by Tyler Keevil
‘I’ll get blood on the seat,’ I said.
‘Forget it,’ Maria said. She leaned on the doorframe, and winked. ‘It’s Pat’s.’
‘He won’t care?’
‘I hope he does.’
She slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The engine, stereo, and heater came on all at once, in this bewildering mix of noise. Jake complimented her, sardonically, on her choice of music (it was old-school gangster rap) and in response she twisted the volume dial: first to max, to mess with him, and then all the way to off. We sat without talking while we waited for the windscreen to clear and the silence was not what you would call comfortable.
Maria pulled out a pack of Marlboro and offered one to us.
‘You still smoke menthol?’ Jake asked.
‘Take it or leave it.’
He took one, and so did I. She passed her lighter around and we all lit up. The funny mint-stink of the things filled the cab. On her first exhale, Maria said, ‘I’m surprised you remember.’
‘I remember a lot of things,’ Jake said.
‘There are beers under the seat,’ Maria said, and put the truck in gear.
‘You want a beer, invalid?’ Jake asked.
‘Pass her back.’
She’d bought us Pabst Blue Ribbon. We’d always drunk Pabst with her, ever since we’d been twelve or thirteen and just getting started. I appreciated the thought, and the first sip tasted metallic and tangy and comfortingly familiar.
We headed out along a gravel access road, beneath a canopy of spruce, skirting the southern estuary of Chapman Bay. Dusk had faded into night and through the trees the water glistened blackly. I looked back through the rear windscreen and caught one last glimpse of the Lady, floating abandoned in the dark, before we rounded a bend and she slid from view. We came to a gate, which Jake hopped out to open. At the intersection on the other side we turned right onto a strip of blacktop, which led us away from the nature reserve. Telephone poles appeared at the roadside, and soon enough the trees began to give way to fields and farmhouses. The outskirts of North Olympia.
A few minutes later we reached a two-lane highway and from there headed south.
‘How far’s the ranch?’ Jake asked.
‘About eighty miles.’
‘An hour and a half or so?’
‘More like two. The roads aren’t good.’
‘Out in the boonies, then.’
‘It’s his bolthole.’
‘For when things get heaty, eh?’
Maria didn’t rise to the bait, this time, and Jake let it drop.
He turned to ask me, ‘How you holding up back there, Poncho?’
‘I could use another beer.’
Jake yanked one from the yoke and handed it to me.
‘Does it still hurt?’ Maria asked.
‘I hurt all over. I’m a mess. I wrenched my shoulder getting her out of the stable, got slammed into the gunnel in a storm, and now this.’
She asked, ‘What storm?’
‘A hell of a storm.’
‘I didn’t know about that. I’ve seen the footage in the stable, and at the gas station.’
Jake asked, ‘How’d we look?’
‘Like a couple of crooks in a Scooby-Doo episode.’
‘Ah, hell,’ I said.
‘At least your face was hidden,’ she said, ashing her smoke out the window. ‘Jake’s a wanted man. An ex-con and horse thief and now a smuggler and an illegal alien to boot.’
She said it affectionately, as if he’d done it all for her. And I suppose he had.
He said, ‘Wait’ll you see the footage from the boat.’
‘In the storm?’
‘There’s no footage of the storm. We were fighting for our lives in the storm. The footage is of when the damned horse jumped overboard to join this hen party yesterday.’
We told her a little about that – exaggerating for effect, though of course it wasn’t the kind of story that needed much exaggeration. We got her laughing pretty good: Maria had this full-bellied laugh, which always sounded genuine and not at all put-on or polite. I had missed that laugh. Stirring it up had always been a goal of ours, when hanging around her.
‘You’re the worst criminals I’ve ever met,’ she said.
The funny thing was, relating our shenanigans in that way made me feel better about all the no-good things we’d done. I suppose that’s part of the telling: sharing a story, even a story full of your own stupidity and mistakes and bad decisions, lightens your burden a little.
