For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down Read online

  He would walk about in his T-shirt, a bottle of flat lukewarm Alpine in his hand, shaking all over, sweating – all humble one moment and fierce and haughty the next, saying he was going to kill Jerry Bines.

  Or he would say he was a mistake on life’s part and wanted to die, and he would begin to draw lots, to see which of the children were going to have the privilege of dying with him.

  Then he would sit on the stairs with only his toes visible to the little children sitting in the room below, and say that everyone had betrayed him, he had a list – he would flash this list out over the stairwell – and he would get them all back, sooner or later. And he had killed before (a lie) so it would be an easy matter for him to kill again (another lie). Like that, he would say, snapping his fingers.

  He would talk about his mother and how she never got a good deal, and how he was going to burn people out, and how he had burned people out before.

  The children would be sitting about the chairs in the living room or hugging against one another on the faded couch, which had an encyclopedia under it for a leg.

  This would go on throughout the long winter day. He would talk and then there would be long periods of silence. Then when he spoke again they would realize he had moved his position a stair or two. Then he would come out and sit on the stairs with his guitar.

  “Who knows this one?” he would say, strumming a chord. “‘Talk back tremblin lips.’”

  “‘Shaky legs just don’t stand there,’” some of the little children would chime in.

  The sun would go down over the crusted red snow-banks. At twilight Buddy would come downstairs in his checkered coat and stand by the heavy winter door, with the rubber insulation torn up the side, looking out the windowpane at the road that hugged their house.

  For years Lucy’s mother Frances was frightened of him. For years she hid the children at night.

  At times when Buddy came home he brought in people. People who came from Calgary and Edmonton or Nelson, B.C., and were wanted on Canada-wide warrants.

  One in particular came in the summer of 1986. His name was Gary Percy Rils.

  He was no taller than Lucy, but Buddy catered to him, and talked about them going to steal a tractor-trailer.

  This was the first time Lucy remembered hearing of Jerry Bines (although she must have heard of him before). And when she first met him he seemed different from all the rest of them in the house. What people did or said never flustered him.

  The man who owned the fur coat once came to the house to ask for him. “Tell him I’m busy,” Jerry said, drinking a beer in the back room.

  This impressed Lucy more than anything else. Besides this, he actually liked the children, called her Lucy-Woosie and bought her jawbreakers.

  His hair was short, he wore an old black watch that his father had left him, studded like a dog collar.

  Lucy knew, however, that there was some trouble with the tractor-trailer right from the start, and that this problem cooled the relationship between Jerry, on the one hand, and Buddy and Rils on the other.

  At first there had been no problem. But once the problem came it seemed unsolvable.

  It seemed Bines had made keys for Joe Walsh’s tractor-trailer. He knew when it would be filled with cigarettes, how much time it would take to drive those back roads in the night, when to do it.

  She’d heard that they drove to Pillar’s Isle. Joe Walsh was Jerry’s uncle and, because Jerry could not take the kind of calculated betrayal of him, he wanted to take the trailer back. They were to sell their cigarettes off to Vincent Paul, who was to sell them to a reserve in Quebec, but Jerry refused to allow it to happen.

  Both Buddy and Rils thought Jerry was stealing the cigarettes from them. And things became more and more difficult at Alvin’s house. Jerry simply said that no one was to touch the trailer until he said. And Gary Percy tried a different tack. He began to tease Jerry about being a hillbilly and about not being able to make up his mind.

  “You’ll find out when my mind is made up,” Jerry said.

  “Hillbilly,” Gary Percy said.

  “Ya,” Buddy countered, as if he’d just thought about it. “Hillbilly.”

  One night Mr. Rils said he was going to cut Timmy open and have a fish fry. He picked the poor old goldfish – that had long ago dropped most of its gold – out of the bowl and watched it wiggle. Everyone was too frightened of the man to say anything.

  But then Jerry, realizing it was the children’s pet, told Rils to put it back. Rils looked at him for a moment in the sweltering night air.

