Crimes Against My Brother (7 page)

So I ignored much of what I heard. Until I read this headline in a paper that my mother sent down to me:
GLEN DEW DIES IN FALL FROM BONNY TOWER

There was only one person Harold truly loved—his brother, Glen. And so I must mention this incident briefly, for it cast a shadow over everything else. And we must understand now, and keep it in mind, that not a moment went by that this tragedy didn’t take its toll. Was Harold’s fight at the police station before or after this event? It was sometime later, I am sure, that he was thrown in jail. Still, what happened to Glen must have been the genesis of the coming storms.

Evan Young got his nickname “Lucky” because he lived, while a younger boy was electrocuted and died, on a transformer tower. The boys had been hired to clean off bird nests from the tower. It was a job
Lonnie Sullivan had been asked to do, and he planned to hire the three sixteen-year-olds, Harold and Ian and Evan, for twenty dollars apiece.

Lonnie waited for the boys all morning. But on that day Ian was not at home, the loss of Annette having made him solitary. Harold would be back only in the afternoon because he had promised to take Annette to town. So Lonnie waited in his car—angered not only that Harold was not forthcoming but that Annette was the reason.

“He likes the money, but he don’t like the work,” Lonnie said to Evan, who was waiting with him. “And all Annette wants is attention. Well, we will see! We will see. Someday I will pay her back as well. She pretends to, but she does me no favours at all.”

Of course this was not true about Harold, and Evan told Lonnie so. And then Harold Dew’s brother, Glen—only fourteen years of age—said he would go up instead.

“Harold didn’t mean nothing,” Glen said. “Don’t fire him. Let me go.” For Glen worshipped Harold and longed to please him. And everyone knew, as he roamed about the lanes and backfields of Bonny Joyce, that Glen was, as they said, “Not quite right, not all there.” And this is why Harold knew his blood brothers would protect the boy, come what may.

Without hesitation, Evan told Glen to stay where he was; there were others they could get to do the job.

“No—there is no others. So you go, Glen.” Lonnie spit a bit of cigar out the door of the car.

“I don’t want him up there,” Evan said. “I can do it by myself to save you money. He’s not good on his feet, and it’s a long way up.” He looked at Lonnie with the eager and urgent gaze of a man wanting to convey a message of importance without speaking—a message about Glen’s world of play, his childlike being.

But Lonnie smiled in a fatherly way as Glen said, “Oh, I don’t mind.”

Evan took his time getting ready, looking at his old watch and hoping Harold would return—but ten minutes came to twenty, and Lonnie became more and more impatient with him. So he could hesitate no longer.

“I can go up alone,” Evan said again. And wind blew down from across that tower in a duct of hot and scalding air.

“No,” Lonnie said, moving his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “If you don’t want poor Glen to earn a spot of money, you are a poor friend.”

Glen looked from one to the other. Lonnie, I am sure, enjoyed himself with all of this, never thinking of anything but how the moment reflected his enormous power over money, poverty and love.

“You stick near me,” Evan said at last.

“Okay. Stick near you, sure,” Glen answered, already seeming to tremble, half in excitement and half in dread.

Evan and Glen climbed up the tower. When they reached ninety feet, they stood out on a small, triangular metal catwalk, without a rail, and carefully picked off the large bird nests that had accumulated for four years but were now a deterrent to workers coming in the next few days to sandblast and paint. The two boys looked like clothespins against a dreary summer sky. The scalding air still swirled out of the harsh blue sky.

It was just after noon when Harold came rushing to the job site, knowing he was late and knowing he might lose out on pay. Seeing him run up the hill that long-ago afternoon, so frightened of displeasing his harsh and ignorant boss, one sees the tyranny over youth of small-minded men.

“Who went up there instead of me?” Harold asked Lonnie, bending over to catch his breath.

“Glen,” Lonnie said.

“He shouldn’t be up there,” Harold said suddenly, wildly, glaring first at Lonnie and then at the tower. “He’s not right in the head—the whole Bonny Joyce knows!” He said “the whole Bonny Joyce knows” as a sacred plea. Everyone knew—surely no one, then, would allow this; who then would allow this?

