Punishment (18 page)

By noon the schools were closing, according to the radio newscast. Authorities were warning people to stay off the roads. Late afternoon I learned from CNN that the British were sending twenty-six thousand soldiers to the Persian Gulf, including part of the armoured Desert Rats brigade. The Americans were sending sixteen thousand more from bases in Texas and Colorado. Colin Powell was pressing the United Nations to stand firm against Iraq. Standing firm against what seems to be inert is ridiculous, I thought. Mental note to Neil: give me one scrap of evidence that the government of Iraq represents a threat to anybody but Iraqis and I’ll take you seriously.

Boredom set in by early evening. I poured a Scotch. Somewhere around nine o’clock all power failed ominously. Lights, television, suddenly gone with the subtle background sounds we never seem to notice until we can’t hear them anymore.
Now only the creaks and protests of the naked house, the sighs and moans of nature, ragged snow flapping at the windows. The phone rang.

“Everything copacetic over there?” Caddy asked.

“Yes. What about you?”

“I have a generator,” she said. “You’re welcome to come over if you can make it.”

“I’m sure the lane is blocked.”

“If you get desperate I’ll send someone with a snowmobile.”

I laughed. “How bad can it get?”

“Sometimes these things can go on for days. You have lamps?”

“They’re all over the place,” I said. “I was going to get rid of them but I kept them for decoration.”

“Get them ready, you’re going to need them,” she said.

After I put the phone down I did a mental inventory. The lamps; stove in the living room is fuelled by oil; I have a propane camp stove somewhere; enough canned food for days; nothing to go bad in the refrigerator; I have a powerful flashlight (property of the Correctional Service of Canada). I realized that I was speaking aloud and that the dog was listening; the sound of my voice and the sense that it was being heard and understood was comforting. He came close, placed his snout on my knee. “I know you’re wondering about Strickland,” I said. “Whether I’m setting myself up for trouble, engaging with him. But you’d have to know the whole story, Birch.”

He licked my hand and clambered up beside me on the couch, turned in a full circle, then lay down, head resting on my thigh. “Go on,” he seemed to say.

“You’re the expert on loyalty,” I said. “You’d understand better than most people what Strickland and I really have in common. Something deeper than the fact that we were both adopted. We’re traitors, Strickland and me. I hate admitting it, Birch, but in the world we come from, we’re both known as rats.”

The dog lifted his head from my knee and stared up at me.

“That’s right. We’re rats. In the world that did so much to shape what we’ve become, where everyone is more or less a prisoner of the system—there are two distinct cultures, two breeds of animal, if you will. Each breed has rules so rigorous you wouldn’t believe it. Or maybe you would, actually. Maybe you would. Because rule one, the absolutely most important, is loyalty—you are unquestionably loyal to your own breed. Anyone who betrays his own is dead, one way or another. And that’s how Strickland and I both ended up back here, back where we started from, both more or less in hiding. His problem is that he got noticed. I want to know: Was your young friend’s death an accident? Or did he do something bad or stupid that night when Maymie showed up at his place. If he brought it on himself, he’ll have to face the consequences. That’s the way we see things, Birch. I know you understand.”

The dog yawned assent. I was relieved he couldn’t ask the obvious.

I’d known what the letter was about before I opened it. There is something ominous about an administrative summons. And over coffee we’d compared them. Me, Meredith, Wilson and Tommy Steele.

“
Roger
William Pittman,” Tommy scoffed. “Anybody know his name was Roger?” We all laughed.

“He was twenty-eight,” said Meredith. “Christ, I thought he was a lot older than that. Just from his record. Busy boy, he was.”

“Okay,” said Tommy. “This ain’t gonna be pretty. But we’re ready for it, right guys?”

There was a murmur of agreement from Meredith and Wilson.

“See, here’s the situation. We’ve all been through this before. People come along after the fact with twenty-twenty hindsight, right? Like we’re supposed to know what’s gonna happen
before
it fuckin happens, right? Just the way the brains trust knows after everything is done and all the reports are in. We were supposed to be fortune tellers.”

He was shaking his head sadly. Then he was looking straight at me, smiling at the mouth. Oh, but not the eyes. Eyes hardened by his insight and his certainties. “Something on your mind, Tony?”

