Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  “Christ almighty!” she said.

  “There is no one so crass as him,” Sherry’s father said. He said he had twice thought of phoning the police that very day because it sounded like they were having a fight.

  “They’re not worth it,” Patsy Mittens said. “She’s an idiot. We already sent her packing from our book club—she wanted us to read Jacqueline Susann. And that little boy of hers—God knows whose boy he really is.”

  Sherry Mittens listened to this too, a tiny, very polite, very cautious smile at the corners of her mouth when Liam’s name was mentioned because she’d decided that he was the one boy she wouldn’t invite to her birthday party. And the invitation to him would not be sent.

  Lonnie had kept track of every penny Ian and Annette had, and now her friends were all planning this robbery together. There were forty-nine thousand dollars in the store’s safe. Out of that, Annette would give Lonnie his fifteen thousand. And afterwards—Lonnie will leave me be! she thought.

  In fact, if she had just once gone to Ian and said, “I am in trouble, I am in desperate trouble”; if she had admitted everything—everything—Ian still would have done anything for her. Deep in her heart she felt she would have been assured of his forgiveness. But she did not do that.

  Two weeks ago she had taken Lonnie’s plan to Ripp and Dickie. The day of the party was the one they picked—she would slip out and back in before Ian was the wiser. Then she would be with him all that night, and when the call came from the police, she would have an airtight alibi.

  The only problem on the day was that people left the party early because Ripp postured and was drunk, so for her to leave would be far too conspicuous. Then Ian went downstairs and they had a chance—but they hesitated and he came back up.

  Corky’s death allowed them to go, and her to go with them, all of a sudden. That is, she took a gamble and left. Lonnie had thought of everything down to the last detail—what money to take, what money to leave, the amount to pay Ripp and Dickie.

  “They’re the real thieves,” he said. “Those unscrupulous bastards!”

  She felt as if she was in a dream and that it would not happen. But then everything had transpired. Now, sitting in her black fur coat, viewing through the window her white hand waving a cigarette as the car rushed along, she caught her reflection and suddenly hated herself. She thought of the crib notes up her sleeve, and what might have happened that long-ago day if she had not hitchhiked home.

  They all three of them were drunk. Ripp, the drunkest of the lot, should not have been driving. They hit a snowbank right beside Victory Warehouse and had to get out of the car and journey on foot. In a few metres the snow had blotted the view of where the car was, and a grey horn sounded, alone and desperate. First they had to drag Annette from the car. Then they dragged her over one snowbank, then another.

  Looking up as they dragged her along, with her hat lopsided over one ear and one hand waving to a passerby, she found herself in front of Sara’s house. She gave a small cry of alarm, twisted loose and began to run in front of the others, stepping into Evan Young’s half-covered boot prints and falling sideways.

  Ripp and Dickie hauled her to her feet, and both of them began to brush her off.

  Her face was damp with water and snow. She thought of her son and went to turn back, but they held her and pushed her forward.

  Of course, Ripp too was frightened of Lonnie, and of the many things Lonnie knew about him. And Dickie was frightened of Ripp. So all of them felt an obligation. They continued holding Annette up and dragging her over the snow. She lost a boot and yelled at them to stop—she had to go back and get it. “Where’s my boot?” she asked.

  The boot itself was filled with snow, and her white sock was covered too. She took her sock off to clean the snow from it and they noticed her toes were painted red and green. The men began to laugh hilariously at this. Finally she got her sock and the boot back on. They picked her up and began dragging her again, as if off to her own execution.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s phone Lonnie.”

  But the men did not hear her.

  When they came to the store, there was a large crowd in front, and the three of them stopped, making mollifying gestures of confusion and blame. There were town trucks and police cars right outside the store itself, and a photographer taking pictures. It was gloomy and dark, and the snow fell in slashes of grey against Annette’s face. This was something none of them had foreseen—that the accident had happened right on this very spot. All of them had assumed it had happened up on the highway.

  Ripp and Dickie turned and quickly walked away, leaving her staggering in the snow until she fell on her back. A police office, Constable Fulton, came over to her and helped her up, and she suddenly pretended to want to talk to the police about the accident.

  “It’s my store,” she kept saying. “What happened? Ripp, come back here!”

  Ripp came back and stood beside her, looking contrite and smiling at some unknown joke. The constable told them Corky Thorn had been hit by a snowplow. Ripp suddenly smiled again, in spite of himself. He had never managed to stop smiling at other people’s pain. Annette noticed this. She noticed everything in the grey dirty afternoon.

  The plow had clipped a pole in trying to avoid Corky and was up against the rear of the shed itself. The driver was speaking with a New Brunswick Power employee about avoiding the wires when he backed it out. The storm whistled about her face, as if she was some type of captive bird in a maelstrom. And in fact, she had been now for years. The tears that had run down her face when she’d been thinking of her child had now frozen against her cheeks. Everything confused her. She did not even know if she was or wasn’t supposed to go through with the plan, and hesitated, wondering whether to continue to the store or not.

