The Glass Harmonica (9 page)

Ron wondered what the drunk driver had done to earn a spot in a cell with a murderer. It must have been something good, he thought. Maybe the guy was mouthy on the first day in: whatever else the guards were, they certainly didn't have short memories. You piss them off, Ron thought, and every other prisoner in for a weekend sentence would sign the book and be let out because the prison was full—and you'd find yourself at the end of a hall next to someone high on smuggled meds who spent the whole night bouncing off the inside of his cell like he was a rubber ball or something.

Ron found it funny that the pudgy little drunk driver wouldn't look at him, even when Ron tried to force him to talk. The guy just made himself as small and nondescript as he could on his bunk for almost every moment he spent in the cell.

Too many nights watching
The Sopranos
or
The Godfather
, Ron thought. Too many movies.

Sometimes he'd hear the drunk driver crying at night, and he couldn't imagine how the guy could spend so much time feeling sorry for himself. One night the guy said something like, “Someone like me's not supposed to be in here,” and Ron found the whole idea so funny that he almost laughed out loud. He'd already learned that, if you listen to them talk, everyone in jail is innocent.

“You and me both, buddy,” Ron had said, but his cellmate only looked carefully at the wall and pretended not to hear. Ron understood looking at the walls: they were heavily coated in thick blue paint, but get close enough and you could find spots where earlier prisoners had scratched messages right into the cinder block, carefully etched reminders scribed with unbent paper clips.
Fight Back
, a message near Ron's head said, but the leg on the
a
was thin and filled with paint, so Ron read it as
Fight Bock
and spent the nights imagining Bock and getting ready to fight him.

A couple of days after he talked to her on the phone, at a bail hearing that his lawyer told him was just a formality—“No way they're letting you out,” the lawyer had said, and closed his briefcase like a door slamming—Ron had seen Liz leaving the courtroom with one of the cops, a lanky fellow named Ballard who'd been one of the guys in the room when they had first questioned him. Ballard had thick dark hair and a bushy moustache and, when he occasionally used it, a deep, flat voice where the lack of inflection made it sound like the police officer didn't believe anything, not even his own words. His questions didn't sound like they had question marks.

Ron wasn't sure if Ballard was an investigating officer or just a supervisor. He seemed to be there whenever they brought Ron into the interview room, a coil notebook open in front of him on the table in the back of the small room. Ballard only took a few notes, and Ron couldn't remember seeing the officer blink or look away. He had a big square head that was almost set right into his shoulders, his neck practically invisible. Sometimes he'd step into a gap in the questioning and throw out one flat, expressionless sentence, and Ron was never sure whether he was supposed to answer it or just accept it. Other times Ballard would get up for no apparent reason and leave the interview room. And every time, a few minutes after he did, the interview would end, the other two police officers would turn off the video camera on its tripod, and it would be back down to the police cells to wait for the prison van to make its trundling tour around the city, picking prisoners up from the police station, the lock-up and the courts.

At Ron's bail hearing, Ballard sat in the back of the court, not saying a word, his eyes flat and gathering. Ballard and Liz weren't even sitting together—that didn't mean anything, Ron thought—and Ballard's face hadn't changed when Liz said her piece from the witness box.

And, Ron thought, what a piece that had been.

Liz had somehow made herself look even smaller up there on the stand, made her voice tremble like she was afraid, stopping and looking down a lot. At first it was short answers, only a few words at a time, the Crown chiding her along like he was trying to pull the story out of her piece by piece. For Ron, it was like watching an accomplished actor on stage. He almost believed he was listening to a completely different person than the Liz he knew.

Once, she even built a shuddering, almost full-stop sigh right into the middle of a sentence, and Ron knew every single man in the room—even the judge—was somehow leaning towards her, ready to protect her if something suddenly happened. Like they could rip their shirts right open and the big Superman
S
would be there on their chests, Ron thought. Every one of them like John Wayne in an old movie, waiting to say, “Need a hand, little lady?” while knocking him down and putting a few boots in for good measure.

He wanted to jump up then, jump up and shout that Liz wasn't really like that at all, that she was just saying whatever they wanted her to say, but his lawyer seemed to realize what was about to happen and looked across at him, shaking his head, the motion keeping Ron in his chair. It was good advice. Whenever Ron moved the least little bit in the prisoner's box, it was like the air in the courtroom changed, the sheriff 's officers leaning in slightly towards him. They looked almost as if they were swelling up inside their white shirts, getting ready for trouble, and everyone in the room, from the lawyers to the clerks, seemed to react to their cue.

It was like magic, he thought: every single thing Liz said was true, yet when you took it all together, none of it was. It was like things had all been taken out of order and then rearranged to reach a different and specific conclusion, and when Liz was finished talking, Ron sat in the prisoner's box for a moment, stunned, not completely sure whether or not he was supposed to applaud.

Then, when it was Ron's turn on the stand, briefly, his words turned to ashes before he could get them out properly. The judge was looking down at the desk in front of him. He didn't seem to notice Ron was speaking, and immediately refused bail, banging his gavel once before standing up in a swirl of black robe and red sash. He left the court without speaking another word.

