into her front pocket. Ron had seen her hips lift like that a hundred times before, angling naked towards his own. The two images flicked back and forth in his mind—in the car, then Liz at home, smiling languidly, lifting her hips so he could slide off her underwear. It was confusing, and complicated. But it didn’t matter.

  “Just because you’ve got money doesn’t mean you gotta right to steal more from me,” Ron said, and then he hit the man in the side of the face with his fist—and the man sagged immediately, so it was like there was no satisfaction in it at all. Ron found himself holding the man up like a big sack of flour with his left arm while he kept hitting with his right, sometimes in the stomach, more often in the face, until finally the man fell right out of his grip.

  Ron was breathing heavily by then, and the wind was rolling fast up the street, pushing loose snow in front of it so the lead edge of each gust looked like a wave reaching in over the cobble of a long, flat, empty beach. He still had one arm pulled back, ready to hit the man again if he even started to move. Ron looked back towards the car, and there was a happy face in the small circle that Liz had wiped clean of condensation. It was Liz’s face. She was smiling, and, Ron thought, her teeth looked sharp—sharp like a weasel or a fox. Like she could bite—like she would bite and enjoy it, too. He could see the tip of her tongue darting out at the corner of her mouth, licking her lips. Two small round circles fogged the glass in front of her nostrils and faded, then fogged again.

  There was a shovel next to the door, aluminum, painted dark red with a silver-coloured edge where the metal had worked through from scraping against the pavement. He picked the shovel up and started to hit the fallen man with it, over and over again, until the wooden handle broke and the blade of the shovel skittered off across the pavement and into the street. But Ron didn’t stop, still swinging with the shovel handle. Hitting the man again and again, the man’s skin splitting like a peach, blood breaking through. Then the shovel handle falling out of his hands as he turned and went back to the car.

  After they pulled away, Liz grabbed Ron’s right hand and pushed it between her legs, the muscles of her thighs tight. She held his hand pinned there, so that the Tercel whined high in second gear because he couldn’t shift, the back end of the car swinging wildly. If I move my hand, Ron thought, I might even be able to feel the stolen change. But he kept his hand right where it was, looking in the mirror to see if anyone else was coming out through their doors, if there was anyone running to help or to try to catch the licence plate number. Ron couldn’t remember if the light over the licence plate on the back of the Tercel was still broken. It probably was. But Ron didn’t see anyone at all.

  Behind them, the snow caught in the fallen man’s eyelashes first. It caught in his eyelashes, so gently that the flakes could have been winked away with a single flutter of his eyelids. They melted when they landed on skin. For a while.

  More snow fell, and the wind stacked the snowflakes gently against the front of the house.

  As the back end of the car swung again, Ron thought about his parents, about what they’d say when he got caught and they found out. What his mom would say. His dad.

  But his father didn’t have the right to say anything, did he?

  Tony fucking jailbird Collins wouldn’t have the right to say anything to him at all.

  117

  McKay Street

  TONY COLLINS

  MAY 2, 2005

  ALMOST a full year before that snowstorm, they had caught Tony with the back of his truck full of plywood. In the cab, Tony Collins kicked himself, because he knew—because he’d known all along—this was going to happen. That it was just a matter of time, a once-too-often-tried gamble, his own sort of Russian roulette.

  Ten full sheets of three-quarter-inch, good-one-side, lying flat and heavy in the back and covered up with bags of garbage, and he’d already gotten a price for them, because he was going to sell them for cash on Warbury Street to a guy who was putting up framing to fix the foundation of his house. The gatehouse was the last thing between him and the money.

  He tried to talk his way out of it at first, tried telling the guys in the gatehouse that he’d bought the plywood and just had it in the truck with him ahead of time when he’d come in for his shift, but then they shook their heads and walked around to show him where they’d marked every sheet, just a little black stripe across one corner with black Magic Marker, and then they held him at the gate, waiting for the police.

  Every now and then, the guys in the gatehouse had looked straight across at him, their mouths turned down at the corners like they were having a hard time believing it, like it was the kind of expression they thought they were supposed to have.

  In the truck, Tony could only sit and look down at the cracked blue plastic of the dashboard, reaching across with one finger and picking away at a spot where the plastic had blistered and split from sun and age.

