It was a rhythm that was completely separate from anything outside the walls, Ron thought, and like almost everything else in prison, an order that made sense only when you were living right there inside it. But inside it, there was a clear-cut, straightforward order that you could depend on.
When the prison settled down again, Ron’s drunk-driving roommate was gone, the guards signing out all of the conditional-sentence prisoners as soon as they signed in, and the whole range took on a feeling of suppressed, pressurized menace.
And then Bart Dolimont was moved into Ron’s cell.
Small in stature and covered head to toe with fine red hair that was little more than fuzz, Bart was from farther downtown, from a harder downtown than McKay Street. And when he first got to the cell, he was in plaster from ankle to hip, the result of trying to pull rank on a new cellmate who’d knocked him unconscious and then propped Dolimont’s leg on the edge of the bed and jumped on it with his full weight, breaking bones in three different places and leading Dolimont to describe to the guards, in detail, how he’d accidentally slipped and fallen off the toilet while he was trying to kill a particularly irritating bluebottle fly.
“My mistake,” Dolimont said, shrugging his shoulders as he told Ron what had really happened. “Really. Shoulda known better. Been in here long enough to know the ground rules, after all. Ground rules are simple, once you got ’em figured. Step outside ’em and you get what’s comin’ to ya.”
Bart Dolimont was unlike any prisoner Ronnie had ever met—and after almost six months he was beginning to think he’d seen every single type with only the occasional variation. He’d seen the tough cases rubbing the tears off their faces after only a few minutes on the telephone with their mothers, and he’d seen the sadistic ones who couldn’t wait for someone to look afraid so that they could give them another reason for fear. Ronnie had seen criers and fighters, and even the quiet ones who just balled themselves up in a corner of their cells and waited for the days and months and years to run out, concentrating on their own interiors. The ones who smiled cruelly and drew their fists back to hit someone again, revelling in the opportunity. The ones who treated the whole thing like a dream they’d wake up from, and walk away from forever.
But Dolimont was like none of them. For him, the whole day was a pattern he’d come to expect, the rules that everyone else chafed about simply a necessary and expected order.
“Sunny day today,” Dolimont would say, looking up through their small window of steel mesh glass as if the weather outside mattered, as if it meant something. He was like that with everything, from showers to linen change, as if the rules didn’t weigh on him as much as they helped him move through his day.
At first, the only thought that Ronnie could muster was that he’d really like to punch Bart in the face—that he’d like to pin the other man down and pound him for his absurd hopefulness, to lift the man’s head up and then ram it down onto the cement floor over and over again and yell at him, “You can’t get out of here, you can’t do anything, you’re just another stupid rat in a cage.” But it only took him a couple of days to realize it wouldn’t matter what he did, short of killing the man.
Dolimont knew exactly how long he’d be in jail, how long he had left in his sentence, and he knew exactly how much he’d have to do to get himself right back inside again. And none of it mattered any more than the cell door sliding open before breakfast.
“I’m thirty-four, and this is my fifteenth year here. Sentenced seventeen times, guilty pleas every single time, never anything bad enough to get more than two years and serve federal time, the kind you have to serve out of the province at a big pen on the mainland,” Dolimont said to Ron. “My scheduled release date is the seventeenth of November, and if I do get out then, I imagine I’ll be back in by the twenty-fifth.”
While Ronnie paced, Bart slept. When Ronnie pounded on the wall in frustration, Bart decided which book he’d like to read next, enjoying the pick even if it was something he’d read before. “Back part of it’s really good,” he’d say. “Can’t wait to get there.”
While every single man in the prison seemed to be twitching with incipient rage and you could feel the anger in the place growing like someone had turned up an invisible thermostat, Bart talked about what the supper menu would be for the next week. “As long as there’s gravy, ya gotta admit there’s a reason to live,” he said.
“Doesn’t it ever get to you?” Ronnie said. “Isn’t there anything else you want to do?”
