For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (5 page)

As Nevin went out Bines was in a building down the street.

Bines had heard that Gary Percy had escaped from jail and he wanted to know if it was true. He had come to ask a friend.

“I heard the same thing,” his friend said.

In the back room there were hundreds of videos, movies of all descriptions.

The walls were heavy and paint-chipped. At the far end of the roof there was a hole, and you could hear pigeons thick in the autumn air, and a feather or two stuck against the tin siding’s rivets. This was once a video-games room but was now being cleared out. It was a building that would become something else. Jerry
tried to think of what it would become and then forgot about it.

The man who owned it, Abrey Smith, was the only man Jerry admired and wished he had become – to control money and assets and small-town politics – but he had not become this.

This was something, as Loretta Bines told Constable Petrie three months later, that Bines was either lesser than or greater than – but could never be.

“Maybe they’ll catch him before he gets here,” the man said, about Gary Percy.

“Jail, ya – good fuckin place for him,” Jerry said.

Jerry went out into the dark, ten minutes after Nevin. He turned in the same direction, along the same battered street.

So this is how they met, the man said: Lucy wore one of Jerry’s old jean jackets. She had a Sunoco hat on her head. Her winter boots were wrinkled like an accordion on her legs, and her breasts were small, and pointed sharply against her light sweater.

Nevin was at the house, rolling a cigarette out of his Drum tobacco, and being very officious about doing this. Finishing rolling his smoke, he lit it and sat back with his feet crossed on the table. The wind blew outside, and it was dark. Bines came in and shut the door behind him and, noticing Nevin, said nothing. It was perhaps the first time they had met face to face,
although no one could be sure. Nevin had been on the jury that had acquitted Bines.

Jerry asked Alvin something – and then looked in the fridge for a beer.

“No beer, Frannie,” Jerry said. “No beer here?”

“No beer,” Frances said.

Jerry seemed annoyed by this and everyone was silent.

“I can get some beer,” Nevin said, startled by his own voice.

“Get us some beer, then,” Alvin said.

Nevin stood up.

“Sure, I can get some beer – I can get some. I’ll have to walk,” he said. “It might take a while. Lucy, will you come with me?”

Lucy said no, but Jerry looked at her and nodded his head.

“Oh, I suppose,” she said.

And they left the house.

They went down the dark street, the man continued. The autumn night was bitter. The streets were bare, except for a slick of black ice here and there.

Lucy coughed into her hand and buttoned her jacket up, and glanced sideways at him, her arms folded across her jean jacket as they moved.

They went to his apartment and he furtively opened the tin box, where he kept his money. Some people thought he had a lot of money. Then he went to the
liquor store and bought a case of beer and some wine, and they went back to the house.

Jerry was sitting in the same place, with a parka and sleeping bag at his feet. Nevin had seen this parka and sleeping bag in Alvin’s closet before. But, the man maintained, Alvin had always mysteriously refused to allow Nevin to wear the parka, though he wanted to desperately. And now the mystery that had surrounded them was gone. They were Jerry’s.

The wine Nevin bought had a cork, but no one had a corkscrew.

A breeze blew against the window, and smoke from chimneys trailed away or was snapped in two, scattering beneath the stars.

Jerry wore a parka himself, with a toque on his head, and an old knitted beige sweater. The one thing everyone noticed was how proportionately strong his body looked.

“I’ll run back to my apartment and get my corkscrew,” Nevin said.

Nevin walked by him, and Jerry moved his foot slightly to let him pass. For some reason Nevin thought that this was some form of reprimand. He thought of the young boys who had stolen his video of Hadley and resolved never to mention them to anyone.

He ran home once again. Out of breath, he took all his utensils out and looked at them over and over and over – three forks, four spoons, four knives.

Finally he went back to the house, dejected.

The wine bottle was opened on the table, and half-empty. Jerry had opened it with his buck-knife.

Nevin went back and sat down in the corner. Now and again he would smooth his hair with his yellowish fingers, and sniff because his nose was running. He took a beer and sipped on it.

Although he didn’t speak initially, after a while he began to say things, and the more he drank the less he was able to control what he said.

The next morning he felt that he had said something terrible, though he couldn’t be sure. Like always, he went about his room searching for cigarette butts.

Then, as always, a vague picture began to take shape. A hand, a noise in the corner, Lucy saying no, a person looking at him as he spoke, and he began to realize something.

