The Glass Harmonica (5 page)

Ted smoothed it over with the homeowner, told him “it was clear it was the driver's fault” and that the city's insurance adjuster would be by in the morning, and that accidents happen but “you wouldn't want us to just stop clearing the snow, now, would ya?” because Ted was good at that kind of thing, the words pouring out of him like it was some kind of heavy syrup, made thicker by the cold.

Ted had motioned at him to back the big truck out of the yard, and the last thing Tony saw as he pulled away from the curb was Ted shaking his head, as if he'd been asked to discipline a particularly unruly child.

Management had looked real hard at Tony's hours then, and cut him back sharply when they realized he was well up over seventy-five hours some weeks, and if he had been driving transport truck, he knew they would have pulled his logbook at some inspection station and written him up for not taking the time to get enough sleep. And that pissed him off even more because, he thought, rules just don't understand.

“Things are getting so expensive,” Helen told him when his pay-cheques came and went. “The prices just keep going up. I don't know how we're going to keep up if the union doesn't get you guys a raise this year.”

Even with the cut in hours, Tony drove most nights that winter, the metal scrape of the snowplow blade often leaking into his dreams while he slept restlessly through the light of the days, the curtains never able to hold back all the light. He liked the nights, especially liked the early mornings when the colour was just leaking into the horizon in a blue so pale it looked almost like grey. Then, as dawn got closer, Tony would see the big upturned bowl of the sky brightening, and even when he saw occasional faces drawn to windows by the sound of the heavy plow, it was still like he was the only real person alive, cutting through the fresh and trackless snow on the only necessary errand in the world.

Out under so much sky, the truck seemed to get smaller and smaller, a tiny creature depending on the brute strength of its back legs to push ahead through the snow. It was the best time to forget everything else, a time when it seemed as though the only world that truly existed was framed by the inside of the cab of the truck, when time itself was measured not in hours but by the metronome of the snow-shrouded parked cars the plow passed along either side of the road, by the corners you cut wide, swinging down empty side streets and flinging the heavy, curling wave of snow and slush up onto the curb.

The universe was self-contained and well drawn then, complete and completely under control, Tony thinking of himself as being as regular a cog as the tiny gear he imagined turning every single second hand on every single clock in the entire world. And that tick gently tocking ahead specifically under his hands.

It was, he was sure, just about the only thing that was under control.

On evenings when he wasn't working—evenings that were few and far between—he'd sometimes go down to the bar with Helen, one block over and three blocks down to a quiet downstairs pub with a single pool table and a dartboard that no one ever used, even though the light over it was carefully angled to throw the yellow and black wedges of the board into high relief.

The regulars all knew her there—sometimes Tony thought they might know her better than he did. It occurred to him that she was a regular at the bar herself, and for a single flashing moment he envied her that, envied her the ability to have a particular place where she clearly fit. Tony was keenly aware that he didn't fit, no matter what he did: he could watch hockey on the big bar television, drink a pint of beer and make small talk, but it was always like the people on either side of him tolerated his presence and his attempts at conversation, but little more. He felt strangely angular away from the big smooth steering wheel, square peg and round hole, so he said little and watched more, his eyes catching the ranks of bottles along the bar, the soccer towels they'd found somewhere and hung from the ceiling, the long row of draft beer taps.

But Helen?

She'd come in with him and then shift her weight sideways onto the stool closest to the pool table, call out to the bartender and wave, and she'd drink club soda, just club soda, and play the machines, the bright lights playing off her face and making strange-coloured, two-toned shadows, like clouds moving quickly through the shafts of sun lighting her face.

As she concentrated, it gave Tony a chance to just stare, and he was overtaken by a simple confusion, as he always was, staring at her: how had they even ended up married? But that too was only half of it. A bigger piece was the question of why she'd ever agreed to have him.

Even now, in her early fifties, Helen was a strikingly beautiful woman, high, sharp cheekbones still, wild, curly hair more restrained than brushed, and comfortably able to smile in a way that just made her face lapse straight into beauty. Tony wondered if, as a teenager, she had practised that smile in front of a mirror, perfecting just how much of her teeth to show, letting her eyes widen slightly at the same time in a distracting, alluring way that almost always made you fall straight in, even if you sensed all along that her expression just might be a deliberately planned and even mercenary trick.

But he had asked her to marry him, and she had improbably said yes, both of them barely into their twenties, and they'd managed all of it up until now: one child, a boy who got into more trouble than seemed possible, then that same boy moving away, and finally the sudden death of her father, Mike, of a heart attack, right at the top of the stairs beside the bathroom.

It seemed to Tony, although he'd never said it out loud, that Mike had gotten up from his chair in the living room all of a sudden and decided to head straight up towards heaven, or wherever it was he went, making the choice to slip right out of his body exactly at the point where he ran out of stairs and could climb no higher inside his skin.

Perhaps it was the expression on the dead man's face that made Tony think that was what had happened, because he'd been in the kitchen when he heard the thump of the old man falling, and had run up the stairs and turned his body over in the narrow hallway. When he did, Mike Mirren didn't look surprised or frightened or in pain or anything like that, not like any of the clichés Tony had been led to expect. Mike Mirren's mouth had been set in a straight, purposeful line, turned up slightly in the corners, as if he were setting out on a particularly involved task that might, in the end, turn out to be almost enjoyable. Like he had his eyes fixed on something in the distance that was on the very edge of out of sight, something both curious and perhaps a little funny.

