“If I hear anything about it I’ll let you know,” he added, because he always said that to people who admired him for being a powerful man. That is, he must have thought that Ralphie wanted his help in some way.
“I’ll let ya know,” he said again, nodding to no one in particular. But his eyes looked puzzled for a moment and he ran his thick callused hands through his hair, as if, for some purely instinctive reason, he felt he had to look more himself.
Vera’s ex-husband, Nevin White, looked like a little old man though he was only forty-five.
“Everyone tormented him, not always through design,” the man told Andrew. “It was in a way heroic that he stayed here – stayed in a room by the bridge.
“The reason he stayed in his unbearable room was for the sake of his daughter. Even when the custody battle was over. For two years he did not see the girl or speak to her. He was not allowed. But for those two years he watched her from a video he had made of her sixth birthday party. After those two years he was allowed one Saturday a month on condition of Vera’s approval. At times Vera gave this approval, and at times she didn’t. And then, seeing a mark on Hadley’s bottom one afternoon, she accused him of incest. It was never proven.
“I knew Nevin at university,” the man continued. “I used to play a lot of bridge then. I never liked him, but now I would say there was something brave about him.
“He tried to take his own life in 1987. But it didn’t work. These things never do if you wake again in the morning.
“Pills are a rather womanish way to go in the face of so much violence on this river,” the man maintained. “And so people began to tease him and call him Aspirin-head.
“And yet it didn’t seem that way – that is, womanish (if we can use that term anymore); it didn’t seem that way. It only seemed that he was a broken man. And it might have been a defiant and even heroic act. Heroics have their own way of adapting.
“He moved from rooming house to rooming house, with his pictures of Hadley and his video. And then one afternoon in October of 1989 he was suddenly filled with new confidence and hope. Vera telephoned him, wanting to see him. And she sounded very pleasant. It took him a day to get up the courage to see her. To bathe and shave and iron his pants and shirt.”
The boy asked when in October this was, and the man said that it was the day of Jerry’s first visit to Vera’s house. Jerry had missed meeting Nevin that day by twenty minutes.
“When Nevin got to the house he found out that Vera wanted only one thing, however – she wanted to change Hadley’s name to hers. Coldness always has its roots in sensible thought.
“Then she asked him if he would remove his hat. As yet she hadn’t looked at him. She was working on a computer, and staring at the screen, with earphones on.
“He took his hat off, sat down, and put it on his knee. He had never seen her working on a computer before, and he was bemused by this. He was bemused because he felt, like Jerry was to feel later on, that he had been left behind forever. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He had practised what he would say to her for an entire day, in just such a mirror, and now he hated his reflection. His hair was thin and drawn back into a ponytail, turning grey. It was as if he suddenly realized he had not moved in twenty years, while the world had spun away.
“When she finally glanced at him, he felt his lips begin to tremble and he looked away.
“He said ‘No!’ He wanted to leave Hadley’s name as it was. And then he said, in a confused state, that she had no right to ask him this. As soon as he said this he felt that she had turned against him forever – and that no matter what he did nothing could ‘turn back the page’ for him and Hadley. That he would go into the dark without either hand to hold. Vera’s hands were long and mannish and yet he remembered only how gentle they could be.
“He held his hat clumsily in his hand and looked down at his cracked and blistered boots.
“‘You are being unreasonable,’ Vera said calmly, continuing to type away, looking at her computer screen – the final draft of an article on aboriginal hunting rights, and the land-track claims certain reserves here had.
“When he looked up Hadley was there on the stairs, listening. As always he wanted to see if she was wearing anything that he had bought her. He smiled, yet when he went to speak to her, she ran upstairs.
“Don’t be misinformed about it. Nevin didn’t pity himself. He hated himself. Worst of all he hated his own posturing, his lack of manliness, is what it came to. He remembered running away one night, from bullies, and leaving his first wife, Gail, alone on the street. While he hid. Back in 1970. All of us at the university knew about this. At the time people made a series of explanations for it, saying he was nonviolent, et cetera; but this only made us queasy later on. I don’t know how else to explain it.
“But don’t be fooled. In a way he was filled with integrity and so could never forget it. He had tried to make up for this act all of his life. And, in a way, it was this act which had caused him to leave his first wife and blame her for things she did not do. And finally take refuge in Vera’s domination of him – with the calculated pretence that this, in itself, was manly.
“Perhaps he was a man struggling to be brave in a world he did not understand. Once you run you almost always run forever.
“So even here he had to suffer the robust torment from teenaged boys. You take that when you are not perceived to be brave. What he had run away from in 1970, he was still haunted by today.
“But” the man said, “they had done an odious thing – they – those street kids who hung about the building – had broken into his small room and had stolen his VCR and, along with it, his video of Hadley. He knew who it was, but they didn’t give it back. And he, like so many people, was unwilling to go to the police. This was his own Golgotha, his Calvary – unknown, of course, to himself.
“The boys stealing his video set in him, within a matter of days, a strange insistence that it was all the fault of Jerry Bines. No one really understood why.
