For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (13 page)

Bines glanced over at Lucy and then at Alvin as Rils told a joke that was not so much off colour as childish.

Rils said he wanted to go by Christmas eve – but he had a few people to take care of, and some money to collect. “Christmas eve,” Rils said. “That’ll give us time.”

Jerry tossed his head to one side and looked at the dog, who pitifully looked up at him thumping its tail.

Downstairs Alvin begged Bines to take him away.

“He can’t stay here,” Alvin said. “You have to take him – he’s your friend – your friend – your friend.” Alvin was close to tears and it was sad to see him crying in front of his children. Hazel stood behind him now, and could feel his legs trembling as he tried to smile. The old dog came over and sat near them, and gave a sad whine when it yawned.

Bines sighed and looked at Lucy. She too seemed to be worried, because the man upstairs was crazy. “He keeps talking about going out and killing an old woman or two – he says the world would be better off without a few old women. Or about getting the Pillars back. I don’t know why he talks like that for,” she said. “And we have a house filled with little kids here.”

“If he touches anyone in town, I’ll kill him,” Bines said as if to reassure them.

“Well, that’s all right for you to say – but it’s us who’ll be dead,” Alvin said. “Jesus – we have little girls here,”
Alvin whispered. “I might turn him in is what I might do.”

“No,” Bines said. “Go get him – tell him to come with me.”

Bines once again felt the power of his own personality surge through him because of what he had just said. But he also had nowhere to take Rils.

He had burned his camp for one reason only – so he would have no hiding place to offer. Now, to protect others, he felt he must find one.

Rils made Bines wait as he argued about leaving.

“No, I don’t want you to go – it isn’t me,” Alvin said, “but you’d be safer with Jerry.”

They came down the stairs twenty minutes later with Alvin leading the way, pale as a sheet and carrying two teacups in his hand to take into the kitchen, like a man who doesn’t want some guest and makes the appropriate gesture to clean up in front of him when he has hope enough in his leaving.

Rils’ expression had changed. He kept looking at Bines one moment and then looking away abruptly. Whenever Bines glanced at him he would notice Rils’ eyes flit past him, as cold in their blueness as Bines’ eyes ever were.

It was a look of absolute certainty of his betrayal at the hands of others, and instead of making him afraid, it gave him a frightening inquisitorial appearance, as if he were keeping score.

Bines called Rils Percy – a term of affection only a few people maintained with him.

And they left and walked out into the iron-smelling snow.

Their first falling out had been over the tractor-trailer, the man said, and now they had come to the second falling out – as soon as they got outside you could feel it between them.

The snow was coming out of the dark; the lumber sat off along the wharf, covered by snow. All the buildings were dark, their slanted roofs casting shadows on the white earth, as it was when Jerry was a little boy.

The argument came because Mr. Rils wanted to rob Mr. Pillar – that was the statement given by Lucy Savoie to Constable Petrie, in her meeting with him on January 3. The idea Jerry had was to get Rils some money, and to get him off the river. But he pretended there was nothing in Ralphie Pillar’s shop that they could possibly steal. “Who am I to be interested in computers,” he scoffed.

He pleaded ignorance of all the new world that was fast coming upon him to save Ralphie.

“Computers are worth a lot – computers are worth a lot,” Gary said. “We could take half a dozen or so.”

They went out into the snow, toward the truck, and became at that moment figures of some greatness, said
the man. You can still almost see their breath in the dark, as the chimney smoke bit away.

Perhaps, the man said, Jerry was displeased that he was protecting those whom he now felt he would never belong to.

Perhaps he was displeased that, in actual fact, he was risking his own child to protect all of them who were at that moment asleep in their beds.

Why did they become figures of some greatness? the boy asked.

Because, the man said, they had become combatants in a life and death struggle, both deciding in breath and brain, more glorious than all the computers that had ever existed, their chances for one more day.

They went into the snow.

They got into the truck and drove away.

“I want to stay at your camp,” Rils said.

“Don’t have a camp,” Bines answered. “Something happened – it burned.”

Rils looked at him a moment, and then looked away.

They turned along the road, and drove outside of town.

“You can stay in my grandfather’s barn,” Bines said, after a long silence. He knew from that moment Rils had become his problem once again.

He left Rils in his grandfather’s barn. Although Vera’s research was done Jerry had to visit her once again.
Coldly self-sufficient, she had no idea he would come back and want to revise the story he wrote. He went to her office. To her this was a terrible imposition. She told him politely that she was very busy.

“Good,” he smiled. “Busy – keep you out of trouble.”

She looked up from her desk and nodded. “This is Christmas, it’s always the worst time of year –”

“Ya,” he said, “worst time – right – worst time.”

“There’s more family violence during Christmas than at all other times during the year,” she said.

“Well, that’s no good.”

“No, it isn’t,” she said, in a slight voice of reprimand. “So anyway–” she paused, and nodded to someone outside her office door, which made Jerry turn slightly.

Jerry nodded at the person outside her door and looked back at her, and Vera got up and closed the door.

“Jerry, you don’t need to come here every day.”

“I didn’t know I did.”

“Well, I mean almost every day. I have serious work to do.”

“Well,” Jerry said, “I was thinking that if I’d get my story – there are things I would change – about it. I didn’t get it right all the time – and –”

“Oh,” Vera said, startled. “That. Well, I don’t know where it is.”

“Oh,” Jerry said. “Ya lose it – lose it, did ya? I could write you another one – lose it?”

