The Fortunate Brother

by Donna Morrissey

  During high tide the only way around the outcropping was by boat. This morning the tide was out. He climbed across wet rock made more slippery by tide-abandoned kelp. He’d been climbing around here since he was a kid, shortcutting it to Hampden. The front of the outcropping spanned a few hundred feet of rugged rock face, a small inlet forged into its centre. Hooker’s grandfather was holding the boat steady near a clutch of rocks before the inlet. Bill was out of the boat and hunched over, looking down at something amongst the rocks, his face scrunched up as though tasting something nasty. Straddling the rocks opposite Bill was Clar’s dog, whining and pawing at the head of a large pool of water left over by the tide. Something greenish was floating in it.

  “What’s going on?” called Kyle. No one looked at him. He came closer and then went down on one knee, his breath sticking in his throat. Clar Gillard. Half submerged. Flat on his back, arms and legs strewn out as though he were basking in sun-warmed waters. Blue jeans suctioned like skin to his legs. Greeny brown seaweed shifting with the water over his chest and bobbing around a face that was grey and frozen like clay on a winter’s morning. His mouth was stretched open, his eyes wide and emptied. Clar Gillard did not look pretty in death.

  “Teeth marks on his shoulder,” said Bill. “Looks like the dog dragged him ashore.”

  “His truck’s over on the wharf,” said the old man. “Was there all night.”

  “He must’ve fallen overboard,” said Bill. “Drunk, I suppose.”

  “Don’t think he could swim,” said the old man. They both looked to Kyle as if he might know.

  “He ain’t never gonna learn now,” said Kyle. A wavelet lapped at Clar’s face and trickled into his opened mouth. The dog whined and Kyle closed his eyes, dizzy. He held on to the cliff and got up.

  “You’ll call the cops?” he said without looking at Bill. He stumbled back around the outcropping and lurched across the beach, cursing the fucking tequila and whisky from the night before. Bad mix, fucking bad mix. He climbed gingerly onto the wharf and crouched by the grump, legs trembling. Sylvanus came out of the house, buttoning his coat and hauling on a toque. Addie behind him.

  “Clar Gillard’s drowned. Caught on the rocks around shore.”

  “Caught where?” asked Sylvanus.

  “Around the cliff face.”

  They both looked towards the cliff. Their faces were blank. As if he’d just told them about a piece of driftwood he’d found over there.

  “He’s dead,” Kyle repeated. “His truck is parked on Hampden Wharf.”

  “Fell over?” asked Sylvanus.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Probably drunk,” said Addie. “Hope they buries him outside the fence. Kyle, you’ll have to drive me to the hospital tomorrow morning; Bonnie’s car is in the garage. And—from what you just said—I expect she’ll be wanting her privacy.”

  The garage. He remembered the car keys in his pants pocket. The car sunk to its rims in mud. “When did she tell you that now, her car’s in the garage?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. When I last talked to her.”

  “When you last talked to her?”

  “Yes. Yesterday afternoon.”

  Her words, uttered with such conviction, silenced him. She turned and went inside and he went after her, but she hurried into the washroom, closing the door, as though she knew he had questions. He got Bonnie’s keys out of the dirty jeans he’d left lying on his bedroom floor and then stood outside the bathroom door.

  “Mom?”

  She didn’t answer. His father tooted the horn, anxious to get to the site, thought Kyle, to get away from everything. From her. He looked at the closed bathroom door again and went outside. Climbing in beside his father, he clicked his tongue disagreeably as Sylvanus rummaged around beneath the seat, pulling out a flask of whisky.

  “She got through to you, hey,” said Kyle. “I’ll not bloody cover for you and she’ll keep her word. You can bet on that one.”

  “Drive,” said Sylvanus, pointing a gnarled finger towards the windshield.

  Kyle turned the ignition key and gunned the motor, seeing in the rearview his mother peering from the doorway. She was looking towards the cliff beyond which Clar Gillard lay drowned. The key to Bonnie’s car dug into his leg from inside his pocket. His mother looked to the truck, near wringing her hands. He saw the worry on her face. Felt his father’s growing impatience sitting there beside him, gripping that flask of whisky. He pulled the keys from his pocket and saw his mother’s hand go to her heart, his father’s finger jabbing at the windshield, ordering him to drive, and he felt the desperation of a landlubber on a sinking ship, trying to figure which of them was his captain.

