Crimes Against My Brother (47 page)

Then he took out some sugar from a small bag and mixed it into the lemonade and they sat around the pitcher. Then he took their photo. Then, as the day passed, they had to look for Pint’s glasses and they couldn’t find them. He didn’t know where he had left them.

They had to go back home without them, with Pint McGraw sitting at the front of the wagon, blinking rapidly, and Fraser holding on to him, and their shirt collars damp. All of them spoke about the movie Liam said he would take them to, and about how they could get money to go. Liam told them he could use his paper delivery money. But he said they would wait until Pint got his glasses. That he and Brad would have to go back tomorrow to look for them. So Liam and Brad divined when they would meet and where.

Then Liam told the joke about the scarecrow who was scared of crows and they all broke out laughing, and it was growing dark and the wagon veered to the right down the path between the trees to the back of his house, so it sounded as if all the houses were suddenly laughing and talking about scarecrows.

Then, when they got home, the police were there. Liam’s neighbour Ms. Spalding had counted six times Liam had used her outlet to get electricity. So the police had confiscated his computer parts and taken his bicycle. All the children stood around him, with their collars still wet and the day growing darker and a robin twittering as it hopped in the backyard grass. But there was something even worse: The police man had also heard from Georgie at the tracks that Liam had had the children’s clothes all off at the pond. And what was he doing taking photos of the children? And no, he couldn’t have the computer back or the bicycle. The police officer, Constable Jarvis, took him into the house and told him he was never to go near children or he’d be run in. The boys stood outside listening to this, and heard Liam’s mother yell at him, “What kind of person did I bring up? Going around and having little boys naked!”

And she hit him hard on the back with a belt.

They all stood in the silent evening, and it was growing dark. Then the boys were taken home.

The next day it rained; the wagon, overturned, had been left in the dirt at the side of the house; black squall blew the trees, and the back of the fort fell. Liam sat in it alone. He looked around his small fort in a daze. And he was shivering, but it wasn’t from the cold.

After that, he was alone again. And he would often go to the park and sit.

One day he went back to the pond and looked for three hours and finally saw Pint’s old glasses under a small piece of driftwood. So he ran downtown, smiling. And he saw little Pint walking down the street. He yelled and waved, saying he had gone back to the pond and found them, but Pint was with his foster mom, who’d told him never to speak to Liam again, and so passed him by.

“You leave him be. You little cocksucker pervert, you is—little faggot is you,” the foster mom did say.

But then Pint, when he was way, way down the street, did look back and smile.

Liam sat in the park after school most days. On occasion, people would still holler at him, “Goofball!”

He almost never went home until he needed to go to bed, for there was no reason to anymore. He was called an “odd little goofball,” but he still walked the streets to find computer chips and motherboards others had thrown away. And he stayed up long into the night working in his room, listening to music from his headphones.

Once his mother beat him for playing his train at two in the morning. He did not know why she did this, but she was drunk and had fallen into a kind of hell without real borders. That is, a hell so borderless it could be anywhere at all.

So the next day he went into Harold Dew’s to sell his train set for twenty dollars. That is, without his parents knowing it, he began to sell or give away everything that had once belonged to his childhood: his Toronto Maple Leafs cap, and his Spider-Man collection that his dad had bought. His beautiful marbles and plumpers. Even the pictures in the scrapbook of him in the wheelhouse getting his picture taken with Captain John. One day, walking alone, he simply tore it in two. That is, he was going away already; already he was leaving them forever, though they did not know.

When he went inside Harold Dew’s pawnshop that late-April day, his teeth were aching and his gums were bleeding because his mom had slapped his face without realizing she would hurt him because of his new braces. She had cut his mouth deeply and it was sore, and he had spit blood most of the way there.

Harold’s heart went out to him, and he gave him a drink from the bottle of rum he got from the attic. He saw the pain in Liam, just as he had once seen the pain in himself. His own teeth had been destroyed
when he was a boy, by a kick in the mouth. His life had been ruined because his mother had told him he was in a will, his friends too had gone away—and he had been on his own from the time he was fifteen. So he knew what it was like to be Liam. And Liam looked so much like his brother, Glen, he couldn’t stop staring at him, and then smile vaguely, as if in some kind of apology. And he began to think of him more and more as his own child.

“Here, let me pour you a glass—poor little fella, poor little lad,” Harold said, with utmost compassion, and he poured out a double shot with a little Coke.

And Liam drank from that glass, and suddenly he felt very giddy and happy. He had never known he could be so happy.

On Good Friday, he went to Harold’s again, just to talk to someone.

The shop was open—the place was dusty and filled with clutter. Harold Dew sat behind the counter doing a crossword puzzle.

“How is yer teeth?”

“They still hurt,” Liam said. The idea that his teeth would be fixed, and that everyone would love him if they were, had been his constant hope. Sometimes children pour their hope out like gold and it falls clinking to the ground, and is lost.

Liam had thought that his mom would love him once he had them fixed. And perhaps his dad had slammed the door on him only because of his teeth.

Now all they did was give him pain.

Harold asked him if he would like another little drink.

“Yes—good, please!”

Harold took the bottle of rum that he had got from Ethel’s mom’s attic and poured out a double shot, and set it on the counter near the boy.

“It’s good—it always takes the pain away is what I found!” Harold said. “But you have to moderate. You can’t drink all the time.”

Liam took a drink, and then again and again, while Harold talked about how he had been kicked in the mouth at school.

Liam put the cup down on the cluttered countertop and Harold winked at him, and he smiled. It was the first time he had smiled with his braces on. He had been waiting to show either his mom or dad.

Now it didn’t matter at all. Now the boys he had made picnics for didn’t matter either.

