Crimes Against My Brother (43 page)

“Nowhere,” Sydney said.

“Well then, thank me, Syd, for doing all this good work—you’re the boy for good works.” And the men there laughed again. And Wally winked and grinned. He was wearing new pants, and a new shirt and a
new buckled belt, and at that moment he took from his pocket and opened a brand new pack of gum.

He smiled as he put a stick in his mouth and winked at Sydney.

Sydney nodded. He went to the door, but suddenly he turned and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Bickle—except—”

“Except what?”

“You have made everything up. You do not care for Liam. His father does. At times in his life they could not afford milk for him—not once did you experience that, nor have you spent time with him. And not only have you not adopted him, as you pretend—you will soon allow a son of yours to be destroyed in the womb rather than to be adopted. So I think, well—you have made it all up, and used this family’s story and their child to your own benefit. So you mustn’t talk about ANYONE betraying another, for no one has betrayed that child and that family more than you. It was the same with Molly Thorn and her two hundred dollars, though you do not remember her.”

“Yes, blame me—for other people’s violence. That’s irony for you,” Wally scoffed.

“No,” Sydney answered, “I could never use irony against you. On the other hand I could never take credit for one bit of pain I never myself had to endure from anyone else’s life. And,” he added, “I have had to endure much pain—and so does little Liam Preston.”

Then he stopped, for his drive north had come, and he looked ashamed at what he had just said. The men were now silent in their coats and hats, and immobile.

“I remember Ian Preston. He is the one who actually loves his child and he, not you, should be given credit for it—and about the mill, he was exactly right,” Sydney mumbled. Then he added, “Forgive me. That’s all I was going to say.”

Sydney Henderson, as you might remember, was never seen alive on the river again. He died on his way home to his family almost three years later.

This “Mr. Ian” now lived in a tiny room, surrounded by thousands of pages of documents; had a little computer he worked on at a small desk. And he was almost there—that is, he had discovered very much in the last three years. It came to him slowly but surely, when reading the stock market reports daily: he realized the stockholders and the price of Helinkiscor shares were all very solvent in a market where Helinkiscor continued to say they must cut back or leave. So he realized, this small wan man, that the wood was not going to be processed in New Brunswick. He asked for a meeting with the premier and did not get it.

He was not allowed on Helinkiscor property and the union hated him. He began to send his letters to the editor of the newspaper, begging people to realize that their jobs were in jeopardy and the terrible destruction on the Bonny would not even benefit them. Four letters were published and then the fifth was rejected.

Harold Dew married Ethel.

He had opened a pawnshop in one of the closed-up buildings (where Annette once upon a time wanted to open up her tanning salon) along a street of endlessly closing buildings, of taxi stands and trinket shops and faceless half-empty stores. It was not only Ian Preston’s store that had closed; everyone had moved to the malls on the outskirts of town.

But Big Harold had no worries. He was finally well off. He had a bass drum and some small pieces of furniture from Millerton, and some nice silver trays. He made a little money, and endlessly thought of ways to make more. He went into Ian’s old appliance building and brought back ovens and fridges, brazenly carrying them right across the street with the help of Spenser and Kyle, and sold them on the black market, moving them off within a week.

FIRE DAMAGED GOODS
the sign proclaimed.

He had asked Sara and Ethel’s mother if he could take things from her upstairs attic to put as teasers in his shop. He would be over at Sara’s office every other day so she could look at his tonsils or his abdomen. He was a constant sufferer, pains and whatnot. That is, like more than enough large tough men, he was a hypochondriac. While there, he would talk and gossip with his sister-in-law. He was a perennial gossip, which as much as he would deny it, showed his puritanical side. He was a big man with floppy boots, his shirttail out and a wide grin.

“Where did you get that odd-looking gash on the back of your head?” Sara asked one afternoon.

“God knows. Drunk, I guess.”

“How long ago?”

Harold shrugged.

“It’s quite a peculiar mark—did you hit the corner of the table, fall backward?”

Harold yawned.

“Did you ever get it taken care of, get stitches?”

“Nah—don’t even remember!”

Sara placed the wrap to take his blood pressure.

“What about that loser, Preston,” he said. “Are you glad you never got hooked up with the likes of him? He got on the coke ’cause of his back. They now tell me he weighs about 102 pounds—that was what Annette did to him!”

Although it was through Harold’s protégés, Kyle and Spenser, that Ian was able to buy cocaine, Harold looked quite sanctimonious when he said this.

People came to his shop with all kinds of things—Harold never asked the youngsters if these things were stolen. “Times are tough,” said a slogan at the entrance. “Get more,” he simply told them, paying them twenty bucks if he felt he could get sixty.

