In the Cage

by Kevin Hardcastle

  “I guess you’re gonna lose those afternoons in that gym now?” she said.

  Daniel lay there at his side of the bed, nearest the window. A full moon showed part of him, shone narrow between the bedroom curtains.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Well, it isn’t that far. I’m sure you could still make it there sometimes if you wanted.”

  “I figured you’d be happy I couldn’t go to the gym anymore,” he said.

  Sarah examined his hands for a little while longer and then she stopped and rolled over to face him.

  “I just don’t want you to get hurt,” she said.

  Daniel shrugged.

  “You could see the difference. Just from you training again. There’s a calmness that you get.”

  “Think so?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Daniel said.

  Sarah put a hand to his cheekbone.

  “Did your eyes give you any trouble when you were sparring?” she said soft.

  “They didn’t.”

  “Did you feel like you could get hurt again?”

  “No,” he said.

  They were quiet awhile. Daniel stirred and reached back to shift the pillow behind his head. He kept his arm there and stared up at the ceiling.

  “I might go evenings after all,” he said. “If I can muster it.”

  She didn’t say anything. She was asleep. Her one hand rested on the bed near his face and the other had been pinned down under her head and her pillows. Her legs were bent at the knees like she might run.

  Daniel took up her wrist and let go. It fell back down to his side where she’d left it. She woke for but a second and slept again. He let her be.

  SIXTEEN

  The van drew up against the curb and settled there, exhaust rattling. Wallace King in the driver’s seat with two men in the windowless rear of the van. Clothed and hooded in black. Gloves on their hands and only their eyes plain through balaclava holes. Under their coverings they were Mike Moreau and Troy Armstrong, hired on again but without their scatterguns. Nobody sat in the passenger seat. Wallace got out of the van. Ash and elm trees lined the one-way street, bare branches reaching and some long enough to touch some twenty feet above the vehicle. The trees grew from the short lawns of hundred-and-fifty-year-old Victorian brownstones that were owned by the rich or had been converted into stores for the rich. Wallace shook his head. He snuffled hard and spat into the middle of the street. Starless sky above. Spotlights flickering there from the downtown core just beyond. The streetlamps were shaded by the thin tree-cover and once in a while some would blink out while others lit in turn.

  Another like van had been parked down the street. That vehicle showed no running lights or exhaust from the tailpipe. Wallace got back into his van and almost right away a white face was there at the passenger-side window. The two men in the back jumped and Moreau stood up and cracked his head on the ceiling and sat down again. Wallace looked at that startled goon and took a deep breath. Moreau was still rubbing at the back of his head through the knitwork when Tarbell opened the door and got in.

  “Nerves of steel on these,” he said.

  Wallace didn’t acknowledge it. The blonde settled into the seat and waited.

  “I seen two cruisers up and down these last few blocks alone,” Wallace said. “You see any the way you came?”

  “I saw one.”

  “Better get this over with. You know what you’re doin’?”

  “No,” Tarbell said.

  Wallace narrowed his eyes on the man.

  “Pardon?” he said.

  “I know what to do,” Tarbell said. “But I don’t know why I’m out here to do this petty shit.”

  Wallace turned back to the road.

  “So what?” he said. “I could build a fuckin’ mountain from the amount of shit you don’t know.”

  Tarbell stared at Wallace King for a long time.

  “Get out,” Wallace said.

  The pale-eyed man opened the door and got out and slammed it shut. Went to the other vehicle. Pulled a hood over his hair. Wallace put his van into gear and pulled out from the curb. When he passed the other van, Tarbell had the forefinger of his left hand pointed at Wallace and his cocked thumb as the trip-hammer. It took all that Wallace had not to swerve and put his fender through the driver door.

  The gallery front was no more than triple-sheetglass in the arched window frames of one of the Victorians. Faint light in the upstairs windows, some in the main floor. A tiny red beacon winked at the sill. Wallace couldn’t see the cameras but he knew where they were.

  “Do not fuckin’ look up. Except to see what you got your hands on.”

  The men nodded.

  “Get everything I told you. You fuck it up, I’ll kill you both.”

  They nodded slower that time.

  “Okay,” Wallace said. He pulled his hood up and tightened it by the drawstrings. Then he got out of the van. He looked up and down the empty street. Maybe a hundred yards afield there were people passing on the avenue. Drunken students and club-goers and finely dressed men and women. He paid them no mind. He walked around the van and pulled the sliding door. Moreau carried an eight-pound sledge as he set his feet to the asphalt and Armstrong held a prybar in each hand.

