And sometimes he would have a pitcher of lemonade and plastic glasses that came from the basement. He also had a marble pot. And once or twice he brought out a bag of chocolate chip cookies, and Spider-Man comic books. They sat about the small benches while Liam worked on the computer or found new shocks to try for his bicycle. He found it was easier to get the power source from the house beyond them. Sometimes they would sit for an hour or two as quiet as could be, watching him.
In a real way, he was their hero those long-ago days, when kids often had no heroes at all, and when Liam never had a friend. He brought out a little TV for them to watch as they ate their cracker snacks.
Sometimes some of the boys wouldn’t show up. Sometimes it would be only Pint and Fraser who would come across the back gully, hauling an old wagon. He would hear the wagon arrive at eight in the morning and look out his bedroom window. Sometimes they would come, rain or shine, and sit there on the bench. He showed them the computer motherboard and RAM discs and pointed to them, saying, “They sent a man to the moon with a computer as big as my house. Now there is enough power in what I hold in my hand to send a man to the moon.”
The children would look up at the sky, blinking.
“To the moon,” Pint McGraw would say, rubbing his thick glasses.
But then Liam did something else. He took his father’s cylinder, the one Ian had worked on in better happier times, and examined it. He knew it was just a pastime, but he also knew what his father had been trying to do: he was trying to use filters to take readings of effluents from the mill. Liam took the cylinder apart and redid it. That is, by midsummer of the year he was twelve he had essentially solved his father’s problem, for the cylinder worked simply: by the shades the effluents made on the filters, and each filter caught the minerals in the water and made the filters dark blue or pink or red.
Then one day he took his father’s invention back to him and placed it in his hand.
“I think I fixed it,” he said. But Ian said he was no longer interested in it, and he placed it on his small shelf in the little room he had rented.
So Liam went back home. He sat on the bed, staring at his Game Boy and his Spider-Man. Far away down the street, there were catcalls from boys his age who always teased him and sometimes slapped his mouth.
“When I grow up, I will go away,” he whispered to himself.
Liam told the children about mathematics, and how he thought his dad’s cylinder would work when placed in water or any liquid. That it would do readings of what was in that water—so it would work in wells or houses, in mills too.
“It will make a million for my dad.” He smiled. And it might have, if his dad had known it.
He told them that people from all over the world who would never understand a word of each other’s language would still understand mathematics. So mathematics was, in fact, the universal language, and even if humans went to the moon or stars, they would have to travel to them on the peculiar principle that two plus two equalled four. And he said, smiling gently, “That’s why there is a God. There is a God because two plus two equals four,” he said. “There is a God because Sara had to go away.” And he told them about Sara and how she had doctored twenty people from the reserve and from Bonny Joyce; and those were the people no one cared about.
“Twenty?” Fraser asked.
“Twenty people.” And he said that if she had married his father, she never would have learned to save those people. “So,” he said, “that’s why there is a God.”
They would sit still and listen quietly as he spoke. His voice would trail off into the leaves and branches where small birds flitted in the afternoon or dipped into the bird bath he himself had constructed at the side of the house. At night he would sit in the dark. Sometimes he would say, “ ‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name,’ ” and then he would listen to the sounds of the trees at night—the wind in the willows—and he would sleep.
“I will be a saint,” he whispered, “and I will—be a saint.”
Liam was always repairing his fort as well, to keep the wind or the rain out. At times he would take the wagon with the kids in it and go down to Randolph’s lumberyard to look for scraps of lumber. The manager would see them coming down the streets, against the hard sun of midday, Liam pulling three kids in a wagon, all of them talking and laughing, with the wind from the water blowing their soft brown hair. Their bodies were as thin as twigs in the summer air, and their little wagon was dwarfed by the lumberyard’s great mesh fence.
The manager often gave them a piece of lumber to take back with them across the flat empty sidewalks of a town in disrepair. Far off the big pulp mill stack loomed. Far away a whistle sounded at noon hour. Now and again someone would hoot at Liam from the pool hall as they passed back toward his fort.
“Goofball!” they would yell.
But Liam never paid attention to people who yelled at him anymore. Once upon a time he had. But not anymore. Now he simply sat at night and thought of the trains that moved people, and how someday he would go on a train. You see, he had never been on a train, or ever outside of town. As the dispute between his parents grew, and gossip grew about who he was, he found his mom and dad had no plans for trips they once thought they would take. And he never looked their way when those people yelled at him.
The children held fast to the idea that Liam was the bravest and best person in the world, the one who gave them lemonade and was making a fort, and knew—well, let me tell you, he knew why two plus two equalled four. Around by the trampled weeds toward the far end of the house, as the trees swayed in the afternoon breeze, they pulled their little wagon with the lumber.
Then that day came when he promised he would take them to the pond, and out they went, all of them, Pint and Fraser and Gord, in the wagon, holding the pitcher of lemonade and the loaf of bread and some peanut butter, and the older boys wheeling the bicycle that they had just finished making, and Brad holding the towels, with Liam leading them all over the tracks to the old pond in the stillness of August when all those other children, those children with mothers and fathers, were at the cottage.
