Mary Cyr

by David Adams Richards

  The woman looked over at her.

  “Aquí,” Mary said, “aquí—cigarillo, por favor.”

  “Here—cigarettes, please,” and she handed over five dollars in American money. “Cigarillo, por favor,” she said. “¿Algunos de ustedes mis amigos?”

  Some of you are my friends?

  Lucretia looked at her a moment, frowned at the murderess, then shrugged and took the money. It was the greatest of victories for Lucretia to be able to come to the jail and get the crowd worked up. She often talked of dragging Mary out and killing her. Almost, as if she was joking. But Mary knew she was not. That some fate somehow awaited her in the shadows of the trees and the head frame of the desperate mine. She realized it when she yelled out, in solitude:

  “‘I wander through each charter’d street—’”

  And sometimes at night she was terrified.

  But whenever Mary asked for something, she usually gave half of it away. So Lucretia put the five into her skirt pocket—and looking back over her shoulder said:

  “Mi pequeña señorita encerrado en su celda,” and she laughed. Mary laughed as well.

  My little miss locked up in her cell.

  Now when Lucretia left, and walked toward the confectionary shop across the road, Principia was alone.

  “Psssp-ppsssp,” Mary said. You could only see her hands, and her eyes.

  Principia looked her way, stunned and almost shamefaced.

  “You know what is going on,” Mary whispered, standing on the crate and on her tiptoes, her dirty fingers around the bars, her fingernails chewed down. “You know I have done nothing—yo nada, no melesto, nada mi—help me prove it, and I will give you two million—dos millones dólares—nuestro secreto—por favor—between you and me—you know I am telling the truth. What is it—Verdad, mi verdad. Someone else did something—something terrible, and you know it. You know who it was—Do you know who it was?” she asked, and nodded her head.

  Principia walked over to her, looked at her with a glum, frozen look. The frozen look came because of how close Mary seemed to be to the truth. She stared into the darkening cell, with its smell of moisture and cement. She started to speak; she was going to be angry.

  Then a look of intelligent sadness came to Principia’s black, shining eyes that to Mary spoke of circuses somewhere long ago. She smelled of night air and a kind of Mexican domesticity that tried in spite of poverty and crime to be kind and decent.

  She suddenly touched Mary’s cheek with her right hand, saying, “Mi poco, poco femenino,” and turned and ran up the broken hill. There were tears in her eyes.

  “Two million” Mary called, snapping her fingers as if it was nothing. Nada toto bien—nothing at all.

  Then she went and sat on the little milk crate and watched a spider climb up the wall.

  She felt that sooner or later they were going to kill her in some gruesome way, and she was terrified. Yes, at this moment she would almost trade places with anyone—anyone, to let the cup pass by.

  She realized she had just peed herself.

  5.

  THE DAY ENDED. NIGHT CAME. TONIGHT THERE WERE LOTS OF parties down the street. Lent was ending. People in the other cells were yelling out to her.

  “Asesina, do you fast at Lent?”

  “Sí,” she would yell. “I always give up my freedom.”

  She turned her light off and stood on the crate to look out. She smiled in a kind of whimsical delight at all the happenings without knowing what the happenings were. It was music and she was like a child whenever she heard music—like a child whenever she saw fireworks.

  There was the smell of gas, and a great fire above the crowd, and everyone was laughing and talking. It was, someone said, Lucretia Rapone’s idea.

  She called out to people from her cell:

  “Hey, what’s going on—what is it that is happening now?”

  After a while the crowd broke away from the square—a dog ran by her, and the old donkey walked toward the near fence with its head down.

  But then, people came back to the jail, carrying drinks and food. They gave her a tortilla and a drink of wine. Someone said she was beautiful.

  “A beautiful devil,” they said.

  They told her they had burned an effigy of her, to save the town from calamity.

  “Thank god for that,” Mary said, turning her head away while handing the tortilla to a sad-faced youngster who had an old crinkled face, and reminded her of her son.

