The Glass Harmonica (4 page)

The pizza shop was hot and damp and spare: Louis had never bothered to put anything up on the walls, because there were only the three small red tables, and nobody ever sat at them unless they were waiting for takeout or buying a single slice. Down-in-the-mouth guys looking for a little warmth, the big pizza oven's heat going right into their cores until Louis pointed at the No Loitering sign and yelled at them to “shift their ass.”

Ron dumped the change onto the counter, spread it out. And it was not twenty-six at all—eighteen dollars, no tip, in fact three dollars short for the pizza in the first place.

“That's money you'll make up,” Louis shouted from the other side of the counter. Louis was a big man, all in white, and he had patches of flour on his forearms and his face. Ron knew from experience that the flour gathered anywhere Louis sweated.
Winter or summer, Ron knew, Louis sweated—only more in summer.

“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

A
LMOST
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.