The Glass Harmonica (23 page)

Instead, she cut down beside Albert Carter's, heading for the back laneway so that she would come up behind her own house and in through the back door. The back door was always unlocked, so there would be no fumbling with keys, just the quick rush through the door, turning and slamming it home. She knew the rules and so did they: once inside she'd be safe, and they'd all melt away like water. Chances were they'd never even mention it again, like it was something as simple as a game gone wrong once the sharp anger of the chase faded.

It was, she thought, her best chance.

Except that, at the back of his house, Mr. Carter had blocked off the gap between the houses. Blocked it off right before the lane, a new ragged fence just a couple of feet long there, built out of rough lumber. Even in the dark, half lit only by the street light out front, she could see the crazy pattern of shiny nails sticking out through the wood in all directions where Carter, no carpenter, had pounded them through, missing the fence stringers so that the wood had spines everywhere, like some armoured prehistoric beast. No way to climb over, not from that side, and there were already heavy feet coming down the gap behind her from the front of the house, and she knew there wasn't time to carefully climb the fence, no way to pick her way past the metal teeth.

So Jillian stopped and turned around.

It was dark, but she recognized a few of them. Ronnie Collins and Brendan Hayden. The Chaulks, out of breath and gasping for air, not used to running, especially Murray. Twig, as rangy as his nickname suggested, thin, long arms and legs, standing there as if he was waiting for instructions. Somewhere nearby, probably, Chris Wheeler too, or Larry Hayden—not participating, but always aware.

“Okay,” Jillian said, her arms at her sides, hands in fists. “You caught me. So what now?”

Ronnie was out in front of the other teenagers, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him. Then she felt his hands on her wrists. A part of her was afraid, another part resigned, a voice saying let's just get this over with already. She wondered how Sam was, whether he was still out there bleeding, unconscious or worse.

“So you like it when they're from away, do you? Or is it just their money you like?” Ronnie said.

“Come on, Ron,” Brendan said. “It's bad enough already. The cops are going to be here any minute.”

“Shut up, Brendan. Get out to the front of the house and keep your eyes open. You saw what happened to that guy—you want to be next?” Ronnie turned halfway towards Brendan, still holding Jillian's wrists, but Brendan was moving back down towards the front of the house. “You'll have your turn.”

High up on a fence on the other side of the laneway, right down at the back edge of the property line, Larry Hayden was perched on the top of a garden shed, his eyes narrow in the dark, looking over the fence at the group of people and already thinking about getting away. Through the back window of the house, he could see Albert Carter walking back and forth through the light, carrying tools. Larry could see Brendan at the front in the gap between the houses, the long, narrow gap lit by one lone street light out on McKay Street, the dark bunch of the other four people silhouetted against the street light, moving like cut-out characters but with their actions absolutely clear.

There wasn't any sound at all from between the houses. Off to his right, a dog barked a few sharp warning barks and then stopped. It was the kind of night when the air hangs still and wet, like sweaty clothing, and sounds seem to come from far away, cleanly divorced from their source.

No noise from between the houses still, but the motion of the cutout shadows brutal and sharp.

2
McKay Street

ROBERT PATTEN

JUNE 30, 2006

T
HEY SAY
you're not supposed to feel anything, but that's bullshit, because I could feel the whole damn thing, the moose still alive or dying or whatever and he was all the way inside the car with me then, kicking around through the back of my seat, flopping my head around like a fish in there, and I kept wanting to yell, “Fuck you, just hold fuckin' still and we'll do something about this,” and I'm sure that was when most of the damage was done.

And there was plenty of damage done. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

There's a big curve on the Trans-Canada Highway down near the Avondale access road, see, just a big curve like so many others, and it's tailor-made for moose down there, high ground looking out over a couple of ponds and a big long stretch of flooded bog. I'd even been in there trout fishing a couple of times, down where the beavers had it all blocked, all the hardwood cut out and dragged into the water and the beavers even starting in on the softwoods because they'd finished up everything else already.

The woods were so full of moose sign when I'd been in there fishing—crap and footprints and everything else all over the place—so much sign that you couldn't help but keep looking around just in case there was a bull moose standing right there behind you, thinking that he was lonely and you were available.

It's tight spruce and fir in there, with the occasional big lonely birch left, but just a solid wall of fat grey trunks and fallen snags all over the place, windfalls mostly, rough terrain to cross because there's peat bog-holes all around. And when you're not scrambling over a snag, you're toppling headfirst into something else with one of your feet up to the knee in soft bog.

The moose are on the move in the mornings and evenings, because they feed in the valleys and they like to rest up on high ground. Out near the highway there, it was moose trails all over the place, they just shrug their way through any small trees, their routes meandering through the woods in all directions, big oval prints pounded right down into anything soft, clear as a bell, like they were left there deliberately.

