Crimes Against My Brother (49 page)

“I’ll pay for everything,” Wally said, and he smiled. “Everything. You could even make a day of it—take DD—is that her name? Yes, and it’ll be my treat!”

She looked at him, her face a study in brilliant curiosity. She touched his limp arm. He was sweaty and uneasy.

“Well—I know, silly. But what about you and me?” She kept rubbing his sleeve with her hand.

“You and me—”

“Well, yes.”

“Well,” Wally said, staring straight ahead, “what I like about you is that we didn’t have to get too involved. You’re so independent—you’ve suffered enough in a bad relationship. And I have a fiancée in Bicklesfield,” he said. He moved suddenly, started the car.

“Who?” she asked. And she smiled, as if he must be joking.

“Well, her name is Missy—but I don’t want her involved in this,” he said, still looking out the window. And a very corporate sternness came over his face and features, accentuated by his heavy coat and scarf.

The next day he passed Annette’s chair at work, saw a used Kleenex on the desk, and the picture of Liam, and the little toy monkey that you wound up to play the cymbals, which Liam had bought her for her birthday from the pawnshop downtown.

Annette and Diane went out of town that day. They called it a “working holiday,” and they were going to have lunch in the Miramichi Room at the large hotel. That would be nice and comfortable.

It came to pass that they were the only ones in the room. Their seats were austere and the waitress was stern. And the lunch menu was beef bisque, veal or Fundy clam chowder.

Then they went to the clinic, and sat in the doctor’s office on a back street, holding hands. But Annette was not comfortable holding hands. So she stood and went to the small window overlooking the dowdy street. She knew Diane was there because of the excitement associated with what they were doing, that Wally had phoned her and asked her to be a companion. But Annette had telephoned him twice before they left, hoping against hope that he would tell her not to, that it would be all right—that they must reconsider. But he said nothing like that. In fact, he didn’t even want to speak. So it would be done.

“Sara would never be brave enough to do this,” Diane whispered to her.

For years Diane had dressed and acted like Annette did, until she had become a mimic. And now, in this situation, Annette was a mimic too. She had become, like so many others, a social mimic. But Annette did not know what mimics were really, or why society dismissed those who were not mimics. Annette did not know this, but she did know the mimicry she had displayed in the last few years had turned her relationships to ash, had made her husband homeless and destitute.

She also knew that Diane was a gossip, and she had begged her on her honour not to speak about this to Ripp or Tab or Dickie. Not only for her relatives’ sakes but for the sake of her little son.

“For Liam’s sake,” she pleaded. “Please, if not for me, for his sake!”

Diane said, “Omigod on my life! Not a word—I mean, if people find out!”

“What would Ian say?” she added with a small beguiling smile. This was the same smile Annette had seen whenever Diane was ready to betray. And Annette had to look away.

Annette wanted most of all to know if it would have been a boy or girl, but they looked upon it differently. Annette had no sophistication in this regard. That is, she still thought of it as a child.

“Boy,” she whispered finally to herself, taking in the peculiar smell of blood and antiseptic. “I know it would have been Liam’s brother.”

But what was most peculiar is she did not know what to do afterwards. She lay on the table in the separate room in a white johnny shirt. She even asked DD if she had all the information.

“What information, dear?” DD said.

“I don’t know,” she said, stupefied and alone, “information about it—just—” But she stopped. Then added, “So what is done is … done!” Still she refused to leave. DD asked her twice more what it was she wanted. Twice more she seemed to be confused.

Then, after a while, the doctor came out and walked toward her, holding Annette’s coat.

“Why is it,” Annette said on the way home that late afternoon, when it became cloudy and snow scattered along the scarred road, and they had to pull over for a pulp truck that had lost its load, as two young men tried to get it upright and stabilized, “always the women who suffer.” She lit a cigarette. She looked into the dark.

DD said, “Omigod, I know, sweetheart, I know—it is because we are progressive, and continually save the world.”

“Oh,” Annette said. “How?”

DD shrugged and smiled, DD did. Because that philosophical question had no answer.