  “Put it back,” Jerry said. “Won’t be telling you no more – no more.”

  Rils put the fish back but Buddy began to say that it wasn’t Jerry’s house and he’d better not try that with him.

  Often Jerry would bring them in a salmon or a piece of moose meat, some game or present for the children.

  And of them all he liked Lucy the most. He liked her because of an incident that happened soon after he got to know her.

  Bines had come into the house to visit and was drinking a quart of wine. He was looking out the window and a fight started across the road between two men. Jerry watched this for a moment without much interest, but then the little girl, Hazel, who was sitting on his knee, started to cry.

  Jerry finished the wine, set the little girl down, and walked across the road. He hit one man over the head with the wine bottle, saying, “Stop makin noise.” And he turned and walked back to the house.

  By this time everyone in the house had scattered. The little girls – to Jerry, there always seemed to be a monstrous number of them – all ran to their back rooms and hid. Alvin also ran and when Jerry went back into the kitchen only Lucy was there. Jerry sucked at his bleeding right hand, and she ran to get something to wrap it.

  In Alvin’s home, during that summer that Buddy had brought Rils home, all the girls lay about in their bathing-suits but none of them ever seemed to get to the beach. The nearest beach was closed and long coats of slime came in with the tide. Frances walked about in her old housecoat, Buddy drank wine most of the day and shined his small car, and Alvin sat in the kitchen rubbing his hand across his balding head.

  There was a hint of things going wrong with the tractor-trailer. At first everything had been fine, but Gary Percy Rils was impatient to take his money and go home – the fourteen thousand dollars that he said was coming to him. But Jerry seemed to be balking at this.

  Jerry came in late at night and spoke to them, and sometimes Lucy would overhear the conversation.

  The heat was oppressive in the house and half the little girls slept naked on the beds. Old trees cast their shadow gloomily through the window.

  Jerry would sit on the couch in his jean jacket and pants, without a shirt, his sleeves rolled up halfway.

  He would say that Joe Walsh had a heart condition and he didn’t want him in any trouble.

  He stared at them and they stared back. Buddy would sit on the ladder-backed chair in the hallway, with its back against the stairwell.

  The old dog would hobble about between them, looking for Alvin, and then it would hobble out to its dish in the kitchen, near the sink, chomping on hard food, so that Buddy had nicknamed it Crunchface.

  Lucy would come to the top of the stairs on her tiptoes and listen.

  There was something about Buddy all summer. He kept tormenting Jerry.

  “You’re just scared of us,” he would say in the dark so that Lucy could only make out his legs as they moved to tip the chair.

  “Right,” Bines would answer, or sometimes he wouldn’t answer, the answer being made in a sort of cold silence.

  “Scared of that big Indian Vincent too,” Buddy would say. “I know who you’re scared of –” Buddy would continue, “– scared of Gary Percy. Scared of Gary Percy,” Buddy would say, as if it was a chant of a man on a rock in a storm. “Scared of that big Indian Vincent too–”

  The days were long and silent and hot and Lucy would do
her toes on the couch in the heat, while the baby, milk-white about the neck, slept with a heat rash on its cheeks, and the little girls, the heat making them blousy and sensuous, lay on the porch.

  No one ever seemed to sleep. People walked about the house day and night, while the children cried on their beds and Frances sat in the corner with her head cocked and her ankles blue listening to the fights.

  This is what Lucy remembered about that summer now. She never heard about the tractor-trailer afterwards except that, a week after the incident, Gary Percy Rils was caught trying to move it to Bathurst alone, and was sent to jail. And she did not know what happened to it.

  After that summer, Jerry’s wife never came back, and he lived alone with his grandmother.

  3

  It was June, ten months after Jerry Bines visited their camp. The man from the camp sat with Andrew and Andrew’s mother outside under the patio awning in the small subsection of town that had been known at one time as Skunk Ridge but which had grown more prosperous and tenaciously middle class. The man had fine grey hair, almost blue in the light of the sun, and he continued with his story about Jerry Bines.

