TONY COLLINS
MAY 2, 2005
ALMOST a full year before that snowstorm, they had caught Tony with the back of his truck full of plywood. In the cab, Tony Collins kicked himself, because he knew—because he’d known all along—this was going to happen. That it was just a matter of time, a once-too-often-tried gamble, his own sort of Russian roulette.
Ten full sheets of three-quarter-inch, good-one-side, lying flat and heavy in the back and covered up with bags of garbage, and he’d already gotten a price for them, because he was going to sell them for cash on Warbury Street to a guy who was putting up framing to fix the foundation of his house. The gatehouse was the last thing between him and the money.
He tried to talk his way out of it at first, tried telling the guys in the gatehouse that he’d bought the plywood and just had it in the truck with him ahead of time when he’d come in for his shift, but then they shook their heads and walked around to show him where they’d marked every sheet, just a little black stripe across one corner with black Magic Marker, and then they held him at the gate, waiting for the police.
Every now and then, the guys in the gatehouse had looked straight across at him, their mouths turned down at the corners like they were having a hard time believing it, like it was the kind of expression they thought they were supposed to have.
In the truck, Tony could only sit and look down at the cracked blue plastic of the dashboard, reaching across with one finger and picking away at a spot where the plastic had blistered and split from sun and age.
He thought for a moment, just for one fleeting moment, about stomping on the gas pedal and running straight through the thin wooden arm of the gate, smashing through the alternating yellow and black stripes like they weren’t even there. But they knew him anyway, so it wouldn’t have made any difference, it would have just meant that the police would have come to his house, the front wheels of their cruiser crackling as they rolled up onto the loose gravel of the driveway, and how stupid would that be? Making them come and find him, come and hunt him down, on the run for ten lousy sheets of plywood?
And even then Tony knew it wasn’t as simple as the plywood. Because there was a zero-tolerance policy at the depot for stealing, a policy written right into the contract now in lawyer’s language, so it was twenty-three years of driving plow in the winter, dump truck in the summer, all of it down the drain, and Helen was going to kill him, he thought, even if he really was doing it all for her.
When the police came, they’d be all set to write it all up in simple police shorthand. Anthony David Collins, 54, of 177 McKay Street. Longtime employee of the City of St. John’s, caught red-handed stealing city property—he could see it like it was already written in the paper, just a couple of sentences, and the paper would be going into mailboxes all the way down the street.
It was the kind of case that would barely get a ripple of interest on the court docket, the courthouse regulars all gravitating towards the graphic testimony of sexual assaults or the gruesome violence of the occasional St. John’s murder, almost always family members killing family members, or a fight that had started between friends in a kitchen. Once in a long while, stranger killing stranger.
Just the same, Tony knew it was the kind of case that marked the complete end of the way life used to be. The police report wouldn’t explain anything, Tony thought, even if every single word on it was perfectly true. It wouldn’t even begin to explain.
It wouldn’t explain how Helen’s dad, Mike Mirren, had left his only daughter 117 McKay when he died, that the house had been all paid off and Mike had been proud of that, but that now, almost inexplicably, it was carrying eighty thousand dollars in a mortgage in Helen’s name, a mortgage that was pretty close to as much as the place was worth.
It wouldn’t explain why Tony was running just as fast as he possibly could, every single day, and that there were only so many places money could come from before you wound up looking at stupid last resorts, at bad decisions made good by desperation.
At first, he’d taken every scrap of overtime he could get, driving the big green dump all night long for snow removal, up the sharp hills and then down again to the harbour to dump the snow from the blowers so the tide could carry it away, and then he’d fallen asleep one night and put the front end of the truck, with the big square rack for the plow, right through some guy’s fence on the low side of Empire Avenue. It was a good thing the curbs were high there or, sound asleep behind the wheel, he would have gone into the guy’s living room, Tony thought.
