The Glass Harmonica Read Free Page B

two girls had been when it started, hands and feet going, both of them beyond caring how it looked. The one in the long coat had gotten tangled up and had fallen flat on her back before the kicking started. But Ron knew he couldn’t stay, no matter how much Liz wanted him to. The car didn’t like idling, not on cold nights. The beaten-up Toyota was running rough and threatening to stall already. Then there’d be the trouble of getting it started again, the pizzas would be cold, and Louis would be right in his face, telling him, “There are plenty of people looking for work in this city,” and his favourite, “I can replace you just like this,” followed by a snap of his flour-covered fingers.
    Before they’d stopped at the courthouse traffic lights, Liz had been drawing happy faces on the condensation on the side window. The car heater seemed to have a mind of its own, and most of the time the air coming out of the vents was as cold and damp as if it had come straight in off the harbour. Ron watched her out of the corner of his eye, trying to remember the next address without opening the pizza bag and letting any of the heat out, trying hard not to be conspicuous as he looked across at her. Liz was beautiful, he thought. Beautiful in a strange way, really, a narrow face with a thin, small nose and overfull lips, at the same time with a pronounced underbite that could make her look feral and somehow slightly dangerous. She had never mastered wearing her feelings on the inside instead of bare across her face, and Ron knew there were a thousand things right there that would tell him how she felt, long before she ever got around to telling him in words.
    Like the way it was all right when she was drawing happy faces. If she got bored enough, the happy faces would turn their lips down, sad at first, then angry-looking, and he knew from experience if she started drawing handguns or round-looking spaceships—jagged space rays shooting outwards from their noses—there wouldn’t be any chance that later he’d get to slip his hands inside the tight top of her jeans. If she got bored enough, she’d turn inwards first, and then start lashing out. How she couldn’t believe how stupid he was, how she couldn’t believe she’d ended up stuck with someone like him, that she’d wound up tooling around through the cold of a St. John’s winter in a junky pizza delivery car.
    It was worse because it was February, and the snow was always coming, lashing down for a few minutes in angry little warning flurries that disappeared as soon as they arrived, whipping out of side streets in curling, tight bursts. Always waiting to just rush down on you out of any one of a row of leaden-grey days. It was February, right in the guts of winter, he thought. Not enough had gone by, and there was still so much to come—the inevitable March wet, the April snowstorms, the heavy, sticky spring snow that packed tight like concrete under the car. No, Ron thought, February was the worst of it, when you’re tired of it already and there’s not even one scrap of light at the end of the tunnel.
    It had been all right in the summertime.
    They’d been going out seriously for a few months then after a couple of years of on-and-off, and it had all been a laugh, driving all hours of the warm nights with the windows down. Summer, when, if you were lucky, the last order on the run was a four a.m. house party where nobody minded if a pair of strangers stayed on and partied too.
    Once, he and Liz had fucked on a bath mat in someone’s huge bathroom, the door locked, bladder-swollen beer drinkers on the other side trying the doorknob again and again. Inside, both of their heads kept banging against the side of the bathtub, and they couldn’t stop laughing. Later, they’d turned down slices of the same pizza they’d delivered, having lost their appetite watching Louis sweating over