  He swore, let go of the keys, and stomped on the gas, speeding down the road.

  “Well, what the hell happened to Clar, do you think?” he demanded of his father. “Fell over the wharf, drunk? What’re you doing?”

  Sylvanus was raising the whisky bottle with both hands like a priest wielding a cross to ward off evil. The bottle was still capped, the seal unbroken. Kyle braked. “What’re you doing?” His father’s shaggy dark eyes blistered with tears. Winding down his side window, Sylvanus flung the bottle into the sea with the same vigour Clar Gillard had hove the log for his dog to fetch just the day before. He screwed the window back up and jabbed his finger towards the windshield again.

  Jaysus.

  Kyle drove them up the road. His father’s face was closed, too closed to speak, too closed to be spoken to. Kyle looked towards Kate’s, and saw that her car wasn’t there. He looked past it and down to the end of the gravel flat and the bed of alders beyond which Bonnie Gillard’s car was sunk to her arse in mud. He swerved off Wharf Road onto Bottom Hill and then, partway up, he braked. That weird scream. The one he’d heard last night after rolling into the ditch. Bejesus if that wouldn’t be Clar Gillard…

  “Fucking nerves are shot,” he said to his father’s startled look. Releasing the brake, he drove on.

  In Hampden they passed by Bonnie Gillard’s weather-wearied hutch where she lived with her sister. No lights on in there. Nor were curtains drawn. Perhaps they’d never had any—too strapped buying bingo cards, thought Kyle.

  “Watch it!” Sylvanus grabbed the dash as Kyle swerved the truck, scarcely missing old Dobey Randall with the hitched-up pants and light-glazed glasses.

  “Trying to give me a heart attack?”

  “Shouldn’t be on the road,” Kyle muttered, catching the old-timer’s bewildered look in his side mirror.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t be,” said Sylvanus.

  “Fucking thorny this morning or what?”

  “That’s it now.”

  “That’s it now, what? Going to be an arse the coming days? Just what she needs.”

  “Drive.”

  “Right.”

  He hauled a right at the bottom of Hampden Hill, glancing at Clar’s truck parked on the wharf. Lyman and Wade appeared ahead of them on the road just before the Rooms, walking hard into a growing breeze, their windbreakers billowing off from their backs.

  Kyle rolled down the window. “Where’s your car?” he hollered.

  “Broke down!” Lyman hollered back. They climbed into the dump, the truck still moving. “You hear about Clar?”

  Kyle nodded and looked to the sky, wondering how the hell bad news travelled on the wind and good news waited for its turn at the supper table. The clouds were clearing, ponds of blue pouring light onto the greyish face of the sea and the dark stubble on his father’s chin. He rubbed his own chin, hands too shaky to shave that morning. Chris’s face, smooth as their mother’s, passed before him. It was the one thing he had over Chris—whiskers. Might’ve started looking older than Chris had there been time. Soon he would be older than Chris ever was. He gunned past the cemetery where Chris lay beneath his sodden blanket and wished to Christ he could gun as easily through his own rutted thoughts of gloom and lament.

  At the job site Sylvanus was out of the tr
uck and heading across the lot, Wade and Lyman behind him, yammering about their father coming home drunk the night before and their mother driving him down to the basement to sleep with the horse.

  “The horse? He got his horse in his basement?” asked Kyle.

  “Kept it there all winter,” said Lyman. “Mother didn’t like that either—he cuttin’ a hole through the porch floor to throw food down to him, hey, Wade?”

  Kyle stared at the young fellow as though waiting for the last line of a bad joke.

  “He got him took out now,” said Wade. “Put to pasture on the road.”

  “Ye going to stand there all day?” Sylvanus called, and Kyle tossed Wade the keys to the truck.

  “Go up to Fox Point. Get more beach sand.” He went over to where his father was kneeling beside the corner footing. “Did you hear what they just said—about Uncle Jake having a horse in his basement?”

  “Had a crow in his bed last year—ask your Aunt Elsie. Get the spades. We digs her down another foot.”

