Punishment

by Linden MacIntyre

  “Of course not,” I said. “He’s no trouble. Maybe another little spell here and he’ll be ready.”

  “As long as I have visiting rights,” she said, smiling.

  On January 2 the store was busy with people emerging from their privacies. Pulling up I noted Neil’s Lexus in its usual spot, close to the door. Inside I felt the unfamiliar warmth of inclusion as people greeted me. “All set for ’03 are you Tony?” Mary said from behind the counter. “Lots of big resolutions I bet.”

  “I don’t believe in resolutions,” I said. “How about you, Neil?”

  “Been making the same one for thirty years and sticking to it. No booze ’til Easter. Secret of my survival in the rest of the year, cleaning out the system in the winter.”

  “That’s admirable,” I said. “And thanks again for Christmas.”

  He nodded, then picked up a newspaper and scanned the headlines.

  Mary said, “Maybe you should make one more resolution and start paying for the newspapers you mess up every frigging day.”

  “Huh,” said Neil, perusing headlines over the top of his glasses. “What are you saying, sweetheart?”

  “I’m saying buy the friggin’ paper if you want to read it, that’s all.”

  “No need to buy the paper when I’ve got the satellite, honey. Two hundred channels, clickety click. Anything I want to know at my fingertips.”

  “I have the satellite,” said Mary, “and it’s all crap that I see there.”

  “You’re just not lookin’ in the right places. You’re lookin’ for amusement. Soap operas and sitcoms and the like. I’m lookin’ for information about the world. About the human condition. Right, Tony?”

  “Whatever you say, Neil.” I winked at Mary.

  “See, me and Tony here have been out in the wider world and we know the importance of keeping informed because the world is all connected now, folks. Everybody in the same boat, more or less.”

  The older man I vaguely remembered—Donald something—said, “I wonder what resolutions old George WMD Bush made for the New Year.”

  Neil snorted, dropped a section of the paper on the counter in front of Mary. “George WMD Bush. That’s a good one. Says right here, about fifteen thousand fresh troops from the third infantry division heading for the Gulf. Now that’s a New Year’s resolution. And all this country can do is dither over doing the right thing,”

  “And what do you think the right thing is, Neil?” asked John Robert, agitating.

  “Everybody in the world seems to know what the right thing is,” said Neil, “except France and this fucking excuse for a country. Don’t get me goin’.”

  After a nervous silence, which even Neil seemed to register, he said, “Time to change the subject. I was thinkin’ about the poor little girl who got murdered last summer. Mary Jane or whatever.”

  “Murdered?” I said. “I think you’re jumping the gun a bit, Neil. And her name was Mary Alice.”

  He raised a hand. “Whatever. Just hear me out. I was saying to the wife this morning that it would be a nice idea to hold a benefit of some kind in her memory. Something in the hall. Raise money for a memorial, a scholarship or something.”

  “How do you think Caddy would feel about this?” I said carefully.

  He shrugged. “I can’t see the downside.”

  “There already is a scholarship fund.”

  “So we’ll have two.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Caddy.” I reached for the newspaper that was reserved for me.

  “I was thinking you should talk to Caddy, Tony,” Neil said. “I think she’d like to hear it coming from yourself.”

  I laughed. “You’re about forty years out of touch, Neil.”

  “I’m just sayin’. It wouldn’t hurt to run it by her.”

  “I think it’s a bad idea for half a dozen reasons. The timing for one. There’s going to be a preliminary hearing in a few weeks. Maybe a trial. The court might take a dim view.”

  “The court’s got fuck all to do with it. This is about the community, Tony. The place hanging together, trying to get some good out of something wicked.”

  John Robert asked, “So what were you thinking, Neil?”

  “Nothing major. A social event, music, food, a liquor licence. Maybe Caddy could say a few words about the kid. Get the priest involved.”

  “It could be fun,” John Robert said. “There isn’t much going on in January. What do you think, Tony?”

