by Tyler Keevil
Chapter Fourteen
In looking back on it, our antics in the stable marked us out as fools and amateurs rather than actual felons, and possibly that aspect of the story was what made it catch on. That and the CCTV footage: drop-frame black-and-white action, and us chasing around after the animal, wearing those comical bandanas. Then my dive and manure slide, like some Buster Keaton stunt. Luckily the cameras didn’t have audio or my hollering would have been picked up, too. As things stood the clip still went viral, after one of the stable hands got hold of it and posted it online: me getting jerked along by that horse, just like I’d been getting jerked along by my brother since the start of the whole affair.
At the time, of course, it all felt serious and grave and frightening. We thought we were wasting time, which we were, and that the security guard might come back any moment. We had no way of knowing that the plan – at least the initial plan – was not going to work, and that a few extra minutes bumbling about in the stables would have no impact whatsoever.
As I lay face down on the concrete, smeared in mud and silage, I heard Jake’s footsteps. He ignored me – he leapt right over me, actually – and began fitting the halter onto Shenzao’s snout. I watched from where I lay, stunned and dazed. He seemed to know how to go about it. Possibly he’d been practising. The horse shook her head once, as if to clear it, but didn’t resist much. She seemed resigned to the ordeal, now.
Jake looked down at me.
‘Help me, man,’ he said. ‘Get up. Can you get up?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We need to get her in the van before she blacks out. I think I gave her too much.’
‘I thought you measured the dose.’
‘I eyeballed it.’
‘My brother, the vet.’
‘Get off your ass and help.’
‘My brother, the master criminal veterinarian.’
But I moved. First I untangled my arm from the rope. I had a brutal burn that coiled around my forearm like a snake tattoo, the skin raw and torn and speckled with broken blood vessels. I cradled it as I got up, moving painfully. My shoulder joint twinged. It was an old injury – I’d once separated it playing hockey – and it came back at inopportune times. Like when I was trying to steal a horse. I had to adjust my bandana, which was all askew.
Jake had put the halter on Shenzao, now. He cinched the strap tight across her chest, and took up the reins. The horse seemed content to let him do this, but she didn’t look all that interested in moving. She was sitting very still and acting more like the statue of a horse than an actual horse. Jake walked forward with the reins, and leaned on them to get her moving.
‘Come on, girl,’ he said. ‘Come on.’ Then, to me: ‘Use the rope, will you?’
My lasso still hung from her neck, too. I took hold of the loose end with my bad hand. My good hand was the one with the rope burn. So in that way, my bad hand was now my good hand, and vice versa. Or, to put it in plain terms, both my hands were now bad.
With Jake hauling on the reins, and me reefing on the rope, we made some sluggish progress. Shenzao shuffled forward reluctantly, without actually standing up. She looked like a dog dragging its butt along, like they do when they have worms.
‘Give it a bit more,’ he said.
‘My arm is screwed, man.’
‘Try pushing, then.’
‘Pushing what?’
‘Her ass. But don’t get behind her. I don’t want her to kick your damned head in.’
‘I don’t want that either.’
I stood off to one side, but right close to her, and put my shoulder against her haunch. I leaned in, like a prop in a rugby scrum, and Jake pulled, and the horse’s legs unfolded and lifted her body up off the concrete. She was moving.
‘Keep going,’ Jake said. ‘Don’t stop.’
Working her like that, we managed to get her to walk the length of the alley. She was taking the path of least resistance, and so long as we made it more effort to remain still than move forward she complied. When we reached the door Jake gave me the reins and told me to keep her on her feet. He had to open the garage door – a rolling shutter that rattled upwards – and then the back doors of the van. He positioned the ramp: fitting one end into a slot on the tailgate and lowering the other side to the ground, at about a thirty-degree angle.