“Name a seven-letter word for scandal—it begins with an o,” Harold said.

“
Outrage
,” Liam said, picking up the bottle and taking another drink straight. “That always works.”

It was when Mr. Ian was in jail that Liam was most on his own. This was also when Wally started to distance himself from Annette. When he veered away from her, when he began to ignore her drunken phone calls late at night.

And this is when Annette declared she was going to write a book. She would phone Wally and tell him a book was coming.

The woman who read her fortune told her that someday she would write a book, and she knew now was the time. Her therapist told her she might try to heal by writing of her terrible abuse. So she would have to write it soon. Why? She did not know. Except to those who still listened to her, and they were becoming fewer and fewer, it seemed to have something to do with an insult once from Patsy Mittens’s book club. She blushed when she remembered it, and wanted more than ever to prove something.

Yes, there was a man in town who she heard wrote—but what would he know? Her character would be a character women could relate to—at one point this character would save a woman from abuse, or live in solitude on an island because men had treated her wrong. And as for religion, she said, “Don’t get me started on the priests.”

This is what Liam listened to as Annette and Diane spoke about perverts. Liam did not know what a pervert was, but he knew he had been
called one by Ms. Spalding with her big straw hat and her dark glasses and her homey, civilized, no-nonsense life in her garden with her new soil.

Annette talked about how she would spare no one; her heroine would be the one to destroy bishops and prime ministers. At one point she said she would destroy all the men at the mill—show them for who they were and how they cheated on their women. Wally, too, if he didn’t watch it.

DD would say, “Oh, I know—wow! What will you call it?”

“Love’s Journey
—or
A Woman’s Heartbreak
. Or
Love Island
, or
Love’s Elusive Flight.”

Then Annette would tip her drink back, and bringing the glass down and pushing it away with her beautiful hand say, “DD, you will be my agent. I will have an agent and it will be DD. We will probably have to go to Los Angeles. Would you mind going there, DD?”

“If I have to. I won’t mind,” DD said, adding dreamily, “I am so glad you are doing it. For what man could ever write about women who live like you or me?”

Annette said it would be almost imperative that they go to Los Angeles, for that’s where the movie would be made. Then, one night, she said that Liam wouldn’t be able to come.

“Why?” Liam asked, heartbroken.

“I don’t know why.”

“Why do you have to go?”

“Because of the movie, dear,” Annette said.

In their folly, she and DD would often laugh at all the men who were now out of work, and speak about how Wally had to order them out of the mill yard, and how she—that is, Annette—had a hand in firing people. “You did—you fired them?” DD asked.

“Yes,” Annette said, affirming this with a quick nod of her pretty head. “Wally said to me, ‘Annette, you know more about the damn men here than I do—should Greg Milton go?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and Wally simply crossed his name out.”

DD laughed and said, “Oh wow.”

And Liam would know that Greg Milton’s little girl was ill, and they had no money, and he would be ashamed of what they said. And one night he saw Annette in a state of complete hysteria, unable to contain herself, tears of laughter in her eyes, and he became terrified that something terrible would happen—and it would—soon.

Then after they spoke and drank, DD and Annette would leave him. They would take their coats and purses and the door would close, the smell of alcohol evaporating in the evening air.

Liam would sit at home. Sometimes he would sit in the den for an hour or two, and then he would get up and sit in the basement near the old pool table. Or he would go upstairs, far up to the attic, and look down toward the great bridge far, far away.

Once she came home from the bar at ten o’clock. He was so happy she had come home early. He heard them and ran downstairs. That was the night she had promised them all a surprise. She wanted him to float for Ripp and Tab and DD.

He wouldn’t do it.

She said she would get a belt.

Tab said, “No, you leave him alone if he don’t want to float.”

Ripp said Liam couldn’t do it.

“You couldn’t float,” Ripp said, “even if you wanted to.”

Tab said, “Leave him alone—he is just a kid. He doesn’t have to float.”

Annette said, “You little bastard—you know how I bragged that you did, you little son of a bitch—so go and float!”

But he did not.

And perhaps it was in the way Ripp grinned when he heard that someone was beaten up at a tavern; or perhaps it was in the way DD could turn on anyone—suddenly, as soon as they were down and alone, with a fleeting look of brutal pleasure in her eyes. Perhaps it was in the way he remembered his father, who had spent money taking them out to dinner on Liam’s eighth birthday, being rebuked in the restaurant by his mother, who drunkenly said, “If you were half the man Ripp is. God, there are times … yes, there are times—!”

Liam at that moment was smiling and waiting for his cake, and then he looked down, ashamed. Perhaps that was when Liam’s heart was broken.

Some nights long, long after Annette went out, he would sit in the den in the dark, listening to the wind, his bare feet on the white carpet. He would think of the cylinder and how he and his father almost made a million—but what was worse, he’d read in
Scientific American
about something just like it, already in use. And thinking of how his father had almost, almost, almost won, tears would flow from his eyes, not out of shame or frustration but out of longing and pride. It would have only taken fifty thousand dollars from the Atlantic Canadian Opportunity Agency—and yet, frightened, they did not award his father the money and had left him alone and broken.

Liam had run to the school the day he had corrected how the cylinder worked, his hair sticking up because it was so dirty, and his sneakers rundown at the heels, and his nose running. “I know how it works,” he told the high school physics teacher. “It is a stabilizer—it works on the premise that every rinse at the mill or any other industrial site can be washed, and effluents can be kept at a minimum. We can test the leaks in any pipe for chemical spill, the leaks into the river can also be monitored—so we will know exactly how much pollution we are causing. All we do is get a male and female coupling and attach it at any given point along a line that is flushing, and we will record by these filters what is in the water and how to devalue its impact!”