The Glass Harmonica (2 page)

Mostly, I nurse a beer or two and tinker away, taking stuff apart and piecing it back together, working my way through the day, waiting for the kid with the newspaper and the mailman, even though there isn't much mail. Pension cheques, the electric bill, the occasional letter—everything you'd expect, but still I get a little jolt when I hear the lid drop back down after the postman goes by the door. Used to be around ten in the morning, but now it's not until after noon, and I'm not sure if they changed the route around or if we just have a lazy mailman. Guy's got a face on him like an old boot, makes me wish I had a dog just so the thing could bark loud inside the door and give him a start.

It's easier to work in the summertime: there's always a reason to pry the lid off the trim paint and see if it's set up solid yet, and I can get at the sides of the house to the outside plug, set up the ladder for the eavestroughs and things like that.

February, it's harder. Lots of things I should have done—lots of things Evelyn always wants done—but I leave stuff too long, and once there's snow in the air, there's a bunch of things that can't get done and just stare you in the face until May. Trim around the door that's primed, not painted, and no one would be able to see it from the street, but Evelyn can tell just from the difference in the shine—the primer flat white, the rest of the door frame semigloss—and I can imagine the look she'd get on her face if she noticed.

In February, sometimes you just make work for yourself. One day, I'd taken out a couple of big ice cream tubs full of stuff—you know, the extra screws and nuts and bolts and nails you end up with, scattered bits of metal and pieces of electrical gear, the screws that once held the washer in the crate it was delivered in, the latch and the hinges from the old gate, that kind of stuff—and I was sorting it out, figuring which pieces should go into each of the smaller tubs and boxes. There's a secret pleasure in it, really, like I'm the only one who knows the code. It's a bunch of junk, but I recognize the old brass pressure valve I took off the water heater when the tank blew ten years ago and Evelyn found a big puddle reaching out across the flat of the kitchen linoleum, and the knobs from the first television we ever bought. I thought they might come in handy somewhere. There are three or four of those fragile mercury switches from thermostats, the little glass containers where you tip 'em and the mercury flows over and completes the circuit. Holding them in my hands, I could almost smell the furnace coming on. Didn't feel right about throwing them out, and I saw a movie once where terrorists used them to trigger bombs. They should be wrapped in paper towel and put in a hard-sided box so nothing can shift and crush them like eggshells.

That's the kind of work that's good in February, when the days are short and it's bitter outside anyways. Pick up the right scrap of something and it can send you back to a summer years before, the way picking up a can of fungicide, that bitter dry-bones poisonous smell, reminds you of rose bushes.

The heater was cranked right up behind me, and I could feel the heat of it on the backs of my legs, the fan battering the hot air against me. After I got the heater, I read on the box that it had to be “two feet away from any combustible surface.” But two feet away really means one foot and someone just covering their ass. Two feet away from me and I wouldn't even be able to feel it, not the way you should feel heat right into your bones, and an old guy deserves a little comfort wherever he can find it.

When I started sorting, it was still light and it wasn't snowing yet, the sky that kind of slate grey that says the bad weather's already looming over you but it doesn't have the guts to just get on with it already. Weatherman had said there'd be snow, a fair amount of snow, and you could tell it by the traffic, by the way it had thinned right out, no one driving unless they really had to. Soon there'd be snow all over and you'd hear the taxis coming, spinning on their bad bald tires, engines revving too high with frustrated feet on the pedal.

I'd pile the bits in groups of similar parts, pick out the screws and nails and put them in their proper places, find the occasional unfamiliar scrap and dig around in my brain trying to figure out what it was and where it had come from. I'm not one of those people who goes around to yard sales and buys up tubs of other people's scrap—no, all of this was my own, so every piece had its own little history.

I don't know how long I was sitting like that when I realized all at once how foolish it would look from outside, an old man sorting useless scraps of metal and staring off into space like someone's reached in and shut his brain off completely. And the day had gone away into night, and the snow had come straight down the road in a wave, the wind trying each door on both sides of the street as it passed.

Even in the darkness the snow still has shape, whorls and columns and devils that build and fall away, and I lifted a corner of the small curtain on the window so I could watch the sheets and eddies of snow and try to decide if they're just passing squalls or the kind of snow that will fall all night, packing in tight against the front door. The kind I'd end up having to shovel, wondering each time if now was the time when my heart was going to simply pick up and just stop.

Across at 35 McKay, where the architect lives, there was a small foreign car—it's almost always foreign cars now—parked on the side of the road, its engine running, exhaust white, the headlights catching handfuls of blowing snow. There was someone in the front seat, but not the driver: the driver was out of the car and up at the front door, right in the architect's face. Strange guy, the architect, a nice-enough fella but sort of distant, as if he wasn't really talking to you as much as he was making fun of you back there inside his head.

Then, all at once, the driver from the car was hitting the architect, over and over, hitting him like some kind of crazy man, short, sharp, accurate punches. Hard punches, too. I've thrown one or two punches like that myself, so I could imagine the jarring force of them, the way, when you connect with your fist, it travels all the way up to your elbow like an electric shock.

And the architect—I wish his name would come to me—wasn't swinging back at all, in fact he was barely getting his hands up in front of him as the other guy whaled away, and as soon as that, the architect was down in the snow and the other guy had picked up a snow shovel from next to the door. And watching it was sort of strange, like watching television or something, especially when the shovel blade broke off the handle and flew out into the street, more like a prop than a shovel. Then just the handle, up and down, but fast. I reached for the doorknob then, but my hand stopped before it closed around the metal—in fact, before it even touched the knob—so that it was half clutching at air.

And then the other guy was heading back for his car, and I ducked down because he was looking back towards our house, scanning the whole neighbourhood, and just before I got down below the edge of the window frame I saw it was the pizza guy, that Collins kid, I don't know his first name but I knew his father, lived down the street before he got fired from the city.

Maybe I should have done something before then, but a seventy-year-old man against some crazy young guy with a shovel? Besides, it was all over before I would have been able to get across the street anyway, and it was pretty obvious that the guy had to be dead. Not my job to get involved, two guys got a problem with each other—but no one wants to be left knocked out on the ground in a blizzard, either. You gotta deal with your problems, and you take care of your own—that's the way it's supposed to work. And then Evelyn was flicking the light on and off behind me like it must be bedtime, and you can tell that she's angry or pissed off or she's been calling for a while and I just didn't notice, because there's barely a second between each flash. Blink-blink, blink-blink, over and over again.

I knew, if I went in and told her, Evelyn would want me to call the cops. I know she would—but I don't like talking to the cops and I never have. I worry that they might have questions about why a guy would spend so much time looking out the door at his neighbours. No one wants to get a reputation as a busybody, after all. In my head, I could hear the way she'd keep at me about it, and I knew she wouldn't let go. But I also knew I'd end up telling her sometime anyway, because what else are you going to do?

I called them from the kitchen, but the truth is that the police hardly took me seriously, and it seemed like fifteen minutes or more before a police car nosed its way quietly through the snow. By then, the snow was coming down hard, and I could barely see the guy on the ground, just a hump in the snow like someone's put their garbage out the night before and now the garbage truck driver's never going to be able to find it. Snow coming down so fast that everything is new again right away. The cop got out and looked around for a minute, tried the front door at 35 and opened it, sticking his head in the door, slow and nonchalant, and I thought I was going to have to go over and show him where the guy was. But then he poked away in the snow next to the door and started talking on his radio right sharp. Then, in a big rush, there were cops all over, and two of them, plainclothes guys with big hands and sharp questions, came over to talk to me.

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.