We circled the outskirts of Olympia and got onto the I5, heading south. From the highway, like so many American highways, you couldn’t see much except walls of trees, cedar and alder in this case, and guardrails hemming in those long stretches of blacktop. Every so often, signs advertising gas stations and fast food and rest areas swept by: those blue signs with square logos on them. After one such sign Jake said, ‘Man I could use me some grub.’
We hadn’t eaten much that day. Just cold soup and bread for lunch on the boat.
‘It’s only another hour to the ranch,’ Maria said.
‘I got to take a leak, too.’
‘Go in your can.’
‘That’s cold.’
‘I don’t want to stop, with the horse in the trailer.’
‘She’s right,’ I said. ‘Remember the gas station.’
‘Yeah – when you should have been watching Shenzao.’
‘I was watching her. I watched her kick the damned doors wide open.’
That exit came and went, but a few minutes later another one appeared. Jake began cajoling Maria again, in that convincing way of his, assuring her we could pull over without taking any risks, and that he would just duck in discreetly.
Maria said, ‘Somebody might recognize you.’
‘This one ain’t even a restaurant. Just a rest stop.’
‘No.’
He grabbed the wheel, and started steering us towards the exit.
‘Goddammit, Jake,’ she said, and elbowed him back.
But she took the turning. The rest stop had a parking lot and a concrete toilet block, and around the other side of the block a serving counter set into the wall – the kind of snack shack you might see at the beach, or a drive-in movie theatre.
‘Let me go,’ I said. ‘Nobody will recognize me.’
‘Your leg’s covered in blood.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ I held up my beer, toasting my own absentmindedness. ‘I forgot.’
‘I’ll go,’ Maria said. ‘You jokers stay here.’
‘Forget it,’ Jake said. ‘I got to take a leak anyway.’
She tried to argue with him but he hopped out of the cab, performing a flamboyant little jig as he started across the parking lot. She shook her head and met my gaze in the rear-view – her eyes narrowing like a cat’s.
‘Your goddamned brother hasn’t changed a bit.’
I was used to that, too. She would get mad at him, through me. Just like Sandy.
‘He’s putting it on, for you.’
For a minute we waited in silence, with me sitting directly behind her. Over the seat all I could see of her was the swirl of hair on the crown of her scalp, but now that we weren’t smoking I thought I could smell her: this citrus perfume that was as familiar as the menthol.
‘Does your leg still hurt?’ she asked.
‘It hurts some.’
‘I forgot – there’s Tylenol in the kit.’ She still had it at her feet. She leaned forward to root around inside it, then sat back up and handed me a pill bottle. I shook out two tabs and washed them down with beer. She asked me if that felt better and I said that it did, as if the painkillers had taken effect immediately.
‘How about you?’ I asked. ‘How are you feeling?’
She asked me what I meant and I said I didn’t know. I was getting a bit wobbly by then, and I was thinking of that letter she’d sent to Jake. If she really had sent him a letter.
‘I made my bed,’
she said, ‘and I’m lying in it.’
‘That don’t sound too positive.’
‘I don’t mean it to be.’
‘What about your daughter?’
‘She’s a joy. She’s sometimes all the joy I got.’
She twisted in her seat so she could see me. She tried to smile but it didn’t look right.
‘Thank you for coming, Timmy.’
She was the only person who could call me that, without getting on my nerves.
I said, ‘Somebody has to look out for him.’
‘You’ve always been the good one.’
‘I don’t know if there is a good one, when it comes to us.’
Jake came trotting back from the snack bar with a white paper bag in one hand. When he hopped in the front he brought with him the smell of hot grease and fried food. He blew on his hands and said, ‘Goddamn, it’s cold out there.’
‘Anybody see you?’ I asked.
‘Course they did. SWAT team’s on its way.’
‘Hope it was worth it,’ Maria said.
‘Well, they had burritos.’
He sounded childishly happy about that. We ate on the go, with Jake doling out food once Maria had us back on the highway. It could have been any other road trip: the same as the ones we’d taken in our teens and twenties, when the two of them were a couple and I was always along for the ride. The cosiness of the cab, the familial warmth and menthol smoke, our steam-breath on the windows, the banter and barbs: all that felt the same, and fated.