“And what exactly would I want to be doing?” Bart asked. “Working on someone else’s yard till I’m beat for minimum wage? Driving truck? Filling potholes somewhere while the rain comes pounding down and gets me soaking wet? Sounds like a ton of fun, hey?”
Then Ronnie wanted to beat the other man all over again just for his stupid simplicity, but when he lifted his fist, it fell right back down by his side again all by itself.
And Dolimont laughed, but not in a bitter way. Not in an insulting way, either. Dolimont laughed because he thought it was funny, and because, watching Ron’s hand fall, he understood.
And Ronnie was angry and frustrated and confused, and at the same time he liked Dolimont just a little bit more.
32
McKay Street
VINCENT O’REILLY
JANUARY 12, 1991
ONE SATURDAY in January 1991, nine-year-old Vincent heard his father and Glenn moving around the small workshop on the side of the house, and he imagined that his father was putting tools back in their familiar places. But before he was close enough to hear it, he could imagine the sound of the heater fan’s steady whine, the thick red heat that came out through the grill into the room almost like the elements inside were throwing hot liquid into the air.
Vincent had been outside in the falling snow, and there was still melting snow left on one of his boots by the front door. One boot was standing up, the other toppled over on its side. It was coming down heavy this time, sound-catching, noise-bending snow, the kind of snow that made the low foghorn positioned on the outer edge of the harbour seem to move all around him, calling first from one direction, then from another. He and Murray and Twig had gotten into a snowball fight, and then had chased a cat and pelted heavy wet snowballs at it, missing every time but driving the cat into a streaking frenzy to escape. Vincent had seen Mr. Coughlin’s truck across the street, the only vehicle on that side of the road that wasn’t buried in a thick blanket of snow, the hood of the truck still clean and steaming as the bunched flakes landed on it.
Vincent snuck into the kitchen in his damp sock feet, hearing the two men’s voices in the back room, a deep, uneven grumble at first, like some primitive and noisy piece of machinery working its way through a lengthy and slow-moving job. Vincent told himself that he was a spy quietly approaching German sentries, and then he got close enough for the sound to separate out into two distinct voices, one clear, the other muffled, sentences broken up by the smaller clattering sounds of the workshop under their hands.
“Your choice, isn’t it?” Glenn Coughlin said.
From where he was, Vincent couldn’t make out what his father said in response, the words in an undertone and indistinct from the far end of the shop. Vincent imagined that his father was facing the street, his back to the room as he talked. Every now and then a car went by on the street, the sound of its engine riding right up over his father’s voice and then fading away again as it drove out of earshot. He couldn’t hear the tires at all, but the drone of his father’s voice was steady. It was an unbroken stream of words, falling in pitch at the end, like his father was telling a long story with a particularly sad ending. Vincent couldn’t make out any of the individual words.
“Things happen,” Glenn said clearly.
Things happen, Vincent thought. Then he said it out loud. But he said it very, very quietly so the Germans wouldn’t hear him, testing out the way the words felt in his mouth. “Things happen.” He liked the way it sounded, t
he way it rolled off his tongue like the full stop of a period at the end of a sentence. Mr. Coughlin was like that. He just made a decision and went ahead and did it, not changing his mind and wrestling through different choices over and over again. Vincent wished his father was more like Glenn, more willing to just charge out and do something, instead of thinking of so many reasons to stay in the workshop and do nothing at all.
On the other side of the doorway, there was a long pause in the conversation. “Your choice,” Glenn said again, the words sounding as if they had been accompanied by a heavy shrug of the man’s shoulders.
Vincent could hear Glenn’s words clearly. He had gotten close enough to the workshop that he could even hear things as quiet as the big man noisily swallowing. He could hear the dry whisper of the empty beer bottle sliding back into the cardboard case.
