The Glass Harmonica
ALSO BY RUSSELL WANGERSKY
The Hour of Bad Decisions
Burning Down the House
THE
GLASS
HARMONICA
RUSSELL WANGERSKY
THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS
TORONTO
Copyright © 2010 Russell Wangersky
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wangersky, Russell, 1962–
The glass harmonica : a novel / Russell Wangersky.
ISBN 978-0-88762-524-4
I. Title.
PS8645.A5333G53 2010 C813'.6 C2009-907219-X
Editor: Janice Zawerbny
Jacket design: Bill Douglas
Jacket image: istockphoto
Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,
a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,
145 Front Street East, Suite 209,
Toronto, Ontario M5A 1E3 Canada
www.thomas-allen.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of
The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which
last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the
Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government
of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development
Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
10 11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound in Canada
For Leslie . . . finally.
Contents
32: McKay Street
35: McKay Street
117: McKay Street
32: McKay Street
32: McKay Street
188A: McKay Street
107: McKay Street
104: McKay Street
32: McKay Street
111: McKay Street
107: McKay Street
32: McKay Street
103: McKay Street
140: McKay Street
32: McKay Street
58: McKay Street
2: McKay Street
109: McKay Street
103: McKay Street
Her Majesty’s Penitentiary, St. John’s
32: McKay Street
111: McKay Street
2: McKay Street
118A: Cavendish Street, Victoria, B.C.
117: McKay Street
58: McKay Street
2: McKay Street
188A: McKay Street
32: McKay Street
109: McKay Street
117: McKay Street
188A: McKay Street
32: McKay Street
Her Majesty’s Penitentiary
Victoria Airport, British Columbia
35: McKay Street
32: McKay Street
Acknowledgements
The Glass Harmonica
32
McKay Street
KEITH O’REILLY
FEBRUARY 11, 2006
MOST PEOPLE just don’t know how to look—and if they do know how to look, they don’t know how to remember. They get stuff stuck up there in their heads and forget about it back there, just wasting it. They can’t see things and keep them handy. Me, I do both. I can close my eyes and tell you every single thing there is to see here: six margarine tubs with nails, five of them yellow and one white from the time I bought the wrong kind. I won’t forget that in a hurry. They’re all above the workbench on a narrow shelf I built, set up high enough so there’s space underneath.
The white tub, that’s ring nails for drywall. They don’t even use ring nails anymore, they use drywall screws and cordless drills instead. It’s faster, and a better job—but if you’ve got to tack in just a little piece, like getting in at pipes under a sink or something, ring nails work just fine. I can tell you about the space heater, out here in the add-on next to the house, because there’s no heat out here otherwise, and about the radio I got, an old-fashioned brown one with a light behind the big circular dial. I don’t really listen to it as much as let it play on in the background.
It’s the only part of the house that’s really mine, one small piece of McKay Street that belongs to me, to Keith O’Reilly. Just one small piece of McKay Street where nobody else goes. Even Evelyn doesn’t come out here anymore—forty years we’ve been married, and we’ve found a way to circle around each other without crashing into ourselves. I heard her tell a friend once that we wouldn’t like the moon much either if it kept swooping in and almost smacking into the earth. That’s Evelyn in a nutshell: sometimes, it makes more sense talking to the cat.
I built the add-on myself, did the framing-up and the roof and the clapboard on a long weekend at the end of August almost thirty years ago now, eye on the street in case there was a city inspector driving around or something. Made crooks of us all, the city has. The weekend comes and I can see all the neighbours loading up as if they were smugglers, hauling in all kinds of construction contraband. Sheetrock and big heavy boxes of spackling mud, and every now and then even bathtubs and toilets. Two-by-fours and two-by-sixes going in basement doors, and you’d swear the whole neighbourhood was owned by the guys who showed up in their battered vans and pickups, lugging saws and extension cords into every house on the street. Gypsy contractors, we used to say, but you can’t get away with that anymore—said it a few years ago when the Roses were over, and Evelyn’s mouth got so big and round you’d swear her nose was going to fall right down in the hole. Then, just like that, she sealed it up into that tight line and the corners of her eyes came right down. After, when we were putting away dishes, she told me you don’t say “gypsy” now, but I don’t see what the big deal is.
Like I said, I didn’t need a contractor, as much as I need everyone to just mind their own business. Whole workshop is only about four feet wide, and it runs the length of the house all the way to the back wall. I’ve got an old door on the front cut in half, so I can lock the bottom and swing the top open in summer, lets the air in without letting neighbours get too familiar, if you know what I mean. Got a big vise on the end of the bench, and a spot to pile the empty beer cases—Evelyn doesn’t like them in the house, and I can usually sneak a few more than she knows when I’m out here in the summer. No phone, though—probably should have had a phone, but then it’s just going to ring and everything, someone trying to sell me insurance or make me get a new credit card or something.