Two o’clock in the morning, and he had to stand outside and listen to the guy who owned the house screaming at him about his damned fence until the supervisor got there, the front end of Tony’s truck stuck through the 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.
“Things 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 angled to throw the yellow and black wedges of the board into high relief.
The regulars all knew her there—sometimes Tony thought they might know her better than he did. It occurred to him that she was a regular at the bar herself, and for a single flashing moment he envied her that, envied her the ability to have a particular place where she clearly fit. Tony was keenly aware that he didn’t fit, no matter what he did: he could watch hockey on the big bar television, drink a pint of beer and make small talk, but it was always like the people on either side of him tolerated his presence and his attempts at conversation, but little more. He felt strangely angular away from the big smooth steering wheel, square peg and round hole, so he said little and watched more, his eyes catching the ranks of bottles along the bar, the soccer towels they’d found somewhere and hung from the ceiling, the long row of draft beer taps.
But Helen?
She’d come in with him and then shift her weight sideways onto the stool closest to the pool table, call out to the bartender and wave, and she’d drink club soda, just club soda, and play the machines, the bright lights playing off her face and making strange-coloured, two-toned shadows, like clouds moving quickly through the shafts of sun lighting her face.
As she concentrated, it gave Tony a chance to just stare, and he was overtaken by a simple confusion, as he always was, staring at her: how had they even ended up married? But that too was only half of it. A bigger piece was the question of why she’d ever agreed to have him.
Even now, in her early fifties, Helen was a strikingly beautiful woman, high, sharp cheekbones still, wild, curly hair more restrained than brushed, and comfortably able to smile in a way that just made her face lapse straight into beauty. Tony wondered if, as a teenager, she had practised that smile in front of a mirror, perfecting just how much of her teeth to show, letting her eyes widen slightly at the same time in a distracting, alluring way that almost always made you fall straight in, even if you sensed all along that her expression just might be a deliberately planned and even mercenary trick.
But he had asked her to marry him, and she had improbably said yes, both of them barely into their twenties, and they’d managed all of it up until now: one child, a boy who got into more trouble than seemed possible, then that same boy moving away, and finally the sudden death of her father, Mike, of a heart attack, right at the top of the stairs beside the bathroom.
It seemed to Tony, although he’d never said it out loud, that Mike had gotten up from his chair in the living room all of a sudden and decided to head straight up towards heaven, or wherever it was he went, making the choice to slip right out of his body exactly at the point where he ran out of stairs and could climb no higher inside his skin.
Perhaps it was the expression on the dead man’s face that made Tony think that was what had happened, because he’d been in the kitchen when he heard the thump of the old man falling, and had run up the stairs and turned his body over in the narrow hallway. When he did, Mike Mirren didn’t look surprised or frightened or in pain or anything like that, not like any of the clichés Tony had been led to expect. Mike Mirren’s mouth had been set in a straight, purposeful line, turned up slightly in the corners, as if he were setting out on a particularly involved task that might, in the end, turn out to be almost enjoyable. Like he had his eyes fixed on something in the distance that was on the very edge of out of sight, something both curious and perhaps a little funny.
Tony and Helen had managed to get past that, he thought, had gotten used to their son Ron quitting school right after grade ten and running around with a girl they hated, a girl named Liz who Tony imagined, for some reason, had a thread of vicious running right straight through her. He didn’t trust Liz and he didn’t really know why, but whenever he saw her, Tony caught himself watching her, watching her hands, trying to figure out just what it was she was up to.
Fact was, he thought, he and Helen had made it to a point where the days were ticking past themselves in an almost-constant comfortable state. They didn’t even have to talk, because almost every single thing between them had been said at least a dozen times already. Even the arguments were old and familiar, less argument than stage play, both of them anticipating the other’s next line.
Until the morning when Tony had been home and awake when the mailbox banged shut outside and he’d gone out to get the mail. And it had only been a couple of furniture flyers and one lone envelope with the electric bill. Helen always paid the bills, but Tony opened it simply out of curiosity instead of leaving it on the counter. And it was three months overdue by then, and there was a cut-off notice attached, the cut-off part printed in bright red.
