by Tyler Keevil
The winding section of trail flattened out and became a road – one of the park’s access roads, maybe – and we floated down that, moving softly and steadily over the snow. Cedar and spruce trees, feathered with hoar frost, rose up on either side like frozen angels. Every so often Sam said encouraging things like, ‘Almost there,’ or ‘Just a little further.’ She had been speaking like that for a long time so I didn’t put much stock in it, and in fact had stopped listening to the specific words while still appreciating the warm sound of her voice. But then we came to a single chain stretched between two steel posts, marking the end of the trail. We had reached that parking lot she and I had seen from the highway. We were only about a mile, or less, from Elma.
I suppose, if we’d been smart (or in a state that allowed us to make smart decisions) we might have tethered the horses and crept into the trees and worked our way around, or at least scoped out the situation. But Jake and I were both on the verge of hypothermia and Sam was just happy to have led us there, to have completed the task we’d charged her with. She guided Shenzao around the obstruction and we followed obediently, as we’d been doing the entire time, and in single file our three horses stepped out into the parking lot.
We didn’t see the SUV until the headlights came on.
Chapter Forty-Two
It was blocking the entrance to the parking lot, but its position didn’t matter. We were in no condition to turn around and flee on horseback. We could barely sit our saddles. I heard the car doors shutting and, through the glare of the headlights, I could see two shadows walking towards us like phantoms.
Jake turned to Sam.
‘This is for me and Tim to deal with. If anything happens to us, and they take you back, you wait until you get the chance and just get out of there and go to the police and tell them everything you know, everything you can.’
‘What’s going to happen?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
He slid from his saddle, and I did the same.
‘Jake,’ Sam said.
He reached up and squeezed her hand, and held it. We didn’t go to meet them. We waited and shuddered in the cold. Jake said, ‘Can you run, Poncho?’
‘I ain’t going anywhere without you.’
‘I’ll try to do something. When I do, run.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘One of us has to make it, to take care of Sam.’
I didn’t know what to say to that. I couldn’t imagine them shooting us here, in the parking lot, in front of Sam. But I guess most people feel like that, before they get shot. And if it didn’t happen here, it would happen back at the ranch. At the prospect of that, I didn’t feel dread or terror, but more a furious frustration that we’d only just met Sam and were now being cheated of our time with her.
Jake said, ‘Here we go, Poncho.’
As the figures came closer I could make them out a little better in the headlights. If it had been Mark, who was far more congenial towards us, it might have turned out differently. But it was Pat, and he had Novak with him. Both of them seemed to be walking wounded. Pat was hobbling, still tender from the sacking Jake had given him, and Novak was favouring his left leg. Pat held a paper towel pressed to his nose, which drizzled blood into the snow.
They stopped about five feet from us. From his coat pocket Novak pulled out his gun – a sleek black pistol – and pointed it at us. Little cuts criss-crossed his face, like razor nicks, presumably from rolling in the broken glass after I’d body-checked him. They didn’t speak right away. Their expressions were vindicated and satisfied and, quite clearly, murderous.
Pat looked from Jake, to me, and then up to where Sam sat on her horse.
‘Samantha,’ he said. ‘Get in the car.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Go on, Sam,’ Jake said.
Sam hesitated, then slid from the saddle reluctantly. She stood there holding the reins. Shenzao scraped the ground with a forehoof, anxious. The other horses seemed skittish, too. Maybe they could smell the blood, or sense the threat.
‘Samantha,’ Delaney said. ‘You don’t want to see this.’
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
Her voice broke a little as she said it. She was trying not to cry.
‘You can’t kill them,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell people. I’ll tell everybody. If you kill them I’ll tell everybody and I’ll tell them how you shot those men by the bunkhouse and you’ll go to prison for a long time.’
‘Shut up,’ Pat said.
He grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her forward, hard, nearly pulling her off her feet. Jake made as if to go for him but Novak held the gun higher, pointing it right at Jake’s face – nearly touching the tip of his nose – and so we stood as Delaney hauled and dragged Sam towards the SUV. She was screaming and crying and calling Jake’s name and my name and telling Pat she hated him and begging for him to let us live, please let them live.
In reaction, Shenzao whinnied, increasingly on edge and – in her animal way – understanding that we’d landed in a dire situation. Her reins lay loose in the snow. She stomped a hind leg and pivoted around, settling into a tense, defensive pose. I don’t know if Jake saw that and sensed the opportunity, or if he just thought we had a better chance with Pat over by the car.
He looked at Novak and said, ‘Look at this piece of work. Him and his gun. Going to shoot us in front of a little girl, is that it? Going to kill me and my brother.’
Novak simply looked bored, and impatient. He’d been waiting for this for a while. The door to the SUV slammed and Pat started stomping back towards us and Novak asked, quite casually, ‘Can I shoot them now?’
Then three things happened so rapidly that it almost seemed simultaneous: Jake leapt for the gun, the gun went off, and Shenzao kicked Novak in the head.
I say all that as if I understood what was going on, but I didn’t. I heard the bang and then I saw this blur of motion, and Novak flew up and backwards, as if he’d been jerked by an invisible rope. He landed in the snow about five feet away. Jake went down, too – first to a knee, then tipping over onto his side. The gun had landed at my feet so I picked it up. I picked it up and waved it around and pointed it at Pat, who’d stopped about ten feet away.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Come closer.’
He looked at me holding the gun, and looked at Novak lying there, and then just turned around and ran back towards the vehicle. Halfway to it, he passed Sam coming in the opposite direction and didn’t try to stop her. He threw himself into the driver’s seat and started the SUV and peeled out of the lot, churning snow. The sound of the engine dwindled to a buzz, leaving us in the quiet and the cold.
I looked at Novak once and that was enough. The side of his skull had caved inwards and his face was all swollen, the skin bulbous and puffy as a water bladder. He was dead or dying very fast. Shenzao, having performed this execution, stood calmly and patiently next to me. The other two horses had taken fright and scattered to opposite corners of the lot.
Sam ran to where Jake had fallen and sat and cradled his head. I knelt down there with her. Jake’s eyes were open and he seemed lucid, but underneath him a patch of red was spreading slowly through the snow.
‘Are you guys all right?’ he said to me. ‘Is Sam all right?’
‘You saved us, brother. It’s going to be okay.’
‘Where’s Novak?’
‘Shenzao killed that bastard.’
‘Good girl.’
All the while I was checking him over, trying to find the wound. It seemed to be in his stomach, right in his guts. I pulled up his shirt, which was soaked through, and saw the hole and the blood bubbling out. I covered it with my hands automatically. The blood felt so hot, almost scalding, and there was so much of it. Where it had run down into the snow, the snow had melted from the warmth, turning to pink slush.
‘He shot you,’ I said dully, still not quite believing it.
‘I’m all fucking numb.�
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‘You’re just cold,’ Sam said. ‘You’ll be fine. He’ll be fine, right?’
She was asking me, and I said that he would be (even though I had no idea) and I did several strange things in quick succession, most of which were only vague notions that I no doubt had picked up from films or television. First I grabbed desperate fistfuls of loose snow and packed that all over his belly. I thought the cold might help. Then I took Jake’s bandana off, bunched it into a ball, and stuffed that right in the bullet hole, which made Jake scream. Lastly I removed my belt, strapped that around his midriff, and cinched it tight. He cried out again and his eyes rolled back and I thought he might be on the verge of passing out.
‘Tim,’ he said remotely, ‘am I fucking dying? Is that what this is?’
‘You’re not dying.’
‘You’re going to live,’ Sam said.
‘That’s right. You’re going to live.’