Summertime, it’s dark inside and the air’s a little cooler, and no one really sees me back there in the shadows unless they know I’m there already. Not like down the street. There’s a guy down there, Brendan Hayden, sits in the front bedroom upstairs with his computer lighting the whole place up like he was a lighthouse, all alone and guiding in the ships. He doesn’t get it—can’t see himself, I guess. That’s the difference—the difference between being and seeing. When it’s dark, I’ve got a scrap of cloth up there for a curtain, just enough of a scrim to let me have some privacy. Tourists walk by and I get scraps of their conversations: “It’s so beautiful, the houses so close together and so colourful,” and “I can imagine living h
ere, can’t you?” even though they don’t know a damn thing about the sloppy nastiness of St. John’s in March.
Runners go by, mostly in the evenings, and I feel sorry for the young guys, pounding along out there even though they’re gonna get old anyway, and I can watch the women’s asses—back out of sight, you can stare all you want. And sometimes I work on projects—I took the whole ball valve assembly apart on the toilet when it used to run all the time, and I packed the spaces in the shed with insulation and put up vapour barrier. I’ll do the last of the drywall too, when I get around to it. The full sheets are heavy, especially for a seventy-year-old retired dockworker, and I’m not as steady on my feet as I once was. Built a thing once so that Evelyn could press a button and a little light would come on out on the workbench to let me know if it was suppertime or she just needed me in the house and I was lost in whatever I was doing out there. Should have thought about that a bit more—it’s like building a leash for yourself—but at the time, it beat having her come out to find me whenever she wanted something.
Mostly, I nurse a beer or two and tinker away, taking stuff apart and piecing it back together, working my way through the day, waiting for the kid with the newspaper and the mailman, even though there isn’t much mail. Pension cheques, the electric bill, the occasional letter—everything you’d expect, but still I get a little jolt when I hear the lid drop back down after the postman goes by the door. Used to be around ten in the morning, but now it’s not until after noon, and I’m not sure if they changed the route around or if we just have a lazy mailman. Guy’s got a face on him like an old boot, makes me wish I had a dog just so the thing could bark loud inside the door and give him a start.
It’s easier to work in the summertime: there’s always a reason to pry the lid off the trim paint and see if it’s set up solid yet, and I can get at the sides of the house to the outside plug, set up the ladder for the eavestroughs and things like that.
February, it’s harder. Lots of things I should have done—lots of things Evelyn always wants done—but I leave stuff too long, and once there’s snow in the air, there’s a bunch of things that can’t get done and just stare you in the face until May. Trim around the door that’s primed, not painted, and no one would be able to see it from the street, but Evelyn can tell just from the difference in the shine—the primer flat white, the rest of the door frame semigloss—and I can imagine the look she’d get on her face if she noticed.
In February, sometimes you just make work for yourself. One day, I’d taken out a couple of big ice cream tubs full of stuff—you know, the extra screws and nuts and bolts and nails you end up with, scattered bits of metal and pieces of electrical gear, the screws that once held the washer in the crate it was delivered in, the latch and the hinges from the old gate, that kind of stuff—and I was sorting it out, figuring which pieces should go into each of the smaller tubs and boxes. There’s a secret pleasure in it, really, like I’m the only one who knows the code. It’s a bunch of junk, but I recognize the old brass pressure valve I took off the water heater when the tank blew ten years ago and Evelyn found a big puddle reaching out across the flat of the kitchen linoleum, and the knobs from the first television we ever bought. I thought they might come in handy somewhere. There are three or four of those fragile mercury switches from thermostats, the little glass containers where you tip ’em and the mercury flows over and completes the circuit. Holding them in my hands, I could almost smell the furnace coming on. Didn’t feel right about throwing them out, and I saw a movie once where terrorists used them to trigger bombs. They should be wrapped in paper towel and put in a hard-sided box so nothing can shift and crush them like eggshells.
That’s the kind of work that’s good in February, when the days are short and it’s bitter outside anyways. Pick up the right scrap of something and it can send you back to a summer years before, the way picking up a can of fungicide, that bitter dry-bones poisonous smell, reminds you of rose bushes.
The heater was cranked right up behind me, and I could feel the heat of it on the backs of my legs, the fan battering the hot air against me. After I got the heater, I read on the box that it had to be “two feet away from any combustible surface.” But two feet away really means one foot and someone just covering their ass. Two feet away from me and I wouldn’t even be able to feel it, not the way you should feel heat right into your bones, and an old guy deserves a little comfort wherever he can find it.
