Victim

by Gary Kinder

  Before long Cortney had hooked a fish and pulled it out of the water by himself. The fish was flapping at the end of the line, and Gary helped Cortney maneuver it back over the grass. Then Gary grabbed the line and handed the part just above the hook to Cortney, who took it in his left hand. As Claire held onto the cane pole, Gary snapped their picture, Cortney sitting in the wheelchair holding up his fish and trying to smile.

  The hook baited again, Cortney swung his line a little way into the creek and waited, poised in his wheelchair for another bite.

  “I wish Mom was here,” he said.

  Byron, Gary, and Claire were standing around him, watching the end of his line. They looked at each other but said nothing, and then Cortney was again occupied by the nibbling of a fish at his hook.

  After having more sharp tugs on his line, and eventually pulling another fish from the water, Cortney told his father he was tired and ready to go back. He seemed happy with the day’s outing.

  On the drive back down the winding canyon road, Byron drove slowly because of the Labor Day traffic and the shallow ruts that jarred Cortney’s gastrostomy tube, hurting his stomach. Gary and Claire talked to Cortney about the fish he had caught, but Cortney didn’t say much until they were halfway down the canyon. Then, staring ahead through the windshield, he suddenly asked of no one in particular, “Where’s Mom? How come she never comes to see me?”

  His father said, “Well, she’s just not here. Can we leave it at that?”

  Cortney said, “No.”

  The other three were silent wondering if Cortney would ask again.

  Byron was prepared to tell Cortney about his mother and the murders, as soon as he was certain that Cortney was ready to hear. Even though Cortney seemed to be pursuing the matter for the first time, Byron wanted to be sure. Then Cortney asked again and his father said, “Cortney, your mother was in the same accident as you, and she’s not as well off as you are.”

  “Well, if she can’t come and see me,” said Cortney, “can I go and see her?”

  It’s difficult to tell your son that’s been all shot to hell, and who’s been sick and needs his mother, and needs the love and affection that she can give him, the attention and strength… it’s difficult to tell him that he’s not going to have that.

  They had reached the mouth of the canyon, where a reception center and parking lot sat hidden in the trees on the south side. Byron pulled into the deserted parking lot, stopped the car, and turned off the engine.

  Then he said to Cortney, “You really don’t remember, do you, son?”

  Cortney shook his head, looking at his father and waiting.

  “Your mother’s dead, Cortney.”

  For a moment Cortney just stared at his father. “Oh, no,” he said finally. “No she isn’t.”

  “She really is,” said his father, “and we have to face the fact that she’s gone.”

  “No she isn’t,” he cried. “She isn’t gone.”

  Tears started down Cortney’s cheeks, and his father wrapped his arms around him and let him cry.

  I think he knew that his mother was dead. I never lied to him. He was going to have to know and he was going to have to face that fact, and he was going to have to live with that fact. You can’t change it. I told him that on the day this all happened that his mother was shot and had the same thing happen to her that had happened to him. And I told him that he was young and strong and was able to live through it, and his mother was older and she didn’t have the strength to live through it. And that they had taken her life.

  Cortney cried for a long time in his father’s arms, as his father held him and rocked him gently.

  “Do you know what’s happened to you,” said his father, “why you’re in the hospital and so sick?”

  Cortney shook his head.

  “Do you want to hear about it?”

  Though he was still crying, Cortney nodded.

  His father told him that on the way home from his flying lesson back in April he had stopped to pick up some pictures and had been trapped by two men downtown. His mother had come looking for him, and she too had been captured by the two men. Then the men had forced them to drink something caustic and had shot them. That was why he was sick and had been in the hospital so long, and why his mother had never been to visit him.

  Claire was sitting in the backseat next to Gary, crying.

