Crimes Against My Brother (34 page)

“You want it just to hold over her head?” Lonnie smiled slyly, thinking of Ian as being a man like himself.

“I intend to destroy it.”

Lonnie took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at it, paused, then opined on all the things wrong with the world. Look at Africa—big mess; Asia—there was another one. Besides, what about him? Trouble had followed him all the days of his life, and what did he do but try to help people?

Ian held the envelope in his gloved hand—he was a citizen of the town now, dressed in a long tweed winter coat and silk scarf, and he wore a silk yellow tie. At one time, though not in a long while, he’d had meetings with premiers and with deputy ministers over town rezoning and a more efficient snow removal system, but in spite of it all, this was by far the most important meeting in his life. There was something magnificent in this meeting—something that stretched the boundaries of what was just and fair. Because this was the moment his empire, such as it was, was falling away, and all he had built up was going to be lost. The premier, who had once mentioned his name in the legislature, would no longer do so. The town council, which had once taken his opinions seriously, now scoffed. And he knew this, just as a man who gambled everything on a long shot knows this. So in this moment, in asking for this test, he was transcendent, trying to protect his namesake and give him what he could.

But he did not want to be caught here—by someone entering and seeing him. He had no idea that both his childhood friends were already on their way.

“Destroying it seems such a waste,” Sullivan said. “I mean, look how she planned it. You know how conniving she was—how she planned it. Now I may as well tell you. ‘You know who would be able to get close to him?’ she asked me. ‘And we wouldn’t have to pay them much? His uncles—yes, have his uncles follow him, those town drunks. They would do it just to do it, find out where he goes, when he closes early.’ I said, ‘Pawnmesoultagod, that it didn’t seem fair,’ and she said, ‘All is fair in love and war!’ I said, ‘What about Sara?’ and she said, ‘Sara who?’ and laughed as if that poor little girl was nothing.”

“That is not important.” Ian touched the buck knife with his other hand, once more, and fleetingly thought of his son and Sara—and let go of the knife as if it burned him.

Lonnie looked hurt at this reprimand, and astonished that Annette was so beguiling, as if he too had been caught up in her web. Then he quietly lit his cigar again and looked at the
Auto Trader
, humming and hawing over pictures of snowmobiles. When he looked up, Ian had put the money away and was turning to leave.

“I didn’t say no,” Lonnie said. He stood and went into the dry room, near an old workbench and industrial wrench that Corky Thorn had sold to him some time before. He came back with an envelope and a slip of paper that he had kept for years. As he rummaged around, he spoke from the other room in carefree disregard of Ian’s feelings or honour. He spoke about the trouble he’d been in with Sylvia’s Mom years ago. Ian realized after some moments that he was talking about a trotter out of Truro, “owned by a man not like you or me,” Lonnie said, but a man who didn’t “have no feelings for people.”

Sylvia’s Mom was a good mare but got caught between a paddock fence and Lonnie’s trailer in a snowstorm and had to be put down. So the man—an awful man, religious too, so you know what that’s about—wanted six thousand. Lonnie said no way—but said he was frightened of losing his own horses. The man had seen Annette with him—more than a few times—and “That’s where it all started,” Lonnie said, matter of fact. Annette owed him “big-time” for a lot of things, and this would get her out from under. He insisted that she wanted to go; it was not his idea—he’d begged her “like my own daughter” not to. Now she wanted to go and meet a rich man. He had told her he didn’t know any. But she’d insisted. She’d insisted on going with him to Truro. She was thinking she could do something special with her life. He’d tried to talk her out of it, said, “Think about your honour, and what about your future? But she said, ‘Never mind that.’ Do you understand? I had no choice in the matter,” Lonnie said.

“I cried a thousand nights thinking about it,” he said.

“I took her to him that spring. Don’t think I wanted to! Don’t think that!” Lonnie said without a change in his voice, adding, “Now, where is that goddamn paper—awful if I lost it! Anyway, she is with him—in the
mortuary, and she frightened to death of funerals. It was an awful painful time. Poor little thing. I wanted to stop it. But what can a man do? Then afterwards she thought he loved her, because he told her how pretty she was—told her that he owned a house in Florida. ‘Does he really have money?’ she asks me. She goes to town and looks for a present for him, goes to the post office almost daily thinking he will write her. Ha!”

There was a pause for a moment before he continued talking. Not only as if Ian had no humanity, but as if Annette did not either.

“Before then, she wanted to get out of Bonny Joyce real bad, get away from Harold, take some course in Moncton, become a hairdresser. Trying to prove she was worth something—you know. So I pay for that and think my obligation is finished. But she had to meet that man, ’cause she had to be rich. Then what happens? She came to me two months later with the pregnancy test and was too scared to look at it. So I did. Was she really pregnant before she met you? Well, you can find out, once and for all,” Lonnie said. “Then we will put all this terrible sordid affair behind us.” And he came out smiling and looking somewhat defensive.

His arms were still large and strong, his eyes were somewhat watery at the moment, and Ian thought of killing him.

He handed over the envelope with the pregnancy test, and then went to take it back as a joke. Then he stuffed the
Auto Trader
in his pocket and took the envelope with the money. Eagerly he opened it, counted the money, suddenly breaking out into a sweat.

“Oh, I coulda got more than this,” he said, but he looked pleased. His breath was short and his eyes glowed. “More than this. So open up the envelope and see what you think about her now,” he said. “Yes or no—was she pregnant or not? It’s like a big prize you might win.” He nodded and pointed in expectation. “Go on. See if Liam is actually yours. He might be, after all.”

Then he looked up, startled. Ian had taken the matches on the desk and lit the envelope with the pregnancy test inside.

