Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  But there was something else—an open secret among the boys. The secret was this: the third boy—the third blood brother, Ian—felt he would not be happy until he was with Annette Brideau. She was the girl he believed he loved, and he also believed she would someday love him. All it would take was the right moment. He did not know when that time would be, but he did feel he would someday win her for himself.

  I have to prove myself, or die trying, he thought. Then she will be mine. And do you want her to be yours?

  “I would give a life for it,” he said aloud.

  So in a way—a very real way—Annette Brideau made Ian resolute and ambitious. He became more and more solitary as he tried to decide what he wished to do with his life. He gave up watching hockey because it cost him two dollars at the rink. He gave up fish and chips on his way home from the field. He gave up everything he possibly could. And in some way he was doing it for Annette, who for the most part did not know he was alive.

  Ian knew he would have to have money. That is, if he was to have Annette, money would be part of his allure. And this was Ian’s first disobedience to his larger soul. He lessened his opinion of himself in order to charm her.

  I am not good enough for her, he would think. I will never be good enough for her—even if I have money. I know that!

  No, I will have someone else—and she will be sorry, he would tell himself other times.

  Then: Why should I need money? If I need money, she’s not worth it.

  Then: Yes, I will have her—I would give a life for it, he would say. But when he met Annette, he would look in another direction entirely and pretend to ignore her existence. On occasion she would become pleasant, look his way and wave, in the innocent way young girls do to flirt. But as soon as he acknowledged her in any way, she would turn away.

  In this fashion, she and he conned each other. She did so by pretending she didn’t want him to be attracted to her. He did so by pretending that Annette would someday tire of all the others in the whole world, even Harold, and seek him alone.

  But by this time, Annette also believed she was nothing. That is, in a profound way she believed she could be nothing without Lonnie’s validation and blessing.

  “Find the right man,” Big Lonnie would say. “For Christ’s sake! Don’t end up with a man who’ll be a burden.”

  “I won’t, I promise, Uncle Lonnie,” she would say pensively, her eyes brilliantly dark and mysterious.

  “Anyways, Harold is okay. But sometime when you are in the mood, and everything like that there, and Harold is not around, maybe you can come with me to PEI or somewhere like that there. I mean, I know families over there in construction who have, like—well, I hate to tell you—”

  “Tell me what, Uncle Lonnie?”

  “Have, like, seven million dollars!”

  “Seven million dollars?”

  “Upon me soul ta God. And there is a young lad over there who is I think is interested in you too. I mean he saw you when he was over here looking at that filly that time—remember? I don’t know if you remember.”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “Not yet—not right away. We will see how Harold does with the Fitzroy will. But if that doesn’t come off for you—well, don’t settle for nothing but the best!”

  Annette, when she first went to work for Lonnie, had thought all of this talk of money untrue. But that was well over two years ago. Now it pleased her, in a strange way, to listen to this talk, because it meant Lonnie was interested in her getting a fortune. By now Annette did not make a move without Lonnie, and in this way he had taken over her life.

  When he was eighteen, Ian decided to do something that no one would have guessed. He determined to leave Bonny Joyce, and leave it forever—leave his friends, and leave everything he had ever known.

  So he worked all summer, haying in the big fields in Millerton, to pay off the debt he owed to Lonnie Sullivan. And he did owe $442—an amount compounded by the piddling amount Sullivan paid. No one believed he would be able to work it off. But Ian went to the hay fields in mid-July and worked for nothing more than lunch and supper, supplied by a vending machine at the corner store. In fact, for the last three weeks, he worked for nothing at all, and slept in the woods and ate bread and drank water, and though Lonnie called him out in front of the others, he asked for nothing.

  “Don’t you need more money?” Lonnie would ask obsequiously, for he did not wish to lose a good worker, and the only way to keep him was to loan him money he would then have to work off.

