No Good Brother
Tyler Keevil
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILBUR SMITH ADVENTURE WRITING PRIZE 2018'A great, gripping story, ferociously well-written, with characters that live and breathe' STEF PENNEY, bestselling author of Under a Pole StarThe Coen Brothers meets Patrick deWitt in this glorious novel from award-winning author Tyler Keevil: a high-stakes adventure of love, loss and morality, introducing two unlikely outlaws…Tim Harding has spent the fishing season in Canada working as a deckhand, making an honest living. When his hot-headed younger brother tracks him down at the shipyards in Vancouver, Tim senses trouble. Jake is a drifter, a dreamer, an ex-con, and now he needs help in repaying a debt to the notorious Delaney gang.So begins an epic, unpredictable odyssey across land and sea as the brothers journey down to the Delaney’s ranch in the U.S., chased by customs officials, freak storms and the gnawing feeling that their luck is about to run out. But while they may be able to outrun the law, there’s no escaping the ghosts of their tragic family past and neither is prepared for who and what awaits them at the other end…
NO GOOD BROTHER
Tyler Keevil
Copyright (#uaf892698-7729-5f8b-a57a-586e470e3c0a)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Tyler Keevil asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Tyler Keevil 2018
Excerpt from 'Highway Patrolman' by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1982 Bruce Springsteen (Global Music Rights). Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Cover photographs © Tim Robinson/Arcangel Images (man); Valeriy Shvestsov/Arcangel Images (man with horse mask); Shutterstock.com (https://www.shutterstock.com) (all other images)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Source ISBN: 9780008228880
Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008228903
Version: 2018-10-16
Praise for No Good Brother: (#uaf892698-7729-5f8b-a57a-586e470e3c0a)
‘Keevil’s writing is unmissable . . . quite simply a brilliant writer’
Viv Groskop, author of The Anna Karenina Fix
‘No Good Brother is a paean to brotherly loyalty and a meditation on the things we can change and the things we must learn to love regardless. It is also the funniest and most exciting book I’ve read in years. A grand adventure in the spirit of Mark Twain, it is reckless and wild and beautiful, like something dreamed up by Cormac McCarthy and Hunter S Thompson on a drunken camping trip. It’s as big and as perfect as the prairie sky’
D.D. Johnston, author of Peace, Love & Petrol Bombs
‘A tender and at turns thrilling novel about grief and the way it seeps unshakably into the lives of the living. Keevil’s storytelling is both elegant and meaty and his prose stunning as per; I could almost taste the bitter sea air of Vancouver’s North Shore’
Rachel Trezise, author of Fresh Apples
‘Quite a story. Keevil’s prose proceeds with the laconic madness of a patient horse, and the same ability to buck and kick’
Cynan Jones, author of The Dig
Dedication (#uaf892698-7729-5f8b-a57a-586e470e3c0a)
For my brother
Epigraph (#uaf892698-7729-5f8b-a57a-586e470e3c0a)
‘For I know that in me, that is,
in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.’
Romans 7:18a
‘Man turns his back on his family,
well he just ain’t no good.’
Bruce Springsteen
Table of Contents
Cover (#ua736dd37-a175-5779-8037-b4c3fdb11a13)
Title Page (#u51d02a42-1ef0-5aba-81d4-3f5ddec912dc)
Copyright (#ufeadad76-5ade-522b-9f46-3b623bf2cc31)
Praise for No Good Brother (#u912ac90c-2e1b-56eb-b6eb-4e2b82a05720)
Dedication (#u53f96d18-dbb1-5672-980a-08836ff90a79)
Epigraph (#u2b5b968c-87f1-55ad-9e27-0768b9526cec)
Chapter One (#uddae1c1d-a582-576d-adb9-415e42b1c238)
Chapter Two (#u6dbc9e45-f5ca-56fc-9aa4-3b27332fd5e9)
Chapter Three (#u9bc2a947-27c0-51d4-ae0d-29c0ebc5f33d)
Chapter Four (#u7031bef5-195a-5c51-b360-5104775edcb7)
Chapter Five (#u4ad8d666-9adf-5012-b1fd-c5e191deba93)
Chapter Six (#u0f6c1ddc-db79-5dde-b0cd-4c096821e016)
Chapter Seven (#u9e03cc9a-c8be-5085-8007-bf2abdaf20ae)
Chapter Eight (#u230df4f3-6fd7-56f1-b863-4fc8413a9285)
Chapter Nine (#ua8007cbb-5d4a-5561-89fc-d6f5157fb423)
Chapter Ten (#u2e5aa535-0985-527f-9e47-09b576b9c6cf)
Chapter Eleven (#ufde478cd-71f6-55aa-b953-2c6aabdf289c)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Tyler Keevil (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#uaf892698-7729-5f8b-a57a-586e470e3c0a)
The end of this story is pretty well known, since people wound up getting killed and the trials were in the news. My brother Jake was portrayed in a lot of different ways. Some said he was just a patsy who had gotten caught up in the scheme of these upstart gangsters. Others said he did it for the money. Then there were the ones who actually believed he was an activist of some sort, or a gentleman robber, and I suppose it was easy to sympathize with that on account of what happened to him. But none of those versions is true, or entirely true. I intend to tell it straight and lay out how it all happened, and how I became involved.
It started when Jake showed up at the Westco plant and boatyard, the day we got back from herring season. That was the end of February, last year. A Monday. I was standing at the stern of the Western Lady across from Sugar, this giant Haida guy who shares the licence with Albert, the skipper. Sugar and I were the ones working the hold, but we had to wait around in the drizzling cold for the plant workers to get the hose and Transvac pump in place and line up the sorting bins. They were union guys and on the clock and in no hurry. Albert was up top, directing them from the wheelhouse.
‘Holy Mary,’ he yelled at them, which is about as close to swearing as he gets. ‘You fellows gonna move that thing or just hope it wanders down here by itself?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ they said.
But they moved a little faster. Albert has that effect on people.
I rubbed my bad hand with my good one. The hand that got crushed hurts something fierce in the cold, even now, years after the accident. Sugar held the water hose with the steel nozzle cradled against his hip, casual as a gunfighter. While we waited, he directed it into the hold and let out a jet-blast of water, churning the fish. The herring, all belly-wet and slickly silver, were packed together in a soupy mix of blood and brine, still flecked with flakes of ice. It was a perfect-looking hold (Albert doesn’t over-fish and only ever takes his quota) but it still made me sad as hell to see. The herring had been in there for forty-eight hours and a lot of them were still half alive, still twitching. They gazed up from the depths of the hull with dull and desperate eyes that had no real understanding of their place or fate. Some of them were so ready to spawn they were already leaking roe: little yellow globules that glistened like fool’s gold.
I heard a vehicle pulling into the lot across the water from where we were moored. I looked over and saw Jake’s truck: a beat-up orange Toyota, twenty years old, with a muffler all shot to hell. I hadn’t seen my brother since Christmas. That hadn’t gone so well. We’d gotten in a fight – first with each other, then with some other guys – and he’d taken off for a while because one of them had been hurt pretty bad. Jake had a record and was worried that the guy might report it, maybe lay an assault charge on him. But nothing ever came of it. I’d talked to Jake on the phone before I headed out for herring season, and he’d gotten some new job that he claimed was legitimate. A cleaning job, was what he’d said.
Jake climbed out of the truck. He was wearing torn jeans and a bomber jacket and his red bandana. He came to the fence that separates the lot from the docks and leaned on it, his fingers hooked like talons between the chain-links. He spotted me and deliberately rattled the fence, like an ape in a cage. He was grinning like an ape, too.
Sugar asked, ‘He your friend?’
‘My brother.’
By then the union guys had manoeuvred the Transvac along our port side, but were still fiddling with the controls. I waved to get Albert’s attention.
‘Give me a minute, Albert?’
‘A minute is all you got.’
I vaulted the gunnel and landed clumsily on the dock, turning my right ankle but not badly. I made my way around the boatyard and up the gangway that connects the docks to the wharf. The water beneath reflected the cannery, but the image was all broken up by the dribbles of rain riddling the surface.
Jake waited for me at his truck, leaning back against the side, smoking a cigarette. As I came up he smiled. He’d lost one tooth when he was in jail, and still hadn’t bothered to get a cap. His hair was long and greasy and held back by the bandana. The bandana was faded and tatty as hell but it was the one Sandy had given him, years ago, so he would never replace it.
‘You look like a real fisherman, Poncho,’ he said.
‘And you look like an ex-con, Lefty.’
I removed my left work glove and we clasped hands, pulling each other into a hug. Jake and I always shake hands like that – with our left – because he’s left-handed and my right hand is the bad one. Two of the fingers are gone and the other three are all mangled, like the legs of a crab crushed under a rock. Whenever I shake hands with anyone else it’s always awkward, because even left-handed guys have learned to shake with their right.
‘You forgiven me for sucker punching you?’ he asked.
‘Let’s forget it.’
‘Close enough for me.’
‘How’d you know to come?’
‘Stopped by the cannery last week. They said your boat was due back this morning.’
I looked over at the boat. Albert was watching us from the wheelhouse, arms folded over his chest like a sentry. The union guys were passing the Transvac hose to Sugar.
‘We’re just about to empty the holds,’ I said.
‘What time do you get off tonight?’
‘We don’t get shore leave until the weekend.’
‘I need to talk to you before then.’
‘About what?’
He flicked his cigarette to the ground, between us, and twisted it out with his boot. ‘I just need to talk to you is all. Can’t you get away tonight?’
‘It’s boat policy. Nobody leaves till the boat’s stripped down. If Albert lets me go, the other guys will be choked.’
‘So sneak away.’
‘I share a cabin with the other deckhands.’
‘Ah, shit.’ He exhaled his last drag, which he’d been holding in. ‘Well, damn – I’ll be gone by this weekend.’
‘Where you going?’
‘That’s what I want to talk to you about.’
From the boat, Albert hollered to me across the water: ‘Timothy!’
He held out his hands, palm up, as if to ask what was going on. I waved.
‘Timothy?’ Jake said. ‘What is he, your dad?’
‘I got to go, man.’
‘Ask him. Tell him it’s important. You got wheels?’
‘Not any more.’
‘Walk down to the Firehall and meet me there, then.’
‘What the hell for?’
Jake just looked at me. He looked at me for a long time.
‘Oh,’ is all I said.
‘You forgot.’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘Goddamn liar.’
I started backing away. ‘Look, I’ll try to come, okay?’
‘Whatever. I’ll be there tonight, with or without you.’
He opened the door to his truck, and slid back behind the wheel.
I said, ‘If I can’t make it, I’ll call you.’
‘If you can’t make it, don’t bother.’
He slammed the door and gunned the engine. As I turned back towards the gangway I heard him peeling out, spinning his wheels as he left the lot.
On the Western Lady, Albert had come down from the wheelhouse and was helping Sugar lower the Transvac hose into the hold. I hopped onto a bollard and used that as a stepladder to clamber back over the gunnel of the Lady.
‘I got this, Albert,’ I said.
‘You sure? Because I can take over if you want to play with your friend.’
‘No, no – it’s all good.’
He grunted and stepped aside. The hose was about a foot in diameter and made of ribbed plastic. I positioned it so that the mouth dipped six inches into the soup of herring, then nodded at Sugar. He began blasting away with the water and we signalled for the dock workers to fire up the pump. The hose started to buck in my arms, wiggling amid the herring and snorting them up like the long nose of an anteater. The dark bodies flashed through the funnel, on their way to the sorter and the bins and a better place.
At around five we clocked off. Sugar went to clean himself up in the cannery washrooms, but I needed to talk to Albert. I took off my slicker and gloves and moseyed on into the galley. Evelyn, Albert’s wife, was standing at the stove, stirring something in a steel pot. She was a big lady, low-built and wide-hipped, and when we set our nets she directed us on deck while Albert navigated. She was pretty much the second-in-command on the Lady. Albert, he liked to joke that she was actually the head honcho, the big chief.
‘Smells good, Evelyn.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I know it.’ Even without the slicker, I still stank of herring. ‘What you got on there?’
‘Beef stew, and an apple pie.’
‘Hot damn.’
‘You mean hot darn.’ She pointed at me with her spoon. ‘Tracy’s coming for dinner.’
Tracy was their youngest daughter. She’d worked on the boat when I first started but had taken this season off to train for her sea captain’s certificate.
I said, ‘She mentioned something about that.’
‘She say anything else?’
‘What else might she have said?’
Evelyn smiled, and shook her head. ‘Just something we been talking about.’
She sounded sly, secretive, and raised a spoon of stew to give it a taste. She smacked her tongue theatrically, making it clear she intended to leave me wondering.
‘Say,’ I said, as if it had just occurred to me. ‘Is Albert about?’
‘Down in the engine room.’
‘Still at it.’
‘Always.’
I kicked off my boots and headed that way, down the short hall between the two cabins where we slept – one for Albert and Evelyn, one for us grunts – and down a short stepladder. The engine room was divided from the rest of the boat by a hatch, which was ajar. I pushed it open. Inside it was cramped and low and you had to hunch over as you walked to avoid cracking your head. Albert was lying on his back, shining a flashlight at the underside of some pipework.
‘Problems, Captain?’
‘Nothing that ain’t fixable. Leaking a bit of coolant.’
I hunkered down beside him, squatting on my haunches, and watched him work for a bit. He reached for a wrench lying next to him, fitted it to a nut on one of the pipes, and gave it a twist. He held his palm beneath the joint, waiting to see if that had done the trick.
‘Need a hand?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell you when you get around to asking whatever it is you want to ask.’
‘Okay, then.’ I sat for a time, staring at the joint rather than Albert. ‘That fellow in the truck today – that was my brother.’
‘The troublemaker.’
‘He ain’t all that bad.’
‘Thought he did time in Ferndale.’
‘That was a while back.’
‘And?’
There was an oil rag on the floor at my feet. I picked that up and began wrapping it around my bad hand, for no real reason.
‘He’s only in town for a day, and wants to see me tonight.’
‘You don’t get shore leave till Saturday.’
‘I know that.’
‘Nobody leaves the boat until she’s in shape.’
