Red Dog, Red Dog

by Patrick Lane

  Give me the pistol, Eddy, Tom said, his voice flat.

  Back off, Tom, said Eddy. I mean it.

  Wayne moved slowly toward the Studebaker. He spoke to Tom, not taking his eyes off the pistol in Eddy’s hand: Can you help me here, Tom?

  Tom stood absolutely still, looking at his brother as he went around Wayne and opened the trunk.

  Wayne held his hands out as if offering a gift to some greater power.

  Get in the trunk, Eddy said quietly, as if what he wanted Wayne to do was a simple thing. Eddy looked peaceful to Tom, almost asleep on his feet, innocent, there at the edge of the sidewalk in his scuffed boots and leather jacket too big for him. He seemed preoccupied, almost as if Wayne was a second thought, someone he’d happened upon by accident.

  Tom went over to Eddy and grabbed his sleeve.

  The pistol swung up and touched Tom’s belt.

  Everything stopped then. A car went by on the street on the other side of the house, and then another. Eddy smiled as if to say they were still brothers, the pistol pointed again at Wayne.

  Eddy? Wayne said his name as if it were a question. He looked terrified.

  Tom was sure Eddy was bluffing, but he’d gone too far. You’ve made your point, Eddy, Tom said.

  Wayne’s jaw was slung down, his mouth open, his forehead bunched. His eyes squatted under his brows. Tom had seen that look before, in a steer when it was being pushed into a narrow chute, the animal knowing something awful was ahead of it.

  Wayne spoke into the silence.

  Why?

  Tom figured the question was one he had asked many times in his life, but had never got a clear answer to before.

  Get in the trunk, Eddy said again and lifted the pistol to Wayne’s chest.

  I’m warning you, Eddy, Tom said.

  Wayne shook his head as if to lose all thought, turned sideways, and put his one leg, kneeling, into the trunk. He stopped there, half in and half out, never taking his eyes off the pistol. Tom heard him start to piss, could see the stain spreading on his pants, the piss running down his leg and into the earth under his bare foot.

  Tom, Wayne said, his head down, crying now. Can’t you help me?

  Eddy pressed the barrel hard against Wayne’s temple, and then, a second later, took the pistol away from his head.

  Tom looked at Wayne, a rifle in the trunk catching his eye. It was the .308, the barrel tucked behind the spare tire.

  You see that rifle there? Eddy said. Take it and get rid of it for me. And then he looked at Tom as if puzzled by something and said: What the fuck is so great about Peyton Place anyway? Superman too, for that matter.

  Wayne fell away from the trunk and lay on the ground, his body shaking.

  19

  what had happened at Wayne’s hadn’t been just about the old man at the house, he realized. It was about Boyco too. Eddy had long ago told him about Wayne laughing at him at the station the day he was taken away. Tom had forgotten about that, but he knew that Eddy hadn’t. All his brother’s friends had been there that day to watch him leave. They looked up to Eddy, as if his getting caught had somehow made him even bigger in their eyes. But they were afraid too, for him and for themselves, the stories of the correctional school a dream they didn’t want to have. Eddy said he’d seen Wayne laughing, and there was no telling Eddy it could have been about something else. Others were there too, the same curious onlookers who came to the station every time a man was sent to Oakalla prison, or a kid shipped off to Boyco. What Tom remembered most was the fear in his brother’s face looking out from the train, and his father and mother not doing anything to stop it from happening.

  From the moment the train pulled out of the station, silence surrounded Eddy’s absence. It was as if his brother had ceased to exist. Even when Eddy returned home a year later, nothing was said by their parents. Father pretended nothing had happened to Eddy. It upset Tom more than his father’s unpredictable disappearances, Father in the bush, gone for a night into town, or days and nights on the road. Mother too, her vanishing into her room. Tom had been afraid to ask them about Eddy, afraid to speak, and he came to wonder if his mother and father had been afraid too.

