Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  “Where did you get that odd-looking gash on the back of your head?” Sara asked one afternoon.

  “God knows. Drunk, I guess.”

  “How long ago?”

  Harold shrugged.

  “It’s quite a peculiar mark—did you hit the corner of the table, fall backward?”

  Harold yawned.

  “Did you ever get it taken care of, get stitches?”

  “Nah—don’t even remember!”

  Sara placed the wrap to take his blood pressure.

  “What about that loser, Preston,” he said. “Are you glad you never got hooked up with the likes of him? He got on the coke ’cause of his back. They now tell me he weighs about 102 pounds—that was what Annette did to him!”

  Although it was through Harold’s protégés, Kyle and Spenser, that Ian was able to buy cocaine, Harold looked quite sanctimonious when he said this.

  People came to his shop with all kinds of things—Harold never asked the youngsters if these things were stolen. “Times are tough,” said a slogan at the entrance. “Get more,” he simply told them, paying them twenty bucks if he felt he could get sixty.

  The pawnshop, which had not existed when the town was whole, existed now when the town was fractured and the downtown had become more broken and closed, when the sanded winter streets looked empty under the glare of the sun. And it existed to entice people to use it. So, in fact, it existed to entice people to bring items to pawn, and those items did not necessarily have to belong to those who pawned them. The store also held wedding rings, and mementoes of dreams now dashed, of men starting to realize that the great broad mill did not hold any future for them. For so many men could not get hired on and others were already being laid off. The West beckoned them, and they left their dreams behind to go to work the sludge piles north of Edmonton, Alberta. There they made money to send home, to keep dreams alive.

  Harold stood in the pawnshop’s perennial gloom, near the metal lamp and an old bass drum, and watched as the men became more and more scarce as if they were in some black-and-white movie from the 1950s where people were targeted by some alien gamma ray, and suddenly and simply disappeared. He watched, in this sad black-and-white movie, that ghost of a man Ian Preston move along a sidewalk with his head down, his arms filled with documents, his legs thin and unsteady. Sometimes children teased him, and he would look at them in splendid confusion, almost as if they had entered from another dimension and he did not understand why they were tormenting him.

  Once, all his documents dropped and he knelt and tried to pick them up when some of the boys kicked them away as a joke. Harold went out and spoke one word and they all scattered.

  “Go!” he yelled.

  He helped Ian pick the documents up and gently handed them to him. He had no idea what they were about.

  One spring day, the boy Liam ran past Harold’s pawnshop, legs flying, on his way to see his dad. Still running back and forth from one place to another—from his father’s tiny room in a motel to his mom’s house, trying always to keep both parents in mind.

  Liam waited for his dad all that day in this room, sitting in a chair that faced the old door. He wanted to show his father his braces. But his dad did not come home. This little room, with its hot plate and dated microwave oven, its forlorn chair and black-and-white television, was the loneliest room in a series of rooms on Ian’s downward spiral. The door had been broken, and the field outside was covered in hard drifts of unmelted half-white snow. Yet Liam waited for his dad as long as he could. He had been working on his father’s cylinder invention and trying to fix it for him, thinking still that if they could sell it, his mom and dad would get together again—and so he had fussed with it now for eight months—and maybe someday he would fix it, and maybe someday—all would be well.

  Ian’s room was in the Blue Heron motel. The motel was once owned by Lonnie Sullivan, and had been repossessed and put on the market and bought by J. P. Hogg, who had given it to his son to run.

  Ian didn’t have a lock on his door—room 17—because it had been kicked open too many times. He was fixing radios for extra money, and still wrote letters about the contamination of the water system by Helinkiscor.

  But Ian did not come back to his room that day.

  So eventually Liam walked home to show his mom his braces. He was going to smile as soon as she came home. He had paid for them mostly by himself, though she had helped with two hundred dollars. He had delivered papers for two years now, because the divorce was financially crippling both his mom and dad. Neither of them knew where the money went; they knew only that the great savageness of divorce had swept them up in its claws and ravaged them. The boy was left solitary during much of this time.