‘I know that too.’
Albert shook his head and made a sound, sort of disgusted. At first I thought it was a reaction to what I’d asked, but he held up his hand, showing me the greenish glisten of coolant.
‘Washer must be shot.’
He went to work with his wrench again.
He said, ‘If I let you go, what do I tell the other guys?’
I didn’t have an answer to that, so I didn’t try.
‘Can’t very well let you go and keep them here.’
‘No sir. Reckon not.’
‘But you want me to make an exception, so you can meet your no-good brother.’
‘I told you – it ain’t that he’s no good.’
I said it sharper than I normally would have. It registered. I could tell by the way Albert paused, just for a second, in twisting that nut. Then he kept working it until it came loose, and with his forefinger fished out the old washer. He gave it to me. ‘Pass me another, will you? Should be in the top of the toolbox, front-left compartment.’
I found a new one and handed it over and waited while he fitted it. There was no use negotiating or haggling with him.
He said, ‘We’re having Tracy over for tea and pie.’
‘Evelyn told me.’
‘Did she now?’
‘She was acting pretty mysterious about something.’
He looked at me, and I could tell by the look that he was in on it, whatever it was.
‘It’s important to Evelyn. I suppose you want to skip that, too.’
‘Tracy is working the night shift, so won’t stay late. I could go after.’
He was twisting the nut back on, turning the wrench in swift rotations. On his upper forearm he had this tattoo of a heart, pink and sun-faded, which shifted with each movement.
‘I can’t give you permission to do that, Tim.’
I stared at the oil rag, at my bad hand.
‘I figured that would be the case,’ I said.
‘But if you slip away – say after we’re all down – I might look the other way.’
‘Thanks, Albert. Thanks for that.’
‘I ain’t doing you no favours. If you get caught, or they see you, I’ll come down hard on you just the same.’
He tightened the nut the last few turns, snugging it into place. On the last twist the wrench trembled with tension and the muscles in his forearm flexed. When it was done he nodded, satisfied, as if that had decided it.
Chapter Two (#uaf892698-7729-5f8b-a57a-586e470e3c0a)
Before dinner, while we waited for Tracy, I hopped on dish duty. I wanted to get a head start, and I suppose make amends in advance for what I intended to do later. So I stood at the sink and scrubbed away at Evelyn’s pots and pans. In the window above the sink I could see the reflection of the others sitting at the galley table behind me, their images transparent and ghost-like. There was Sugar and Albert and Evelyn and Big Ben, Sugar’s nephew: a quiet kid with a buzz cut and a scar across his nose, who’d joined the crew the same season as me. The four of them were talking about hockey and listening to Gram Parsons. It was one of Albert’s scratchy old cassettes, and the ragged vocals always reminded me of Jake, the way Jake used to sing.
Evelyn still hadn’t said any more about her little secret. She’d told me I had to wait till Tracy got there. Since I was at the window I spotted her first: clambering over the port-side gunnel. Like her mother she was strong and solidly built and at ease on the boats and water. When she straightened up she saw me and smiled, her cheeks burnished red from the cold.
‘Company’s here,’ I said.
Albert got up and hurried to open the door for his daughter, reaching it just as she did.
‘Should have called out,’ he said. ‘Would have helped you aboard.’
‘I’m training to run this boat, Dad. Reckon I can board it myself.’
Big Ben shook her hand and Sugar told him that was no way to greet a lady, then demonstrated by wrapping Tracy up in a bear hug and lifting her right off the ground. He’d known her since she was six years old and could make that kind of thing seem completely natural. I shuffled over to join them, and when it came my turn to greet Tracy I hugged her as well, though with me it was different. I hugged her cautiously, as if she were a cousin or a formal acquaintance. I always worried, hugging her, that it would seem improper in front of Albert.
‘Let’s all sit down,’ Evelyn said.
‘I just got the pots to finish.’
‘Oh, leave the dishes, Tim. We have company.’
We sat around the galley table, pulling up a pair of extra chairs for Tracy and me. Evelyn put on her oven mitts – these mitts in the shape of flippers we got her two seasons back – and brought the stew over to the table, along with homemade buns and a bowl of salad. This was all dished out, plate by plate, and the plates were handed around the table to the person on the end: Sugar, in this case. That was how we did it. Everything we did on the boat had its own ritual, and eating dinner was no different.
As we ate we chatted about the herring season. Tracy had already heard from Evelyn that we’d made our quota, and that the rest of the company had, too. Sugar and Albert shared the licence but operated through Westco in a collective. We told her about where we’d cast our nets that year and some of the stories we’d brought back: the skiff that had run aground and the yahoos on the Western Rider who’d gotten gooned and overslept and nearly missed the fisheries window. We moaned a little about the weather and how hard Albert worked us.
‘Your dad sure gets his money’s worth out of his poor crew,’ Sugar said.
‘Don’t I know it,’ Tracy said.
‘These fellows,’ Albert said, shaking his head, ‘would sleep through a hurricane if I let them. They would sleep through the End of Days.’
After the stew came the pie, and when that was done we got out the cards and played High Chicago for pennies, which was another ritual. Sugar lost quickly, and after declaring bankruptcy he palmed the table-top to push himself up. He’s six-four and two-twenty, and in the close confines of the deckhouse he moved slowly, carefully.
‘You coming for a walk?’ he asked his nephew.
The way he said it wasn’t a question. Big Ben folded his hand and followed his uncle outside. We played a few more rounds and Evelyn made a pot of coffee and we got to talking about payday and the cheques we all had coming our way. Albert was going to install a new furnace in their place out in New West, and Evelyn, she was putting some of her share away for a trip to Palm Springs. But even then I had the feeling that it was all preamble. I was still waiting for whatever it was they were going to spring on me.
‘What about you, Tim?’ Tracy asked. ‘You got any big plans once this taskmaster sets you loose?’
‘Ah, you know me. I ain’t got much imagination.’
‘No raising Cain?’ She elbowed me. ‘No lady friend to buy pretty things for?’
‘Well, there is one.’ Evelyn stopped sipping her tea. They all looked at me, waiting. ‘Old woman by the name of Evelyn,’ I said. ‘Might need a new dishwasher.’
Evelyn got up and slapped me with her flipper mitt.
‘No sir,’ Albert said, playing along. ‘Nobody buys my woman a dishwasher but me!’
The joke ran its course, and as Evelyn settled back down she said, ‘Albert – why don’t you tell Tim. Tell him what we were talking about.’
‘Oh no,’ Tracy said.
Albert frowned at her, and cleared his throat, and then spread out one hand to stare at the fingernails. The cuticles were rimmed with black: a lifetime’s worth of engine oil and grease. He ran his thumbnail beneath the nail on his forefinger, as if removing some. Then he said, ‘You know we normally head up to our cabin in Squamish for a week at the end of season. Well, we’ll be heading up this Saturday, after we finish, and wondered if you wanted to come.’
‘Wow,’ I said, which was all I could think to say. ‘That’s real kind of you.’
‘Our boy Rick will be there, with his kids, and Tracy.’
Tracy was staring into her teacup, as if trying to read the leaves.
‘That would be really something,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ Albert added, ‘if you got other things going on …’
‘No. No I don’t got anything else. The only thing keeping me here would be my mother. If she needs me, I mean. Seeing as I’ve already been away for a while.’
‘Of course, Timothy,’ Evelyn said. ‘You’ve got to look after your family, too.’
‘It would only be for a few days,’ Albert said.
‘That sounds real nice.’
‘Think about it, anyway,’ Evelyn added.
‘I will. I really will.’
She stood up and began to clear the cups, even though mine was only half-finished.
‘Well,’ Tracy said, ‘I better get back. Shift starts in an hour.’
She was working security at a local college, while undertaking her training.
‘I’ll walk you out, if you like.’
The docks were quiet, aside from a few old-timers on one of the boats, drinking to celebrate the end of season, their voices and laughter echoing across the water. Tracy and I walked in silence until we crossed the gangway. Then she said, ‘I’m sorry about that. They like to play matchmaker.’
‘It’s a nice idea.’
‘Nice is an easy word.’
‘I mean it would be fun.’
‘Well, maybe it would be.’
We reached her vehicle: a classic Jeep that she’d salvaged from the scrap heap, and fixed up. She’d parked in the same spot that Jake had earlier. She unlocked the driver’s door and before she got in I hugged her again. In the dark, away from the others, I could have held onto her longer, and maybe I should have. But it was funny. I still acted the same way.
That night, it wasn’t hard to slip away. I just waited until Sugar and Big Ben were asleep (this was easy to determine because they both snore like bears) and then crept out of the cabin, eased open the galley door, and lowered myself down to the dock. Sneaking off felt shady and dishonest but those were feelings I generally associated with my brother, and any plan of his which involved me.
The Firehall, where we were meeting, is on the corner of Gore and Cordova, just a few blocks away from the Westco plant. It isn’t a firehall any more. It’s an arts centre and performance space now – a fairly well-known one. They produce shows of their own and also put on work by touring theatre and dance companies. The outside still looks like a firehall: worn brownstone walls, glossy red doors, and those high-arched windows.
The night I met Jake, a company called The Dance Collective was performing. The name was spelled in block capitals across the marquee, and on the A-frame board out front a series of posters listed the various dancers and their pieces. I walked cautiously up the wheelchair ramp and stood for a time outside the doors, peering in through the glass.
The place hadn’t changed much. On the left was the box office, and on the right was the bar – a classy-looking affair, with a marble bar top, chrome beer taps, and leather stools. On some of the tables platters of appetizers and hors d’oeuvres had been laid out: smoked salmon and pastries and little vegetable rolls. In the foyer thirty or forty guests – a mix of well-dressed artists, hipsters, and bohemian types – stood chatting and milling about. All of it looked so eerily familiar I felt like a ghost, lurking in the cold and haunting my old life.
I have to admit: I just about turned and walked away.
But my brother was in there, waiting for me. So I went ahead, passing through the glass doors and falling backwards into memory. I knew exactly where to find Jake too: hunched at the bar, ignoring the room and world.
I sat down next to him and he said, ‘So the old man let you loose.’
There were three empty bottles of Molson in front of him and he was already looking a bit belligerent.
‘He said he wouldn’t stop me, if I snuck off.’
‘Better make the most of it.’ He motioned to the bartender, signalling for service. ‘Two more Molson and two shots of Wiser’s.’
‘Only beer, for me,’ I said.
‘Forget that. You just got back from sea, sailor.’
‘I’ll be scrubbing holds at six thirty.’
The bartender – a slim, trim guy with a stud earring – looked at us in a way that made it clear he’d rather be serving anybody else.
‘Do you want the whisky or not?’ he asked.
‘I ordered it, didn’t I?’ Jake said. Then, to me: ‘Get this bartender. I been tipping him big and behaving myself and he still treats me like a dishrag.’
Jake folded a twenty in half and flicked it towards the guy. The bill fluttered in the air like a demented butterfly, before coming to settle in front of the bar taps. The bartender took it reluctantly and smoothed it out before slipping it into his till and pouring the drinks. When the whiskies landed in front of Jake, he nudged one towards me.
‘Drink up,’ he said.
‘I ain’t playing, Jake.’
He shrugged and scooped it up to knock back himself.
‘You been drinking here all night?’ I asked Jake.
‘Hell no. I saw the show.’
I looked towards the stage doors. A few of the dancers were coming out, now. You could tell by the way they dressed – tracksuits or tights and leggings – and also by how they held themselves: that particular upright posture, chins outthrust, heads perfectly level.
‘You watched the whole dance show on your own?’
‘Why not? I know more about it than most of these posers.’
The bartender, bringing over the beers, frowned when he heard that. Jake waggled his head and stuck out his tongue at him, as if to imply some kind of uncontrollable insanity.
‘Was it any good?’ I asked him.
‘It was hit and miss.’
‘Any unarmed turnips?’
Jake snorted and sprayed beer on the bar top.
Before one of our sister’s performances, we’d seen this guy do a modern dance in the nude. He’d swaggered up to the front of the stage, swinging his pecker like a little lasso, and announced that he was an unarmed turnip. That had been the benchmark, from then on, and the kind of thing that Sandy had to rise above: the legions of unarmed and untalented turnips.
‘No – no turnips, thank God,’ Jake said, wiping his mouth with his hand. ‘But hardly any of them were classically trained. You can tell. They just don’t have the range, like her.’
‘Nobody did.’
That wasn’t really true, but it was true enough, in our minds. My beer was still sitting there – I’d been eyeing it but hadn’t touched it yet. Now I reached for it, in a way that felt momentous. It tasted smooth and cold and nice as ice cream. I swivelled around on my stool and leant back against the bar to watch the crowd.
‘I ain’t been back here since,’ I said.
‘That’s because you’re trying to forget.’
‘I haven’t forgotten anything.’
‘Except the anniversary.’
‘I was at sea. The season was late, this year.’
‘On your boat with your little fishing family.’
‘They’re good people.’
‘They ain’t kin.’
‘I’m here, aren’t I?’
‘Your body is.’
A dancer came up to the bar beside Jake and ordered a vodka lemonade. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun, so you could see where the roots tugged at her scalp, and she still had sparkles and stage make-up on her face.
Jake glanced sidelong at her, then down at her feet.
‘This is one of the real dancers,’ he said to me. ‘She’s done ballet.’
She looked at him, startled, still holding a ten up for the bartender.
‘How’d you know that?’
‘You’re standing in third position. Only ballet dancers do that.’
Jake said all that without looking at her. He said it in a calm and certain way that is difficult to describe and unlike how anybody else talks – at least unlike how they would talk to a stranger, off-the-cuff. She might not have liked it, but he had her attention, all right.
‘Did you enjoy the show?’ she asked.
‘I liked your dance, and a few of the others. But you want some advice? You need to work on your arabesques. You bend your back leg too much.’
She turned to face him more fully, almost as if she were squaring up to him.
‘It’s not ballet. Modern isn’t as strict as that.’
‘An arabesque is an arabesque.’
‘I can do a proper arabesque if I want.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
Her drink was ready, and she took it without thanking the bartender, as if it was an inconvenience or a distraction. She looked about ready to dash the vodka in Jake’s face.