  “I’ll have nothing to do with it.”

  Silence then while everybody stared at me. Finally I said, “Caddy and the family are struggling to put what happened behind them. Going through the trial will be bad enough.”

  “If there ever is a trial,” said Neil. “That’s another thing.”

  “What’s the real agenda here, Neil?”

  “Whoa, Tony. What are you talking about? It’s just an idea. Fuck me.”

  I walked out with my newspaper, realizing outside that I’d forgotten to pay for it.

  I became an obsessive television watcher, staying up late at night, surfing through the channels for discussions about Iraq. Maybe I was trying to prepare myself for a showdown with Neil.

  Collie, from behind the counter, had commented, “You have to admit, Neil makes a good point now and then.” I was shocked. Sensible Collie agrees with Neil?

  “What good point?” I asked. “Name one.”

  “Well, if they have managed to hide serious weapons in the desert somewhere, who knows …?”

  “They haven’t been able to find any evidence of weapons. And the country is hardly functioning after all the years of sanctions.”

  “Maybe. But you can’t be too careful dealing with those kinds of people.”

  “Come on, Collie,” I said.

  “I’m just sayin’.”

  Around the middle of January Sullivan called to tell me Dwayne wanted to talk to me again.

  I told the lawyer that I hadn’t changed my mind since the last time we talked.

  “I think he understands your position,” Sullivan said. “I’m just passing on his request. Maybe he just wants a visitor. He’s pretty much alone in the world, as you know.”

  I said I’d consider it. Sullivan told me they were expecting a firm date for the preliminary hearing any day, probably in early February.

  “I think we’re in pretty good shape,” he said.

  After he hung up I sat for a while in the silent house. Alone in the world? When all is said and done aren’t we all alone in the world?

  But soon enough I decided I’d go to see Strickland. I would do it for Caddy and the community. Maybe learn something useful. Perhaps he trusted me enough to disclose what really happened the night the girl called Maymie died.

  The sky was dark and the air still as I stood at my kitchen window the next morning waiting for the coffee water to boil. And then large feathery flakes of snow began to float straight downward. I stood, hypnotized, and it was only when the first gust of wind sent the gentle snowfall into a swirling fury that I realized that I was witnessing the birth pangs of a snowstorm. You aren’t going anywhere, I said to myself. Not even to the store. I watched, with my coffee, as the rising wind wrapped the snow around the house, softly flinging it against the windowpanes.

  By noon the schools were closing, according to the radio newscast. Authorities were warning people to stay off the roads. Late afternoon I learned from CNN that the British were sending twenty-six thousand soldiers to the Persian Gulf, including part of the armoured Desert Rats brigade. The Americans were sending sixteen thousand more from bases in Texas and Colorado. Colin Powell was pressing the United Nations to stand firm against Iraq. Standing firm against what seems to be inert is ridiculous, I thought. Mental note to Neil: give me one scrap of evidence that the government of Iraq represents a threat to anybody but Iraqis and I’ll take you seriously.

  Boredom set in by early evening. I poured a Scotch. Somewhere around nine o’clock all power failed omino
usly. Lights, television, suddenly gone with the subtle background sounds we never seem to notice until we can’t hear them anymore. Now only the creaks and protests of the naked house, the sighs and moans of nature, ragged snow flapping at the windows. The phone rang.

  “Everything copacetic over there?” Caddy asked.

  “Yes. What about you?”

  “I have a generator,” she said. “You’re welcome to come over if you can make it.”

  “I’m sure the lane is blocked.”

  “If you get desperate I’ll send someone with a snowmobile.”

  I laughed. “How bad can it get?”

  “Sometimes these things can go on for days. You have lamps?”

  “They’re all over the place,” I said. “I was going to get rid of them but I kept them for decoration.”

  “Get them ready, you’re going to need them,” she said.

