Punishment

by Linden MacIntyre

  He shook his head. “John Robert is kind of chicken. What do you think? We’ll just go up and knock on the door and take her home. There’ll be no problem if there’s two of us.”

  I uncapped the bottle, swallowed, shivered, almost gagged. Handed it to Neil. He held it indifferently for a moment, still studying me. Then swallowed briefly. He was wearing gloves. I noticed the quality of them, soft leather like a second skin. He handed back the bottle.

  “I don’t think I could face Strickland,” I said.

  “You could always wait outside,” Neil said. “I’d just like to have you there. Moral support, right?”

  I shrugged.

  “The last thing the place needs is another dead kid,” he said. “Maybe last summer, if somebody went there … but you can suit yourself.”

  “I’ll get my coat,” I said.

  There was light visible as we drove slowly up the lane. We crept around a car parked in darkness halfway up. “That’ll be John Robert,” Neil said. So what do you need me for? I wondered silently. We drove on. From the yard I could see the glow in the living room. The flicker of a television screen. We climbed out, closed the car doors quietly.

  Neil paused near the living room window, then moved closer, peered in, beckoned. Strickland was asleep on his couch, in the fetal position, hands clasped between his knees.

  “He seems to be alone,” I whispered.

  “She’ll be upstairs,” Neil replied softly, confidently. Then he was around to the back, easing through the doors. In the kitchen he whispered, “You go wake him up.”

  I made no attempt at stealth. I just walked into the living room and ran a hand up the wall just inside the door where I found a light switch. Lit the room.

  Strickland was like a cat. Off the couch on all fours and as he rose I saw the baseball bat. He was still half-crouched and coming at me but I but I stepped in and caught him just below the ear. This time my fist was ready for the impact, but still there was a lightning jolt of pain. He fell back, the bat clattered on the floor and I had it then. And then he was coming at me hard. I swung, two-handed and he turned his face away and there was a solid crunch as the bat connected with the back of his head. He went down with a crash. Laughter on the television. Someone talking.

  Now Neil was leaning over him, “Grab a leg,” he snarled as he grabbed one and started tugging.

  I could feel my heart pounding, the terror now a mix of horror and remorse. “Jesus, Jesus.”

  Then Neil was in my face, shouting, “Grab a fucking leg.” For a moment I was paralyzed. “Grab that fuuuuck-ing leg!” And so I did. Struggling toward the kitchen I was desperately looking for a phone. It was on the kitchen table. I dropped the leg, reached for the phone. “I’ll call 911,” I shouted. Neil was uncapping a quart rum bottle, then pouring the contents on the motionless Strickland. Rum? Then I caught the reek of kerosene. I dropped the phone.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  There was the snap of a Zippo lighter and a flash and sudden flame all over Strickland, running along the floor in the direction of the stove.

  I remembered the girl.

  “No,” Neil screamed as I bolted toward the living room, up the stairs, crashing through the empty bedrooms. Cold. Damp. Dark. Musty. Empty. Empty. Empty bedrooms, closets. Looked under beds. Frightened children hide. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Smoke met me, curling up the stairs. I plunged through, head down.

  Now more smoke and crackle, burning heat. Coat off trying to smother flames, bare hands tearing at Strickland’s clothing, get it off him. Neil nowhere, then his feet on the floor beside Strickland. Then a sudden flash and the wooden floor lurched up and struck my face with a shattering force.

  The yard was full of vehicles. The sky sparkled and glowed. There was a crashing sound and the air was heavy with the pungent odour of ancient boards and timber burning. Red and white light strobing slowly, tree shadows, car shadows, man shadows. Voices all around me. I tried to sit up but my head throbbed and I felt breathless. I fell back, now aware of a pillow under my head, a blanket over me. Realized my hands were wrapped in gauze.

  Then I heard Neil talking: “There was no stopping him, he just tore off in there, trying to save the guy. I got there just after he passed out with the smoke … could only get one of them out … didn’t think there was any hope for the other fellow anyway.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to remember. Trying not to remember.