It was when he was getting his handcuffs put back on that Ron was suddenly completely certain that Liz was involved with Ballard, that at least one other person in the courtroom probably now knew all about orange juice and faked shyness and sharp, savage teeth.

Ron knew Liz. He just knew.

He knew the truth from the way she kept cutting in close next to Ballard, knew at once that she was keeping an orbit too small and proscribed to be anything but deliberately gravitational. Her hands didn't actually touch the police officer, but at the same time she came carefully close, close enough that, watching, Ron could remember the delicate thrill of those hands, a feeling on his skin that involved both warmth and something like a gentle, constant vibration.

The door closed behind them while the sheriff 's officers were pulling him down out of the prisoner's box.

He could imagine the sound of her panting in Ballard's arms, and tried hard to shake the sound from his head while the sheriff 's officers pulled him back to the holding cells and the other inmates waiting for the van to haul them back to the prison. He cut up his knuckles by pounding his cuffed hands slowly and repeatedly against the cinder-block walls, blood appearing in stripes on the paint until the other inmates started yelling, afraid of what might happen if he hurt himself seriously. Then the sheriff 's officers came in and knocked him down, cuffing his hands behind his back instead. They left him lying face down on the floor of the big cell, unable to stand or sit until court ended for the day and the van finally came. The other men in the holding cell stepped around him and over him, staying away from his head as if he were a big sleeping dog that might wake up and all of a sudden decide to swing its head around and bite whatever it could reach.

Back in the prison, days later, when Ron finally had a visitor, when he was called up to the small room and sat down at the empty table and was told “No contact, hands or feet,” it turned out to be someone from a different range in the prison, someone from general population.

His father.

“Called in a couple of favours,” Tony said, shrugging. He was sitting across from Ron, the room so narrow his knees were almost touching Ron's legs despite the rules. The guard against the wall, watching. “Lots of people get their start working with the city—firefighters, guards, cops, everyone.”

And then Tony sat silently across from him in the blue-painted room as Ron tried—and failed—to find the right words.

“It wasn't . . . I didn't mean to . . . It was like it was all out of my hands the whole time,” he said. “I was there, and I was doing it, and it was like there was no deciding at all. Like there was nothing I could do to stop it, even if I'd wanted to.”

Then Ron stared hard across at his father, a challenging expression on his face, daring his father to say anything. Instead, he was startled to see Tony looking straight back into his eyes, with something close to a half smile that seemed to be sad, resigned and understanding all at the same time, as if nothing he had said had been news to Tony at all.

Ron was suddenly overwhelmed by his father's familiar smell and the look on his face, and it was like he was five years old all over again, holding on tight and trusting his father to make it all stop.

“Can you fix it, Dad?”

Ron couldn't believe at first that he was even saying the words, but he couldn't believe he was crying, either. This won't happen again, he thought, willing the tears to stop, feeling them running hot down his face.

Ron could see Tony shaking his head.

“There are some things you can't just fix,” Tony said. “Believe me.”

107
McKay Street

KEVIN RYAN

JULY 14, 2006

F
EBRUARY
had turned to summer when Kevin Ryan first saw the yellow rubber gloves. His first impression, there in the dark, though, was neither that they were yellow nor that they were rubber.

The gloves stood out under the dark blue sky and the orange of the street lights as if they were brilliant white and perfectly smooth: for an instant they seemed almost disembodied, floating there in the air, because the rest of the old woman's clothing was so dark. She was bent unnaturally, as if her waist was too high, so that she seemed more like a moving pile of clothes than like a person.

He saw her from a distance, while he was walking home from a downtown bar, one too many beers in him, unable to resist it when the bartender spoke to him, even if it was only to ask, “Another?” He was walking slowly, revelling in the sheer absence of people on the street. Except for the headlights of occasional cars sweeping over him, he felt wonderfully, perfectly alone. Except for her.

She had a rake, and she was reaching along the gutter, raking the soaking wet and blackened leaves towards her feet. “You've got the red car,” she said carefully.

Kevin Ryan nodded, and then, realizing that he'd be hard to see in the darkness, answered “Yes” as well.

“I've seen you,” she said. “Seen you leaving. You're up for work early in the morning.”

“Pretty much,” Kevin said.

“Here,” the woman said, handing him the rake. “You get them. I can't reach that far.”

The handle of the rake was wet and slick with black fragments of rotten leaves. As Kevin started to rake up the overwintered and oily-wet mess, he saw the woman bend down and start to pick up wet handfuls of them, stuffing them into a garbage bag. He thought the only real word he could use to describe her was
thick
. Every part of her he could see was stout, so that it seemed as if every joint bent only with the application of a steady and determined force. As she moved up and down, back and forth from the gutter, he got small glimpses of her face in the glow from the street light: snapshots, he thought, or perhaps single frames of a movie. The light caught her only in flashes—the tip of her tongue in the corner of her mouth, overlong eyelashes around black, bead-like eyes surrounded by leathery wrinkles—so that it seemed as if she were a collection of constituent bits, more a collage than a face.

“There are two girls living in your basement,” she said, her face at that point partially turned away from him, the words careful and distinct.

“Yes. Heather and Claire.”

“They're too loud late at night,” the woman said, turning back, her mouth small and disapproving as it shaped the words.