Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  But she became coy and said nothing for a while. Then, as they turned along the lane toward his car, she told him he should improve his looks for Sara’s sake.

  “What should I do to look better?”

  “I would cut that big snip of hair right there,” she said, touching the twist he had at the front. “And maybe pin your ears back a tad.”

  Then she started talking again, quicker than before. She had nothing but kind things to say about Sara Robb. “And her leg—her leg. If I had a leg like she had a leg, I would jump pell-mell off a bridge,” she said. This did not sound demeaning but kind.

  But there was something else, almost immediately. He had noticed it when he’d first seen her while visiting Sara’s house. It was her insistence—in how she spoke to him, looked at him and then glanced at Sara and back at him—that said: I can have you anytime I want, married or not. Get married and I will still have you. I remember the day I made you walk all the way to Hackett Brook—yes, you remember that day too! You couldn’t take your eyes off me back then, just like now. So she was telling him now, and once and for all, she could have him. And more than that, she was insisting it was only fair if he succumbed. And more to the point, he knew—and she knew he knew—that he would, sooner or later.

  But what was most profound was the self-deceit. Both knew and said nothing.

  He went to flick his cigarette into the darkness and she said, “No, here,” and took it once more and had a final drag before she crushed it with her foot. They had almost come to his car and his mind was racing. That is, he was confused about what to do next.

  But bending down to pick up a piece of coloured glass to look at, bauble in her hand, she stopped walking and said, almost as if she was out of breath, “You scared me when you were a boy—back then.”

  “I scared you how?”

  She shrugged, looked at the glass and began to walk once more. “Well, I would have loved to have gone out with you, but you were so wild. Oh, you were so damn wild. Sara will probably tame you back down so women like me won’t be scared of you.”

  Of course he knew she was saying this to please him, and it wasn’t true—Harold and Evan were far more wild than he. He had always been innocent without being stupid—but even this was flattering.

  “God—you don’t remember me, but I remember you,” she said. That is, she completely reversed reality and made it sound utterly true. And Ian found it wonderful, like a soft reassuring moment in youth when one becomes suddenly glad and in love with life.

  “Oh, you remember me with Harold—but you don’t remember me when I was so alone at night, sometimes waiting in my house for someone to come and see me.”

  That is, Annette’s insistence was collaborative, for sin is always collaborative. It was as if she was willing him to agree with her plans, and he was too weak not to—just as she had done in high school with others.

  Was it, then, a sin? For nothing had been done yet. But betrayal is always a sin—at its worst, it is in Dante’s furthermost reach of hell. This is what my students and I spoke about, discussed and argued about, many days in a small dark classroom in a cold red building at the top of the hill.

  So to accomplish this sleight of hand, Ian pretended he did not remember her very well. He also pretended that this conversation was not out of the ordinary because Annette was Sara’s friend. She then mentioned other men, men he had heard of, who were part of the great collection of men who hung around the new bars in town, and who laughed and rollicked about other people’s failed dreams and marriages, as if tragedy itself was nothing.

  She mentioned these men to see if he approved and then redirected her talk to something else. In this way she was placing him.

  He had heard of these other men, Ripp and Tab and Dickie—but only on occasion, and they seemed distant and remote from anyone he or Sara could know or ever want to know. One of them, Ripp, often bullied people where he lifted weights, and someone said even the police were frightened of him—and he liked it when he heard that people were frightened of him. He wore white T-shirts showing his arms with their tattoos. He had an absolute conviction that it was wonderful to make others fear him. Ian, in fact, disliked him intensely.

  Seeing his reaction, Annette simply laughed. It was her laugh that really placed him, that told him she already knew more about the world than he ever would.

  “Well, don’t pretend, love—you are as wild as they. That’s what makes you so attractive to all the girls! Oh God, is that your car?” She wisped her hand along the top of the black hood and then took it away quickly. A certain flirtation began that was, in fact, the point where there could be no turning back. Ian was struck by how much she wanted him to realize this—and how much he desired her now, just as he had when he was fifteen. It was much more than desire. It was the idea that she was the one thing he’d longed for and needed since he was that boy from Bonny Joyce Ridge who’d vowed to be a success. But it even went beyond all of that—he knew at this moment that she had settled on nothing less than his complete betrayal of his fiancée; or at least, he had a strong indication that this was what must happen. And both of them in their minds were planning this in intricate ways, without speaking or considering the consequences, while at the same time pretending that this was not at all what they were thinking of.

  Suddenly he was angry. For how could she come back to him now, just when it was too late? Why hadn’t she said any of this before? And this made him upset with Sara. But by this time, none of it mattered. Really, by this time it wouldn’t have mattered if she was saying and doing everything just to spite Sara. In fact, he at one point felt she was, and still it did not matter; so, in fact, from the moment he and Annette began to walk together he was spiting Sara too, and he knew it. Nothing mattered except that now he had a chance with Annette; and he could not say he didn’t know what he actually knew and did not see what he actually saw: that is, her previous complete dismissal of him had been replaced by a subtle but lavish desire for who he now was.