  But Ian said he wanted not a penny. “No” was all he said, and all he seemed able to say. “No.” He was working his debt off and would not accrue any more. And the debt dwindled to two hundred dollars and then one hundred and then $38.50, which is what he was paid for a day’s labour.

  But on the last few days, Lonnie picked a Mandeville boy from Millerton to drive the tractor and told Ian he had enough men to throw the bales.

  So Ian sat far back at the edge of one of the huge fields, watching. At night there was a great moon, and it bathed the land, and the last of the bales looked like blond wheat rolled against the sky. Down below, the lights near the river flickered out while the cement plant shone white behind the scattered machines. He looked down the hill at the cement plant, at the waves of soft cement that had drifted over clumps of grass, at the chalk-white building where the office was, with its three windows and its hum from the generator. And looking down at this he thought of himself as a Frankenstein creature that no one would ever love.

  He determined he would sit where he was all the last day, and watch the workers work—to prove not his, but Lonnie Sullivan’s, disloyalty and madness.

  But on that last day the boy from Millerton did not return. He had broken his wrist in a fall at the river, having gone for a swim after work. And so Lonnie, cigar in his mouth, looked about for someone to help—and spied Ian four hundred yards away near the very back of the field, and called him down.

  Exhausted, tormented by both hunger and thirst, Ian went to work. He repaid the last of his debt that night.

  Annette heard all this from Lonnie, and understood it in the way Lonnie himself described it.

  “He is crazy,” Annette said. “After all you did for him—it makes me almost cry.”

  “I do cry,” Lonnie said. “You help a man out and he spits in your face. It’s a shameful old world we live in, pawnmesoultagod.”

  Ian had a tiny bit of money. It clung to the pocket of his suit jacket like dirty coins. It had come from his mother, from a small bank account that she had put aside for him before she died. He moved to town and got a room near the bridge, where he could listen to the hulking of trucks in the night buckling the spans as they moved back and forth while a perpetual warning light flashed on and off.

  Far away from home he was quiet and obscure, a faceless journeyman neither happy nor sad. Of all the pictures from his past, he took only one with him: a picture of Annette standing beside Lonnie Sullivan’s car one summer afternoon. He put this in his room and looked at it as he ate his solitary supper. People assumed she was his girl from Bonny Joyce. But he quietly told them she was not his girl, but his friend’s girl. Or perhaps she was no one’s girl; he did not know. She was, he said, an uncertain girl because she was uncertain of herself, and he hoped the best for her, and could say no more than that. They looked at him with a kind of strange curiosity, so he said that she was elusive and unhappy and wanted more to her life—but who among us does not? And then he would stroke the picture just once and turn it away, as if to keep her memory pure.

  This caused him to be looked at and spoken about in a peculiar way. That is, he was soon mocked behind his back by people who heard of him, and his antics became known at the mill where many worked. And this, I know, played a part in his life as well.

  Ian sent Harold and Evan letters and Christmas cards, but they have not survived, nor were they answered. He was lonely, and walked by himself along snowy stree
ts at dusk, wondering what would become of him—not fitting in, not knowing anyone. His two uncles were both town drunks, and sometimes came by to ask for money—and he felt obligated for the first little while. Then in anger he chased both of them downstairs, furious, saying he would kill them if they tried to rob him again. This was the first indication of his violent temper and it brought the police, the two uncles standing sanctimonious behind the officer, as filled with civic duty as mayors, ready as always to tattle.

  Ian spent that Christmas by himself, with a small Cornish hen he had scraped together enough money to buy. The mill stank in his lungs, but in desperation he applied to work there so that he might impress Annette with a big mill job, and a man from middle management—the kind most of us know if we live in small towns, a man who curls and belongs to the Kinsmen, who has ordinary ideas, a man with a fine and open face, happy-go-lucky, with nice wavy hair, and who couldn’t seem more pleasant—dismissed Ian outright because no family member of his had ever worked there. The mill glowered in the night air like a giant red sore over the river, and Ian was left to walk the road back to his room and open his door to a small couch and a night table.