  We all were crying. Cortney cried and cried, and Dad just held him and tried to comfort him, and he said that even though Mother wasn’t there, we were all together, and we had each other. He said, “It’s too bad you have to ever even know, but you’ll have to know sometime.” And he said: “Go ahead and cry, we’ve all been through it. It happened months ago, and now it’s your turn.”

  PIERRE

  Dale Pierre’s birthplace, the isle of Tobago, lies in the azure waters of the Caribbean due east of Venezuela. Twenty miles to the southwest of Tobago is Trinidad, where Pierre spent most of his childhood. These southernmost islands in the West Indies, once under the British crown, now comprise a country named simply Trinidad and Tobago.

  In southern Trinidad, between the city of San Fernando on the west and the cane fields to the east, is the community of Pleasant-ville, where Pierre lived from the age of five to the age of seventeen with his mother and father, and eventually a brother and six sisters, in a modest cinder-block house. The house was pink with a yellow gallery and rows of white ventilation brick above the jalousied windows. In front was a matching pink and white brick fence, and in the backyard, high above the house, coconut palms drooped and banana fronds fluttered just above the roofline. It was the largest house on the block and filled with furniture built by his father, a quiet man with a reputation as one of the finest wood craftsmen in San Fernando.

  A short distance from the pink house, along roads running through cane fields, was the local government school, where Pierre was taught by a man named Cecil Colthrust. Pierre’s favorite teacher, Colthrust had a deep, authoritative voice, and an unusual awareness of each child in his class. One afternoon after the murders he was standing in the breezeway on the second story of the small school, remembering Pierre as a young student, one of the brightest he had taught.

  “I had Dale for two years,” he said, “from about age nine to eleven, preparing him for the Common Entrance Examination for college [the equivalent of junior high and high school in the United States]. He was in the top three in his class all the time, very consistent in a class of fifty. Both mother and father were active members of the PTA, and I visited their home on more than one occasion. We just chat and chat and chat, not necessarily about the children, just talk, friendly with it sort of. It would be unfair for me to say that things were lacking at home for I saw no evidence of ill treatment. I think he had an ideal home background, an ideal set of parents, you know. They lacked nothing. They were very religious people, Seventh-Day Adventists. Very, very religious. His father used to be a very good joiner, and then he did this what we call sideline also as a joiner at night and on weekends. I would have this opinion of him, that he was a father who meant well for his children. They had a nice home because he built a lot of the things for his home.”

  In his early years in school Pierre not only was a good student, he was a fast runner as well, and represented Pleasantville as a sprinter in the hundred-yard flat race. “But whenever he won,” remembered Colthrust, “he would gloat that he was the greatest. I mean, he would walk in the corridor and do things that he must be observed. You must see him. He could be loud, classes might be in progress, he might call out to somebody, so then the teacher say, ‘Boy, what is your name?’ ‘I’m Dale Pierre!’ ‘Oh, you are the fella who won the …’ ‘Yes’m.’ You know, that attitude. He would project himself, he must be known.

  “Now if he lost, well then, he would look for some sort of an excuse to show why he lost. He would not accept it and say, ‘Well, look, I have lost and this is it.’ I remember once in his best subject, math, he didn�
��t get the mark that was expected of him, and he just figured, well, the teacher must have favored some other student to allow the student to make a higher mark than he made, which wasn’t so, it was just through sheer carelessness on his part. But he doesn’t lose of his own, must have been somebody else’s fault, never his. And this is Dale. Somebody else must have caused him to be on the losing end.

  “Even at play he had sort of a controlled temper. He would get highly offended and you could see it, but when he realized that authority would be down his throat eventually, he would become sort of subdued. It was inborn. You couldn’t call him a bully, but if given the opportunity he could have been.”