  Evan, who was standing there, suddenly turned and looked at her. She started to cry and nodded at him, gave a timid smile and looked quickly away.

  There, in front of her, lying across the road, was Corky Thorn, his head twisted back as if it was ready to come off, his ugly little face looking more determined than ever, his stark eyes opened unblinking, catching the snow and boldly staring right at her. It was as if he was guarding in death what he had lost in life.

  She became scared and ran home. “Ian,” she called when she got there, “is that you? Ian, let me tell you, I went by the store to see what happened—and let me tell you—”

  A door closed upstairs and the house became quiet once more. And she understood: he had known her intention for weeks.

  She began to shake; her whole body felt broken. At some point she began to pray: “ ‘Hail Mary, full of grace—the Lord is with thee’!”

  Some years later I interviewed Constable Fulton. He remembered that day, the wildness of the snow and how Annette was so drunk she was almost incapable of talking.

  “So I put her in the back of the police car and drove her home, up streets that were almost impassable. I didn’t like her friends,” he admitted. “I often wondered later what in heck she was doing with them. Still, to me Ian Preston was in many ways an honourable and decent human being, and was never really given credit for it.”

  The next morning, early, when the snow was sparkling and the sky was painfully blue, that honourable and decent human being Ian Preston drove down to see the man he believed was his one remaining friend: Lonnie Sullivan. He was shaking and upset—as upset as he had been when he was a young boy and people teased him. He had not known he could return to such uncertainty. He asked Lonnie if he thought Annette could be forced by her friends to do something as reckless as rob her own husband, break into their own store. And he had brought Lonnie a Christmas present from Lonnie’s godson, Liam.

  “It’s her friends,” Ian said. “They have much too much influence over her—something is going on.”

  Lonnie was silent for some time. He looked up finally from under his eyebrows and said in an astonished voice, “Yes, her friends are deep-fried scum. I keep
telling her to stay away from the likes of them. But it’s nonsense about robbing stores—my God almighty, Ian, have some sense. If you were told that, you were told by riff-raff.” And when he said “riff-raff,” he looked away in complete disgust.

  “No, you are right,” Ian said. “You must be right.”

  “I am always right—always. I think of that little Corky Thorn, and you know I begin to weep. How old was he, anyway? You know he had no one when he was a kid—I was the one to take Corky Thorn fishing in Arron Brook.”

  And of course, this was true.

  It was also true that of the two-hundred-and-eighty thousand dollars Ian had at the time of his wedding, only forty thousand was left.

  PART SIX

  AT CORKY’S WAKE IN THE SMALL HOUSE, THE OTHER TOWN, the town within a town that did not belong to those Ian had come to be associated with, became apparent. So Ian Preston saw that town again—that is, the town that had existed for him when he was the son of a pulp truck driver. All those boys he had grown up with and those girls, now men and women, came in and out, paying their respects with the air of obligation and duty that was at once mimicking and in a strange way singular and special. Here were toughened men who wouldn’t blink if you hauled out a crowbar and threatened to hit them. Here were men who would give you the shirt off their back, or save you in a storm—or hand you their last dollar. To them, Ian had changed, become a part of the town that was elusive and unknown. They simply did not trust him as much anymore. And he knew it, and felt the sting of it, and could do nothing about it.

  Sara sat on the couch unable to say much about anything. She had just returned from university and looked like a woman now—that is, a woman who did not rely on beauty tips from Cut and Curl. A woman who had been on her own and did not need to remember him. She had no real need of the town. She was aloof without being condescending, which made him feel his betrayal even more.

  That is, somehow he was ashamed of the very things that had once made him seem so special to her. While at the same time, Sara, with her plainness and her lack of makeup and her poor left leg, seemed more than special, almost beatific.

  Ethel looked exactly the same. Her big ears poked through her blond hair, and her sad eyes looked up at him. Her sticklike little legs and knobby knees, now not in pink stockings but in black ones, made her scarecrow figure even more endearing.

  He tried not to look at Sara, because every time he did the same feeling of betraying her overcame him, and a horrible sensation of waste and loss plagued him. He did not know why, but for a second he believed that everything had happened because of him.

  She came up, took his hand and thanked him for coming. Annette had not come with him. It was not a cruel or malicious decision. Annette had always been a coward when it came to death, and she could not accompany her husband now. So they did not speak about her.

  Ian went home, and worried a great deal about his wife and his marriage. Yet he could not leave Annette. Why was that? Simply this: with Sara back in town now, he felt he had to stay. He could not prove others right. That is, both he and Annette knew they had made a disastrous decision and were unhappy. And life, such as it was, would have to go on.

  “You should leave him,” DD started to say at certain times. And Annette would stare through her, as only Annette could do.

  “No, that is not possible,” Annette would say. “For better or for worse!” Because she knew Sara was back in town as well.

