The Glass Harmonica (16 page)

32
McKay Street

KEITH O'REILLY

MARCH 15, 1980

T
WENTY-SIX YEARS
earlier, Keith O'Reilly was still in his forties. And desperate.

“It's in the paper.”

Keith said the words simply, the two of them in the truck, heading down the steep hill at Leslie Street, and it was like the words had just emerged on his lips and had then accidentally fallen straight out into the air. The words hung, like they could get caught in the cold air in the cab and hover there, waiting for something to crash into them and break them into pieces.

Slush on the road, splashing up underneath the quarter panels on the truck, heavy and spattering. A clear day, the sun out, the temperature just the other side of melt, and the snowbanks were receding. It was still too early to start thinking about spring—too much disappointment in a St. John's March. There would be snow again, but it would at least be the heavy, wet, clinging spring snow, the kind that tires ride up over and press down into hard white ice, the kind that doesn't last as long with the wind turning warmer.

“Whatcha mean?”

“There's a story in the paper. Today. About the girl.”

Glenn frowned, but his eyes didn't leave the road. Every time they passed a driveway, there was wet snow thrown out onto the road by someone clearing a large path to their door, and every time, Glenn's hands seemed to flex tighter on the steering wheel as the front wheels thunked through it. Then the back of the truck would shake over it as well.

“What'd it say?”

“That she came down here from Labrador, that she was working at the Dominion on the cash and then she didn't show up for work Thursday. And that now she's missing, and that no one's seen her. That she was nineteen years old, Glenn. Nineteen fucking years old.”

Glenn still didn't look away from the road, but Keith could see his mouth working slowly, could see it in the muscles of his cheeks, more like Glenn was chewing over a thought than anything else.

“That's what they got? That she didn't show up for work? Doesn't seem like a hell of a lot.”

“The police are asking if anyone saw her getting into a vehicle, so they've got something, don't they?” Keith said.

“That's the question they ask about anyone—and since no one's been saying anything, I guess so far nobody saw anything,” Glenn said. He looked over at Keith: the other man was looking out the side window of the truck, fidgeting. Then Glenn said, “C'mon, Keith, think about it. After all, it's not like anyone's really going to be looking for her, is it? They'll go through the motions for a while, then more important things will come along. So stop worrying.”

The truck eased down the long hill towards the harbour, slowed for the traffic lights and the sudden left turn, and when they got to the dockyard gates, Keith looked up, almost frightened by the sight of the huge fishing trawler looming down at them from up on the blocks, a big Latvian factory-freezer hunched up there and waiting for the workers to come back.

There was always an otherworldliness about the dockyard for Keith, the way the big ships were up on shore like they'd been tossed aground by massive waves that had themselves pulled back and disappeared, leaving everything behind them in the wrong place. The ships looked too tall and heavy to float properly, great slab-sided metal boxes that really should sink like stones, more like fortresses than vessels. Each one different, each one with its own particular problems, each one designed with a specific purpose by a marine engineer whom no one had ever heard of.

They'd had to bring the exterminators in on the Latvian ship first.

The
Novlyov
had been crawling with armies of rats and roaches, and a whole shift of dockworkers had flat-out refused to go down below and start work on the propeller shaft until the rats were dealt with—the propeller shaft and its channel low down in the bottom of the boat, dark and greasy and the kind of place where the rats could hide by the dozens.

The propeller shaft had bent as the huge vessel had slowed enough to accidentally let its own trawl lines slide back over the prop, the trawl wires binding tight and twisting the shaft out of alignment. Even after the crew had managed to unwind the trawl cables from the propeller, the slight bend in the shaft had been enough to make the whole ship hum with an even, regular vibration every time its crew tried to bring it up to a reasonable speed. No speed, no trawling. And no trawling, no fish, so the captain had reluctantly made port to have the repairs dealt with.

Not without complaint, though. The captain had complained about the cost of the exterminators, and had complained even more when the yard foreman told him he'd have to take the whole crew off the vessel until the work was done. The exterminator's vent covers were coming off as Glenn drove towards the gate, the vessel's crew bunched up next to the tool shed with their bundles of clothes, waiting to go back on board. Some of them had found their way out to the city dump and had spent their time digging up and packing their pockets and clothes with dozens of cans of thrown-away tinned peaches, all of the cans well past their expiry dates and buried at the dump by a food wholesaler. Later, the peaches would be the cause of scores of cases of on-board diarrhea and, finally, the source of a better batch of homemade alcohol than anything the prisoners had been successfully making in the St. John's penitentiary.

Glenn stared at the exterminators beetling over the deck in their white suits, taking the plastic wrap off, dropping it over the sides of the ship like glassy parachutes, where it blew around on small gusts of wind while other members of the extermination crew tried to gather it up before it blew into the harbour and out of reach.

“Can't tell you how much that fumigation stuff stinks,” Glenn said. “Gets in your nose and won't come out. Sour as anything. Like tin on your tongue, only worse. But at least it meant I had the place all to myself. Made me think when I was lighting the torch, though—make a spark and take the chance of blowing the decks right off.” Then Glenn smiled, his mind moving quickly to other things. “Betcha they try the water trick. It looks like their style.”

Occasionally, vessels from Soviet republics, short on hard currency, would have the crew sneak out in the middle of the night just before the vessel was to leave dry dock and fill the potable water tanks from the fire hydrants. It was free water, something they'd have to pay for once they were docked wharfside, and it often made the vessels so heavy the D9 pusher couldn't shove them out of the dry dock and back into the water. Then the foreman would complain about the weight and the captain would deny everything and there'd be a stalemate, the vessel building up day charges, all work stopped dead, until finally someone relented and drained enough of the water out of the tanks so that the ship could finally be shifted.

