The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  Bit by bit, the whole neighbourhood was changing, Sam thought, and in a year or two his place wouldn’t be overpriced for the block, but instead an obvious, solid investment. The whole street would be different then, with only a handful of the stubborn old owners left, hanging on like bad teeth, and they’d hardly be able to afford to stay on—because if the city was good at anything, it was good at ensuring the municipal taxes would rise in perfect lockstep with the neighbours’ house prices.

  You could already tell who was who just by the cars, Sam thought, the difference between the dull-painted Reliants and Tercels and the newer Volkswagens, even the occasional Volvo.

  There were still signs that this had once been a self-contained small neighbourhood, the kind of place that might have a name like Georgestown or Rabbittown, a traditional kind of name that would be loosely known by every single person who lived there, even if the neighbourhood’s real boundaries were only clear to the inhabitants who lived within them.

  There was still a small butcher shop on the corner, but it was losing ground fast, the hand-drawn poster-paint signs for pork chops and hot Italian sausages fading in the sunlit front window because they hadn’t been changed in months. Sam had never even been inside, but he imagined a white-aproned butcher, like you’d see in a sandwich-meat commercial, maybe with a moustache, red stains on the front of the apron, a bulky, square man standing rigid behind a wall of chest-high, old-fashioned, white-enamelled, glass-fronted coolers.

  There wasn’t a bakery anymore, but there had been. Now it was just an empty plate glass window in the midst of another conversion. But there was a corner store at Prescott, just a shell of itself, totally dependent on the triple addiction to beer and smokes and lottery tickets, looking as broken down and fading as many of the customers who shuffled their way in.

  Mornings are hard here, Sam thought, looking down the street. Two neckless beer bottles, dropped. The bottles’ decapitated tops were still capped, lying jagged and right next to each other, their bottoms half inside a torn shopping bag.

  There was a wet wool hat, slowly draining the rain it had harvested overnight onto the pavement, and a spot where someone had bent over and thrown up next to the curb. There had been pigeons working over the remains of the vomit until he got close to them and the biggest of the pigeons poked its head forwards once or twice, feinting like a small and cocky fat-necked boxer. Then all the birds stumbled and tripped into the air and away, wings clapping together, wing tips touching with a light feathery slap like they were right on the edge of overreaching themselves in the effort of escaping.

  Then there was more broken glass on the street: patterns of fallen shards where car mirrors had been starred and smashed out by a rock or a passing fist. At least it was only mirrors, Sam thought. It was cheaper to fix side mirrors than to be replacing car windows, and there were certainly parts of town still where people sometimes took out a car window for something as simple as a handful of change in the cupholder or the briefcase in the back seat that you’d forgotten to bring in overnight.

  Ahead of him, someone on the street had put their garbage out early, ignoring the schedule so that the dark green bags had slumped on the curb for days, and the bags had been torn into by cats or seagulls. There was some kind of plastic packaging pulled and tufted out through the holes like the bags were in the process of being disembowelled. And that was just the bright morning leftovers. There were leftovers at night too.

  There were still plenty of loud fights when there would be a police car left on the street, empty, its roof lights spinning and battering the houses with splashes of blue and white and red, while indoors a police officer would be standing between an angry couple, a referee up until the point where someone went too far, and then it would be a trip to the lock-up.

  Screaming some nights, already one night clear enough that Sam could hear it from his bedroom. “Just fuck off and stay away from me, you bastard. Do you think I want whatever it is you caught from her?”

  But that was surely changing, surely being shoved aside by the higher incomes and new people, he thought. It couldn’t change fast enough for him, and he walked down McKay Street singling out houses in his head where he thought people should move, and the ones where they would be allowed to stay: 56 and 58 should go, 60 could stay, and 62 should just be torn down to the ground, the clapboard faded and hanging loose in places along the front, the windows already practically rotting. He felt like a judge at a dog show, scoring each house to decide best in class, and he went all the way down the street to the end before turning around, crossing the street and walking home, rating the houses on the other side as well.

  Around six, back in his own kitchen, Sam had only a moment or two of misgiving before he took the number off the fridge and called.

  He looked around the kitchen while the phone rang on the other end, looked at the oak cupboards, running his hand along the granite countertop. The developer had done a good job, he thought. You can’t say enough about good workmanship.

  Then Jillian answered. It was a short conversation, mostly Sam saying, “So, do you want to go out?” before writing down the name of the bar she gave him almost immediately. Just down the hill, she said, the kind of place you fall into and just feel you’ll never be out of place in again.

  Outside that evening on his way to meet her, Sam decided the air was finally leaning towards summer evening, that it had a high kind of still and holding humidity, the thorough heat that makes sweat a clear disadvantage.

  At least it’s downhill, Sam thought, turning and heading for the harbour, where the light had already fled and the water was black glass, even though there was still some light left in the sky. There was a broken bottle on the pavement again, darker than the lengthening shadows, and he kicked some of it away from the curb and in next to the foundations of the nearby row houses.