  After I put the phone down I did a mental inventory. The lamps; stove in the living room is fuelled by oil; I have a propane camp stove somewhere; enough canned food for days; nothing to go bad in the refrigerator; I have a powerful flashlight (property of the Correctional Service of Canada). I realized that I was speaking aloud and that the dog was listening; the sound of my voice and the sense that it was being heard and understood was comforting. He came close, placed his snout on my knee. “I know you’re wondering about Strickland,” I said. “Whether I’m setting myself up for trouble, engaging with him. But you’d have to know the whole story, Birch.”

  He licked my hand and clambered up beside me on the couch, turned in a full circle, then lay down, head resting on my thigh. “Go on,” he seemed to say.

  “You’re the expert on loyalty,” I said. “You’d understand better than most people what Strickland and I really have in common. Something deeper than the fact that we were both adopted. We’re traitors, Strickland and me. I hate admitting it, Birch, but in the world we come from, we’re both known as rats.”

  The dog lifted his head from my knee and stared up at me.

  “That’s right. We’re rats. In the world that did so much to shape what we’ve become, where everyone is more or less a prisoner of the system—there are two distinct cultures, two breeds of animal, if you will. Each breed has rules so rigorous you wouldn’t believe it. Or maybe you would, actually. Maybe you would. Because rule one, the absolutely most important, is loyalty—you are unquestionably loyal to your own breed. Anyone who betrays his own is dead, one way or another. And that’s how Strickland and I both ended up back here, back where we started from, both more or less in hiding. His problem is that he got noticed. I want to know: Was your young friend’s death an accident? Or did he do something bad or stupid that night when Maymie showed up at his place. If he brought it on himself, he’ll have to face the consequences. That’s the way we see things, Birch. I know you understand.”

  The dog yawned assent. I was relieved he couldn’t ask the obvious.

  I’d known what the letter was about before I opened it. There is something ominous about an administrative summons. And over coffee we’d compared them. Me, Meredith, Wilson and Tommy Steele.

  “Roger William Pittman,” Tommy scoffed. “Anybody know his name was Roger?” We all laughed.

  “He was twenty-eight,” said Meredith. “Christ, I thought he was a lot older than that. Just from his record. Busy boy, he was.”

  “Okay,” said Tommy. “This ain’t gonna be pretty. But we’re ready for it, right guys?”

  There was a murmur of agreement from Meredith and Wilson.

  “See, here’s the situation. We’ve all been through this before. People come along after the fact with twenty-twenty hindsight, right? Like we’re supposed to know what’s gonna happen before it fuckin happens, right? Just the way the brains trust knows after everything is done and all the reports are in. We were supposed to be fortune tellers.”

  He was shaking his head sadly. Then he was looking straight at me, smiling at the mouth. Oh, but not the eyes. Eyes hardened by his insight and his certainties. “Something on your mind, Tony?”

  “Maybe we should talk about this,” I said.

  “What’s to talk about?”

  “Maybe coming clean.”

  Tommy didn’t move. He was sitting with his arm hanging over the back of his chair, expression wary. The coffee-shop din suddenly seemed far away.

  “So you’re gonna strike out on your own,” he said at last.

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Amounts to the same thing. You going rogue on us?”

  “I’m just saying the simplest and safest thing is to explain exactly what happened.”

  “Okay, Tony. Exactly what happened?”

  “We waited too long … it got out of control. There were four of us. We could have gone onto the range, we could have got security in sooner. It was a wrong judgement call, by all of us. And so there’s a guy dead. I don’t care what he was, Tommy. He …”

  “Great,” he said. “Just hand them an excuse to hang someone out to dry. And who do you think that someone’s going to be? Not you, Tony.”

  “I’ll take my share …”

  “Don’t go getting all sanctimonious on me. Just do what you feel you gotta do.”

  And he got up from the table and walked away, shaking his head. But then stopped, turned. “We’re all counting on you, Tony.”

