For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (11 page)

It was now the middle of December.

In the darkness a man of medium height and build, about fifty to fifty-five with greying hair and a sharp, somewhat impressive face, with very pale blue eyes that were somewhat sunken into his head, made his way along a street in town. He had a false
ID
and two hundred dollars in jewellery in his pocket that he himself had calculated to be worth much more. His name was Gary Percy Rils.

He had been wanted on a Canada-wide warrant for the last six months, for escaping custody and a murder committed in Sudbury, and though summer had been fine, now he was cold and tired. There was over a
bootful of snow on the ground. He wore shoes and thin grey socks, and suit pants that the wind cut through.

He was the darker square of the jigsaw, the most oppressive in his disregard for the life of others, and the most vindictive in his sense of self-perpetuation.

He moved into the derelict lot and sat for a while on an oil barrel. Seeing a police car drive by he gamefully waved to the constable, who nodded back, and, lighting a cigarette, looked back over his shoulder at some noise on the road above him. The small trees that were once here had disappeared. The earth had the smell of cinder and wet snow. He had just walked through the woods about one half-mile and it had frightened him.

In all ways over the last twenty-five years he had become a city boy – and yet something compelled him to believe that this was where to be. He had had no idea an hour ago that he would make it here and be sitting in this old derelict lot. But this is where he now was.

Across the street a tiny light shone out from the house, and a wind started. The sky was brutally clear, the streetlights glimmered.

He had been Buddy’s friend since they met in Dorchester in 1976, and this is where sanctuary would be for a while. He made his way across the street and knocked, quickly kicking the snow from his flat, soaking shoes.

The knock was answered by a shuffle inside, as if a disturbance had been interrupted, and finally the door opened. A soft light shone on his face.

“Oh,” Alvin said. He said nothing more for a
moment, and it was as if he were wondering whether or not he could close the door and lock it before the man put his forearm in, which he had started to do.

Rils’ face was one of those faces which, in the light of a room, demonstrated a total invariable of expression. It was simply cold.

“Hello, Alvin,” Gary Percy said as he came in. His fine hair was soaking and stuck in three separate ropes against the back of his neck. Sticking from his jacket were two or three small boughs, which he had placed inside to keep warm.

He glanced about the room. Over in the corner, curled up and watching him, while she smoked a cigarette – like young people do, with the affectation of someone older and wiser – was Lucy. She had been in bed for three or four days, as she was every month at this time, and was now just coming around.

The man nodded in her direction, and the faint flicker of a smile passed over his face. Frances hobbled in from the other room, and looked at him. She had a sore ankle from where Alvin had kicked it. For his part he hadn’t meant to kick her but he had gambled away some money of theirs on the machines and everyone at the tavern – or those he put the most stock in – had teased him, and when he came home he took it out on her.

Alvin had been walking around the room, finishing up the beer left over from the night before, when the
man knocked, and he was telling the children that they were all to go out and get jobs. When the knock came on the door he had thrown a shirt over his back to hide his stump – which he hardly showed to anyone outside the family.

When Gary Percy came in, Alvin looked cautiously at his daughters and said nothing. But his face looked as if he had just taken a hit in the mouth.

However, regaining his composure, though his hand was trembling as he held it out for the man to take, he smiled as if a trick had just been played on someone and he had been a part of it, and thought that it was a fine thing.

“How did you make it here?” he said in a voice a little too enthusiastic, so he tried to look suspicious at the same time.

“I’ve been around here for a month,” the man said, “though they don’t know.” And he tossed his head as if to indicate the police. But this was a lie, though it didn’t matter.

Lucy caught what she always caught about men when they came to the house, and which she had caught since she was a little girl, that is, whether these men were weak or strong. And she could see by the way her father looked that this man was strong and even more so than Jerry Bines. She had known this before.

She sat up and looked at him. From far away she looked like her cousin Adele, except there was no great
softness of her features that enhanced her looks. She was beautiful or would be, there was no doubt about that.

Rils sat down on the edge of a chair and looked about. The wind blew outside and the old house seemed to crack and move. The lights themselves flickered slightly.

“Where’s Jerry?” he asked, and again Lucy looked over at him cautiously, and lit another cigarette.

“I haven’t seen him,” Alvin said.

“Tell him I want him,” he said, and he glanced over at Frances, who stood in the same position she had when he came in.

“Well, I don’t know where he is.”

Then Alvin told him that Jerry spent most of his time now with Ralphie Pillar – hanging around with the judge’s son. Gary Percy said nothing about this for a moment. “Has he got religion or money?” he said finally.

“I think he had a little of both,” Alvin said, suddenly realizing disgust at Bines.

The man shrugged, but his small eyes glittered in an immobile darkness. All the children, who were sitting in small rows on the stairway, all those blonde and brownheaded little girls, who had been born in this household and were now waiting for Christmas to come, watched him. They all noticed the cheap watch on his wrist, because its imitation gold glittered somewhat.

“He might be here tomorrow night,” Frances said.