‘You sure know a lot about it,’ she said.
‘Our sister used to dance. She used to dance here.’
The dancer put her drink down. She looked hard at Jake’s face, and then over to me.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You’re Sandra’s brothers, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right. Jake and Tim.’
‘I’ve met you. I danced with her. It’s Denise, remember?’
Without waiting for a reply, she hugged Jake, and then me. She started tearing up, so I patted her forearm, in a way that felt awkward, even to me.
‘It’s so good to see you. It’s been so long.’
‘Ten years,’ Jake said, tonelessly.
‘I still think about her.’ She was wiping at her eyes, now. All her mascara had run down her cheeks in black streaks and it was hard as hell, seeing that. I don’t know. It was as if she were crying for all three of us. ‘I was younger than her. She was the one we all looked up to. She was the dancer we all wanted to be.’
‘Me too,’ I said.
‘Oh – you wanted to be a dancer, too?’
Jake started laughing, and I had to explain that no – I meant I’d looked up to Sandy.
‘Of course. Everybody did.’
Denise took the straw out of her drink and threw it on the bar top and drank most of her vodka lemonade straight from the glass, knocking it back. When she finished, a little breathless, she asked, ‘What are you guys doing here, anyway?’
‘Just came down to see the place, again.’
‘Are you coming to the after-party? We’re going to the Alibi Room, I think.’
Jake said, ‘I got to take my brother somewhere. But we should meet up later.’
‘For sure.’
She pulled a pen from her purse, jotted down a number, handed it to him. Then she hugged Jake again, and me, longer this time – really squeezing the breath out of me. I could feel the strength in her body, thin and lithe as a wire cable, and she still smelled of sweat and activity, of a body in motion. All of that was so familiar, like hugging a memory or a dream.
‘I should mingle,’ she said. ‘But I’ll see you later.’
She took another look at us, not quite believing it, and moved off. We swivelled back to the bar and drank our beers in silence and after about five or six seconds Jake said, ‘Jesus.’
‘I know.’
I motioned to the bartender: two more whiskies. When he brought them this time he treated us with a kind of deference, his eyes downcast. He’d overheard some of it, I guess. I gave him another twenty and waved away the change and Jake and I knocked back the shots. I felt the belly-burn, that old familiar smoulder.
I said, ‘You said you wanted to take me somewhere.’
Two months before Sandy died, she auditioned for a dancing job in Paris with the Compagnie Cléo de Mérode, and landed it. At first I didn’t understand the significance of that. I just knew it meant she would be living in Europe for a while. But the full extent of her achievement was made clear to us at the celebration party. It was held at the house of one of Sandy’s dancer friends and all the people there were either dancers or choreographers or artistic types of one sort or another, aside from me and Jake and Maria, who he was still with at the time, and who has her own part in this story.
Jake and I were working the bar, mixing cocktails and pouring drinks and generally acting like jackasses. It was magical and heavenly to be surrounded by, and serving, all of these lean-limbed, long-necked women with perfect posture, who seemed to float from room to room and every so often stopped to order from us and teasingly flirt with us because we were Sandy’s little brothers and in that way were little brothers to them all.
At one point Sandy and Maria came up together, and Maria ordered them both a Bloody Mary. This was a unique opportunity because Sandy hardly ever drank, due to the demands of being a dancer, and even when she did it was seemingly impossible to get her drunk. Our sister was always focused, severe, in complete control – both of herself and us. She was the only one who could keep Jake reined in, seeing as our old man was no longer around, and our ma, well, she’d had it tough for a while. And since Sandy took care of all of us, she never relented in what I would call her vigilance.
That night we made a good go of it. Jake mixed the Bloody Marys and dumped a good splash of vodka in both. He served them the real way – over ice, with salt around the rims – and Maria scooped hers up and raised it high to toast and passed on what some local hotshot choreographer had just told her: he’d said that Sandy getting in with the Compagnie Cléo de Mérode was the same as if she’d won the gold medal of modern dance.
‘Gold medal winner,’ Maria repeated.
‘Solid gold sister,’ Jake said, and kissed her on the cheek.
Sandy laughed it off, but the phrase stuck with me, and the memory of the night. Sandy had two more Bloody Marys and sat Jake and I down, very solemnly, and laid out her plans for moving the whole family to Europe so we could stay together. Jake could make his music and I’d apprentice to be a carpenter and Ma would sit on our balcony and have coffee and croissants every morning. Maria claimed she wanted to come too and Sandy said that was fine, but she – Maria – would have to marry Jake and when they had kids Sandy would be the godmother. Then once Sandy hit thirty she would retire and marry a French plumber and start a family of her own and we would all move back home and buy an acreage in the Okanagan, and I could build houses for each of us and her husband would fit the plumbing and together we would set up polytunnels and vegetable fields and start our own farm.
She had all these plans, crazy but brilliant enough to believe in. At the time, we had an unquestioning faith that Sandy could shape our future through her force of will, and even now it doesn’t seem to me as if that faith was naïve.
Later in the night, when Jake and I had abandoned our posts at the bar, we built this makeshift sedan out of broomsticks and a kitchen chair. We put Sandy in that and hoisted her up on our shoulders and carried her around the party, with Maria clearing the way in front of us. When we passed everybody cheered and applauded, and Sandy played her part perfectly: sitting upright, looking stern and commanding as Cleopatra, our golden queen and champion.
Chapter Three (#ulink_5ca41017-f481-5385-a0b2-9776c388711e)
Jake had his truck at the Firehall but he was too far gone to drive (he was very particular about that, on account of what happened) and instead we took a cab down Granville and west on Marine Drive towards the Southlands area. There are some huge spreads out that way: big rancher-style houses with sprawling yards, which might have been smallholdings or farmsteads back in the old days. We cruised past those and I had no idea what we were doing, or why, but something in me – my brotherly pride, I suppose – refused to pester him about it.
Jake told the cabbie to drop us at a place called Castle Meadow Stables and Country Club. The sign out front was small and discreet: just a brass plaque mounted on a gateway beside a curving drive. We walked up the drive in the dark, crunching gravel beneath our bootheels. At the end of the drive was a parking lot, and the clubhouse. Over to the left were the stables, still and quiet at this time, and beyond them a field or paddock or what have you.
As we approached the front doors, I finally gave in and asked, ‘You going to tell me what we’re doing way the hell out here?’
‘Just getting a drink,’ Jake said, and pushed through the doors.
They opened into a foyer, leading on to the clubhouse and bar: a big room with low ceilings and hardwood floors. The walls were lined with wainscot panelling, and above the wainscot hung black-and-white pictures of old racehorses, presumably famous ones. The place felt like an old-time golf club, crossed with a western-style saloon. In one corner a cluster of video poker machines bleeped forlornly.
It was getting on near ten o’clock and the only other customers were a bunch of good old boys wearing plaid shirts and cowboy boots and, sitting a little apart, two younger guys in suits. At the bar Jake ordered us two more Molsons and two shots of Crown and asked the bartender to put it on his tab. The woman smiled at him and punched it into her screen, and I figured this was partly why we’d come out here – just for me to witness Jake order on a tab.
We sat down and knocked back our shots, which were tasting better and better. After being dry for so long it was going to my head and I felt very tender towards my little brother.
I said, ‘How’d you get membership in a place like this?’
‘I ain’t a member.’
‘How’d you get a tab, then?’
‘This is where I work.’
‘I thought you had a cleaning job.’
‘I do – cleaning stables.’
It took me some time to get my head around the notion of Jake cleaning stables, or being associated with that realm in any way. It just seemed so peculiar. But then, no more peculiar than delivering brake parts or laying paving slabs or working on a seiner or any of the other jobs we’d both done over the years.
‘So you’re like a stable boy?’ I asked.
‘Hell no. Stable boys actually look after the horses. They groom them and feed them and dress their injuries and crap. I’m not even really supposed to go in the stalls. I just clean the alleyways between the stalls, hose down the drainage troughs, carry loads of horseshit out back to the bin. Make sure the stable boys and trainers have everything they need.’
‘How in the hell’d you land a job like that?’
‘Connections I made inside. A lot of the gangsters are into horses.’
He nodded significantly at the two guys in suits. They were eating chicken wings and talking earnestly about something and didn’t appear drunk at all. If Jake hadn’t pointed them out I would have assumed they were businessmen.
‘What – they ride them?’ I said.
‘They ride them and breed them and race them. This is one of the places you can keep them, if you don’t have a ranch of your own. And I clean up their shit. Literally.’
‘I guess hard work is honest work,’ I said, ‘as Albert would say.’
‘Work sucks. But it’s something. And I get a tab.’
‘A tab you’ve got to pay.’
‘Not tonight I don’t.’
He looked up at the TV above us. There were half a dozen spread around the room. The screens were all the same size – thirty inches or so – and they were all showing the same image: a long shot of a racetrack in some exotic location, where the skies were dreamily blue and where everybody wore white linen clothing and wide-brimmed hats and carried parasols. It made me think of Monte Carlo or Casablanca. Some place that we’d never see, anyway.
‘Mostly it’s a farce,’ Jake said. ‘Hardly any of their horses get into real races, let alone win.’
‘But the bigshots need something to do with all that money, eh?’
‘You got it.’
We touched glasses and drained what remained of our beers. It was warm and flat and tasted almost soapy, like watered-down dish detergent. As I finished I heard a buzzer going off, and the TV screen images changed to a close-up of the starting gates, springing open. In the faraway country the horses were racing now. At a nearby table, this beefy guy with a mullet started shouting at one of the horses, telling it to come on, come on. But even before the home stretch he’d given up on that and sat watching morosely. He was all on his own.
‘How’s Ma?’ Jake asked.
‘No worse, but no better, either.’
‘I was thinking of going over there this weekend, if you want to come.’
‘I usually do, when I’m not on the boat.’
‘The model son.’
Jake picked up a bar coaster and drummed it repeatedly on the table, tapping out a rhythm that I recognized but couldn’t quite place. I knew he was holding something back.
I said, ‘Down at the plant you said you needed to talk to me.’
‘I’m going on a little trip and I just wanted to see you and Ma before I go.’
‘What kind of trip?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘I’m not worrying.’
‘Worry about your other family, and your little fishing girlfriend.’
‘Her name’s Tracy. And she ain’t my girlfriend.’
‘Sure – she’s your mermaid.’
‘I don’t know what you got against them.’
‘Forget it. Tonight, I just want to have a good time with my big brother.’
Hearing that, more than anything else, made me start worrying in earnest. Jake hopped up and took our empties back to the bar and returned with another round of whisky and beer. This time when he knocked back his shot I left mine standing there.
‘Lefty,’ I said. ‘Are you in some sort of jam or what?’
‘I’m always in a jam, Poncho.’
‘How bad a jam?’
He folded his hands and rested them on the table. He looked at them for a long time and then he looked up at me. Greasy strands of hair hung out the sides of his bandana, and his jawline was shadowed with stubble. Then there was that gap tooth. But he still had this innocent look about him, somehow, which he hadn’t lost since childhood.
He said, ‘We never talked about my time inside.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘I’m not laying a guilt trip on you. I’m just trying to explain.’
Jake jerked his head at the mullet-haired race fan, as if implying he didn’t want the guy to overhear. Jake got up and I followed him out. He led me through the clubhouse to a set of glass doors that opened onto a patio overlooking the training grounds. They had tables and chairs out there, but no heaters or lights. Nobody was sitting in the cold.
We smoked in the darkness next to the paddock and Jake explained what he could. It was as if he needed the shelter of the shadows to let some of it out. He said that a lot of what you saw on TV and in films about being in jail was bullshit. But not all of it. It was true that sooner or later you ended up needing protection, and when you accepted that protection you were expected to repay the favour some other time.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ he said.
I said I did, or thought I did. At the same time, I didn’t understand at all.
‘What do they want you to do?’
‘Just one thing.’
‘A big thing.’
‘Not so big I can’t handle it.’
‘And then?’
‘That’s it. I get paid and that’s it.’
I said, ‘It’s not legal, though.’
‘That goes without saying.’
I leaned my elbows on the railing, and stared at the empty field. It was mostly hard-packed dirt and on the far side a few show jumping obstacles seemed to hover in the dark.
I said, ‘I just don’t get it.’
‘It’s not complicated.’
‘I mean how this is happening. How this has happened to you. We’re not bad guys. We had a decent family. A pretty nice house, even. Hell, we had a fucking vegetable patch.’
‘That’s all gone and you know it. It’s as gone as that hand of yours.’
I flexed my broken fingers, feeling the sting of the cold. Sometimes, I almost get used to the injury. Other times it catches me off-guard and I see it for the first time, or I see how people react to it. Then I wonder: what the hell is this mangled thing at the end of my arm? But Jake was right. It had all happened and this was where we were at, him and me.
I tucked the hand in the pouch of my hoody, warming it.
I asked, ‘What exactly are you supposed to do?’
‘That’s hard to say, at this stage.’
‘Well, when will you know?’
‘By the weekend. Saturday. It’s happening Saturday.’
‘Why Saturday?’
‘It just has to be Saturday.’
‘I hope you don’t expect help from me.’
‘I don’t expect anything from you.’
‘I’m working till Saturday, and then I’m heading up to Albert’s cabin, with Tracy.’
‘I know you got your other life, now. I just wanted to let you know what’s going on in mine.’ He patted me, a little too hard, on the shoulder. ‘Come on. Let’s have another shot and play the slots.’
Chapter Four (#ulink_4ab74c8e-9363-5da3-acd5-4bb58d515810)
By the time the clubhouse closed we’d lost about fifty bucks – most of it mine – playing video poker and since we didn’t have enough cash left to pay for another cab we had to ride the night buses back across town, by a route that seemed circuitous and convoluted to me in my drunkenness but which I now suspect was deliberate. Jake’s bartender friend had sold us a mickey of Seagram’s for the road and we passed that back and forth between us as we rattled along Victoria. We were sitting side-by-side and I could see our reflections in the window across from us. We looked pretty haggard: just a couple of bums, beat-up and worn-out.