Chapter Thirty-One
The burritos and beers and Tylenol and the dull rocking of the truck lulled me into a doze, and when I woke up the landscape had changed. Low-lying hills spread out around us, and up ahead I could see streetlamps, flat-roofed buildings, and a few gas station signs hovering like flying saucers: a town, of some sort. Jake and Maria were staring straight ahead and talking to each other in terse, intense tones. Arguing under the radar, as it were.
I heard Jake say, ‘That’s the dumbest thing you ever did.’
‘You don’t know the whole story.’
‘I know what you told me.’
‘I haven’t told you everything.’
‘That’s for sure.’
‘Lighten up, lovebirds,’ I said. I made a big to-do about easing my wounded leg down, and leaned forward between them. Jake had another beer in hand and Maria had one too – in her cupholder. ‘The reunion only just got going and you’re already bickering.’
‘You fell asleep,’ Maria said, accusingly.
‘Yeah,’ Jake said. ‘What did you expect?’
That was one of my roles: I’d always been an integral part of their relationship. The tempering influence that allowed them to connect, and made them treat each other decently.
I yawned and asked, ‘Where are we?’
‘Elma,’ Maria said.
‘Where the hell is Elma?’
‘On the edge of Capitol State Forest.’
‘I don’t know where that is, either.’
‘Southwest of Olympia.’
Just before Elma we turned off and descended a long off-ramp, reaching a junction and underpass opposite a building materials yard. Towards town, road signs advertised hot food and hotels and something called the Summit Pacific Medical Center, but we turned in the opposite direction, beneath the underpass, heading south on a smaller highway – the 12. The town fell away behind us. Freshly laid tarmac rolled out in a long strip between fallow fields on the right and tree-covered hills on the left: the state park that Maria had mentioned.
‘We getting close?’ I asked.
‘Only about fifteen more miles,’ Maria said. ‘But the last bit is rough going.’
At the next exit we turned off, and our headlights pulled us along a single paved road that wound tortuously through the woods. The ground glittered with frost and old snow lay in dirty clumps at the roadside. Out my window all I could see were the trunks of passing alders, like a rough-hewn palisade, hemming us in and channelling us towards our destination.
We passed a US national parks sign and a few miles on the road dissolved into a dirt track, bumpy as hell and riddled with potholes. Maria kept right on going, riding it out. The rattling hurt my leg and I got worried about the horse. I was about to say something but Jake got to it first.
‘Easy on the gas,’ he said. ‘We got precious cargo back there.’
Maria took a swig of beer and said, ‘And I got a nine-year-old at home alone.’
Jake said, ‘A nine-year-old?’
‘I told you – my daughter. You forget already?’
‘I just thought she was younger than that.’
‘You lost a lot of years.’
The track had a steady gradient and occasionally doubled back on itself. Maria did ease off a little, for the next ten or fifteen minutes, until we came to the base of a steep hill.
Then she said, ‘Hold onto your horses.’
She dropped into first and took a run at it and we rattled up the hill, crested a rise, and levelled out on a kind of mountain plateau, cleared of trees. The driveway – or what served as one – ran a hundred yards further, past a wooden barn and rundown outbuildings. Beyond that loomed the main house, big and dark and abandoned-looking.
‘This is it,’ Maria said. ‘It’s a work in progress.’
As we drove closer, our headlights swept across the front: a sprawling ranch-style house with two storeys and a porch out front. The porch sat maybe four feet off the ground, but there was no railing. It looked half-finished. The rest of the house had a similar feel. The wooden siding was painted in a bright orange undercoat, and some of the windows still had that protective plastic sheeting on them that they peel off after the glass is installed.
Maria pulled up in front of the porch and yanked on the handbrake and killed the engine. She took a final swig of beer – tilting the can back to drain it – and tossed the empty out the window.
