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The Glass Harmonica

Page 30

by Russell Wangersky


  But that was only half of it. Sometimes he’d be by the side of the river drinking thirsty great slugs of rum straight out of the bottle, his head tilted back so that I could see his Adam’s apple shifting up and down with each swallow, and he’d turn a kind of mean that I don’t think anyone but me ever really saw. He could pull the back of his hand across his mouth afterwards in a way that made me know he wanted to slap me with that same hand, and alone and outweighed up there in the woods, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it except pay for whatever sin he’d decided I’d committed this time.

  It was a sharp contrast, the sudden slap of flesh on flesh while all around us the world was holding its breath, and once I found myself lying face down on a small rocky beach, blood dripping slowly out of my nose, looking at the ground while an ant slowly foraged in among the river sand, and I remember thinking that there was nothing the ant would be able to do if the river rose even a few inches—a great wide watershed up there above us so that all the rivers in the basin could rise startlingly quickly—nothing the ant could do but struggle and be buoyed along by it all, and hope that it would eventually find its little feet on shore again.

  The funny thing was that I always thought it had nothing to do with me at all, when he hit me, that it was really about every other single thing in the world, and it was like I was just the canvas he happened to have in front of him. I suppose it’s really like that for everyone—nothing that special about me. It didn’t stop, it didn’t ever stop. I kept it away from Vincent as much as I could, but I think he always knew. At least, he knew something. Children are like that: they can feel the currents in a room the way eagles find thermals—their wings just happen to be in the right place, and they rise and fall accordingly. But the obvious parts, when Keith’s mood went jet-black—it was like bad weather coming, even if Keith didn’t realize it, and I’d try to steer it right into me when I knew the clouds were about to split, and sometimes I paid dearly for that.

  Part of my job, part of my choice, I guess.

  Once, we hit a dog on a dirt road heading home and we didn’t even stop, a small, sandy-coloured, short-haired dog, and we left it there trying to haul itself off the road, dragging its back end like its spine had been broken. And Keith was furious, and kept talking about the dog when we pulled around the bottom of the Eight Mile pond where the beaver dam used to be, the car going too fast in the loose gravel. How it was the dog’s fault for straying onto the road, the owner’s fault for letting it go around untied, the highroads department for letting the alders grow in too close on the shoulders.

  And “Sometimes you just get what’s coming to you,” and he said it through clenched teeth, because we were just above the Cataracts bridge then and sliding sideways on loose gravel towards the guardrail. He pulled the car back under control then, the old Chev we’d had for years, and we rattled across the battered concrete bridge deck, and he looked across at me for a moment as if, if he’d had a gun with him, he would have had no problem at all pressing the barrel up next to my ear and pulling the trigger.

  Like staring into a shark’s eye, that’s the way I think about it now. Big and black and unblinking. And I still shiver. And I wonder just exactly what he knows, and when he knew it.

  Some days, my memory just isn’t so good. To be honest, I still wander, and sometimes things get in the wrong order in my head, so that Vincent is a little boy and then he’s all grown up, like it happened in minutes, and I get distracted and lost. I think children come out as opposites of their parents—forced to be big where their parents are small, allowed to be small in the parts where their parents are too large. At least, that’s the way I think about Vincent.

  Sometimes, still, the words go away inside my head, and it’s like I’m grabbing at unfamiliar shapes looming all around me in the dark.

  Right now, I wish I could rub my hands together, just wring them to make the blood flow a little more quickly, to stop the endless buzzing. Like bees in my fingertips and there’s something so familiar about that, so familiar that I should be able to figure it out—so strange and yet so familiar. Like I should remember something important about it. But it’s all like fighting your way through spiderwebs, so much work just to put some order to the simplest things.

  When Keith comes in, maybe we can get all of the fishing gear, jump into the car and just go. I should probably be getting ready now, get changed. I can see the closet, his clothes on the left, mine on the right, and I know exactly what I’d wear.

  The little bright leaves must be out on the alders by now, the fish sharp and fast and hungry now that there are bugs around again. Out above North Harbour—there are three or four big rivers out there, the kind where there’s enough water for big fish but you can still cross them in hip waders. The partridgeberries will be flowering white confetti, and there will be all those fine smells that you forget going through the winter, when the most familiar smell is the heat coming on in the radiators and sending the burning fine dust back up into the air. There’s no smell like the wet smell of spring—the fullness of it, the complicated roundness of it.

