Fred’s mountain bike gave him freedom to roam. And the journey itself was almost as satisfying as the neighbours he visited, the occasional female jogger he flirted with and the strangers he met.
Some of these bike rides lasted three hours. And that was just one way. Fred would go any distance to try to replace the life force he had previously guzzled at the arena in the city.
In addition to service stations, churches and diners, Fred had recently begun visiting the library twice a week. Because that’s where Badger would meet him.
“Um, um, did I tell you that this is where Papa Joe found Taillon’s name?” asked Fred quietly.
“Yes, a mountain in France. Strong and majestic just like your friend.”
“My best friend.” Fred wiggled his bum on the shiny leather chair, still fascinated with Badger’s oxygen gear. He had already told him he looked like an astronaut on the moon three times. And Badger had said he felt like an astronaut on the moon three times.
“I thought I was your best friend.”
“Not since I turned you in and I wish Papa Joe would stop talking about that night because I want to forget it, buh, buh, have you forgiven me? I forgot.”
Badger leafed through a book. “If I bore any ill feelings I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“I love it when you talk high-class, buh, buh, why are you here? It seems odd that a wise man would spend so much time with an imbecile. You must be lonely and desperate.”
“I’m an old man. That doesn’t make me wise.”
“And I am a brain-injured man. That doesn’t make me dumb. So we are just two strange men passing the time.” Fred watched Badger’s finger tracing down the page of the book in his lap. “What are you reading?”
“A road atlas.”
“Why?”
“I’m thinking about a road trip before I die.”
“You’re not going to die.” Badger said nothing. This made Fred uneasy. He took a deep breath. “Where?”
“America.”
“It is not quite as big a country as Canada, buh, buh, bigger than France, could you be more specific?”
Badger closed the atlas and set it down on the coffee table that separated the two. “I have to be more careful this time.”
“Wowee, you said you forgave me and now this. And I don’t even know what this is.”
“This is about having our day.” Badger’s voice dropped to a whisper as he readjusted his nasal cannula. “I’m going after Madison again.”
“You are too sick.”
“You really think so?” Badger rose unsteadily and began singing, pretending he was crooning into a microphone. “Before I slip into unconsciousness, I’d like to have another kiss, another flashing chance at bliss, another kiss, another kiss.”
Fred looked around the library to see if anyone was looking. And of course everyone was. Badger continued. “The days are bright and filled with pain, enclose me in your gentle rain, the time you ran was too insane, we’ll meet again, we’ll meet again.”
Badger began waltzing around Fred’s chair, humming the notes and playing an imaginary piano, completely transported to another place, another time, ecstasy beaming from his eyes. Fred thought he would croak right then and there. When Badger finished with the imaginary piano he returned to his imaginary microphone. “Oh, tell me where your freedom lies, the streets are fields that never die, deliver me from reasons why you’d rather cry, I’d rather fly.” Badger tipped, exhausted, into his chair. “Or drive,” he said, tinkering with a valve on his portable oxygen tank.
“Yes, I think you need more oxygen, you have snapped like a dry branch.” Fred’s eyes began blinking. “Um, um, will you go with your team of assassins?” asked Fred loudly.
Badger looked around. “No, I’m going alone. They all have criminal records. They can’t cross the border.”
“You have crept through life without going to jail so maybe you will stay lucky and creep a little further, buh, buh, do you ever think of that French farmer in his field?”
Badger frowned. “Memory disorder, my ass.”
“It comes and goes. Like the sun on a somewhat cloudy day.”
Badger tugged up a brown sock that had crumpled past his ankle. “I have a confession to make.” Fred crossed himself and held out his hand. “What’s that for?” asked Badger.
“Tithing.”
Badger fished in his wallet and handed Fred ten dollars. Fred stuffed it in his pocket. “Now I can pay my overdue fines, thanks.”
“When you’re fighting for something you really believe in …”
“Like beating the tar out of the Nazis.”
“… and innocent people are hurt …”
“Like Juliette’s family.”
“Sun’s shining bright today, eh, Mr. Memory?”
