The Glass Harmonica (17 page)

103
McKay Street

LEN MENCHINTON

AUGUST 12, 2005

I
T'S ALL
innocent enough, Len Menchinton thought. He was sitting outside on a sunny day, a full twenty-five years later. It's innocent enough, like watching girls on the street, as long as they don't catch you staring and get nervous or anything.

Innocent, because no one would get hurt, because no one really needs to know anything about it.

Most of all, not Ingrid. Because she would be hurt. Len was sure of that.

Ingrid would most certainly be hurt. But Ingrid was always hurt: Len thought she'd made a science of that long before he'd met her, that she had designed a way to hold her face that just made you think you had no choice but to do what she wanted, if for no other reason than to make that look go away. It had always been at the core of their relationship: he would do something, something unexpected, and her eyes would fill with that great disappointment, and Len would find himself falling all over the place to try to move things in reverse, to undo the damage, until finally she let it all wash from her face again like makeup coming off.

But this was different, this was something he felt he couldn't hope to escape. It started in May, when the first of the new leaves were coming out but the trees were still bare, still showing the neighbourhood through their branches in a way that would soon become impossible. It started with the laundry next door, hanging wet and embarrassed on the line for the very first time that season. Laundry: as simple as that. And he wouldn't have believed it if someone else had tried to convince him that it was true.

Len couldn't help thinking it was already an awkward time of year, a time when everyone seemed suddenly and sharply aware of the changes in their routines. The gardeners had already started in on the raw ground, but moving hunched over and with fast, darting motions, as if they always needed to be aware of the possibility of snipers and the probability of late and bitter snow. No broad garden hats and languid sweeps with the hedge trimmers here, Len thought. No teams of landscapers hired to put down easy soft-skinned annuals in even, regular rows that end up looking like fountains of floral plenty. No, this was emplacement gardening, digging foxholes and trenches and laying in the heavy work, turning compost and hauling fallen branches. Not for lightweights, not in a place where the weather seemed to delight in frustrating growth.

At the back of the yard, he saw a black and white cat with a red collar stepping carefully along the grass just inside the vertical grey palings of the fence, looking straight ahead with that kind of rapt concentration cats always find when they are homing in on prey, and it struck Len that the cat was learning the outdoors again for spring, just like he was.

It was the time when other people seemed to wear a constant look of mild surprise at the outdoors—a kind of blinking wonder that winter might be ending after all, a rediscovery that the world on the other side of the walls marvellously existed after the evil, cold wet of April. Nearby, at the rehab hospital, he had seen that they were even wheeling the patients out for a little bit of vitamin D, a few quiet minutes in the sunshine, Len thought, before heading back into the noise and echoes of the linoleum hallways—and what a tantalizing hell those few minutes outdoors must be.

Len liked to sit behind his house and look up the long, greening yard towards the back fence. It was a narrow yard, no more than fifteen feet wide at the widest point, but it was plenty long enough, three, maybe four times the length of the house, Len thought. He had an office administrator living on one side of him and a grocery store manager on the other. The office manager was Art Taylor and the grocery store guy went by the unfortunate name of Tinker. “That means I'm either the soldier or the spy,” Len would joke to friends, even though he already knew which one he was.

Private investigator
was what his card said, but what it didn't say was that he spent more than half his time trolling for shoplifters in chain stores, an unassuming-looking and small man with bright blue eyes, wearing the easy camouflage of a red-and-black-checked felt jacket.

He had developed a curious way of making himself seem almost invisible: people could stare straight at Len and then completely forget that they'd even seen someone, to the point that they'd swear they'd been the only ones in housewares or linens. And if they did manage to remember him somehow, they were almost always completely unable to describe him successfully. Asked what he looked like, they might approximate his height before stalling completely, unable even to pull up the colour of his hair. The trick, Len knew, was to always be looking away from them, and to never be spotted doing anything when anyone else was looking.

It was easy enough work, he thought, really just a matter of always keeping his eyes open, easy enough to keep both himself and Ingrid comfortable, the paycheques nibbling away at the mortgage every two weeks. The worst part was when there wasn't anyone stealing, the boring times when he spent his shift walking down the wide store aisles and fingering the fabric on men's pants he'd never buy, his eyes always set on “slightly distant” in case someone a few rows over was making off with underwear and bras.

And Len realized eventually that he liked the thieves better than the average shoppers. The thieves, at least, were interesting. He'd watched the shoppers long enough to develop a strange sort of disdain for them, an urge to always group them into two or three different types, like herd animals he was paid to look at over the fence and keep a constant eye on. There were the pilers, the pickers and the snubbers—they might as well have been the pigs and the chickens and the cows. The pilers with their perilously full carts, stuffed as if expecting the apocalypse; the pickers with one item, then another, then back to the first item again; and the snubbers, picking things up and tossing them down, bored and gum-chewing.

The thieves, now, they were different—they had a kind of purpose that set them apart, the need to grab and move and hope that no one was going to try to stop them. Sure, sometimes they'd try to run when Len put his hand on a shoulder and said, “Just a minute, please,” but for the most part they gave that up as soon as he had them cornered.

Once or twice he'd known them to make it as far as the parking lot, but that was rare. When they'd been caught, they were almost always immediately resigned, willing to sit quietly in the small office with the single door, the single desk and the single steady-eyed video camera, waiting for the police. Often they'd empty out the stolen merchandise from their pockets themselves, telling Len they'd never have thought he was security, not even for a minute. Telling him they hadn't even seen him, even when he'd been standing right behind them.