The pawnshop, which had not existed when the town was whole, existed now when the town was fractured and the downtown had become
more broken and closed, when the sanded winter streets looked empty under the glare of the sun. And it existed to entice people to use it. So, in fact, it existed to entice people to bring items to pawn, and those items did not necessarily have to belong to those who pawned them. The store also held wedding rings, and mementoes of dreams now dashed, of men starting to realize that the great broad mill did not hold any future for them. For so many men could not get hired on and others were already being laid off. The West beckoned them, and they left their dreams behind to go to work the sludge piles north of Edmonton, Alberta. There they made money to send home, to keep dreams alive.

Harold stood in the pawnshop’s perennial gloom, near the metal lamp and an old bass drum, and watched as the men became more and more scarce as if they were in some black-and-white movie from the 1950s where people were targeted by some alien gamma ray, and suddenly and simply disappeared. He watched, in this sad black-and-white movie, that ghost of a man Ian Preston move along a sidewalk with his head down, his arms filled with documents, his legs thin and unsteady. Sometimes children teased him, and he would look at them in splendid confusion, almost as if they had entered from another dimension and he did not understand why they were tormenting him.

Once, all his documents dropped and he knelt and tried to pick them up when some of the boys kicked them away as a joke. Harold went out and spoke one word and they all scattered.

“Go!” he yelled.

He helped Ian pick the documents up and gently handed them to him. He had no idea what they were about.

One spring day, the boy Liam ran past Harold’s pawnshop, legs flying, on his way to see his dad. Still running back and forth from one place to another—from his father’s tiny room in a motel to his mom’s house, trying always to keep both parents in mind.

Liam waited for his dad all that day in this room, sitting in a chair that faced the old door. He wanted to show his father his braces. But his dad did not come home. This little room, with its hot plate and dated microwave oven, its forlorn chair and black-and-white television, was the loneliest room in a series of rooms on Ian’s downward spiral. The door had been broken, and the field outside was covered in hard drifts of unmelted half-white snow. Yet Liam waited for his dad as long as he could. He had been working on his father’s cylinder invention and trying to fix it for him, thinking still that if they could sell it, his mom and dad would get together again—and so he had fussed with it now for eight months—and maybe someday he would fix it, and maybe someday—all would be well.

Ian’s room was in the Blue Heron motel. The motel was once owned by Lonnie Sullivan, and had been repossessed and put on the market and bought by J. P. Hogg, who had given it to his son to run.

Ian didn’t have a lock on his door—room 17—because it had been kicked open too many times. He was fixing radios for extra money, and still wrote letters about the contamination of the water system by Helinkiscor.

But Ian did not come back to his room that day.

So eventually Liam walked home to show his mom his braces. He was going to smile as soon as she came home. He had paid for them mostly by himself, though she had helped with two hundred dollars. He had delivered papers for two years now, because the divorce was financially crippling both his mom and dad. Neither of them knew where the money went; they knew only that the great savageness of divorce had swept them up in its claws and ravaged them. The boy was left solitary during much of this time.

Annette wanted to have her divorce be as public as Princess Diana’s. So she was a star for a while in town. And being a star, and having friends, soon compelled her to spend whatever money she had. She threw a huge party the day it became final. She blew money everywhere. There seemed to be no end to what she would do. She even had loaned Wally Bickle eight thousand dollars. But after all was said and
done, she realized quite tragically that the divorce had cost her thousands, and Hogg had not, in a long time, returned her calls.

That day—years ago now—Liam waited in the chair in the foyer to smile when his mom came in. Yet his braces keep hurting, even though the orthodontist had said the hurting would go away. When he telephoned, the orthodontist had already left for the long weekend. So he took an aspirin and pretended the pain would go away. He had paid for these braces almost fully by himself—and they had made quite a joke of it at the office, which was across the street from Hogg’s law office. The orthodontist had taken his money in dribs and drabs, and he worried about all of this endlessly.

Today as he had walked back to the house, the picture window in Mr. Hogg’s large law office was busted, a piece of plywood and plastic covered it, and he’d wondered what had happened.

“Yer dad’s gone to jail,” said Sherry Mittens, coming over to him and smiling. “My daddy says no one can help him now, and no one wants to anymore. Not any of the good people, anyway—not any of the people like us!” She had three or four friends with her, and she looked at them out of the corner of her eye as she spoke, delighted that they were delighted too. Liam watched them very carefully, saying nothing. Then they turned in front of him and he walked behind. And they spoke as he walked behind them, and Sherry Mittens spoke most of all.

He learned that his daddy had been taken to jail in a dispute with Mr. Hogg. This is what Sherry Mittens said as he walked by Harold Dew’s pawnshop on his way back home. Sherry said his father had been taken to jail in handcuffs with his forehead cut open.

“He is not Liam’s father anyway,” one of the youngsters said.