  Keith would say I’m just getting carried away by it all, that it’s just a smell, even though I know he’d be lying about that, because I’ll never forget the way he came in our first winter together and held his cloth gloves under my nose so I could smell the fir sap.

  “There,” he said. “There. Now you know you’ve smelled it, and part of you will never be able to forget.” And that’s in him too, the wonderful piece, and it’s all part of the same man. Part and parcel.

  We’ll find a place there where I can sit and he can fish, and we might stay there until the sun angles down behind the hills and it all starts to feel like long sleeves of dark are running down along the arms of the valley, so that we’re in evening already while the high ground is still lit bright with the sun.

  And sometimes it’s like something inside my head is blossoming somehow, like my head is filling up and warm. Pressure, not unpleasant or painful, but clearly there. Reminds me of waking up and finding Keith’s hand weighted and warm in the middle of my back.

  And sometimes I can’t even think of the right words, as if they are all right there and yet don’t make sense.

  Sometimes things rush right at me, the way I imagine a subway train must sound, pushing all that wind and noise out in front of it. Lights seem to flicker. Or is it me? There’s also a claustrophobia. Maybe that’s not the right word. There’s a feeling I get, as if the world is going to come in and find me here, even that a person is going to come in here to rob the place, and I’ll be unable to get out of this chair. I’ll be unable to do anything, unable to stop it, unable to make a sound—and I don’t even know just what it is that they’ll do. Not even that they’ll hurt me—I think I’m long beyond that now. I think it’s that they’ll look at me and know that they can safely ignore me, that then they’ll go through the drawers and rob the place, knowing that I can hardly tell anyone what happened. Then everything will only be there in my head—all my little treasures gone, except for in my memory.

  And if anyone has learned you can’t trust that, no matter how hard you try, it’s me.

  There.

  What was that noise? Was that Keith? I don’t think so.

  I don’t think we should let Glenn come over anymore. I know he’s your friend, I just don’t think he should have the run of the place, all right? The man scares me, especially when I’m alone.

  Someone in the kitchen?

  I hate this, the way it runs in over me, like lying unable to move on the beach long enough for the tide to finally catch you. You know it’s coming, you can even imagine the cold of the water, just then when it first touches your toes.

  My breath is running away from me, and everything is like a weight. Like a . . .

  Lights flickering or . . .

  Is the dog barking?

  I’ve never liked dogs.

  Keith wanted one once—to hunt in the fall, he sa
id.

  A big sad-eyed beagle, the kind of dog that just eats and lies around and smells wet. Shedding and drooling and messing up everything. Waddling off to the back door when it has to go out, whining to come back in, and who would be opening the door every time?

  I said no, and Keith just nodded, but I knew that somewhere in there he was adding it up, saving it, keeping a tally, another legitimate reason for those dark stares of his that clearly had to be hate.

  Those stares, the ones that shake you, that make you feel small, make you want to admit to anything, just so they will stop. I think it happens with everyone you know really, really well—that sharp flash, that window into their real insides. Marks you up—changes your timbre. Silly word—timbre. Where did that come from?

  Keith?

  I wonder if he’s coming in.

  Coming in now. Heavy words, those: coming-in-now.

  Keith, please come in now. I can never find that little light switch when I want to, can’t make my fingers close around it, can’t let him know out there in the shop. It’s too far.

  I can’t reach.

  I can’t lift my hand.

  Come in now.

  Can it really be dark already?

  Acknowledgements

  This book is far better—and in fact even exists—because of the help and support of a number of people.

  Leslie Vryenhoek, my consort and editor, devoted a considerable amount of her own valuable writing time to both editing and hearing endlessly about this book. My friend Pam Frampton also gave her editing time unstintingly.

  Philip and Peter Wangersky—and Raquel Bracken—who put up with me commandeering the main computer in the house and the kitchen that computer lives in.

  Publisher Patrick Crean and Senior Editor Janice Zawerbny at Thomas Allen Publishers, who saw this book from its very beginnings, drawn on a sheet of scrap paper in a Toronto restaurant, and never let their doubts show.

  The Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, who provided much-needed financial assistance—even though it is not, actually, the book of short stories they were promised. That collection is complete, and will be next.

  My employers, the St. John’s Telegram and Transcontinental Media, who have been endlessly flexible with time.

  Thanks to all. I hope, in the end, it’s worth the investment.

 

 

 


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