For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (4 page)

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.

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.

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.

“If I hear anything about it I’ll let you know,” he added, because he always said that to people who admired him for being a powerful man. That is, he must have thought that Ralphie wanted his help in some way.

“I’ll let ya know,” he said again, nodding to no one in particular. But his eyes looked puzzled for a moment and he ran his thick callused hands through his hair, as if, for some purely instinctive reason, he felt he had to look more himself.

Vera’s ex-husband, Nevin White, looked like a little old man though he was only forty-five.

“Everyone tormented him, not always through design,” the man told Andrew. “It was in a way heroic that he stayed here – stayed in a room by the bridge.

“The reason he stayed in his unbearable room was for the sake of his daughter. Even when the custody battle was over. For two years he did not see the girl or speak to her. He was not allowed. But for those two years he watched her from a video he had made of her sixth birthday party. After those two years he was
allowed one Saturday a month on condition of Vera’s approval. At times Vera gave this approval, and at times she didn’t. And then, seeing a mark on Hadley’s bottom one afternoon, she accused him of incest. It was never proven.

“I knew Nevin at university,” the man continued. “I used to play a lot of bridge then. I never liked him, but now I would say there was something brave about him.

“He tried to take his own life in 1987. But it didn’t work. These things never do if you wake again in the morning.

“Pills are a rather womanish way to go in the face of so much violence on this river,” the man maintained. “And so people began to tease him and call him Aspirin-head.

“And yet it didn’t seem that way – that is, womanish (if we can use that term anymore); it didn’t seem that way. It only seemed that he was a broken man. And it might have been a defiant and even heroic act. Heroics have their own way of adapting.

“He moved from rooming house to rooming house, with his pictures of Hadley and his video. And then one afternoon in October of 1989 he was suddenly filled with new confidence and hope. Vera telephoned him, wanting to see him. And she sounded very pleasant. It took him a day to get up the courage to see her. To bathe and shave and iron his pants and shirt.”

The boy asked when in October this was, and the man said that it was the day of Jerry’s first visit to Vera’s
house. Jerry had missed meeting Nevin that day by twenty minutes.

“When Nevin got to the house he found out that Vera wanted only one thing, however – she wanted to change Hadley’s name to hers. Coldness always has its roots in sensible thought.

“Then she asked him if he would remove his hat. As yet she hadn’t looked at him. She was working on a computer, and staring at the screen, with earphones on.

“He took his hat off, sat down, and put it on his knee. He had never seen her working on a computer before, and he was bemused by this. He was bemused because he felt, like Jerry was to feel later on, that he had been left behind forever. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He had practised what he would say to her for an entire day, in just such a mirror, and now he hated his reflection. His hair was thin and drawn back into a ponytail, turning grey. It was as if he suddenly realized he had not moved in twenty years, while the world had spun away.

“When she finally glanced at him, he felt his lips begin to tremble and he looked away.

“He said ‘No!’ He wanted to leave Hadley’s name as it was. And then he said, in a confused state, that she had no right to ask him this. As soon as he said this he felt that she had turned against him forever – and that no matter what he did nothing could ‘turn back the page’ for him and Hadley. That he would go into the dark without either hand to hold. Vera’s hands were long and
mannish and yet he remembered only how gentle they could be.

“He held his hat clumsily in his hand and looked down at his cracked and blistered boots.

“‘You are being unreasonable,’ Vera said calmly, continuing to type away, looking at her computer screen – the final draft of an article on aboriginal hunting rights, and the land-track claims certain reserves here had.

“When he looked up Hadley was there on the stairs, listening. As always he wanted to see if she was wearing anything that he had bought her. He smiled, yet when he went to speak to her, she ran upstairs.

“Don’t be misinformed about it. Nevin didn’t pity himself. He hated himself. Worst of all he hated his own posturing, his lack of manliness, is what it came to. He remembered running away one night, from bullies, and leaving his first wife, Gail, alone on the street. While he hid. Back in 1970. All of us at the university knew about this. At the time people made a series of explanations for it, saying he was nonviolent, et cetera; but this only made us queasy later on. I don’t know how else to explain it.

“But don’t be fooled. In a way he was filled with integrity and so could never forget it. He had tried to make up for this act all of his life. And, in a way, it was this act which had caused him to leave his first wife and blame her for things she did not do. And finally take refuge in Vera’s domination of him – with the calculated pretence that this, in itself, was manly.

“Perhaps he was a man struggling to be brave in a world he did not understand. Once you run you almost always run forever.

“So even here he had to suffer the robust torment from teenaged boys. You take that when you are not perceived to be brave. What he had run away from in 1970, he was still haunted by today.

“But” the man said, “they had done an odious thing – they – those street kids who hung about the building – had broken into his small room and had stolen his
VCR
and, along with it, his video of Hadley. He knew who it was, but they didn’t give it back. And he, like so many people, was unwilling to go to the police. This was his own Golgotha, his Calvary – unknown, of course, to himself.

“The boys stealing his video set in him, within a matter of days, a strange insistence that it was all the fault of Jerry Bines. No one really understood why.

“And late at night, wearing his torn coat, a pair of dark heavy-rimmed glasses that were taped in the middle, and tan cowboy boots, he would make his way back to his room, lie on his cot smoking, and fall asleep with the television on.”

How did Bines and Nevin meet? They met through the inevitable wanderings, the man said. They were bound to meet because they missed each other by seconds so often. Nevin had moved his room six times in the last
three years, always within the space of a mile or less, very near to where Jerry stayed when he was in town.

They met at Alvin’s on October 17 – this was in the final police report. It had been pale all day and, by night, a few sharp tiny flakes of snow began to fall, near the school, and down over the great grounds.

Throughout the day of October 17, Nevin slept. He tried to sleep most of the day. It was almost dark when he got up.

In fact, the lights were on down the street, above the tavern. There was a little light off by a side shed.

He went downstairs to check his mail. He was waiting for a letter from his father, because he had written to him to ask for three thousand dollars. Then, moving across the street, he turned towards the Savoies’.