The Glass Harmonica (8 page)
It was quiet in the front hall where the three of them were waiting, and then Vincent's father was coming down the hallway towards them fast, his arms in tight next to his sides, hands up high so that it looked like he was racing down the narrow hallway towards a fight. He had his coat on already, hands pushed angrily down through the sleeves so that, inside, the sleeves of his sweater were pulled up in bunches on his forearms. It didn't matter: five minutes after they got to work, everyone would be in the dark blue insulated coveralls and steel-toed work-boots anyway, hard hats perched on their heads like yellow cherries on sundaes, the dockyard logo on a rectangular patch right in the middle of their backs like they were small blue billboards swarming all over the latest ship.
“Come on then, Vincent, time to get going,” Keith O'Reilly said gruffly, as if Vincent had been the one holding them all up.
Vincent didn't say anything, knew better than to say anything, but he picked up his bookbag quickly, accepting a kiss on the cheek from his mother as he turned for the door.
“The three men, all heading out together for their shifts, hey, Vincy?” Glenn said, laughing.
Glenn was always laughing, Vincent thought, even when there wasn't anything funny to be laughing about. Vincent swung his school bag up over his shoulder, walking between the two men as they crossed the street. Vincent looked both ways, just the way he had been told, before he stepped off the curb. He noticed that Glenn didn't bother, as if a car hadn't been made yet that would dare to hit him.
On the other side of the truck, Vincent's father held the passenger door open, stood there as if trying to make up his mind, and then climbed into the cab of the truck himself, sliding into the middle of the bench seat next to Coughlin.
“You take the outside, Vincent. You're going to be getting out first anyway.”
“First in, last out, just like the contract says, hey, Keith?” Glenn said, slipping the truck into gear and pulling it away from the curb. As they drove, Vincent looked out the window and into the side mirror. It was starred and broken, several shards simply gone, as if someone had driven a fist into it as Glenn had pulled away. The truck mirror had always been like that. Vincent liked looking in it, liked looking at the way the different pieces broke up the view behind the truck, so that every single shard showed the world in a slightly different way, each one highlighting its own particular facet of the things they passed. His father noticed him staring at the mirror.
“Why don't you get that damned thing fixed, Glenn? Been broken forever,” Keith said. “Don't know how this thing passes inspection anyway.”
“Don't need it, do I? Besides, a new one's close on sixty dollars,” Glenn said. Then he laughed again, a dry little shallow laugh, like he was making a point. “Some people can get around just fine without it, and without hitting stuff.”
Vincent's father crossed his arms stiffly across his chest at that, glowered, and didn't say anything else.
“Lighten up, would ya?” Glenn said.
They drove in silence for a few minutes down the snow tunnel that was McKay Street. The city plows had been out overnight, turning big curved berms of slush and snow up against the sides of the parked cars on the road, the corridor so precise that it seemed like they were on a private road, a road built just for them. Vincent was watching the sun play off the rounded slush, the backwards curve made by the plow's blade now hardening into ice. He watched the way one line of bright sun seemed to run along ahead of the truck on the freezing bank, the reflection never getting any closer to them nor any farther away, the way the light made longer points on the top and bottom, so it was like they were following some simple, always-moving schoolbook drawing of the Star of Bethlehem.
“Foreman said we can work inside on the trawler if we want, or we can go back to the paint crew in the tanker. It's our pick,” Keith said. There were only two vessels in the yard, nothing else waiting or even scheduled to come in, and most of the short-timers had already been put on layoff for the rest of the winter. Keith had been complaining for a week about the two ships, wishing the yard was empty and that the whole crew could be on layoff for a little while. “Hate winter,” he'd mutter.
“We can be freezing cold outside, or inside in the warm and the whole day stinkin' of paint. That's pretty slim pickings,” Glenn said.
Vincent thought that the pair of words sounded just the way Glenn always talkedâ“slim pickings”âjust a couple of sudden words that didn't seem to mean anything at all on their own but that fit him perfectly. “Slim pickings”â“Fat chance”â“No way.” Not “No damn way” or “No fucking way” eitherâand Vincent had heard both of those before, from his father and from other men at the yardâbut just “No way,” and the way Mr. Coughlin said it, it sounded far more serious than anyone else could make it sound.
Glenn stopped the truck at the four-way stop and then turned onto Bond Street, passing the house he never seemed to be in, a narrow trench dug through the snow towards the front door like he felt the digging was hardly worth the effort. The back wheels of the truck slipped because the snow had melted and then frozen again overnight where it had run out in a long tongue just past the crosswalk.
The sky was flat white and still, all the blue bled out of it by winter and the latitude, the sunlight thin and distant and struggling to throw down any heat at all.
Vincent looked up at his father out of the corner of his eye. It looked like his father was going to say something else, but then it was like Glenn could read his mind. He gave a small shake of his head, raising both his eyebrows at once.
Glenn Coughlin, Vincent decided, had eyebrows that were far more bushy than any he had ever seen.
They drove in silence for a few more minutes, the streets still relatively empty, Coughlin taking the corners wide and fast, his side of the truck often in the other lane. When they met another vehicle, it was the other car or truck that acquiesced and coughed up the right-of-way. Glenn had no compunctions about sitting in the street, nose to nose with someone else and at a dead stop, until the other driver changed his mind and let Glenn go on.
