VINCENT O’REILLY
JANUARY 12, 1991
ONE SATURDAY in January 1991, nine-year-old Vincent heard his father and Glenn moving around the small workshop on the side of the house, and he imagined that his father was putting tools back in their familiar places. But before he was close enough to hear it, he could imagine the sound of the heater fan’s steady whine, the thick red heat that came out through the grill into the room almost like the elements inside were throwing hot liquid into the air.
Vincent had been outside in the falling snow, and there was still melting snow left on one of his boots by the front door. One boot was standing up, the other toppled over on its side. It was coming down heavy this time, sound-catching, noise-bending snow, the kind of snow that made the low foghorn positioned on the outer edge of the harbour seem to move all around him, calling first from one direction, then from another. He and Murray and Twig had gotten into a snowball fight, and then had chased a cat and pelted heavy wet snowballs at it, missing every time but driving the cat into a streaking frenzy to escape. Vincent had seen Mr. Coughlin’s truck across the street, the only vehicle on that side of the road that wasn’t buried in a thick blanket of snow, the hood of the truck still clean and steaming as the bunched flakes landed on it.
Vincent snuck into the kitchen in his damp sock feet, hearing the two men’s voices in the back room, a deep, uneven grumble at first, like some primitive and noisy piece of machinery working its way through a lengthy and slow-moving job. Vincent told himself that he was a spy quietly approaching German sentries, and then he got close enough for the sound to separate out into two distinct voices, one clear, the other muffled, sentences broken up by the smaller clattering sounds of the workshop under their hands.
“Your choice, isn’t it?” Glenn Coughlin said.
From where he was, Vincent couldn’t make out what his father said in response, the words in an undertone and indistinct from the far end of the shop. Vincent imagined that his father was facing the street, his back to the room as he talked. Every now and then a car went by on the street, the sound of its engine riding right up over his father’s voice and then fading away again as it drove out of earshot. He couldn’t hear the tires at all, but the drone of his father’s voice was steady. It was an unbroken stream of words, falling in pitch at the end, like his father was telling a long story with a particularly sad ending. Vincent couldn’t make out any of the individual words.
“Things happen,” Glenn said clearly.
Things happen, Vincent thought. Then he said it out loud. But he said it very, very quietly so the Germans wouldn’t hear him, testing out the way the words felt in his mouth. “Things happen.” He liked the way it sounded, the way it rolled off his tongue like the full stop of a period at the end of a sentence. Mr. Coughlin was like that. He just made a decision and went ahead and did it, not changing his mind and wrestling through different choices over and over again. Vincent wished his father was more like Glenn, more willing to just charge out and do something, instead of thinking of so many reasons to stay in the workshop and do nothing at all.
On the other side of the doorway, there was a long pause in the conversation. “Your choice,” Glenn said again, the words sounding as if they had been accompanied by a heavy shrug of the man’s shoulders.
Vincent could hear Glenn’s words clearly. He had gotten close enough to the workshop that he could even hear things as quiet as the big man noisily swallowing. He could hear the dry whisper of the empty beer bottle sliding back into the cardboard case.
Vincent imagined exactly where they would have to be in the workshop for their voices to sound like that: his father at the far end, standing, and Mr. Coughlin on the four-legged stool, right next to the door but with his back to the kitchen and the rest of the house. It was quiet outside, and equally still inside, and on Vincent’s side of the house he could hear only the tick of the electric heaters cooling. Vincent thought, if he listened hard enough, he might even be able to hear the simple, gentle sound of the snow coming down.
Then his father began pulling down boxes in the workshop, cardboard rectangles that uttered muffled metal jangles and bangs, and every time, his father dropped the boxes that last short inch or so to the top of the wooden workbench. Vincent knew that meant his father was angry, that he was working out something he hadn’t put into words yet—something like, “Damn it, Vincent, you come home when you’re told to come home, and no excuses.”
Vincent could picture the boxes slamming down perfectly, as perfectly as the way his mother set the table in the kitchen: three forks, three knives, three plates. Three of everything, laid out in the same order every single time, his mother travelling counter-clockwise around the table without ever realizing she never went in the other direction. Sometimes, though, four of everything, if Mr. Coughlin announced he had decided to stay and eat.
The boxes came down from the shelves in the same way, as if his father were searching for some critical thought right there in the sheer process of it. Then Vincent heard his father’s voice clearly, as if he had turned to face Coughlin down the length of the workshop.
“Enough is enough. I don’t know how long you think I’m supposed to just put up with this. Damn ship’s probably been cut up or sunk years ago, and you’re still bringing it up,” Keith O’Reilly said, his voice unusually hard and brassy, hard enough that Vincent looked over his shoulder, planning his retreat. “You’re in here all the time, rooting around at God knows what. For all I know, you took it. I don’t know, for a little insurance or something, just to keep the goddamn leash around my neck. All I know is that it’s gone, and you’re the only one who could know anything about it, right?”
“I didn’t even know you had it. Didn’t even know it existed. And that was a fucking stupid thing to do, too,” Glenn said. “Beside, in this fucking mess, it could be anywhere. You might have just lost it.”
“Bullshit. You know, I don’t think you should keep coming around here anymore. I think, by now, we must be square. But if you’re going to do something about it, you go right the fuck ahead,” Keith said. “If you’re looking to rat me out after all this time, you can just go right ahead.”
The angry words startled Vincent, as did the long silence afterwards, and he moved slowly backwards, sure the door would burst open any second. And then he heard the distant scrape of the snowplow, and he turned and ran out of the kitchen to the front window, watching for the big green truck. Almost as good as the fire trucks coming to Mrs. Purchase’s house all over again. The fire trucks were always stopping there and leaving after a few minutes, after another round of checking whatever she was afraid of this time. The firemen knew Mrs. Purchase well enough that they always waved when the big trucks were pulling away. If it was Mr. Collins driving the plow, and if he saw Vincent looking out the front window, Vincent knew that he would give the air horn chain a short tug for him.
He was already running for the living room in his sock feet, so he didn’t hear Glenn’s stool being pushed back, or the boxes being swept off the workbench and onto the floor as the two men grappled with each other, throwing awkward fists at each other’s faces. Then more serious fighting. A bottle broke, but neither man spoke, except for sharp noises when a fist hit home.
What Vincent did hear was the snowplow slowing down and taking the corner at the top of McKay Street, heard it nose into the sidewalk to spill the snow off the plow in a huge mound and then lift the blade and back up. When the blade dropped to the pavement again, it rang like a great funeral bell, and Vincent heard the truck’s engine rev up and muscle the plow into the snow and down the street towards his house. Vincent shut his eyes tight and concentrated on the sound of the plow, imagining himself in the big front seat, heading away. Just away.
Later, from the living room, he watched Glenn Coughlin head out to his truck, fumble with the keys for a moment, and then turn around and look back at the front of the workshop, his arm in the air, middle finger extended.
“You’ll need something again, O’Reilly. You know you will—you’ll get in over your head before you know it. You always do,” the big man shouted towards the house. “You’ll need something again, but don’t even think about calling me.”