VINCENT O’REILLY
JANUARY 5, 1991
TWO DAY SLATER , and no one even knew Bart had been in the O’Reillys’ house. Glenn Coughlin, standing in the front doorway, said, “Gonna be just like your dad, aren’tcha?” and he smiled when he said it.
Nine years old and serious, Vincent O’Reilly stood in the front hall, his arms straight down by his sides as his mother knelt in front of him, doing up the buttons on his coat. Big Glenn Coughlin from the dockyard, standing just outside the door on the front steps, the door wide open, two paper cups of coffee steaming in his hands. Across the street, Coughlin’s fourteen-year-old truck was idling next to the curb, exhaust pillowing out into the early morning air in short, uneven chuffs.
Fine snow was coming down out of a clear blue sky, almost magically, the individual shards of broken flakes caught glistening in the hard white winter sunlight as they fell. Vincent looked over his own shoulder and stared at the vibrating exhaust pipe, at the ancient dark green truck with the rust holes in the quarter panels and the distinctive light green outline of flames drawn along the sides, the stencilled outline now coming apart with age. It was topped with the ratty white camper back that Glenn had bought somewhere on the cheap, a camper top obviously designed for a different truck and slightly too large for the pickup’s back. It perched, more than fit, on the truck’s box. Vincent had often heard his father say, “Glenn doesn’t care what anyone thinks about how something looks, as long as it does its job.”
Keith O’Reilly and Glenn would load up the truck in the fall to hunt moose, cases of beer tucked inside the back, against the tailgate, then take a whole weekend and come back smelling of dirt and cigarette smoke and stale beer. “Went up to the cabin on the Northeast,” Keith would say when they got back, but if they were ever successful on their hunting trips, Vincent hadn’t seen any sign of it. They never brought a moose home, head on the roof of the pickup, and rabbits never made their way into stew. Vincent knew his dad came back from the weekends almost deflated, and in its own way that was a good thing, like pressure letting go before it was too much to contain. He came back rumpled, Vincent thought, and smelling somehow like overripe plums, as if he’d gone bad a little out there in the country, something spoiled taking root somewhere around his neck and shoulders and breath. He also came back with something Vincent would only be able to describe later as blunted menace, an important slowing of unreasonable anger: whatever else there was in the small house, there was an undercurrent that if things didn’t go Vincent’s father’s way, there could easily be serious trouble. It wasn’t something Vincent could put his finger on. It was simply there—and Glenn Coughlin was right in the middle of it.
“Keith’s on his way now, Glenn,” Evelyn O’Reilly said, looking back into the house over her shoulder, hearing her husband’s footsteps. Vincent looked at the man he was always told to call Mr. Coughlin and wondered what it was that he didn’t understand about the man.
Glenn Coughlin, Vincent had realized, was the only person who walked into the O’Reilly house whenever he wanted to. Glenn didn’t ring the doorbell, he didn’t knock—he just parked his truck, hitched his pants, strode up the sidewalk, put his hand on the knob and walked right in like he owned the place, as if he had every right to be there. Like it was his own house. He actually lived ten blocks over, on Bond Street, in a small, detached two-storey house with white vinyl siding and new windows that were so small the house looked as if it had been designed as a fort with narrow gun emplacements instead of real windows. Vincent had never been inside, had never done anything more than drive by the place, and it sometimes seemed to him that he could say the same thing about Glenn. Coughlin spent more time at their house than he spent anywhere else.
It might be five in the morning or nine at night, but Glenn almost always had two cups of coffee with him in a takeout tray, one for himself, the other for Vincent’s dad. Glenn even called Vincent’s mother Ev, and no one did that, not even Vincent’s father. But nobody seemed to mind Glenn doing anything—at least, no one said anything if they did. And it didn’t stop there. Glenn could walk back into the workshop and grab tools—the precious chainsaw that no one else touched, the Vise-Grips, anything—and walk right straight out of the house again, and Vincent’s father wouldn’t get angry, wouldn’t do anything but laugh that hollow little laugh that seemed completely connected to Glenn Coughlin and absolutely no one else. More than once Vincent had heard his father pleading with Glenn to return one tool or another, his father caught in the middle of a project that needed something that had gone missing. Other times Vincent had gotten up in the middle of the night, everyone else asleep, only to find Glenn in the kitchen, silhouetted by the light from the fridge as he searched for something to eat. “Hi bud,” Glenn would say, his mouth half full, leftovers in his hands and sometimes on the side of his face.