“Oh, he still designs to come here, does he –” Gary Percy said. And the whole family laughed, even the little girls on the steps.

Lucy then stood and walked by him with her blanket wrapped about her, because she was almost naked under it.

She turned and looked back over her shoulder for a second, and then went upstairs to her room.

The thing was she had no love for Gary Percy Rils. She thought only of warning Jerry Bines.

Lucy got dressed later and went out through the old back hallway which slanted, and down the back stairs with a door at the bottom. She stole away in the dark and crossed the picket fence.

She went to Ralphie’s shop and looked through the glass. There was no one there. The stars were out and it was cold.

Boys on the street whistled to her.

“Hey Luc—cy,” they said.

“Piss off,” her answer was.

She made her way through the small gate at the side of the brick shop and along a narrow street grown more narrow with snow until she reached the highway, and then she cut across the graveyard in a hurry.

In ten minutes she was at a small house above the
tracks where a group of boys, and one or two girls, were sitting smoking and talking.

“Where’s Jerry?” she asked.

No one had seen him.

She waited in the house a moment because she was cold. Ice had formed on the window outside.

Then she turned and walked back down over the hill. It was after eleven at night and she had no idea what to do. Her boots made a soft echo of late night as she walked along the street, and the lights in the houses were out.

When she got back to her own street she saw Jerry’s truck coming in the other direction slowly. He flashed his lights and she ran up to him.

“Gary is here,” she said.

He nodded and looked out the window.

She got into the truck and he began to drive.

“I have to get him off the river,” he said. “Do you know where there’s any money?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“At the house.”

“Well, he can’t stay there – Alvin’ll get drunk and start blabbing it all over town – I have to be away but I’ll be there when I can – when I can.”

He left her at the corner, and, turning his truck quickly about, he drove off.

The man who had been at the camp with Andrew came back with them to the house for breakfast.

It was now July. The screen door let in a breeze that was almost forlorn. The street was hot though, and the great shrubs had turned brown at their tips.

Andrew was at the age where he was beginning to discover that intellectual beliefs did not always match action and that sins were sometimes overcome by personal attributes.

When he thought back to that night at their camp, and the wind and rain blowing across the thousands of puddles that filled and dotted the muddy roadway, he remembered Jerry Bines more than anyone else, and his handshake that seemed at once so powerful and vulnerable. The boy also had gone downtown to find a strap for his watch that was just like Bines’ – but he couldn’t find one. This was because the watch belonged to another age and another time, an age that was being swept away and replaced by a new age. Jerry Bines had belonged to that former age.

Bines had blown up his camp so Rils couldn’t use it. He knew he was coming. He had known it for two months or more. He kept a shotgun in the house, loaded at all times. He knew Rils might follow him, so he did not go back to his wife’s house except late at night.

What had happened at Jerry’s camp? He went to set off the propane and it blew him backwards through the
door. That night back in September when he came to their camp – that was the first night that he knew that Rils was coming.

Going through the camp door had made him lame in his left arm, bleed in his left lung.

He hid it as well as he could and for most of the time he stayed at home. Once he set up a bear trap in the back porch and wired his shotgun so it would go off if anyone opened the door. Then he would make phone calls to his wife.

“How’s Willie?” he would whisper.

“Is that you, Jerry?”

“I want you to take the boy and go over to Fredericton to live with your sister.”

“I can’t do that, Jerry, they want nothing to do with us – they disowned me –”

“When did they disown you – disown you?”

“When I married you. They don’t want to look at the boy, they don’t speak to me.”

If Christ had shed a drop of blood for every sin in the world, as Andrew believed, he must have shed a pint and a half for Jerry Bines. The whole idea, as he heard while busying himself with his Nintendo game that July morning in the small quiet house in the middle of a subdivision, of the bear trap and the shotgun being wired was worth an enormous amount of blood.

He had gone to his catechism priest to ask him about this.

“A drop of blood,” the priest said, “for every sin.”

“But there is a whole bunch of sins,” the boy said. “A whole lot of them.”

“So,” the priest said, “now you know how much Jesus suffered.”

“I can’t understand it, we only have a few dozen pints of blood or something like that there – I mean
don’t
we?”

“Oh yes, but now you’re trying to reason with God. That’s like the man who never thinks of Christ but reasons with God when times get bad and asks questions.” And the priest smiled at his own answer, which increased his self-esteem as light came into the basement of the church.

Rils had been waiting in Alvin’s house. He hardly moved from the upstairs bedroom where they had put him. But once in a while when someone came up those stairs he would say: “Jerry.”

The person would pass on, or say something in a quiet voice to assure him it was not, and he would be quiet again. He had no money except for the jewellery, so he had given it to Alvin to sell for him at the tavern. Alvin, of course, to please him, had told him he had never seen such fine jewellery. There were a few stubby rings and an old watch and two bracelets with the name D. Henniker and the date 1982 on one. The other one was a tainted gold piece that had a broken clip,
and which had dangled over Rils’ fingers when he handed it over.