  He thought for a moment, just for one fleeting moment, about stomping on the gas pedal and
running straight through the thin wooden arm of the gate, smashing through the alternating yellow and black stripes like they weren’t even there. But they knew him anyway, so it wouldn’t have made any difference, it would have just meant that the police would have come to his house, the front wheels of their cruiser crackling as they rolled up onto the loose gravel of the driveway, and how stupid would that be? Making them come and find him, come and hunt him down, on the run for ten lousy sheets of plywood?

  And even then Tony knew it wasn’t as simple as the plywood. Because there was a zero-tolerance policy at the depot for stealing, a policy written right into the contract now in lawyer’s language, so it was twenty-three years of driving plow in the winter, dump truck in the summer, all of it down the drain, and Helen was going to kill him, he thought, even if he really was doing it all for her.

  When the police came, they’d be all set to write it all up in simple police shorthand. Anthony David Collins, 54, of 177 McKay Street. Longtime employee of the City of St. John’s, caught red-handed stealing city property—he could see it like it was already written in the paper, just a couple of sentences, and the paper would be going into mailboxes all the way down the street.

  It was the kind of case that would barely get a ripple of interest on the court docket, the courthouse regulars all gravitating towards the graphic testimony of sexual assaults or the gruesome violence of the occasional St. John’s murder, almost always family members killing family members, or a fight that had started between friends in a kitchen. Once in a long while, stranger killing stranger.

  Just the same, Tony knew it was the kind of case that marked the complete end of the way life used to be. The police report wouldn’t explain anything, Tony thought, even if every single word on it was perfectly true. It wouldn’t even begin to explain.

  It wouldn’t explain how Helen’s dad, Mike Mirren, had left his only daughter 117 McKay when he died, that the house had been all paid off and Mike had been proud of that, but that now, almost inexplicably, it was carrying eighty thousand dollars in a mortgage in Helen’s name, a mortgage that was pretty close to as much as the place was worth.

  It wouldn’t explain why Tony was running just as fast as he possibly could, every single day, and that there were only so many places money could come from before you wound up looking at stupid last resorts, at bad decisions made good by desperation.

  At first, he’d taken every scrap of overtime he could get, driving the big green dump all night long for snow removal, up the sharp hills and then down again to the harbour to dump the snow from the blowers so the tide could carry it away, and then he’d fallen asleep one night and put the front end of the truck, with the big square rack for the plow, right through some guy’s fence on the low side of Empire Avenue. It was a good thing the curbs were high there or, sound asleep behind the wheel, he would have gone into the guy’s living room, Tony thought.

  Two o’clock in the morning, and he had to stand outside and listen to the guy who owned the house screaming at him about his damned fence until the supervisor got there, the front end of Tony’s truck stuck through the splintered pressure-treated lumber like a big green beetle eating a meal of sticks. The top of the fence, Tony noticed, cut in gingerbread curves, too fucking cute by half.

  The supervisor, Ted Greenaway, slid out from behind the steering wheel of his pickup like his big belly had been greased, a huge round man who wobbled, balanced on two too-slender pins of legs. And Greenaway had spent years driving just like Tony, but they all knew he’d been looking for a supervisor’s job all along, that he’d been looking for the little green pickup of his own for years, and that he’d sucked up to anyone he could until he finally got there.

  Ted smoothed it over with the homeowner, told him “it was clear it was the driver’s fault” and that the city’s insurance adjuster would be by in the morning, and that accidents happen but “you wouldn’t want us to just stop clearing the snow, now, would ya?” because Ted was good at that kind of thing, the words pouring out of him like it was some kind of heavy syrup, made thicker by the cold.

  Ted had motioned at him to back the big truck out of the yard, and the last thing Tony saw as he pulled away from the curb was Ted shaking his head, as if he’d been asked to discipline a particularly unruly child.

  Management had looked real hard at Tony’s hours then, and cut him back sharply when they realized he was well up over seventy-five hours some weeks, and if he had been driving transport truck, he knew they would have pulled his logbook at some inspection station and written him up for not taking the time to get enough sleep. And that pissed him off even more because, he thought, rules just don’t understand.

  “Things are getting so expensive,” Helen told him when his pay-cheques came and went. “The prices just keep going up. I don’t know how we’re going to keep up if the union doesn’t get you guys a raise this year.”

