Punishment (14 page)

“Kids can be wicked mean,” he said. “But there was no harm in it. You were no different from anybody else.”

Ma saying: “That Neil, he’s nothing but a bully anyway. You tell him that your mother and father got to choose you. His didn’t have a choice, they got the first
droighneach
that came along. And it’s the truth
.”

“I remember this time your dad, Duncan, landed at the house. It’s vague now. He had a wild temper, Duncan.” He puffed the cigarette, eyes narrowed. Cleared his throat. “He was … anyway, I can’t remember what it was all about. Ahhh Jesus, I was only about fifteen. But big. Anyway, the old man got in between us before Duncan got ahold of me. And fucked if
they
didn’t go at it.

“Only lasted seconds I suppose. But this is the best part. The two of them took off together. Gone for a couple of days in that old red truck of yours. On a tear. That’s the way they were, eh. There was nothin’ personal. A dying breed they were. Duncan was a war vet too, I think.”

“He was,” I said.

“I just wanted to say, once and for all, how bad I felt when I realized the way we tormented you.” He rolled the window
down. Smoke rushed out and the cold night air refreshed the car. There was a high pale distant moon, stars glittering. He rolled the window up until there was just a small gap at the top. “I actually confessed it once. I went to the chaplain and we talked about it. Things like that bother a fellow when you’re seeing people blown to pieces every day and figure it could be you next. You think about all the shitty things you done. Anyway the padre said I should one day tell the person how I felt. Meaning you. So.”

He laughed and drew on the cigarette. The ember lit his face again. “I said to that padre, ‘You’re assuming, Father, that I’ll survive this shithole.’ He just laughed. He was a good guy, that padre. You could talk to him like that.”

He looked away for a while and there was a long silence. “So here I am. Talkin’ about how I felt. Who’d’a believed it?”

“I hardly remember anything from then,” I said. “But I appreciate the thought.”

He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a flask. “A
dileag
for the old-timers,” he said, uncapping it and passing it to me. I swallowed. It was warm from the heat of his body.

“But by Jesus you put me in my place eventually,” Neil said, laughing again, coughing on the smoke.

“I did?”

“You sure did. You’re not telling me you forget that scene?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“It was in the old co-op store. You’re full a shit if you’re telling me you don’t remember.”

I remembered.

He’d knocked my cap off again. I lost count of how often. But they’d
laugh every time. I’d bend down, put it back on, stand up, look him in the eye. He’d do variations. Feint with one hand, then sweep up with the other, knock the cap off. He was fast with his hands, already widely known for his aggression. A bad man on the ice. Played hockey with the men. Fought with the men. He was a head taller than I was, which was convenient for knocking off the cap
.

“We’re hanging around the co-op one noon hour, the way we always did, and I was picking at you as usual, and you just poled me, in front of everybody. There wasn’t a thing I could do. I had it coming. Nobody bothered you after that.”

“I don’t think I poled you.”

“Sure as I’m sittin’ here. Cold-cocked me. It was the surprise that did me in. It wasn’t much of a punch, if you don’t mind me saying.”

I’m bending to pick the cap off the floor again and I notice, just behind his heels, a wooden crate full of empty pop bottles. As I’m straightening up I see his gut at the level of my face and without a thought I drive my fist into it, just below the belt buckle where it doesn’t take much to do a lot of damage. I drove that fist in without a thought. And he goes backwards over the pop case, crashing down arse over tea kettle. And I stand above him, watching as he rolls, doubled up, face all scarlet with the pain and shame. “You cock … sucker,” he says. “I’ll fucking kill you.” But he can’t get off the floor. And then it’s Big Frank, the co-op manager shouting: “Everybody out … You two, MacMillan, Neil … I don’t want to see either one of you back in here for a week.” And all the way back to the school, he’s goading, threatening, pushing. But I ignore him and he knows by the silence of the moving mass of spectators surrounding us that it is over. Mercifully frigging over
.

He blew a stream of smoke through the small open space at the top of the car window. “All’s I remember is you put me in my place. Best thing that ever happened to me. You had balls, my friend. Whatever else you had, you had that going for you. Big ones. Took shit off
noo-body
. It’s what we all admired about you, from day one. Not like this piece of shit.”