Then the pickup was in front of the school. It was an old school, a big, two-storey brick building with too-large windows, and there were scores of other children spinning up the sidewalk towards the front door like busy ants. Down among narrow streets of row houses, each house seemed to be disgorging more kids onto the streets every moment, the narrow sidewalks blocked with snow, and every child was producing his or her own tiny engine-like plume of steam as they moved in masses along the curb.
Vincent opened the truck's door, and as he did, Coughlin reached across in front of Keith and ruffled Vincent's hair. “Work hard,” he said. “Do your best. Get good grades. You'll probably end up down on the dock with us anyway, though.”
And no, I won't, Vincent thought even then. Vincent liked geography best of all, because it was the study of everywhere else. A study that made McKay Street, and even St. John's, the smallest possible speck.
Glenn took his hand away by giving the boy's head a sudden little shove and then a sharp, harsh knock with two of his knuckles, as if suggesting any sort of kindness was a passing thing.
“See ya, Vincent,” his father said quietly.
“See ya, Dad.”
Coughlin put the truck back into gear and was pulling away from the curb before the door was fully closed. Halfway down the block, the truck's horn gave a forlorn little toot, as if remembering something it had forgotten, but Vincent's hand was already on the big brass door handle to the school, and he barely bothered to look at the truck as it vanished downhill towards the harbour.
The tide of children surged and pushed their way in through the heavy door to the school, jostling all around him and carrying him in through the door like he was a chip of wood suspended in a current, the direction he was going to travel already decided upon by everyone else.
RON COLLINS
FEBRUARY 18, 2006
L
IZ TOLD RON
she was leaving their apartment the first time he managed to reach her on the prison pay phone. It was only a week after he'd been arrested, and it was as though every single thing about her had changed.
“I'm not really supposed to even talk to you, right?” she said, her voice tinny and distant through the earpiece of the phone, and he could imagine she was winding her right index finger in her hair while she said it. “I'm a witness.”
She said it like it was an important job she'd been individually selected to do, as if the term had a special and particular weight, like it was “I'm a doctor” or “I'm an engineer.” He remembered the way her voice sounded as she said it, remembered that tone and pitch for days.
The phone was pressed against his ear and he could feel the hard plastic circle of it against his skin, even though everything else around him had reduced in the same instant to a circle of grey, sparkling fog. Behind him, the voices of the other inmates were bouncing off the blue-painted walls in the long hallway, high and harsh, sharp and metallic and constantly in motion, but to Ronnie it seemed as if they were simply fading out of earshot with the impact of what she was saying.
“If I see you or talk to you or anything, you can be charged again. So it's for your own good, really, you not calling here anymore. Your mom's coming to get your stuff and she'll put it in the basement. And I had to sell the car, but I sent your parents half.”
Liz kept talking, but suddenly he wasn't listening, and instead was hopelessly picturing her naked in front of the refrigerator in their apartment, drinking orange juice straight out of the carton so fast that he could hear the sound of her swallowing, the liquid rushing down her throat urgently, like it was needed in some kind of immediate and elemental way.
And then he remembered the way she would close the fridge door and turn towards him, legs apart, one hand on her hip, not the least bit shy, wiping her lips with her other forearm. He wondered if that whole memory was at risk, if he was now the only one who remembered it, and, if something happened to him, whether all of that reality would simply be gone.
When he hung up the phone, he figured that, out of the two of them, he was the only one close to crying.
The guards were slamming the doors back on the range, getting everybody out of their cells at once, forcing them out to exercise for an hour in the prison yard, where the only thing you could see up over the walls was the plastic shopping bags caught in the razor wire and the top of a building that had once been a nurses' residence. Sometimes the guards took that opportunity to turn a few of the cells upside down, searching for contraband or homemade weapons, so that prisoners would come back and find the only place they had that was even close to home turned over like soil in the rows of a field of harvested potatoes.
The guards had a small house just outside the walls where they would throw parties on the weekends. Everyone inside thought that the guards went out of their way to be as loud as they could, just so the inmates could hear them having a good time, the guards rubbing in that they could do exactly what they wanted and the people on the inside of the walls couldn't.
Other than the searches and the noise, the penitentiary, an ancient grey stone complex squatting at Forest Road, wasn't at all like Ron had thought it would be: it wasn't like television, he hadn't been beaten up or threatened. There weren't gangs or much in the way of hard drugs, beyond abused prescriptions. Nor were there assaults by burly men in the showers or hissed warnings from guys thick with inky, smudged prison tattoos. Most of the time, Ron was just bored silly, spending every single day in his cell, waiting to hear from anyone, the days ticking by metered only by the small bit of sky outside the reinforced-glass window of his cell and the endless routine of every day.
The jail was regularly overcrowded, but all that meant at first was that he sometimes shared his cell with an overweight convicted drunk driver serving his conditional sentence on weekends. “New guys with serious charges, we like to inch them into the regular population,” one guard told him, a rumpled old guy who walked down the range as if every shift was his last before retirement. Most of the guards didn't speak to Ron unless they were telling him where to go or what to do, short, sharp sentences that involved the guards either pointing or flexing the muscles in their arms.