When I started sorting, it was still light and it wasn’t snowing yet, the sky that kind of slate grey that says the bad weather’s already looming over you but it doesn’t have the guts to just get on with it already. Weatherman had said there’d be snow, a fair amount of snow, and you could tell it by the traffic, by the way it had thinned right out, no one driving unless they really had to. Soon there’d be snow all over and you’d hear the taxis coming, spinning on their bad bald tires, engines revving too high with frustrated feet on the pedal.
I’d pile the bits in groups of similar parts, pick out the screws and nails and put them in their proper places, find the occasional unfamiliar scrap and dig around in my brain trying to figure out what it was and where it had come from. I’m not one of those people who goes around to yard sales and buys up tubs of other people’s scrap—no, all of this was my own, so every piece had its own little history.
I don’t know how long I was sitting like that when I realized all at once how foolish it would look from outside, an old man sorting useless scraps of metal and staring off into space like someone’s reached in and shut his brain off completely. And the day had gone away into night, and the snow had come straight down the road in a wave, the wind trying each door on both sides of the street as it passed.
Even in the darkness the snow still has shape, whorls and columns and devils that build and fall away, and I lifted a corner of the small curtain on the window so I could watch the sheets and eddies of snow and try to decide if they’re just passing squalls or the kind of snow that will fall all night, packing in tight against the front door. The kind I’d end up having to shovel, wondering each time if now was the time when my heart was going to simply pick up and just stop.
Across at 35 McKay, where the architect lives, there was a small foreign car—it’s almost always foreign cars now—parked on the side of the road, its engine running, exhaust white, the headlights catching handfuls of blowing snow. There was someone in the front seat, but not the driver: the driver was out of the car and up at the front door, right in the architect’s face. Strange guy, the architect, a nice-enough fella but sort of distant, as if he wasn’t really talking to you as much as he was making fun of you back there inside his head.
Then, all at once, the driver from the car was hitting the architect, over and over, hitting him like some kind of crazy man, short, sharp, accurate punches. Hard punches, too. I’ve thrown one or two punches like that myself, so I could imagine the jarring force of them, the way, when you connect with your fist, it travels all the way up to your elbow like an electric shock.
And the architect—I wish his name would come to me—wasn’t swinging back at all, in fact he was barely getting his hands up in front of him as the other guy whaled away, and as soon as that, the architect was down in the snow and the other guy had picked up a snow shovel from next to the door. And watching it was sort of strange, like watching television or something, especially when the shovel blade broke off the handle and flew out into the street, more like a prop than a shovel. Then just the handle, up and down, but fast. I reached for the doorknob then, but my hand stopped before it closed around the metal—in fact, before it even touched the knob—so that it was half clutching at air.
And then the other guy was heading back for his car, and I ducked down because he was looking back towards our house, scanning the whole neighbourhood, and just before I got down below the edge of the window frame I saw it was the pizza guy, that Collins kid, I don’t know his first name but I knew his father, lived down the stre
et before he got fired from the city.
Maybe I should have done something before then, but a seventy-year-old man against some crazy young guy with a shovel? Besides, it was all over before I would have been able to get across the street anyway, and it was pretty obvious that the guy had to be dead. Not my job to get involved, two guys got a problem with each other—but no one wants to be left knocked out on the ground in a blizzard, either. You gotta deal with your problems, and you take care of your own—that’s the way it’s supposed to work. And then Evelyn was flicking the light on and off behind me like it must be bedtime, and you can tell that she’s angry or pissed off or she’s been calling for a while and I just didn’t notice, because there’s barely a second between each flash. Blink-blink, blink-blink, over and over again.
I knew, if I went in and told her, Evelyn would want me to call the cops. I know she would—but I don’t like talking to the cops and I never have. I worry that they might have questions about why a guy would spend so much time looking out the door at his neighbours. No one wants to get a reputation as a busybody, after all. In my head, I could hear the way she’d keep at me about it, and I knew she wouldn’t let go. But I also knew I’d end up telling her sometime anyway, because what else are you going to do?
I called them from the kitchen, but the truth is that the police hardly took me seriously, and it seemed like fifteen minutes or more before a police car nosed its way quietly through the snow. By then, the snow was coming down hard, and I could barely see the guy on the ground, just a hump in the snow like someone’s put their garbage out the night before and now the garbage truck driver’s never going to be able to find it. Snow coming down so fast that everything is new again right away. The cop got out and looked around for a minute, tried the front door at 35 and opened it, sticking his head in the door, slow and nonchalant, and I thought I was going to have to go over and show him where the guy was. But then he poked away in the snow next to the door and started talking on his radio right sharp. Then, in a big rush, there were cops all over, and two of them, plainclothes guys with big hands and sharp questions, came over to talk to me.
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