  “No big loss, I suppose,” someone said.

  “Ah well,” said Neil, almost sorrowfully.

  18.

  It was dawn when the doctor told me to go home. My hands were heavily bandaged, mind fuzzy with painkillers. “Take these when you need to,” he said.

  “What is it,” I asked.

  “Percocet,” he said. “Be careful with this stuff.” And he handed me a prescription. “I understand you live alone.”

  I nodded.

  “Is there anyone you could stay with for a few days?”

  I shook my head.

  Neil was in the doorway of the examining room. “We’ll see that he’s taken care of,” he said. Then John Robert was beside him. “He has a whole village to look after him,” John Robert said. The doctor smiled, tapped me lightly on the shoulder.

  “You’ve had quite a night of it,” he said.

  Driving back through the watery spring light, I asked, “What about Dwayne?”

  There was a long silence. “He’s gone,” Neil said at last. “A hard way to end up.”

  I was behind him in the back seat and I couldn’t see his face. So I waited.

  “Like I was explaining to John here, nobody could have done more than you tried to do. And after him trying to take your head off with a baseball bat. You did more than I’d have.” He grunted a grim laugh.

  I watched the landscape passing. Surely it wasn’t so simple. A young man was dead and I had helped to kill him.

  “I’ll have to give a statement,” I said.

  “Like I told John Robert. Damned fool was trying to get the fire going with gas or kerosene or something, sees us, drops the bottle, goes for the bat. Something catches. Takes a whack at you but you tear off looking for the girl. He comes after me but now he’s on fire and I do like we’re trained, knock him down, try to smother it. But damned if he didn’t fight me. Then you’re back and you’re on fire too. So I gotta get you out. By then he’s done … no way getting back in for him.”

  “I was waiting in the lane,” said John Robert. “I kind of froze there when I saw the fire. In a way I feel responsible.”

  “She wasn’t there,” I said. “I checked every room.”

  John Robert grunted. “The little witch was home. Arrived in after I left. Not a word about where she was all afternoon and evening. I just assumed the worst. Up at Strickland’s, on the dope or worse.” He sighed. “Hard times to be a parent, Tony. You didn’t have any yourself, did you?”

  He turned to look at me, arm over the back of the front seat. I closed my eyes, shook my head.

  “Wise man,” he said. “I never knew how good I had it when I was single.”

  There was no movement in the landscape, only us passing through it. The sea was flat, pewter grey.

  “Bloody shame it had to come to this,” Neil said. “But meaning no disrespect to the dead, he brought it on himself.”

  Then we were in the village and I saw my truck in Caddy’s driveway. Neil slowed, then turned in and stopped behind it. “We took the liberty of moving some of your stuff over here,” Neil said. “Caddy insisted. And you know what she’s like.”

  “We put your things in the guest room,” Caddy said. “I’ll show you.” She caught my arm, just above the elbow, and squeezed it as we climbed the stairs. Then, cheerfully, “This is it. You’ll be here for as long as you have to.”

  “It’s too much trouble,” I said. I felt a sensation similar to panic growing inside me. I remembered the rooftop dream, the feeling of vertigo and helplessness. “It�
��s decided,” she said. “There will be no discussion.” The room was cool, impersonal, multiple pillows on the bed, a thick blue duvet, a large window, drapes drawn. I peered out. The day was brightening. We went back downstairs where the others were waiting.

  “All settled in then?” said Neil rising. John Robert was still seated, studying me with an expression that seemed full of unasked questions. Then he stood too. “I’ll grab a ride home with you.”

  After the sound of the car faded I asked: “Whose idea was this?”

  She was busy at the sink, washing coffee mugs. “It was a group decision.” She turned. “Don’t worry, I won’t molest you, unless you want me to—for therapy.” She smiled at me and turned away again, rattling the mugs in the sink.

  “The place will be abuzz,” I said.

  “It’s the twenty-first century,” she said. “Even here.”

