Crimes Against My Brother (46 page)

Sara once told Ethel that people are fascinated with what is bad because they believe bad can actually hide the good that is underneath. That this is the true reason for the attraction to bad, and that people never really like the bad, but love when bad or feared people act with a degree of kindness and spontaneous generosity. This is a defining idea, and the idea that bad men are misunderstood because of this hidden goodness allows many of them to play the con of being good underneath. They often
do this in spite of good intentions, and do this to and with themselves, because the con is in so many ways and for so many reasons self-beguiling.

Sara did not say this about anyone in particular, but she did see how many, many people were attracted to Harold Dew, and how even she was fascinated by him. For he had been a rough and a bad man many times; he had done things most men would not do, and yet people—even some he’d cheated—were fascinated and attracted by him.

There were still some very kind things about him, things that Sara herself saw and liked. He could give you the shirt off his back—many said he had done this, many times. It was true that he had a good deal of charisma, especially with the young, and the young flocked to him and did his bidding, just as in years gone by they had done for Lonnie Sullivan. For instance, he gave a five-tonne truck to Rueben to haul wood—just as he said he would do.

Still, he always wanted and needed something in return. So therefore, like Lonnie Sullivan, he did not know that he had to con himself in order to con others, and to gain the confidence of youngsters he had to believe that he would do them no harm. But in ways he did not know or consider, in ways he did not comprehend, the very conditions of their friendships led to harm.

And this had happened all his life—first with Rueben Sores, who sold drugs for him, and in a way with Corky Thorn, and now with others like Kyle and Spenser, who ran and did his bidding and who both were doing things for him to work off loans, and who, in fact, if they did not watch out, would go to jail for him.

So the courting of Liam Preston was a natural phenomenon. Liam was alone now, and so was Harold, and Liam needed a father figure, and Harold believed—even though, when he thought rationally, he knew it couldn’t possibly be—that Liam was his own son. Liam had, in a way, lost both his father and his mother. Harold realized this and tried to be nice to him. When Harold was nice to anyone, he was like his uncle Lonnie—he could be exceedingly nice without even knowing it. And he felt sorry for the little boy too. He told Kyle and Spenser never to bother this boy
again, and he told others as well that if they ever in their lives were anything less than respectful to this boy, he would hear about it.

So, though Liam did not know why, he only knew that it had happened and that no one bothered him anymore. And Liam began dropping into Harold’s happy pawnshop after school every day. For there was no one home, and there were no friends either. One day he came to pawn his Thomas The Train set. Harold looked at it, realized it was not much good but offered Liam twenty dollars. He also said that Liam could have a job at the shop, cleaning up.

Harold was Ethel’s husband—and of all the people who had been kind to him, the one who had been kind to him the most was Ethel.

Liam’s teeth hurt and he needed money. He did not talk to Annette anymore. He had waited for her to come home for supper too many times. And she had her own life again, and it was a life where she excluded him, because she was once again youthful and beautiful and single.

So Liam would cook beans and wieners for them both and sit there waiting in silence. Sometimes, on occasion, when he saw her walking along the street and she did not notice him, his heart would go weak with love. Once he called out “Mom!” but she didn’t hear.

Where would Liam go? This was one of the main questions my students asked.

A few years before he met Harold Dew, Liam had a fort he had built by himself. He worked on building his own computer and putting his own bicycle together. He would send away for parts for his bicycle or seek them at second-hand shops, spending afternoons alone, and he would find computer parts in the dump, which he would carry home through the streets on sunny afternoons in summer. And after a while he had friends—Jack and Dan and Brad and Gordy and Fraser and Pint McGraw. They were all much younger than he was, for no one Liam’s age bothered with him.

So he told the children stories about how he wanted his computer to work and how he would take them for a trip to the pond. Someday when
the day was hot, he said, they would all go back across the tracks to the pond. He just had to wait for the right day. And he knew the situations of all those boys; he knew when Gordy’s father was out of town or when Pint was teased; and he would say, “In my fort no one is teased, and no one’s father is out of town,” and he would smile at Pint and sit Fraser on his knee. Pint had weak eyes and wore thick glasses. So he gave Pint twenty of his Pokémon cards. Pint McGraw often came to the fort and sat on the bench in the corner, and folded his hands on his lap and looked up at you and smiled. Sometimes he came there at seven in the morning, just to wait for the others.

Pint was so skinny his socks would fall off his feet, so Liam made small pins to hang from his shorts, and attached thread from these pins to his socks. Pint and Frazer were five, Gordon was six, and Dan and Brad were eight. These were his friends from those summers long, long ago. Brad and Dan were the ones who helped him search the dump for old computers, and Brad was the boy who helped him with his bicycle. He would tear the backs off the computers and look for the right chip and bring it back. Or sometimes he would carry the entire hard drive back to his fort and take it apart. So computer parts lay all over the back lawn, and bicycle parts did as well. Liam’s eyes at this time were deep grey and beautiful. He had read books on computers and showed the older boys how to win the computer games everyone was playing. And the one thing about these children from Injun Town and beyond—from near the old sawmill and on those lanes that ran toward the water—was this: all of them were in one way or the other as orphaned or as alone as he was.

It was easy for them to be alone that summer around the back of the house, beyond the garden, near the wall of elm trees where the sun came through. When Brad and Dan wanted to do something without the other kids, who were too young, Liam would say, “In my fort everyone does things together.”

And sometimes he would have a pitcher of lemonade and plastic glasses that came from the basement. He also had a marble pot. And
once or twice he brought out a bag of chocolate chip cookies, and Spider-Man comic books. They sat about the small benches while Liam worked on the computer or found new shocks to try for his bicycle. He found it was easier to get the power source from the house beyond them. Sometimes they would sit for an hour or two as quiet as could be, watching him.