‘Can you believe,’ Jake said, ‘that these places are worth a million bucks?’
He was looking beyond our reflections at the passing houses: one-storey clapboard or stucco boxes, with rusty fences and overgrown yards. But Jake was right about their value.
I said, ‘Every house in Vancouver is worth a million bucks or more.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘No way we’d ever be able to afford a place.’
‘You make decent money.’
‘It’s seasonal. And there’s Ma.’
We got out near Hastings and instead of waiting for another bus just started walking. By then it was past midnight and everything was closed except a few late-night pho noodle houses. A car tore down the strip and the passenger lobbed a half-empty can of beer in our direction. It skittered across the sidewalk at my feet.
‘We could go see Ma next weekend instead,’ I said. ‘After I’m back from the cabin and you’re all done with your “little trip”.’
Jake made a vague sound in his throat. ‘I might be gone for a while, with this thing.’
‘Where the hell you going?’
He took a long pull on his smoke, the flare illuminating his jaw and cheekbones. He exhaled using an old trick of his: blowing smoke through his gap tooth, which makes this eerie whistling sound, high and long and lonesome.
‘It don’t matter,’ he said.
‘Then it don’t matter if you tell me.’
‘You got any cash you can front me?’
‘I knew you wanted something,’ I said.
‘That’s me. Always mooching. I’m the mooch and you’re the Scrooge.’
‘I give you plenty.’
‘Like all the money you gave me to help me get back on my feet.’
‘You still sore about that?’
‘I know you had some.’
‘That was for Ma’s care.’
I pulled up my hood and cinched it tight, using it like blinders to block him out. I walked with my head down and my fists tucked in the pouch of my hoody, cradling my bad hand with my good one. We passed a rundown apartment block and a couple of empty lots and in time came to an intersection, where Jake stopped. I looked up. I hadn’t been paying attention and I couldn’t understand why we were waiting there when the walk light was green. On our right was a used car lot and on the corner across from us was an auto repair shop. I knew those places. I knew that intersection. Hastings and Clark.
‘Oh,’ I said. Just that.
Tied to a directional sign on the meridian, on our side of the intersection, was a bouquet of lilies in cellophane wrapping. Some of the petals had fallen off and lay on the concrete divider. I removed my hands from the pouch and stared at the street and the asphalt, which the rain had left all slickly glistening, like the surface of a dark pool. I figured this final stop had been part of the night’s plan – just as much as the Firehall, and the stables.
‘You put those flowers there?’ I said.
‘You sure as hell didn’t.’
He walked to the centre of the crossroads and uncapped our mickey and poured what remained of it out on the pavement, the liquor glinting gold in the light of the streetlamps and spattering into a small puddle. It was a melodramatic gesture and no doubt partly staged for my benefit. When he was done with the ritual Jake went over to the meridian and laid the empty bottle at the base of the sign, beneath the flowers. He picked up one of the petals.
‘Fucking cheap bouquet,’ he said, which struck me as a very Jake thing to say. ‘I spent fifteen bucks on these shitty flowers and the goddamn petals are already falling off.’
He tried to throw the petal, and of course it didn’t go anywhere. It just fluttered to the ground and landed in a puddle.
Before moving to France Sandy had several more shows to perform with her old company at the Firehall. On that night, the last night, I didn’t see her dance because I was working as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant downtown. It was my day off but I’d offered to pick up a shift and of course that’s one of the things I can’t help thinking about, and hating myself for, because if I’d been at the show I would have waited for her and we would have driven home together, probably along a different route and definitely at a different time. Jake did see the show – we always saw her shows when we were free, even if we’d seen them a dozen times before – but he had Maria with him so didn’t wait around to say hello to Sandy afterwards, which I know is something that haunts him even more than my absence haunts me.
Since neither of her brothers was there after the show that night, Sandy changed and showered and had a glass of soda and lime with her friends and then left the Firehall at five past ten. She had a small white Nissan hatchback at the time and that was the car she was driving. She drove east on Hastings with her windows down, which she always did after a performance, even in winter, because it took hours for her core body temperature to fully cool down. She was going forty-five kilometres an hour, five klicks under the speed limit. I often think of those moments, of that drive with the open windows and the cold coastal air and the sea-brine stench of the city. In my mind and memory, I elongate that stretch, grant her just a little more time. I know she would have been filled with the feeling she always got after dancing, a feeling that she’d never been able to fully describe and which I can only partway imagine: riding that updraught of endorphins, gliding along like a hawk, the world all in focus, clear and sharp as cut glass. I let that elation last for as long as possible.
In reality she only made it ten blocks. At the Hastings and Clark intersection her car was hit broadside by a black Mercedes going a hundred and eight kilometres an hour. The whole front of her car was sheared away and the rest went spinning into the meridian. There is no doubt about any of this because it was not so late that there were no witnesses.
At that point she was alive but unconscious.
At eleven twenty-nine the emergency crew arrived. They examined the car and found that the driver’s footwell had collapsed inwards, crushing Sandy’s legs. The steering wheel was up against her sternum and most of her ribs were broken and her collar bone and breastplate and a lot of other bones, too. They had to use the jaws of life to cut her out. There was blood, of course. Her legs were mangled. They put a tourniquet on each, above the knee, and got her onto a stretcher and gave her blood and oxygen, and that was when she came to, waking into the nightmare of what remained of her life, and started to scream in pain and fear and shock.
Jake and I squatted together on the kerb and stared at the spot where all that had happened. There was nothing to say about any of it and so we didn’t, but simply sat with our elbows on our knees, hands clasped in front of us like two men praying to a saint. I thought vaguely about whether Sandy’s blood had reached the pavement, mingling with the oil and coolant from the destroyed car. If that had happened it had long since been washed into the gutter and down the drain and out through the sewers to the sea. There was no trace here of the sister we’d once had and that fact was brutal and eternal and unalterable.
Eventually Jake stood up and I did too. We crossed against the light and plodded on in a mute and morose daze. Jake was staying at the Woodland – this dive hotel further along Hastings – but instead of heading in that direction he walked with me towards the waterfront. Off to our right was the DP World shipping terminal, where industrial cranes loomed up like monstrous mechanical insects, soulless and indifferent. At Main Street we crossed over the railway tracks and circled back to the Westco plant parking lot. I could see the Western Lady in her berth, the windows dark.
Jake held out his left hand and I took it, and we shook formally, like strangers.
‘I’ll be seeing you, Poncho.’
‘Just tell me what you’re up to.’
‘I’m up to no good – what else?’
‘Seriously.’
He considered it, and said, ‘It’s better I don’t tell you if you’re not going to help.’
‘Do you need my help?’
He put his hands in his coat pockets and kicked the ground. He looked at the water, and at the sky, and then he looked back at me. His features were softened by shadow and in that one moment it was as if he’d aged backwards, losing some of the edge and hardness that prison had given him. Back before Sandy’s death, and all that came after. Back before what Jake had done and what he had become. And when he spoke, it was in the voice of that boy.
‘You’re my brother,’ he said. ‘I’ve always needed your help.’
He turned and walked away from me and then – maybe realizing that was a bit much, a bit too over the top – he flipped me the finger and called back: ‘Stay gold, Poncho.’
‘Nothing gold can stay.’
I watched until he merged with the darkness and faded out of sight.
Chapter Five (#ulink_ad027019-fc68-5f50-97e7-39dd2729bf5c)
One of the last jobs we did each year was to offload the supplies that Albert and Evelyn had brought from their house and didn’t leave on the boat during the off-season. It included a mix of cutlery and crockery, pots and pans, sheets and bedding, dry goods and perishables, and also Albert’s power tools, which were top-of-the-line and worth a pretty penny, as he liked to say. Security at the boatyard wasn’t great and there had been a couple of break-ins over the years.
Thursday Tracy came to help with the unloading. She drove Albert’s truck down to the plant: a big Ford Ranger with a tonneau cover. With Albert and Evelyn, she and I began loading all the supplies into a wheeled skip alongside the Western Lady. Evelyn and Albert carried the boxes onto the deck and I lowered them over the gunnel to Tracy, who arranged them in the skip. She did this in a practised and specific way, so that all the different items fitted together, snug and intricate as a jigsaw.
‘You haven’t forgotten,’ I said.
‘Heck,’ she said, dropping a box of frozen fish into place, ‘it ain’t been that long.’
‘You miss it?’
‘I’ll be back, once I’m qualified.’
Evelyn, who was coming on deck with a sack of flour, overheard and said, ‘She’ll be skipper some day, if I can ever convince that man of mine to retire.’
‘Hope there’ll still be room for me,’ I said, and took the flour from her.
‘There’ll always be a place here for you, Timothy.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ I said. ‘Don’t know what I’d do without your cooking.’
‘Lose some pounds, I reckon,’ Tracy said.
I patted my belly, which was getting substantial. ‘It’s all muscle.’
Albert emerged from the galley, his boots clomping loud on the deck, a box of pots and pans in his arms. He must have overheard us, because he added, ‘Boy’s still a rake, compared to me.’
We laughed at that, politely, and continued handing boxes and bags to one another, like a game of pass-the-parcel. There was a familiar rhythm to it all, and to the dialogue, too.
The morning air carried a frosty, refreshing sting, and behind the clouds the sun glowed like an opal, and everything felt just fine while the four of us worked together. But eventually Evelyn stepped out of the galley and made a criss-cross motion with her hands: no more.
Tracy said, ‘I’ll wheel the skip up to the truck.’
‘Leave that to me and the greenhorn, princess,’ Albert said.
‘I been with you for years,’ I said, ‘and I’m still a greenhorn.’
‘You’ll always be a greenhorn,’ he said. ‘Leastways till you grow up.’
He stepped down from the boat, moving heavy, and we both leaned into the skip, pushing it on rusty wheels down the dock, up the gangplank, and then along the wharf.
‘You thought any about coming up to the cabin?’
‘I thought plenty about it. It sounds real nice.’
In two days they would be locking up the boat and heading out to Squamish. I still hadn’t given any clear indication one way or the other whether I’d be going with them.
‘I could use some help up there. Got a copse of spruce to cut down.’
‘It’s just my mother is the only thing.’
‘Your mother or your brother?’
I didn’t answer immediately, and I guess that was answer enough.
‘You two had a good time the other night, I gather.’
We’d reached the parking lot, and turned the skip towards his Ranger. We positioned the skip at the back, and then Albert locked its wheel brakes and dropped the truck’s tailgate.
I said, ‘He’s a hard fellow to say no to.’
‘His type often are.’
‘He ain’t a type.’
‘I know that.’
Albert shielded his eyes, gazing back down at the boat. Tracy was on the aft deck, waving to get his attention. She held an imaginary phone to her ear, and motioned for him.
‘I’ll send Tracy up,’ he said, ‘to help you load.’
He headed back. He moved slowly – Albert never rushed – but each stride was solid, deliberate, purposeful. As I waited I massaged the fingers of my bad hand, feeling the little nubs that had healed over. A few minutes later Tracy came down the wharf. She clambered into the back of the truck, hunching beneath the tonneau, and I lifted boxes up to her, one by one. As we worked we chatted about her night job, and the training she was doing.
‘It’s just a piece of paper. I know all I need to know about boats.’
‘I’ll say.’
‘But it’s got to be done, if I’m gonna take over.’
‘You ready for a life at sea?’
‘For two fisheries a year, anyway.’
‘I can think of worse ways to earn a living.’
I said it the way Albert might have, which got her laughing. When we finished with the unloading we stood leaning against the truck, jawing for a time. She asked – as casually as possible – about the cabin. I looked down at a coil of rope in the skip, really considering it. I mentioned my brother, and him maybe needing my help. It sounded about as vague and suspect as it no doubt was.
‘But I’m not sure yet,’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard from him since the other night. If I do have to stay around here, though, I could always come meet you up there a couple days later.’
She nodded, but I couldn’t really tell what she thought, of any of it.
‘You don’t talk much about your brother.’
I pushed away from the truck, and picked up the rope. I started knotting a bowline – just to be doing something. ‘You remember how bad off I was, when I first started working with your dad?’
‘No shame in that. You’d lost your sister.’
‘Well, Jake took it even harder than me. He was younger. Our pa died when we were kids and our ma didn’t always have it together. Sandy, well, she was like a parent to the both of us. And after what happened, Jake just got on the wrong track, if you know what I mean.’
‘He went to jail.’
I nodded.
‘Is he getting back on track, now?’
I grunted, snugging up the bowline, and then held it at eye level, checking my work. Through the loop, I could see gulls circling above the cannery, lured by the stench of roe. They went around and around, white scraps in a whirlpool, slowly going down.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t reckon so.’
The night Sandy died Jake got to the hospital first. I don’t remember much of my own drive over there, or finding the emergency room where they were operating on her. It’s all just impressions, really. The glare of those fluorescent tube lights. A hallway lined with white tiles, shiny as a sheet of ice. At that time I didn’t know much. Just that she had been in an accident and had been rushed to Vancouver General, which was the closest hospital to the scene of the crash. They hadn’t told me it was bad or that she was not likely to survive, and I suppose those are the kinds of things they don’t tell you over the phone. She had both our numbers and the home phone number in her emergency contact details on her cellphone and that was how they reached me at work, and Jake, who was with Maria. Our mother had her phone off – she was at a movie with a friend – and so they couldn’t get a hold of her. She had a few more hours before she found out, and in a way I envy her that extra time.
When I got to Emergency, Jake was standing alone and staring hard at a glass window that was covered by venetian blinds. He was staring at the blinds as if he could see through them. Looking back now, the intensity of his expression – the tightness in his jaw, the hard look in his eyes – seemed to signify the beginning of the change that occurred in him. I grabbed him by the shoulder and asked him what the hell was going on and he told me that she’d been T-boned by a drunk driver, and I asked him if it was bad and he said that it was – he said that it was very bad and after that we didn’t say anything.