‘Okay girl,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
He took the reins back from me and walked up the ramp, leading her on. When Shenzao saw where she was going, she held her head stiff and turned it sideways – mighty suspicious – and tried to backpedal. Jake pulled on the reins, struggling to hold her. If she had been lucid, and not sedated, that would have been it. But she was too confused to put up a real fight, and eventually made her way up the ramp and into the cargo box.
Jake tied off the reins to a clip at the front of the trailer, and slipped around her, watching closely in case she kicked. She seemed reasonably calm, all things considered.
‘Can she just stand like that?’ I asked.
‘That’s how they travel. She’ll be fine.’
We pulled down the garage door, and Jake re-locked it from inside. Then we walked out of the access door (Jake locked that, too) and got back in the cab. Once we were in our seats, with me at the wheel, we lowered those bandanas, so they hung around our necks like kerchiefs. We sat there for a time, and Jake laughed, short and sharp – a sort of bark of a laugh. Neither of us could quite believe that we’d done it. We’d made asses of ourselves and we’d made a lot of noise, but we had the horse in the van.
I started the engine. Now we just had to drive her to wherever it was she was going. For the first time, it almost seemed possible: doing it without getting caught. Not the perfect crime but a crime. It happened. People got away with crimes all the time. Bank robbers and car thieves and, in the old days, train robbers and horse thieves. We were now part of a grand tradition: in cahoots with all those other fools like us.
Chapter Fifteen
That sense of hope and optimism buoyed us up like hydraulics as we bounded out of Castle Meadow, got onto Marine, and followed that all the way around to the Pattullo Bridge. From there we scooted over to the TransCanada highway, heading southeast. It was two thirty in the morning. The city had settled into that sleepy, late-night state, lazy as an old tomcat, and we had the highway almost to ourselves, aside from a few truckers hauling freight.
‘I never thought we’d actually do it,’ I said.
‘I told you: pick-up and delivery.’
‘How much they paying us for this delivery, anyway?’
‘A hundred grand.’
‘A hundred grand?’
‘Yeah – ten for you, ninety for me.’
‘My ass.’
‘We’ll negotiate.’
‘If I’d known it was that much, I would have signed up quicker.’
It seems funny, looking back, that there was a brief period in all of this when we really and truly believed we could simply drive across the border with a stolen horse, drop her off, and get paid. We even started talking about what we were going to do with the money. I had this idea about putting a down payment on a boat, and getting my own licence, like Albert.
‘You could come out for the fishing seasons, man,’ I said.
‘Sure. It’ll be a family affair.’
‘Me, you, and Ma.’
We talked and joked about that for a while, even going so far as to name the boat – The Sandra Jane, after Sandy – and then it was Jake’s turn.
‘Me?’ he said. ‘I’m gonna buy myself a little place in the interior. You can get a lot of house and a lot of land, with that kind of deposit. Turn one room into a studio. Just live out there and make my music. Fuck this city, and its millionaires.’ He waved a hand at the buildings we were passing, as if he could make them disappear. ‘I’ll get by doing odd jobs.’
‘We could have a vegetable farm, like Sandy wanted. Live off the fat of the land.’
‘You fuckin
g Lenny.’
‘Tell me about them rabbits again.’
‘Just remember what happened to Lenny.’
‘I always hated that part.’
Thinking of poor Lenny getting shot sobered us up, some.
‘Still got a long way to go,’ Jake said.
Olympia, where we were headed, was straight down the coast, south of Seattle. I’d been that way before and from what I recalled the journey hadn’t taken too long.
I said, ‘How close to Olympia is it?’
‘A little beyond, out in the hills. But there won’t be traffic.’
‘You figuring on four hours?’
‘Five, tops. We got to cross at Aldergrove.’
The plan was to get the horse down, and then come back in a different vehicle the following day, leaving the van at the ranch with Maria. On Monday Jake would show up for work, as usual. It would be his job to act as surprised and shocked as all the other grooms and stable hands. That was the plan, anyway. It wasn’t a particularly good one. But I’m not making any grand claims for our criminal capabilities. I’m just telling it how it was. And it was nice, for a little while, to make believe it was all going to turn out okay.
