For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down Read online

  He moved slowly towards the door and knocked lightly and entered.

  He nodded to her. “How’s William,” he said.

  His son had just come from the hospital. There was something the matter again.

  Bines sat down at the wooden table and looked at her.

  “He has another appointment,” she said.

  His wife had left him and had taken the boy. He didn’t mind any more. And he knew what was going to happen now, and, because of this, he had come to ask his wife a favour: “I think we should change his name.”

  “To what?”

  “To your name – your name – it’d be better for the boy – better for William.”

  “Well, everyone on the river knows who he is.”

  “No, no – better for the boy – better for the boy,” he said. “Better for the boy,” he added again, staring through her.

  He didn’t like this but he couldn’t think of what else to do at the moment.

  “I’ll have to go to a lawyer to get the name changed – it’s a lot of rigamarole.”

  “Lot of rigamarole, ya – lot of rigamarole,” Bines said as if reflecting on something else.

  She told him that the doctors had made him another appointment for a blood analysis.

  “We could take him down to Halifax now – down there ourselves,” he said, suddenly. “We could – take him down there – take him down there,” he said.

  “Well – the appointment’s set. I think if we went and prayed at the church for him,” his wife said. She was a Pentecostal girl and although she would do whatever she could for her son she didn’t put as much faith in specialists as others.

  “Ya, well – anyway – you go,” he said. “That’s all right – you go.”

  He went in to see his boy. He was four years old but he looked younger. He had not gained much weight and Bines stood over him for a moment, looking at this small face turned sideways against his teddy bear. His face had a white pallor, his lips slightly blue.

  “How ya doin?” Bines said to the sleeping boy. “How ya doing, boy?” He went to touch his head – but Bines had hardly ever touched his son, and his large hand only slightly touched the pillow.

  “I might burn my house,” Bines said when he came back out.

  His wife looked at him.

  “My camp too,” Bines said. “People coming to get even for the tractor-trailer racket. Gary Percy’s on his way back. They let him out on day parole and he’s gone.”

  His wife didn’t answer. But the fear she’d always secretly held for him took sway. He looked at her.

  “Don’t worry about it – I’ll straighten things around – get a sprocket for the bicycle for him – you wait and see.”

  After giving his wife some money – and after telling her she would have to make do for a while on her own – he turned at the door to look at her, and then towards the room where Willie slept. After he left his wife he crossed the river, at the farthest point of the bend.

  Jerry Bines’ father had shot through his bedroom wall in an attempt to commit suicide when Jerry was fourteen.

  “I hit the floor that fuckin time,” Jerry would say.

  The only thing his father left was a house at the end of a dirt road. The only thing he gave Jerry was a watch with a studded strap, which Jerry now wore. He had cancer in his stomach and wouldn’t go to the hospital, and Jerry used to go out and buy him Aspirin and Rolaids and come home and force his mouth open.

  “Here ya go now – here ya go,” he would say as his father sat on his bed, the sheet covered with sweat. “Here ya go,” Jerry said.

  Jerry had loved his mother but she had died when he was four years old. She was Joe Walsh’s sister, and he had always liked Adele and her younger sister Milly, though they wouldn’t speak to him after he was fifteen.

  Jerry was Dr. Hennessey’s namesake and godchild. The night he was born a storm had closed the roads and schools and made travel impossible. His father had hitched the old horse and put his mother on the sleigh and started down the river, beating the horse around the ears to get it across the ice.

  And when they came up over the bank near the bridge Hennessey was waiting for them. He had come out as far as the bridge but couldn’t make it past. The horse’s face was turned against the storm and capped with snow, and seemed eerie in the lights of the tractor-trailer that was trying to secure passage.

  When he was little he used to sing for the men who visited the house: songs like “love’s going to live here – love’s going to live here – love’s going to live here again” and “the lights – in the harbour – they don’t shine for me – I’m like a lost ship – adrift in the sea – sea of heartbreak, lost loves, and loneliness.”

  And walk three miles to get a pop at the corner store.

  You turn right instead of left and your life changes forever without your knowing any change has come. Or you need a sprocket for a child’s bike and turn in one direction instead of another.

  One afternoon Ralphie Pillar was working in his shop. When he looked up, a man was standing with his back to him looking out the window at the dusty gravel lot turning to hard callused dirt in the afternoon sun.

  The man was caught in this afternoon sun, this October afternoon drawing to a close. (Ralphie looking at him was suddenly reminded of things far away and almost forgotten.) His back appeared to be a part of the wall, near the window where he stood. The window trembled slightly in the wind – a few leaves blew upwards in the yard and became still again while the sun made an effort to regain the cloud.

  Suddenly the man looked over and smiled, sunlight on his cheek. Far away in the great afternoon children scrambled and kicked the drywall boards of an old building. It was Thanksgiving weekend.

  “Hello, Ralphie,” the man said, as if he’d always known him.

  Ralphie nodded and smiled, but he wasn’t quite sure who the man was. There was something instantly unapproachable about him, though, even when he turned and smiled. And Ralphie instinctively wanted to draw away. Ralphie had become a quiet, reflective man and he didn’t know many people in town anymore.

