Free Crimes Against My Brother by David Adams Richards Page B

rob Fitzroy and be done with it. As he sat there that afternoon, this is what he began to think.
    What he hated was, in fact, how much this money plagued him. And how much Fitzroy did not like him. Fuck him, I’ll just take it, he thought. He don’t like me and I don’t like him, and that’ll be an end to it! And he looked very self-righteous and stern when he thought this.
    Robbery was not at all a new thing for Lonnie Sullivan—nor was using Harold Dew to steal. In fact, by now he had enough on Harold to turn him over to the police without implicating himself in the least. That is, Lonnie always had something on his friends. The younger they were when he met them, the more he held on them.
    So now he said to Annette, with paternal caution, that she should look for someone closer to home. He asked her if she had seen Harold lately, if they were still dating. She told him they were, now and then. But she was not really in love with Harold. Not really.
    Lonnie shrugged.
    “Love! Love is nothing. He’s a good lad—and smart,” Lonnie told her. “And you are going on twenty now—perhaps he will be the best deal for you. Not that you ever need a man, or anyone. I am not saying that any woman needs a man—just saying.” And he shrugged.
    Soon, in spite of all Annette’s plans and Lonnie’s promises about men in distant places who had seen her, rich young men he knew; in spite of Lonnie acting as her agent and speaking about what he intended to do for her; in spite of all her wild, unrealistic hopes that Lonnie had fed for five years, she was suddenly engaged to Harold, a man from Clare’s Longing. And she became engaged without even knowing she would be, or that she would accept when he asked.
    “It can’t be,” she would say some days.
    And yet it was. And she was exactly like twenty other young women she knew, and not one bit more satisfied.
    “Things will be different with me—won’t they, Uncle Lonnie? I mean, there is still a chance?” she said one gloomy day, sitting on the porch couch, staring out at nothing at all.
    “With you—oh, of course! A chance? A woman like you will always have the world by the balls.”
    Would you kill for her? Ian was haunted by his declaration, and told himself: Look at the girls in town and forget her forever.
    Yes, kill for her, Ian thought—my God, what a thing to say. But then, just the memory of Annette running to Harold at the horse haul was enough to enrage him. How could she have done that to him? How could she have done that—to him ?
    So after she was engaged, this is what he resolved to do: He took her picture off his mirror and put it in a drawer, determined never to speak of her again. He ate alone at Susie’s steak house on the corner, and went to work in a blue-collar shirt and pair of workpants. He read serious magazines and had a subscription to the The New Yorker . Of course, there were many jokes about Bonny Joyce and the Clare’s Longing stretch that he had to listen to—about the skanks that lived there and how many children could be accredited to any of their husbands. And once others in the city knew where he was from, it got worse.
    But people relied upon him, and his one ambition was to work hard and keep his mouth shut. In fact, people went to the store where he worked because of Ian—his expertise in dealing with electricity and plumbing and all things of that nature was natural and profound. Soon customers were asking to deal solely with him. He found himself indispensable. It was at this time he was offered another interview for a job at the mill. He declined in a stiff, formal fashion. He remembered and hated the personnel manager with his wavy hair and small red tie. His bosses at the store knew about this and raised his salary twice. So he knew that someday—somehow—he would saveenough to buy the huge appliance store he worked in. He began thinking that someday he would own his own house too.
    The store owners were two elderly