I went over to a coffee machine in the corner and stared at it. I suppose I went over to it because I’d seen people do that, in TV and films, but I didn’t want coffee or anything else. I went back to Jake and we took up the vigil together, staring at those blinds. Everything that happened to Sandy happened out of sight and out of our realm of knowledge and understanding. I didn’t know what the regulations were at the time about relatives being in the emergency room, but in retrospect I wish we’d forced our way in there to at least be by her side. As it stood we were excluded, relegated to the role of bystanders during those final and definitive moments.
People passed us and at some point a nurse asked us if there was anybody else we should contact and we both looked at her, dazed. I had to think of the question again, going over the words in my head, before I mentioned our mother and that she ought to be called but that one of us could do it. The woman moved away and Jake said he’d already tried Ma. I was fiddling with my phone, thinking I ought to try again, when the door to the operating theatre opened and a doctor came out. He had taken off his gloves and cap and mask but still had his scrubs on and the front was spattered with blood. I knew that it was Sandy’s blood and knew, too, by his expression that she was dead even before he came over and opened his mouth and said words to that effect. For a few minutes I shut down and was vaguely aware of Jake talking to the doctor in intense, terse tones, and when I tuned back in Jake was asking if we could go in and see her. The doctor said it would be okay but asked us to wait while they cleaned up the operating room. He stepped away from us gently, cautiously, moving backwards and keeping his eyes on us, as if he had a feeling that in our grief we posed a potential problem.
The door shut for a few minutes and opened again and the doctor came back out, and the rest of the trauma team came with him this time. They looked at us with sympathy and timidity and the doctor said we could now go in to see our sister if we wanted. He also said something about needing us to come talk to him afterwards but I don’t think we ever did.
The room was smaller than it had looked from the outside and darker than I expected. They had left the overheads off and turned out the surgical lights and the only illumination now came from a bedside lamp that cast a grim yellow glow. Jake closed the door behind us, shutting out the noise of the ward. Any surgical tools and instruments had been removed, and the machinery all around her that had presumably been working to keep her alive, or monitor her life, was still and quiet. The dim silence had a dense and murky underwater quality to it, as if we had locked ourselves in a submersible and were slowly floating down, away from the world of light and warmth that we had always known, towards some place else.
Sandy lay on the operating table in the middle of the room. Her lower half had been covered by a sheet. The sides of the sheet were bloodied. We went to stand on either side of her and we each took one of her hands and the one I held felt as warm as my own, as warm as it always had. Her face was bruised and one cheek swollen into a grotesque bulge but she was still recognizable as her, or what had once been her. Jake reached down for the sheet. When I saw that he was going to raise it I looked up and away, at him, so I never saw what happened to her legs. But I sometimes think that seeing the reaction on his face was worse, in a way.
After that I did something odd. I walked over to the corner of the room and sat down and sort of curled up, like a child or a wounded dog. Jake, he stayed beside her. I could hear him talking to her in low and tender tones and even though I couldn’t make out the words I knew what he was saying and just wished she could have heard it. Through all of this I’ve never been tempted by any notion of comfort in another life and have no doubts that what was lying on the table was no longer our sister, and in that state had meaning only to us.
The door opened. I thought it would be the doctor coming back, but when I rolled over I saw it was somebody else – a younger woman about our age. She wasn’t in the OR scrubs and instead wore some kind of blue uniform. She stopped and made a startled sound and put her hand to her mouth. I couldn’t stand but managed to sit up, facing towards her.
She said she hadn’t known anybody was in there and I explained that we were family, that we were her brothers. Then she started talking, a bit too fast, and it took me a moment to work out that she was saying she had been part of the paramedic team that arrived at the crash site. She said she’d wanted to see Sandy, to check up on her. She said she probably wasn’t supposed to and apologized and then she said she’d never seen anything like that and she put her hand to her mouth again and started to cry. Seeing those tears made me wonder why neither of us was crying and I remember being hazily aware that I was probably still in shock. Jake stood looking curiously at the girl and then went to shut the door behind her and said he wanted to ask her about something. She wiped at her eyes and said that would be okay. First he got her to describe the crash site: what it had looked like when she arrived. She told us about the demolished vehicle and how her supervisor had known right away that they needed the fire department and the jaws of life to cut out the driver. Sandy was unconscious at that time and the girl had stayed next to her, just talking to her gently through the broken window, in the ten minutes it took the crew to arrive. I did not think to thank her for that at the time, but I have thanked her often since, in looking back on it, offering up my silent gratitude like a futile and hollow prayer.
The girl – who was staring at the floor, remembering – said that Sandy had come around when they cut her out of the car. Jake asked her if Sandy had been lucid at that time, which confused the girl and she said something about them giving Sandy morphine for the pain, but that wasn’t what Jake was getting at. He put his hands on the girl’s shoulders, not roughly, but as if he needed to make sure she understood what he was asking. He asked if Sandy had been aware and understood what had happened to her legs. The girl had to think. Possibly she was thinking about lying to us. But eventually she admitted that Sandy had been crying out about her legs as they loaded her into the ambulance and after that the girl didn’t know any more.
When Jake heard that he sat on the edge of Sandy’s bed and put his hands to his face, as you might if you were splashing yourself with water, only in this case he held them there for a long time. The girl said she was sorry again and I expected her to leave, but she didn’t. Her presence didn’t seem out of place in any way, though, and she stayed with us until Jake stood up and headed for the door and shoved it open and left. I went after him. I came out of that dim murk into the blazing lights of the ward and the noise and the people. I spotted Jake down one of the hallways, moving away from me, hunched forward and cradling his guts as if he were physically hurt or wounded. I called out his name and started to hurry. He reached the end of the hall where there was a big plate-glass window overlooking Oak Street. In front of the window was a gurney, an empty gurney, and Jake picked that up and hurled it at the window. Only the window didn’t break. They must have safety glass in those places, in case of all the things that might happen, things like that. The window didn’t break but the gurney did. It bounced off and landed in a tangled mess, upside down, like a dead mantis.
I reached Jake at the same time as two orderlies. They held him – gently – by both arms, but he didn’t struggle or react to them in any way. It was as if they weren’t even there. He looked at me and his face was teary and boyish-looking and filled with a terrible hatred. Keep me away from that guy, he said, or I’m going to kill him. It sounded like a vow. At that time we didn’t even know the name of the driver, but I told Jake I would and that was just one of the many ways in which I failed him, one of the many ways in which I’m just as responsible as him for all the no-good things that he’s done.
Chapter Six (#ulink_66530e18-924e-528c-867c-21d745b61ed8)
On the boat that night my sleep was as fretful and uneasy as the first night I’d spent at sea. I had dreams and Sandy was in them, regarding me with what you might call a reproachful expression – which was just like her – and though I do not believe in such things as visitations I knew damn well why she’d appeared. By four thirty I was already awake, alert, waiting. I could hear Big Ben snoring in the bunk opposite. I lay there listening to that. It was a very human sound. After a few minutes I reached for my phone and texted Jake: if you really have to do this you won’t be doing it alone. I’ll see you tomorrow. Then I put the phone away. The only thing left was to break it to Albert. Evelyn and Tracy, too. But especially Albert.
It seemed as if most of the day was spent looking for that chance. But I needed to get him alone and the opportunity didn’t present itself. We all had our end-of-season jobs, and moved about the boat in an orchestrated routine: passing to and fro, working around each other. Evelyn was wiping down all the surfaces in the galley and Sugar was inside cleaning our cabin and bunks. Big Ben was gathering any excess gear – ropes, buoys, life jackets – and loading those in the storage locker. Albert was down in his engine room, making a few final adjustments: as pernickety and mysterious as a piano tuner. The urgency of the past week was now gone. We had worked hard up until the last day, and had plenty of time to perform these tasks and we did so with a melancholy sort of reverence. The end was in sight and when it is there’s no longer such a rush to get there.
In the morning, Albert gave me a job I’d done every other season: repainting the boat’s name across the transom. I tied a floating dock off the stern and crouched down there with the brush and bucket of marine paint. I had to use my left hand for the job, since my right was no longer good for delicate tasks. My forefinger and middle finger are the ones that are missing, making it impossible to hold a brush properly. But I’ve gotten pretty good with my left.
I dipped the tip in the pot of white paint and gently stroked the letters, coaxing them to lustre. The boatyard was still and quiet and echoed with emptiness. Some of the other crews, skippered by captains less thorough than ours, had already battened down the hatches and locked up the cabins and headed back to their respective houses or trailers or apartments or whatever abodes they each had waiting.
Around mid-morning my cellphone rang. I fished it out of the pocket of my coveralls. I could see by the number it was Jake.
‘Poncho,’ he said, right off. ‘I need you tonight.’
Just that. He didn’t thank me for agreeing to help. I guess my involvement had been a given, for him. I put down the paint brush, balancing it precariously on the edge of the pot.
I said, ‘You said Saturday.’
‘The job is Saturday. But I’m meeting them tonight.’
‘You’re meeting these guys?’
‘And they want to meet you, too.’
I stood and stared at the water. It was lapping at my little dock, spilling over the edge nearest me, where my weight had lowered it.
‘But you said Saturday. I said I’d come Saturday.’
‘And I’m telling you, I need you tonight.’
‘Albert won’t let me go.’
I could hear voices in the distance. He told me to hold on and I heard him swearing at somebody. Then he was back. He said that if I wanted to sell out there was still time and he didn’t care, but if I was going to help him I had to come tonight. That was it.
‘I can’t do it, Lefty.’
‘Whatever, then.’
‘I can still come tomorrow.’
‘That’s no good. It’s tonight or you’re not part of tomorrow.’ Again I heard the voices, and again he swore back at them. Then, to me: ‘Look, I got to go. Some horse is shitting all over itself or something. Forget about it, okay? Just forget the whole thing and forget I even asked you.’
‘Jake –’
And of course he hung up. I stood and stared at the phone. I was still staring like that when Albert leaned over the stern to check up on the work I was doing. I tucked the phone away but not before he’d seen it. He didn’t ask about it, though. He eyed up the work and told me it looked good. I thanked him and he didn’t leave right away, and if there was a time to tell him it would have been then. But after Jake’s call I didn’t know what to say, so I just said I’d be done soon and up for lunch when it was ready. And then Albert was gone.
I bent to pick up my brush but my bad hand betrayed me and I knocked the brush off the side of the pot. It bounced on the dock, splattering paint, and rolled clumsily off the edge. I lunged for it – swiping my paw through the water – and missed. I watched helplessly as it sank, slow-turning through the murk, until it vanished. I hadn’t finished the job. The ‘Y’ was fainter than the rest of the letters, and stood out.
That night, I got up and left.
I waited till Sugar and Big Ben were out, which didn’t take long, and from beneath the bunk pulled the duffel bag that I had filled with my belongings. Packing hadn’t seemed odd or conspicuous because all of us were doing the same, and we were due to depart the next day, anyway. There wasn’t much work left to be done but it wasn’t about the work or the hours so much as the act of leaving early and abandoning ship. Albert always said he couldn’t abide a man who shirked his responsibilities and I guess I was about to prove I was that type of man.
In the galley I stepped into my work boots and picked my jacket off the hook. I had a letter addressed to Albert and Evelyn that explained some and I left that folded on the table. I took a final look around and eased open the door and crept out onto the deck and shut the door behind me – turning the handle before I closed it so as not to make any noise.
‘Sneaking off like a thief, eh?’
Albert was up in the wheelhouse. I don’t know if he’d been waiting for me or just standing up there, on watch, like he did at sea sometimes. I stood, tense and hesitant as a jackrabbit, as he came down the stairs to deck, his big boots ringing on the metal.
‘I didn’t know how to tell you.’
‘So you did the cowardly thing, instead of the right thing.’
‘I guess so. I guess I did.’
He had his arms crossed and his face looked hard and unforgiving as granite. Just this big carved figure of a man. He said, ‘And you’d also decided not to come to Squamish.’
‘I was thinking I could come meet you, later.’
‘You can forget about that, now.’
The strap of the duffel bag was burning my collar bone. I shifted it a bit.
‘I’m sorry, Albert. I’m sorry as hell.’
‘Tell Tracy, why don’t you.’
‘I want to do right by her.’
‘She doesn’t need you to do anything for her. She’s fine. Only trouble is she likes you.’ He nodded, once, as if affirming the truth of that. ‘We all do. But you’re making a bad choice here. I know it and I think you know it too.’
‘He’s my brother, Albert. He’s in a bind.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
‘What if it was your family?’
‘I’m done jawing about it. Go and do what you got to do, or think you got to do. But don’t expect us all to be waiting here for you when you finish being loyal. Don’t expect a job to be here, either.’
‘Ah, hell, Albert.’
‘Get off my boat, I said.’
His tone was furious and fearsome, and if I hadn’t gone he’d have thrown me off. So I went. I’d seen him when he got like that and all I could hope was that time would cool his rage, and that maybe my letter would help some, too. It was a simple letter but it was honest and Evelyn would have his ear. And Tracy, as well. That might be enough. If it wasn’t, I’d just given up the only home I’d had for five years.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_cffa4dcb-7a7d-5643-a362-cd777b079b33)
When I reached the Woodland Hotel I stood outside in the dribble of rain, with the duffel bag slung over my shoulder. It was a four-storey beige brick building, with two shops built into the ground floor: a paint and hardware store, all shuttered up for the night, and some kind of Christian mission with pictures of Jesus and a crooked cross in the window display. Above that the hotel sign jutted out on an awning, green-on-white, only half illuminated. I had a notion Jake had chosen the Woodland deliberately, to accentuate his sense of hardship and destitution. Or maybe he really was that down on his luck. With him it was hard to tell.
A black security gate barred the entrance, but somebody had left the gate ajar, so I could walk right in. The hotel had no lobby or reception, and no employees on duty, and in that way it wasn’t really a hotel at all, but more of a flophouse. I pressed the button for the elevator (Jake’s room was on the second floor) but when no elevator appeared I took the fire stairs, which stank of piss and beer. Up there some of the doors had numbers on them, in the form of black stickers, and others didn’t. Jake’s did: twenty-two. I stopped in front of it and considered knocking but then I just reached for the handle and pushed it open.