  “There you go, my child,” she said.

  Lucretia seemed to be hoping she would be more upset.

  “Like Joan of Arc,” Lucretia said, in English, handing half of the cigarettes over, smiling in the darkness, her face covered in soot. She helped light Mary’s cigarette through the bars with a Zippo lighter. Then she lit herself one and stood for a moment in silence, looking at the little woman. Lucretia’s face was glassy with heat and sweat. All the other women were one with her, obedient, it seemed.

  “Muy hermosa,” she said, and she moved her hand up and down at the wrist to show her approval.

  Then she handed over something else—one of the effigy’s glass eyes that had not burned.

  “Maybe you can see what we will do to you.” Lucretia smiled.

  Mary said:

  “Thank you,” and handed her, her pair of six-hundred-dollar designer sunglasses. It was her favourite pair. Lucretia smiled, and even though it was eleven at night put them on.

  “Tú también eres famosa,” Mary said; though her Spanish was not good, she knew more Spanish than French. You are famous.

  “Sí,” Lucretia said. “Sí.”

  “You will be very famous—when I die,” Mary said. “My death will make sure of it,” and though she was terrified before, she did not feel one bit afraid now.

  The next day Gabriella began to visit and feed the donkey—and Mary waited for her visits across the street with great, almost feverish, emotion. Every time she saw her she stood on the small orange crate and lifted herself to the bars. Some days she would wait looking out at the street for the young girl to come.

  “Mi amiga,” she would say. “Mi amiga—” It took a while for Gabriella to trust her, to come close enough so Mary could say, “I know I know you were a friend of Victor—I know he wanted to give me something—do you know what it was?”

  She did not know how long things would take, but someday—in some way she would be free.

  6.

  THEN THERE WERE THOSE OTHER GIRLS, FROM LONG AGO. SHE waited for them, for over ten years, to have a falling-out. Rhonda was the ringleader, the one who accepted her role, who dined out on each new trend, forever seeking a sky-blue life. And they doted on Rhonda, on her beauty and grace. They fell out over the ski chalet business they and their husbands had all entered into.

  After three poor seasons they were in debt and all were blaming one another. All wanted funds from one another. All sued one another.

  And when they did, when they were fighting over property taxes and ski lifts, when one husband would not speak to another, when each was trying to sabotage everyone else, when Rhonda tried to take $170,000 out of the joint account before an audit came and froze the account, Mary appeared one day out of the blue, in a pink scarf and new spring hat. It was April and the air felt still fresh and cool along the streets of the resort in the Laurentians. She had driven from Ottawa in a purple Jaguar.

  She brought the creditors into the room, with a lawyer. She sat with them, looking across the table at Rhonda, seeing how miserably they tried to use each other, and she let it be known that she knew. Then she bought them all out, paid off their credit for twenty cents on the dollar. So with their bankruptcy she was in the end able to make a good deal of money.

  As she looked over their files and statements, it was clear that Gail had been treated the worst—the girl who had believed most in friendship, who had invested her entire livelihood, losing almost everything.

  “Ah. Every day the fairy tale is
proven true,” Mary said.

  “What fairy tale?” Rhonda asked.

  “Why—Cinderella, of course.”

  Mary then cautiously showed Rhonda four pages of expenses that proved she was having an affair with Bonnie’s husband. But only to her, and silently—that is, she was not like that—she could not destroy those who had tried to destroy her—at least completely.

  Mary left the meeting, coat over her arm. One of the husbands called to her:

  “Please, we’d like to negotiate.”

  She did not look back.

  The group called Lite Snow Enterprises lost $2,467,000. Or thereabouts. She paid less then three hundred thousand.

  So Mary Cyr could do what she wanted with it. She studied it. She shrugged. She had no use for it.

  She went to a charity for the Toronto General Hospital board and had her picture taken with Kiefer Sutherland and Randy Bachman. It was in all the newspapers, so those ladies would see it the next day.