  But then he realized, after a moment or two, that it was Jerry Bines.

  Bines’ smile, however, seemed nothing but kind and even wonderful.

  Ralphie was tall and thin, with delicate facial features, but he had deceived himself into thinking he was much taller, for when Bines walked up to him he was almost as tall, but far more powerful when he held Ralphie’s hand and pressed it in his own.

  “I wonder if ya got one of these,” he said. And he hauled out a small sprocket for a bicycle.

  Ralphie said he didn’t have one in his shop but he would look around, and for Bines to come back.

  At first he didn’t think anything about this, but after Bines left Ralphie had the strangest sensation, just as the sun came in on the old yellow window plant, of a kind of euphoria that Bines would bother to ask him this favour.

  He did not know initially why he had this feeling. But, of course, it all had to do with Bines being famous and wild.

  That night he told Adele about meeting him. He spoke of the way he looked when he was inside the door. And again he was pleased, as if he had been filled with a kind of grace, and this made him agitated.

  “He’s my cousin,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “C-O-U-S-I-N.” She spelled it out. And then sniffed.

  Ralphie was silent. It was Thanksgiving. Joe and Rita were both gone, and so too was Ralphie’s mother, Thelma. All had died within the space of six years. Though Ralphie was in his thirties, his hair was now turning whiter, his face was even thinner than it had been.

  “Stay away from him, Ralphie-face – he’s bad news.”

  “Oh, he just wants a sprocket,” Ralphie said. “What do you mean, your cousin?”

  “We are cousins – me, Milly, he – cousins. He’s the bad side of the family – you’d do no good to broker pleasantries with him,” she said i
n the old-fashioned way.

  Ralphie laughed. “I thought you were the bad side of the family,” he said.

  “Not a little bit,” she glanced up at him quickly. “Joe tried to get him settled down for two years – took him to AA, helped find him a job – but all as it did was cost Joe his life. Who do you think set up the tractor-trailer?”

  “Oh – I don’t believe that,” Ralphie said, suddenly angrier than he should be for some reason, and reflecting on how kind Bines seemed to be to him.

  “I have no use for him, Ralphie,” she said.

  “Well, either do I,” Ralphie said, annoyed. And decided not to mention Bines again.

  He actually did find a sprocket in his box of spare parts. And Bines did come back the next afternoon.

  “How much?” Jerry asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” Ralphie said, “I’d never use it, never miss it – go ahead.”

  “Well, I’ll do you a favour then some day,” Bines said. “Do you a favour.”

  The little boy had come to Adele and asked her to tie his shoe, and stood there weaving as small boys do.

  He was her cousin from upriver and his mother was sick. They had brought her to the hospital the day before because she wouldn’t stop bleeding, and now he was getting ready to go to visit her.

  His father was Digger Bines, and he had already made a fuss at the hospital and had hit the priest.

  Adele, who was seven, did not tell him this. But the boy still sensed that things were not right and he kept staring at his Aunt Rita as if to get her to explain something. It was as if this was his first glimpse of the darker world, and he was perplexed.

  His name was Jerry Bines, and that was Adele’s first memory of him, tying his shoe in the May sunshine, and Jerry standing above her talking about worms and fishing and red spinners.

  He had talked nonstop about visiting his mother, and he had bolt-black, almost contagiously brave eyes that could stare at you for an hour without so much as a blink. And he would not stand still when they fussed with his suit, which seemed to be a patchwork job of two or three suits, and a pair of brown shoes, second or third hand, which were two sizes too large, so Rita had stuffed newspaper in the toes. He ran upstairs to get the new pin for his lapel.

  Jerry wanted to tell everyone that Adele was his girlfriend, but he said he would only tell his mother.

  Adele remembered something else. Digger bought Jerry a huge family-pack size of potato chips that morning and he carried them wherever he went, offering them to everyone as if he was the richest boy in the world. Also, he was very excited because he was going to take a taxi.

  He placed the chip bag carefully on top of his suitcase when he ran to get into the taxi to go and visit his mom, and stuck his feet out the window one at a time. “New shoes,” he said seriously to passersby, being driven with his half-mad father up the lane, “new shoes.”

  People turned on the sidewalk to watch and Jerry fell back against the seat, while everything in the world was in bloom.

  When his mother died the next afternoon, Adele sat at the table with him, and, putting her arm around him said, “I’m your forever girlfriend.” And she smiled.

  All of this had been forgotten and swept away, down a thousand other avenues and years, until now.

  2

  Bines was already famous. People had heard a great deal about him. So it was not an unusual request that Ralphie’s sister Vera had to meet him and to write his story. She had gone to Adele for her help. Vera now worked for the department of social services, specializing in child welfare. She had divorced her husband Nevin for mental and emotional cruelty, and spoke calmly about this, and about her refusal to let Nevin see their child, Hadley.

