“Why should I believe in God?”
“I don’t know—maybe because God believes in you!”
The days were long and drawn out in school, and he was alone. He would fall asleep with his head on the desk. A teacher would yell at him, “Do you know the answer, Liam, to the seventh equation?”
“Z to the fifth,” Liam would answer without moving his head, not counting on the teacher’s displeasure that the answer was correct.
Sometimes when Liam would see a man waiting after school for his child, he would close his eyes and whisper, “Make it be Dad, make it be Dad—make it be Dad!”
Back on a day after the last blizzard in late February some years ago, two or three years after Lonnie Sullivan was found lying in his blood, Harold came into town to look at empty shops. It was the right time to get his pawnshop going, he decided, because so many buildings were closing up. He wanted one right in the centre of town.
Before he went to check out the best building available—an empty square block of a place, with the plaster already turning yellow and a grey water stain running the length of the ceiling—he saw Ethel Robb walk across the park to the restaurant where she worked, holding Liam by the hand. Harold was doing much better because of his uncle’s death—ruled an accident. He had been left two old trucks and three thousand dollars—and of course no one knew that he had found much more. He had sold Ian’s property to Helinkiscor. He smoked cigars now himself, and had gained weight—so he looked very much like his uncle once did. He always had a cigar or two in his pocket, his shirt opened, showing his medallion and chest hair. He talked so loud at times that people in the mall would turn to look at him.
He went across the street to see the boy, who he now believed was his son.
He ordered three cheeseburgers, and watched as Ethel carried them to him. She was scared to death she would slip and spill them, for it was her very first day on the job.
“You got a big appetite,” she said.
“I do. Yes, dear, I have a big appetite—I’m big in every way.” He smiled. He tweaked the little boy’s ear and made him smile and said kind things about him, and asked if he would like some french fries.
“Share my plate,” he said.
He was the only customer, and the windows were covered in snow. He moved his seat closer to where Liam sat, and they talked about hockey. He talked about school and said Liam had better study and get an education so as not to end up sorrowful. He said he knew many people who were sorrowful, and didn’t want another person in town to be so.
The way the boy looked at him Harold was moved. He hugged him and asked him how he was.
Ethel wore multicoloured stockings and had two blue ribbons in her hair, and her big short-sighted eyes blinked rapidly and hopefully under her pink glasses so he felt a sudden compassion for her. Yes, he said, he remembered her as a girl at Bonny Joyce, and hadn’t time changed them all.
Ethel asked him if he knew what had happened to his uncle Lonnie Sullivan.
“Oh, that was years ago now—slipped, I guess,” he said. And he patted Liam’s head as he said it. He was attracted to Liam because Liam looked so much like his own dead brother, Glen. He kept glancing at the boy and smiling.
“Oh,” she said. “My Corky slipped too.”
Suddenly, as if to change the topic, Harold pulled something from his pocket: the fur hat he had got from Rueben Sores, who had stolen it from someone at the tavern a few years ago. He was taking it to Frenchies, the used-clothing store, to see if they wanted it. But he changed his mind now.
It was a woman’s fur hat, in fine condition, but he had no use for it. Rueben had given it to him because Harold had been so angry they had burned a small boy’s hands.
“Take this, for Christ sake, and shut up about it,” Rueben had said.
Now Harold told Ethel he had just bought it, and there was only one person he would ever think of giving it to. And he handed it to her.
“A present for you, dear!” he said.
She herself had nothing—just like Harold, and two generations of people from Bonny Joyce Ridge. She tried it on and smiled. She wouldn’t think of keeping it. The radio played some bebop-alula song from long, long ago that Corky had said was his very favourite song. It was called “There Goes My Baby,” and when she heard it, she should think of him. The snow hit the green window and melted, and she looked like a little doll in her big fur hat. She tried to hand it back, but Harold wouldn’t take it.
“My God,” she said, “that’s so expensive!”
“What do I care?” Harold Dew said, taking her hand and holding it gently. “It looks like it was meant for you.”
Then he did something so spectacular: he gave Liam a ten-dollar bill.
“Someday when she doesn’t know it, I’m going to send Mom a note that says I love her—and a chocolate doughnut,” Liam said, mostly to himself. “And make her guess who it’s from!”
“That’s a good idea—your mother is the most important thing,” Harold said, and he smiled gently, and kissed the boy’s cheek, and took his hands quickly in his to see if they were scarred.
In late April, Annette Brideau got a phone call from Wally Bickle himself and was offered a job at the mill. This came so suddenly and unexpectedly that she went into a state of euphoria, and went shopping, ordering almost an entire new wardrobe—skirts and slacks and blouses. She did not know about odious file 0991563; but neither did Wally Bickle.
It was over a week later when Ian heard of this job. Someone came into his store and told him. At first, Ian did not catch on. But once he did, he saw the disaster of it, felt it through to the pit of his stomach.
He sent Liam away later that afternoon, telling him he did not want to see him anymore. Then he went out later to bring him in, but Liam had gone.
So, like the remark he’d once made against Corky, Ian could not believe he had said anything so unkind.