“Maybe we should talk about this,” I said.

“What’s to talk about?”

“Maybe coming clean.”

Tommy didn’t move. He was sitting with his arm hanging over the back of his chair, expression wary. The coffee-shop din suddenly seemed far away.

“So you’re gonna strike out on your own,” he said at last.

“That’s not what I said.”

“Amounts to the same thing. You going rogue on us?”

“I’m just saying the simplest and safest thing is to explain exactly what happened.”

“Okay, Tony. Exactly what happened?”

“We waited too long … it got out of control. There were four of us. We could have gone onto the range, we could have got security in sooner. It was a wrong judgement call, by all of us. And so there’s a guy dead. I don’t care what he was, Tommy. He …”

“Great,” he said. “Just hand them an excuse to hang someone out to dry. And who do you think that someone’s going to be? Not you, Tony.”

“I’ll take my share …”

“Don’t go getting all sanctimonious on me. Just do what you feel you gotta do.”

And he got up from the table and walked away, shaking his head. But then stopped, turned. “We’re all counting on you, Tony.”

I sat alone in my office.
There can be no going back. There’s only going forward now. The issue isn’t what happened. It’s what’s going to happen
.

I opened my desk drawer, extracted the folded sheet of paper I’d almost memorized by then.
Strong as we are / Memory punishes us / Is our disease …

I folded the poem and placed it in my inside jacket pocket. This I’m going to need, I thought. And you, my wise dear Sophie.

I dialed her office number but she wasn’t there.

I fell asleep to the howls of wind and whispering of trees. Sometime during the night I awoke to what sounded like the splattering of rain. Early morning I looked out on a glistening
landscape, trees drooping with the weight of crusted snow. The power was out. The battery radio reported trees and lines down, all across the province, tens of thousands without electricity.

I took advantage of the daylight, read a lot, resolved to read more. Coffee on the camp stove tasted lovely. Beans and wieners spooned from heated cans. Birch slept mostly and I envied his ability to drift off at will.

Just after four a machine roared in the lane and I thought at first it was a snowplough but it was a snowmobile, rider lost in heavy winter clothes, a helmet. The sudden and unexpected appearance of strangers still makes me nervous, even here. But this was Mary, delivering newspapers accumulated since my last visit to the store.

“I thought you’d be in bed when I was going home last night so I didn’t want to bother you.”

One of the papers seemed disorganized, as if it had been read. “I see Neil got out in spite of the storm,” I said, smiling.

“No, that was me. I won’t charge you for that one.”

She turned to leave and impulsively I said: “Is there room for two on that machine of yours?”

“Sure,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”

“Caddy’s,” I said. “She has a generator. She’s offered supper. And I think the dog is missing her.”

“You’ll have to make your own way back, unless you want to wait there until I’m coming home.”

“What time will that be?”

“About nine tonight.”

“Surely Caddy can put up with me ’til then.”

——

Bundled in my warmest coat, the dog wrapped in a blanket clutched to my chest I teetered on the back end of the machine as we roared through a deserted countryside. Wood smoke curled above silent blank-windowed houses, here and there cars were abandoned on the roadside or in ditches, half-buried. A snowplough passed us carefully, wheel chains clanking, as we seemed to hurtle down the road. The dog squirmed and I held him tighter. The setting sun seemed briefly to have paused between a bank of purple cloud and flexing sea.

I could see Caddy smiling in the kitchen as we thumped across her back deck; the dog had his head protruding from the blanket and was struggling to be free. I dumped him through the sliding door and she quickly stooped to hug him. “Well look what the cat dragged in,” she said. Then she stood, eyes gleaming and touched my face. “You’re half-frozen,” she said. “Give me that coat. You’re too much, the both of you.”

Over a hot drink I said, “Last night I started talking to the dog. Then I was thinking that poor old Charlie probably started out like that. Talking to himself or to an animal.”

“Storms do that,” she said. “Especially when the power fails. I overheard someone at the store telling the gang that during the last big storm he caught himself talking to the wife. That was when he bought a generator, mostly to keep the TV going.”

“When did you buy yours?” I asked.