Tony got a lot of stares from people the next day when he wheeled the big green city tandem dump truck into customer parking at the power company, filling two parking spots. He paid the entire overdue bill with cash, watching carefully as the woman behind the counter stamped the face of the bill with her date stamp and then initialled the payment. Watching until he was sure she had entered the payment into the computer in front of her.
He didn’t mention to Helen that he’d paid the bill, but looking at her that night in the living room, he felt as if twin weights were conspiring to pull each side of his face downwards and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
That was only the first late bill. He started catching others when he could, overdue accounts threading their way into the mailbox, where he would quietly pay them too, with any cash he could gather up. He’d take a quick swing down McKay Street on the days he knew she was out, just long enough to climb down from the idling truck, rifle through the mail in the mailbox and climb back into the driver’s seat again. But he didn’t tell Helen, not even when he intercepted a bank statement showing the cash advances on their joint chequing account, and the size of the numbers took his breath away.
And more.
He hadn’t even known that they had a line of credit, nor that it was already all spent by the time he discovered its existence. He just knew that it was in her hands, and that whatever it was, he wouldn’t be able to ask. He also knew then that it didn’t matter how many hours of overtime he managed to work. And he knew that he would have to find other ways to put money together.
First, it was a circular saw from the equipment locker, one of the battered old saws that travelled all over the city rolling around loose in the backs of different city trucks. Surprisingly, it didn’t feel like he was crossing any sort of line by taking it: it didn’t feel like anything at all, except simple, plain necessity—it was there, and he needed it. Tony noticed the saw in the open metal locker when he came off shift, and simply tossed it into the thin space behind the front seat of his pickup. He didn’t think about it, really.
The guys on the gate were supposed to give personal vehicles a going-over for city supplies on the way out of the yard, but Tony knew they rarely came out of the gatehouse when it was raining. That morning, his old wipers could barely keep up, smearing back and forth across the windshield glass, and the guard on duty had just waved him through, newspaper up in front of him. But Tony checked the rearview mirror for blocks anyway, looking over and over again to see if a police car was pulling up behind him. When he thought about it later, it was the first and only time that he ever felt as if he had done anything even remotely wrong.
Soon he began to think that, in some ways, it was all their fault, because they really should have caught him then—because he was careless and impulsive, and because it was the very first time. And if he’d thought they would check the truck, he wouldn’t have been able to do it at all.
But they didn’t, and he did.
When he got home, Tony slammed the door behind him in the driveway and left the saw in the unlocked truck, and almost wished that someone from the neighbourhood would come along and take it. But no one did, and he got thirty dollars for the battered saw from a neighbour after he peeled off the inventory sticker and wire-brushed the city ID number away.
It was like he’d crossed a line he hadn’t even really known he was crossing.
And each time, it got a little simpler. When he thought about it, he thought about the mechanics—not the stealing itself but how to do it. Pressure-treated lumber, steel-toed boots, power tools—he took all of it, and more. He learned things as he went, like the obvious fact that the newer a thing was, the easier it was to sell. Other things too—like the larger something was, the harder it was for anyone to believe it was actually stolen.
Once, at four in the morning with the guy in the gatehouse sound asleep, Tony had gotten out through the gate with one of the big-wheeled jackhammer compressors, right out in the open and hitched to the back of his pickup. He sold it to a guy who spray-painted it grey and sold it right away again as surplus, no questions asked, in another part of the province, and that was eight hundred dollars in quick cash, even if the compressor was worth thousands.
That time, Tony had been sweating driving away from the depot, sweating because it was just so obvious, and for the next three days he’d kept expecting one of the supervisors to call him up to the office “for a chat.” But no one noticed, at least not right away.