  He walked back in the February slush for four miles, his feet soaked and his suit pants covered in salt. He counted his money, quarter by nickel on the metal table, a plastic curtain over the window. He looked at the calendar and wondered where he would be in seven or eight years. He would see that man from the mill again, he thought to himself—yes, someday this man would come to him. Someday he would stand in a place Ian owned. And when that man did come to him, when he did, the tables would be turned. This is what he hoped for and prayed for—though he said to himself that he did not believe in prayer. But he thought about how the town, this town, orchestrated itself into a hierarchy of small-minded businessmen and conceited mill officials, all succumbing to the idea that a paycheque in their back pocket and new pants on their arse made the man. And then he was ashamed to have been thinking such unkind thoughts.

  He was brighter by far than they were, and he would prove it.

  So Ian rented the room in town, and fixed radios for money. No one knew much about him, and that, it seemed, was the way it would always be. He took jobs when he could—mainly lifting and carrying, and working the boats. He did this for a year. At the first of each month he struggled to make the rent. And he promised himself that he would not drink, for drink had destroyed his family for three generations.

  Although he was alone, his reputation for being able to fix whatever he put his hand to grew, so after being out of work for some time he finally got a job at a large second-hand appliance store on the square. There people noticed him, and some—more than some; many—called him brilliant, for twenty-year-old radios would find a spark in his hands. But this was nothing to him.

  In a way, it was Annette who kept him from drink—for it was she who he kept hoping for. He kept her picture in his room, and his ability to stay sober helped keep his hope of being with her alive. Oh, it was a false hope and stupid, and he felt stupid too, and he thought of how foolish a hope it was. But he was proud of his ability not to drink; so many around him had already succumbed to this very thing that had destroyed their fathers.

  “I don’t drink,” he would say to people who offered him an ounce. “Drink is a whore that doesn’t charge you but robs you blind.”

  His uncles now came back to see him—both speaking about how much they had loved his mother and tried to take care of him. He knew they had robbed her, and many times made fun of him, and he also knew this: that they were filching spies for Lonnie Sullivan, who wanted to know what Ian was up to. Lonnie envied anyone who got away from him, who made it out from under and directed their own life. So Ian put each of the uncles on an allowance of a bottle and a half of wine a week. And he bought them new rubber boots for the winter, so shiny and black you could pick them both out standing at the corner.

  And he thought: Yes, I am a blood brother—but neither Harold nor Evan ever take the time to say hello. And in his reverie he would think how both had cheated him, and both had neglected him when he was down. He would not have done so to them. Stung by old memories, he decided he would remain living on his own and make it on his own, with no help from his two former friends. When he was rich enough, they would see who he was. And this he longed for.

  Ian’s first month on the job, he heard that Harold had bought Annette “the diamond.” It was tiny, not much bigger than the smallest stone—but she wore it and showed it off everywhere she went. People told him he would no longer recognize her, that she was someone different now, and different in the way she acted. She was sure of herself now, and sure of her destiny.

  “What do you mean?” Ian asked when someone said this one night. He was hardly able to breathe, asking about her again.

  “She dresses the part,” the man told him.

  “What do you mean, ‘dresses the part’?” His throat was dry and his voice seemed to come from someone else.

  “Well, what Lonnie wants a woman to be, Lonnie gets.”

  This stunned him. For the first time he understood how much Lonnie controlled her, that she was Lonnie Sullivan’s shadow—and how had he not seen this before? It all came back to him, how she’d smiled at him from the car window. The man he was with continued to talk, pleased at the information he was divulging, declaring first this and then that.

  “Say nothing more about her to me,” Ian said, feeling blood rise to his temples and his eyes flame. The man turned white, shrugged and left. But when he got halfway down the block, he yelled, “She’s just a fuckin’ downriver twat. ‘Lonnie’s twat’ is what she is called. Ha, you don’t know. You’re as dumb as Harold Dew. She is with Lonnie in the car every day—she is on the road with him every day—so what do you think they do!”