And each had a particular method. They'd even start explaining it to him: how they'd managed to squeeze their way into several pairs of pants, all different sizes, in one of the small dressing rooms, and how they'd already lined someone up at one of the flea markets to help them unload the stolen jeans on the weekend. They'd talk, that's one thing he'd learned. They'd almost always talk if he just stayed quiet, digging themselves in deeper with every single moment that the tape just kept on rolling.

Sitting out on his deck, Len thought that was the single most important thing he'd ever learned from the shoplifters: there are things you always do wrong when you get caught. Don't start explaining—let the empty spots in the conversation stay the way they were, empty. It's hard, he thought. People hate a vacuum, hate the waiting, feeling like they are somehow required to fill up the conversational space between themselves and someone else.

But admit nothing. Resist the urge to starting digging your own grave.

He kept that thought in mind, even made it into one of his rules—rules of which there were really only two. The second rule was just as absolute, and in its own way just as simple. It doesn't matter what you're arrested for, it doesn't matter how ludicrous and impossible and stupid the charge might be—hire the best lawyer you can, right away. Whatever it turns out that the lawyer is going to cost, it will almost always prove to be worth it. Bad lawyers will dig you into a hole faster than you can dig the hole yourself, he thought.

And don't wait to call—no one's going to change his mind and just let you go. No one's going to listen to you, feel sorry for you and just open the door—“Go on, buddy, you caught a break this time, everyone makes mistakes.”

Len couldn't believe how often people messed up the rules and called the first lawyer's phone number they came across. And he couldn't believe the way they always thought they'd be able to talk their way out of it. The police are just doing their job, Len wanted to tell the shoplifters every time, wanted to tell them before it was too late. It's just that their job is arresting people. Period.

From where he was sitting on his back deck, Len had a view up over the fence, and two yards over he could see Mrs. Purchase trundle out through her back door, down the grey-painted steps and into her yard. She was carrying a red plastic bucket, and Len knew that when she got to where she was going, she'd upend it, thump it down onto the grass and use it for a seat, her knees shot and her mind not that much better. May was almost the only time when he could see Mrs. Purchase clearly: there was a big silver maple in the back corner of the yard, and instead of just growing upwards in a big fan, it had spread out too, growing unexpected tufts of saplings up from the ground that all but blocked the neighbours' houses from view once the leaves came out.

He got a long-distance lecture over her fence from Mrs. Purchase about those maple shoots just about every year. “You should cut them back,” she'd shout. “They'll drain the energy away from the main trunk.” But Len could never get up his own energy enough to go back there with the brush hook and the saw. He didn't have the heart, either, the heart to go ahead and lop off all that hopeful, eager, questing life. He figured the tree had to know what it was all about, its natural impulse likely the best choice.

Instead, he watched the branches spread out every spring and summer, wondering at how the sticks seemed to be able to find every scrap of clear space to throw out their new leaves, filling in and grabbing every torn rag of sunlight. At how the tree could spread out underground and push up new growth like eager birthday candles, absolutely unaware that someone could be trundling along pushing a lawn mower, ready to cut everything right back to the quick. And how the tree would never learn about that, and keep sending the shoots up anyway.

Len waved to Mrs. Purchase as she stumped down her steps and she waved back, and he thought again that, every single year, she seemed a little more tentative. Age comes for all of us, he thought, stopping for a moment, remembering that he was not really that different from anyone else.

That was the other thing catching shoplifters had taught Len Menchinton, something else he thought about regularly: every single one of them thinks he's different, he knew, every single one thinks she's unique. They all think they can get away with stuff—believe that the bad things won't ever happen to them. Until they do. No one ever thought the store would prosecute—but the store
always
prosecuted. Charges every time: no excuses, no exceptions. How often had they sat there, right in front of him, their faces in their hands, snuffling, “This can't be happening to me.” With Len across from them, his eyes rolling because he was thinking, It sure can be happening to you, and actually, it is.

He knew that. Knew that bad things are all pretty much inches away from everyone all the time, just inches away and waiting for the day when you take your eye off the ball. Robert Patten, he'd lived down McKay Street almost his whole life. The guy had been driving a company car when he hit a moose on the Trans-Canada Highway. No more walking, no company car either. It can happen, Len thought, and it will happen—so no use crying about it.

Then Len saw Vernie Taylor come out of her house next door—well, he heard her, anyway. That's what I would have to say if I were asked under oath, he thought. Not that I saw her, even though I knew at once that she was there. Judges are sticklers for precision, and you can gain a whole bunch of credibility just by correcting yourself before anyone else in the court gets a chance to.

The Taylors' house was on the left and just a little bit shallower than Len and Ingrid's, so that the Taylors' yard was deeper, even though it ended at the same fenceline down in the back. What he heard, instead of saw, was the Taylors' door slamming, and then the thud of something being dropped heavily on the porch.

That's correct, your Honour, Len thought, practising his testimony even on his day off. That's what I heard. A distinct, clear thump.

You have to be confident in court, he thought. Precise. Direct. Stick to the true parts, and always keep your sentences short. Let the silences hang there, unfilled—because the silences are just a trick to make you start talking.

Len didn't stand up, didn't want Vernie to catch him staring. There's a regular diplomacy to neighbours and nearly shared backyards, he knew, a diplomacy that suggests that an immediate reaction to a neighbour's presence is never expected or welcomed. You have to ease yourself in at the edges, so that you're noticed obliquely.

Then he heard the sharp metal screech of the wheel on the far end of the clothesline, and Len realized that Vernie was hanging out the wash. The wash, he thought, and felt it like a solid beat in his chest.