  For three years those women were broke. They knew what it was like to be poor. They knew what it must be like for a child to pick blueberries in order to buy clothes for school. They knew too, when their affairs with each other’s spouses became known, what it was like to be ridiculed for sex, to have their bodies talked about and mocked. As poor Perley had been long ago.

  They fought and cursed. They sued and counter-sued one another. They had to sell homes and move residences.

  And then one afternoon—it was in April 1996—she simply sent the deeds to the property back, gave them title to what they once owned, with the stipulation that they must remain in partnership even if they hated one another until she, Mary Cyr, was paid back every cent, not twenty cents on the dollar but every dollar, or her largesse would be rescinded; and a charity tourney had to be opened and trophies given up in Debby Dormey’s name.

  “You are being awful—what did we ever do to you—”

  “Nothing—nothing at all.”

  After that phone call, she sat in a corner, tears in her eyes. She knew it was a terrible thing to do—in fact she wrote in her diary it was the worst victory she had ever had.

  PART TEN

  1.

  MARY CYR DROVE DOWN TO MACHIAS, MAINE, THAT SUMMER OF Rhonda, with Bobby in the back seat wearing an Expos baseball cap over his bald, vulnerable head. John had discovered after all this time that it was to find Perley, who had gone to Maine to join the Marines. Except, being a Canadian, he couldn’t, and being terribly out of shape he couldn’t either. So he got drunk and tried to drive home, and found himself in the Washington County Jail in Machias, terrified and alone. He wasn’t allowed to make an international call, so he telephoned a business associate of his father, and asked him to contact Mary—Mary alone, no one else.

  It was Mary Cyr who drove down that evening and posted his five-hundred-dollar bail. He was led out through the back by a sheriff’s deputy, who undid his cuffs and handed him back his wallet and sunglasses, and car keys in a plastic bag. Mary had to find a mechanic to get his car out of impound and drive it north for them, and that cost another two hundred and fifty dollars.

  Once across the border Perley could drive his own car. He had not lost his licence in Canada, and Mary Cyr had managed to keep it out of the papers in New England.

  “I will never forget this,” he said.

  “What’re cousins for—” Mary asked, holding Bobby in her arms, looking at him through her designer sunglasses.

  She laughed. It was a lighthearted, sudden laugh that captivated him, and that now, after all of these years, made him attempt to help her—to organize a payoff or an escape.

  He in fact had planned it meticulously—he had been planning it for a long time. In fact he too would bring money with him, to Mexico City—he would see one man he had been in contact with: Alfonso Bara. There he would offer payment to allow himself to trade places with her. That is, if it was Tarsco they were so concerned about, he had more shares in Tarsco than she ever did. If they wanted someone to take the blame for the Amigo Mining disaster, they could have him, as long as they left her alone. He had sat alone at home thinking of this for days—and it seemed to him the only way in the world to help her. At first he had thought of an escape, and he had paid two men twenty thousand dollars to set this up. That was the cell phone number he was given. Hare-brained and farcical, it summarized his own unfortunate misunderstanding of the dreadful world. But the men had become very elusive in getting back to him. So now he was planning to take matters into his own hands.

  Yes, he had it all planned, and the plan seemed entirely workable, as long as he did not actually think about it. Once he began to think it over, it became more and more foolhardy and undoable. The two Mexican men he had hired, who said they knew people in Oathoa who would help him, no longer returned his calls.

  The problem was, he could not say no to their proposal and not think it might be her only chance. So he paid them the money. And in truth, if the truth be told—did he once think they were Mexican?

  He had placed the money in an envelope and met them in downtown Saint John near Harbour Station.

  “We will phone you by Friday,” they said.

  He waited two days for a call on his cell phone. At first every day—no, every moment of every day—he was filled with exuberance, thinking every time his cell phone rang he would hear her voice.

