Brotherly Love

by Pete Dexter

  Peter lets go of the front seat and drops back into his spot next to Michael. His cousin is smiling, seeing Leonard has bothered him. Peter looks out the window. It frightens him to hear them talk about Harry and Nick.

  “So tell me something,” Michael says a little later, “what harm does it do, the kid makes a few dollars while he can?”

  “You don’t understand the way they live,” Peter says.

  “What, they don’t like money?”

  It is quiet a moment, and Peter says, “They like things the way they are.”

  Michael smiles at that, Leonard’s face appears in the rearview mirror, and he is smiling too.

  Peter turns to stare at his cousin. “You think Nick doesn’t know his kid can fight?” he says. “He taught him. He’s been where that kid would go, and it’s not worth it. They got enough right where they are, not to throw it away doing something they don’t want to do.”

  “The kid don’t like to fight.”

  Peter closes his eyes. “He likes to fight,” he says slowly, “he just doesn’t want to sell it.”

  “You ever thought,” Michael says a little later, “maybe it isn’t the kid that don’t want to sell it? Maybe it’s just the old man, afraid he’ll lose him.”

  Leonard Crawley smiles in the rearview mirror. Peter sits forward again, his hand on the front seat. “I been wondering about something, Leonard,” he says. “You figured out yet how to suck dicks through those wires or what?”

  The horse’s name is Helen’s Dream, and he is a monster. Peter has never seen a horse this size before, but he is sure that nothing this heavy can run.

  Michael stands in front of the stable half a minute, his mouth cocked into a smile, and then takes a roll of bills out of his pants pocket.

  “Eight thousand,” he says. “Right?”

  Mornings, they visit the horse.

  A wasted, clubfooted trainer named Carlos meets them at the stall and reports on the animal’s legs, which are always sore, or his chest, which is always congested, or—on days that he has worked out—that he has bled from the nose.

  In spite of the bad news, the horse affords Peter a certain relief. Michael does not seem as interested now in the boxing career of Harry DiMaggio.

  Michael touches the animal while Carlos offers his reports. He runs his hands up its neck and then down the slope of its nose, carefully, as if he is feeling for something, and then when the report is finished, when the clubfooted trainer has told him again that the horse isn’t ready to run, Michael backs away from the animal smiling, taking him in, and he says, “Lookit the size of this motherfucker, would you?”

  Some days, Michael goes to the track by himself. He feels safe there, believing that something in the old Italians’ rules won’t let them shoot up a stable and kill innocent horses.

  Some days Peter goes with him, and some days they pick up Jimmy Measles, who comes out of his house now as if he were coming out of a coma. Somewhere time is missing.

  Jimmy settles into a seat, carrying a bag usually—apples or carrots for the horse—and begins one of his stories, and sometimes for a little while, crossing the bridge into New Jersey, things are the way they were before the club burned.

  At the track, Michael sends him for coffee or Danish or to find the trainer.

  Peter watches them touch, Jimmy and Michael, he sees the skin blister, day by day.

  Jimmy Measles will not move away from him, though. He feels safest when he is close to the source of his trouble, getting Michael to laugh at his jokes, reminding him of the food he sent to the hospital, of the way he took care of him at the club.

  Sometimes Peter walks off and wanders through the stables, unable to watch. Nick has a word for the feeling, skeeved.

  He looks at other horses, stopping to rub their noses—they all seem to be the wrong size after Helen’s Dream—thinking of a way he can tell Jimmy Measles he is wasting his time.

  Michael sticks a cigar in his mouth and stares out over the infield—the two ovals of the track, dirt and grass, and inside them the pond. It is late afternoon, and beneath him an old couple poses for pictures in the winner’s circle with their horse and jockey.

  Jimmy is on one side of Michael, Leonard is on the other. Peter is sitting two rows higher in the private box, alone, drinking a beer, his shoes on the seat in front of him.

  “What I’m wondering, Jimmy,” Michael says, looking straight ahead, “is when I’m going to see some of my fuckin’ cash.”