Tony and Helen had managed to get past that, he thought, had gotten used to their son Ron quitting school right after grade ten and running around with a girl they hated, a girl named Liz who Tony imagined, for some reason, had a thread of vicious running right straight through her. He didn't trust Liz and he didn't really know why, but whenever he saw her, Tony caught himself watching her, watching her hands, trying to figure out just what it was she was up to.

Fact was, he thought, he and Helen had made it to a point where the days were ticking past themselves in an almost-constant comfortable state. They didn't even have to talk, because almost every single thing between them had been said at least a dozen times already. Even the arguments were old and familiar, less argument than stage play, both of them anticipating the other's next line.

Until the morning when Tony had been home and awake when the mailbox banged shut outside and he'd gone out to get the mail. And it had only been a couple of furniture flyers and one lone envelope with the electric bill. Helen always paid the bills, but Tony opened it simply out of curiosity instead of leaving it on the counter. And it was three months overdue by then, and there was a cut-off notice attached, the cut-off part printed in bright red.

Tony got a lot of stares from people the next day when he wheeled the big green city tandem dump truck into customer parking at the power company, filling two parking spots. He paid the entire overdue bill with cash, watching carefully as the woman behind the counter stamped the face of the bill with her date stamp and then initialled the payment. Watching until he was sure she had entered the payment into the computer in front of her.

He didn't mention to Helen that he'd paid the bill, but looking at her that night in the living room, he felt as if twin weights were conspiring to pull each side of his face downwards and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

That was only the first late bill. He started catching others when he could, overdue accounts threading their way into the mailbox, where he would quietly pay them too, with any cash he could gather up. He'd take a quick swing down McKay Street on the days he knew she was out, just long enough to climb down from the idling truck, rifle through the mail in the mailbox and climb back into the driver's seat again. But he didn't tell Helen, not even when he intercepted a bank statement showing the cash advances on their joint chequing account, and the size of the numbers took his breath away.

And more.

He hadn't even known that they had a line of credit, nor that it was already all spent by the time he discovered its existence. He just knew that it was in her hands, and that whatever it was, he wouldn't be able to ask. He also knew then that it didn't matter how many hours of overtime he managed to work. And he knew that he would have to find other ways to put money together.

First, it was a circular saw from the equipment locker, one of the battered old saws that travelled all over the city rolling around loose in the backs of different city trucks. Surprisingly, it didn't feel like he was crossing any sort of line by taking it: it didn't feel like anything at all, except simple, plain necessity—it was there, and he needed it. Tony noticed the saw in the open metal locker when he came off shift, and simply tossed it into the thin space behind the front seat of his pickup. He didn't think about it, really.

The guys on the gate were supposed to give personal vehicles a going-over for city supplies on the way out of the yard, but Tony knew they rarely came out of the gatehouse when it was raining. That morning, his old wipers could barely keep up, smearing back and forth across the windshield glass, and the guard on duty had just waved him through, newspaper up in front of him. But Tony checked the rearview mirror for blocks anyway, looking over and over again to see if a police car was pulling up behind him. When he thought about it later, it was the first and only time that he ever felt as if he had done anything even remotely wrong.

Soon he began to think that, in some ways, it was all their fault, because they really should have caught him then—because he was careless and impulsive, and because it was the very first time. And if he'd thought they would check the truck, he wouldn't have been able to do it at all.

But they didn't, and he did.

When he got home, Tony slammed the door behind him in the driveway and left the saw in the unlocked truck, and almost wished that someone from the neighbourhood would come along and take it. But no one did, and he got thirty dollars for the battered saw from a neighbour after he peeled off the inventory sticker and wire-brushed the city ID number away.

It was like he'd crossed a line he hadn't even really known he was crossing.

And each time, it got a little simpler. When he thought about it, he thought about the mechanics—not the stealing itself but how to do it. Pressure-treated lumber, steel-toed boots, power tools—he took all of it, and more. He learned things as he went, like the obvious fact that the newer a thing was, the easier it was to sell. Other things too—like the larger something was, the harder it was for anyone to believe it was actually stolen.

Once, at four in the morning with the guy in the gatehouse sound asleep, Tony had gotten out through the gate with one of the big-wheeled jackhammer compressors, right out in the open and hitched to the back of his pickup. He sold it to a guy who spray-painted it grey and sold it right away again as surplus, no questions asked, in another part of the province, and that was eight hundred dollars in quick cash, even if the compressor was worth thousands.

That time, Tony had been sweating driving away from the depot, sweating because it was just so obvious, and for the next three days he'd kept expecting one of the supervisors to call him up to the office “for a chat.” But no one noticed, at least not right away.

The street-repair program hadn't started for the spring season, and it was three weeks before the police even came to look into the theft, and when they did, they interviewed everyone on shift, including Tony. He feigned a kind of uninterested nonchalance, and it was almost as if that nonchalance rubbed right off on the two police detectives who came and sat and did interviews in the lunchroom.

They looked bored the whole time they talked to him, one of the officers, a tall guy named Ballard, fiddling with his coffee cup as he worked his way down the same list of questions they wound up asking everyone. The two policemen gave off an air like they felt they were being asked to investigate something that was far beneath them, like being asked to chase graffiti artists instead of busting up drug rings.

The police ended up being more interested in Wally Norman than anyone else, because it turned out that Wally had a record that no one knew anything about, some scheme from his twenties where he and his buddies used to go out to the airport and just grab random baggage off the luggage carousels and head for the door. If someone came up and stopped them, saying, “Hey, that's my suitcase,” they'd just hand it back and say, “Sorry, I've got one that looks just like it.”