“No, I’ve not lost it. I’ll look for it and send it along to you. I’m not trying to steal your story, Jerry.”

“Steal my story –” Jerry nodded, almost embarrassed. “Why in fuck would anyone want to do something like that?”

It was growing dark on the street. His life had been nothing. His first wife was now a stripper in a bar in Calgary. His second wife had left him and to him Vera was someone almost untouchable, a part of the world he would occasionally glimpse and swipe at, like a cat at an ascending bird.

He still wanted to explain something. He didn’t know why. And Vera sensed this.

“You must have hated your dad very much,” Vera said.

“Oh, no,” he said, his eyes shining, “I never did.”

But he knew at that moment that she simply did not believe him.

“I never did,” he said. “Never did.”

“That’s a natural reaction,” Vera said. “You just have to realize that he’s no longer worth protecting.”

Bines looked at her. It seemed as if the very things he had wanted to make her see had been mistaken or misconstrued. The chasm between them had grown not lessened.

“What you want to protect,” she said, “is the male line, that’s all. But when the truth gets said it’s always painful – especially when you discover it does not agree with your former notions.”

“I have no notions,” Bines said.

“Well, you certainly have some idea that you told on someone – and you don’t like it. You probably always protected your father – your mother probably protected him as well. It’s natural now to feel guilt.”

Suddenly he realized he was being used for something much more complex than he ever realized. He never would understand this fully, and would go into the dark groping for it.

“Why do you want your boy’s name changed?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Bines said. “Seems like a good idea.”

“You want to get rid of your father’s name,” Vera said. “You want to stop the bleeding – that’s why –”

And she smiled that certain smile that was present one moment and gone the next. A smile that was always controlled and said that the truth of the moment was to her the truth of all time.

All of her life Vera had gone from one religion to another asserting herself as its principal devotee. All his life Bines was searching for some notion of God, without ever having a concept of why he was.

Chekhov once wrote about a kiss, how it altered a soldier’s life, how it made him dream of a rendezvous with someone he never knew. How he travelled back later only to see the faded emptiness of the house, the absolutism of reality.

Bines had brought Vera a present that visit.

“I almost forgot,” he said, as he took it out of his parka.

“I can’t take this,” she said.

“Oh, it’s nothin –” he said. “Christmas – for Christmas.”

He was angered that she did not want it. He might too have been a little surprised that she did not have a Christmas present for him. He shrugged and placed it on the table. He had assumed perhaps with licence that she must have had a great affection for him when she asked him about his life. And now he sat in the chair glancing sideways, his head cocked to the right.

She looked behind him, to the waiting client outside and nodded, and Bines turned about and nodded also.

Then he turned back and looked at her.

“Jerry, I should tell you I’m involved.”

“Involved – in what?” Jerry said.

“I mean I have a friend – he’s studying Environmental Marine Biology in Halifax. Hadley and I are moving down in August if all goes well. He’s second-generation Chinese Canadian – so he certainly knows about stereotyping.”

She said this to prove that she knew other men with greater problems than Jerry Bines, problems that could in fact involve the court of world conscience.

“Environment – that there is what Ralphie is interested in. That there – environment.”

“Yes,” she said. She seemed distracted by this.

Bines looked at her and smiled.

“I knew that’s what Ralphie is interested in,” he said as if to please her.

There was a long silence.

“If we got our oil there – we’d perhaps be better off,” he said. And then he added: “I was just wondering there if you want to go for coffee.”

“Oh, I can’t go now,” she said. “I’m up to my chin in work.”

“Up to yer chin,” Bines said. But he did not know how to say anything else. He carried his left hand crooked against his side, and he was bleeding in his left lung, so that when he breathed his breath came short and pained.

Later on, Vera was to relate this episode to people on occasion.

She got to her feet first and started towards the door. And Bines stood and brushed against her. Then he bent over suddenly and kissed her, not on the mouth, but on the side of the face, roughly, and held her to him for a second, so her breasts flattened against his parka.

She drew back startled. A look of humiliation swept over her face, clouding her expression.

Bines stepped back and wiped his mouth.

“It was the most brutal thing I’ve ever experienced,” Vera later said. “The least appreciative of the true nature of affection between a caring man and woman.” But she felt she had to say this, and it was what others would expect her to say.

The boy’s uncle maintained that none of the Pillars ever saw Bines again. But the other man stated that he was discounting the strangest event of all:

Ralphie was sleeping. Adele was curled up beside him. It was about 1:00 in the morning on December 17.

There was only the light of the street in the room. And a thaw had come, which had made the ground foggy. It rose over the trees and parted against a glassy sky. Lights from the street cast down feebly through the dark near the old schoolhouse.

Adele woke. To her dread she felt the presence of someone across the room on the far side of the window, sitting on the French chair in the corner by their blue coverlet. It was the dread of an apparition in a room late at night, like you have when you are a small child.

Bines was drinking a quart of wine. He seemed more happy to see them, than she was to see him.

It was as if he were a shadow from some other space and time, which had come back from the past, and was looking in upon a future where he did not belong, dismayed at being cast out and having to perform a task in order to rest. He was in darkness, so that his hands looked as if they were cast in the same mould as his jacket.

And like someone seeing an apparition, she was uncertain if he were there or if she were deluded by
night terrors in the form of shadows playing upon the objects in a room.

Later she thought he had whispered something but she could never be certain. Everything had the vague substance of a dream, and when she woke up later it was morning, and a pale cold light slanted into the corner where he had been.