  I was sitting on the side of the bed studying my bandages. My hands hurt when I tried to move my fingers, seared with pain as if the skin was splitting, tendons snapping. Then Caddy was in the doorway with a tray piled with gauze and salves and scissors. She set them on the bed, then moved a chair and sat in front of me. Took a hand gently in hers. “I have instructions to change these every day. Okay?” She searched my face. “I know this isn’t easy for you.”

  She worked carefully, in silence. “You’re better than a nurse,” I said. She just smiled.

  When she was nearly finished, she said, “Neil told me what happened so you mustn’t feel you have to explain. Nobody blames anybody. It was just a horrible accident.”

  “Is that what everybody thinks?”

  “It’s the only way to look at it.”

  I struggled to interpret the meaning of her comment, finally suppressed the urge to ask her straight out: How much do you know, really?

  Then she straightened up, holding both bandaged hands gently, eyes intense on mine. “You always had a tendency to blame yourself for things, Tony. Always too hard on yourself. Let this one go.”

  I listened carefully for evidence of guilty knowledge, but I could hear only what seemed to be a genuine attempt at comforting. I nodded.

  Then she stood, still holding my hands. “Come,” she said. She dropped my hands and turned. In the doorway she paused and looked back. “Come,” she said. “I’ll only be fretting, thinking of you over here alone.”

  In her bed I whispered, apologetically: “I can’t do much with these hands.”

  “Let me do the work,” she whispered back.

  And a little later, in the darkness, she murmured: “I liked what you did the last time …”

  I look back on the weeks I spent with Caddy as one of those rare occasions when I managed to banish all consciousness of memory or place beyond that special time with her. I would tell myself: this won’t last and I’ll have the rest of my life for self-doubt, questions, accusations, guilt. So I let myself sink deeply into the sound and the touch and especially the better memories of her. It became normal, how I settled into the rhythms of her day.

  She was an early riser and I awoke each morning to the spatter of her shower. She seemed to become younger, more alive as the days passed, and I allowed myself to think it was my presence, my nightly ministrations to needs that had been long neglected, that accounted for it.

  Now I realize of course that the real cause was something else entirely. Strickland’s death had closed off an ugly chapter in her life. She was liberated from the menace that he represented and I was part of that liberation. I discovered a Caddy I couldn’t have imagined.

  “If things had been different back in the sixties, do you think life could have been like this?”

  She considered my question for a while then kissed me quickly. “It could have been anything we want to imagine now,” she said. “But I don’t want to imagine that. It would only make me sad. Okay? I hate regrets.”

  And she was so right. It is in the fertile gap between how things are and how things might have been that sorrow blooms.

  I’d noticed him once at the store, a ruddy-faced man in an expensive leather jacket and designer jeans, cowboy boots that made him seem tall. My trips to the store while I was at Caddy’s were perfunctory. Walk in, grab what I needed and get out quickly before authorizing, by some careless word or glance, a torrent of discussion about Strickland’s death.

  On this visit the stranger caught up before I reached the door. “You’d be Tony MacMillan?”

  “Yes.”

  “I doubt if you remember me, we were in school together a long time ago.”

  I studied the face. He was probably near my age but the features were commonplace where we grew up. Blue eyes, cropped silver hair, strong jawline. I couldn’t come up with a name.

  “Jimmy Joe MacInnis,” he said. “Dwayne Strickland was brought up at my brother’s place on the Shore Road. I grew up there too, in the old house, the place that burned down. I was hoping to talk to you about that when you’re feeling up to it.”

  I could feel my heart rate accelerate.

  “I know you now,” I said. “Dwayne often talked about you.” I fumbled in my heart for words of sympathy, but found only an old cliché. “I’m sorry for your trouble.” And then, embarrassed: “I’d shake your hand but mine are still a little tender.”

  “I expect so,” he said. “I appreciate what you tried to do for him. In prison. The night of the fire. Dwayne thought a lot of you. Maybe I could come and see you sometime. Have a coffee. You’re in the old MacDougall place on the Shore Road, I think I heard. Old Charlie’s.”