“If they only took half their tanks, we could just shove them out, no problem,” Glenn said. “You'd know it if you were driving the dozer, you'd feel the weight of it and all, but no one would say nothing. But everybody's got to be greedy. Everyone's got to go whole hog, have more than their fair share, take two handfuls of everything every single time. That's life.”

Keith didn't say anything for a moment.

When they reached the gatehouse, Glenn's green pickup was waved straight through. He pulled into the employee parking, stopping the truck. Glenn pulled the keys out of the ignition, tossed them up in the air and caught them again. Then he reached across with the keys in his open palm, held them in front of Keith and smiled wickedly.

“Want to borrow the truck?” he said. “Or have you gotten that out of your system by now?”

Keith didn't answer, and he made no effort to get out either, his arms still and heavy and hanging at his sides. “Where did you . . .” he started, but Glenn cut him off quickly.

“There's stuff you don't really want to know, so just don't ask,” Glenn said. “There are a lot of places in a ship that get closed off and then never get opened up again, Keith. You know that. Means there are a heckuva lot of places where no one's ever going to look. A boat looks pretty little out there all alone on the ocean, but it's pretty damn big inside, full of nooks and crannies.”

Keith still didn't move, his hands now in his lap, fingers moving against each other. “You gotta understand. It wasn't . . . She . . .” Keith said, and then stopped. “Bold as brass, she was. Right there on McKay. I just stopped to ask if she was looking for someone and she climbed right into the truck. Like she knew the game.” He looked down at his hands. “We drove down here. I brought her under the overpass there where it's good and dark, backed in up behind the pillars. You know, out of the way where no one's going to see you. Things got carried away. I was telling her what I wanted and she just went crazy. I thought we had a deal, I thought we were going to do it right there, and then she said she wasn't like that, and she was trying to get out of the truck, and then she was out and running.”

He stopped talking, looking down at his hands in his lap, looking at them as if they belonged to someone else. He turned his hands palms up, looking at the legacy of scars from cuts and marks that cut across the pads of his fingers and the heels of both his hands. Work scars.

Glenn shoved him with his shoulder, trying to get his attention. With that, Keith started talking all over again. “I just wanted to talk to her, to try and calm her down. I got past her and then put it in reverse, tried to cut her off just so we could talk. It's so fucking hard to see anything backing up with that big camper top on there, and I caught her with the bumper, drove the truck and her right up against a telephone pole. Didn't even feel it until I hit the pole, too. And it was over like that. I got out to see if there was anything I could do, but . . .” Keith's voice trailed off. “I was on Water Street then, lights on up and down the street, like there were people awake everywhere. I mean, anyone could have come out and they would have seen it all.

“You and your damned broken mirrors,” he said. “You can't see anything in that piece of junk. It shouldn't even be on the road.”

Glenn's voice went hard. “So you're saying it's my fault now? Somehow it's all my fault for not fixing a mirror I never use anyway? It's my fault, for lending you the truck when you asked me for it?”

Keith sighed heavily, slumped down against the door, the vinyl hard and slick in the cold. “No. That's not—”

But Glenn cut him off. “You call me, you tell me you've got a problem, and I come and help, no questions asked. Then there's a dead body in the back of my truck—a dead girl—and you're a mess, you can't even tell me what happened till now, and I take care of it for you. All of it. And it's my fault?”

“No, no,” Keith said. “I didn't mean that. It's just that, well, someone's going to be asking questions, and eventually someone will say they saw something . . .”

“Well, if anyone asks about any of it—and they won't, you can be certain they won't—but if they do, you just say that you were with me,” Glenn said. “And I'll tell them that we were together, that we were downtown having a couple of beers, and we walked back up to your place together. Simple as that. ‘Truck in the driveway all night long, officer. Someone must be mistaken, officer. 'And forget about it, Keith. You can just owe me. For all of it.”

He got out of the truck and then he waved at Keith to come out as well. Keith didn't move.

“She'll just be gone, okay? There's nothing to even connect her to you. Not one single blessed thing.”

Keith reached up, his arm incredibly tired, and opened the door. You don't know it all, he thought.

Glenn didn't know that in the rush to get out of the truck, the girl had left her small dark purse and wallet behind on the seat, that Keith hadn't found it until he had already rolled her body over the tailgate into the bed of the truck and climbed back inside the cab. Glenn also didn't know that the small purse was at Keith's house, buttoned up beneath the insulation and behind a small, square piece of wallboard near the heater, a piece of wallboard that was just waiting to be fastened in place with a handful of drywall nails. And Keith could only imagine what Glenn would think about that, if he knew.

They walked across the yard and into the low, corrugated steel building where the men changed and where the small lunchroom was, plastic chairs and hard-topped and chipped Formica tables that had been there for longer than any of the workers.

Keith and Glenn were standing in front of their lockers, the same dark green side-by-side steel lockers they'd had for years, shouldering themselves into their overalls, before Glenn spoke again. Keith would later remember every single word Glenn said, hearing the simple structure of the sentence, the intonation, and he would remember thinking that Glenn's words were too carefully precise to be accidental. That he was almost calculating in the way he set it all up.

“Your Evelyn, she's still quite the looker, isn't she?”