She and I said that over and over, like a prayer we could make true through repetition, as I stooped down and got an arm beneath his neck and another beneath his knees, and then I lifted my little brother up from the blood-covered snow. He writhed and screamed from the pain, which was a horrible thing to hear.
‘Sam,’ I said. ‘Get on the horse. Get on Shenzao.’
She didn’t ask why. She just did it, fast. I hoisted Jake and eased him over the saddle – so he was draped in front of her, between her knees and the pommel.
‘Now listen,’ I said to her. ‘You’re only a mile from that medical centre. The one where your mom gets her methadone. You ride there now, down the highway, as fast as you can – as fast as you’ve ever done. Just don’t stop and keep going. Do you understand?’
‘I get it, I get it,’ she said impatiently. ‘Just step back. Get out of my way.’
And I let go of my brother and stepped back. I think he was unconscious by then. Sam heeled Shenzao and shouted, ‘Ha!’ and together the three of them just flew, across the parking lot and out onto the highway, moving dreamily, the hoofbeats muted by the snow.
‘That’s your dad,’ I called after her. ‘That’s your dad!’
In the darkness the horse stood out longest, floating away into the night, while I was left beside a dead man and a puddle of my brother’s cooling blood.
Chapter Forty-Three
When I arrived at the medical centre, lumbering along on Old Marley with Thunder in tow, I saw Shenzao standing out front, beneath the awning. Sam had tethered her to the bike rack, using it like a hitching post. I did the same thing with the other two horses. As I slid down from the saddle the doors opened and somebody rushed out: a short and stocky woman, dressed in a pale blue uniform. An orderly or nurse of some sort.
‘What is this?’ she said. ‘Are you part of the same incident?’
‘Not an incident,’ I said, struggling with the words. ‘A shooting.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
I nodded, still huddled up in my blanket.
‘Come on in,’ she said, leading me towards the doors. ‘You’re freezing.’
As soon as I hit the warmth of the foyer I started shaking uncontrollably. The man at the front desk sat upright and stared at me in alarm. The orderly tried to guide me towards a chair but I wouldn’t sit: I demanded to know where they’d taken Jake, the person who’d been shot. The desk clerk wanted ID, wanted to know who I was, and I just started babbling that I was his brother and I needed to be with him, and the girl who’d come with him.
The orderly directed me to the emergency ward. I shuffled in that direction, with her following me warily. My joints felt stiff and my feet were clunky as clogs, still half-frozen. In my hands I had no feeling at all. We went down one corridor and under a sign and turned left, through a set of swinging double doors. On the other side of the doors was Sam. She had blood all over her hands and jacket and I suppose I must have been covered in it too. She looked completely stunned, frightened as a doe. Seeing that, I thought it was done: Jake was gone. But Sam told me that they were operating on him – they were trying to save him. She pointed to a room with blinded windows and I understood it was all happening in there.
I stood and stared dully at the door to the room, reeling, still half-frozen and feeling partially separated from my body. The smells, the scene, the late-night eeriness: I’d been there before, but it was reversed. Jake had taken Sandy’s place, and I was waiting out here with her. It was what he’d always wanted. Anybody but her, he’d said. Me, him, anybody.
Sam must have seen the utter dread in my face, the horror at the thought of it, because she broke down and started sobbing and trying to tell me something. She fell against me and I held her for a long time before I made out what she was saying: ‘I rode as fast as I could. I got here as fast as I could.’ I had put all that on her. I had put his life in her hands, which had been a terrible and no-good thing to do, but I hadn’t had a choice. Or so I told myself.
We stood together with the weight of that knowledge between us for thirty minutes. Then the door to that room – the operating room – opened and a doctor came out: a stooped, older woman with dark curly hair. She asked us to confirm our relationship to Jake and I said that we were his family, and she instructed us to sit down and once we had she told us what we needed to know.
Later we were allowed to see him. He lay in the bed, peaceful and pale and still, like one of those marble sculptures you see on tombs. The machines around him hummed with electronic life and the whole atmosphere felt subaquatic, and that, too, stirred up my memories of Sandy and the night we’d lost her.