‘Home sweet home,’ she said.
We got out. We’d climbed a fair way from sea level and you could tell: the air had a bitter chill to it. Wind sliced right through my jacket and made the surrounding trees shiver.
‘I’m going to check on Sam,’ Maria said.
‘What about the horse?’
She pointed back the way we’d come, towards the outbuildings. ‘Stable’s that-a-way.’
‘Is there a stall for her?’
‘Should be. I don’t go down there much.’
She gave us her flashlight and told us to come on in when we were done, and then she left us to it.
‘You’d think she didn’t want us here after all,’ Jake said.
‘What did you expect?’
‘I can’t rightly say.’
We went around to the trailer and Jake let down the gate. It served its purpose better than a ramp originally intended for loading furniture. Shenzao had her haunches towards the rear and turned her head sideways to see behind her, trying to suss what was going on. Jake spoke to her and explained what we were about to do. She seemed mighty skittish from the ride and I couldn’t blame her. I felt as if I’d been in a paint shaker for half an hour.
‘You’re here, girl,’ I heard him say. ‘No more vans or boats or trailers. We got a nice stable for you to sleep in, and some new friends.’
He untied her and backed her out and together we walked her down. We’d outrun the coastal cloudfront and all across the mountain sky stars glittered like flecks of ice. The dirt in the frozen drive crunched beneath our boots.
The stable turned out to be the barn-like structure we’d passed on the way in. It had board-and-batten siding and a shingled roof, and only one entrance: these big barn doors held in place by a two-by-four. I went to slide that aside and pushed the doors open. It was dark within, and I smelled manure and livestock – a scent to which I was now well-accustomed.
Jake panned the flashlight around the interior. The beam picked up concrete floors and a few bales of hay and the stalls, where t
he shadows of horses stood in sleepy silence. I could hear the rattling hum of a heater but it wasn’t much warmer inside than it was out. Next to the doors was a pull switch and when I tugged that a single bulb flickered on overhead: a tungsten worklamp that they’d strung in on an extension cord and hung from the rafters.
‘Well, it ain’t exactly the Ritz,’ Jake said.
From what I could see, the stable had maybe a dozen stalls and only half of them were occupied. Jake left me holding Shenzao’s reins and went to scope out the free stalls. He said the horses seemed to be in decent shape and the stalls looked clean, at least. In one of them we scattered some hay on the floor – to make it more cosy for her – and led her on in. When the gate shut behind Shenzao she manoeuvred around, and appeared startled to see us on the other side rather than in the pen with her. She stretched her head over the gate and nosed at Jake, and he petted her in a manner that seemed both pleased and melancholy.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we got you here, old girl.’
‘Sorry about all we put you through,’ I added.
‘We’re no good as horse handlers.’
‘You deserve a hell of a lot better.’
She huffed at us, as if to dismiss our inadequate apology.
‘This ain’t no place for a horse like this,’ Jake said.
‘At least he’s taking care of them.’
‘Sure – he’s a real prince.’
‘Come on. It ain’t worth thinking about.’
We bid goodbye to Shenzao and tried to pretend it was that easy. But when we got to the doors and turned to look back before pulling out the light, she was gazing after us with what I would call a mournful expression, as if she knew we’d abandoned her to a new and uncertain fate, after all we had put her through. Then Jake clicked out the light and she became a white shape in the dark, like a reverse silhouette, and we closed the doors on her.
The interior of the house matched the exterior. Or maybe mismatched is what I mean. The front door looked new, and newly installed, but the frame hadn’t been painted or stained. It opened into what was possibly meant to be a hall, but partition walls weren’t up yet – just the timber – so you could see right through to the kitchen on the left, and the lounge on the right.
Maria was in the kitchen, leaning on the counter, so we went that way – walking right through where the wall ought to have been. The kitchen was bigger than our mother’s entire apartment. It had granite counter tops and slate floor tiles and a big black refrigerator that looked like a space coffin: all top-of-the-line stuff. But where there should have been a stove, there was just a big gap.