“I’m on a roll, don’t stop.”
“You’d think I’d be more upset about it.”
“About what?”
“That’s a cumulus cloud, I do believe.”
“Must mean rain.”
“But there’s one thing I hate almost as much as the military-industrial complex in the United States.”
“Sheep manure?”
“Guilt. It’s such a waste of time. What’s done is done. History is bunk.”
“Who said that? Um, um, Joey Stalin?”
“Henry Ford.”
“Unless it is guilt about something really bad, buh, buh, I think you try and talk about history being bunk because you are not ready to offer a full confession. If you were, you would not be so glib because that peasant man was working in a potato field and he ended up dead. And I bet he had a family. And they probably thought the Germans shot him.”
Badger turned a whiter shade of grey, “I have to go to the bathroom.” He tripped on Fred’s foot as he lurched away, his oxygen tank tucked under his arm.
“A deal’s a deal. I’m keeping the ten bucks.”
Ryan Feniak was doing what he’d been doing since the hockey season ended: cutting class, barrelling around in a truck with his friends, drinking beer and smoking pot.
“Stop!” yelled Ryan as he looked across the road to the library parking lot. Fred was standing with Badger outside the motorhome. Badger hugged Fred and Fred patted his oxygen tank.
“Is that your retard neighbour?” asked Tod.
“Yeah, he’s with Badger.” The name didn’t register with Tod. “The old guy who tried to save the team.”
Tod peered over Ryan’s shoulder. “Fucking Jew. Cost my old man fifty bucks. I bet he pocketed some of that money.”
Ryan and Tod watched as Badger’s motorhome chugged out of the parking lot and passed them. Tod gave Badger the finger. Badger didn’t notice. Fred departed on his bike. Tod followed Fred in the truck. Ryan leaned his head out the window. “I thought you weren’t supposed to be hanging out with the terrorist, Pickle.”
“Dissent is not terrorism,” said Fred, pedalling fast. “Buh, buh, why aren’t you jogging and lifting weights?”
“Buh, buh, buh, buh, I’m telling my mom,” said Ryan.
Tod gunned the engine and swerved the truck, causing Fred to jerk his bike to the side. Neither Ryan nor Tod could hear what Fred yelled. They were laughing too loudly.
The gravel moved under Fred’s tires like a torrent of water through a narrow gorge. His left thigh was in spasms. His left arm was numb. The more it hurt, the harder he pushed. The image of Badger lurching toward Andrew Madison in his owner’s box flared inside his mind.
Fred leaned his bike against the house and limped to the barn. The sounds that greeted him from inside were horrific. He poked his head inside the door.
Lambs were wailing, bleating. Some huddled in a corner. Others were on their sides, legs kicking, eyes rolled back. And Jack was right in the middle of the carnage, on his knees, torturing a male lamb with what looked like a large pair of pliers, attaching a rubber ring that sprang fast and tight around the lamb’s testicles.
It had been e
xplained the year before and the year before that, but Fred had forgotten what happened on this particular day in the production cycle of a sheep farm. He thought Jack had snapped. He imagined Jack grinning like a maniac, enjoying the spoils of his sadistic game. All the lambs were now bound by these tight rubber rings, on their tails, on their testicles. When Jack struggled to his feet and shook the numbness out of his legs he didn’t appear crazed at all. He looked tired. At least until he saw Fred. Then he looked crazed. “Where you been?” asked Jack.
“Okay, okay, first things first, are those little boys and girls going to be okay?” asked a panicked Fred.
Jack had told Fred about docking and castrating. The procedure was no more painful than tying an elastic band around the tip of one’s finger. Only these bands stayed on until the appendage fell off.
There were plenty of soothing words that Jack could have shared with Fred about the elastrator, the reasons for docking tails and castrating males. But he scrubbed his hands slowly in a bucket of soapy water. “Let’s step outside,” said Jack coolly.
Jack and Fred stood at the fence for quite a while. Long enough for three different vehicles to pass and for Fred to come up with five different ways to get even with Ryan for ratting on him. “I thought I said I didn’t want you talking to Badger.”
