Stolen Life (40 page)

The telephone rang; it was Erna at the hospital. Sounding pretty bad. Had her cheque come in? No. Could Yvonne bring her some cigarettes? Sure.

Baby had run out with a swarm of vegetable diggers, and Chuck was coming out of the living room. Looking angry.

“That was Erna,” Yvonne said to him. And she felt a chill through her: had she seen him—she was looking so hard at Baby, but out of the corner of her eye—had she seen him leering at her baby’s naked bottom?

“Erna admitted she’s a drunk,” Chuck muttered. “She’s got no brains, and admits it. I can respect that about her. She’s trying to help herself anyways.”

Dwa had the van, so Chuck drove Yvonne to a house Dwa had painted to pick up a cheque for his work, over $400. The
IGA
knew her
well, and she cashed the cheque there when she bought groceries for supper and cigarettes, then they went to the liquor store and she bought a bottle of Southern Comfort as a special for Dwa, and more beer. In Erna’s room in the new red-brick hospital off Northmount Drive, she opened the whisky and poured some into a Tupperware container, but Erna shook her head, no, she could only have cigarettes. They talked a bit, then Chuck drove Yvonne back through downtown, between the old false-front and brick businesses and the line of peaked grain elevators along the railroad track, back to her little house among the trees on the corner of the dead-end across from the park and Parkdale School.

“I told you,” Chuck said suddenly, “I don’t like kids. And women are bitches, good for nothing but a fuck—but you’re different. I respect you. You have a mind, you’re not just a cunt.”

Chuck bothered Yvonne. How could he not, saying such gross things? And from his tone and repetition really meaning them. Yet to her he was courteous, even opening the car door for her, which no one ever did.

When she had first seen him standing outside the liquor store with two bags of heavy bottles, and she had remembered the teaching: if you see someone in need, help them, for some day you too will need help.

So she offered him a ride then and he gladly accepted. He tried to climb into the bucket seat of her Dodge van, but her Baby was already sitting there, so he had to pick her up to sit down. And then he held her far away from him, as if she might contaminate him. She asked him what was the matter.

“I don’t like kids,” Chuck said.

“Why not?”

“I like them better if they’re someone else’s,” he said. Which she found odd: her Baby was “someone else’s.” “Me and kids just clash.”

He passed the little girl over to Yvonne, and she sat on her lap, helping her drive.

Yvonne dropped Chuck in front of a bungalow; she didn’t even notice the address.

“That was my only meeting before with him,” Yvonne wrote later.

But now, Erna had walked into her house with him, and the same night had to commit herself to the hospital.

It appears to me, now, that Chuck was much better acquainted with Yvonne’s house than she realized. It was not until four months later, at the preliminary inquiry into Chuck Skwarok’s death, that Yvonne heard that late the night before, 13 September—or the fourteenth, as perhaps it was already past midnight—Chuck and his cousin Lewis Bonham had driven around looking for a party, any party. Bonham testified that Chuck had been certain that there’d be one at Yvonne’s, but when they got there the house was dark. Chuck stopped anyway, got out, and went up to try the porch door. It was open—Yvonne says that’s impossible, they were at home, and at night she always locked the door—but Chuck didn’t go in. Instead, Bonham testified, he came back down the porch steps, stopped, looked around, and then opened his pants and pissed against the spruce tree.

Yvonne knew nothing of this when Chuck took her home from visiting Erna at the hospital. She simply thanked him as she got out; he grunted, said again he’d come by later “when the men were home,” and then his old hatchback grumbled away.

Shirley Anne was watching them, sitting on the porch steps. She looked angry. And coming up the walk with her shopping bags, Yvonne was suddenly, startlingly, aware of silence.

“Where are the kids?”

Shirley Anne took her own sweet time answering, and Yvonne strode up to her.

“Hey? Where?”

“I sent all them brats packing, and yours,” she shrugged her shoulders, “are in the basement.”