They went to the pond the front way, between the two new subdivisions that were spreading mercilessly toward the future. It was cool and the mud was worn, and there were broken beer bottles on one side, and the ruins of a fire. So they stayed on the side where they were, in the sunlight of afternoon.
Liam acted as a lifeguard, and watched them swim. They had towels and blankets and peanut butter sandwiches, and Liam made them a lunch and laid it on the blanket. They watched the sky. Fraser and Pint and Gord lay naked because they didn’t have underwear and didn’t want to get their shorts wet, and Dan and Brad lay in their underwear, which was almost black from dirt, and they all looked up at the trees, and spoke of going to school. Then they started talking about going to heaven. And it didn’t matter what religion they were; they all wanted to go to heaven the same way. And in case they didn’t know where it was, Liam told them that it was beyond the clouds, and a place where the fort was too. And as Ethel had told him, in heaven—why, in heaven any wish, as long as it was kind, would come true. He knew he was saying this because he was older, more assured, and most importantly because someone had taken the time to say it to him.
Then he took out some sugar from a small bag and mixed it into the lemonade and they sat around the pitcher. Then he took their photo. Then, as the day passed, they had to look for Pint’s glasses and they couldn’t find them. He didn’t know where he had left them.
They had to go back home without them, with Pint McGraw sitting at the front of the wagon, blinking rapidly, and Fraser holding on to him, and their shirt collars damp. All of them spoke about the movie Liam said he would take them to, and about how they could get money to go. Liam told them he could use his paper delivery money. But he said they would wait until Pint got his glasses. That he and Brad would have to go back tomorrow to look for them. So Liam and Brad divined when they would mee
t and where.
Then Liam told the joke about the scarecrow who was scared of crows and they all broke out laughing, and it was growing dark and the wagon veered to the right down the path between the trees to the back of his house, so it sounded as if all the houses were suddenly laughing and talking about scarecrows.
Then, when they got home, the police were there. Liam’s neighbour Ms. Spalding had counted six times Liam had used her outlet to get electricity. So the police had confiscated his computer parts and taken his bicycle. All the children stood around him, with their collars still wet and the day growing darker and a robin twittering as it hopped in the backyard grass. But there was something even worse: The police man had also heard from Georgie at the tracks that Liam had had the children’s clothes all off at the pond. And what was he doing taking photos of the children? And no, he couldn’t have the computer back or the bicycle. The police officer, Constable Jarvis, took him into the house and told him he was never to go near children or he’d be run in. The boys stood outside listening to this, and heard Liam’s mother yell at him, “What kind of person did I bring up? Going around and having little boys naked!”
And she hit him hard on the back with a belt.
They all stood in the silent evening, and it was growing dark. Then the boys were taken home.
The next day it rained; the wagon, overturned, had been left in the dirt at the side of the house; black squall blew the trees, and the back of the fort fell. Liam sat in it alone. He looked around his small fort in a daze. And he was shivering, but it wasn’t from the cold.
After that, he was alone again. And he would often go to the park and sit.
One day he went back to the pond and looked for three hours and finally saw Pint’s old glasses under a small piece of driftwood. So he ran downtown, smiling. And he saw little Pint walking down the street. He yelled and waved, saying he had gone back to the pond and found them, but Pint was with his foster mom, who’d told him never to speak to Liam again, and so passed him by.
“You leave him be. You little cocksucker pervert, you is—little faggot is you,” the foster mom did say.
But then Pint, when he was way, way down the street, did look back and smile.
Liam sat in the park after school most days. On occasion, people would still holler at him, “Goofball!”
He almost never went home until he needed to go to bed, for there was no reason to anymore. He was called an “odd little goofball,” but he still walked the streets to find computer chips and motherboards others had thrown away. And he stayed up long into the night working in his room, listening to music from his headphones.
Once his mother beat him for playing his train at two in the morning. He did not know why she did this, but she was drunk and had fallen into a kind of hell without real borders. That is, a hell so borderless it could be anywhere at all.
So the next day he went into Harold Dew’s to sell his train set for twenty dollars. That is, without his parents knowing it, he began to sell or give away everything that had once belonged to his childhood: his Toronto Maple Leafs cap, and his Spider-Man collection that his dad had bought. His beautiful marbles and plumpers. Even the pictures in the scrapbook of him in the wheelhouse getting his picture taken with Captain John. One day, walking alone, he simply tore it in two. That is, he was going away already; already he was leaving them forever, though they did not know.
When he went inside Harold Dew’s pawnshop that late-April day, his teeth were aching and his gums were bleeding because his mom had slapped his face without realizing she would hurt him because of his new braces. She had cut his mouth deeply and it was sore, and he had spit blood most of the way there.
Harold’s heart went out to him, and he gave him a drink from the bottle of rum he got from the attic. He saw the pain in Liam, just as he had once seen the pain in himself. His own teeth had been destroyed when he was a boy, by a kick in the mouth. His life had been ruined because his mother had told him he was in a will, his friends too had gone away—and he had been on his own from the time he was fifteen. So he knew what it was like to be Liam. And Liam looked so much like his brother, Glen, he couldn’t stop staring at him, and then smile vaguely, as if in some kind of apology. And he began to think of him more and more as his own child.