Jake was sitting on his bed with his elbows resting on his knees, dressed in jeans and a tank top. His hair was wet and stringy as if he’d just come in from the rain. Something about his expression really got to me. A lot of his performance had been planned, I’m sure, and put on – but not that look: a look of surprise and relief and gratitude. He stood and came over to me and pulled me into a hug, holding me fiercely and clapping my back with his palm.
‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ he said, ‘I thought you’d cut me loose.’
What do you say to that – when your brother tells you something like that? I stepped into his room and dropped my duffel bag on the floor, like an anchor I was laying down.
‘What about the boat?’ he asked.
‘I left the boat.’
‘You mean you left it?’
‘I mean I left it.’
‘Ah, hell.’
He reached into his back pocket and fished out a rumpled pack of Du Mauriers and withdrew a bent cigarette. He lit it and took a drag and held in the smoke as he crossed to the window, which was open: an old sash window with rotten wooden trim. I could feel the cold wind blowing in. He exhaled in a thin stream and stood for a time looking out. I don’t know what he was looking at. Nothing, maybe. Then he nodded, as if I had said something else.
‘I appreciate it, Poncho,’ he said, ‘I really do.’
The room was a ten-by-ten-foot box, not much bigger than a prison cell. It didn’t have a toilet or shower but it had a sink. Above the sink was a mirror with a jagged crack running diagonally across the centre. I could see a divided version of myself in there, and he looked like a damned fool. Next to the mirror an old medicine cabinet stuck out from the wall at a lopsided angle. Then there was the bed: a steel cot with a thin foam mattress. At the foot of the bed lay Jake’s battered leather suitcase, open and overflowing with dirty clothes.
Draped atop the pile was a white sports bra. I nodded at it.
‘You cross-dressing now?’
He grinned, both sly and shy, and I understood.
‘You and your dancers.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘You know who you’re really after.’
‘Don’t say that.’
He went over and modestly tucked the bra behind the suitcase. Next to it, his old guitar stood propped against the wall. He picked it up and sat on the bed, resting the guitar across his lap. The body was battered and chipped and one of the strings was missing but I was glad to see it. If he still had his guitar it meant something. He plucked the E-string and let it quiver, resonating.
I said, ‘You going to tell me?’
‘I don’t know all of it.’
‘Do you know any of it?’
He squinted through the cigarette smoke. ‘I know we got to make a delivery.’
‘Something stolen.’
‘Probably.’
‘Then what?’
‘We’ll find out more tonight.’
‘And then it’s done?’
‘Then it’s done. And we get paid, too.’
‘I don’t want any money. I’m not doing it for money.’
On the top shelf of his medicine cabinet were two teacups and a twixer of Black Velvet. I got down the teacups and rinsed them in the sink. The water smelled brackish and a ring of rust encircled the sinkhole. I dried the cups on the inside of my shirt and poured us each a few ounces. I took one over to Jake and he accepted it and we each pinched our cup by the handle, very genteel, like a pair of elderly gentlemen having afternoon tea.
We clicked the cups together and drank.
‘Was the old man choked at you?’ Jake asked.
‘Said he wouldn’t take me back.’
‘Damn, man. What about your girl?’
‘Tracy ain’t my girl.’
‘She’s something to you.’
I said I hadn’t even had the chance to break it to her. I didn’t know how she’d react.
‘But maybe she’ll see my side of it,’ I said.
We looked out the window together. Directly opposite was the Paradise, this dive bar and hotel where hipsters go to drink. Compared to the Woodland, the place might as well have been paradise. Out on the patio, a handful of customers stood in a herd, smoking and laughing. Every so often cars hummed along Hastings Street. A few blocks down somebody shouted, though whether in anger or merriment it was hard to say. Either way, things were in motion. Time hadn’t stopped. Already the boat and my chaste relationship with Tracy seemed very distant, like some other life. A better life, maybe. But not my life.
‘So where the hell are we going tonight?’ I asked.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_26a7e4b2-8636-5fe3-826c-8f4b9b20c6db)
In Jake’s truck we headed east on Powell, then merged with McGill and got onto the Second Narrows Bridge, which connects Vancouver to the North Shore, where we grew up. Beneath us Burrard Inlet shimmered and rippled, a dark swathe of water burnished by city lights, and up ahead the mountains stood out blackly against the night sky. On the far side of the bridge we kept going along the Upper Levels and the Cut – this long stretch of highway hacked into the hillside. Drizzling rain smeared the windscreen and one of Jake’s wipers was busted, so the blade flopped around all crazily, like a snake having conniptions.
Along the way, Jake forgot to act grave and compassionate about the loss of my job. My presence had cheered him up some and as he drove he whistled through his gap tooth – some little ditty that was irritating as all hell.
‘It’s good to have you along, bro.’ He leaned over, punched me in the shoulder. ‘Good old Poncho. The handsome old buck, with a busted hand.’
He was smiling reminiscently.
‘What are you grinning at?’
‘Just thinking. Having you involved always made my schemes seem more legitimate, somehow. You were the respectable one. If you were part of it then Sandy and Ma figured it had to be okay.’
‘Even when you were up to no good.’
‘I was always up to no good.’
‘What are we getting into, man?’
‘You remember the Delaney brothers? Mark and Patrick?’
‘From back in the day? Sure.’
They had grown up on the North Shore and gone to a rival high school, around the same time as us. I’d come across them a few times. Back then they’d had a reputation as badasses but there were a lot of posers around who dealt a bit of weed and pretended to be gangsters and most of the time it didn’t amount to anything.
Jake said, ‘They’ve been busy since then.’
‘I heard something about that.’
‘They’re making a name for themselves.’
He told me that two years ago they’d formed this new gang that was causing quite a stir. Most of the gangs in the Lower Mainland were one ethnicity or another, but theirs – the World Legion, they called it – had done away with that, and they were muscling in (that was the term Jake used) on the turf of the older gangs: the Triads and the Hells Angels.
I said, ‘Equality among criminals, eh?’
‘They’re the ones who helped me out inside.’
‘Because you’re North Shore?’
‘An old friend vouched for me, and Mark Delaney remembered me.’
‘So that’s why you owe them.’
‘Now you’re getting it, Poncho.’
We’d followed the highway past the Lynn Valley turn-off and took the exit at Upper Lonsdale. We swung north, going up the hill towards the mountains, past the Queen’s Cross pub and the squat apartment buildings near there. The area beyond was leafy, suburban, and pleasant-looking.
‘This is where we’re meeting them?’ I asked.
‘They use their house as a base,’ Jake said. ‘Their mom’s house, actually.’
He laughed, and snapped his fingers, as if that was the punchline to a joke.
Of all the outrageous parts of this story – and I admit there are many – the one I find hardest to get a handle on is the existence of the Delaney brothers. For the same reason, they were a source of fascination during the trials: people wanted to know how two guys from a white-collar background (their father was an accountant, their mother a legal secretary) could get it in their heads that they wanted to be gangsters, and then go about it in a way that forced the actual and established gangsters to take them seriously, at least for a little while.
But a lot has been written about that, from all kinds of angles, by people who have far more direct knowledge than me. All I can do, really, is relate our own experiences in dealing with the Delaneys, which – it goes without saying – did not end very well at all. Looking back, most of those troubles were set up in that first meeting, played out on a small scale.
The Delaney family lived on a cul-de-sac in a new real estate development, with tree-lined boulevards and big sprawling lawns. Their house was built in the style of all the others: two storeys, faux-brick façade, cream siding, double-garage. There was nothing to set it apart except, I suppose, for the vehicle parked on one side of the driveway: a black Cadillac Escalade, as blatant as a tank, with tinted windows and jacked-up suspension.
Afterwards, Jake told me there had been brawls, showdowns, police raids, and a drive-by at the place: the hazards of their gangland aspirations spilling over into suburbia.
At the porch we rang the bell, and while we waited I asked Jake what he wanted me to do, how he wanted me to act in there. He said it would be best if I kept quiet and let him talk it over with them, which of course was fine by me.
The door opened and an elderly woman peeked out at us. She had her hair done up in an old-fashioned perm, and was wearing an apron around her waist. The entranceway smelled of baking and perfume. The woman, who I assumed to be Mrs Delaney, welcomed us in and said it was very nice to see us. I felt as if I was back in high school, having come to a friend’s house to hang out. But Jake, he just took it all in stride. He commented on the smell of her cooking and she patted her perm and said that the cake wasn’t ready yet, but when it was she would send some up.
‘Mark’s in the office,’ she said, pointing to a stairwell on the right.
It ran straight up to a small landing and door. I could hear odd sounds – clanking and grunting – in the room beyond. Jake knocked and after a second somebody shouted for us to come on in and so Jake pushed open the door. Directly opposite, facing us as we entered, a guy sat at one of those personal gyms (the elaborate kind with complex pulley systems) doing reps on the fly press. That explained the clanking. The peculiar thing – or the more peculiar thing – was his outfit: he was wearing jeans and a sport coat, rather than anything resembling gym gear. The rest of the office looked relatively normal: desk, chairs, filing cabinet, card table.
The guy grimaced at us and said, ‘Just got to finish this set.’
And Jake said, ‘Sure thing, Mark.’
We waited and watched, respectfully. As we did, the door shut behind us. I looked back, startled. Some other guy had been back there the whole time: I hadn’t even seen him. He had sunken, angular cheeks pitted with acne scars. He didn’t smile or greet us in any way. He just stared, clinically, and my overall impression of him was not a congenial one.
Mark finished with the fly press, hopped up, and patted his belly.
‘Trying to get rid of this goddamn jiggle-ball,’ he said.
‘Ladies like a man with a little padding,’ Jake said.
Mark laughed. ‘Fucking Jake Harding. Come here, man.’
He met Jake halfway and gripped Jake’s hand and they did a shake and punch. Mark started talking right away about how glad he was to see Jake, and have him on board.
‘How are things at the stables?’ he asked Jake.
‘I’m getting on all right.’
‘See, Novak?’ Mark said, looking beyond us at the other guy. ‘I told you Jake would make it work. Novak here thinks you’re gonna screw this job up. He thinks it’s a bad idea.’
Novak just smiled, or seemed to. His teeth were not nice to look at: yellowish and square and standing out from the gums. Skeleton teeth.
‘Nobody’s gonna screw anything up,’ Jake said.
He sounded very confident, very convincing. At the time, even I believed him.
‘That’s my boy. Send those fuckers a message. Pull some Coppola-type shit on them.’ Mark snapped his fingers. ‘Hey Novak – why don’t you see if that cake is ready?’
‘Cake,’ Novak said, as if considering it. ‘Yes, I will get the cake.’
He slipped out the door, eel-like, and shut it silently behind him.
‘Don’t mind Novak,’ Mark said. ‘He’s a crazy Slav. But useful.’
He led Jake and I over to the card table. It had four chairs around it and on top, in the middle, was a crokinole board. The board was carved from mahogany and so were the discs. I’d never seen a board like that. Mark noticed me studying it and rapped on the edge.
‘We just got into this. Crokinole. My bro’s obsessed with it.’
‘We used to play as kids.’
‘Oh yeah?’ He sort of perched sideways on the edge of the table, in a way that didn’t look particularly cool or comfortable, and eyed me up and down. ‘Jesus, Jake. You didn’t tell me you were bringing the Angels in on this deal. What chapter are you with, buddy?’
I told him I wasn’t with any chapter. I wasn’t with the Angels. I sort of got that he was making fun of me but I still didn’t understand it. Then Mark laughed. His laugh was really something: a high-pitched, squeaky giggle, like a teenager before his voice breaks.
‘Shit – I’m just messing with you. I meant the outfit.’
I was wearing my watchcap and goose-down jacket and work boots.
‘He’s on the boats,’ Jake said, clapping my back. ‘Fishing and shit.’
‘At the docks? We got some guys down there.’
Mark rattled off a list of names, but I didn’t recognize any of them, since I didn’t actually work at the docks he had in mind. This seemed to disappoint him momentarily, and he looked at me anew, as if I might not be a fisherman at all but a guy posing as one.
‘So this is your brother?’ he asked Jake.
Jake introduced me, and Mark held out his hand to shake mine. As we did, he noticed my fingers and turned my hand up so he could get a better look. He bent over it as if he were going to kiss it.
‘Jesus Christ. You get bit by a shark or what?’
‘No – I got bit by your mom.’
I do that, sometimes, when I’m nervous. I say something completely inappropriate and out of line. Mark let my hand drop. For a second it seemed as if it could go either way, but Mark laughed again – that squeak of a laugh – and said something about me having balls, to make a crack like that. Then he stopped laughing, and gave his earlobe a gentle pinch.
‘Just don’t say anything like that around my brother, okay?’
‘Where is your brother?’ Jake asked.
‘He’ll be here. We got a few minutes to kill.’
He took a seat and we did the same. While we waited he wanted to see our crokinole skills. We divided up the rocks and took turns shooting twenties. Mark wasn’t that good but he was very enthusiastic. We did that for ten or fifteen minutes, until headlights flooded the office. A vehicle had turned into the drive: another SUV, a big Durango. As it pulled into the garage beneath us the thump-thump of heavy bass beats made the whole room vibrate. Then the music cut out, and a few moments later Patrick Delaney made his entrance.
‘What’s the fucking dilly, yo?’ he said.
Pat had Mark’s features but he was heftier, all muscled up, with a crew cut and the kind of wide-shouldered, swaggering walk tough guys develop. It should have been comical but there was undeniably something intimidating about him. Jake and I both stood up, since the situation seemed to call for it. Pat ignored us. He had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and he went right to the desk and dropped it. It landed heavily.
Mark said, ‘You got them.’
‘Check it,’ Pat said, and unzipped the bag.
There were black vests inside. They were puffy and heavy and when Pat pulled one out I realized it was a bullet-proof vest like cops wear. Mark held it up to his chest, checking the size, then undid the Velcro and strapped it on, over his sport coat.
‘Yeah, motherfucker,’ he said, and thumped his chest.
‘You’re invincible.’
They played around with the vests a while longer, and I got the sense that this was largely, or partly, for our benefit: they were showing off their toys. Then Pat deigned to notice us. Or notice Jake. He came over to the crokinole table and stood in front of him.
‘We ready to roll on this, Jake?’ he asked.