“What!”

“I locked them in there to protect them.”

“Protect them from what?”

“From your ‘friend’ Chuck Skwarok! I thought he might sneak back here and kidnap one of them.”

Yvonne exploded: “What are you talking about? I barely know him, he just drove me to see Erna.”

“You oughta know him better. He could have kicked you out anyway, easy. What could you do, big bugger like that?”

“What do you know?” Yvonne was bent towards her, suddenly terrified.

Shirley Anne’s lips twitched in that self-satisfied, catty expression she had when she was certain of her knowledge and of another’s fear.

“He told me,” Shirley Anne said.

“Told you what!”

“He told me this when all the kids were running around, back and forth,” Shirley Anne declared, drawing it out. “He was looking at them kinda funny; he said they had nice buns, and then, just out of the blue, he told me, ‘My wife charged me for molesting my little girl.’ And he was looking at one of the kids kinda funny when he says this, and I says, ‘Well, did you?’ And he told me the whole thing.”

Yvonne’s breath caught in her throat, her mind racing … but it was too much, she couldn’t believe Shirley Anne, her smug, fat face.

“Yeah, right.” She picked up her groceries. “A strange guy who doesn’t even know you is going to spill his guts to you about molesting his own kid—yeah, right.”

“Yeah, really, he did!”

Yvonne just walked into the house.

Yvonne recognizes now, whenever she talks and writes to me about that day, that what she did after Shirley Anne’s statement makes little logical sense. She tried to hide it from her cousin, but she was shocked beyond belief: the man she had been driving around with, who had sat in her house, watching her children, had actually once held—no. She couldn’t face that, she wanted to avoid it, she had to feel better. So she got busy.

She brought the kids up out of the basement, where they’d been playing on the slide she’d built them for winter days. They promised not to leave the yard. She wanted desperately to feel better, so she got out the Tupperware container of whisky Erna wouldn’t accept and sat at the kitchen table. The more she drank, the easier she felt and the less she cared about her cousin’s yapping.

But Shirley Anne kept picking, picking at any possible fear, reminding her that Chuck had said he’d be over later, “when the men were home.”

“So if he’s after kids,” Yvonne countered, logically enough, “why does he want the boys to be here?”

Once Baby ran in and showed Yvonne her raspberry, just the way Yvonne had told her too—that’s right, good girl!—and Shirley Anne rolled right on:

“Just imagine,” she said, “your little blonde Baby in diapers, her little finger curling around his finger as he leads her to the bedroom, she’s so trusting, you’ve protected her so good, he’s laying her on the bed, he slips her diapers down, and then he’s squatting down, smiling, spreading her little legs, wide, his big fingers spreading her little lips open like——”

“O shut up,” Yvonne interrupted harshly, not daring to reveal her deep reaction. She had to be big and tough; no stupid cousin would play with her mind. “Lay off that shit.”

With every swallow of smooth Southern Comfort, the power of her foreboding dulled. Shirley Anne was playing her; the whole basis of a child molester’s life is secrecy; if he really was one he’d never admit it. Chuck was big, White, handsome, no mousy beat-up Ernie—Shirley Anne was trying to use Baby to get him, and he just left her sitting while he drove off to see poor Erna. Yvonne hated herself for thinking this; she detested herself even as she detested Shirley Anne for sitting there, soused, making her think it.

Chantal appeared with carrots, Baby and James trudging behind. They wanted supper. Yvonne had bought meat and they had all that good garden stuff. And Ernie was still working on the freezer in the garage; he’d be hungry too. Cook, get up and cook.

When Ernie came in, Shirley Anne had someone else to tell. He got very disturbed too—that goof said that?—and Yvonne could see Shirley Anne loved it. She knew something dirty, she was the centre of attention.

“Yeah, and when he comes,” Shirley Anne said, “I’ll tell him right to his face in front of you guys, what he told me. I’m not lying.”