I walked over to the side of the bed and Sam circled around to the other. My fingers had started stinging as the circulation came back into them, and I felt this most of all in my bad hand, which I placed clumsily over Jake’s open palm. He was breathing very shallowly – almost imperceptibly – but he was breathing. At my touch his eyes flickered open.
‘Poncho,’ he said.
He managed to roll his head. Sam pawed away tears, and smiled hopefully.
‘And Calamity.’
‘We’re both here.’
‘Did they tell you?’ he asked.
‘Your legs.’
‘Well, half dead is better than all dead.’
He sighed, settled, and closed his eyes. We stood with him for a time. Then, when I stepped back, I tripped over his damned heart monitor and pulled the wiring off him and the machine started flatlining, and for a second I actually thought I’d killed him until the orderly ran in and affixed those little suckers to his stomach again and assured me he was still alive.
‘But maybe you should sit down,’ she said.
‘I think I better.’
‘I’ll get you some soup, warm you up.’
As she went off, Sam and I sat in the chairs next to Jake. From our position we could see out the window to the entrance, where we’d tethered the horses. Old Marley and Thunder were on either side of Shenzao. They were all three standing quietly. It had started snowing again – lightly sprinkling flakes, like angel dust. It swept through the ochre glow of the lamp in the clinic’s drive. The whole scene looked as peaceful as the backdrop in a snow globe.
Chapter Forty-Four
I turned into the mobile home park, which they called Ridgeview, seeing as it perches on a hillside outside of Hope, overlooking the town. It’s a decent enough place, and each trailer has its own patch of artificial turf. Most of the community are older folk, just past retirement age, and decorate their plots with assorted lawn ornaments: gnomes and windmills and bird baths and whatnot.
It was eight in the morning but the day was already looking to be a scorcher: hazy blue skies, temperature in the mid-twenties and climbing, and that sea-heavy humidity you only get near the coast. I parked Jake’s truck in front of their place – a sizeable double-wide – and the door banged open and Sam came sprinting out. She’s a few inches taller, now, and only has one more year before she starts high school. Whether that will be out in Hope, or
in the city, now that things are safer, is something that hasn’t quite been decided.
‘Poncho!’ she yelled. ‘You’re late, you goddamn cracker!’
Her grandma came to the door to see her off. Maria’s mother is round and soft as a big old pierogi, and she wagged a plump finger after her granddaughter, chastising her.
‘Language, Samantha! Some young lady you are.’
Sam didn’t apologize, so I did for her, as if that was all my fault. And maybe it was – the no-good Harding blood she had in her. I waved and Maria’s mother waved back. She and I, we get along just fine. I promised her I’d have Sam home for bedtime, as usual.
As I backed out of the drive, Sam asked, ‘What’s the plan, Poncho?’
Sam’s window was down and she rested her elbow on the sill, peering at the world through her shades: an oversize pair of Ray-Bans Jake had bought for her birthday.
I said, ‘You look like a narc in those glasses.’
She grinned and mimed pointing a gun at me. ‘Tell me the plan, or you’re busted.’
I laid it all out for her: two of our usual stops, and then a surprise.
‘What surprise?’ she said.
‘You’ll see.’
She tried threatening me with her fake gun again, but I wasn’t having any of it.
‘A surprise is a surprise,’ I said.
To make it out there to pick up Sam by eight, I’ve got to be on the go by six, since it’s about an hour and a half from Vancouver to Hope, if you put the pedal down. But I rise at that hour most days, and our Sunday road trip (that’s what she calls it) is the highlight of my week. I know that pretty soon Sam will most likely grow tired of spending time with me, in the way that teenagers do. She’ll have parties to go to, or friends to see, or homework to do. I’ll be consigned to another part of her life, a less important part. But for now, this is what we’ve got, and we have the damnedest time, trucking back together towards Vancouver.