  I sat alone in my office. There can be no going back. There’s only going forward now. The issue isn’t what happened. It’s what’s going to happen.

  I opened my desk drawer, extracted the folded sheet of paper I’d almost memorized by then. Strong as we are / Memory punishes us / Is our disease …

  I folded the poem and placed it in my inside jacket pocket. This I’m going to need, I thought. And you, my wise dear Sophie.

  I dialed her office number but she wasn’t there.

  I fell asleep to the howls of wind and whispering of trees. Sometime during the night I awoke to what sounded like the splattering of rain. Early morning I looked out on a glistening landscape, trees drooping with the weight of crusted snow. The power was out. The battery radio reported trees and lines down, all across the province, tens of thousands without electricity.

  I took advantage of the daylight, read a lot, resolved to read more. Coffee on the camp stove tasted lovely. Beans and wieners spooned from heated cans. Birch slept mostly and I envied his ability to drift off at will.

  Just after four a machine roared in the lane and I thought at first it was a snowplough but it was a snowmobile, rider lost in heavy winter clothes, a helmet. The sudden and unexpected appearance of strangers still makes me nervous, even here. But this was Mary, delivering newspapers accumulated since my last visit to the store.

  “I thought you’d be in bed when I was going home last night so I didn’t want to bother you.”

  One of the papers seemed disorganized, as if it had been read. “I see Neil got out in spite of the storm,” I said, smiling.

  “No, that was me. I won’t charge you for that one.”

  She turned to leave and impulsively I said: “Is there room for two on that machine of yours?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Caddy’s,” I said. “She has a generator. She’s offered supper. And I think the dog is missing her.”

  “You’ll have to make your own way back, unless you want to wait there until I’m coming home.”

  “What time will that be?”

  “About nine tonight.”

  “Surely Caddy can put up with me ’til then.”

  ——

  Bundled in my warmest coat, the dog wrapped in a blanket clutched to my chest I teetered on the back end of the machine as we roared through a deserted countryside. Wood smoke curled above silent blank-windowed houses, here and there cars were abandoned on the roadside or in ditches, half-buried. A snowplough passed us carefully, wheel chains clanking, as we seemed to hurtle down the road. The dog squirmed and I held h
im tighter. The setting sun seemed briefly to have paused between a bank of purple cloud and flexing sea.

  I could see Caddy smiling in the kitchen as we thumped across her back deck; the dog had his head protruding from the blanket and was struggling to be free. I dumped him through the sliding door and she quickly stooped to hug him. “Well look what the cat dragged in,” she said. Then she stood, eyes gleaming and touched my face. “You’re half-frozen,” she said. “Give me that coat. You’re too much, the both of you.”

  Over a hot drink I said, “Last night I started talking to the dog. Then I was thinking that poor old Charlie probably started out like that. Talking to himself or to an animal.”

  “Storms do that,” she said. “Especially when the power fails. I overheard someone at the store telling the gang that during the last big storm he caught himself talking to the wife. That was when he bought a generator, mostly to keep the TV going.”

  “When did you buy yours?” I asked.

  “That was Jack’s doing,” she said. And became silent for a while before she stood and fetched the kettle from the camp stove, the bottle from the sideboard. “Let me strengthen that.”

  At the refrigerator door she said: “The generator keeps the fridge on, and of course the television. I hope you don’t mind leftovers.”

  Fork poised in mid-air, she frowned, then lowered it. “I hear that there was talk at the store about some kind of benefit, a memorial for Maymie.”

  “So what did you hear?”

  “Just that. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Doing it for the family, they say.”

  “You’d think they’d have discussed it with the family.”

  “Well, actually, that was supposed to be my job.”

  She studied me, face slightly tilted. “So?”

  “Obviously I didn’t do my job. I think it’s a bad idea. Especially now.”

  She sighed. “I agree with you.”

  “I think Neil is trying to stir people up. He’s behind it. I heard him use the word ‘murder.’ ”