  Evan Young started back to his house after the accident, after the police had spoken to him, and after the reporter’s interview. He only told them what had happened: The more he had yelled for Corky to stop, the more frightened Corky had become, and the more he had backed away, and Young did not know why. But he couldn’t have seen the plow, and the wind was blowing ferociously. They questioned him about this, of course, perplexed, for Evan Young, once so lucky, now had a bad reputation. Everyone remembered things about him, and recalled who had said what about his wife and child. So now perhaps he had got Corky too! Perhaps in some diabolical way he wanted the whole family; who would not think that? The cops actually did think this—and in all the fantastic coincidences of life, this one seemed particularly interesting to them. Though they could not prove it, they believed he had done something with this Thorn family, and noted to each other that although they had no proof now, someday he would do something to implicate himself forever. Evan, however, did not know they were thinking this. Or more to the point, he believed that even if they thought this, they would realize soon enough that he himself could not harm anyone.

  “I tried to get him to stop” was all he said, and he seemed dazed.

  They had no reason to hold him longer than they did and let him go.

  For two days Lucky sat in silence, staring at the snow and his cannibalized automobiles. He kept thinking of what he might sell to get himself out of this financial mess. But he didn’t know.

  He phoned about, asking who wanted a radiator for a Chevy, or a water pump. But no one did. He kept looking into the old chest where the child’s belongings were kept, remembering Jamie in the ambulance, his wife sitting beside him. That, he decided, was when his wife died—when she fell to her knees and prayed to God. He thought long enough about the brash and ignorant statement he had made to Sydney Henderson, about taking care of one’s family—and how he would never let his family down.

  He lay down on the cot and tried to sleep, and wind battered the house.

  On the second night he went to the wake and saw Ethel, and her older sister, Sara. Yes, he said, he remembered them. And he said he was sorry he had not been able to stop Corky from walking backward across the street.

  Then he hiked back home. It was minus twenty-seven, and he got a drive with an old man from Bonny Joyce, who told him that Ian was in for it: no one trusted him, he’d lost much of his money and he had hurt his back. And the old man said only what Evan himself had heard: that Ian had overextended himself investing in some real estate and even the business he’d bought had liens on it. That he was, in fact, a very good electrician and a very poor businessman who others took advantage of. And one of the people who had taken advantage of him was his own lawyer, J. P. Hogg, who did not inform him that the warehouse he was buying had a lien of eighteen thousand dollars on it.

  “It was done just for spite—I heard the mayor wanted to get back at him—or something—what I heard!” the old fellow bragged.

  “I am sorry about that,” Evan said.

  “That’s what comes from stealing—that’s what God does to ya if ya steals!” the old man said. There was a sudden hope in his eyes that he was right. He talked too about Harold. The old man had owned a snow blower and had come home to find it gone. He said Harold had stolen it.

  “I can’t see Harold doing that,” Evan said. But of course he knew Harold had.

  “Did you know he hurt his back in a fight, and now and again wears a brace himself?”

  “I heard as much.”

  “What do you think of that?” the old man asked. “Both he and Ian? It’s like they have to carry their crosses from now on.”

  “Ah yes,” Evan said, “and me too. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “The brace—it doesn’t do much good.”

  Evan was let out at the road to Bonny Joyce, and walked the last three miles in the cold.

  Back home he burned some boards and wood in the stove, and got the old oil K-Mack going again. He made Kraft macaroni and cheese for the sixth straight day. He was in a bad way, unrecognized by millions of citizens in Canada and just as recognized by millions of others. He was in the throes of poverty. And he was paralyzed with a feeling of unseen forces allied against him. And this was not a phenomenon that was unusual, for in many ways he was correct. Once this luck of his had failed, once he was perceived to be in trouble, gossip and rumour and hearsay had abounded, and in their abounding had separated him from others and accorded him a difference that heightened the initi
al difference of his luck, and caused hilarity and scorn that he could not extricate himself from and made him subject to the curse of this scandal and the contagion it afforded, until he was as bereft of friends as he was of family. So friends fleeing, he was alone and desperate for recompense. And people knew he was desperate for recompense and did not help.

  Because they thought gleefully: Well, look at where his luck got him.

  The problem was, he owed nine hundred dollars to his lawyer, J. P. Hogg, and there was no way Hogg would let it go. And Evan knew that anything he did, any problem he had, would be exacerbated by this debt. The office had sent him two reminders. Jeremy Hogg was Jeremy Hogg, and he would go after a penny.

  Evan sat in the gloom, stuffing old plank boards into the stove far after it got dark, and now and again lifting the lid to spit, just as men had done for generations. Nor did he want to hurt anyone; nor did he want to take from people. Had he willed Ian to be cheated too—had he willed him to have a bad back? He only knew that Fitzroy’s money had been something all of them, at one time, had had a chance at—and look what it had done.

  He tried to think of what to do. He realized that Corky had owed him money from the time they were both up north, some four hundred dollars. Perhaps he could go to Ethel or Sara to collect it.

  After Molly died, a neighbour had come over and said Molly hadn’t paid for embroidering the blue-green sash on the child’s crib.