  He is sitting with twelve hundred dollars’ worth of bad tickets in his pocket, the program crushed in his hands, his pulse visible in his jaw. Even Leonard Crawley knows better than to say anything now.

  Jimmy Measles swallows what is left in his cup and begins to explain his problems with the insurance.

  Michael stops him. “I don’t want to hear nothing about some prick at the insurance company. I want to hear when I’m going to see the cash.”

  “The minute I get paid, you got the cash.”

  Michael nods, still looking out over the infield, thinking that over. “I hope that’s soon enough,” he says.

  And then, before he lets go of the view of the track and un-wrinkles the program to begin looking for a big horse, before he sends Jimmy Measles back to the window to place his bets for the next race, he says, “You understand what I’m saying here, that this is business.”

  And Jimmy Measles turns to look at Peter, and he smiles.

  His face goes gray, as if the smiling itself drains his blood.

  No one wishes Michael more luck with the ponies than Jimmy Measles.

  Jimmy Measles calls Peter at six in the morning to ask if he is driving to the track or going over with Michael.

  Peter picks him up in the Buick.

  In the car he asks, “How long is it before I got a problem with Michael?”

  Peter closes his eyes. The traffic is coming into the city from Jersey on four lanes of the Ben Franklin Bridge. He hears horns, and thinks of driving like this, with his eyes shut, until something outside the car stops him.

  He opens his eyes, finds that he is still in his own traffic lane. He takes a deep breath and lets it seep out, a slow leak.

  “The thing with your cousin,” Jimmy says, “with all due respect, he never says I got a month or a week or five minutes to come up with the cash, he just says time’s running out. It makes you more worried than just knowing it was here.…”

  Peter drives the car.

  Jimmy says, “I think this guy at the insurance company, he’s ready to come across with something.”

  Peter nods, staring into the traffic.

  “It isn’t the same guy,” Jimmy Measles says. “They took the other guy off it, and this one, he said he wants to get me off his desk.”

  Peter pulls into the far right lane, gives the man in the tollbooth a dollar.

  “What I was wondering,” Jimmy Measles says, “could you talk to Michael about it. I bring it up, it only reminds him he’s pissed off.”

  Peter drives away from the city, passing the topless clubs along Admiral Wilson Boulevard. He remembers that Michael owns one of them; something he bought and turned over to someone on this side of the river to look after.

  “Pally?”

  Peter takes the ramp to Highway 70, and follows it to the track. Jimmy Measles stares at his hands, waiting for Peter to tell him what to do.

  They stop at the gate in back and Peter shows the guard an owner’s pass. They drive slowly through the stable area.

  “The way I see it,” Jimmy says, looking out the window, “the insurance guy worries a while, and then he gets tired of the whole fucking thing and makes everybody happy.”

  Peter stops the car near the stables. “That isn’t what those guys do,” he says, “make people happy.”

  Jimmy Measles takes the atomizer out of his coat pocket and puts it deep into his mouth, as if he wants to swallow it.

  A little later Jimmy says, “Michael isn’t going to do his
own friends for, what is it now, sixty-five thousand?” He considers what he’s said, agrees with the logic of it again. “Sixty-five thousand, he’s lost that in an afternoon.”

  “You shouldn’t count on being friends with Michael,” Peter says.

  “I’ve seen him with that much in his pocket, he doesn’t even know it’s there,” Jimmy Measles says.

  Peter says, “Michael doesn’t know anything about business. He’s got strangers telling him what it costs to do shit he didn’t know he wanted to do it. But where he tuned in, is sixty-five thousand dollars. He knows it’s something that’s his, and somebody else has got it.”

  “The insurance guy …”

  “The insurance is just something else Michael doesn’t understand,” Peter says. “What he understands, you’ve got something that’s his and he wants it back. You don’t hand it over, to him you’re stealing.”

  Jimmy Measles reaches for the atomizer.

  They see the clubfooted trainer then, leading Helen’s Dream in the direction of his stable. All the horse’s legs are bandaged today, and he is favoring the one on the left side in back badly.