  Then, little by little he began to look at his cell phone suspiciously and then annoyingly—At the last he couldn’t look at it.

  On the tenth day the phone did ring. He picked it up. It was John Delano’s friend Constable Markus Paul.

  They had picked these two men up—they were in a tavern bragging. People were so angry they had done this to him they had phoned the police.

  They had been in jail since last night.

  “The two skinny little runts,” Markus said.

  Did he want to identify them and press charges? They were not Mexican. They were First Nations men, and they had two whites with them, who had helped them set it up.

  “They had been planning this for weeks, looking both you and Mary Cyr up on the internet. I am sorry for your trouble.”

  The money would be returned.

  Worse, Mary would remain where she was.

  “I am gullible and stupid,” Perley said. “I am stupid and naive.”

  “No,” Markus said, “you are not silly, or naive—you are just an average person trying his best. You would give anyone money to help her—and you know—I remember her when I was a youngster—and so would I. Don’t despair.”

  2.

  NOR COULD PERLEY KEEP IT OUT OF THE FAMILY’S OWN PAPERS—though he had tried. He wrung his hands, his face became red, he sweated. But he could not keep it out. The story had first appeared on the back inside page—not the picture but the story without her name. It had moved in the last week to International on page four. That is where it was until yesterday—a heavily edited version, to be sure—but because of this, people were ignoring his papers and going online, where everything that was published in the New York tabloids was more salacious. He looked in the mirror at his great big ears, his huge stomach, and sighed.

  The sun came through on his large body and his large head, and he looked at his cell phone, and then at his feet, pondering what to do. He was waiting for a call from Greg, who was in a meeting. Now he had to wait, because Greg had an empire to run—shipping and lumber, et cetera, were all his province now.

  “I love Mary,” Perley said. “She is the only one who ever loved me—”

  But his father said something that he sometimes said without thinking—something that callously defined his own self-interest—without realizing how it sounded.

  “Well—she is to receive the seventy-eight million—but if she gets into trouble—well, then the money reverts back to the family—the family pays off Amigo Mining, and everyone is happy once again. They might even let her out of jail sooner. You know, let her do fewer years. Or maybe to a woman’s p
rison here—and you could visit her at Christmas.”

  Perley looked at him in childlike wonder and disbelief, and Garnet managed a timid smile.

  “Just saying, son,” Garnet said

  The next morning Perley was rushed to the hospital. He’d had a slight heart attack. He was only forty-six.

  But as soon as they put a stent in one of his arteries and placed him on medication, he was out of the hospital and making plans to go and rescue her. The trouble was, of course, she had heard about it.

  3.

  AFTER PERLEY CAME BACK FROM MAINE THAT TIME, HE TOLD her he was useless; he didn’t even manage to join the marines. He stayed in his room and would not even read the notes she put under his door. Finally she used her own key (the doors of the old cottage had skeleton keys) and came in, when he was sitting bare-chested in his underwear. He had one of his grandfather’s machetes in his hand, thinking he could kill himself with it. The machete they were going to use to go to Oak Island and discover the treasure, a long time ago when their hearts were young and glad.

  “We’ll be more rootin-tootin than that good old Dug Vanderflutin,” Mary had said to him. They were seven and eight. They had found those old India-issued British imperial helmets up in the attic and had walked about with them on their heads, sat at the table with them on, winking at each other—collecting rope. Making a potato salad. Sneaking quarters to buy chocolate bars. Then they had found the machete, and a map—which they themselves had picked up at a service station, and were heading to the door, with a picnic basket, when Nanesse and her old aunt stopped them.

  “Tu ne pouvez pas imaginer ce qu’elle est sur lui—une mauvaise influence,” Nan said later that day to her husband.

  You can’t imagine what a bad influence she is.

  It seemed only a moment from then until this moment when he held the machete and looked at her.

  She told him he didn’t need to.

  “Need to what?”

  “Need to join the marines to be a man—”