“Here, let me pour you a glass—poor little fella, poor little lad,” Harold said, with utmost compassion, and he poured out a double shot with a little Coke.
And Liam drank from that glass, and suddenly he felt very giddy and happy. He had never known he could be so happy.
On Good Friday, he went to Harold’s again, just to talk to someone.
The shop was open—the place was dusty and filled with clutter. Harold Dew sat behind the counter doing a crossword puzzle.
“How is yer teeth?”
“They still hurt,” Liam said. The idea that his teeth would be fixed, and that everyone would love him if they were, had been his constant hope. Sometimes children pour their hope out like gold and it falls clinking to the ground, and is lost.
Liam had thought that his mom would love him once he had them fixed. And perhaps his dad had slammed the door on him only because of his teeth.
Now all they did was give him pain.
Harold asked him if he would like another little drink.
“Yes—good, please!”
Harold took the bottle of rum that he had got from Ethel’s mom’s attic and poured out a double shot, and set it on the counter near the boy.
“It’s good—it always takes the pain away is what I found!” Harold said. “But you have to moderate. You can’t drink all the time.”
Liam took a drink, and then again and again, while Harold talked about how he had been kicked in the mouth at school.
Liam put the cup down on the cluttered countertop and Harold winked at him, and he smiled. It was the first time he had smiled with his braces on. He had been waiting to show either his mom or dad.
Now it didn’t matter at all. Now the boys he had made picnics for didn’t matter either.
“Name a seven-letter word for scandal—it begins with an o,” Harold said.
“Outrage,” Liam said, picking up the bottle and taking another drink straight. “That always works.”
It was when Mr. Ian was in jail that Liam was most on his own. This was also when Wally started to distance himself from Annette. When he veered away from her, when he began to ignore her drunken phone calls late at night.
And this is when Annette declared she was going to write a book. She would phone Wally and tell him a book was coming.
The woman who read her fortune told her that someday she would write a book, and she knew now was the time. Her therapist told her she might try to heal by writing of her terrible abuse. So she would have to write it soon. Why? She did not know. Except to those who still listened to her, and they were becoming fewer and fewer, it seemed to have something to do with an insult once from Patsy Mittens’s book club. She blushed when she remembered it, and wanted more than ever to prove something.
Yes, there was a man in town who she heard wrote—but what would he know? Her character would be a character women could relate to—at one point this character would save a woman from abuse, or live in solitude on an island because men had treated her wrong. And as for religion, she said, “Don’t get me started on the priests.”
This is what Liam listened to as Annette and Diane spoke about perverts. Liam did not know what a pervert was, but he knew he had been called one by Ms. Spalding with her big straw hat and her dark glasses and her homey, civilized, no-nonsense life in her garden with her new soil.
Annette talked about how she would spare no one; her heroine would be the one to destroy bishops and prime ministers. At one point she said she would destroy all the men at the mill—show them for who they were and how they cheated on their women. Wally, too, if he didn’t watch it.
DD would say, “Oh, I know—wow! What will you call it?”
“L
ove’s Journey—or A Woman’s Heartbreak. Or Love Island, or Love’s Elusive Flight.”
Then Annette would tip her drink back, and bringing the glass down and pushing it away with her beautiful hand say, “DD, you will be my agent. I will have an agent and it will be DD. We will probably have to go to Los Angeles. Would you mind going there, DD?”
“If I have to. I won’t mind,” DD said, adding dreamily, “I am so glad you are doing it. For what man could ever write about women who live like you or me?”
Annette said it would be almost imperative that they go to Los Angeles, for that’s where the movie would be made. Then, one night, she said that Liam wouldn’t be able to come.
“Why?” Liam asked, heartbroken.
“I don’t know why.”
“Why do you have to go?”
“Because of the movie, dear,” Annette said.
In their folly, she and DD would often laugh at all the men who were now out of work, and speak about how Wally had to order them out of the mill yard, and how she—that is, Annette—had a hand in firing people. “You did—you fired them?” DD asked.
“Yes,” Annette said, affirming this with a quick nod of her pretty head. “Wally said to me, ‘Annette, you know more about the damn men here than I do—should Greg Milton go?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and Wally simply crossed his name out.”
DD laughed and said, “Oh wow.”
And Liam would know that Greg Milton’s little girl was ill, and they had no money, and he would be ashamed of what they said. And one night he saw Annette in a state of complete hysteria, unable to contain herself, tears of laughter in her eyes, and he became terrified that something terrible would happen—and it would—soon.
Then after they spoke and drank, DD and Annette would leave him. They would take their coats and purses and the door would close, the smell of alcohol evaporating in the evening air.
Liam would sit at home. Sometimes he would sit in the den for an hour or two, and then he would get up and sit in the basement near the old pool table. Or he would go upstairs, far up to the attic, and look down toward the great bridge far, far away.
Crimes Against My Brother Page 33