  “Oh, shit,” Jimmy Measles says, more to himself than to Peter.

  Peter watches the horse until he has disappeared behind the line of stables. “What I think,” he says, “it might be a good idea if I drive you over to the High Speed Line, you took the train back to town before Michael shows up.”

  But then he looks in his rearview mirror and sees the limo coming through the gate behind him. Leonard at the wheel. The early morning sun catches his glasses as he gets out to open the door for Michael.

  “Such things happen,” the trainer says.

  Michael is standing just outside the stall, his hands at his sides, staring at the horse. He does not give the impression he is listening. There is a pitchfork in the corner, some blinders hanging from a nail.

  “We take him for the gallop this morning,” the trainer says, “try to make everyone happy, get him into shape so he can race like you said, a nice easy gallop and he pulls hisself lame in the back leg. I have the vet to take a picture, and he’s broke a bone. Not too bad, it ain’t much of a break, but the truth is, you know, this ain’t really a sound horse.”

  He steals a look at Michael. “I’m tellin’ you the truth, Mr. Flood. Such things happen.”

  Michael moves his gaze from the horse to the trainer. Leonard picks up the pitchfork, feeling its weight.

  “What you’re saying, this horse ain’t really a racehorse.”

  The trainer shrugs. “He used to could run,” he says. “It ain’t that he couldn’t used to run. But a horse’s legs is a delicate thing and something happen. Maybe his breeding ain’t right; maybe, you know, he’s just too fucking big.”

  Michael turns away from the trainer and seems to notice Jimmy Measles for the first time that morning. “The horse is too fuckin’ big,” he says.

  “Might be that,” the trainer said. “Might be his father and mother.”

  “Might be,” Michael says, looking back at the trainer, “he’s been around you so fuckin’ long, he thinks that’s how he’s s’posed to walk.”

  The trainer shrugs, Peter turns to look at the horse.

  Its nose is wet and a muscle flutters down it’s back, a minnow under the coat.

  Leonard is playing with the pitchfork, lifting it and dropping it so the prongs stab the dirt on either side of the toe of his loafer. Michael reaches into his waistband and comes out with a pistol. The trainer freezes.

  “You’re supposed to shoot these fuckin’ things, right?” he says.

  Leonard smiles, everyone else stands dead still.

  “You can’t shoot your horse,” Peter says. Leonard holds the pitchfork, poised over his alligator shoes, and watches Peter slide farther away from Michael’s protection.

  “I own the fuckin’ thing,” Michael says.

  Peter shakes his head. “All the time you been out here, you seen anybody else shooting their horse?”

  “I ain’t seen nobody else out here got a horse that isn’t a horse.”

  “There’s a lot of broke-down horses, Mr. Flood,” the trainer says.

  “You already talked, told me the horse is too big,” Michael says. “My cousin’s talking now, telling me I can’t shoot the motherfucker. When he’s through tellin’ me what I can do, then it’s your turn again.”

  “They inject them,” Peter says.

  Michael thinks it over, the gun still in his hand, the horse still dripping from the nose. Michael looks at the trainer. “A needle?” he says.

  The trainer nods, watching the gun.

  “Go get it.”

  The trainer shrugs and heads off in the direction of the barn; Michael puts the gun back inside his pants. The horse blows and twitches, Jimmy Measles uses his atomizer. Leonard throws the pitchfork into a bale of hay, trying to get it to stick.

  The sun breaks the line of stables and touches the top of the stall. Peter studies Michael’s mood, waiting for the time to talk him out of killing the horse. He doesn’t want an argument; if Michael thinks there is an argument, he will shoot the horse to settle it.

  Another trainer walks past, leading another horse. Michael’s attention drifts, following the awkward, unsteady motion of the animal’s rear legs; they walk as if they are on high heels.

  “You know,” Peter says, “there’s no reason we got to do something right now. We could ship him back to Maryland, have them take a look there.”

  “Look at what?” Michael says. “The assholes stupid enough to buy him?”

