The Glass Harmonica Read Online Free PDF Page B

splintered pressure-treated lumber like a big green beetle eating a meal of sticks. The top of the fence, Tony noticed, cut in gingerbread curves, too fucking cute by half.
    The supervisor, Ted Greenaway, slid out from behind the steering wheel of his pickup like his big belly had been greased, a huge round man who wobbled, balanced on two too-slender pins of legs. And Greenaway had spent years driving just like Tony, but they all knew he’d been looking for a supervisor’s job all along, that he’d been looking for the little green pickup of his own for years, and that he’d sucked up to anyone he could until he finally got there.
    Ted smoothed it over with the homeowner, told him “it was clear it was the driver’s fault” and that the city’s insurance adjuster would be by in the morning, and that accidents happen but “you wouldn’t want us to just stop clearing the snow, now, would ya?” because Ted was good at that kind of thing, the words pouring out of him like it was some kind of heavy syrup, made thicker by the cold.
    Ted had motioned at him to back the big truck out of the yard, and the last thing Tony saw as he pulled away from the curb was Ted shaking his head, as if he’d been asked to discipline a particularly unruly child.
    Management had looked real hard at Tony’s hours then, and cut him back sharply when they realized he was well up over seventy-five hours some weeks, and if he had been driving transport truck, he knew they would have pulled his logbook at some inspection station and written him up for not taking the time to get enough sleep. And that pissed him off even more because, he thought, rules just don’t understand.
    â€œThings are getting so expensive,” Helen told him when his pay-cheques came and went. “The prices just keep going up. I don’t know how we’re going to keep up if the union doesn’t get you guys a raise this year.”
    Even with the cut in hours, Tony drove most nights that winter, the metal scrape of the snowplow blade often leaking into his dreams while he slept restlessly through the light of the days, the curtains never able to hold back all the light. He liked the nights, especially liked the early mornings when the colour was just leaking into the horizon in a blue so pale it looked almost like grey. Then, as dawn got closer, Tony would see the big upturned bowl of the sky brightening, and even when he saw occasional faces drawn to windows by the sound of the heavy plow, it was still like he was the only real person alive, cutting through the fresh and trackless snow on the only necessary errand in the world.
    Out under so much sky, the truck seemed to get smaller and smaller, a tiny creature depending on the brute strength of its back legs to push ahead through the snow. It was the best time to forget everything else, a time when it seemed as though the only world that truly existed was framed by the inside of the cab of the truck, when time itself was measured not in hours but by the metronome of the snow-shrouded parked cars the plow passed along either side of the road, by the corners you cut wide, swinging down empty side streets and flinging the heavy, curling wave of snow and slush up onto the curb.
    The universe was self-contained and well drawn then, complete and completely under control, Tony thinking of himself as being as regular a cog as the tiny gear he imagined turning every single second hand on every single clock in the entire world. And that tick gently tocking ahead specifically under his hands.
    It was, he was sure, just about the only thing that was under control.
    On evenings when he wasn’t working—evenings that were few and far between—he’d sometimes go down to the bar with Helen, one block over and three blocks down to a quiet downstairs pub with a single pool table and a dartboard that no one ever used, even though the light over it was carefully