It was the parka and sleeping bag. He kept asking Jerry if he could have the parka, since Jerry had his video of Hadley. And Bines had tried to ignore him. But when he went to reach for the parka under the chair, Bines had reached his hand over and squeezed his wrist. That was all – the hand coming out to stop him from picking up the parka. And yet it seemed to Nevin emblematic of everything that was going to happen.

Later that day Nevin, still drinking, went back to see Lucy and Alvin. His hair was tied in a ponytail at the
back, and he wore a pair of gumboots over his pants. The air was clear and raw and had stayed that way all day. Although the
TV
was on, and all the children were crowded about watching, Nevin took no interest in this. He was bothered by a problem.

The problem was not thought out, yet it was heavy upon him. Why did he feel more guilty about the sins he had done in his life than Jerry felt about what he had done. Why was this? Who was happier? Who was more at ease?

He sat for a while not speaking, and not able to look at anyone. In fact, all he did was stare at a part of the old chair, where, he remembered, Jerry had sat the night before. Then suddenly he decided to tell Frances and Lucy what he knew about Jerry, thinking that they themselves wouldn’t know.

“He has a bad reputation,” he said. “He has a little boy who has leukemia and he doesn’t provide for him. He robbed more than one family here.”

“Who says?” Lucy asked. Her eyes were fixed upon him and there was a curious, cold smile on her face. The breakfast dishes were still sitting on the table and Frances was sitting beside them, her head cocked in a peculiar way, as if she did not know whether to laugh or not.

“Oh, it’s what I heard,” he said. “So it’s best if we stay away from him.”

Frances coughed and looked scared at this remark.

“Well,” Nevin said, as if he did not want to upset
anyone. “I’m certain he stole my video of Hadley – still, no one wants you to be mean to him. It’s how he was brought up.” And then he turned to Frances and said: “It’s bad for your mother to have him around too, Lucy.”

“Jerry’s dad was Frannie’s brother,” Lucy said quietly.

“Oh,” Nevin said. He looked over at Frances who had her head cocked slightly. And he blushed. Then he felt cold.

“Jerry’s dad was wounded in Korea,” Lucy said. “In fact, he was disabled because of that – and Jerry took care of him the best he could.”

“Oh,” Nevin said. “Is that the way it goes?” He remembered now that the man Jerry had shot in 1986 was Buddy Savoie.

And suddenly he looked about the little brown room. There were tea stains all over the wall where Alvin had thrown his cups when he got mad at the children – especially on Sundays. There was a long picture on one wall of a regiment of soldiers, and another of a man in an air-force uniform standing in the park.

“Oh,” Nevin said. “Well, still – that doesn’t excuse Jerry, does it?”

“Nothing excuses anyone,” Lucy said. “When my dad touched a wire and lost his arm Jerry was the one to climb the tower at Millbank and get him down.”

“Yes,” Nevin said, upset with himself, “well, we all climb towers, don’t we –”

The old dog, with its back matted with fur, and one
ear chewed off, and its face carrying a perpetual look of dishonour, hobbled down the stairs and clicked across the tiled floor wagging its tail miserably. This, and the pictures of the soldiers, made Nevin feel uncomfortable, as if he should get up and leave.

A man can be born anywhere and go anywhere. But to live your life in a place far from where you are born, it’s best to be in a city. A man ending up in a small town, as Nevin had, is readily adrift.

He stood to go, his ponytail hanging flat against his neck.

As far as Bines was concerned he had nothing to do with Nevin. He did not know or care about him.

“Vera’s ex-husband or something,” he would say. “Ya, I’ve seen him. He was on the jury that let me go.”

He did not particularly like him and he did not like his ponytail, but he didn’t care what he did. The principal things that Nevin remembered were with Bines all passed over. (The hand reaching out to stop him from taking a parka, opening his wine with a buck-knife.) But then there was the idea of the video. Nevin had been telling people that Bines had his video of Hadley.

Bines was angry at this but he had gone into town to find out about it. Within a half-hour he had the video in his possession.

Then he told Lucy to go over to the apartment and take Nevin his video back.

“Give him his video back – it’s all he had of that little girl.”

“Oh dammit,” Lucy said, “why didn’t he get it back for himself?”

Bines knew Lucy did not like Nevin – but he was Vera’s ex-husband and Vera had been nice to him, so he wanted to take no sides. Besides, the boys had tormented Nevin about the video long enough – and it was time to give it back.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with Constable Petrie,” he told Alvin suddenly. “I say hello, how are you, and the next day he’s up at my house with a dog looking for cocaine and a shotgun pointed at my head, with Gram trying to hit him with a broom. That’s no good.”