  Still clutching the flat green bit of bottled glass, she unexpectedly squeezed his hand. Both of their palms were cut by this. She squeezed his hand hard once more and then let it go.

  “Oh my,” she said, “blood!”

  She turned and walked away in the night, with her head down as if deep in thought, in remorse for love. She looked back once, stopped abruptly, looked at him, then turned and ran. It was as if she had just said:

  Try to forget me.

  Ian did try to forget her completely. He tried to forget that he had touched the same cigarette she had, that his blood had mixed with hers.

  He went a week or so not seeing or speaking to her. He trembled every time he thought of how awful he was. And this was because of Sara’s innocent desire to please him and how annoyed he was with her.

  Yet in that week there were moments of the sublime, where he felt he had become exactly what he had set out to become, and for some reason he believed it was he who’d achieved this on his own. He visited the old Jameson sawmill twice—imagining himself the new entrepreneur who would take Evan’s dream and fashion it for him. He would buy the mill and give it to Evan as soon as he could. But then, at his most sublime moment, the thought of what had happened would darken his mood. For now he knew he could have Annette, but having her would end all his dreams. In a strange way, he thought he must decide between success and her, and it was his success that allowed this. How strange all of this was to him now.

  She wants me now, he thought. Well, no matter, I couldn’t care less.

  But then, impulsively, he tried to find her. This was on a day when he helped Sara set up chairs for a Heritage Foundation meeting. He had expected Annette to be there and she wasn’t. So he went to Cut and Curl pretending to be looking for Sara, knowing Sara was at the meeting. But Annette was gone for the day with Lonnie. DD wasn’t sure where. He was tormented by this and depressed. Why was he depressed? Because she had left without telling him that she was leaving, even
though, as he said to himself, he couldn’t care less.

  Something is going on that I do not understand, he thought. What is really going on? But that thought was fleeting, and soon forgotten.

  Then, a few days later, he heard that she was back. He heard this one rainy afternoon when he was home, looking at saws he could buy for the mill—he had made inquiries into the land below Bonny Joyce that Evan wanted and felt that in two more years he would have all his ducks in order. He was thinking that he and Evan would be back on track then; and he was thinking—and this was a distinct possibility—that they would make a million dollars together.

  Out of the blue, Ethel came over to see him, and he blurted out his plan: “Tell Corky to get ready—we are going to do what I told him. We are going to make a sound offer on the mill in the next six months. He will have to break the news to Evan, though. I am just going to stay in the background until I can patch things up a bit. I think in two years everything will be good.” And he smiled and shook his head at his own ruefulness.

  Ethel laughed and clapped her hands like a child and sat on his knee—for to Ian she was a child. She kissed him on the cheek and said, “Sara is some happy today to have her bridesmaid back.”

  He picked up a magazine and looked at it. “Oh, she’s home, is she?” he said, too flippantly. At that moment he believed he had no desire to see her again.

  Later he went over to see Sara, hugged her and kissed her as if he had not seen her in months. And when Annette came over that night, he didn’t look her way at all. He left by the crooked back gate in a rainstorm.

  Sara and Annette were planning the engagement party, and Annette came over every day to the little house on the side street, bringing ideas, decorations and balloons for the “buck and doe,” as it was called. That is, the men and women would join in one party. They were doing this because it was Sara’s party—she was paying and would not allow Ian to. So things were done according to her budget.

  The desk was to be used as a dining-room table, with the living room serving as the dining room. Those who came to help spoke of what they had been through and how their lives were similar. All of this made them feel a kind of reductive gaiety, a pleasant truth about the circumstances in which all of them had grown up, and a sense of fierce loyalty toward each other. Most of the men had never cut for blood—but they would cut you in a second if you hurt one of their friends.

  Annette was there each afternoon. So finally Ian had to speak with her. And eventually he had to move a table, with her picking up one end and he the other. But something strange happened: she either ignored him or looked at him with furious cold eyes. This fury in her, this queenliness she exhibited, was strangely ordinary and, just between the two of them in the sour little house, somewhat pathetic. Yet she, not Sara, became the one he went to see on those days, the one he couldn’t wait to close the store for. Now that she did not bother with him, he thought he might have been mistaken about her intention and wanted to win her attention back.

  Annette was the maid of honour. And each day she spoke of how spoiled she would make Sara and how smart Sara looked. And this in itself bothered Ian, because it seemed untrue, somehow superficial and even disrespectful. So he tried to be more kind to Sara than usual.

  The idea of him having to be kind to Sara showed already how complicit he had become—and how little it took for him to be complicit. So he was wounded by his own betrayal even before the betrayal happened. And now he longed for Annette to come to the house and was agitated if she did not. He went looking for her three or four times. Once he even took a chance and went to see Ripp to ask him if he had seen her.

  “Oh—haven’t you?” Ripp VanderTipp smiled in the affectionate, gloating way egotistical men often have.