  Annette wanted to have her divorce be as public as Princess Diana’s. So she was a star for a while in town. And being a star, and having friends, soon compelled her to spend whatever money she had. She threw a huge party the day it became final. She blew money everywhere. There seemed to be no end to what she would do. She even had loaned Wally Bickle eight thousand dollars. But after all was said and done, she realized quite tragically that the divorce had cost her thousands, and Hogg had not, in a long time, returned her calls.

  That day—years ago now—Liam waited in the chair in the foyer to smile when his mom came in. Yet his braces keep hurting, even though the orthodontist had said the hurting would go away. When he telephoned, the orthodontist had already left for the long weekend. So he took an aspirin and pretended the pain would go away. He had paid for these braces almost fully by himself—and they had made quite a joke of it at the office, which was across the street from Hogg’s law office. The orthodontist had taken his money in dribs and drabs, and he worried about all of this endlessly.

  Today as he had walked back to the house, the picture window in Mr. Hogg’s large law office was busted, a piece of plywood and plastic covered it, and he’d wondered what had happened.

  “Yer dad’s gone to jail,” said Sherry Mittens, coming over to him and smiling. “My daddy says no one can help him now, and no one wants to anymore. Not any of the good people, anyway—not any of the people like us!” She had three or four friends with her, and she looked at them out of the corner of her eye as she spoke, delighted that they were delighted too. Liam watched them very carefully, saying nothing. Then they turned in front of him and he walked behind. And they spoke as he walked behind them, and Sherry Mittens spoke most of all.

  He learned that his daddy had been taken to jail in a dispute with Mr. Hogg. This is what Sherry Mittens said as he walked by Harold Dew’s pawnshop on his way back home. Sherry said his father had been taken to jail in handcuffs with his forehead cut open.

  “He is not Liam’s father anyway,” one of the youngsters said.

  “My mom says it wasn’t Mr. Preston who was a father to him, ever.”

  “Be kind—be kind,” Sherry Mittens said.

  At home Liam waited for his mother, who did not come home.

  Finally, he lay on the leather couch in the back room, tears coming down his cheeks because of the pain in his mouth. It had been his father’s favourite couch. But all of that was over now.

  The last four years had cost Ian everything. The store was gone. His wife had spent even more than he had trying to keep the house and the furniture, but in the end the house would have to be sold. That is what her lawyer told her. After a while—after all things were settled—Hogg sent his last bill, for $13,782.75.

  Many days fixing his radios, Ian would think over his life. Ten dollars a week he tried to put aside for Liam, but sometimes he could not manage to do it. He tried as best he could to keep in contact with his son as well, but at times it was difficult—and he knew he was losing him without wanting to. Long after Liam had stopped hoping he would, Ian would walk to the school to meet him—but as so often happens, it was too late, and Liam seemed more and more solitary and alone. And Ian would return to his room and his own solitude.

  At time
s he would reflect on Sydney Henderson, the boy he and his friends were supposed to be different from—the man who was so poor he could never put money aside for his children either. In so many ways, Ian thought now, he was the same.

  Ian never drank. Syd Henderson did not drink. Ian was not violent. Syd was not either. Ian loved his child, although it was said he didn’t—just like Sydney, and too, just like Evan. In fact, Wally Bickle constantly told people that he loved Ian’s child more than Ian did himself.

  Both Evan and he were, in fact, now accused of some of the same things Sydney had been accused of long ago. In fact, so little seemed to be different in their lives that they must in some way have devoted themselves to the same causes. Yet, Ian knew, their causes were entirely different. It was the world that sought to destroy them all. Sydney’s wife, Elly, had been accused of theft, and this was completely false. Sydney told Ian that someday someone would accuse his own wife of the same crime, and he had.