He planned never to go back to the house. He would live on his own and move into an apartment on Charles Street that he knew was available. He would continue to fight the mill—no matter what! He would be able to walk to work, although he also thought of simply selling what was left of the sorry old store and going back to fixing radios. In fact, this was the only thing that might be available to him. Yet when he received the bill for the wardrobe, and realized the amount she had spent—twenty-three hundred dollars—he went back to the house in a rage, staggering along the street.
When he got home, he saw that his clothes had been moved and packed in boxes, and those boxes placed near the basement stairs. But at this moment, Annette attempted to be reasonable and sanguine. She shook as she lit a cigarette. She stood and then sat, and then walked away from him and back toward him. Then she sat again. She told him that she had tried desperately to save the marriage even when people had told her it was hopeless—and that she had lived in a state of denial about what he really thought of her, and now she had to finally begin to live for herself. She said that he had never thought she was good enough for the likes of him. But now people were looking out for her, because they knew what she had had to endure. That she had endured too much—and everyone said to her, “How can you endure so much?”
He slumped down on the very chair he had slumped into the night he had come back from Halifax. And suddenly she began to lecture him.
She had a job now—so there was no use in him crawling back to her—he should just crawl somewhere else—maybe under a big rock. He glanced at her a moment and said nothing.
She continued speaking. Look at all the money he had spent frivolously on elections and posters.
“Big election boy!” she said. “And where did that get us?”
They could have had money; they could have been set—but he was too pigheaded. When she mentioned how her good friends, like Ripp, had warned her, her eyes brightened like a sudden flame.
“Leave me alone,” he kept saying, “leave me alone!” Then he said it once more: “Shut the hell
up and leave me alone!”
“But I am just saying,” she continued, “I told you not to do what you did—I told you. Now you are broke and everyone says you are so fuckin’ stupid, and that’s not my fault. And you used Liam to burn the store.”
“Why would you ever talk like that—why?”
“Ha! Everyone says you’re not right in the head—that you might need a lobotomy of some kind.”
Then she suddenly began to count on her fingers. “Here is what DD herself said just last week: that of all the women, you had the most beautiful one—and look what you end up doing like a total nut job. So anyway, DD is right. And Ripp says, ‘Let me at him if he comes near you.’ That is what Ripp said, so you should be careful, my boy. Me talking? You should hear what they say about you. In fact, they said to me—and I mean a whole whack of people—that you should have stuck to a person more your speed is what they say: Sara Robb!”
And she began to laugh at the unintended joke and put her hand over her mouth, giggling.
He didn’t remember doing this: he grabbed her hair, threw her down and slapped her so hard it bloodied her lip. She was suddenly, and for the first time, terrified of him. He straddled her on the stairs, looking down at her manically.
“I’ll kill you. I swear I will kill you,” he said—and it was said so calmly that she had no trouble believing him. Then he hauled her to her feet. Later he was so ashamed because he remembered he could feel her shaking in his arms.
Liam ran from the den and tried to get between them. But Ian, seeing only a form coming toward him, thought it was Ripp VanderTipp. He hauled out his knife and swung it backward, and in a second he cut the boy on the arm. Not a bad cut—but some blood did fall on Ian’s shirt.
“Dad, stop!” Liam said. “I want to show you my new Pokémon cards. Dad—that’s why I came to the store, okay—when you sent me away—I was just wanting to show you my cards. I’m sorry.”
Ian looked at his child, gave a shout of agony and left the house.
Liam picked the knife up, and after taking it upstairs hid it.
And with this, a new age was dawning on the river, one where, as DD said, all her real friends would be finally and truly free.
Sara Robb had been called to the death scene of Lonnie Sullivan a few years back. He had been found by one of the young Wizard boys who had come to collect the garbage. He called the town police, for the old shed was just on the expanded town line, and Dr. Sara Robb was then called by the coroner, Jarvis, to accompany him.
They met at Lonnie’s place. Wind had blown the snow deep inside the shed. Sara asked that nothing be moved, but the young Wizard boy had already turned the body over to see if it was Lonnie—and then he’d turned it back once more. Jarvis instructed Wilson, the photographer, to take a number of pictures—three of the roadway, five of the outside of the shed, et cetera—until they managed to get inside the shed itself. There they took pictures of everything—of the tool box from four different angles, and the bench, and the way Lonnie lay. The coroner walked about the shed itself, measuring footprints.
The body was already stiffened and the right arm extended out. There was a broken rum bottle, the glass scattered over most of the floor. There was an Auto Trader lying open between the bench and the body.
The first thing Sara noticed, besides the body of Lonnie, was the blood on the corner of this metal bench, as if he may have fallen and hit his head. It had solidified on the bench and had seeped along the bench leg. So she took a scrape and sample of that blood.
She also looked at the wound on Sullivan’s head and collected some of his blood. She took the samples of blood back to her office; but then things happened, and the death was ruled an accident, and she went on to other things.
Over time, Sara went back to Africa, twice almost fell in love—thought of moving to Belgium with a divorced co-worker—was recruited by the UN to act as a liaison officer in Rwanda for the World Health Organization. She decided against this, for she wanted to have her own practice in the little place where she was born. The modern world was closing in on her, just as it was on those in Africa who she doctored and tried to care for.