  Colthrust had read of Pierre’s involvement in the Hi-Fi Murders in a local newspaper called The Bomb. When he also learned of Pierre’s previous arrests for stealing the Corvette and the Rivieras, and the manner in which he was soon caught after returning to the scene of the crime, Colthrust shook his head. “A hell of a fella! You mean that he would say this and do this and do that and then go back and ... It really ties up then. Yes, I’m seeing it now. You see, now that this has happened and I could take my mind back and certain little things that he would do, certain of his mannerisms, let’s say his general deportment, this idea of wanting to be observed, wanting people to know, ‘Well I am this, I am that,’ it sort of ties up now. He has matured, his fanciful ideas. I wonder what he wanted to establish? Really. He’s the greatest?”

  One Saturday morning a man named Ben James was drinking beer in a Pleasantville rumshop, only a block from the pink house where Pierre had lived as a child. From the time the Pierres had moved into their new pink house until they had immigrated to the United States twelve years later, Ben James had lived next door. That morning at the rumshop, Ben was telling a small audience about the son of his former neighbors.

  “From the time that child go to school,” Ben said of Pierre, “he was a worthless fella. And the parents, they was very disappoint of his doing during his growing up days. I don’t know what is the cause, or what happen, but they had plenty worries in his growing up.

  “I could carry you home now and show you coconut tree where when he start to grow up, I say to him, ‘Boy, don’t pick the coconuts!’ He didn’t care what I say. He pick the coconut and drop it down the fence! The only difference myself and the Pierres have is when Dale come picking the coconut. We never had nothing else between us, so I can’t say anything of difference toward the father and mother.

  “I could tell you, before we came to live Pleasantville I have known the father. I give him job to do for me which still in the house. I’m living there now, and if you going in the drawing room you see a table there, the father make it for me. The bed in the back room, the father make it for me. We have certain thing in the passageway, father make it for me. There’s not no maybe about that, he is a good joiner. He had a good reputation, you understand. I mean, I’m giving a mon what he is. He’s a very good joiner and a fella who keeps up to his character. Sticks to his words, even in his movement and so on. He’s a very good fella, a good citizen. His wife also. She was working in hospital as ward assistant.

  “But Dale have differences in his growing up. He run away, and sometime he sleep in my gallery or neighbor gallery, and he didn’t care one thing about it! So he was very worthless. I don’t know for what reason, you understand. I tell you as a tis. Whenever he stay out, I don’t know what is the cause. Sometime they beat him, but I wouldn’t say that they was severe in correcting him. They correct him in a way that he should go the right way.

  “Well, the time come up which they had some improvement. They went to the States, and there they make their home. Why you think they carry the boy there? That he should have a better future! The parents did all they could for him, they do all within their power to do good for him. I know that because we living neighbor, and I will tell you they didn’t relax of giving him his future benefits.

  “Now since then, Mrs. Pierre come back here many time, Trinidad, and I never see her a tall. But still, if I could disclose our relationship, her family and I, it would be very difficult. So I wouldn’t disclose that… .

  “Mmmmmm, well, as neighbors we talk. I and the wife have more discussion than the mon. You see, because a morning I was home and she disclose this thing to me. I was never interested to find it out, because although we becomes friends, I don’t want to know her past. Right? But it happen 1959 or ‘58, somewhere around there. She tell me and I just accept it like that. So you see, this thing, I don’t want to disclose it because …

  “Um, which I want to say is this. She had a brother in Tobago who kill their sister.”

  * * *

  Pierre was born on a rise known as Jigger Hill on January 21, 1953. Jigger Hill was at the center of his grandfather’s small cocoa plantation in the lush central highlands near Mason Hall, Tobago. When Pierre was three years old, he and his family moved across the channel to Trinidad, eventually settling in Pleasantville. They had been gone from Jigger Hill for three years when Pierre’s uncle murdered his own sister in the same two-room shanty where Pierre was born.