Vincent imagined exactly where they would have to be in the workshop for their voices to sound like that: his father at the far end, standing, and Mr. Coughlin on the four-legged stool, right next to the door but with his back to the kitchen and the rest of the house. It was quiet outside, and equally still inside, and on Vincent’s side of the house he could hear only the tick of the electric heaters cooling. Vincent thought, if he listened hard enough, he might even be able to hear the simple, gentle sound of the snow coming down.
Then his father began pulling down boxes in the workshop, cardboard rectangles that uttered muffled metal jangles and bangs, and every time, his father dropped the boxes that last short inch or so to the top of the wooden workbench. Vincent knew that meant his father was angry, that he was working out something he hadn’t put into words yet—something like, “Damn it, Vincent, you come home when you’re told to come home, and no excuses.”
Vincent could picture the boxes slamming down perfectly, as perfectly as the way his mother set the table in the kitchen: three forks, three knives, three plates. Three of everything, laid out in the same order every single time, his mother travelling counter-clockwise around the table without ever realizing she never went in the other direction. Sometimes, though, four of everything, if Mr. Coughlin announced he had decided to stay and eat.
The boxes came down from the shelves in the same way, as if his father were searching for some critical thought right there in the sheer process of it. Then Vincent heard his father’s voice clearly, as if he had turned to face Coughlin down the length of the workshop.
“Enough is enough. I don’t know how long you think I’m supposed to just put up with this. Damn ship’s probably been cut up or sunk years ago, and you’re still bringing it up,” Keith O’Reilly said, his voice unusually hard and brassy, hard enough that Vincent looked over his shoulder, planning his retreat. “You’re in here all the time, rooting around at God knows what. For all I know, you took it. I don’t know, for a little insurance or something, just to keep the goddamn leash around my neck. All I know is that it’s gone, and you’re the only one who could know anything about it, right?”
“I didn’t even know you had it. Didn’t even know it existed. And that was a fucking stupid thing to do, too,” Glenn said. “Beside, in this fucking mess, it could be anywhere. You might have just lost it.”
“Bullshit. You know, I don’t think you should keep coming around here anymore. I think, by now, we must be square. But if you’re going to do something about it, you go right the fuck ahead,” Keith said. “If you’re looking to rat me out after all this time, you can just go right ahead.”
The angry words startled Vincent, as did the long silence afterwards, and he moved slowly backwards, sure the door would burst open any second. And then he heard the distant scrape of the snowplow, and he turned and ran out of the kitchen to the front window, watching for the big green truck. Almost as good as the fire trucks coming to Mrs. Purchase’s house all over again. The fire trucks were always stopping there and leaving after a few minutes, after another round of checking whatever she was afraid of this time. The firemen knew Mrs. Purchase well enough that they always waved when the big trucks were pulling away. If it was Mr. Collins driving the plow, and if he saw Vincent looking out the front window, Vincent knew that he would give the air horn chain a short tug for him.
He was already running for the living room in his sock feet, so he didn’t hear Glenn’s stool being pushed back, or the boxes being swept off the workbench and onto the floor as the two men grappled with each other, throwing awkward fists at each other’s faces. Then more serious fighting. A bottle broke, but neither man spoke, except for sharp noises when a fist hit home.
What Vincent did hear was the snowplow slowing down and taking the corner at the top of McKay Street, heard it nose into the sidewalk to spill the snow off the plow in a huge mound and then lift the blade and back up. When the blade dropped to the pavement again, it rang like a great funeral bell, and Vincent heard the truck’s engine rev up and muscle the plow into the snow and down the street towards his house. Vincent shut his eyes tight and concentrated on the sound of the plow, imagining himself in the big front seat, heading away. Just away.
Later, from the living room, he watched Glenn Coughlin head out to his truck, fumble with the keys for a moment, and then turn around and look back at the front of the workshop, his arm in the air, middle finger extended.
“You’ll need something again, O’Reilly. You know you will—you’ll get in over your head before you know it. You always do,” the big man shouted towards the house. “You’ll need something again, but don’t even think about calling me.”