“And late at night, wearing his torn coat, a pair of dark heavy-rimmed glasses that were taped in the middle, and tan cowboy boots, he would make his way back to his room, lie on his cot smoking, and fall asleep with the television on.”
How did Bines and Nevin meet? They met through the inevitable wanderings, the man said. They were bound to meet because they missed each other by seconds so often. Nevin had moved his room six times in the last three years, always within the space of a mile or less, very near to where Jerry stayed when he was in town.
They met at Alvin’s on October 17 – this was in the final police report. It had been pale all day and, by night, a few sharp tiny flakes of snow began to fall, near the school, and down over the great grounds.
Throughout the day of October 17, Nevin slept. He tried to sleep most of the day. It was almost dark when he got up.
In fact, the lights were on down the street, above the tavern. There was a little light off by a side shed.
He went downstairs to check his mail. He was waiting for a letter from his father, because he had written to him to ask for three thousand dollars. Then, moving across the street, he turned towards the Savoies’.
As Nevin went out Bines was in a building down the street.
Bines had heard that Gary Percy had escaped from jail and he wanted to know if it was true. He had come to ask a friend.
“I heard the same thing,” his friend said.
In the back room there were hundreds of videos, movies of all descriptions.
The walls were heavy and paint-chipped. At the far end of the roof there was a hole, and you could hear pigeons thick in the autumn air, and a feather or two stuck against the tin siding’s rivets. This was once a video-games room but was now being cleared out. It was a building that would become something else. Jerry tried to think of what it would become and then forgot about it.
The man who owned it, Abrey Smith, was the only man Jerry admired and wished he h
ad become – to control money and assets and small-town politics – but he had not become this.
This was something, as Loretta Bines told Constable Petrie three months later, that Bines was either lesser than or greater than – but could never be.
“Maybe they’ll catch him before he gets here,” the man said, about Gary Percy.
“Jail, ya – good fuckin place for him,” Jerry said.
Jerry went out into the dark, ten minutes after Nevin. He turned in the same direction, along the same battered street.
So this is how they met, the man said: Lucy wore one of Jerry’s old jean jackets. She had a Sunoco hat on her head. Her winter boots were wrinkled like an accordion on her legs, and her breasts were small, and pointed sharply against her light sweater.
Nevin was at the house, rolling a cigarette out of his Drum tobacco, and being very officious about doing this. Finishing rolling his smoke, he lit it and sat back with his feet crossed on the table. The wind blew outside, and it was dark. Bines came in and shut the door behind him and, noticing Nevin, said nothing. It was perhaps the first time they had met face to face, although no one could be sure. Nevin had been on the jury that had acquitted Bines.
Jerry asked Alvin something – and then looked in the fridge for a beer.
“No beer, Frannie,” Jerry said. “No beer here?”
“No beer,” Frances said.
Jerry seemed annoyed by this and everyone was silent.
“I can get some beer,” Nevin said, startled by his own voice.
“Get us some beer, then,” Alvin said.
Nevin stood up.
“Sure, I can get some beer – I can get some. I’ll have to walk,” he said. “It might take a while. Lucy, will you come with me?”
Lucy said no, but Jerry looked at her and nodded his head.
“Oh, I suppose,” she said.
And they left the house.
They went down the dark street, the man continued. The autumn night was bitter. The streets were bare, except for a slick of black ice here and there.
Lucy coughed into her hand and buttoned her jacket up, and glanced sideways at him, her arms folded across her jean jacket as they moved.
They went to his apartment and he furtively opened the tin box, where he kept his money. Some people thought he had a lot of money. Then he went to the liquor store and bought a case of beer and some wine, and they went back to the house.
Jerry was sitting in the same place, with a parka and sleeping bag at his feet. Nevin had seen this parka and sleeping bag in Alvin’s closet before. But, the man maintained, Alvin had always mysteriously refused to allow Nevin to wear the parka, though he wanted to desperately. And now the mystery that had surrounded them was gone. They were Jerry’s.
The wine Nevin bought had a cork, but no one had a corkscrew.
A breeze blew against the window, and smoke from chimneys trailed away or was snapped in two, scattering beneath the stars.
Jerry wore a parka himself, with a toque on his head, and an old knitted beige sweater. The one thing everyone noticed was how proportionately strong his body looked.
“I’ll run back to my apartment and get my corkscrew,” Nevin said.
Nevin walked by him, and Jerry moved his foot slightly to let him pass. For some reason Nevin thought that this was some form of reprimand. He thought of the young boys who had stolen his video of Hadley and resolved never to mention them to anyone.
He ran home once again. Out of breath, he took all his utensils out and looked at them over and over and over – three forks, four spoons, four knives.
Finally he went back to the house, dejected.
The wine bottle was opened on the table, and half-empty. Jerry had opened it with his buck-knife.
Nevin went back and sat down in the corner. Now and again he would smooth his hair with his yellowish fingers, and sniff because his nose was running. He took a beer and sipped on it.
Although he didn’t speak initially, after a while he began to say things, and the more he drank the less he was able to control what he said.
The next morning he felt that he had said something terrible, though he couldn’t be sure. Like always, he went about his room searching for cigarette butts.