In a real way, he was their hero those long-ago days, when kids often had no heroes at all, and when Liam never had a friend. He brought out a little TV for them to watch as they ate their cracker snacks.

Sometimes some of the boys wouldn’t show up. Sometimes it would be only Pint and Fraser who would come across the back gully, hauling an old wagon. He would hear the wagon arrive at eight in the morning and look out his bedroom window. Sometimes they would come, rain or shine, and sit there on the bench. He showed them the computer motherboard and
RAM
discs and pointed to them, saying, “They sent a man to the moon with a computer as big as my house. Now there is enough power in what I hold in my hand to send a man to the moon.”

The children would look up at the sky, blinking.

“To the moon,” Pint McGraw would say, rubbing his thick glasses.

But then Liam did something else. He took his father’s cylinder, the one Ian had worked on in better happier times, and examined it. He knew it was just a pastime, but he also knew what his father had been trying to do: he was trying to use filters to take readings of effluents from the mill. Liam took the cylinder apart and redid it. That is, by midsummer of the year he was twelve he had essentially solved his father’s problem, for the cylinder worked simply: by the shades the effluents made on the filters, and each filter caught the minerals in the water and made the filters dark blue or pink or red.

Then one day he took his father’s invention back to him and placed it in his hand.

“I think I fixed it,” he said. But Ian said he was no longer interested in it, and he placed it on his small shelf in the little room he had rented.

So Liam went back home. He sat on the bed, staring at his Game
Boy and his Spider-Man. Far away down the street, there were catcalls from boys his age who always teased him and sometimes slapped his mouth.

“When I grow up, I will go away,” he whispered to himself.

Liam told the children about mathematics, and how he thought his dad’s cylinder would work when placed in water or any liquid. That it would do readings of what was in that water—so it would work in wells or houses, in mills too.

“It will make a million for my dad.” He smiled. And it might have, if his dad had known it.

He told them that people from all over the world who would never understand a word of each other’s language would still understand mathematics. So mathematics was, in fact, the universal language, and even if humans went to the moon or stars, they would have to travel to them on the peculiar principle that two plus two equalled four. And he said, smiling gently, “That’s why there is a God. There is a God because two plus two equals four,” he said. “There is a God because Sara had to go away.” And he told them about Sara and how she had doctored twenty people from the reserve and from Bonny Joyce; and those were the people no one cared about.

“Twenty?” Fraser asked.

“Twenty people.” And he said that if she had married his father, she never would have learned to save those people. “So,” he said, “that’s why there is a God.”

They would sit still and listen quietly as he spoke. His voice would trail off into the leaves and branches where small birds flitted in the afternoon or dipped into the bird bath he himself had constructed at the side of the house. At night he would sit in the dark. Sometimes he would say, “ ‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name,’ ” and then he would listen to the sounds of the trees at night—the wind in the willows—and he would sleep.

“I will be a saint,” he whispered, “and I will—be a saint.”

Liam was always repairing his fort as well, to keep the wind or the rain out. At times he would take the wagon with the kids in it and go down to Randolph’s lumberyard to look for scraps of lumber. The manager would see them coming down the streets, against the hard sun of midday, Liam pulling three kids in a wagon, all of them talking and laughing, with the wind from the water blowing their soft brown hair. Their bodies were as thin as twigs in the summer air, and their little wagon was dwarfed by the lumberyard’s great mesh fence.

The manager often gave them a piece of lumber to take back with them across the flat empty sidewalks of a town in disrepair. Far off the big pulp mill stack loomed. Far away a whistle sounded at noon hour. Now and again someone would hoot at Liam from the pool hall as they passed back toward his fort.

“Goofball!” they would yell.

But Liam never paid attention to people who yelled at him anymore. Once upon a time he had. But not anymore. Now he simply sat at night and thought of the trains that moved people, and how someday he would go on a train. You see, he had never been on a train, or ever outside of town. As the dispute between his parents grew, and gossip grew about who he was, he found his mom and dad had no plans for trips they once thought they would take. And he never looked their way when those people yelled at him.

The children held fast to the idea that Liam was the bravest and best person in the world, the one who gave them lemonade and was making a fort, and knew—well, let me tell you, he knew why two plus two equalled four. Around by the trampled weeds toward the far end of the house, as the trees swayed in the afternoon breeze, they pulled their little wagon with the lumber.

Then that day came when he promised he would take them to the pond, and out they went, all of them, Pint and Fraser and Gord, in the wagon, holding the pitcher of lemonade and the loaf of bread and some peanut butter, and the older boys wheeling the bicycle that they had just finished making, and Brad holding the towels, with Liam leading them all over the
tracks to the old pond in the stillness of August when all those other children, those children with mothers and fathers, were at the cottage.

They went to the pond the front way, between the two new subdivisions that were spreading mercilessly toward the future. It was cool and the mud was worn, and there were broken beer bottles on one side, and the ruins of a fire. So they stayed on the side where they were, in the sunlight of afternoon.

Liam acted as a lifeguard, and watched them swim. They had towels and blankets and peanut butter sandwiches, and Liam made them a lunch and laid it on the blanket. They watched the sky. Fraser and Pint and Gord lay naked because they didn’t have underwear and didn’t want to get their shorts wet, and Dan and Brad lay in their underwear, which was almost black from dirt, and they all looked up at the trees, and spoke of going to school. Then they started talking about going to heaven. And it didn’t matter what religion they were; they all wanted to go to heaven the same way. And in case they didn’t know where it was, Liam told them that it was beyond the clouds, and a place where the fort was too. And as Ethel had told him, in heaven—why, in heaven any wish, as long as it was kind, would come true. He knew he was saying this because he was older, more assured, and most importantly because someone had taken the time to say it to him.