“I know—but it was Evan who insisted. It’s always money with fuckin’ Evan. You know that!” Lonnie said. The hand in which he held
his cigar trembled slightly—for he now realized what he had done. And his body shook a tiny bit. And he wouldn’t look Harold’s way. He struck a match again, relit his cigar and looked up. “It’s a bad spot for that youngster to be in,” Lonnie said, with sympathy. “But what are we to do with the likes of Evan Young? Don’t think he is not in everything only for himself.”

Harold was now beside himself with panic and worry—no, it was worse than panic, worse by far than worry; it was premonition. And this premonition gave him a dull heaviness as the hot gusts of wind blew. He walked toward the tower, over the stubble of burned and desperate ground.

Glen was frozen in fear at ninety feet. That is, he had not known he would have to climb so high on a ladder, and now he did not know how to get back down. He looked around like a lonely bird, his small neck craning here and there in gloom and desperation. And the reason he did this was that he could not for the life of him attempt to lift a leg over the top of that ladder. He felt he would lose his balance. Nor was there anything to hang on to. So he froze, and tried not to look down.

“Hold on here. I’ll be just a second, then I’ll take you back down,” Evan Young told him.

Young decided to climb up the thin ladder the rest of the way by himself, and he did so hand over hand, like you would do on a ship, picking up the innocuous raven nests from every cross-section of pipe and tossing them out of the way, while Glen looked at him, watching those nests falling down, out of a bluer sky than he had ever seen before.

Onto the highest perch Evan Young climbed, straddling two beams, and even Glen Dew was far beneath him. He managed to reach the osprey hatch and reel it over the side, so it fell like a shadow against the sun. Then Young let out a whoop, and laughed for the sheer delight of being so high in the air. But beneath him on the tier things were not well.

“Harold, come and get me!” Glen called, and Harold shouted that he was going to climb.

Young yelled out, “Harold, there’s no room for the three of us up
here. I will bring him down, and he can have my twenty dollars for being brave.”

So Harold stood where he was, looking up one moment, looking away the next.

“I want someone to get me down,” Glen yelled. His state—which was often the case—was one of perplexity, and his hands began to flail about like those of a boy of three or four, and he decided it was time to walk down by himself.

“Don’t move,” Harold yelled up at him. “Don’t move your arms!”

By this time Lonnie had moved back to stand beside his car, with the door open. He had only sent Glen up as a joke, something he could relate later to someone, to prove his power over children. And now it stunned him: his own useless folly.

“I’m coming down to you now,” Young said. “And you can have my twenty for all yer help!”

But before he reached the catwalk, Evan saw a ball of fire, orange in the bright sun.

Glen Dew had grabbed a heavy wire above him. In a second, electricity shot through him and caused his hair to flame orange and smoulder. He was sent flying from the tower. The flash caused Harold to look up as the boy fell from the sky. “Like Icarus,” the paper said later.

The heat caused Evan to fall the last fifteen feet to the catwalk and lie there, strangely hearing the ticking of crickets, while Harold Dew’s brother fell, both sneakers burning with blackened thick smoke, the eyes melted from his head.

When Evan came down, he was poled back by a jarring straight right from Harold. It put him to his knees as he staggered, but he did not retaliate. Lonnie backed his car up into the gravel ditch and drove away. He threw his cigar onto the side of the road.

And even into the dead of winter, when their houses were settled under great wisps of snow, people talked about poor little Glen Dew and his melted eyes, and how Evan forced him onto the tower when he didn’t want to go. All for twenty dollars’ pay.

PART TWO

E
VAN
’
S GIRLFRIEND
, M
OLLY
T
HORN, TOLD HIM TO FORGIVE
himself and forget the threats and treatment he now endured at the hands of Harold. But Evan told her that Harold would always want to pay him back.

“He’s still your friend,” she would say. “You cut for blood with him and Ian. Why don’t you come to church?”

At first he did not respond, but when she asked the third time, he yelled, “Church! Leave me alone about fucking church! What happened didn’t have anything to do with sin, and why should I go confess?”

“I am only saying it might make you feel better!”