Near Langley, just before we turned off onto Highway 13, the fuel light came on. This was not a complete and total surprise. When we’d picked up the van, I’d noticed we had about a quarter tank. I’d just clocked it, in the way you do, when you get into any vehicle. It wasn’t nearly empty and of course we’d had other things on our mind. And it hadn’t been an issue.
Now it was. It meant we only had about eighty klicks before we’d be running on empty. We debated whether to cross the border first and gas up in the States, which was what tourists usually did because it was cheaper down there, or to gas up before we made the crossing. In the end we decided the second option was better. If we hit any delays at the border, there was the risk we’d run down the tank while we waited and get stuck, which of course would have been disastrous. And partly I think we were more comfortable stopping at a Canadian gas station. The familiarity made it seem safer.
We pulled into an all-night Shell station off of Highway 13. It looked innocuous enough: eight pumps, car wash, air and water station, and a till with a little twenty-four-hour shop. I parked the van and Jake got out to fill up, turning his collar up against the cold. An employee was out on the forecourt, wiping down the gas pump opposite. At that point I didn’t pay him much attention, other than as a figure at the edge of my vision.
The digits on the pump display cycled upwards. A car whooshed past on the highway. Jake slowed down as the total neared fifty bucks. When he finished he replaced the nozzle on the pump and I asked him to pick me up a coffee for the journey.
‘Sure,’ he said, but just as he said it, from the back of the van, the horse whinnied, or neighed, or whatever you call it. It made a noise, anyway. Jake and I exchanged a look – both of us understanding that it was time to go, and now – and he fast-stepped across the forecourt to pay at the till inside.
But the guy cleaning the pumps had heard. He shuffled towards the van, carrying his mop like a staff. He was an old-timer with a wisp of white beard, wearing a puffy ski jacket. He sidled up to my window – which was open – and asked what we were transporting.
‘Livestock,’ I said, which was all I could think to say.
He asked something else, but I didn’t catch the question: it was obliterated by a second bout of neighing, which then turned into an ominous stomping. Shenzao was kicking the side of the van. It sounded like a goddamned clap of thunder each time, or somebody belting away on a giant kettle drum. Thrum, thrum, thrum.
The old guy – he looked surprised as hell. I didn’t know what to say, and so I reached down and patted the driver’s door with my palm and told him, ‘Don’t worry – this thing is sturdy.’ As if to reassure him it could withstand the onslaught.
‘Your animal,’ the old man said, ‘is not happy.’
He pronounced this very solemnly, as if reciting a proverb, or reading my fortune. My animal was not happy, or my karma was out of line, or what have you – which was no doubt true, since I was now a thief and lawbreaker and deserving of all the bad luck I had coming my way.
‘She’s a live one, all right,’ I said.
‘What kind of animal?’
‘Well,’ I said, and stopped.
I didn’t want to lie, in case it sounded as if I was lying. But some guilty instinct also wouldn’t let me say horse. So I considered it for a few seconds, but was saved from having to answer because that was when Shenzao kicked open the back doors of the cargo box.
Later, Jake told me he saw it all from inside, through the windows. He said he heard this huge crash and him and the woman at the till both looked across the forecourt, and there was Shenzao: stepping out onto the pavement like the queen of goddamn Sheba, looking royally pissed off.
The woman just said, ‘Wow.’
Jake threw fifty bucks at her and came sprinting across the lot to help.
I’d got out of the van, but I hadn’t approached Shenzao. I simply stood at the ready. I didn’t want to spook her, in case she bolted. She took half a dozen steps across the forecourt and then drew up short, as if she’d just noticed she was somewhere completely unfamiliar. She held her head high and sniffed, scenting the air – possibly smelling manure or other animals on nearby farms. Beneath the gas station lights her coat seemed to be glowing, bright and pearlescent. In that setting she looked absolutely surreal.