  “I’m not there just now.” And I explained that I was recuperating at Caddy’s. “You probably remember Caddy Gillis, now Stewart.”

  “I remember Caddy well,” he said smiling warmly. “Saint of a woman, Caddy is.”

  “So what’s new at the store,” Caddy asked, as I unfolded newspapers on the table. And checked by an instinctive caution I said, “Nothing. The usual.”

  And then, “I suppose I should be thinking of getting back to the Shore Road one of these days. These hands are almost useful again.”

  “I noticed,” she said. I couldn’t see her face. “I thought you liked it here.”

  “I do. I love it here. I just don’t want to end up like the dog.”

  She performed an exaggerated double take. “Dead, you mean? No danger of that here, unless …” She smiled.

  “I meant getting too attached,” I said.

  “Well, why don’t you let me worry about that.”

  “I think I’ll lie down for a bit.”

  “You do that.” Neutral tone, expression.

  That afternoon, lying on her bed, it all came back, the awful night, March 22. The images emerged around me slowly like wisps of fog, or smoke seeping underneath a door, small scraps of particular memory hovering—the dazed and desperate expression on his face as he lunged with the baseball bat, the stunned shock when I hit him with my fist, the baseball bat clattering in hypnotic slowness on the floor, the grip end rising slowly toward my outstretched hand, the feral violence in his face, a look I’d seen a hundred times in a hundred faces. And then he was crumpled on the floor and I was standing over him, Neil crouched and roaring: “Grab a fucking leg.” And me, dazed, wondering who or what had done this thing. “Grab that fuuuuck-ing leg!”

  I rose from the bed, struggling to breathe, paced the floor for a while, trying to suppress the rising panic. I breathed deeply several times then walked downstairs. Caddy was at the kitchen table, the newspaper open before her, and looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. “That was an efficient nap,” she said.

  I sat in what had become my usual place.

  “I was thinking of pouring a drink,” she said. “Could I interest you in joining me?”

  I nodded. And the relief flowed through me, the prospect of a drink or simply being in her healing presence.

  I’ve often asked myself: What makes an ordinary man a killer? But am I so ordinary? Did I intend to kill? I r
esponded to an immediate danger from instinct, training and experience. The baseball bat became a baton. How often have I wielded a baton against a man who believed that by brute force he could gain control of some small aspect of his life or, in extreme cases, an institution by disabling or killing me? The prison system taught me that the margin between life and death is frequently as narrow as a hesitation. Had I intended to kill Strickland with the baseball bat? Another question for perpetuity.

  That evening over dinner I said to Caddy, “Sooner or later we’ll have to talk about it.”

  “About what?”

  “You know.”

  Her eyes were full of kindness and she touched my hand gently. “In due course.” Then she smiled. “Hey, you didn’t flinch when I touched the hand. You must be getting better.”

  “We’re going to have a visitor,” I said.

  She looked puzzled.

  “You remember Jimmy MacInnis? We all went to school together.”

  It took half a minute for her to work it out. “What does he want?”

  “He didn’t say. I met him at the store. He said he’d like to drop by.”

  “I’ll be out,” she said. Then she stood and started gathering the dishes.

  Before we went to sleep that night I asked: “Do you think we could make this work long term?”

  “What does ‘long term’ mean anymore?”

  “You have a point.”

  “How about one day at a time.”

  “That’s good enough for me.”

  Jimmy MacInnis called three days later, just before noon. Caddy answered, handed me the phone. He asked if two o’clock would be convenient. I covered the mouthpiece. “He wants to come by at two.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I have to go to town anyway.”

  “You wouldn’t consider staying?”

  “What would you want me here for?”

  “Moral support.”

  She laughed. “What do you need that for? You’re the guy who got half-burned to death trying to save the asshole.”

  Was that sarcasm or the official story? Was that how March 22 and Strickland’s death would be remembered? I felt a wave of nausea.

  “Suit yourself,” I said and I left the kitchen to sit alone in the living room, watching the road as she drove off toward town.