by Tyler Keevil
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
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 a
gainst 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
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.