  Ian started toward him, and the man turned and ran again. Ian went back to the store, sat on a stool and stared vacantly out at the river.

  Why was this story surfacing now about Annette?

  It had begun five months before. Annette had gone to Lonnie wondering, in her innocence, about the boy he had told her about, the boy with the seven million dollars. She thought Lonnie would be pleased with her inquiry. But Lonnie, having just lost on horses, was furious, and said he would not be going back there and for her to stop pestering him. His shirt was covered in sweat, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, exposing his two tattoos. He counted money and now and again looked up at her. He called her greedy and said the one thing he hated was a gold-digger. (This is what someone had called him in Charlottetown.) Then, still counting money, he calmed himself and told her that he’d thought she was going with Harold anyway. So she should continue with that.

  “Harold?”

  “Why not—go get engaged to him, why don’t you?”

  Lonnie had not thought of Fitzroy’s money in a long while, and it was because of his falling out at the races in both Truro and Charlottetown, and his conversation with Annette, that he began to think of it again. He needed money, was always trying to determine ways to get it. And he had the idea that he would rob Fitzroy and be done with it. As he sat there that afternoon, this is what he began to think.

  What he hated was, in fact, how much this money plagued him. And how much Fitzroy did not like him. Fuck him, I’ll just take it, he thought. He don’t like me and I don’t like him, and that’ll be an end to it! And he looked very self-righteous and stern when he thought this.

  Robbery was not at all a new thing for Lonnie Sullivan—nor was using Harold Dew to steal. In fact, by now he had enough on Harold to turn him over to the police without implicating himself in the least. That is, Lonnie always had something on his friends. The younger they were when he met them, the more he held on them.

  So now he said to Annette, with paternal caution, that she should look for someone closer to home. He asked her if she had seen Harold lately, if they were still dating. She told him they were, now and then. But she was not re
ally in love with Harold. Not really.

  Lonnie shrugged.

  “Love! Love is nothing. He’s a good lad—and smart,” Lonnie told her. “And you are going on twenty now—perhaps he will be the best deal for you. Not that you ever need a man, or anyone. I am not saying that any woman needs a man—just saying.” And he shrugged.

  Soon, in spite of all Annette’s plans and Lonnie’s promises about men in distant places who had seen her, rich young men he knew; in spite of Lonnie acting as her agent and speaking about what he intended to do for her; in spite of all her wild, unrealistic hopes that Lonnie had fed for five years, she was suddenly engaged to Harold, a man from Clare’s Longing. And she became engaged without even knowing she would be, or that she would accept when he asked.

  “It can’t be,” she would say some days.

  And yet it was. And she was exactly like twenty other young women she knew, and not one bit more satisfied.

  “Things will be different with me—won’t they, Uncle Lonnie? I mean, there is still a chance?” she said one gloomy day, sitting on the porch couch, staring out at nothing at all.

  “With you—oh, of course! A chance? A woman like you will always have the world by the balls.”

  Would you kill for her? Ian was haunted by his declaration, and told himself: Look at the girls in town and forget her forever.

  Yes, kill for her, Ian thought—my God, what a thing to say. But then, just the memory of Annette running to Harold at the horse haul was enough to enrage him. How could she have done that to him? How could she have done that—to him?

  So after she was engaged, this is what he resolved to do: He took her picture off his mirror and put it in a drawer, determined never to speak of her again. He ate alone at Susie’s steak house on the corner, and went to work in a blue-collar shirt and pair of workpants. He read serious magazines and had a subscription to the The New Yorker. Of course, there were many jokes about Bonny Joyce and the Clare’s Longing stretch that he had to listen to—about the skanks that lived there and how many children could be accredited to any of their husbands. And once others in the city knew where he was from, it got worse.