“I thought it was okay because he is sick.”
“It’s not.”
“Okay, he talks mostly, I listen, buh, buh, he tells me not to pay any attention so I don’t.”
“That’s just his way of brainwashing you.”
“Just because I am handicapped doesn’t mean I can’t think for myself or even dream of a life that’s more than emptying tins of cigarette butts beside the barn.”
“There’s more to do around here and you know it.”
“It is better than a halfway house, I will give you that, buh, buh, it is still a three-quarter house and I think that one day I would like the full house.”
“You tried that. Remember Invermere? You nearly killed that building manager.”
“Um, um, he stole my things. He had a key to my room. I wanted my ski pants and some gloves and sweaters. It was his baseball bat. He hit me first.”
“If George hadn’t stepped in you’d still be in jail.”
“If he hadn’t paid that man off I would have had my day in court and been vindicated instead of violated.”
“You want to spend the rest of your life in a home? ’Cause that’s where you’ll go if you get into trouble again.”
“Badger thinks I will do just fine.”
“He doesn’t know shit about you and you don’t know shit about him.” Jack’s hand pulled the top wire. It sprang back, sending a wobbly wave in both directions. “This is my fence. These are my sheep. This is my farm,” said Jack, his voice measured. “It’s my way or the highway.”
Jack started walking back to the house. Fred spoke, but Jack was already out of earshot. “Buh, buh, I thought you didn’t want me on the highway.” Fred stuck out his tongue, but once it was out it stayed there, making him look like Taillon on a hot day.
Fred eventually telephoned Badger collect, while Jack was in the barn, and told him his wings had been clipped, that he couldn’t meet him at the library for a while. Badger sounded terrible. He wasn’t coughing or anything, he just seemed really sad.
Troubled by Badger’s mood, Fred hung up the phone and went to brush the dust off the roof of his log cabin. Then it hit him. Badger had mailed the model kit when Fred was going through a tough patch. Fred could do the same.
—
Jack was sound asleep when he heard the creak of his door. “Fred?” Something rolled along the hardwood floor. It sounded like a marble. The door shut quietly. Then the potent reek of sulphur hit Jack’s nose. “For Chrissake!”
To punctuate his protests for independence, Fred usually set off several stink bombs during the off-season. It was behaviour that Jack had tried to fix by reasoning with him. He told Fred that using the Palestinian–Israeli conflict as an inspiration for his actions was an insult to Palestinians and Israelis, many of whom were dying in the streets. When Jack grew tired of being reasonable, he yelled really loudly, “I’m not goddamn Israel and this is not occupied land, and you’re not oppressed, and you’re not a goddamn Palestinian!”
Undaunted, Fred continued to wear his kaffiyeh, blocked Jack’s tractor whenever the spirit moved him and sometimes threw clumps of dirt. This never troubled Jack much. Fred had lousy aim. The hunger strikes didn’t bother Jack either. That’s because they only lasted until noon and then Fred became hungry and asked what they were having for lunch. He was used to the funeral marches. Fred would wail and carry several pieces of packed lamb meat balanced precariously on top of a two-by-four that tipped like a teeter-totter on Fred’s shoulder.
What did make Jack very angry were the stink bombs—and the fireworks. Fred would wait in the kitchen until Jack was almost asleep on his recliner, then light his ladyfinger fireworks, rush into the living room, yell, “Praise Taillon!” and the fireworks, glued to a strap around Fred’s waist, would go off. The firecrackers were small but loud and Fred stood there and flinched as each one popped. Once Jack was done yelling, Fred would run into the garage and pretend he was making love to seven virgins. Jack never saw this part.
Jack had endured Fred’s delinquent actions in summers past because he knew that once the season tickets were ordered the protests would subside and Fred’s kaffiyeh would disappear. Jack did not want to think about what was going to happen this year, because there would be no season tickets.