  The night before Liam went to visit his dad in the motel room, Ian had gone for a walk, his mind plagued with thoughts of Sydney Henderson and with the idea of getting his luck back by finding out in his heart what had caused him to lose it. To lose everything.

  It was almost Easter, and he thought of the blood of the saints for the first time in a long time. That is, he thought about what his forefathers had believed. Yes, and they died for their belief, many of them—and he had died for his belief as well; or one could say with a good deal of truth that he was prepared to die for it. And his belief was looked upon as insane—so he was now, in many ways, more than a little like Sydney Henderson, that man they had grown up with and mocked. Ian in fact had, like Job, called out to God many times to stop his pain. He just did not admit that he had.

  He looked up through the leafless trees toward the moon and found himself on a side street, walking down toward the town square.

  The trees themselves seemed pitiless, and his shadow showed how he walked stiffly because he was unable to bend his back. Annette’s friends had accused him of spending money on quacks to find a cure, but he had not seen anyone about his back in years. He no longer cared. That is, though he fought the pain, he no longer cared to be cured.

  He thought of it this way: Corky should have been in the store helping him move the fridge—why wasn’t he? And was that the start of his business’s decline? Once the decline had started, so his marriage had started failing too—and because Annette was so impressed by all those men at Helinkiscor, he had decided to fight the mill. Now he could see clearly how every moment had led only to his destruction. Then, as he got to the bottom of the street, he thought of the trunk—the thing he had wanted to buy. Why wasn’t it there at Joyce Fitzroy’s—that in itself would have changed every other event in his life.

  And as he walked by the law office of Hogg and Hogg, he glanced in—just a glance, nothing more, and at nothing in particular.

  And there it was—the travelling trunk that had belonged to his family that his mother wanted, that he had tried to buy seventeen years before as a wedding present for Evan and Molly.

  He stopped and looked closely. No, there was no mistaking it at all.

  The night air had that glaze of spring, when there is still ice in the ditches but the snow is gone.

  He looked around for five minutes or more, trying to find a suitable weapon. Finally he loosened a frozen rock from the soil and threw it through the plate glass. Then, with another rock, he broke the rest away. He entered the office and began to overturn everything, even as the alarm was sounding. He picked up a fire extinguisher and crouched down behind the trunk. When the police came in—one of them was Constable Fulton, who had always been very kind to him—he stood and sprayed them. Fulton told me that Ian held off the police with a fire extinguisher for five minutes, and then with his boots for as long as he could, until they threw him down.

  “We threw him down very hard, and I was worried we had hurt him,” Fulton told me in that interview.

  Reports circulated that he had died, but that was not the case at all. He only wished he had.

  Sara went down in the afternoon to see how her sister, Ethel, was, because it was close to Easter and the earth was warming, and they sat together on the porch in the glare of sun and the fading scent of winter. And Sara spoke with the soft certainty that had directed her life now for the past fifteen years, and her breath made a faint outline and was gone, and she whispered, “Something happened, Ethel, long ago, and now everything is wrong—I do not understand it at all, but something, some small trick of fate, caused all of this to be, don’t you think? Ian was so gentle, and still is, but he has been betrayed—and lashes out at shadows.”

  Ethel nodded and said simply, “People get married to the wrong people—and things get mixed up when they do. I was supposed to marry Corky, and you were supposed to marry Ian, and Annette should have married Harold, then Molly would still be alive. But here we are, mixed all up. Still, things always turn out, in some way.”

  “Do you hate Annette?” Sara asked her.

  “No, no, no, I love Annette. At times, in the house when I worked there, I know she loved me too.”

  Sara smiled and nodded.

  Ethel took the fur hat Harold had given her and started to fluff it with her fingers. Her little house shook as the great trucks filled with Bonny Joyce timber went by, still smelling of dying sap. Everything along this road was heaved and pulled away, as desolate as a marsh in late fall. The smell of machinery entered the rooms, diesel on the air mingling with the shouts of men, harsh yet loving at the exact same time.

