Punishment Read Free Page B

disclosure. When she learned that I was single she seemed shocked. I was forty-three. She was thirty, also single, but she had lived a fairly vivid life, lots of travel, a hippie phase, several intense relationships, any one of which in more conventional circumstances would have qualified as marriage. She had, she confessed, a mild aversion to commitment and a fear of bearing children. She didn’t tell me right away that her dad was also in my line of work, at that time assistant warden in a medium-security establishment called Warkworth. I stepped back a bit when she did tell me later. Her father had a reputation in the system—an old-timer, feared equally by con and copper. But looking back, the outcome of our chats and coffee seemed preordained.
    I don’t recall a swell of orchestral accompaniment as our friendship crystallized, or when on a pleasant weekend trip to Montreal in 1991 (during
le Festival de Jazz
) we broke through the barriers of caution, entering what we both acknowledged to be “a relationship.” But that weekend would, in my crooked, two-faced memory, mark the true beginning of a nine-year phase of unrestrained (some would call it reckless, even selfish) happiness.
    Oh Anna. Where are you now? Are you alone? Unlikely.
    And then as I watched the sun go down I thought of Caddy. Anna and Caddy, the end and the beginning of my journey from here to there and back again—an emotional odyssey, I suppose, if I wanted to sound grand. I had banished Caddy from my consciousness decades earlier. That’s the way it oftenhappens when you’re young. In time the pain and passion are forgotten. But today, when she turned and smiled, the protective ice just melted, leaving me exposed, and Anna, at least temporarily, forgotten.

2 .
    A month passed before I summoned up the nerve to visit Caddy. Why not, I reasoned. After all, at the courthouse she’d invited me and it had been more than thirty years since our last meaningful communication, if you want to call it that. I think there had been one encounter since, a superficial social moment long since lost in the confusion it had caused. We were different people now, I told myself. But I’d already made it my business to find out where she lived—a tidy bungalow in what I remembered as a hayfield, not far from Collie’s store.
    Though Collie saved a metro daily for me faithfully, I frequently forgot to pick it up. Faraway events didn’t seem to matter much anymore. But that day I remembered to get the paper. Or maybe I was having second thoughts—I hadn’t hadthe nerve to call her in advance. A call to set a time would sound too purposeful. Best if I just dropped by unannounced. Or maybe not at all. Or maybe she’d not be at home.
    There were cars and pickup trucks in front of the store. Inside, half a dozen men were gathered around his complimentary coffee urn. Neil Archie MacDonald was among them. I’d have recognized him anywhere though I’d not set eyes on him for decades. He was just as tall and straight as he’d always been, the shoulders still formidable. Obviously meatier around the middle and he still had the aggressive confidence of an all-American big-city cop, Vietnam War vet, local hero.
    He was expounding on Iraq as I was paying for the papers. Collie said, “It’s starting to look bad for Saddam. Neil thinks the Americans are on the warpath over nine-eleven.” He nodded in Neil’s direction but Neil didn’t seem to notice.
    “I didn’t realize Saddam had anything to do with nine-eleven,” I replied, loud enough for Neil to hear.
    I could feel his eyes, the sudden silence, measuring the moment. “There wouldn’t ’a been a nine-eleven if they’d done what they had to do in ’91,” he said carefully.
    I pretended to be scanning the front page of the paper. “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Neil,” I said. I could feel that he was struggling to remember who I was.
    “Two tours.” His tone communicated the