“That was Jack’s doing,” she said. And became silent for a while before she stood and fetched the kettle from the camp stove, the bottle from the sideboard. “Let me strengthen that.”

At the refrigerator door she said: “The generator keeps the
fridge on, and of course the television. I hope you don’t mind leftovers.”

Fork poised in mid-air, she frowned, then lowered it. “I hear that there was talk at the store about some kind of benefit, a memorial for Maymie.”

“So what did you hear?”

“Just that. Do you know anything about it?”

“Doing it for the family, they say.”

“You’d think they’d have discussed it with the family.”

“Well, actually, that was supposed to be my job.”

She studied me, face slightly tilted. “So?”

“Obviously I didn’t do my job. I think it’s a bad idea. Especially now.”

She sighed. “I agree with you.”

“I think Neil is trying to stir people up. He’s behind it. I heard him use the word ‘murder.’ ”

She shrugged, pushed a bit of food across her plate. “So what?”

“It’s a loaded word and he knows it.”

“I just want it all to go away,” she said. “Nobody knows what happened and even if they did it won’t bring her back.”

I placed my hand on hers. “Even Strickland says he doesn’t know what happened.”

She bit her lower lip. “I suppose he would, wouldn’t he.”

“Do you really want to hear this?”

She shrugged. “Ignorance, I’ve learned, is anything but blissful.”

“His story doesn’t add up to much—just that she was alive
the last time he saw her, as far as he knows. She was fine. A bit down maybe. But otherwise, normal.”

“Down?”

“He didn’t elaborate.”

“And you believed him.”

“I’ll be interested in the evidence.”

“What evidence could there be? There was just the two of them.”

“Yes. But there will be forensic stuff. It won’t be easy to listen to, Caddy.”

She stood up. “I’m going to make tea.”

“I’ll have some.”

With her back turned, she said, “Nothing can be worse than what’s already happened. Nothing can make it un-happen.”

“He wants to talk to me again.”

She turned, studied me for a long moment. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“I’ll probably go.”

“Fair enough,” she said and turned back to face the cupboard.

I could hear the wind rising outside. We sipped our tea. I noted it was nearly eight o’clock. “Mary said she’d come by around nine to give me a lift home.”

She studied her cup for what seemed like a long time. “You don’t have to go so soon.”

“How would I get home?”

“I can get you home,” she said. “There’s a snowmobile in the garage. I know how to drive it. So you’re not stranded.”

“One of us will have to call Mary at the store, tell her I’ve made other arrangements.”

“Let me do that.”

“When she returned from the telephone, she said, “I’m glad you’re here, Tony. When I talk to you, it’s like …”

“It’s okay …”

“No, I want to say it. It’s like having another life, where things really are okay.”

After a long silence, she said, “Come. Sit.”

We were sitting on the couch, side by side, my arm behind her on the back of it. Then she turned slightly and nestled closer and plucked something from the front of my sweater. “How did you get into that line of work anyway, Tony?”

“Random circumstances,” I said.

“I could never picture you in a penitentiary, among that sort.”

“What sort?”

“Crooks. Convicts.”

“Ah Caddy, there’s worse than them walking around free.”

Now she was examining my hand. “So how did you end up there?”

“Back in ’66 I had a roommate. I’m sure I talked about him, when we were … His father was a prison guard in Halifax. Full of stories. They were supposed to be comical, or philosophical. I found them grim. The prisoners he talked about sounded a lot like me. Outsiders.”

“Oh stop,” she said.

“You asked.”

Now her forehead was against my cheek, hair tickling.

“So I took some post-grad courses in sociology and criminology. And ended up working for a professor who eventually got a government contract to look into the causes of the 1971 riot in Kingston Pen. I don’t know if you remember. It was a big story for a while. The inmates trashed the place, took hostages. It was a kind of turning point for the prison system. He sent me to Kingston for the field work, interviewing people, researching for him.”

“I often wondered where you got to.”

“One of his recommendations was better screening for people going into corrections. He thought guards and other staff in the system generally should be more … educated, I guess. He thought that a lot of the trouble started with attitudes among the people who run the system. I agreed with him and at some point decided that I wanted to get into it, make a difference.”