When she came home, the death of Lonnie Sullivan was forgotten.
Over time, no other theories were presented. Sara discovered that the test on the blood had come back when she was away, and a few weeks after she came home she looked at it, and was surprised that the blood on the corner of the bench was not the same type as that of Lonnie Sullivan. She handed her results over to the coroner but heard nothing back.
So Sara Robb kept what was left of the sample of blood from the corner of the bench in a refrigerator in her office, as simple prudence, and life went on. She was smart to be prudent, because when the coroner himself retired, he discarded all the blood evidence in his possession.
Annette went to Jeremy Hogg and asked him what she should do.
“You really need to divorce him,” Hogg said. “Everyone knows he’s crazy as a bag of hammers—he trashed his house, his store, you have already had to call the police. Your friend Ripp tells me how he has to stand guard for you. So then, no one will blame you.”
“Oh, I don’t know—I wish he was back to himself,” she said, wringing a Kleenex nervously and sitting in Hogg’s dark office near the old travelling chest, looking about uncomfortably—for now she was here, and now she was doing it.
She was propelled to divorce because people expected her to, and she could do so and be certain that she would be applauded for taking this step. This was, in fact, not only part of it but its greatest part—the tremendous tearing away of all that once was had now started. That is, divorce was an institution as much as marriage and she was now a part of it as an institution, so she must follow the rules of this institution. If that sounded cold, it would only be if she was the one who was totally vulnerable and alone—and though this was the state she and her new lawyer projected, she was neither of these things.
Now Hogg stood and closed the office door so they could have privacy. This in itself made her feel not only special but somehow selected.
As he walked back to his desk he said, “I usually tell people to reconsider—for the children.” He always said he usually told people to reconsider, and he always followed this with “But in this case—if your mind is set. He has probably hurt the boy—has he?”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, many times, all of that,” she said. “Stabbed him!” Annette looked at him.
She was still beautiful; there was no doubt. However, her face was starting to turn puffy like that of her mother. She was not the youthful and irrational woman he had heard so much about—but she was still striking—and in a certain way he was overcome by her, which allowed him to dislike her husband even more.
Ian was hated on the river. He was hated at the mill where she worked. Both Hogg and Annette knew this. They also knew how people (Hogg’s wife being one) cynically spread rumours that the boy was not his son.
“A young woman like you should make something more of your life. He already hurt one woman, I hear—Sara Robb,” he said, not knowing the implications of this remark. Not knowing that Annette’s fury was, in great part, fury that Sara had succeeded in a way she never would, in spite of capturing him. In fact, the real lesson being that Annette capturing him allowed this transformation of Sara. Annette looked at Hogg with a transfixed look and said nothing.
Hogg caught this delicately and showered her with praise for standing up to him on her own to protect the boy. “You got a black eye protecting your son,” he said. “He probably would have killed the boy! A knife he had on him to do his dirty work, if it came to that.”
“Yes,” she said, “yes, I had to fight him off!”
“Yes, I have heard as much,” Hogg said, suddenly yawning.
Hogg, however, had the vulgar male trait of immediately and bellicosely taking the side of women’s independence, as long as it wasn’t his own wife. It was politically expedient to do so, and Hogg
was nothing if not expedient.
But to say that Annette did not know this was to say she did not know how the game between men and women was played. She knew it ruthlessly and predatorily from the time she was fourteen.
So they played, miming both the importance of her hard fight for independence and the child—whose name Hogg kept forgetting (some goddamn Irish wannabe name, he thought), and the sudden ruthless attitude of her husband, who, “in this day and age,” would act the way he did, insanely jealous because she had to take a job and had danced with someone at a dance.
Then, finally, the money was mentioned. She looked about and said secretively that Ian kept his money in a safe. That she had money in her account, but she knew he had lots in the safe. That she was worried because the store had suffered a fire.
“A safe in his office is the worst place for it,” Hogg said. “He might decide to blow it. You should have some investments—do you have any? Do you know what he does with his earnings?”
She was shocked as this sudden realization took hold. She shook her head and tears came flooding to her eyes.
“I don’t know anything about it,” she said truthfully.
“What? No investments—in this day and age! Well, I’ll help you with that! I can increase your money tenfold—but he should not control it. And he will fight this, I know. So we have to get a court order to get it out of the safe and into a bank, where it belongs. Put it in trust for the boy until all of this is settled.”
He told her to make sure she had a friend stay with her, change the locks on the doors, and he would see that the money was removed and put into a bank on a court order.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she kept saying, adding that it would be the hardest thing she’d ever had to do. Her newly bought wristwatch with its juvenile black leather strap seemed to accentuate her defencelessness.
Her father worked daily in the Department of Motor Vehicles; every once in a while he came out with a prurient off-colour joke to show how lively he could be. He had a stuffy chair he sat in, and an enclosed living room that always smelled of damp and cigars. Her mother was a little shrewish woman who disliked her and was envious of her beauty, always saying, “Oh yes, it’s all Annette, all the time!”
Crimes Against My Brother Page 29