Glenn worked in the dockyard with Vincent’s dad. They’d gone to school together from boyhood, Glenn always the bigger of the two, always willing to step in when Keith was in trouble with someone else—Keith, small and ready to fight but always outweighed, Glenn slower to action but always ready to turn on whoever was tormenting the smaller boy and settle matters with quick, heavy fists.
They’d finished high school together, sporting identical low-average marks, started work at the dockyard together, and stayed together on the same shifts for years, Glenn backing up Keith with his size, Keith talking Glenn out of corners, like the time Glenn decided he was going to beat up a supervisor—a supervisor who was later fired when his locker somehow ended up full of gear stolen from the skipper’s cabin on a provincial ferry that was in the yard for a refit.
Keith would move to sandblasting for a change, then Glenn would catch up, moving over to the same crew within a week or so, like an old couple who argued publicly but really couldn’t stand being away from each other. They had stayed on the paint crew for all of three weeks before deciding that they hated painting more than anything they’d ever done, and both promised they would never, ever go back. They had top welding tickets, and either one of them could fire up the big D9 Caterpillar bulldozer and use it to haul a ship up onto the synchro-lift, black raw diesel smoke belching from the short stack on the tractor as it hauled the ship along, the tractor in the lowest possible gear. Both men had enough seniority to bump just about anyone else off a job, and they weren’t afraid to use it, either. Keith always led: every time Keith tried something new, it was like Glenn decided he wanted to try it too, and it seemed they would leapfrog around the yard into any job they wanted to. “Ya gotta like the union, Keith,” Glenn said, and he said it often, especially when the shop steward was in earshot, and then Glenn would wink.
It was quiet in the front hall where the three of them were waiting, and then Vincent’s father was coming down the hallway towards them fast, his arms in tight next to his sides, hands up high so that it looked like he was racing down the narrow hallway towards a fight. He had his coat on already, hands pushed angrily down through the sleeves so that, inside, the sleeves of his sweater were pulled up in bunches on his forearms. It didn’t matter: five minutes after they got to work, everyone would be in the dark blue insulated coveralls and steel-toed work-boots anyway, hard hats perched on their heads like yellow cherries on sundaes, the dockyard logo on a rectangular patch right in the middle of their backs like they were small blue billboards swarming all over the latest ship.
“Come on then, Vincent, time to get going,” Keith O’Reilly said gruffly, as if Vincent had been the one holding them all up.
Vincent didn’t say anything, knew better than to say anything, but he picked up his bookbag quickly, accepting a kiss on the cheek from his mother as he turned for the door.
“The three men, all heading out together for their shifts, hey, Vincy?” Glenn said, laughing.
Glenn was always laughing, Vincent thought, even when there wasn’t anything funny to be laughing about. Vincent swung his school bag up over his shoulder, walking between the two men as they crossed the street. Vincent looked both ways, just the way he had been told, before he stepped off the curb. He noticed that Glenn didn’t bother, as if a car hadn’t been made yet that would dare to hit him.
On the other side of the truck, Vincent’s father held the passenger door open, stood there as if trying to make up his mind, and then climbed into the cab of the truck himself, sliding into the middle of the bench seat next to Coughlin.
“You take the outside, Vincent. You’re going to be getting out first anyway.”
“First in, last out, just like the contract says, hey, Keith?” Glenn said, slipping the truck into gear and pulling it away from the curb. As they drove, Vincent looked out the window and into the side mirror. It was starred and broken, several shards simply gone, as if someone had driven a fist into it as Glenn had pulled away. The truck mirror had always been like that. Vincent liked looking in it, liked looking at the way the different pieces broke up the view behind the truck, so that every single shard showed the world in a slightly different way, each one highlighting its own particular facet of the things they passed. His father noticed him staring at the mirror.
“Why don’t you get that damned thing fixed, Glenn? Been broken forever,” Keith said. “Don’t know how this thing passes inspection anyway.”
“Don’t need it, do I? Besides, a new one’s close on sixty dollars,” Glenn said. Then he laughed again, a dry little shallow laugh, like he was making a point. “Some people can get around just fine without it, and without hitting stuff.”
