Read Online The Glass Harmonica by Russell Wangersky - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œCome on then, Vincent, time to get going,” Keith O’Reilly said gruffly, as if Vincent had been the one holding them all