Badger stared incredulously at the opened box with its accessory parts: little white arms, noses, glasses, ears, eyes and a pair of tiny blue shoes, all strewn across the kitchen table. He had assumed, incorrectly, that Fred had sent him a gift inside a Mr. Potato Head box. It would never have occurred to Badger that Fred had mailed him a real Mr. Potato Head. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?” A small note from Fred, barely decipherable, provided the answer, “Build it and it will go away.”
Badger swept the note, the box and all the accessory parts to the floor with an angry, mighty sweep of his hand. Then he stumbled to his bedroom and climbed into bed.
Fred stared incredulously at the phone bill. Jack stood with his arms crossed behind him. Jack had already called enough numbers to know that everyone who answered was a Brad Tate, a Bradley Tate or a B. Tate. The calls stretched from Vancouver Island to Ontario. Fred hadn’t made it to the Maritimes. The bill was more than three hundred dollars. Obviously Fred hadn’t hung up when he found out the Tate on the end of the line wasn’t the one he was looking for. He had talked. A lot.
“Who in the hell is Brad Tate?”
“Um, um, he was a boy in Brandon, he caught his sleeve in a wood shredder and started his own business. I was going to get a job with him. He showed me there is life after hockey and I thought he might show me there is life after sheep farming.” Fred groaned when he saw the total due on the bill. “I will pay for this.”
“You’re pushing your luck.”
“No, I’m just confused.” Fred pulled himself up from Jack’s desk and plodded to his bedroom. Jack picked up the phone. He needed help and he knew who to call.
seventeen
Fred had never given the highway much thought. But now that he was outside the Spindletop Motel and cars and trucks and minutes were rushing past, he decided it was a big, beautiful artery. It wasn’t like the tiny veins that surrounded Jack’s farm. This led somewhere. Perhaps to a place he could call home. Perhaps to oblivion.
It made no difference that the truckers didn’t honk their horns when they saw him pumping his hand. Fred was mesmerized. People coming, going. Engines, low and soothing from a distance. The tires, hissing words of wisdom, or so Fred imagined. The blacktop fusing into a vanishing point at the top of the next hill. The road was calling.
As soon as Fred saw Mutt wave from his rental car, he remembered why he was ther
e and sounded his double-barrelled laugh. Mutt honked back.
The hug the two brothers enjoyed was not a quick chest thump and slap on the back. It was as if they were celebrating an overtime goal. Mutt punctuated the end of the embrace with a kiss on Fred’s forehead.
“You little devil.”
Mutt held Fred’s shoulders with his big hands, looking him over intently. “How ya doing?”
“Oh, you know, I am sad that I cannot show you my skating rink, buh, buh, I am a lucky ducky because Papa Joe lifted my roaming curfew and let me ride my bike again.”
Mutt’s handsome face and alert eyes offered no clue as to the origins of his nickname. Neither did his pressed Otis Redding T-shirt or jeans. His hair, rolling a little ragged over his collar, offered its own tantalizing possibilities. But today it was washed and brushed.
Mutt checked himself into the motel and, because Fred wanted to show how fast he could ride, he followed Fred back to the farm, reaching almost thirty kilometres an hour on the straightaways.
Mutt had never made it out at Christmas and had waited until June because Fred had told him not to come out during lambing season. This had nothing to do with Jack. It was Fred’s way of trying to impress his older brother with the fact that they had a farm to run.
Jack was happy to see Mutt. Retired cops of Jack’s generation and cab drivers like Mutt shared an affinity for conversation. Jack appreciated the easy way Mutt interacted with strangers, a skill noticeably absent in a lot of the folks Jack didn’t like.
Fred led his brother to the fields. Jack had forty acres for grazing, split into two pastures. And now that Jack had turned out the ewes and lambs, Taillon could fully realize his role as pasture enforcer, and Pearl had more to do than follow at Jack’s heels. Even the llamas seemed invigorated by the added responsibility.
Jack ended up with three sets of triplets, thirty-five sets of twins and eleven singles. Ninety lambs and no lost ewes. Jack was pleased. Of course, he really only had eighty-nine lambs. Lucky Lucy was the lamb Fred had saved and she—as well as Taillon—was the reason Fred was so excited to take his brother out there.
The Horn of a Lamb Page 20