  Sam took long, overstretched, eager downhill steps, feeling the satisfying pull in his legs and hips, his eyes already up and looking out for the bar she had told him about. He walked by the place twice before he found it, just a small bolthole door off a narrow dark lane, the kind of place where precise directions aren’t really that much help—but then again, once you’d been there, he thought, you would probably be able to find it in your sleep.

  He was late, and she was already halfway through a vodka cooler in a clear bottle, and he watched her at the table, watched her drink a mouthful while he was still standing in the doorway, her neck long and smooth and perfectly angled, before he walked over and hung his jacket on a chair.

  “Hi, Jillian, sorry,” he said, looking up at the British beer signs tacked up on the walls and at the tarnished brass lights over the pool table. “Nice old place.”

  “You don’t really know much about anything, do you?” she said, staring at him, and he stared back, startled.

  Sam thought her voice sounded sharper than he had remembered, as though the length of the day had hardened her into a drier, more spare version of herself, cutting away convention and even politeness like it was unnecessary fabric.

  “This is all new,” she said. “The whole place. The pool table, everything. It came in the door looking old, but only because it was meant to. It’s always been a bar, but not like this. Used to be just a dive. Now it’s a fancy dive.” She stopped, took another drink. “It didn’t even used to be wood,” she said, looking up at the walls. “Yellow paint, it was then.” She had peeled the label off her cooler, her fingernails looking sharp and dangerous when she did. “And the beer used to be cheaper then, too. You can’t just take things at face value. You gotta leave a little room for some experience, too.”

  Sam wasn’t sure if she was lecturing him or if she was laughing at him, and he knew his face was tilting towards a sulk, that it was moving towards the sort of formal face he kept, always at the ready, for strangers.

  “I’ve got . . .” he said, but the words came out woodenly, and he realized that, despite the night before, despite the sheet
s and the feel of her legs against his that he remembered all too well, they were still essentially unknown to each other. It was a depressing thought, draining, like starting a long and exhausting road race all over again.

  She tilted her head, calculating, her eyes sharp and reading, obviously teasing him now. “How about a blow job in the men’s room?” she said, and she said it loud, suddenly grinning, staring right at him, daring him to look away. And at least two faces turned towards them from the bar, one of them a lawyer whom Sam had done some business with.

  The lawyer smiled. With that, Sam could feel the tension drain away between them like water down the drain.

  At ten o’clock, a thin guitar player with sunken eyes and curly hair set up his equipment in a corner of stone wall by the front door, settled onto a stool, and after a few minutes put his guitar on a stand and walked over to the bar, ordering a beer.

  “Another hour and he’ll play,” Jillian said. “That never changes. Tease you at ten, sing at eleven or twelve, done at three. It must be written down in the musician’s handbook somewhere.”

  So for an hour they talked, and with each passing minute, each sentence back and forth, Sam could feel the comfortable familiarity between them coursing back.

  When the guitar player did start playing, he was better than Sam expected, the man’s long fingers drawing notes out as if surprising mice in corners, and Sam noticed that Jillian was drinking at the same rate he was, bottle for bottle, though she was drinking coolers compared to beers for him, so she had the edge on alcohol. She wasn’t really showing it, though, her eyes fixed on his, as bright as birds. But he noticed that she would look away when the door to the bar opened, nodding slightly to people as they came in, and sometimes offering a short, openhanded wave.

  “You’re from this neighbourhood, then,” Sam said.

  “Born and bred.” And this time it was like the last syllable spiralled slightly downwards. “Lived on McKay Street for my whole entire life. It was my grandmother’s house, and then my father’s. Plenty of us around here then, the whole neighbourhood full of kids. We all grew up together, same street, same school, same plans.”

  “Not me,” Sam said.

  “You think?” she said wryly. “I know that. I know your house, know it better than you do. I know it from when it was Mike Murphy’s place, and from when his two girls were growing up. Alison was in my class, all the way to grade twelve. I played with dolls in that backyard, back when there were shrub roses all along the back fence.”

  Sam listened and Jillian talked, and sometimes he managed to tuck in an observation, but mostly it was like she was drawing a map for him, explaining more and more about the street and the people. About Mr. Carter, whom hardly anyone ever saw anymore and who seemed to be living on whatever food he could buy at the closest convenience store, about the people who had been arrested for theft and those who beat up their spouses, and all of it was connected to the street and yet was still unconnected to him. And Sam realized that when there were screaming fights at night, Jillian would be able to pick out who was fighting just by the sound of the voices and where the police cars were stopped, by something as simple as the angle of the flashing light bars on the roofs of the cars.

  And for one wistful moment, he found himself wondering what it would be like to fit so well in a place, to have the comfortable feeling of knowing exactly where you belonged and exactly what it was you were supposed to be doing, dovetailing into everyone else’s lives. As he listened, he thought that he and his two immediate neighbours were intruders, that no matter how long they lived there, they might never find a place in the curious fabric of the street.

  And then the bar was closing and they found themselves out on the street, heading upwards, and to Sam’s surprise they were even holding hands, their arms swinging back and forth in unison in a big arc. Heading back to his house, and he smiled and thought it wouldn’t even be so bad if more Scotch glasses got broken. The night was close and humid by then, and up the street above them a group of teenagers were gathered at the edge of the street. Sam could see the bright tips of cigarettes as they got closer, but he wasn’t paying attention, talking instead, eager for a chance to explain the things he saw in the neighbourhood.