  It wasn’t that his story interested her so much. But he fitted a pattern that she had concerned herself about over the last four or five years. And she had convinced herself that she could expose this pattern better than anyone else, show his kind of male violence, show the broader scope of such violence and how it “impacted” on children and women. “Impacted” being the new word of choice for her at this moment.

  He was going to be one of the many people she would write about, but she felt that he would be at the centre of a long history of “maleness” and “patriarchy,” which is how she described it, to her friends and devotees.

  She felt that she too would become famous with this book, at least in a small way amongst a certain group.

  Vera was now in her forties. Her hair was short. She was too tall for her weight. She had done some freelance work for magazines and she had travelled.

  And it seemed to her at the moment that Jerry Bines was the personification of her concern. And she felt this because he had become famous. She went to see Adele after Thanksgiving.

  “Why do you come to me for this?” Adele said.

  “Well, first of all he’s your cousin.”

  “That doesn’t matter – I don’t like him.”

  “Well, like doesn’t matter. No one says we should like him. In fact it’s probably preferable not to like him.”

  Adele thought this over for a second. Why did I ever get mixed up with the Pillar family – it’s just a family-pack of loons.

  Adele did not like this idea. It seemed to her to be like every other idea Vera had. And on the other side there was something cheating about not liking him if you were going to use him.

  “If you don’t like him, why would you bother to want to do a book on him?” Adele said.

  “Would he let me do a book on him?” Vera said.

  “Why would he want you to write anything about him if you don’t like him – and why would you want to?”

  But again Vera said that like or not like did not matter. She would be fair and objective, and that was more important.

  Like or not like meant very much to Adele, however. Nothing else ever mattered more. And there were a good deal of things she would not tell anyone about Jerry. She gave a sigh.

  That Vera would come to Adele, whom she never had liked, made her suddenly seem vulnerable, however. And this is what made Adele feel sorry for her. A book to Adele was nothing. There were too many of them around anyway – just heaps of them – and now Vera wanted to write one. Just as Adele had predicted she would.

  “Are you scared of him?” Vera said. She had her tape-recorder going and Adele glanced at it suspiciously.

  “Am I being interviewed or something like that?” Adele said.

  “No, no – this won’t be used.”

  “I’d be a fool not to be scared of him,” Adele said, “and so would anyone else – but we both have something in common.”

  “Oh, what’s that?” Vera said.

  “We’re both exceptionally good haters – and neither of us has ever forgotten a kindness or an insult.”

  “My,” Vera said. “Dear, dear, dear.”

  Adele shifted her gaze and looked about.

  “What I’m saying is – if you use him, use him right.” But again she was angry. She herself did not want to use Bines rightly or wrongly. She knew too many things that she couldn’t say.

  “Will I be frightened of him?” Vera said.

  “Only if he wants you to be,” Adele said. Then she sighed.

  “He’s the kind of man who if he can’t beat you with his fist would get a brick.”

  “Well, this is just what I’m after,” Vera said delightedly. And her severe brushed hair seemed suddenly to testify to this.

  “He’s been in prison four times, he’s been involved,” Adele said. “And he has people who would kill him like that.” She snapped her fingers. “If they weren’t scared to death to.”

  “That’s just what I want,” Vera said again. “I want all of that.”

  Of all the lost and hopeless why did her cousin become famous. And why was this happening? Ralphie and she were finally content. They had given up their only child, a daughter, which was the worst thing they had ever done. But nothing could be done about it now. They had t
alked themselves into it and regretted it instantly and forever.

  They had their own home and their own lives. And though Adele could not have another child they had resigned themselves to it.

  “So when can I see him?” Vera said.

  The meeting was arranged for two nights later.

  All day long Adele sat in the huge wicker chair in the back room staring out of the huge old windows at her trampled little garden, which had grown nothing but a few radishes and some brown tomatoes. It seemed a mistake to get mixed up in things best forgotten and so ultimately dangerous.

  By 5:00 the dusk came and made her go back into the kitchen.

  “Don’t they know what they are getting themselves in for?” Adele said, lighting a cigarette – her first in three weeks – and feeling abysmal because she had lighted it.

  Of course she knew all about Bines and they did not, and she could not tell them – because her family had refused to speak about him, and so she had refused too. But still there was another reason. Once Bines came into the room he could command them to like him. He had always been able to, and she was frightened of this. It was not a sexual attraction, more a kind of devotion. And it was this devotion she had already seen in Ralphie, who knew nothing about him.

  At 7:00 Vera arrived.

  “Is he here yet?” Vera said.

  “No – perhaps he won’t come –”

  The three of them sat in the small parlour off the living room.

  Every now and again Ralphie would stretch his long legs out and then bring them back, smile, and then bend forward, as if trying his best to find something to do.

  At quarter to eight the small clock in the hallway gonged, and Vera stood and walked into the living room.

  “He won’t be here,” Adele said.

  She watched Vera pace back and forth for a minute, and then come in through the dark hallway to the parlour again.

  “Well, maybe he’s frightened to come,” Vera said.

  “No – he’s right behind you,” Adele answered.

  Vera turned her head, gave a startled jump, and moved more quickly along the hall.