And I was on my own in the car coming back from Clarenville, the Doe Hills already well behind me and the sunset out behind me too, and up there I had the long shadow of the car cast out in front like unexpected company on all the downhill stretches, daring me to try to catch it. Every single thing all around was lit up with the orange of the sinking sun, and I was thinking that it was a Friday night and I'd be able to get back into town in an hour or so, the road wide open and dry, all the traffic coming the other way, people pouring out of the city for the Easter long weekend. Me in a white rig with potato-chip company logos all over the outside, Robert Patten, a manufacturer's agent for a snack food company. We used to kid around at the warehouse that if there was salt all over the outside and you could eat it and it was downright unhealthy, we were probably responsible for selling it to you.

And by Avondale, it was all of a sudden cutting down towards full dark, just at the point when there's really a difference between high beams and low beams on the pavement out in front of you, and I was rocketing down a long, swinging curve to the left, knowing the road so well that I was already getting set for the big pullback in the other direction under the access bridge, caught between the guardrails that kept the cars from going off the road and down into the culvert.

And he came up out of a little dirt road there on the right, right where campers sometimes set up on the edge of a pond, little more than a widening in the brook, really, and he came up fast through the one small gap in the guardrail.

As quick as that.

A big moose, a big slab-sided, fast-moving bull moose, fifteen hundred pounds of solid animal, and he was on his way across the highway before I even had a chance to think more about it than, “There you are.” Then, “Of course you are,” the brakes already right to the floor, because where the heck else would he be going, and where else would a moose be more likely to be?

And all the planning—what a waste of time that turned out to be.

I mean, you can't be on the highway in Newfoundland all the time and not expect to see plenty of moose, not expect to eventually have to make a split-second decision about what to do. You have to plan and prepare and wonder, especially when you've come up on the wreckage of a few moose–car collisions, the kind of wreckage that you'd expect from a car hitting a block of meat that weighs more than a ton.

The experts say aim for their backsides, because moose move forwards at different speeds but don't ever back up. Aim at their backsides and then you're supposed to be guaranteed at most a glancing blow, one that makes sure they won't be coming through the windshield or flipping up and landing on your roof. A huge stupid animal standing on four thin stick-like legs, just waiting to topple onto your car roof and fold it down onto you in a great big bowl.

And I'd seen plenty of moose through the years, even nicked a yearling male with my passenger-side mirror once, and I'd had close calls where they barrelled up out of the ditch and onto the pavement with no notice whatsoever. But never as close as this one.

In the end, I didn't get a chance to try to decide where I wanted to hit my moose. At 120 kilometres per hour, there wasn't really time for that kind of decision.

No decision at all, really. I just hit him.

One moment, no moose, the next, all moose, and all over me.

I was driving the best and newest of the three little company SUVs, the only one with working four-wheel drive for snow, because at thirty-five, believe it or not, I was the senior guy by then. In sales, you're always moving on to the better commission and no one ever holds it against you. That's just business. As it was, the level of my hood was right above knee level for a moose.

And really, that's what you don't want.

I saw brown fur in the headlights, and immediately after I hit him, he was past the headlights and into the windshield and then I didn't see anything at all.

My brother Tony is a mechanic, and when I went in to see him at lunch one day, he showed me a van he was working on, an auction purchase by the garage owner after it hit a moose, the animal coming right in through the windshield. Just a little project for Tony to fix up in his down time, so the owner could sell it off in the classifieds later without ever bothering to mention that it had been an insurance write-off. A nice sideline for the ethically challenged.

Inside, there were tufts of torn-off moose fur on every projecting point: on the knobs for the windows, on the stump of the rear-view mirror, on every single seat belt mount from front to back. On the headrests.

My brother told me that particular moose had finally stopped moving when it fetched up solid on the inside of the hatchback at the very back of the van, after it smeared its way over every single seat for the entire length of the vehicle. That the wildlife officers had opened the back of the van and the dead moose had fallen straight out onto the pavement, like someone had brought along a big meaty suitcase they hadn't secured very carefully.

The RCMP officer who came in to see me at the hospital said I'd been in “a trademark moose/vehicle accident,” and he slapped his black notebook closed when he said it, like he was disciplining an inattentive student. “Nothing you could have done about it probably. Just bad luck.”

Small consolation, that. Especially with the way he left the “probably” just hanging out there, like there was always the chance it was all my fault after all.

The moose slid straight across the hood when I hit him, breaking in through the windshield with his back and then sliding right over me into the back seat. Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Moose. Make sure your seat belt's on—mine was, and that didn't make anything any easier.

The moose was panicked and dying and trying to get away, and it started kicking out wildly, its hooves tearing out the ceiling of the van, tearing into the seats. The police officer showed me pictures of it, sure I'd be interested. The hoofs were tearing into me—into my back and neck, while I was safely pinned in place by my seat belt and all the bent metal.

And three other cars stopped right after the accident, even before the police got there, but the drivers couldn't even get near me until the moose was finally dead and not jerking around anymore.

They needed a tow truck. Not just for my car, but to haul the moose carcass back away from me, and I could smell blood and shit and blown-apart moose guts for most of the time I was awake. I was slipping back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness. Luckily, the consciousness part didn't continue when they were taking the car apart to get me out.