  “That butcher shop is—” Sam started.

  “It’s not a butcher shop,” Jillian interrupted, like he’d missed a point she’d already tried to make. “It’s Harringtons, okay? They’ve owned it for years, we call it Harringtons.”

  “Okay, Harringtons. It’s not going to last much longer, and—”

  “What do you mean? It’s been there forever.”

  “I mean it’s not going to last much longer.” He was exasperated, thinking he was in danger of starting to lecture. But he also felt powerless to stop, feeling the words digging their own defensive trenches around an otherwise indefensible position. “I mean, it’s obvious the place is going out of business, you just have to look at it.” He could feel his face getting flushed.

  Jillian, angry now: “Three generations at least. And maybe it looks like it’s on its last legs, and maybe a bunch of other things around here are too, but it doesn’t mean we have to come up behind it and give it a shove down the stairs, just to be sure it’s really good and on its way.”

  They were closer to the corner now, and up ahead of them the group of teenagers had coalesced into two distinct and separate groups, facing each other. Sam felt Jillian’s fingers tighten around his own, felt as much as heard her suddenly go quiet.

  And two of the teenagers were pushing each other now, first one, then the other, harder, and then they had their fists up, too. One of the smaller teens staggered backwards into the low fence right on the corner, and as Sam watched, the boy turned and ripped one of the fence pickets free, holding it up over his shoulder, baseball-bat-high.

  In the light from the street lamp, Sam could see the steel shine of nails.

  There were lights on in some of the windows up and down the street, but it was like the houses were looking out and beyond whatever was going on in the street, not paying attention to it at all.

  “Come on,” Sam could hear the kid with the fence picket yelling. “Come on, you fucker. Let’s see you come on now.”

  And it was like there was a discernible change in the air: one moment they had been loud and angry but like actors playing expected, formal parts, and the next they were all scrambling for weapons of their own. Other fence pickets came free. A bottle was picked up off the ground. What looked like a short length of copper pipe appeared in a hand, maybe grabbed from the rooming-house Dumpster. All of it held up high, twelve o’clock and serious, all of it meaning business.

  Dangerous, this, Sam thought. A bunch of ramped-up teenaged kids with no idea how much damage they could really do to someone, kids who might think you could belt someone with a fence picket and that person would fall down and somehow later still be able to walk away. Kids old enough to feel rage and strong enough to do something about it, but not old enough to really understand consequence. Movie violence, but violence that would have real results.

  And Jillian was tugging at his arm, pulling him around the corner and down onto McKay Street even though his body was still turned the other way, his face and shoulders still facing the teens while she pulled him almost backwards down the street, his legs feeling like they were working the wrong way.

  “But I’ve got to do something,” Sam said. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

  “Yeah, someone’s going to get hurt all right,” Jillian said, but she said it resignedly. “Someone always gets hurt. Sometimes badly. Sometimes enough to stay in the hospital for a while. And if you’re not careful, it’s going to be you.”

  Sam tried to pull out of her grasp, but she wouldn’t let go.

  “Look—I’m from here and you’re not. And I’m telling you that what you want to do with this now is to just stay out of it,” Jillian said, her voice suddenly flat, almost impersonal. “They won’t even blink be
fore they lay you out cold. Or worse. We should keep walking, let them sort it out themselves.”

  “I can call the cops,” Sam said, deciding and pulling his phone out of his pocket.

  “Suit yourself,” Jillian said, letting go of his arm, “but make sure you know what street you’re on so you can tell them the right place to go.”

  And that was the last thing she said.

  When Sam opened the phone to dial, when he held it up next to his ear, the cellphone lit up the side of his face with a pool of light blue, and Jillian didn’t so much vanish as she simply faded away from beside him, so softly that he didn’t even feel the shift in the air as she disappeared.

  Even as the 911 operator was answering at the other end of the line, the teens were all turning towards him, recognizing the blue glow, their arms spread, a semicircle, like an opening fan of playing cards. And instead of two groups, there was really only one, and everyone was looking straight at him. A big kid, his face hidden back in a hood, was coming towards him.

  “Get ’im, Ronnie,” someone else said.

  “You’re in the wrong place, mister,” the kid they’d called Ronnie said. “The wrong place completely.”

  32

  McKay Street

  VINCENT O’REILLY

  JUNE 5, 2006

  THREE YEARS later, on a hot summer afternoon, Vincent O’Reilly was looking at inch-and-a-half bright-stainless finishing nails. There were maybe a hundred of them, rolling around loose in the bottom of a margarine tub. Years since I’ve been back here, he thought, and it’s like not one single thing has changed.

  The lip of the tub had been tightly sealed when he picked it up, as if the nails might spoil if they were exposed to the air. They whispered as they slid across the plastic, rolling back and forth, fetching up against each other in tight patterns, rolling in an order as precise as if they had always known exactly where they were going to end up.