The cleaner rubbed his eyes with his fists, in this pantomime manner, as if he thought he might be dreaming. He said something wondrous to himself, in another language.
Then Jake got back. He said, ‘What the hell, Poncho!’
‘She just went crazy.’
‘You should have pacified her.’
‘You should have tied her up better.’
Clearly, there were a lot of things we should, and shouldn’t, have done. We put our heads together and had a quick pow-wow. The funny thing was, the guy – the cleaner guy – came to join us.
‘I help you,’ he said.
Apparently he was going to help us.
‘Okay,’ Jake said, accepting the offer without question. ‘You both circle around, one on each side. Keep her between the pumps. I’ll get a hold of the reins and lead her back to the van.’
The two of us followed his instructions, splitting up and getting into position. I was having visions of her bolting, and dragging me like she’d done in the stable.
‘I ain’t lassoing her again,’ I told Jake.
‘Just stand your ground, okay?’
I waited there, with my arms out wide, like a rugby player ready to make a tackle. Opposite me, the cleaner got into a crouch and made gentle clicking noises with his tongue, intending to soothe her. We held our positions as Jake sidled up to her, talking all the while. I think the fact she didn’t bolt was due less to his horsemanship and more to her own uncertainty and terror at being in such a daunting location, the like of which she’d never known.
She let him take her reins, anyway.
As he led her back to the van, I hustled around to set up the loading ramp. Jake walked her right up and in, but when we tried to shut the doors, they wouldn’t latch, let alone lock. Her kick had busted the damned mechanism. We fiddled around with that for a bit, bickering all the while, and the old man observed us doing it. Eventually he patted Jake on the shoulder and went over to his cleaner’s cart. He came back with a reel of wire and from it he uncoiled maybe two or three feet. We used that to hold the doors in place by winding it in a figure eight around the door handles. It wouldn’t resist one of those thunder-kicks, but so long as she stayed tied up her hooves weren’t within striking distance.
‘Your animal,’ the man said, and smiled wistfully, ‘is very beautiful, very strong.’
Jake thanked him, already getting into the van. Just before we pulled away, I looked over at the till. The woman was talking on the p
hone, peering out at us. Whatever we were doing with that horse in a nondescript van, she’d clearly guessed we were up to no good.
I didn’t tell Jake about the clerk until we’d put a few miles behind us, and things seemed to have settled. Shenzao was no longer stomping or kicking, anyway. The rhythms of driving seemed to calm her. It was after we had stopped that she’d lost it. It started to rain – a faint drizzle that hissed across the windscreen – and we came up to the turn-off for Aldergrove.
Then I mentioned the clerk, and what I’d seen.
He said, ‘She could have been calling a friend.’
‘A friend.’
‘Yeah – in a “you won’t believe what I’m seeing” type way.’
‘Or she could have been reporting it.’
We both had to think about that. Let it sink in, as it were. In the back, Shenzao brayed, as if she was laughing at us.
Jake said, ‘It doesn’t change anything.’
‘Like hell.’
‘Worst-case scenario: they’ll put two and two together and figure out the horse was stolen by some guys in a shitty white van. They’ll know she’s gone by the morning, anyway.’
I stayed quiet for a minute, pensive and worried as all hell.
‘Were there cameras?’ I asked.
‘What?’
But you could tell he was only saying that to buy time. We both tried to recall.
‘I don’t think there were any near the pumps,’ I said. ‘What about the till?’
‘I didn’t notice,’ Jake said.
The way he said it sounded suspiciously disinterested.
‘Say there was,’ I said.
‘There probably wasn’t.’
‘If there was,’ I said slowly, thinking it through, ‘they’ll have your face.’
Jake fumbled for his pack of Du Mauriers and thumbed the cigarette lighter. When it popped he pulled the little cylinder out and held the glowing coil up to his cigarette. As he took a first drag he cranked down his window with quick, vigorous jerks. Cold air poured in, smelling of winter, and the Coast Mountains, and potential snow.