  “Can you stand those trucks every day—and all that noise?”

  “Maybe I am thinking someday they too will be gone!”

  Sara kissed her, put forty dollars on the windowsill and left.

  Ethel had the mind of a little girl, as Sara said. Ethel would try not to—that is, she would try to be bright. She would sit at the kitchen table and try to remember things, like how to make pancakes.

  She would forget she had a mom who loved her and a dad who used to tickle her and say, “My little angel who will go straight to heaven—not a moment in purgatory—right up to the clouds—and all nice clouds too, because you are the kindest child in the world!”

  Even when she failed grade two, and then grade three, and had to go into something called “remedial” in grade four, and walked home alone all those winter days ago. Once last autumn she had tried to carry a huge pumpkin into the house, thinking she could make Harold a pumpkin pie. It had rolled on top of her at the bottom of the steps, and it had taken her almost twenty minutes before she could get it off.

  Sometimes Harold didn’t even have to speak and she would say, “I’m sorry,” because she did not know what it was she had done wrong.

  She sat in the room with her long hair in pigtails, her eyes staring into the dark and her tights wrinkled at the knees, and her legs so thin they looked like sticks. And there wasn’t a person you could mention that she didn’t love. And if you thought that wasn’t important, she would say, “Just go and ask God.”

  Today when Sara left, she picked up the rosary blessed and given to her by Father MacIlvoy, and put it in her big dress pocket. She thought long and hard. So hard she squeezed her eyes shut. Yes, it was up to her. She was the woman who had managed to get Liam his first communion. Annette had in the end relented on that. Now she decided he needed to be confirmed. If he was not, he might get in trouble. For who knew what might happen if a person was not confirmed?

  She told Harold this when he came home from the pawnshop. He said, “Sure, confirm whoever you want.”

  Harold had asked Ethel’s mother to allow him to go to the old house and take some things from it for his pawnshop. The first time he went he took a little windup monkey that had once belonged to Sara, which her mother had bought her long ago for being brave that day they’d almost drowned.

  He went there once more, to get the wicker chairs he believed he could sell for se
venty dollars. He looked into the dark back closet at the end of the attic to see if he could find anything else. He suddenly noticed the bottle of rum Corky had bought when he was worried about the wrench. Harold picked up the bottle and put it in his jacket pocket, and carried it with him into the future. Then he went back to the pawnshop and brought the newspaper with him.

  LOCAL BUSINESSMAN INVOLVED IN LATE-NIGHT BREAK AND ENTER, it said.

  Sherry Mittens told her friend Liam about his father being in jail. That is, Sherry was Liam’s great friend, always telling him things to try, in her little heart, to inform him, and say it was for the best that he heard all these terrible things from her. She was filled with sarcastic irony, always willing to undercut his dreams. She would wake in the morning and prepare herself in front of the mirror, thinking of what she would say and how she would say it, and her little mouth would turn up in a slight smile. Then she would time walking to school so that Liam, pants rumpled and hair uncombed, came out of his front door, and she would catch up to him. Her whole body would smell of nice pink soap, and a scent of cleanliness would pervade his senses. He would wait for her, and she would entertain herself by speaking of non-specific things—how her cat, Muffy, was—how she herself would never have children, and how she would like to live in a city like Toronto. How her father was from Toronto—did you know? How the university here was not for her father, who was so much more devoted and brighter than others in his sociology department, don’t you know.

  Then, when others joined them, she would drift ahead of him and walk a few paces beyond him with her other friends.

  She was devoted to this, and she would sometimes whisper to people that Liam had done something with little boys, for that’s what her auntie, Ms. Spalding, had told her. She maintained she said this for his own good as well, dressed in her sweet flouncy dress, her fine white coat and her decorative yellow mittens. Yes, yes, it was better she say it. No one could ignore her pretty smile, or how her eyes flashed when Liam’s name was mentioned. Or when she thought of him during the day, and remembered something more to say.