The truck, the one Harold Dew had inherited from Lonnie Sullivan’s estate and had given to Rueben Sores, now sank in the snowy mire and the bog. The wood had to be unloaded in the freezing cold. Rueben threw the eight-foot pulp to the side and it sank in the ditch scum and ice. The other boy, Rueben’s young brother, was under the tilted machine, hoping to right it before the great squall came from the north. Their family had worked this way for generations. Yet they had only managed twenty loads in the last month, for the old truck was always breaking down. Both boys, tough and anger prone, were fed up with their quota. They saw how the wood was being harvested and how tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of it were being taken to the yard. Rueben watched the cutting at Bonny Joyce, saw the ugliness of it all, and realized that there was far more wood being cut than they were processing.

“They must be going to take it somewhere else,” he’d told his friends the previous month.

His brother and he were fed up and disliked the mill now, and all it stood for. For they had helped build the road that not only took our wood but hacked an opening from Good Friday Mountain into Quebec. So Rueben knew where the wood was to go. That is, he and the other workers were not so stupid. They knew the Quebec mill that Helinkiscor owned was now closer to the great trucks’ farther hauls than the mill here. So what would happen to the mill here? And what would happen to them, who would not be allowed to haul wood into Quebec? By now they had taken all of the wood in Bonny Joyce, and left a thrashed heap, snow blown, desolate and barren.

DD drove around them in the darkness. Rueben looked at them both, his stare filled with a passionate indifference. It was now six years since he had burned Mr. Ian out, over Ian’s concern for the mill.

“Cunt,” he said to his brother, because he had just cut his hand wide open once again.

Darkness, night coming, end of the world.

Annette went home. She sat in the kitchen with her high boots leaving slush on the tile, and stared out the back window at the night.

That night she saw a book by that writer from town, the one who was so despised. Annette remembered how they’d all cornered him one night at a bar—Ripp and Dickie and her and a few others—to tell him his books were terrible, and that all of them could write something better if they wanted.

He had simply drunk his dark rum and ignored them. And now he was dead, and some said he was famous.

Liam had brought home one of his novels and had read it. Some weeks ago Liam had asked Annette if she’d ever met this writer. And Annette had postulated a good deal about why this writer had been rejected by his people. That he was morose and drunk and violent.

“Perhaps he was all of that—I am sure he was. I do not know. I only know he actually wrote—wonderful things,” Liam said.

She picked the book up and then set it down quickly, as if it would burn her, and walked to the fridge. Yes, she rarely spoke about her own book now. But oh, what she could tell if she ever really wanted to.

She still had her own problems, Annette Brideau. And soon after she came home she began to realize it. From that moment forward, Wally did not speak to her or look her way. Now when she smiled his way, she looked like a frightened girl.

He would spend time staring out the window, tapping his pencil and listening to phone messages. Sometimes when she went in to see him, knocking on the side of his little office cubicle, her lunch in a paper bag,
he wouldn’t even turn around. He would stare, his hands cupped behind his back, at the parking lot.

She asked him what the matter was.

“Oh, I’m just busy.”

Then she heard that Diane had mentioned something at Cut and Curl about their trip. Once again, she begged Diane not to tell.

“Of course not—you have my word!”

And so it spread all over town, what Annette had done, to the mill where Annette still worked. And when it spread there, Wally was furious and cut her cold. They had better not blame him. He was willing, as he often said, to go to the ends of the earth for women, but not for that! He left by the back door, ran past the back window, and soon began to tattle about her too.

So Annette was now alone. Suddenly, irrevocably alone.

Cosmo
was the magazine she relied on. She kept two copies at her desk. But to say this is foolish is to say that
Cosmo
did not entertain women, and men as well, with an idea of moral superiority. These magazines she and DD read, published in faraway New York or Los Angeles, did not know of the little house with pitch-black eaves where she had grown up. And now that she felt abused, she had no one to turn to. Nor could she say she felt abused by this treatment—because supposedly this treatment wasn’t abusive. Yet Sara—alone and berated, and in fact betrayed—had said that it was.