When I followed the line of his arm I noticed for the first time that we were parked near the end of a long laneway.

“Who lives there?” I asked, pretending not to know.

“Your man Strickland,” he said. “There was a piece of work … from day one.”

“But you and I were both gone long before he got here, right?”

“Ah but I heard plenty. I’m surprised you didn’t. Total arse-hole right from the get-go. You say you’ve never been up there?” Neil’s voice was now tinged with a skepticism that might have been deliberate.

“Can’t say one way or the other,” I said.

“Cuz somebody at the store was saying how you once went out of your way to straighten him out, saying how the priest or somebody asked you to weigh in.”

“I’m not sure what they’re talking about,” I said.

“More power to you if you did. Sure someone should have taken him in hand while there was still a chance.” He was studying the lane and in the light of the moon I could see a pulse in his cheek, near the jawbone, as if he was chewing gum. He puffed on his cigarette in silence, then he turned to me and smiled.

“There’s also talk—I think I mentioned this already—that you were thinking of going to bat for him, come the trial. Word is they were going to try to get a soft sentence. Time served or
some other slap on the wrist. And you’d have some influence, being from here and also knowing his situation from when he was inside.”

He was staring at me, smile gone, and I wondered how familiar all this seemed to him, a darkened road, a silent car, him in the driver’s seat exuding power and moral certainty; some lesser being sitting where I am, light slowly dawning in the brain.

I chuckled. “The store. Wherever this stuff comes from, I’d love to know.”

He looked away then. “I hear you,” he said. “People without half enough excitement in their lives. I got first-hand experience with how things get garbled by folks with too much idle time and not half enough factual information. You take what happened to me.”

“I don’t think I heard anything, Neil, apart from what you told me yourself. How you’ve got a bullet in you.”

He laughed. “There’s a half a dozen versions of how that bullet got there, Tony. But here’s the only one that matters: me and my partner stumbled on a drug deal and before you could shit yourself or say a word everybody in the room was trying to shoot everybody else. Pure chaos, and I’ll be honest—pure terror. You hadda be there.”

He reached into his pocket for the cigarette pack, lit another. “To hear some of the horseshit afterwards: It was me trying to rip off the drug dealer. It was me and my partner running a protection racket, or we were slum landlords. You name it. In the papers even, a couple of nigger-hating cops run wild. They kind of brushed aside the fact that my partner was a so-called nigger himself. And that he was
fuck-ing dead
.”

I didn’t look but I knew he was staring at me intensely.

“I know you think I’m just a redneck, Tony, but I’m not. I know those people. The good ones and the bad ones. So you don’t have to say what you’re thinking.”

I sighed, squirmed for warmth. “We should move on, Neil. It’s not good sitting here. We can continue the conversation at my place. Have a nightcap. Or a cup of tea.”

At the mention of the nightcap he produced his flask again and drank from it.

“Even after the official report—even after everything was cleared up, no wrongdoing found. Not even what happened to poor Donnie. Never mind what happened to me. Guys in that room had records as long as your arm—but you should have heard the garbage. You’d think I shot Martin Luther King. So here I am.”

He chewed his lip. “Poor Donnie never had a prayer.”

He was staring at me again, handed me the flask. I just held on to it.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I’m here because me and Hannah sat down and figured it was the only safe place for us. Word on the street was that somebody put a contract out, fifty grand to put another bullet in me. Think of that, Tony. A sanctuary is what this place is. I got half a notion that it’s the same for you. A safe place. And that’s why I’m saying to you that it’s going to be up to guys like you and me—you and me, Tony—to keep it that way.”

I screwed the top off the flask and drank, gasped, screwed the top back on. “That’s not bad,” I said to the flask.

“The very finest,” he said. “No more second class for Neil Archie MacDonald.”

He looked at me again. “So what do you think? Tony. Here we sit, just the two of us. Two old guys with a lot of history and a little bit of future. Not a lot we can do about the history. But what are we going to do about the little bit of future we got left?”