The street-repair program hadn’t started for the spring season, and it was three weeks before the police even came to look into the theft, and when they did, they interviewed everyone on shift, including Tony. He feigned a kind of uninterested nonchalance, and it was almost as if that nonchalance rubbed right off on the two police detectives who came and sat and did interviews in the lunchroom.
They looked bored the whole time they talked to him, one of the officers, a tall guy named Ballard, fiddling with his coffee cup as he worked his way down the same list of questions they wound up asking everyone. The two policemen gave off an air like they felt they were being asked to investigate something that was far beneath them, like being asked to chase graffiti artists instead of busting up drug rings.
The police ended up being more interested in Wally Norman than anyone else, because it turned out that Wally had a record that no one knew anything about, some scheme from his twenties where he and his buddies used to go out to the airport and just grab random baggage off the luggage carousels and head for the door. If someone came up and stopped them, saying, “Hey, that’s my suitcase,” they’d just hand it back and say, “Sorry, I’ve got one that looks just like it.”
But Wally and his friends had tried the scheme once too often and been spotted by security, because guys in their twenties just weren’t flying every week. While all of Wally’s friends had gotten away, he’d been tackled by a wiry old commissionaire as he tried to get to the car, and was pinned on the rain-wet pavement out next to the crosswalks until the police arrived. The commissionaire’s glasses had been broken in the struggle, so the police tagged Wally with an assault charge too.
“Guy thought he was back in World War Two or somethin’, ’stead of stoppin’ someone stealin’ fuckin’ suitcases,” Wally said matter-of-factly, like it was a hockey game they’d all been talking about, a sloppy outlet pass or bad penalty killing. “Like he was catchin’ a bank robber or sump-thin.”
When they finished their interviews and got ready to leave, the police stopped for a moment in the lunchroom to tell Wally in front of everyone else that they would be keeping an eye on him. And Wally shrugged, a big, slow, over-exaggerated shrug that telegraphed “Who gives a shit?” as clearly as if he had said it out loud, right there and then.
As soon as the police left, Wally told the guys that they’d taken the suitcases more as a game than anything else, because “most of the time it was just old clothes ’n shit, ’n half the time we’d just flick ’em out the door onto the highway anyway. Big old suitcases, spinning off into the ditch. Burstin’ open. Ya should’ve seen it.” But he didn’t seem to regret any of it, not even the idea that the police were now looking at him as a suspect. “You make a choice and jest go from there,” he said, and went to get more coffee.
Tony sat with his drink at the bar and stared across at where Helen was sitting, and it seemed to him that he was suddenly aware that he was hearing something urgent being spoken in a different language, a language that he didn’t fully understand but that he needed to hear.
He was sure that everything important was happening right there in front of him, right then, if only he could figure out what all the various pieces meant, and how they all fit together. Like a chain with one important link missing. He looked around the room, trying to see if there was a secret code written on the walls or hovering over any of the five people up at the bar, huddled close together as if they were freezing cold. Looking for the switch that was just waiting to be thrown.
And Helen’s purse was open, the lights from the lottery machine playing across the front of her blouse again so that it seemed as if her clothes were magically changing colours, flicking from one shade to another.
With her hands barely moving, she was threading twenties into the thin slot in the front of the machine, over and over again without even looking, a motion so practised that it seemed to take no effort whatsoever, that it seemed to take neither aim nor concentration. It looked for all the world as if she was just holding her hand in front of the machine while the money magically disappeared from her grasp, and she didn’t even look away from Tony as the money simply vanished.
He noticed the expression in her eyes didn’t change when she turned to look at him—in fact, her eyes didn’t move at all, her gaze holding his in one simple and straight line. And the whole time, he could feel her eyes on his face, staring straight across at him, and when he looked up and back at her, she smiled that familiar smile, her eyes widening just enough. And Tony fell hard, just like he always did.
He fell, but he also knew.