  “He isn’t a bad horse,” Peter says. He notices Jimmy Measles then, standing at the corner of the stall, watching him negotiate for the animal’s life. Jimmy Measles doesn’t seem to be breathing. The horse nuzzles Jimmy’s coat for a carrot.

  “We take him back, maybe they fix him so he can run around the meadow,” Peter says, “maybe let him fuck little horses once in a while, that way the colts come out, they’re the right size.”

  Michael looks at Helen’s Dream, thinking.

  “I didn’t buy him to run around the meadow and fuck other horses,” he says finally.

  The veterinarian is wearing tennis shoes and a stained shirt, and looks at his watch as if he has someplace else to go. His hair is pulled into a ponytail and he squints through rimless glasses, looking over the four men gathered at the stall in an impatient way.

  He reminds Michael of a kid named Butchie he used to chase home from school.

  The veterinarian sees Michael watching him. “You the owner?” he says.

  Michael nods, noticing the tone of his voice. He thinks it has been too long since somebody chased Butchie home.

  The veterinarian opens his bag and comes out with a piece of paper. “Owner’s signature,” he says.

  Michael takes the paper and signs it against the door of the stall. The veterinarian takes it back and turns it over to the trainer, who signs it too.

  The veterinarian puts the paper into his shirt pocket and stretches a pair of rubber gloves over his hands. He goes back into the bag again, this time for the syringe.

  There is something so sudden in the gesture that even Michael feels it, a coldness. Jimmy Measles turns away; he does not like needles.

  The veterinarian studies the animal’s neck. “Hold him,” he says, and the trainer wraps his arms around the horse’s face.

  The horse accepts the embrace.

  The veterinarian runs his fingers along the neck, finding the spot. He holds the syringe with his other hand, pointed down and away from himself; a single, clear drop of liquid hangs from the tip of the needle, and then drops.

  He puts the needle in twelve inches beneath the head, pointed in the direction of the brain. His hand stretches under the rubber to accommodate the size of the syringe, and then he squeezes his thumb and his fingers together.

  The needle comes out and the veterinarian takes a step back. The trainer holds on a moment longer. The horse
begins to blow, and then, as if there is something he’s forgotten, he suddenly stops, and shudders, and drops.

  The ground moves under Peter’s feet.

  The horse lies still, his nose protruding a foot out of the stall, his tongue a few inches beyond that, coated with dirt.

  The veterinarian peels off his gloves and makes out his bill. His fingertips are stained yellow and there is grime under his nails. Two hundred and forty dollars.

  Michael hands the bill to Peter; Jimmy Measles has gone white.

  Peter pays the veterinarian out of his pocket, peeling off the bills without looking at the man who is taking them. Leonard sits down on a wooden fruit box near the animal, holding the pitchfork between his legs.

  “You want me to have somebody come get this?” the veterinarian says.

  The trainer looks at Michael, who does not answer.

  “Yo,” the vet says. “You want me to take care of this, you want to have it done yourself?”

  Michael examines him then, up and down, and in that moment the veterinarian changes, as if he has spilled a little of what he gave to the horse on himself.

  “The thing is,” Michael says, still watching him, “I changed my mind.”

  Leonard stands up, showing the veterinarian the wires in his mouth. He takes off his sunglasses and hangs them outside the pocket of his shirt.

  The veterinarian looks at the trainer, and then, seeing there is no help, back at Michael.

  “You hear what I said?” Michael says. “I changed my mind.”

  The veterinarian starts to smile, tries it and then lets it go. “You said you …”

  Peter steps between Michael and the veterinarian, cutting off the line of sight. “Michael …”

  Michael moves around him where he can see the veterinarian again. “Leonard,” he says, “gimme that fuckin’ bag.”

  Leonard takes the bag away from the veterinarian and hands it to Michael. He opens it, looking over what is inside, and takes out a syringe that is similar to the one the veterinarian put into the horse’s neck.

  “Give him his bag,” Peter says. “You told him put the horse down, he put the horse down.”

  “He’s a big shot,” Michael says.