  Pierre’s uncle was named Lennox; at nineteen he was the youngest in a family of three boys and four girls. In 1959 he was living on Jigger Hill with his ailing father and his sister Merle, who was seven months pregnant. One day an ongoing feud over Lennox’s refusal to help harvest the cocoa crop or assist with household chores erupted into a fight, and Merle told him he was no longer welcome in the house. Her father sided with her. Furious, Lennox boarded the inter-island ferry to Trinidad, swearing he would return just to kill Merle. Weeks later, on June 12, he did return, and when night came, he stole up on the quiet, dark house on Jigger Hill, a flashlight in one hand and a machete in the other.

  Merle’s body was discovered hours later by her brother-in-law, his flashlight illuminating the most macabre scene he had ever witnessed. Merle was lying between the drawing room and the bedroom, the blood-spattered nightshirt rising over the mound of her belly, and irregular red puddles congealing on the floor around her. Behind the white mound Merle’s head was cocked askew and twisted backward, little more than her windpipe joining it to her body.

  After hiding in a mango tree all night, Lennox was captured at gunpoint the following morning as he approached a water truck parked on a dirt road. He made no attempt to escape, dropping the murder weapon still in his hand at the command of the arresting constable.

  Lennox was incarcerated in the Scarborough jail until the next scheduled assizes were held in Tobago some months later. When his estranged mother went to her other sons and daughters asking for money to hire a lawyer to defend him, Pierre’s mother refused.

  “I give not’ing a tall,” she said. “Lennox has bring a disgrace on de family, an’ I not encouragin’ any wrong t’ing.”

  When his case eventually came to trial, Lennox was represented by a lawyer, a Trinidadian white. The most damaging testimony against him came from his usually taciturn father, who said on the witness stand that Lennox had come crashing through the house like a tractor. He described how Lennox had chopped the pregnant Merle in the neck with the machete, then had come searching through the brush where the old man had escaped with a granddaughter and was hiding. Lennox was found guilty of first-degree murder, and was transferred to the main prison at Port of Spain, Trinidad. While his appeal was pending, his mother would visit him, bringing him oranges and mangoes. One day she asked him why he had killed his sister.

  “She get to high talkin’,” he replied, “an’ so it happen.”

  A few months later Lennox was taken to the gallows and hanged.

  When Pierre was growing up in Pleasantville, across the street from his house was a lamppost that served as the “liming” spot, or meeting place, for the neighborhood boys. Pierre was rarely permitted out of his front yard, and the boys who gathered at the liming spot often saw him peering at them over the pink fence. The Pierres would not allow their son out of the yard, because the core
of the element that gathered across the street was a family of brothers and their friends known locally as “badknobs.”

  “They would not have been a good example for Dale to follow,” said Pierre’s teacher, Cecil Colthrust. “If he was prohibited from playing with them or associating with them, I think it would have been for his own good, because they came here and they gave us no end of trouble. They were always involved in all sorts of things, fighting, petty thefts. I wouldn’t have wanted my boy to go there. I would keep him in. And if I found him disobeying me, I would give him a heavy scolding and then maybe a good licking when he deserves it. Dale’s father was trying to do the best for his boy, discouraging him from going out and idling at the corner there.”

  Pierre resented the restrictions imposed by his parents, and as he got older, he began sneaking across the street to lime with the boys. When he got caught, his parents would give him “a good licking.” Children in Trinidad often were disciplined by what was termed a licking or thrashing, what amounted to a hard spanking with a belt. Pierre’s mother administered most of the lickings he got, but he never seemed to resent her or her actions.

  “Even though my mother did beat me with any and everything and very severely at that,” he later wrote,

  it was not a constant thing. I had periods of up to six months without a beating. My adoration for my mother stems from the fact that in spite of everything, she did all she could to encourage me to seek an education. She also gave me more liberty as far as visiting some of my more acceptable friends. All in all I can safely say that when bad came to worse I could always count on her support.

  Though Pierre professed to adore his mother, he detested his father, a quiet, hardworking man whom Pierre seemed to resent precisely for those qualities. He once described his father as “a classic workaholic,” and in a letter wrote this paragraph about their relationship: