RON COLLINS
FEBRUARY 11, 2006
HOURS EARLIER, when the snow hadn’t really started in earnest yet, Ron Collins watched the tall girl kicking the other one in front of the Supreme Court—kicking the one who was down on the ground shrieking, the swear words carrying easily through the closed windows of the car.
“I get up, I’ll fucking pound ya,” the one on the ground was yelling. “I’ll show ya, ya fucking skank.”
He watched, half interested, half bored—but the pizzas were getting cold. So Ron reached down to put the Tercel into gear, and Liz reached across from the passenger seat and held his arm just above the wrist, stopping him. “No,” she said, her voice strangely eager, almost breathless.
It was almost fully dark by then, the big stone court building looming over the girls and throwing long, inky shadows. The snow was coming down in thin scrims in front of the street lights, softening all the angles, smoothing lines.
It wasn’t softening the sight of the two fighting girls. Across from them, two teenaged boys were sitting on a low wall next to the courthouse steps, watching too. Probably the boyfriends, Ron thought, although neither of the two was doing anything to break up the fight. He had been startled at how wild the 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 the pizza an hour earlier, hard at work with almost his whole upper body over the outspread dough. And when they’d left, they’d both talked about the bathroom, the taps, the huge hot tub—the way the bathroom alone was big enough to cover half of their entire apartment.
Even coming home after daybreak wasn’t bad, the heat having fallen away, so that they could wake up in the middle of the afternoon, still twined around each other like tree roots. He could remember falling asleep with the liquid burble of the robins loud in the brightening dark, the sky shifting up from black into a rich, deep and promising blue.
But the winter was harder, working all the time with the headlights on, a whole shift of unremitting night. One headlight had blown in the third week of January and there wasn’t enough money to buy a replacement, so that driving the car was like driving with one eye closed. The colder it got, the more Liz sank into her seat and the door on her side of the car, wrapping her arms around her chest. Ron kept telling her that she could stay home in the apartment, but she wouldn’t. “We’ll get turned all around,” she said, arms moving, hands pulled back into the sleeves of her sweater. “I’ll be sleeping nights, you’ll be sleeping days, and pretty soon it will only be breakfast, dinner and sleep. And what’s the point of that?”
It made sense—he had to admit it. But she looked wretched in the car, especially in the big snowstorms. Ron loved the big snowstorms, when everyone was wishing they’d bought that expensive four-wheel drive, when cars were being abandoned on the crosstown arterial by drivers with shit for brains. In whiteouts and deep fresh snow, he loved how the Tercel kept chewing its way along, the tires as bald as they could be, the car moving only because he knew it so well, because he could feel the wheels starting to slip and knew when to hit the gas and when to back off. Delivering pizzas to the stormbound, to houses with buried cars and new snow tires and not two ounces of common sense to rub together. It was as if he were shouting out at the windows that he didn’t need their money, that he could get by just fine without it.
Snowy nights, and the sky would turn matte orange and flat with the reflected glow of the street lights. The streets would lie empty and quiet, and even if it was cold, he’d run with the windows down sometimes to clear the condensation, looking for the blue flickering reflection of the snowplow flashers rumbling up the side streets, trying to hook up with a city plow going in the same direction. It made Ron feel like he should have one hand out the window, waving to the passersby struggling through the snowbanks on foot. Like he was the featured attraction in a parade. It wasn’t the same for Liz: often he’d come back with the tip money and find her sound asleep against the door like some hypothermia victim on the very edge of icy death. He always wanted to shake her awake, just to be sure she was all right, but also so she wouldn’t miss the way they were suddenly the centre of it all. Instead, he’d slide the car into gear gently and try to get it going and back into the middle of the street without the tires slipping, so the car wouldn’t lurch or buck and wake her up.
35 McKay Street—the architect—must have been looking out of his window, Ron thought. Big blue house, clapboard, all tricked out with multicoloured trim. Ron hadn’t even touched the doorbell when the door started to open. That’s when people usually yell at you, saying you’re late, Ron knew. And he thought, like he’d been thinking all night, that he shouldn’t have stopped to watch the fighting girls at the court, because the lectures just weren’t worth it. But it turned out the guy was just eager.
“Gotta pay you in coin,” he said. “All I’ve got. It’s twenty-one dollars, right? Here’s twenty-six.” He had both hands full of loose change, quarters and dollars all tumbled in together, like he was daring Ron to stop and count them.
“Pizza delivery guys and taxi drivers, we all like change,” Ron said, and he could feel himself grinning for no reason. It made him angry, wondering if 35 McKay was looking at his teeth. Ron could feel his lips tightening, pulling closed again—he wanted to tell the guy that they had met before, wanted to ask him, “Don’t you remember me? Don’t you remember?” but he didn’t.
35 McKay was grinning back, with his own two rows of even white teeth. Ron thought he could feel Liz’s eyes on his back, and he wondered if she was comparing the two of them somehow. Ron knew he was taller and fitter: 35 McKay was a dumpy soft guy with a big gut and an expensive-looking haircut. 35 McKay smiled too fucking much, too.
Ron could feel the muscles tensing in his arms. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. It felt like it was too late to still be on the road, and it was altogether too cold. Maybe it was the fight they’d seen earlier that had him all shaken up—the strange sense there was about it, out in the open and with no one moving a muscle to stop the girls from hurting each other. Or maybe it was just something like an exhaust leak in the back of the Tercel—maybe that was what was making his head feel the size of a watermelon.
He went back to the car and reached over to Liz’s window without stopping to count the money, knocked on the glass with two knuckles. Liz rolled the window down and he handed her the change. Her hands were white and cold-looking when he dropped the loose change into them, but she didn’t drop even one coin. He liked that—she was always ready, ready for anything.
But suddenly there was something he didn’t like: perhaps it was the way she was looking past him, her eyes level with his hip. Maybe she likes this end of McKay Street, he thought. The expensive end. Maybe she liked something about number 35, about the solid, warm yellow light that hung on the dark blue clapboard next to the glass front door, about the long, warm yellow hallway stretching back. He could hardly imagine what it would be like in there. But Liz could. He saw she had found a distant, almost sleepy smile as he walked around the front of the car to climb back in. He turned towards her as he closed his door, and he noticed her hips were just settling back into the seat. Pulling away from the curb, he threw the car too quickly into gear and the back wheels dug down and hit asphalt. And then Liz brought up one white hand and wiped all the condensation away from the side window with one quick sweep, happy faces and all, and she turned in her seat and looked back towards the house until they took the next corner.
The pizza shop was hot and damp and spare: Louis had never bothered to put anything up on the walls, because there were only the three small red tables, and nobody ever sat at them unless they were waiting for takeout or buying a single slice. Down-in-the-mouth guys looking for a little warmth, the big pizza oven’s heat going right into their cores until Louis pointed at the No Loitering sign and yelled at them to “shift their ass.”
Ron dumped the change onto the counter, spread it out. And it was not twenty-six at all—eighteen dollars, no tip, in fact three dollars short for the pizza in the first place.
“That’s money you’ll make up,” Louis shouted from the other side of the counter. Louis was a big man, all in white, and he had patches of flour on his forearms and his face. Ron knew from experience that the flour gathered anywhere Louis sweated. Winter or summer, Ron knew, Louis sweated—only more in summer.
“You’ll make it up, ’cause he shorted you, not me,” Louis said, shrugging, and he turned to put another pizza into the big oven. “Mebbe now you learn to count.” The heat roiled out of the open door of the oven in a wave.
But Ron had already turned his back, was already on his way out the door.
The Tercel fishtailed in the snow, going downhill too fast. Liz was huddled tight against her door, as if forced there, a tight dark bundle of winter jacket, not talking. He could only see the back of her head, the fine hair above her collar, hair he knew was impossibly soft to the touch. He didn’t reach across to feel it.
And then he was banging on the door of 35 McKay. That pretty glass door, he thought, that door with the frosted design over part of the glass. And there were still lights on in the back of the house: he could see a sliver of kitchen down the long hallway, a white coffee maker, and he could see someone coming towards him, backlit and black against the kitchen lights. And he could feel himself winding up tight like a spring, so that his hands—bundled almost without thinking into fists—felt oddly heavy hanging down by his sides.
“You stiffed me, smartass.” Ron said it as soon as the other man opened the door. “Twenty-six dollars, you said. Like there was enough there, like there was a five-dollar tip in there.”
“There was twenty-six dollars,” 35 McKay said, looking puzzled.
“There was, was there?” Ron knew he was smiling now, not caring about his teeth, a wild, broad grin as the architect dug himself in deeper. “Think I can’t count, do you.” He said it flat, so that it wasn’t a question, so that there wasn’t any sort of possible answer.
But 35 McKay tried anyway. “Of course you can count . . .” he started, his voice falling, calming, trying to mollify. He stepped out though the door, but Ron wasn’t waiting anymore. He grabbed the man by his shoulders and pushed him hard back against the clapboard. “I’ll get you fired,” 35 McKay said, trying to twist out of Ron’s hands.
“Like I care about that,” Ron said. “Like I’m not almost fired every night.” He wasn’t letting go, and the snow had started to fall more heavily, coiling around and flattening sounds. Ron was thumping the man softly, rhythmically, against the front of his own house. A car came down the street, cautious, its headlights probing out ahead. But the car didn’t slow down, just kept going on its way.
In the Tercel, Liz was keeping a circle of glass carefully clear with the sleeve of her jacket. 35 McKay pointed over Ron’s shoulder. “Her,” he said, still trying to squirm out of Ron’s grip. “Maybe your girlfriend took it,” he said, looking over Ron’s shoulder at Liz’s face, round and white and indistinct behind the glass.
The man’s voice was high now and shrill, because 35 McKay Street was obviously frightened. And for a moment a thin shadow of a memory ran through Ron’s head: he was walking around the front of the car, looking through the windshield as Liz arched her hips upwards from the seat, straightening her body as if she had been pushing something into her front pocket. Ron had seen her hips lift like that a hundred times before, angling naked towards his own. The two images flicked back and forth in his mind—in the car, then Liz at home, smiling languidly, lifting her hips so he could slide off her underwear. It was confusing, and complicated. But it didn’t matter.
“Just because you’ve got money doesn’t mean you gotta right to steal more from me,” Ron said, and then he hit the man in the side of the face with his fist—and the man sagged immediately, so it was like there was no satisfaction in it at all. Ron found himself holding the man up like a big sack of flour with his left arm while he kept hitting with his right, sometimes in the stomach, more often in the face, until finally the man fell right out of his grip.
Ron was breathing heavily by then, and the wind was rolling fast up the street, pushing loose snow in front of it so the lead edge of each gust looked like a wave reaching in over the cobble of a long, flat, empty beach. He still had one arm pulled back, ready to hit the man again if he even started to move. Ron looked back towards the car, and there was a happy face in the small circle that Liz had wiped clean of condensation. It was Liz’s face. She was smiling, and, Ron thought, her teeth looked sharp—sharp like a weasel or a fox. Like she could bite—like she would bite and enjoy it, too. He could see the tip of her tongue darting out at the corner of her mouth, licking her lips. Two small round circles fogged the glass in front of her nostrils and faded, then fogged again.
There was a shovel next to the door, aluminum, painted dark red with a silver-coloured edge where the metal had worked through from scraping against the pavement. He picked the shovel up and started to hit the fallen man with it, over and over again, until the wooden handle broke and the blade of the shovel skittered off across the pavement and into the street. But Ron didn’t stop, still swinging with the shovel handle. Hitting the man again and again, the man’s skin splitting like a peach, blood breaking through. Then the shovel handle falling out of his hands as he turned and went back to the car.
After they pulled away, Liz grabbed Ron’s right hand and pushed it between her legs, the muscles of her thighs tight. She held his hand pinned there, so that the Tercel whined high in second gear because he couldn’t shift, the back end of the car swinging wildly. If I move my hand, Ron thought, I might even be able to feel the stolen change. But he kept his hand right where it was, looking in the mirror to see if anyone else was coming out through their doors, if there was anyone running to help or to try to catch the licence plate number. Ron couldn’t remember if the light over the licence plate on the back of the Tercel was still broken. It probably was. But Ron didn’t see anyone at all.
Behind them, the snow caught in the fallen man’s eyelashes first. It caught in his eyelashes, so gently that the flakes could have been winked away with a single flutter of his eyelids. They melted when they landed on skin. For a while.
More snow fell, and the wind stacked the snowflakes gently against the front of the house.
As the back end of the car swung again, Ron thought about his parents, about what they’d say when he got caught and they found out. What his mom would say. His dad.
But his father didn’t have the right to say anything, did he?
Tony fucking jailbird Collins wouldn’t have the right to say anything to him at all.