Vincent’s father crossed his arms stiffly across his chest at that, glowered, and didn’t say anything else.
“Lighten up, would ya?” Glenn said.
They drove in silence for a few minutes down the snow tunnel that was McKay Street. The city plows had been out overnight, turning big curved berms of slush and snow up against the sides of the parked cars on the road, the corridor so precise that it seemed like they were on a private road, a road built just for them. Vincent was watching the sun play off the rounded slush, the backwards curve made by the plow’s blade now hardening into ice. He watched the way one line of bright sun seemed to run along ahead of the truck on the freezing bank, the reflection never getting any closer to them nor any farther away, the way the light made longer points on the top and bottom, so it was like they were following some simple, always-moving schoolbook drawing of the Star of Bethlehem.
“Foreman said we can work inside on the trawler if we want, or we can go back to the paint crew in the tanker. It’s our pick,” Keith said. There were only two vessels in the yard, nothing else waiting or even scheduled to come in, and most of the short-timers had already been put on layoff for the rest of the winter. Keith had been complaining for a week about the two ships, wishing the yard was empty and that the whole crew could be on layoff for a little while. “Hate winter,” he’d mutter.
“We can be freezing cold outside, or inside in the warm and the whole day stinkin’ of paint. That’s pretty slim pickings,” Glenn said.
Vincent thought that the pair of words sounded just the way Glenn always talked—“slim pickings”—just a couple of sudden words that didn’t seem to mean anything at all on their own but that fit him perfectly. “Slim pickings”—“Fat chance”—“No way.” Not “No damn way” or “No fucking way” either—and Vincent had heard both of those before, from his father and from other men at the yard—but just “No way,” and the way Mr. Coughlin said it, it sounded far more serious than anyone else could make it sound.
Glenn stopped the truck at the four-way stop and then turned onto Bond Street, passing the house he never seemed to be in, a narrow trench dug through the snow towards the front door like he felt the digging was hardly worth the effort. The back wheels of the truck slipped because the snow had melted and then frozen again overnight where it had run out in a long tongue just past the crosswalk.
The sky was flat white and still, all the blue bled out of it by winter and the latitude, the sunlight thin and distant and struggling to throw down any heat at all.
Vincent looked up at his father out of the corner of his eye. It looked like his father was going to say something else, but then it was like Glenn could read his mind. He gave a small shake of his head, raising both his eyebrows at once.
Glenn Coughlin, Vincent decided, had eyebrows that were far more bushy than any he had ever seen.
They drove in silence for a few more minutes, the streets still relatively empty, Coughlin taking the corners wide and fast, his side of the truck often in the other lane. When they met another vehicle, it was the other car or truck that acquiesced and coughed up the right-of-way. Glenn had no compunctions about sitting in the street, nose to nose with someone else and at a dead stop, until the other driver changed his mind and let Glenn go on.
Then the pickup was in front of the school. It was an old school, a big, two-storey brick building with too-large windows, and there were scores of other children spinning up the sidewalk towards the front door like busy ants. Down among narrow streets of row houses, each house seemed to be disgorging more kids onto the streets every moment, the narrow sidewalks blocked with snow, and every child was producing his or her own tiny engine-like plume of steam as they moved in masses along the curb.
Vincent opened the truck’s door, and as he did, Coughlin reached across in front of Keith and ruffled Vincent’s hair. “Work hard,” he said. “Do your best. Get good grades. You’ll probably end up down on the dock with us anyway, though.”
And no, I won’t, Vincent thought even then. Vincent liked geography best of all, because it was the study of everywhere else. A study that made McKay Street, and even St. John’s, the smallest possible speck.
Glenn took his hand away by giving the boy’s head a sudden little shove and then a sharp, harsh knock with two of his knuckles, as if suggesting any sort of kindness was a passing thing.
“See ya, Vincent,” his father said quietly.
“See ya, Dad.”
Coughlin put the truck back into gear and was pulling away from the curb before the door was fully closed. Halfway down the block, the truck’s horn gave a forlorn little toot, as if remembering something it had forgotten, but Vincent’s hand was already on the big brass door handle to the school, and he barely bothered to look at the truck as it vanished downhill towards the harbour.
The tide of children surged and pushed their way in through the heavy door to the school, jostling all around him and carrying him in through the door like he was a chip of wood suspended in a current, the direction he was going to travel already decided upon by everyone else.