111
McKay Street
BRENDAN HAYDEN
AUGUST 6, 2006
BRENDAN read about the skeleton a hunter found in an Ontario provincial park in 1968, nothing more than bones, the remains of a man believed to be Eastern European, with the oddity of an extra rib on his right side and a looped and knotted rope tangled through the collection of small bones from his wrists and hands. The suggestion, the police said on the web page, was that he might have been tied up when he died.
The police had gotten someone to sculpt a face out of clay based on the bone structure beneath, and the clay face stared out of the computer monitor at Brendan as blankly as Brendan stared back at it. At him. At it. Brendan couldn’t make up his mind about which it was. Glass eyes, flat and even and empty like any photograph—mirrors of the soul they may be, Brendan thought, but you can’t take a believable photograph of a mirror either.
He tried to limit his searches so that he didn’t spend much time on the website when he was at work, but small things were so compelling. One corpse, found in the shallows of Lake Ontario, was wearing only a pair of pants, the only distinctive feature some blurry writing in black ink on the inside of the waistband. It had remained unidentified for long enough that the inventory of the corpse’s pockets—ten dollars in all and a fistful of small change, every penny accounted for—listed two two-dollar bills, two one-dollar bills. It was a man’s body—the corpse’s pockets, his pockets: Brendan kept having to remind himself that the corpse was a person, not simply an “it.” Brendan couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a one-dollar bill, but he could remember the light green of the paper, and the way it would soften from frequent touch on the oldest bills until they were almost like worn fabric.
Looking at the website was easier at work. At home, in front of the computer in the dark of the front room upstairs, the faces were altogether too haunting—sometimes they’d come back to him late at night or when he woke up in the darkness, that strange, plasticine rigidity they sported around their mouths sharp in front of his eyes. They hung in his memory, faces caught exactly at the point of death like bugs in amber, except this amber had a short half-life, the faces bending and turning with rigor mortis and the inevitable workings of decay.
Brendan read about bodies in water, expanding his research, read about how they might sink for a while but that they’d always rise as the biology in their insides blew them up like fleshy inflatable rafts, pressurized flesh pre
ssing out between the buttons and against the zippers of their clothing. Brendan went to work, went home, divided his life completely between the two. He looked out the window. Took notes. He read impassively about bloat and even about the havoc wreaked on bodies by the ocean, about the way saltwater shrimp could strip away exposed flesh in an afternoon, so that the only parts of a body that would hold together were the parts inside the clothes, like the straw inside a scarecrow—feet inside long rubber boots or sneakers: hands inside fireball-orange rubber fisherman’s gloves, the rest of the body long since disjointed and washed away in scattered pieces.
A newspaper article about a coroner’s career stuck in his mind, the coroner complaining that it took seven years to have a missing fisherman declared dead so that his family could have a funeral and make claims on things like insurance policies.
“That’s a hell of a long time for closure, isn’t it?” the coroner had said.
“If an arm washes up with a ten-dollar wristwatch on it anywhere in this province, maybe twenty thousand of that same watch on the market at the same time,” the coroner went on, “then I’ve got six or eight women in here insisting that they’re absolutely sure it’s their husband’s watch, and they’re ready to swear an affidavit on it. Pretty much anything to let them move on, to close that door. It’s simpler for them to lie than to try and just wait for a truth that’s never going to come.”
Women seeking any body whatsoever: bodies on a public website seeking any owner whatsoever. It made Brendan think it would be possible to run some kind of macabre matchmaking agency: “Need a body? Find a body.” It wouldn’t be that hard to do, either, he thought.
Many of the drowning victims on the website didn’t even have photographs. Brendan shuddered and decided he could imagine why. Anyone with the brass to do it could probably claim one of those lost souls, haul it home in an airline casket and bury it good and deep before anyone got around to asking the tough questions.
The Glass Harmonica Page 20