‘We’re rolling like dough,’ Jake said.
Mark patted Jake’s back. ‘Jake’s got full run of the place.’
The four of us sat down and Pat didn’t mess around with preamble. He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a white envelope and placed that on the table, beside the crokinole board.
‘There might be a key in that envelope. If there is, it might fit a vehicle that will be parked in a particular location tomorrow night.’
‘What kind of vehicle?’ Jake asked.
‘I don’t know. I don’t even know what’s in that envelope – get me? But whatever it is, it’ll be what you need. Once it’s there, ready to be picked up, you’ll get a call on this.’
He slid a cellphone across the board. It spun and came to a stop near us: a black clamshell Nokia. Jake took the phone and envelope and tucked them in his jacket pocket.
‘You drive it over,’ Pat said, ‘and when you get there, and everything’s a go, you give us a call just to let us know. We’ll make sure the next phase is in place.’
At that point, I assumed it was money. Or dope. That was what I’d been expecting all along: some kind of drug run or delivery with us acting as mules or couriers or whatnot.
Pat asked, ‘You sure you can gain access?’
‘I got clearance.’
‘If you screw any of it up, you’re fucked, and we don’t know you. You take the fall. That’s how it works. Can you handle that?’
‘We can handle it.’
Pat looked at me. I’d been frowning, trying to follow it all, but when he looked at me I smiled instead. I smiled in what must have been a weird and extremely unconvincing way.
He said, ‘Your brother doesn’t seem so sure.’
I said, ‘It all sounds pretty vague.’
‘That’s called being smart. That’s called deniability.’
‘Deniability,’ his brother repeated, and giggled. He was still wearing his vest.
‘We can handle it,’ Jake said.
‘Good. Maria said you’d get it done. She said you were reliable.’
‘Maria?’ I asked.
I couldn’t help it. It just popped out. They all looked at me, expectantly.
‘Like Maria O’Connell?’
‘That’s her,’ Mark said. ‘That a problem, Relic?’
‘I just didn’t know she was involved.’
Pat jerked a thumb at me, and asked Jake, ‘He gonna be all right?’
‘He’s fine.’
Mark was giggling again. He started telling a confusing anecdote, the overall point of which seemed to be that Maria had set fire to his brother’s Hummer, after an argument.
‘She was always a firebrand,’ Jake said.
‘She’s turning into a goddamn liability,’ Pat said to him. ‘You’re gonna see her and her brat down there. Do me a favour and make sure she’s not too strung out, will you?’
‘I’ll look after her.’
There was an edge to how Jake said it. Pat didn’t miss that. He jerked his chin.
‘You two used to have a thing, didn’t you?’
‘Years ago.’
‘You’re lucky the bitch dropped you.’
The door opened and that guy, Novak, came back in. He’d brought the cake and four plates. He laid the cake in the centre of the board and from his pocket slid out a slim blade, a stiletto, which he used to slice four pieces, getting the sizes exactly the same. With the flat of the knife he lifted each piece onto a plate, then went to take up his position by the door again.
‘Our mom makes the best fucking cake,’ Mark said. ‘Try this shit.’
Pat took his piece and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth. I ate mine more slowly, pretending to really appreciate it. I have to admit: it was good cake – lemon and poppy seed.
‘Golden,’ Jake said.
Pat grunted. Then his phone buzzed, and he checked the screen.
‘I got shit on,’ he said. ‘We good here?’
‘What about our money?’ Jake asked.
‘You’ll get your money on delivery.’
‘And then Jake’s square with you, right?’ I said.
Pat held out his hand, palm up, as if to say, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ and they all laughed. When the laughter settled, Pat reached over and thumbed a crumb off his plate.
‘Sure,’ he said, popping it in his mouth, ‘and then Jake’s square with us.’
Chapter Nine (#ulink_f14faae3-85d6-59a5-a00a-8f2b55a541dd)
Once we had left the Delaneys’ and were alone in Jake’s truck, cruising back along the Upper Levels towards the bridge, I didn’t say a damned thing. Not at first. I sat with my arms crossed and stared out my window at the concrete barricade that divided the highway from the houses and yards and normal lives that lay on the other side. I was trying to demonstrate my rage and general ire at the mess my brother had once again gotten himself into, and me along with him. In addition, I was trying to work out the whole thing in my head, but didn’t have much success. A lot of what I’d heard in there hadn’t made any kind of sense. But one thing had stood out.
‘Maria,’ I said. ‘Your Maria.’
‘She ain’t mine any more.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me she was part of this?’
‘She isn’t, really.’
‘That’s not what it sounded like.’
‘She’s with him now. Big slick.’
‘When did that happen?’
‘Few years back. You know Maria. She’s got her needs.’
When it all went haywire after Sandy’s death, he and Maria had both gotten into a lot of different shit. Jake went clean, eventually, but Maria didn’t. And apparently still hadn’t.
‘I knew she was rolling with some shitty people,’ I said. ‘But that boner?’
He flicked his cigarette out the window. ‘Why do you care, anyway?’
‘I care because you told me this was about you paying your debts.’
‘It is.’
‘Now it turns out Maria’s involved, and brought you into it, and that we happen to be working for her boyfriend, who’s a total fucking Carlito. Don’t tell me that’s a coincidence.’
‘Of course it’s not, you turnip. You heard him: she suggested me.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘Maybe because she knows I need a chance to pay them back.’
‘Or maybe because her boyfriend needed a patsy, and she knew you’d do it.’
We were on that section of the Cut with a wide shoulder. I told Jake to pull over and, after a second’s hesitation, he swung in and shoved the stick into park and killed the engine. The rain spattering the roof and hood seemed to crescendo, like the roar of applause, or laughter.
I said, ‘Are we doing this for her or for you?’
‘It’s not that simple, man.’
‘It’s simple enough.’
‘It’s not like it was all laid out. It’s not like they called me up and said, “If you don’t do this you’re dead.” She recommended me and they asked me and I said yes because these are not people you say no to, and because I owe them, okay?’ He paused, and shifted in his seat, as if he’d sat on a pinecone or prickly pear. ‘And I owe her, too.’
‘You don’t owe her anything.’
‘You weren’t even here.’
‘Weren’t here when?’
‘When do you think? Some brother.’
I couldn’t talk to him like that, all twisted sideways in the cab. So I got out. I got out and he got out and we started shouting at each other across the hood of the truck in the rain. I pointed at him and demanded he take it back, but he said it was the truth and that at the time I hadn’t been much of a brother, and I told him that was a cheap and low-down thing to say.
He said, ‘Sandy dies and you skulk off like a total shrew, and go tree planting for God’s sake. You were up there for like three months, having your little blue-collar bonanza. What the hell do you think was happening back here, aside from Ma having a stroke?’
‘I know what was happening. You and Maria were playing Sid and Nancy.’
‘Fuck you we were. We were looking after Ma, getting her treatment.’
‘That sure worked. Did you inject heroin directly into her brain?’
Then something shifted in his face and I understood we were going to fight, right there at the side of the highway. And it came as a relief, that realization. It was inevitable and probably had been since he’d first arrived at the boatyard.
Jake walked around the truck and started trotting towards me and I stepped into him and we sort of crashed together like that, like a couple of rams or bucks, both of us hard-headed and bone-stubborn, and both of us just as dense and senseless as the other.
I know exactly what my brother will do in a fight and he knows the same about me. He has a penchant for chokeholds and grappling and I prefer to punch him repeatedly in the ribs and torso. We rarely hit each other in the face unless we’re drunk or insane with rage, which sometimes happens – so perhaps by rarely I mean less often than not. He tends to get my head under his arm and squeeze down so my chin touches my chest and my windpipe gets cut off, and now the tendons at the back of my neck click repeatedly from having suffered this technique so often. But I also know how to wriggle out of it, just as he knows to cover his sides with his elbows to avoid the body-blows with which I aim to hammer him. It’s worth noting that my punches are much less effective than before the accident with my hand but in truth even before that I wasn’t much of a puncher. My hands are too small.
This makes our fights strangely futile. Neither of us can get the advantage because neither of us really wants to win. What we want, I suppose, is to annihilate the other and at the same time absorb or become him. We’re like conjoined twins, frustrated at being yoked together, grasping and punching and flailing both at our brother-double, and ourselves.
We scuffled like that for several minutes, flopping about in the wet gravel, caught in the glare of headlights as cars swept past. Some of the drivers honked (either disapprovingly or enthusiastically) and others slowed down to heckle us or just rubber-neck and have a look. Eventually one of the cars pulled over and an old-timer got out. By then we were spent and gasping and lying on the shoulder of the road like a couple of wounded raccoons.
‘Cops are on the way,’ he said, tipping back his cap. ‘You two better move along.’
‘You called the cops?’ Jake said.
‘My wife did.’
‘Damn.’
Jake picked himself up and sort of brushed his jeans off extravagantly. I sat there for a moment longer, still panting. I’d skinned the knuckles of my good hand on the asphalt and they were bleeding and Jake’s face was bleeding too. He held out an open palm to me, and after staring bitterly at it for a moment I took it. He tried to haul me to my feet, but I was too heavy, or he was too weary, and so instead I ended up pulling him back down beside me.
Jake wanted to buy me a drink to make up, but no bar would let us in looking like that so we took his Black Velvet up to the roof of the Woodland, where we sat on a vent in the cold and gazed over the alley to the inlet. The darkly shimmering water reflected back a broken version of our city, and we stared at that and drank miserably from his little teacups and nursed our wounds and didn’t speak. I must have smacked my head during the fight because my skull seemed to be buzzing, irksomely, as if there was a small insect inside it.
It was true what Jake had said, about me sneaking off after Sandy’s death. I signed on with a tree planting company based out of Quesnel and bought a Greyhound bus ticket for sixty-eight dollars and change and that was enough to leave behind what remained of my family. In the mornings we were assigned plots and given sacks of yearlings – baby trees – and I would take my sack and go to my plot and stab my shovel into the ground and make a hole with the shovel and put a yearling in the hole. Then I did that again, and again and again. And at the end of the day I would have blistered hands and a face swollen with bug bites and the arch of my right foot would ache from stomping the shovel. It tired me out enough to sleep and then morning would come and it would start again. All the days merged into one, or maybe the same day enacted repeatedly. A kind of penance. It was what I had needed, but when I came back things had changed, and my brother had changed, too.
‘I’m sorry, man,’ I said.
‘I started it.’
‘I mean for bailing like that.’
He leaned back and blew a slow whistle of smoke upwards, like a steam train.
‘I appreciate that.’
‘But you got to be straight with me about this.’
‘Who says I’m not?’
I sipped my whisky, by habit sipping from the teacup as if the liquid was hot and might burn my tongue. ‘You should have told me Maria was involved.’
‘Her involvement doesn’t change things.’
‘Like hell. I know what she means to you.’
‘But not to you, right? She’s just my crummy ex – some troublesome chick.’
‘Hell, Jake.’ I stared at my hands. They were all grimy and cut up from scrapping in the dirt with him. ‘You know that ain’t true. I cared for her, too. She was like family to me.’
‘And to Sandy.’
‘But she drifted away, man. That junk meant more to her than us, in the end.’
‘The end hasn’t happened yet.’
He stood up and went to peer down at the alley. The wind caught his bandana and blew it sideways and he seemed to sway with the motion. I had this terrible image in my head of him leaning forward, letting himself go over the edge. A long fall into the dark.
‘What else haven’t you told me?’ I said.
‘What else is there?’
‘What the hell we’re stealing, for one thing.’
He tipped back his teacup, draining it. When he finished he backed away from the ledge, took a few running steps, and threw the cup in a long lobbing arc, over the roof of the next building. A few seconds later I heard the distant shatter-pop, delicate and irreparable.
‘A horse,’ he said. ‘We’re going to steal a racehorse from Castle Meadow.’
I didn’t even answer. I couldn’t. I just lay back on the roof and stared at the stars. The concrete was hard and cold beneath me and those stars looked impossibly far away.
Chapter Ten (#ulink_080c8f00-837f-53a0-b948-10899a85841b)
The next morning Jake announced we were going to see her, this horse we were meant to steal. I’d already told him that I didn’t want any part of it but no doubt he’d expected this kind of resistance: it was why he’d held off telling me for so long. So he cooked me a fried egg on his hotplate – just an egg, no toast or bun or anything – and convinced me to at least come out to the stables with him, as if that would somehow bring me around to the scheme. I also had a brutal hangover, and when I went to take a shower I stumbled across an old lady in a housecoat smoking crack in the bathroom on Jake’s floor. When I walked in she smiled at me, bashfully, and offered me a toke. Overall it was a terrible way to start the day.
We took Jake’s Mustang to Castle Meadow. During the drive Jake assured me he’d ‘scoped out’ the situation (he was already talking like that) and claimed it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Security at the stables was minimal, he said. A night watchman, a couple of CCTV cameras – that was all. It wasn’t like at the racetrack, where they were paranoid about people tampering with the animals. At Castle Meadow they didn’t worry about horses getting stolen because it just wasn’t something anybody had ever done.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and there’s a reason for that.’
When we arrived, we wheeled past the clubhouse – where we’d had a drink the other night – and parked closer to the stables. They were long clapboard structures with corrugated tin roofing. Nothing fancy.
‘This isn’t going to change anything,’ I said.
‘Just come check it out.’
He whistled idly through his gap tooth as we crossed the yard. We entered the stables through a garage door, big enough for vehicle access, and walked along a concrete alley between the stalls where they kept the horses. The air smelled of manure, hay, and animals. At that time – mid-morning – a lot seemed to be going on. We passed stable hands mucking out the stalls, and grooms measuring scoops of feed, and riders saddling up their horses. A few of the riders looked small enough to be professional jockeys, although they weren’t dressed in their full get-up like you see at the track. Some of the workers nodded at Jake, but for the most part we were ignored.
Jake stopped at a stall, with a tin nameplate nailed next to it: Shenzao. It was empty.
‘She must be out for a run,’ he said.