Two days later, he got the keys for a city backhoe from the sign-out locker and two hard men from downtown did all the rest without him, driving the piece of heavy equipment straight out through a chain-link fence without stopping and onto a low-rider flatbed already parked just outside on the street. And even though it must have taken them more than a few minutes to chain the backhoe down, no one admitted to seeing anything. And there was money in a plain white envelope in the mailbox when he got home, his name on the front in pencil in block letters, as if it could just as easily be erased and replaced by someone else’s.
That same week, he managed a mitre saw and a set of air chisels, and that was despite the fact the city had hired a private firm to beef up security, and there were strange new serious faces in the lunchroom and strolling through the equipment yard at odd times.
Once they caught him with the plywood, Tony was pretty sure that they would want to blame him for everything. Would want to play the familiar old “one bad apple” game and declare the problem solved, even if there was city equipment in garages and basements all over the place. They just didn’t have enough proof—so Tony knew they’d go to the wall for ten sheets of plywood instead.
Wally Norman took him aside and quietly said he understood, and by way of condolence admitted that he had four of the city’s five-ton hydraulic screw jacks in his own garage if anyone ever took it into their heads to come looking. “Ya haven’t done nothing that anyone else here hasn’t done,” Wally said, smacking a hand down between Tony’s shoulder blades, but Tony didn’t get any particular comfort from the admission.
“I still can’t believe it, Tony,” Helen said quietly while they were sitting together in the small, overheated courtroom, waiting for his case to come up. It had already been a month without pay, a month when, “suspended pending,” he hadn’t driven a truck or been up early enough in the day to see the wonder of the darkness fading into blue. He wasn’t even allowed on city property, and at home, the money had dried up completely, bills now lying unopened on the counter because they were questions that Tony and Helen couldn’t begin to answer.
“I just can’t believe it, that you were stealing. What were you thinking, anyway? And what do you think my father would have said about this?” Helen said. “You always said you wanted him to think well of you.” And something about that whole speech rang funny, even though Tony couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was.
And she’d been saying that for a month, saying it ever since the court date had been set. He didn’t feel like starting what would have become unstoppable finger pointing, hadn’t once mentioned the gambling machines, didn’t even bother putting words together into something that might seem like an explanation.
What was he thinking? Her words stuck in his head and nagged at him like a splinter until the moment when he figured it out. When Tony suddenly realized that none of it was about thinking, really. That it was actually a whole bunch of different things, layered in on top of one another. That it was about reacting, about watching and picking up unspoken cues. And he thought that, perhaps, if he’d laid it all out for his father-in-law, Mike Mirren might have understood completely, and smiled, and talked to him for a few minutes about all the things it turns out you really don’t have any choice in after all. And he would have gone back to being dead then, still smiling faintly.
Eventually, it was Tony’s turn, the whole courtroom waiting and quiet, and there really wasn’t much left to say. And the prosecution lawyer stood up and said they wanted to add extra charges, that since his arrest they’d found the backhoe and the compressor too, and they had three witnesses they wanted to bring forward, and they were talking about charging him as “a career criminal.” Tony smiled a bit when he heard the words, hearing them differently and deciding that it was exactly true, that a career was what had been stolen after all.
So Tony stood up, leaning over for a moment so his lips were by Helen’s ear, and over her shoulder he could see Ted Greenaway taking important notes in a small notebook for the city’s disciplinary hearing, his arms resting across his large stomach as he wrote, face carefully pulled into a frown.
“I love you, Helen.” Tony said it simply, like that should explain everything. As if those few words made sense of all the rest.
Then, when he was asked by the judge, Tony found three more simple words. And they explained everything, and yet only a tiny part, too.
“Guilty, your honour.”
It was simple, just like that, and Tony knew exquisitely, exactly, what was slipping away right then, knowing the words Greenaway would be writing so carefully in his notebook.
That nights and snowplows and wonder were gone, like a chapter slapped closed in a book for good.
Guilty, Tony thought, guilty like everyone. And stuffed full of things he knew and didn’t dare let out.