  Eddy had got up the morning after he returned, all of them in the kitchen, Mother with her back to the three of them as Father told Eddy there’d be no more school, he had to go to work. Eddy stared blankly at him. Mother had been frying a welter of eggs in bacon grease, the boil and splatter all around them. She never turned around. And Tom had just sat there not moving as Father told Eddy he’d found him a job in the bush and Eddy looked back as if not caring what his father threw at him. Father’s words were huge in the room, followed by silence.

  Tom remembered a day when he’d been out hunting. He’d taken seven grouse. Eddy had been home then for two months. Tom had been walking through the orchard and was about to come down the path by the creek when he saw through the spare willows Eddy sitting on the steps leading down to the root cellar, his face wet.

  He’d never seen his brother like that before. Not even when Father beat him for burning down the barn over by Black Rock when Eddy was younger. Tom figured Father didn’t care that Eddy had burned it, only that he’d been caught running from the conflagration. Father said he’d told the farmer that Eddy couldn’t have done it, that Eddy had been with him all that day up in Enderby where he’d been selling bootleg liquor, but the farmer had argued and left, cursing Elmer and cursing his sons, telling him the Stark family was a blight on the face of the earth. Enraged, Father took Eddy down to the root cellar. His brother never made a sound as Tom watched from the orchard, Father beating him with that belt, punishing him for everything, it seemed, for all his wanton anger and hatred, for being indulged too much, for being his mother’s son.

  Tom had dropped the grouse in the grass by the well. He remembered that, their falling soft onto their feathers. He’d gone to his brother then and sat down on the step beside him. It was a new kind of fear he felt, for if his brother could allow himself to cry, what safety was there in the world for either of them. Tom knew then that whatever had been broken in Eddy couldn’t be fixed, by him or by anyone. And because he didn’t know what else to do, he reached out and placed his hand on Eddy’s arm. He touched him in the tentative way he’d have touched an injured animal, a dog say, hurt in a fight, or one struck a glancing blow by a car and left barely breathing in a ditch. It was just his hand on Eddy’s arm, but Eddy had lifted his head and looked at him, his mouth closed tight. They had sat there together in that silence.

  Tom turned now into the big park down by the creek and stopped the truck in the shadows of the grandstand where the baseball diamond was. He was sweating, his skin wet and cold. Eddy had driven away from Wayne’s heading for the back roads leading to Hurlbert’s farm out in the Coldstream Valley. His brother was like some outlaw now. Tom had been driving around aimlessly, thinking, and the sun had gone down. He waited there, staring into the rear-view mirror, and after a minute or two the police car that had been following him for the last while passed slowly by the turnoff and went on up Mission Hill. Tom sat there for a long time, but the squad car didn’t return.

  In front of him was the baseball diamond with its bags still pinned to the bases and around it the white board fence, the stands and fence both a little dilapidated, baseball a game people listened to on the radio now, not one they played. But he remembered the crowd rising to its feet, him and Eddy following the white leather sphere as it arced up into the afternoon sky, everyone there sure it would go beyond the man leaning back against the fence, his arm outstretched as he reached for something that was falling beyond him.

  He got out and walked around. A breeze stirred, a last sunflower standing against the near fence, its dried head picked clean by birds. A few black seeds studded in the hearts of the flower pans were all that was left of summer. He went over to the stands and up the worn wooden steps to the top of the bleachers. He hadn’t been up there for years. This is where he and E
ddy used to watch the ball games. He sat down, a spider web catching his eye. It was huge, the funnel a foot across. He stopped and gazed into the silk mouth, the splayed legs of the spider draped out. As he stared, a night-struck Bluebottle fly landed on the spider’s web. He watched it trying to walk, its feet caught in the sticky mesh. For a moment there was only the fly trying to crawl off the web and then the spider rushed from its dark tunnel and placed the end of one long leg on the fly’s back. Tom reached out then, the spider quickly retreating, and taking the fly gently between his thumb and finger, lifted it up. The fly battered with frantic wings, and he let it go into the night.