  Ian went back to his house and locked the door as if locking out his own desire. But then, in a moment of anger, he looked at himself in a side mirror, saw the lonely boy from Bonny Joyce everyone had laughed at, and decided he wouldn’t speak to Annette again.

  “No, she had her chance. I am not playing games with her anymore!”

  That night when he left Sara, he went to the lanes beyond the wharf. Looking back, he could see his grey store in the distance. If he did not have this store, would Annette have ever become close to him? No, he knew she would not. She once mentioned that she had never thought he would be capable of “untold riches.” So she had told him no lie. Yet still he felt pleased that he had suddenly won her affection.

  He could not separate himself from the store, could not separate himself from the man he now was—and that was because of the store. So he was very different than he had been before. He had different plans because of this store. He was going to help Evan, Harold and Corky because of this store. He had in fact managed to save three-hundred-thousand dollars because of this store.

  So to say he was the same man was wrong. So to say she wasn’t right to see him as a different person was also wrong. This is how he thought: he owned a house, drove a sports car—so he had changed. So last week when Annette had made fun of Corky, he had allowed this because he wanted her to presume that he was above worrying about Corky Thorn; he had allowed it even though it hurt him when she said things like that and despite the fact that so many of his plans involved Corky Thorn. And so, without even wanting to, he had changed to please her. But he knew that if he kept changing to please her, she would not consider changing to please him.

  More importantly, the idea of how he could live his life—of the help he could give Corky and Evan and Harold—would have to change forever if he was with her. And there was one final factor to consider: he would do Annette a disservice if he married her. Why? Because as much as he wanted her, now in the deepest part of his being he knew he did not love her and that she did not love him. So if anything happened between them, he was culpable, not she. So, knowing this, knowing they would destroy each other—knowing now that she was wilful, spoiled and vain, all as he had to do was say “no.”

  How did Annette know where he was that night? People long after said it was Lonnie Sullivan who’d kept an eye on him and told her where to find him. Lonnie knew this about human nature: that they who pretend friendship often want most to destroy the luck you have and take it for themselves. He knew that the two men he could get to tattle on Ian were his own uncles. It was a Wednesday night—and Lonnie had discovered where Ian had gone: to a place overlooking the great river, to be alone.

  At this particular moment, Ian’s life spread out before him in an unerring way: the sawmill, the lumber, the expansion to a new warehouse, the idea of constructing houses; all of this was possible with Corky and Evan—and possible too with Harold, for Ian had not forgotten him. And as he stood looking out over the river at this moment—a quarter past eight on a white spring evening—he was secure. And Sara was, in fact, that beacon that made him secure. That is, without her he had no idea what might or might not happen.

  Ian was standing at the opposite end of the field just beyond the last lane, down near Sky Town, staring at the great river where the evening swept over the black water and lights were coming on in the distance. He was smoking a cigarette and looking out into the darkness as the great ship the Liverpool Star came into the channel and was now dropping anchor.

  Suddenly she stood beside him, both of them looking at the same great ancient river and the great blackened ship with its deck lights looking like a separate city. Suddenly Annette was there, and he knew it without glancing her way. They stood for a while in silence. Then she asked, quickly, almost broken-heartedly, “Are you looking at the same river I am?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, “I know you are!”

  Both of them were again silent. She stood close to him so that the back of her left hand touched the back of his right, and he trembled slightly. Neither of them moved.

  “Let me see your mark,” she said. She held up the hand cut by the coloured glass and he held up his. She placed her scar agai
nst his, so that they fit almost perfectly. Then she said, “I have to go.”

  He almost turned and went in the other direction, toward Injun Town and Sara, but he did not. He caught up to her and told her to slow down. She seemed terribly upset and he didn’t want that—and the feeling that would become the signature of his life came over him now: a heavy feeling of remorse and guilt.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. He saw that she was crying.

  “Down to my cottage,” she said.

  It was an old clapboard shed separated from the other cottages by a wild beach fringed by wood, and it rested out on a point of the bog. It was a cottage, however, and she had used it as such in the summers since she’d been a girl. In fact, back then she would not let him near it. Now she told him she had to take some fuses and open the place—that she had been waiting to do this for a week and had to go now.

  Ian told her it was too late and there might still be snow on the camp lane. “Why don’t you go tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Because I’m morning and afternoon at Cut and Curl.”

  They walked together back across the field with the wind blowing, toward the old hotel and post office looking, like so many other places, vanquished and deserted in the once-proud town.

  At the edge of the field, Annette took off her shoes and walked barefoot over to her car.

  “Well, I guess I’m on my way,” she said. She turned away from him impatiently, angrily. Her eyes were sharp and black as coal.

  She said, “You love tormenting me so I can’t think straight. Do you want me to have to say I want you? That’s what you want. Stop following me and go away, why don’t you? Go back to her!”

  Stung by this, he heard himself saying, “No—push over and I will drive.”

  He would, as the years came and went—flew by, actually, from this moment—never know why he’d said this impulsive thing.