“Aren’t you even going to look?” Lonnie asked, incredulous.

Ian watched with inquisitive pensiveness as the small envelope burned and the fire grew hot. Some ash scattered, the small slip of paper inside burned too, and Ian held it in his hand until there was nothing to hold, and it fell and scattered—as if it was nothing at all.

He turned and left.

“Do you want to know? I been nice to you—I coulda got a lot more. Ha! I coulda got more—I’m being nice!”

Lonnie turned and shrugged and put the envelope with all that money in the back drawer and went inside the shed, opened the desk drawer, took out a bottle and poured a drink. He had another young girl coming in to clean the place for him. Someday he would tell her about Annette and how she broke his heart. How she robbed him. And he would warn that young girl not to be like Annette.

Now he thought that with this money all the property on both sides of Bonny would be his, and the houses he bought would be sold for a hundred thousand and bulldozed into a road for the mill, and he would get the biggest lump sum he had ever had—after sixty-eight years of life. He stretched suddenly and smiled at the thought of Ian trying to protect that woman.

Must be a point of honour or pride—something like that, he decided, spitting sideways onto the office floor and clearing his throat. God, he himself didn’t remember if she was really pregnant or not. Yes, he had her believe she was something special to that man in Truro. Was that right—or what? He wasn’t sure. But he’d never done anything to harm anyone. Really, he couldn’t think of one instance when he had.

At that moment Lonnie Sullivan had twenty-four minutes to live.

A disaster was about to befall Ian Preston. He did not know this, nor could he have foreseen it in any way—nor contemplate the fight that he was about to be immersed in. He had no idea that the next day when
he woke and went to his store and locked himself inside, that when he came out, he would become embroiled in the fight of his life.

By this time it was certain that Bonny Joyce was to be given up to a Helinkiscor cut that would include all the tracts of land everyone was concerned about—and more besides. By 1992, people were being offered money for their old properties at five times their price because a large new road had to be made—so many people were simply selling out and moving away. They understood they could not fight both the company and the government. Most were looking into what Helinkiscor would offer them—and these were the same properties Lonnie had been determined to pull out from under the feet of the rightful owners. But he had died in a queer accident at his office. So as I say, people were selling off and moving away, and the world had once again caught up with those on the fringe of it.

To most, Ian appeared to have forgotten all about it.

The little group he had organized in the late 1970s to protect the Bonny Joyce had long since disbanded. Now he never seemed to have a word to say on anything in the world. He wandered out at night alone, preoccupied and friendless. Men shouted insults at him because of the dealings they had had with him. Many things said about him were untrue, yet he had no one on his side. He was able to quell the pain in his back with pills and cocaine, and he was for the most part left alone. He did not drink himself into a stupor as Evan and Harold had—but the pills and cocaine offered the same stupor at a different rate of exchange.

Sometimes wags would come and ask him for money, or his uncles would phone him about a bill, and he would fuss and worry over this. And everyone knew it. Yes, he had been too stingy, even with Annette and his child. Then suddenly his uncles died, within two months of each other, and he was preoccupied with paying for their funerals, and trying to find enough people to act as pallbearers.

His wife no longer had anything to do with him. She went out at night alone. So no one paid the least bit of attention to him. That is, how could a man like this—dispossessed, attacked and ridiculed mount a campaign to save anything?

Yet just when everything seemed to be settled, a month or two before the mill started operation, Ian spoke up. No one had expected this from him at all—least of all Annette. Now and again Annette woke with a terrible hangover, and she would wander downstairs to look for him. He would have left a note with some money—informing her that he was going to see Liam after school, and he was working at the store and might stay there over supper. And she would not see him again that day. DD, in fact, began to plant the idea that Annette had more to live for and should seek a divorce.

Yet in spite of it all Ian looked almost venerable, as if his temperament and pain had changed his very nature. As he walked along the street, his face was strengthened by resolution. He used a cane because of his back, and waited at stoplights even when no traffic was coming.

He appeared at the town council one cold February night the next year. He was august, as if knowing supreme knowledge was bestowed from within. Suddenly the old suit and tie, the derelict face, revealed the contours of fascination and brilliance, a moment on the world stage with his hands shaking slightly as if palsied. His rubbers were covered in salt. His face was strained with worry. He had not spoken to Annette in a week—he had not been home once in that time. He had been making a plan, slowly but surely, to fight for Bonny Joyce.

“The woods won’t last five years,” he said at this meeting. He held a black briefcase filled with documents. He passed them around, and each councillor looked at them in turn and then passed them to the next councillor and then back to him.

“What is it?” one of the young men asked. A new, brash, understanding, liberal-thinking man—liberal in the sense that as a Maritimer the main concern must be money.

“Well,” Ian said, “this is what Helinkiscor has done in Quebec. This is the track on the west side of the Gaspé—it is unrecognizable from this picture taken three years before! They have cut north of that too, and into the river. They have cut right up to the Caribou herd. That is why they have come here—and they have come for Bonny Joyce, which
was considered by the Heritage Foundation to be untouchable and sacrosanct just ten years ago.”

Ian, coming home from the town council through a dreary drizzle, realized he would be alone. Annette had told him that it was a losing cause, and was waiting for him to agree and to go back to being him. People had long talked about him as being what she’d thought he was when she was a girl—a complete fool. The one thing that stung her was this: many people spoke to her about him as if she should be as amused by him as they were.

“What’s that husband of yours up to this time?” the ignorant man who ran the big clothing store in the mall asked her so loudly one day everyone turned to listen. “You’d better smarten him up. I hear he now wants to stop a hundred million dollars from coming to the river.”