Crimes Against My Brother (52 page)

After Annette arrived smelling of alcohol with a bottle of champagne in her hand, Verna, dead against alcohol (but not raspberry pies), sat in the chair in the parlour and would not come in to meet her; she sat with her big hands flat on her big knees and said, “I am fine, Wally. You and your friend have your little talk, and I will wait here.”

Now and again Verna peered into the room. She could see the makeup and the new facelift. Worse, of course—Annette was Catholic and French.

Finally, Annette walked into the parlour, and standing over the big-bosomed woman reached out her hand.

“You must be so proud of your son,” she said, lisping slightly, the top of her mauve sweater unbuttoned to show the edges of a black brassiere.

“Everyone is proud of my Wally,” Verna said, taking the hand so lightly so as almost not to touch it before she let it go. “All the girls he graduated with just a few years ago love my Wally!”

Then Verna gave one of her looks that would freeze you in your tracks, a look at the unbuttoned see-through sweater only a mother could give, a look that had death and utter Baptist hatred of Catholic mass deeply embedded in it. And Annette turned her face away quickly and buttoned her top button. When she looked back, Verna was smiling kindly, with her eyes fixed on some distant point.

Verna said nothing more for the longest time. Until Annette left the house. The champagne was left unopened on the table in the far corner of the room; perfume still lingered in the lonely affixed places.

“You’re not mixed up with her!” she asked, still sitting by herself. “Missy would be devastated—little Missy would!”

Missy, Wally’s girl from Bicklesfield, had gone to community college. Missy liked things just so, was a church girl, and had bought a thigh reducer advertised on television but had not used it yet.

“No!” Wally said, almost hysterically, and walking first in one direction and then turning and walking in the other. “No—no, no, she’s had a painful marriage. It is terrible—her husband beat her black and blue and is now in jail for breaking into her lawyer’s office,” he said. “I tried my best with her is all—but what can you do, what can you do!”

“Well—she’s trash pure and simple,” Verna sniffed, “showing off her tits—trash to be beat black and blue, trash not to be, as far as I’m concerned. A woman like that needs a good whack in the ass!”

“Oh, don’t you worry, I know what she is,” Wally said suddenly. “I know all about her!” he said in the voice of a child. He stopped pacing and looked shamefully up from under his eyes.

That very same night, Liam left his house at ten thirty and walked the streets looking for his friend. When he found Harold smoking outside the tavern, he said, “I need some pills—you must know where to get some.”

“For who?”

“For my mom.”

“Pills for your mom—what does she need pills for?”

“She has a sore stomach or something and she won’t go to the hospital—she refuses to go, so she needs pills. She is crying and everything.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“No, Harold, she won’t see no one—just pills for my mom!”

Liam waited twenty minutes and Harold came back with the pills in a small box. “Here, Boss,” he said. “You take good care not to lose these.”

Then Liam turned and ran back down the lane toward his large house in the dark with pills for his mom.

She was sitting on the bed in her nightgown. There was some blood on a Kleenex. She smiled at him.

She had been drinking to ease the pain in her stomach. He came upstairs and into the room slowly, and smiled tenderly. But he could smell her body as soon as he came into her great carpeted room, with its large floral bedspread on the bed.

“Mom,” he said, “you have to take a bath—you peed yourself again.”

He ran her bath and made her a drink, and came back and gave it to her.

She looked at him as if he was a stranger. He told her she looked pretty and kissed her forehead. He didn’t know what else to say. After all this time, being pretty was the thing she wanted to be.

He gave her one pill and then one more. Then he helped her take a bath. She told him that they would be happy—she would see to it. She asked him if he wrote Ian the letter.

Later, sometime later, she simply fell into a sound sleep.

When she woke at six in the morning, she was dizzy. Her child was standing over her, with his face pale, his lips protruding just a little because of his braces.

“What did you give me?” she asked.

“A pill.”

“What kind of a pill?”

“I am not so sure—but I wanted to help you. I think it is something like Dad takes for his back sometimes.”

“Did anyone phone?”

“No.”

“No … Wally?”

“No.”

She lit a cigarette.

“Do you think my face looks some good?”