  Kyle got the spades and started trenching away from his father at the southwest corner. The good stiff ground was easy to shovel and solid for building. The sun crept through cloud, filtering warmth on the back of his neck. He eased out rocks with the tip of his spade and smoothed over the holes and bent and measured the trenches, keeping them the same height. The wind brushed at his face and the sea washed over the shore and washed over his thoughts and the only time he felt content was when he was measuring, sawing, and hammering. He glanced at his father, who was kneeling by the trench and examining its depths and needing no ruler or marker to show him the dimensions. He was proud of his father’s precision and irritated by the rumble of the truck returning and their work interrupted.

  “Clar Gillard got knifed,” Wade was blathering before the truck door was shut behind him. “In the guts.”

  Kyle let go of his shovel and Sylvanus rose as the brothers hurried towards them across the site.

  “Murdered,” said Lyman.

  “Right in his guts,” said Wade.

  “Yup, murdered.”

  “Bled out, not a stain in him.”

  Sylvanus went back to his digging.

  “Is the cops out?” asked Kyle.

  “All over the place,” said Lyman. “And they’re coming down now to talk to you, Kyle. Right, Wade?”

  “Right. They heard about your fight last night. With Clar.”

  Sylvanus stood back up.

  “Is that what they’re calling it. Fucker sucker-punched me,” said Kyle.

  “Fred Snow seen it. He was in the can. By the time he got his belt done up, you were gone,” said Wade.

  “Must’ve took time to fix his hair, did he?” said Kyle. “Never seen nothing till Clar’s fist crunched my jaw,” he said to Sylvanus. “Woke up in the ditch across from the club.”

  “Fred told a couple fellows,” said Lyman.

  “But you was nowhere to be seen when they went out looking,” said Wade.

  “And the cops were down to Bonnie Gillard’s place this morning.”

  “But she was home all night,” said Wade.

  “That’s what her sister Karen told the cops, right, Wade? That Bonnie was home all night.”

  “Right. But nobody seen her car.”

  “Nobody seen her, either. Floyd Murphy’s sitting by his window with a sprained foot since yesterday and he never seen her coming or going. Or her car. But it was too foggy last night to see much.”

  “But Mrs. Murphy seen her this morning looking through her room window.”

  “So she’s home but nobody sees her car.”

  “Perhaps she lent it to somebody,” said Kyle.

  “We’d know it if she did. Right?”

  “Ye fellows going to trim that plastic?”

  “Right, Uncle Syl,” said Wade. “Three-quarter-foot strips.”

  “Don’t take your eyes off them clouds. If she starts raining when we starts pouring, you gets it covered fast.”

  “Else it’s like fish on a flake, hey, Uncle Syl? A drop of rain and the whole thing’s dun. Get it? Dun? Done?”

  “Dun?” asked Kyle.

  “Dun. Dun, b’y. Mould on a fish. If they gets wet drying on the flakes,” he said to Kyle’s blank look. “Jaysus, b’y, where you been?” Wade winked at Kyle as Sylvanus started back to his shovel, muttering something about them all being too smart for him. “Some mood, ain’t he, Kyle, man?”

  Kyle gave a commiserative nod and picked up the ends of a couple of two-by-twelves. He dragged them over to the corner his father was working on. Murdered. Clar Gillard was murdered.

  He threw down the wood and picked up his spade and started digging.

  “How come you never spoke about the fight?” asked Sylvanus.

  “Wasn’t a fight.”

  “It was something.”

  “Fucker clocked me one.”

  “How come you never spoke about it?”

  “Would’ve. Had time.”

  “You could’ve got that in.”

  “That’s it now, was nothing to it. I come out of the club and he cracked my jaw. Woke up in the ditch.” He looked to the road as the whine of a faulty alternator preceded Kate’s old Volvo. Throwing down his shovel, he started across the site, rubbing his hands on the sides of his jeans.

  Kate was getting out of her car, her grey braid trailing beneath a wool toque and her fingerless gloves a grey arc as she waved in greeting. She closed her car door and he felt again that patient, expectant air around her as she watched him approach. Her grey-green eyes appeared to be twinkling behind the lenses of her wire-framed glasses, but up close he saw they weren’t twinkling at all, just light dancing on glass. He didn’t see Kate much outside her nightly fire. How many times, he now wondered, was he tricked into thinking she was smiling when she wasn’t?