  Descending from the stands, Tom got back in the truck. He started the engine, hung his bad hand out the window into the cool air, pushed the truck into first gear, and followed the road around the baseball field, deeper into the park. He passed under the elm trees by the railroad right-of-way. It was where he’d see the hoboes when he was a kid. They would let him sit with them around their fires as they stared into their bottles of cheap wine, beans seething in billy cans. They were the lost ones, men without friends or family and so, to Tom, beyond both safety and danger, having only themselves to care for. Now they were gone into their graves or, rare, a solitary man might be there, kneeling over a blackened stone circle, a small fire burning in the slurry of those ancient ashes.

  A car swept up the incline of the railway overpass and disappeared down the road toward the Arrow lakes. He got back in the truck and, thinking of the police car that had been following him, remembered the rifle he’d taken from Eddy’s trunk. He looked behind him and made sure it was still covered by the folded tarp.

  He idled past the wading pool where little children had run naked through the summer afternoons to the clucking of their mothers. He’d watched them in summers past, the women all milk and sweat, their only glory the babies squeezed out of them. The barren pool glimmered under the moon and he wondered why women thought a baby an answer to the grief of this world. What hope was theirs? He asked, but like Wayne’s hapless plea, he realized there was no answer adequate to the request. He thought of turning around and going back out to the valley and getting Eddy, the two of them driving away then into the night, but to go where, to do what?

  He pulled the truck over at the deep end of the park where the bush started. There were no lawns there, no ponds or baseball diamonds. The night he sat in was made deeper by the remnant slab fire from a small, transient sawmill by the tracks. The mill had been set up there for the past few weeks cutting private timber off the Bar L Ranch. Tom knew the gypo outfit would be gone over the weekend, some of the equipment already loaded onto a flatbed truck that had seen better days. Back in the trees, Coldstream Creek purled into the big lake and the Okanagan River. He imagined a small woodchip falling from a saw into the creek and riding all the way to the Columbia River, the bit of wood drifting down through the desert, falling from the lip of Grand Coulee Dam and disappearing into that huge froth.

  He glanced into his rear-view mirror and saw a car coming up behind him, its headlights blinking through the cottonwoods and willows. A police cruiser stopped behind his truck, its motor turning quietly over, no one getting out of the car.

  He closed his eyes. Then the car door opened behind him. He heard the slick of grease in the hinges, and then the sound of boots on stones. He opened his eyes and saw Sergeant Stanley in the side mirror standing at the rear fender in his black cowboy boots. He came to the window.

  Well, if it isn’t Tom Stark, Stanley said. What are you doing hiding down here in the park?

  The Sergeant’s brush cut shone like burned stubble.

  I was thinking your brother might be with you, Stanley said, his voice quiet, almost friendly, the threat buried under his words. You don’t happen to know where he is, do you? Him and me, we’ve got some things to talk about.

  Tom could feel the hate in the man. He stayed silent, staring straight ahead.

  Get out of the car, said Stanley.

  Tom, shaking a little, lifted the door handle and stepped sideways out of the truck, turning his body toward the cool air coming off the creek.

  I went to a house out Priest Valley Road the other night, Stanley said. You know the one. It’s right near Garofalo’s butcher shop. I understand your brother was out that way.

  I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tom said.

  We got a tip, you see, something about a break-in out there. I followed it up. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, would you?

  I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  Stanley put the flat of his hand on Tom’s shoulder and guided him around to the front bumper. Put your hands on the hood, Stanley said, and Tom did, his breath coming short and fast.

  How’s your brother these days?

  His voice was casual, as if he was asking about a friend. Then he kicked Tom’s legs wide and put his hand between his shoulder blades pushing him down. Tom’s cheek was pressed against the metal. He knew every dint and scratch in the truck’s paint, the knuckles in the chrome bumper, the pits in the steel where sun and snow had eaten it.

  Stanley’s hand moved up Tom’s back, then he tightened his fingers around his neck as he spit out his words. Your brother’s still got a fucking mouth on him!

  Tom stayed there absolutely still as Stanley went on: Your brother stopped me outside the pool hall last week when I was walking with my little girl. I was taking her to the Kandy Kitchen for a bottle of Orange Crush. She’s only five, for christ’s sake!

  I don’t understand.