He took me through another door that opened onto the training grounds. I hadn’t been able to see much the night we came out. The main enclosure was about the size of a lacrosse box, the turf mucky from recent rain and cratered with the impressions of horseshoes. At the far end a set of bleachers rose up, but the seats were empty. A few spectators sat at tables on the clubhouse patio, and others leaned up against the perimeter fence, observing the grounds. A dozen horses were prancing around out there, doing laps or jumping over obstacles. Their hoofbeats thudded dully across the big space. As we watched, one barrelled towards us: a big dappled grey. It snorted and steamed as it ran, bearing down on us before peeling away along the fence-line, kicking up clumps of turf in its wake.
‘How do you like that?’ Jake said.
‘That’s the horse?’
‘No. I don’t see her yet.’
We leaned against the wooden rail. The morning was misty and dreary. I stared sullenly into the middle distance, across that pit of mud, and tried to find a way to say it.
‘I’m out, man,’ I said. ‘I can’t do this.’
‘This isn’t the kind of thing you back out of, brother.’
‘You didn’t tell me what we were doing.’
‘Sure I did. Pick-up and delivery.’
‘I thought it would be drugs or money or stolen goods. Not a horse.’
‘Would you keep it down?’
About twenty yards away, an elderly woman – tiny and grey-haired, possibly Asian – was watching the horses through a set of opera binoculars. At her side stood a man in a grey overcoat and dark sunglasses, even though the sun wasn’t out. They made for an odd pair.
‘They can’t hear us,’ I said.
Jake got out his crumpled pack of Du Mauriers and tapped one free. Lighting it, he blew a plume of smoke into the morning cold, and nodded slowly, as if in understanding.
‘I get it,’ he said. ‘You’ve got cold feet.’
‘I’ve got cold everything. It’s madness, man.’
‘It’ll feel a lot better once we’re dancing.’
It was something Sandy used to say to us, as a joke, when one of us – usually Jake – had gotten into trouble or screwed something up. But it was a cheap trick to use under these circumstances, and I just shook my head.
‘I’ll come see Ma with you,’ I told him. ‘Then you’re on your own.’
He reached over and grabbed my bicep. ‘Here she is,’ he said.
He pointed to the far side of the enclosure. It’s a moment I remember well, and not just because of all that came after. She seemed to emerge from the mist, on account of her being entirely white. Even her mane was white. She had a long stride and drifted over the ground towards us, swift and effortless. The guy atop was just along for the ride. She flew down the straightaway and soared past, her head straining at the reins. Then she was gone.
‘Hell,’ I said.
I knew nothing about horses, but I could tell she was really something.
‘Morning spirit, or spirit of morning,’ Jake said. When I looked at him curiously, he explained: ‘That’s what her name means. Shenzao.’
‘And she’s valuable.’
‘She’s rare,’ Jake said. ‘There aren’t any white racehorses.’
‘I’ve seen white racehorses before.’
‘No you haven’t.’
‘How do you know what I’ve seen?’
He held out his hands, as if gripping an imaginary box, and moved it up and down. It was a gesture he used when explaining something that he thought was very simple.
‘You’ve seen grey horses that look white. She’s actually white.’
‘Like an albino.’
‘It’s called Dominant White. And a potential winner – unlike most of these nags.’
She was across the paddock now, floating like a phantom through the mist. Just beautiful. The elderly woman was slow-tracking her progress through the binoculars.
‘What the hell do the Delaneys want her for, anyway?’
‘Ah hell,’ he said, and kicked the bottom rung of the fence with his boot. The timber reverberated ominously.
‘You said you’d be straight with me.’
‘They honestly didn’t tell me.’
‘But you have an idea.’
He dropped his smoke in the dirt, and checked his watch. ‘We better get a move on. I told Ma we’d swing by at eleven. You know how she is.’
‘Jake.’
‘I’ll tell you after, okay?’
‘No more bullshit.’
The horse was coming back. This time the jockey had slowed her to a canter. In passing the elderly woman, he tipped his cap, and she clapped vigorously, almost comically, the sound echoing across the enclosure. Shenzao carried on, high-stepping and tossing her mane. As she got closer she tilted her head to look at us sidelong, and snorted dismissively – as if she already suspected that we were up to something, and that it involved her, and that the result would be no good for any of us.
Chapter Eleven (#ulink_f8ad078d-45df-5da6-b6fa-684db2ccf938)
Our mother opened the door to her apartment and smiled, or partially smiled. Half of her face still drooped, lopsided and permanently saddened, but the effect was no longer so strange or disconcerting. We’d grown accustomed to it. It had been like that since the day Jake found her, sitting at the kitchen table in our old house in Lynn Valley. She had been glass-eyed and slack-jawed, with a dribble of milk and Rice Krispies leaking from the corner of her mouth. At first he’d thought she might be dead but when he came into her field of vision her eyes reacted and seemed to register his presence, though on a distant and dimmer level.
She had recovered a lot of mobility and some awareness but still needed assistance, so we’d sold the house in the Valley and paid off the mortgage and with the remaining money rented her a one-bedroom apartment on Lower Lonsdale, four blocks up from the Quay and Sea Bus terminal. We paid a local company – Helping Hands – to send somebody for an hour each day to check in on her and bring her a hot meal and do her chores. She had a microwave and an electric kettle but not a stove. A stove, we’d been told, was a bad idea. Our mother was not quite herself, or not quite the mother we’d known, but she was still our mother.
‘Boys,’ she said, slurring the word slightly. ‘Come here, boys.’
She got up to hug us fiercely – me first, then Jake. Physically she was still pretty good, pretty strong.
‘We brought Timmy Ho’s,’ Jake said, shaking the bag of doughnuts.
‘Oh,’ she said, and clapped her hands. ‘That’s wonderful. Let me put on the kettle.’
She shuffled through to her kitchen, walking with a slight limp. It was one o’clock and she was still wearing her bathrobe. She was also wearing a shower cap. Not because she had just gotten out of the shower, but because this was something she had taken to doing. It kept the bugs out, she said. It made her look a little like a prep cook at a fancy restaurant.
Jake and I sat down to wait at the dining table. The table was from our old house, as was the majority of her furniture and decorations. She’d wanted to keep as much as possible. The items were familiar but the arrangement was bewildering and of course the space was diminished, cramped. It felt like entering a museum, filled with the paraphernalia of our past. She had put up so many paintings and old photos that they completely obliterated the walls, in an overwhelming collage. Most of the paintings depicted the prairies, where she had grown up, and the photos were of us: family shots of when our father was still alive, and later ones with just the four of us. After Sandy, there were no more photos.
Our mother filled the kettle and set it to boil and while she did this she chattered to us excitedly. She was having a good day and remembered I’d been on the boat and asked about the herring season, and also asked about Tracy, who she called such a nice girl. She hadn’t seen Jake for months but she didn’t question his absence, just as she hadn’t fully registered the time he’d been in jail. She asked him about his own work and he explained he had a new job down at the stables. That impressed her. She had spent portions of her youth on a farm, where they kept dairy cows and some horses. The stroke hadn’t dimmed those memories at all, and instead had made them clearer by wiping away some of the intervening years.
She asked Jake, ‘How did you get that job?’
‘I had some connections down there.’
‘That’s wonderful. How convenient.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Very convenient.’
Jake frowned and shook his head, as if my comment was too stupid and obvious to warrant a reply. He began laying out the doughnuts on a plate in the centre of the dining table. Our mother went on talking about his new job until the kettle started shrieking and she said, ‘Oh!’ and rushed over there. As she poured the water – slopping some down the sides of the cups – she asked him, ‘And do you get to work with the horses?’
‘Mostly I clean up after them.’
‘That’s a start, though.’
‘I could bring you down there some time.’
‘I’d love that. I miss horses so much.’
‘They’re amazing animals.’
‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘Priceless. And worth stealing, no doubt.’
He whipped a doughnut hole at me, sideways. It was dusted with icing sugar and left a starburst of white in the centre of my shirt. I calmly picked it up and put it on the plate next to the others. He’d grown more and more surly since I’d started talking about backing out.
‘You’re a goddamn clown,’ he said quietly.
Our mother brought the cups in one at a time, gripping each with her good hand, her right. I adjusted my chair in case I had to move quickly, to catch her or rescue a cup, but she managed okay. Then came the milk and the sugar, again separately, and she joined us at the table and beamed.
‘And what about Sandy?’ she asked. ‘How’s Sandy?’
‘She’s good, Ma,’ I said, before Jake could answer. ‘Wherever she is.’
‘It must be so cold there. She sent me a postcard, you know.’
‘That’s right. I remember.’
Sandy had sent her one from Paris, when she went out for the audition that got her the job. The postcard was on our mother’s fridge: a photo of the Sacré-Cœur, all lit up at night.
‘I’m so proud of her.’
‘She blew them away, over there.’
Jake shook his head and sort of sneered. I spread out my hands, as if implying, what do you want me to do? He popped a doughnut hole into his mouth and chewed it loudly, deliberately smacking his lips, and then made a loud comment about the terrible weather.
‘Yes,’ our mother said. ‘It is rather dreary.’
In the aftermath of the stroke both Jake and I had tried to explain the truth to her in our own way and each time our mother had either perceived the revelation as a terrible joke or expressed horror and dismay – as if she was finding out for the first time, all over again, that her daughter was dead. The blood vessel that had ruptured in her brain had wiped away that era of her life. That was all it had taken to obliterate the tragedy. Possibly it was also psychological but that didn’t matter to me. I envied her the magic and the blissful ease of it.
Sandy didn’t come up again while we sat and drank our coffee and ate our doughnuts. When the doughnuts were done Ma fumbled for her pack of Craven A, which she kept in the pocket of her bathrobe. It was a fresh pack, probably her second of the day. She slid open the top and peeled back the foil with her fingers, stained that strange yellow-brown from years of tar. Jake asked for a cigarette and she said, ‘Don’t be silly, Jake – you don’t smoke.’ But when he reached across for one she didn’t try to stop him.
‘I’ve been a bad influence on you boys,’ was what she said.
Jake grunted – neither in acknowledgement nor disagreement.
Both our parents had smoked when we were kids, until our dad had died of cancer – not lung cancer but another cancer, pancreatic, which had most likely been brought on by his smoking. After that our mother had quit, due in large part to Sandy’s vigilance. Sandy had patrolled the house and found hidden packs of smokes like a detective uncovering clues, and destroyed any she found. She had stopped Ma from smoking for fifteen years, but when what happened had happened, Ma started up again and there was nothing to be done about that.
While they smoked I got up and opened the sliding door that led to the balcony. It was barely a balcony at all, and felt as confined as a coffin. Just a few feet deep and about six feet across. All she had out there was a single chair and two potted plants – both dead. They were so withered I wouldn’t have even known what they were, except that I had bought them for her: a gardenia and a magnolia.
I stood at the rail. The balcony overlooked the alley behind Keith, and the back of another apartment block. In the alley three storeys below I saw greasy puddles of rainwater, overflowing Dumpsters, and the rusted remains of a bicycle. That view, and her little apartment, was all our mother had, and all she would have until we moved her to a care home, if we could afford to move her to a care home. Standing there in the dreary cold on my mother’s balcony, for the first time I felt the allure of Jake’s plan, of receiving a big pay-out, a windfall. He hadn’t told me how much the Delaneys were offering but it had to be a lot, considering the risk.
I turned and went back inside and slid closed the door, shutting those thoughts out. Our mother had lit a second cigarette and was talking fondly about Sandy again. Jake was gazing vacantly at the photos on the wall, tolerating her but not really listening. When I sat back down, he seemed to rouse himself. He said to her, ‘Ma – I have to go away.’
She smiled uncertainly. ‘For how long?’
‘A little while.’
‘Not to jail again? You’re not going to jail, are you Jake?’
Her voice peaked a little as she said his name. I was surprised she’d remembered.
‘No, no – on a little trip, is all.’
‘So long as you’re careful.’
‘You know me.’
She frowned, sceptically, in a way that reminded me of her old self. ‘Is Tim going with you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘He was going to but now he’s not.’
‘Oh, Tim,’ she said. She reached over to pat my hand. Against mine, hers looked very small and withered. A mummified hand. ‘I’d feel better about it if you were going.’
‘I might, Ma. I guess I might.’
‘That’s a relief. You take care of your brother, won’t you Tim?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I will.’
Jake and I gazed at each other, through the haze of smoke they’d created. I guess I knew then that I was going to be part of it, and that all my talk about backing out had been just that: talk. The truth is, my loyalty to my brother was so strong that I would have gone along with pretty much any plan, no matter how dumb or foolhardy or crazy, no matter what.
Our mother asked, ‘Where are you boys going?’
I raised my eyebrows at him, but he pretended not to notice.
‘Just on a drive,’ he said, distantly. ‘A sort of road trip.’
‘Will you see Sandy?’
‘You can’t drive to France,’ Jake said.
‘But she might meet us,’ I said.
‘Oh – how wonderful.’
‘Ma,’ Jake said.
But she was up. Charged with nicotine and caffeine. She went into the kitchen and started opening and closing cupboards, mumbling about us taking Sandy something. But it wasn’t clear what she had in mind. Then she seemed to remember and opened the bottom door of her fridge – the freezer compartment – and got out a microwaveable burrito. We’d eaten them all the time as kids. She brought it over and deposited it on Jake’s lap.
‘That’s for her,’ she said, triumphantly. ‘Bean and cheese. Her favourite.’
Jake held it up, helpless. He said, ‘Ma – we’re not going to see Sandy.’ And then he said, ‘Ma – Sandy’s gone. I can’t give her some frozen burrito, for God’s sake.’
He said it quietly, but not so quietly she didn’t hear. She laughed, high and terrified. ‘What are you talking about? Timothy – what on earth is your brother talking about?’
‘Nothing, Ma. He’s just messing around.’
‘It isn’t very funny.’
‘I know. I know it isn’t.’ I took the burrito from Jake. He let it go but his hands retained its shape, as if he were still holding it – as if he were now holding an invisible burrito. ‘We’ll give this to her. Sure we can give this to her. Sandy loves these things.’
‘I know she does. And they don’t have them in France.’
‘No – that’s good thinking. That’s real considerate.’
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