“Priests jerking off little altar boys and then handing you the Host!”

Molly worked at church picnics and sang in the choir, while Harold’s girl, Annette, wore her Catholicism as a virtue, without worrying one way or the other if she was being particularly virtuous. Catholicism to Annette was a way of the world—and if someone else had another way, so be it. Practising writing her name—“Mrs. Harold Dew”—was her great celebratory occasion in front of other young women.

“When we have the money, we will go far away from here and never come back,” Annette would tell Harold when he became depressed over Glen and many other things. For she did not want to spend her life there—not in Bonny Joyce or Clare’s Longing. At moments, when she thought about this—that is, how her life would go—there was a vague, faraway and dreamy look on her countenance, a look that not everyone understood. It was especially noticeable when you walked toward her on some late-spring evenings when she seemed unaware that it was cold and that the rawness had penetrated her skin. And of course, it was
clear that she had to leave behind her house and her servile father, with his obsequious daily journey to his job in the Department of Motor Vehicles, his training manuals for teenaged drivers, and the one big dinner he treated his peaked, selfish wife to once a year. If she did not leave all that, if she could not—if she relented and stayed—she was doomed. I knew this when I saw her once, dancing at the Byron Creek sock hop with five boys surrounding her, all vying to be her partner, while she remained steadfast, solitary and alone. She wanted the right boy—the right boy to be her partner—and Lonnie Sullivan had promised her he would help her find him.

But after the debacle on the tower, Lonnie secretly decided to destroy them all—including Annette. And the gullible child in her did not understand this. She did not know that, as I was writing my master’s thesis on disenfranchised youth, Lonnie would begin to ask her to do things for him—and little by little, because of this, she would turn into the Annette that everyone came to know, or worse, to hear about, from one end of the river to the other. She would steal this or that, betray this friend or that, all the while hoping it would make her someone special. Soon that little child within her would disappear, and eventually she would struggle against the odds to get her back.

But there was something else—an open secret among the boys. The secret was this: the third boy—the third blood brother, Ian—felt he would not be happy until he was with Annette Brideau. She was the girl he believed he loved, and he also believed she would someday love him. All it would take was the right moment. He did not know when that time would be, but he did feel he would someday win her for himself.

I have to prove myself, or die trying, he thought. Then she will be mine. And do you want her to be yours?

“I would give a life for it,” he said aloud.

So in a way—a very real way—Annette Brideau made Ian resolute and ambitious. He became more and more solitary as he tried to decide what he wished to do with his life. He gave up watching hockey because it cost him two dollars at the rink. He gave up fish and chips on his way
home from the field. He gave up everything he possibly could. And in some way he was doing it for Annette, who for the most part did not know he was alive.

Ian knew he would have to have money. That is, if he was to have Annette, money would be part of his allure. And this was Ian’s first disobedience to his larger soul. He lessened his opinion of himself in order to charm her.

I am not good enough for her, he would think. I will never be good enough for her—even if I have money. I know that!

No, I will have someone else—and she will be sorry, he would tell himself other times.

Then: Why should I need money? If I need money, she’s not worth it.

Then: Yes, I will have her—I would give a life for it, he would say. But when he met Annette, he would look in another direction entirely and pretend to ignore her existence. On occasion she would become pleasant, look his way and wave, in the innocent way young girls do to flirt. But as soon as he acknowledged her in any way, she would turn away.

In this fashion, she and he conned each other. She did so by pretending she didn’t want him to be attracted to her. He did so by pretending that Annette would someday tire of all the others in the whole world, even Harold, and seek him alone.

But by this time, Annette also believed she was nothing. That is, in a profound way she believed she could be nothing without Lonnie’s validation and blessing.

“Find the right man,” Big Lonnie would say. “For Christ’s sake! Don’t end up with a man who’ll be a burden.”

“I won’t, I promise, Uncle Lonnie,” she would say pensively, her eyes brilliantly dark and mysterious.

“Anyways, Harold is okay. But sometime when you are in the mood, and everything like that there, and Harold is not around, maybe you can come with me to PEI or somewhere like that there. I mean, I know families over there in construction who have, like—well, I hate to tell you—”