  Andrew had not met Alvin or Lucy. He might have passed them a thousand times in the street, or walked by them in a store with his mother, or come upon them in a snowstorm as he walked home at night, and he would not know it.

  But he knew the Pillars. He had met Vera when she came to the house to get his mother to sign a petition against the leghold trap. He had seen her at the recital at school. She belonged to Women for Women, the action group his mother belonged to, and a group for the ethical treatment of animals.

  This was the woman who, people said, Jerry Bines had loved. And at the recital, while all the parents and children were standing in the hallway outside the auditorium, he wanted to get closer to her.

  Vera must have thought it strange that this little boy was slowly edging up to her, slipping sideways through the crowd, and then finally standing right next to her and craning his neck to look up.

  Her hair was thrust back and had spots of white in it. She had become locally famous, especially since she had published her book on Bines. The boy had wanted a copy of the book and they had gone down to the store but they couldn’t find one.

  “We sold it out, and there won’t be any new ones in until next month.”

  “Oh,” the boy said, disappointed. “I knew him, that’s all,” the boy said. “He was a friend of mine.”

  “A friend of yours?” the man said.

  “Yes,” Andrew said. “He was – a friend of mine.”

  Of course he romanticized Vera just as he had Bines. And he didn’t think she would be older than his mother. But to him she looked like a lady. And the book wasn’t called “Jerry Bines” as the boy thought it would be. It was called: The Victims of Patriarchy (and Its Inevitable Social Results), and it was not a hard-bound book with a glossy picture on the cover like the Hardy Boys. The book itself looked like a thick scribbler – and it looked as if it had been just printed by a typewriter. There was, however, a picture of Jerry Bines on the inside cover. And the book was riddled with words like “sexual deviance,” and “malfunction,” and “dysfunctional,” “hereditary masculine reaction,” “empowering,” “cross-addictive personality,” and “impacting” – all of which the boy stumbled over and became bored with. The worst of it was, to the boy, the book had no life. It did not show how Jerry Bines shook your hand.

  “The book was just to get back at her ex-husband, Nevin, for the emotional violence thing,” the man said. “That’s all. Anyway, I think the relationship between Jerry and Ralphie is more important in the end, to be the only friend Jerry had at the last.”

  Ralphie was to meet him twice in a row.

  Both meetings were peculiar to say the least.

  4

  Ralphie believed he had seen the last of him. During the middle of October he was working on behalf of the Kinsmen, collecting money for the Hospital for Sick Children in Halifax.

  One evening Jerry Bines was waiting for him when he came out of his shop. It was raining and cold. There was a slight fog in the earth. Jerry seemed nervous, or impatient. “You know where I live?” he said.

  “Yes, I think so,” Ralphie answered.

  “Well, I have something for you – so come up to supper – up to supper tomorrow night.”

  Jerry then mentioned something about his truck and never alluded to the supper again. But, for some reason, after Ralphie said that he could make it, Jerry looked very pleased with himself.

  He went to Jerry’s house the next night without telling Adele where he was going.

  Jerry’s grandmother lived upstairs, and Jerry lived alone downstairs. He opened the curtains when he saw Ralphie and waved.

  He had to put his two dogs away and then went to let Ralphie in.

  Bines sat down and focused his attention on Ralphie, and smiled slightly at him. The house was very nice – the downstairs was furnished in oak and pine; the chesterfield was at an angle to the bay window so you could watch the hummingbird feeder and the stream.

  “Workin today,” he said.

  Ralphie, for some reason, felt the discomfort of being under scrutiny. But Jerry Bines did not understand this.

  Jerry looked sideways and cocked his head as he spoke. His eyes never looked at Ralphie for long. When he caught a reaction to his look he would look away, to the side, with his arms folded, and speak out of the side of his mouth.