  Even with the cut in hours, Tony drove most nights that winter, the metal scrape of the snowplow blade often leaking into his dreams while he slept restlessly through the light of the days, the curtains never able to hold back all the light. He liked the nights, especially liked the early mornings when the colour was just leaking into the horizon in a blue so pale it looked almost like grey. Then, as dawn got closer, Tony would see the big upturned bowl of the sky brightening, and even when he saw occasional faces drawn to windows by the sound of the heavy plow, it was still like he was the only real person alive, cutting through the fresh and trackless snow on the only necessary errand in the world.

  Out under so much sky, the truck seemed to get smaller and smaller, a tiny creature depending on the brute strength of its back legs to push ahead through the snow. It was the best time to forget everything else, a time when it seemed as though the only world that truly existed was framed by the inside of the cab of the truck, when time itself was measured not in hours but by the metronome of the snow-shrouded parked cars the plow passed along either side of the road, by the corners you cut wide, swinging down empty side streets and flinging the heavy, curling wave of snow and slush up onto the curb.

  The universe was self-contained and well drawn then, complete and completely under control, Tony thinking of himself as being as regular a cog as the tiny gear he imagined turning every single second hand on every single clock in the entire world. And that tick gently tocking ahead specifically under his hands.

  It was, he was sure, just about the only thing that was under control.

  On evenings when he wasn’t working—evenings that were few and far between—he’d sometimes go down to the bar with Helen, one block over and three blocks down to a quiet downstairs pub with a single pool table and a dartboard that no one ever used, even though the light over it was carefully angled to throw the yellow and black wedges of the board into high relief.

  The regulars all knew her there—sometimes Tony thought they might know her better than he did. It occurred to him that she was a regular at the bar herself, and for a single flashing moment he envied her that, envied her the ability to have a particular place where she clearly fit. Tony was keenly aware that he didn’t fit, no matter what he did: he could watch hockey on the big bar television, drink a pint of beer and make small talk, but it was always like the people on either side of him tolerated his presence and his attempts at conversation, but little more. He felt strangely angular away from the big smooth steering wheel, square peg and round hole, so he said little and watched more, his eyes catching the ranks of bottles along the bar, the soccer towels they’d found somewhere and hung from the ceiling, the long row of draft beer taps.

  But Helen?

  She’d come in with him and then shift her weight sideways onto the stool closest to the pool table, call out to the bartender and wave, and she’d drink club soda, just club soda, and play the machines, the bright lights playing off her face and making strange-coloured, two-toned shadows, like clouds moving quickly through the shafts of sun lighting her face.

  As sh
e concentrated, it gave Tony a chance to just stare, and he was overtaken by a simple confusion, as he always was, staring at her: how had they even ended up married? But that too was only half of it. A bigger piece was the question of why she’d ever agreed to have him.

  Even now, in her early fifties, Helen was a strikingly beautiful woman, high, sharp cheekbones still, wild, curly hair more restrained than brushed, and comfortably able to smile in a way that just made her face lapse straight into beauty. Tony wondered if, as a teenager, she had practised that smile in front of a mirror, perfecting just how much of her teeth to show, letting her eyes widen slightly at the same time in a distracting, alluring way that almost always made you fall straight in, even if you sensed all along that her expression just might be a deliberately planned and even mercenary trick.

  But he had asked her to marry him, and she had improbably said yes, both of them barely into their twenties, and they’d managed all of it up until now: one child, a boy who got into more trouble than seemed possible, then that same boy moving away, and finally the sudden death of her father, Mike, of a heart attack, right at the top of the stairs beside the bathroom.

  It seemed to Tony, although he’d never said it out loud, that Mike had gotten up from his chair in the living room all of a sudden and decided to head straight up towards heaven, or wherever it was he went, making the choice to slip right out of his body exactly at the point where he ran out of stairs and could climb no higher inside his skin.

  Perhaps it was the expression on the dead man’s face that made Tony think that was what had happened, because he’d been in the kitchen when he heard the thump of the old man falling, and had run up the stairs and turned his body over in the narrow hallway. When he did, Mike Mirren didn’t look surprised or frightened or in pain or anything like that, not like any of the clichés Tony had been led to expect. Mike Mirren’s mouth had been set in a straight, purposeful line, turned up slightly in the corners, as if he were setting out on a particularly involved task that might, in the end, turn out to be almost enjoyable. Like he had his eyes fixed on something in the distance that was on the very edge of out of sight, something both curious and perhaps a little funny.