Then, as always, a vague picture began to take shape. A hand, a noise in the corner, Lucy saying no, a person looking at him as he spoke, and he began to realize something.
It was the parka and sleeping bag. He kept asking Jerry if he could have the parka, since Jerry had his video of Hadley. And Bines had tried to ignore him. But when he went to reach for the parka under the chair, Bines had reached his hand over and squeezed his wrist. That was all – the hand coming out to stop him from picking up the parka. And yet it seemed to Nevin emblematic of everything that was going to happen.
Later that day Nevin, still drinking, went back to see Lucy and Alvin. His hair was tied in a ponytail at the back, and he wore a pair of gumboots over his pants. The air was clear and raw and had stayed that way all day. Although the TV was on, and all the children were crowded about watching, Nevin took no interest in this. He was bothered by a problem.
The problem was not thought out, yet it was heavy upon him. Why did he feel more guilty about the sins he had done in his life than Jerry felt about what he had done. Why was this? Who was happier? Who was more at ease?
He sat for a while not speaking, and not able to look at anyone. In fact, all he did was stare at a part of the old chair, where, he remembered, Jerry had sat the night before. Then suddenly he decided to tell Frances and Lucy what he knew about Jerry, thinking that they themselves wouldn’t know.
“He has a bad reputation,” he said. “He has a little boy who has leukemia and he doesn’t provide for him. He robbed more than one family here.”
“Who says?” Lucy asked. Her eyes were fixed upon him and there was a curious, cold smile on her face. The breakfast dishes were still sitting on the table and Frances was sitting beside them, her head cocked in a peculiar way, as if she did not know whether to laugh or not.
“Oh, it’s what I heard,” he said. “So it’s best if we stay away from him.”
Frances coughed and looked scared at this remark.
“Well,” Nevin said, as if he did not want to upset anyone. “I’m certain he stole my video of Hadley – still, no one wants you to be mean to him. It’s how he was brought up.” And then he turned to Frances and said: “It’s bad for your mother to have him around too, Lucy.”
“Jerry’s dad was Frannie’s brother,” Lucy said quietly.
“Oh,” Nevin said. He looked over at Frances who had her head cocked slightly. And he blushed. Then he felt cold.
“Jerry’s dad was wounded in Korea,” Lucy said. “In fact, he was disabled because of that – and Jerry took care of him the best he could.”
“Oh,” Nevin said. “Is that the way it goes?” He remembered now that the man Jerry had shot in 1986 was Buddy Savoie.
And suddenly he looked about the little brown room. There were tea stains all over the wall where Alvin had thrown his cups when he got mad at the children – especially on Sundays. There was a long picture on one wall of a regiment of soldiers, and another of a man in an air-force uniform standing in the park.
“Oh,” Nevin said. “Well, still – that doesn’t excuse Jerry, does it?”
“Nothing excuses anyone,” Lucy said. “When my dad touched a wire and lost his arm Jerry was the one to climb the tower at Millbank and get him down.”
“Yes,” Nevin said, upset with himself, “well, we all climb towers, don’t we –”
The old dog, with its back matted with fur, and one ear chewed off, and its face carrying a perpetual look of dishonour, hobbled down the stairs and clicked across the tiled floor wagging its tail miserably. This, and the pictures of the soldiers, made Nevin feel uncomfortable, as if he should get up and leave.
A man can be born anywhere and go anywhere. But to live your life in a place far from where you are
born, it’s best to be in a city. A man ending up in a small town, as Nevin had, is readily adrift.
He stood to go, his ponytail hanging flat against his neck.
As far as Bines was concerned he had nothing to do with Nevin. He did not know or care about him.
“Vera’s ex-husband or something,” he would say. “Ya, I’ve seen him. He was on the jury that let me go.”
He did not particularly like him and he did not like his ponytail, but he didn’t care what he did. The principal things that Nevin remembered were with Bines all passed over. (The hand reaching out to stop him from taking a parka, opening his wine with a buck-knife.) But then there was the idea of the video. Nevin had been telling people that Bines had his video of Hadley.
Bines was angry at this but he had gone into town to find out about it. Within a half-hour he had the video in his possession.
Then he told Lucy to go over to the apartment and take Nevin his video back.
“Give him his video back – it’s all he had of that little girl.”
“Oh dammit,” Lucy said, “why didn’t he get it back for himself?”
Bines knew Lucy did not like Nevin – but he was Vera’s ex-husband and Vera had been nice to him, so he wanted to take no sides. Besides, the boys had tormented Nevin about the video long enough – and it was time to give it back.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with Constable Petrie,” he told Alvin suddenly. “I say hello, how are you, and the next day he’s up at my house with a dog looking for cocaine and a shotgun pointed at my head, with Gram trying to hit him with a broom. That’s no good.”
He took the video out of his pocket and placed it on the table, then drummed his fingers softly.
“You take that down to Nevin,” he said to Lucy, nodding at his own generosity.
Always with Bines, one action should prove everything. He was giving the video back not for Nevin but for Vera. When Vera found this out she would like him – and therefore, he conjectured, write a better story about him. He did not consciously think this – until later on – but he felt pleased when he placed the video down.
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down Page 5