  “Like salmon?” Bines asked.

  “Yes,” Ralphie said, smiling.

  “Good. Gram is cooking salmon.”

  There was a silence. Ralphie could actually count ten seconds going by.

  “I have something for you,” Bines said finally. “In the back. What are you worried about – the dogs?”

  “No,” Ralphie said.

  “Dogs won’t touch you,” Bines said gently. And he smiled as if to reassure him.

  They got up and moved into the back room. It was huge and cold. The carcass of a buck deer was hanging, though deer season didn’t start for another two days. It seemed to startle Ralphie, the buck with its front legs stiff, the cool room.

  “Here you go,” Bines said. “For your little boys and girls.”

  In the corner were three wheelchairs.

  “I always liked children,” Jerry said. “I have a little boy.”

  He watched the expression on Ralphie’s face.

  “Little crippled boys and girls – it’s a shame,” Bines said, watching him quietly. “It’s good doing things for people,” he added quickly. “I always like to, anyways.” There was just a touch of hesitation in his last remark because he had been waiting for Ralphie to say something. And Ralphie knew this.

  But Ralphie did not know what to say or do. He looked at Bines and nodded, and started to speak but didn’t. He just looked at the chairs again, and the whole moment, instead of being a happy one, became a painful one.

  Bines then started to show Ralphie how they worked.

  “Foot-rest flips down right here,” he said. “Look – there’s a motor on this one –” He smiled as he sat in the motorized wheelchair. “Ha ha,” he said, “look at me.”

  Jerry laughed. Then he glanced at him, and got out of the wheelchair as if he had belittled his original intention. It was obvious that for a moment neither of them knew what to say – and then he motioned for Ralphie to go back inside. “Well, never mind them for now,” he said.

  When Ralphie left the room he could feel Bines’ eyes on the back of his neck.

  “They’re great, Jerry,” he said, turning around, and he almost fell when he turned. Jerry grabbed him, so quickly Ralphie didn’t even see the hand come out, and held him steady.

  “Well, never mind about them for now,” Jerry said.

  Bines never mentioned the chairs again. Ralphie then tried to talk about them enthusiastically, but Bines said nothing.

  When Ralphie woke the next morning he forgot how
he had gotten home. He stumbled from bed to look and see if the car was in the yard.

  Then he sat down in the chair in the corner of the room and tried to think. Daylight was breaking over the trees. The old school he had gone to as a child looked harsh and silent across the street.

  He had talked too much – it was Bines’ eyes resting upon him that made him. He had told Bines about himself – about the feasibility study he had done on an oil pipeline a few years ago. About its complete failure – and his complete failure.

  He had worked day and night for months on end, only to have all he did trivialized. And his data not used. It was a government-subsidized study, and they used data from a firm in the States that did not have the province’s interests at stake.

  Ralphie told him about this and the waste of a quarter of a million dollars, just to see if our own oil could be pumped to us. And they decided that it couldn’t – and that it was for the good of us if it was not. They had tried to get both the British and the Americans interested in Hibernia again.

  “I’d get even with them,” Jerry said matter-of-factly.

  “No, no,” Ralphie said, shrugging in a way which suggested that he actually could get even if he wanted to, and that he knew what getting even meant.

  But the strange thing Ralphie noticed was that Bines did not know where our oil came from. Then, of course, the feasibility study struck Bines as ludicrous. If we had oil in our own country, why buy it from somewhere else?

  For a moment he thought that Ralphie was joking with him, and it became very painful.

  “Who are these British and Americans to run and bull us?” Jerry said.

  “But it’s all true,” Ralphie said, mentioning the name of the man he had worked for.

  “Haaa,” Bines said abruptly, as if, if Ralphie laughed, then he would know he was fooling. “Haaa – oil pipeline,” he said. “Oil pipeline – pipeline,” he repeated, looking down and rubbing his pants. Then he glanced away cautiously.