He smiled at her in a certain way, a way that was knowing. It was awful now, her face. It was pinched forward as if suddenly she was in a casket.

She shrugged.

“Of course, Mommy,” he said, “you are beautiful. Daddy knew that too,” he added.

She asked him if she should wear the blue skirt with the jumper top. She asked him to find her shoes.

Liam ran about to find these things for her. To find the pieces of jewellery she hadn’t lost.

That is why his mom had the facelift. Her resurrection, as she called it. So many jokes now were at the expense of a religion she had once believed in as a girl. But she had needed her facelift. To look beautiful once again.

“Here, Mommy,” he said, trying to clip her necklace on, tears in his eyes.

The night Annette visited Wally’s, he and his mom went to the Kingsway and had the big fish-and-chip special. Verna looked at the menu for a long time, contemplating every dish, it seemed. He waited anxiously, wondering what she would say. She sniffed and said her nose was itchy. She said she liked Bicklesfield.

Wally felt the screws of convention plague him. He thought of the bottle of champagne. Yes, there was no foolishness with his mommy. No champagne for his mom. He came back from the Kingsway in the dark, and sat in his house smoking his little cigarillos. Two girls had to be let go in the main office.

He took his pen out of his pocket pen holder. He sat forward as he had done as a boy when reading over a test, as if in an impertinent way he was judging what was about to judge him. His stomach protruded over his pants buckle as he went through the names.

He picked Ines Drillion to go. He looked over the list again. He lit a cigarillo.

He picked Annette Brideau.

That very morning Annette decided not to go to work, but took a drive along the coast all the way to Bicklesfield.

She waited by the community college. Then, at three in the afternoon, she saw her, the girl she had hunted down just to find out who she was. Missy Melonson, in her purple leotards and her woollen skirt, walked by the car.

Missy had ’99 on her jacket. So, Annette thought, she would graduate next year—and then she and Wally would be married.

Annette watched the somewhat homely pouting child plod along, all the way to the river.

She suddenly shivered, and rubbed her nose like a little girl.

Then, shrugging at the immense folly of her own life, its bewildered journey toward the dark, took a last brazen drag on her cigarette, looked at the red polish on her manicured nails, and started the car.

Ian was called on by Markus Paul, and for a few hours spoke to him. But Ian, being a gentleman, never once tried to sway the opinion of the officer.

“Did I kill Mr. Sullivan?” he said. “No, I did not. I did not know he was dead until after he was buried—it was the strangest thing. I was speaking to him, yes, about a private matter—and then four days later someone tells me they had just been at his funeral. So I must have been on a hunt for information about what Helinkiscor was doing—or I might have just not opened the door to my store for those days.”

“What were you and Sullivan speaking about?”

“A private matter—nothing important.”

“There was a rumour you took money to him, but no money was found—did you take money?”

Ian did not answer. He did not answer because he felt Evan had killed Lonnie in a fit of rage and had taken the money—and he wanted to say nothing about it. The money had destroyed them all, become hubris unleashed. It had destroyed his wife, who in some way he still loved.
And he had harmed her enough. He remembered her terrified childlike eyes when he’d raised his fist to strike her. That was not what a man should ever do.

Markus closed his notebook and asked Ian if he thought the mill would remain solvent. All the pain he had gone through, was it worth it?

“I thought Helinkiscor would be gone by now” was all Ian said.

Markus Paul left. The day was bright, and Ian thought of Evan—and thought about how he had caused it all, all of it. He finished his cigarette and lay in his bunk.

Ian had predicted the mill would close in 1996. He was dead wrong. It closed in 1998. But that was because our little provincial government reinvested another twelve and a half million in the mill. This was called “Wally’s reprieve”—though Wally had nothing to do with it, and the money was already spent by the time he was made boss. But suddenly, because he was made boss, this was his reprieve, one he had organized—he had, rumour had it, walked into the office, cleared those people out who did not want to co-operate, and took things over.

So Wally was called a “take charge kind of guy!” People wanted him in politics; they wanted him to settle things.

At this time Helinkiscor was loading their yard with timber. It was piled so high some people thought the mill would last another fifteen years.