  His jeans were creeping down his hipbone like he was losing weight and he hooked his finger through a belt loop, jerking them back up. “Looking for the inspector’s job, Kate?”

  She waved towards the cousins fumbling with the roll of plastic they were spreading out. “Expect you got all the help you need.” She pulled a pack of smokes from her back pocket and lifted one to her mouth and offered him one.

  “Still quit.”

  She struck a match to her cigarette and pushed back tendrils of hair flickering about her face from the wind. “Clar Gillard got a hole in him,” she said, tossing the match aside.

  “They know who done it yet?”

  “Nope. The cops are out from Corner Brook, questioning everyone they sees on the road. Thought I’d tell you what I told them. That I picked you up in my car around eleven-thirty last night, walking home from the club. And we built a fire and talked till past midnight when your father showed up with Hooker. And that you went home shortly after. Your father followed around a half hour later. Oh, and I happened into your mother earlier—she was taking a walk. She says she don’t’ remember when either of you got home, she was sleeping.”

  Kyle was staring at her in surprise. “That’s nice of you, Kate. But why the hell would you tell lies to the cops? And would Mother bother telling you—”

  “The cops talked to her before me. It’s fine,” she said to his sudden look of consternation, “they’re talking to everybody. That’s how they learned about your fight with Clar. They spoke with Hooker first and he come to me and we fixed up the details, smooth it all over.”

  “Smooth what all over? Jesus Christ, you thinking I need an alibi?”

  “No, b’y, calm down. I’m just following along with Hooker. He told the cops your father was passed out in the truck behind the club all night…picked it up from there.”

  “So—why wouldn’t I have drove the old man home in his truck? Why would I have walked?”

  “You weren’t thinking straight. Took a punch to the jaw and a blow to the head when you fell. Hooker went looking for you in your father’s truck. Look, this is Hooker’s blabbering and that’s what we’re stu
ck with. Go with it—beats having your old man drinking and driving.” She got back in her car, tossing the better part of her cigarette into the ditch. Kyle went after her.

  “What’s all this to you? Lying to the cops, that’s a bigger rap than the old man’s driving record.”

  “Perhaps I’m just thinking about your mother, Kyle. Looks like she got enough on her mind these days. Go tell your dad where he was last night.”

  Kyle stood himself before her car door, keeping her from closing it. “You thinking I put the hole in Gillard?”

  “Not thinking nothing. Word is you left the bar between eleven and eleven-fifteen. Then had a fight with Clar and nobody seen you after. So happens I seen you. Around eleven-thirty.” She started backing up. He let go of her door and she drove off, pulling it shut.

  “Eleven-thirty-five,” he yelled after her. “More convincing when it’s specific!” Least, that’s what he’d learned from watching cop shows.

  Sylvanus was bent over, digging. His cousins were hunched over the sheet of plastic they’d stretched onto the ground, readying to cut. They looked at him curiously as he strolled past. “What did you do last night?” he asked, bending down beside his father.

  “You going to work today?”

  “Asking what you done last night.”

  “I done nothing. I done what you done.”

  What I done. Kyle rose. Rocked back on his heels. What I done. Right. Drunk and bawling in a ditch. That’s just the size of it, now, isn’t it? Me drunk and bawling in a ditch and you drunk and bawling in the truck. Some loopholes ought to be drawn tight. God bless Kate.

  “The cops are coming,” he said to his father. “Hooker said you were passed out in your truck all night. Behind the club.”

  Sylvanus placed the tip of his spade against the curved side of a rock embedded in the footing and levered it out, his face wincing as though he’d levered it from his ankle bone.

  “Is that where you were?” asked Kyle.

  “Must have. I woke up there.”

  “And Hooker drove you to the gravel flat around midnight. I was already there having a beer with Kate. I left and went home and you came home after you finished a beer with Hooker—around a half hour later. We better stick to the story else Hooker will be nabbed for lying. Making you look good—drinking and driving. You got all that?”