  Your asshole brother asked if her dog was okay. How’s your dog, little girl? Him with that shit-eating grin on his face. Your brother squatted down right in front of her and said: Got quite an appetite, that dog of yours!

  The Sergeant’s hand squeezed the back of Tom’s neck. That’s when he said he’d watched her when she was playing in the backyard. My daughter!

  Stanley held fast to Tom’s neck as his other fist swung into Tom’s kidney, and though Tom knew it was coming and had tightened up, still the fist came hard. Tom sank to his knees, the vomit coming hot from his throat out onto the bumper. He looked at it, something wet on the chrome. Stanley was behind him, breathing, and then he was gone, his boots carrying him back to the car. Tom knelt there, the car lights passing over him as the cruiser turned around and drove off into the dark.

  He turned down the narrow dirt road leading to Marilyn’s trailer, Swan Lake ahead of him. He could see the bulrushes, their long leaves shrivelled at the tips. At the top of the ramp were two small suitcases with what looked like some sweaters and a jacket resting on top of them. He turned the truck sideways in the yard and stopped. Close up the trailer looked more weathered, the paint scratched, the aluminum gone white from the sun, worn from the steady wind that blew down the Spallumcheen. There were lights on in the back of the trailer and he tapped the horn three times. Starlight glanced off the lake, the moon just beginning to break over the eastern ridge of the mountains.

  The door opened and Marilyn stepped out, leaning down to gather up her loose clothing from the cardboard suitcases. Arms full, she came down the ramp, behind her in the doorway a wheelchair appearing, her father sitting there with his hands on the polished steel. As Marilyn came to the truck, Tom opened the door and she piled her stuff behind the seat. Your father’s there, Tom said.

  She didn’t reply, just turned and went back up the ramp. Her father rolled the chair partway out the door, and Tom heard Marilyn say something he couldn’t quite make out. Taking a suitcase in each hand, she said something else to her father, who simply looked at her, saying nothing as she carried the bags to the truck and put them in the back. Tom watched as a woman in a flowered housecoat came behind the wheelchair in the doorway and pulled it back into the trailer, neither of them saying or doing anything to stop their daughter. Then the door closed, the light shining from the small window.

  He let out the clutch and drove back up t
o the road. They didn’t look back as the truck skirted the clay hills, heading slowly toward the lights of the town. He drove along the twisting ruts, potholes and washboard shivering the truck. The lake was low as it always was this time of year, the water seeping its autumn scum into the sunken belly of the valley.

  How long’s your father been in that wheelchair?

  She leaned back in the seat and told him about her father and how he was wounded in the war in Holland, a piece of shrapnel lodged in his spine. They crippled him, she said. Marilyn spoke softly as she told how her father spent his days in the chair or on the couch in the trailer listening to the radio and reading magazines her mother brought home from her housekeeping jobs. Her mother had told her he was changed when he came back from Europe. He isn’t mean, Marilyn said, it’s just that he’ll blow up every once in a while for no reason. It could be anything, a piece of toast dropped on the floor, her closing the door too hard, or even just a bird hitting the window. There’s no one to help him most of the time, she said. My mom’s out cleaning houses most days, and I’m at school. She told him her father hated being pushed around by her or her mother. He’s got some kind of pension from the army, she said. My mother gets us by as best she can.

  Tom thought about the woman he’d seen in the trailer door. Marilyn said her parents had met at some small-town dance in Ontario when her father was guarding the Welland Canal. Tom hadn’t heard of the canal and asked why it was so important it needed guarding from a war so far away, but Marilyn said she didn’t know. She told him her mother was Irish from the Ottawa Valley. Black Irish, she said. You can tell because her hair’s so dark. She said she got her brown hair from her father’s side. Tom was quiet for a moment and told her he didn’t know where his people had come from, way back.

  The truck bumped over a large rock and Marilyn sat forward, bracing herself on the dashboard. My mother never paid me much attention except to tell me to be quiet and not to upset my father, she said. She brightened for a moment. My mother knows all about herbs and healing. She makes what she calls concoctions from things growing right under your feet. People along the lake know about her remedies.