“I don’t know, Neil. There’s only so much a fella can do to control the future.”

“But you gotta do what you gotta do. Take that fuckin Saddam Hussein, over there in Iraq. He’s sitting there, one great big threat to all our futures. Which is why they gotta take him out. Weapons ’a mass destruction, you name it. It’s only a matter of time he turns them on us. Look at what happened on nine-eleven. That’s what you get when you don’t make the first move. And then there’s this asshole, up that lane, if he ever gets back there …”

“You’re covering a lot of ground, Neil,” I said. “I think we should call it a day. We’re getting tired. We aren’t the men we used to be.”

“No, that’s for sure. But here’s the thing. My partner there, Donnie Turner was his name. Black as the ace of spades he was. You couldn’t have found two different fellas on the face of the planet, me and Donnie. But we were like one man, Tony. No black, no white. We were two parts of a machine. Five fuckin years. I never had a brother but Donnie was close. Closer, I think. Brothers got their issues. But Donnie and me, man.” He went silent, voice thick with emotion.

“I know what you’re saying, Neil.”

“I’m only glad he wasn’t there to see what happened afterwards. The goddamn media, liberal politicians … the bastards
crucified him, and him dead. All they could talk about was the piece of shit he blew away in self-defense, and the other two who survived to my everlasting regret. Moanin’ and groanin’ about the one with his arm blown off. Arm blown off, my arse. It should have been his fuckin head. But that’s not the point I’m making here, Tony. The point is, for all our differences, when push came to shove, black Donnie and white old Neil Archie MacDonald were one man. And that was because of values, man. We shared the same fuckin values. We stood for the same things. You’re an educated man. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Values,” I said.

“Yes, values,” he echoed. “You think about it. It’s values holds us all together. Keeps us civil. It’s values I fought for in the war, on the police. And it was fuckin values kept you in the prison system all those years. We got values to uphold, Tony boy, and don’t you fuckin forget it.”

He started the engine, turned on the headlights. In the glow of the car interior his face was grim. He turned to me once more before we drove away.

“I just know the kind of a man you always been, Tony. I know the kind of man you are now. And when the old bugle blows, I know in my guts that you’re gonna be on the right side of things.”

“That’s for sure,” I said. And he put the car in gear.

Turning down my lane, he asked: “Surely it wasn’t just the marriage breakup got you thinking of early retirement. You must have just got tired of babysitting bad guys, I bet. Christ, I wouldn’t last a week at that. If I had my way we’d go back to
the old days, send them off to some place like Australia. Some other planet maybe.”

I laughed. “That might work.”

We were driving down the lane slowly, trees close around. “You got a few enemies yourself, eh Tony?” he said with what I took for grim sympathy. “You see that’s the trouble. We put the bad guys in jail but then they let the bastards out and it’s us who end up lookin’ over our shoulder. Strange, strange, strange. Then you got your Strickland.”

When the car stopped, I knew I should just thank him and get out. Say good night. Maybe it was fatigue, or the liquor, or maybe it was studying my darkened house. But I sat there pondering his homily about values and I came within a whisker of saying what I really thought, that some of the worst people in the system never get out, that they fester there, day after day, until the bureaucracy permits them to retire. Cops and prison guards. And how the one thing that sustains them is the power they wield, the power to control the smallest details of the incarcerated life, to bully and abuse people in poverty and prison in the name of institutional security, public safety, righteousness and values. And how we are so, so corrupted by that attitude and by our power. I came
that
close to saying it aloud. But was silenced by an overpowering feeling of futility.

“Good night, Neil,” I said. “It was a lovely dinner. Thank Hannah again for me. You lucked out there, pal.”

“You got that right,” he said. “I got a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other. Us old-timers gotta stick together, Tony. Aren’t many of us old-school fellas left, buddy.”
The telephone was winking red in the darkened kitchen. I was exhausted and wanted to ignore it. The dog was leaping on my leg making small whiney sounds. “Sorry, Birch,” I said. “Didn’t mean to be so long.” Then I realized his bladder was probably exploding. I opened the porch door and he shot out. I flipped on the kitchen light. Then I listened to the message.