He took the video out of his pocket and placed it on the table, then drummed his fingers softly.

“You take that down to Nevin,” he said to Lucy, nodding at his own generosity.

Always with Bines, one action should prove everything. He was giving the video back not for Nevin but for Vera. When Vera found this out she would like him – and therefore, he conjectured, write a better story about him. He did not consciously think this – until later on – but he felt pleased when he placed the video down.

“He’s been after me for years,” he said.

“Who?” Alvin said.

“Petrie – I done nothin to him.”

“I know, I know,” Alvin said, but he smiled slightly.

It was the smile of someone who is happy that misfortune has happened to someone else. In fact, Jerry had suspected Alvin of informing Petrie on him more than once.

“Lucy,” Jerry said, just as Lucy was going out the door. Lucy turned to him. Her hat was pulled down over her eyes, her hair was tossed up under it. She had three studs in each ear. “Tell Nevin not to bother me no more,” he said simply. “No more.” And this immediately erased Alvin’s annoying smile.

Jerry went out to his truck, as the first snow fell against the flat grey windows on the street. A week passed before anyone saw him again.

By June the air was still and great fields of hay lay hot in the sun near the stream that smelled of small fish and flat rocks and the bittersweet longing scent of shale gravel under the bridge.

Andrew did not know how close he was to the centre of the conflagration until his mother’s boyfriend – that is, the man who had taken him to the camp last September – told him.

“Oh, he lived right over there,” the man said.

“He did?”

“Right across the river in that white house.”

There was nothing about the house one way or the other that looked unusual or spectacular. There were
some flat boards out back lying in the small triangle between the shed and the back door. There was a back porch, where Bines supposedly unwrapped his eyes at 3:00 on the morning he came from the hospital.

“And that’s where Rils came in to shoot him,” the boy said excitedly.

“No – that wasn’t here – that was at his wife’s house.”

The heat made the air soundless and sweet and the branches were filled with new leaves. The boy’s mother had just bought him a fishing rod, so the man could take him out fishing, and he felt sorry for them both – felt sympathy for his mother for buying him this rod and sorry too for the man.

Andrew’s uncle had come with them today. And the two men began to discuss Bines.

The boy looked over at the house. Its back window was closed. Some shrubs sat in the warm air, and under the blue sky they could see a bird-feeder on a stick.

“How long was Mr. Rils in town?” the boy asked, trying to bait a hook, and sound grown up, and watching as the worm dangled into the water and then was swept into the eddies a few feet away.

“Oh, a week or two.”

“Last December.”

“And Vera found out and became angry with Bines.”

“No, Vera never knew much about what was going on,” the uncle maintained.

The whole idea the two men spoke about was that Bines had somehow reached toward another world,
Vera’s world, and had for a moment tried to divorce himself from the world he was in. Now one of the men countered that that too was a falsehood. And Vera knew this.

And they went over point by point what Jerry gave and what he would want for it. If he gave kindness he would want devotion.

The boy had not seen Bines much at all.

Last fall Bines had come into the camp again to help them retrieve a moose. There was sleet in the air and the trees were dark. The men had searched for the moose all afternoon and then one of them had gone to get Jerry to help. He arrived at about 10:00 that night.

“Who shot it?” Bines had said.

“I did,” the boy’s uncle said.

“How many?”

“How many what?”

“How many times did you hit it?”

“Only once.”

“What were you using?”

“A .308.”

“Well, that would bring it down – bring it down,” Jerry said. “Anyway,” he said, “we’ll go find the calf – because the calf won’t leave it.”

The men hadn’t thought about the calf, and when they got into the trucks for the long ride back to the chopdown everyone was silent.

Jerry took a light from his truck and went into the
woods and walked for about fifteen minutes about the perimeter.

“It’s over here,” he said, and then he told the boy’s uncle to bring him the gun.

Now, as the boy thought back to that night, and how it had stormed later on, he thought about how the talk centred on Jerry’s wife, Loretta Bines.

“He brought her down a long way,” someone said, as the boy lay in his bunk. “What a kind, sweet little girl she was –”

“His first wife – no one hears of her anymore – he took them both down.”

And again the boy felt uneasy lying there in his bunk safe and warm, and he felt that Jerry Bines was outside of life.

When he asked about this now the man told him that no one was outside of life.

“Some people just have more of a chance than others, and some just have to take the chances that they have. I know a lot of people who were more unfortunate than Jerry Bines, who turned out much better –”

The day was warm and filled with new life, and it was only June, which meant he had the whole summer to go.