Crimes Against My Brother (30 page)

Corky’s old friend Ian—a boy he had grown up with far away, on Bonny Joyce Ridge, and now a man standing in a huge house, a man still
worth, after all his hard luck, thousands upon thousands of dollars—heard that someone had been killed downtown on the main street by a snowplow in the blinding storm.

It was twelve minutes later that Ian heard it was Corky—that is, Mr. Charles Thorn, age thirty-three. The plow had hit him as he was backing across the street. A policeman came to Ian’s door to find Ethel Robb and tell her.

“Oh my” was all she was able to say. “Oh my. Could someone look after Liam for a bit?”

Ian went and sat with his son. He sat with the boy on his knee and looked out over the snowy street.

Ethel had fled with the policeman and the party had broken up—even though many of the guests didn’t know the man killed. He was a friend, Ian told them. Annette had left with the others. He’d seen her putting on her coat and boots, as if she herself was a guest, while Ripp looked back over his shoulder to see where Ian was. Ian could have stopped them. He maybe could have demanded that he go along. But he would not.

He heard the door shut and waited for the outside door to open. She won’t do it, he thought and prayed. It will mean the end of everything if she does.

The outside door opened and then closed, and he was alone with his son.

“Are you happy that all the people came?” Liam asked.

“Oh for sure,” he said. “For sure!”

“They don’t seem like your friends. They seem like Mom’s,” Liam said. Then he said, “Maybe Ethel and you will someday have the same house.”

“What do you mean?”

But Liam said nothing more. He only smiled shyly and said that he wanted to buy a birthday present for a girl in his grade one class.

“And what’s her name?” Ian said.

“Sherry Mittens.”

There was another house that night where people were having a party. They were all sitting in the grand living room. The house was modern, with furniture that often looked austere and artificial. There were many books, and many discussions about life, and many practical solutions to the world’s problems. The father was a professor at the university. His name was Jonathan Mittens and someday I would be a colleague of his. I would work in the same department, and we would learn, over time, to dislike each other intensely.

Jonathan Mittens was clean-shaven except for a practised goatee, and had many good qualities. He had a daughter named Sherry Mittens. She had very good qualities too. In fact, the whole family had good qualities. This was the little girl Liam liked—loved—and thought about at night as the trees waved and made shadows in his room. She was so clean and precious and sweet-looking. And Liam thought of saving her from forest fires, or maybe a drowning or two. Still, Liam did not know this: the topic of conversation that day at the Mittens house was how wild and noisy those parties were two blocks over, and how you could hear the partygoers up and down the street, and how those people were devoid of any culture at all. And how Jonathan’s wife, Patsy Mittens, had been invited to the party and tore up the invitation and placed it on a log in the fire.

“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

A
T
C
ORKY
’
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.