  They hustled quick over a three-foot high wrought-steel fence and across the front lawn. Then Armstrong slowed up with the prybars. Moreau took long strides and raised the sledge up over his head and pulled it back like a warhammer at the ready. He broke into a short run and then planted his feet and let fly. The sledge went end over end through the air and blew the window in without slowing and slammed into the far wall of the gallery room. Glass pelted the hardwood and showcases. Alarms wailed. They took a prybar each and cleared the jagged leavings from one side of the window frame and then leapt the ledge.

  Wallace took cover inside the van. He watched the sidewalks and parked cars and the neighbouring houses. In his rearview mirror he saw the busy avenue small in the distance. Life went on. By the busted shop window he could see the men levering the paintings from their wallmoorings. Moreau put his boot to an installation in the floor and bashed the display case apart while it lay prone. Four-inch fastener bolts stuck out of the bottom. Long splinters of hardwood clung to the bolt-ruts. Wallace studied the street again. When he turned back to the gallery both of the thieves were already coming out. Wallace got out of the van again and went around to meet them. They’d left the tools and now Armstrong had two paintings pressed together under his armpit and Moreau held a weathered wooden case to his chest. Moreau slid the chest into the back of the van and climbed into the hold and then took the paintings from the other man. Armstrong leapt onto the vehicle and he had barely cleared the lip when Wallace whipped the door shut.

  The alarm-siren howled on but no other windows had lit anywhere on the street. Wallace made it to the driver door and reached for the handle. There he stopped. A stranger stood agog in the road, feet stepping uneasy on the pavement. Wallace turned his face away and opened the door to shield it. He was about to cuss the man out when he heard whistling behind a loud bang. Chunks of bark blew clear from an elm trunk not five feet from where the stranger stood in the lane. The young man blurted nonsense and got to the ground in fits and starts. Nothing in him seemed to be working right. He crawled the road strange and two more shots rang. Even Wallace cowed behind the vehicle door. From there he saw the kid scramble up and lurch out crazily toward the opposite sidewalk where he bowled through wooden fencework and somehow kept moving on all fours until he was lost to the gap between two houses.

  Wallace got into the van and gunned the engine. The door carried shut as he drove. Soon enough he came upon the other van, Tarbell standing outside with a pistol in hand. Wallace put the passenger window down as he came close. He reached under his
seat and brought up a pistol of his own. Aimed it at the blonde.

  “Give that to me,” he said.

  Tarbell yet held the pistol, looked at Wallace blankly. Then he slowly let the clip out of his gun and held the clip and pistol together in his hand. He did not take his eyes off of Wallace. He stepped closer so that his hands were inside the van and then he ran the slide and loosed the round in the chamber. It all dropped to the empty passenger seat. He waited.

  “You got any other shit that’ll get you locked up?” Wallace said.

  Tarbell shook his head.

  “Motherfucker,” Wallace said.

  He took off and Tarbell barely got clear in time. Stood in the road and watched the van’s taillights. Then he turned to the busted gallery. Perhaps two hundred feet between that building and the second, identical van in his charge. He sat on the rear bumper of the vehicle and crossed one leg over the other and waited. Soon he saw cherries turning the dark as the first cruiser pulled up to the scene. When the second cruiser arrived Tarbell stood and walked to the driver door of the van and got in. Turned the key and fired the engine. He had the handbrake cranked and his left foot heavy to the clutch. He shifted into gear and hammered the gas, spun rubber until he could see smoke in the sideview mirror. He dropped the brake and popped the clutch and peeled out loud. The van bucked hard over low speed bumps as he sped off down that suddenly electric side street.

  The two cruisers caught the van before it got to the highway on-ramp, one unit trailing and belting threats from a loudspeaker, the other running the lane over until it got a car’s length ahead. There the cruiser skidded to a stop on a diagonal and pinned the van up against the curb. The cops came out with their pistols drawn, hollering for the driver to keep his hands on the fucking wheel. One hulking cop came up to the door, eyes wide and white against near blue-black skin. He had his sidearm pointed at Tarbell’s cheekbone. The other cop stood on the other side of the van, ginger-haired and taller than the black cop if not as wide. Yet another cop came up on the van from the rear, the smallest of the men.

  “Is there anyone else in the vehicle?” the black cop said.

  Tarbell said no. To have a look if they felt like it.

  The cop stared at him and the ginger had made his way to the front of the vehicle where he could see into the van on an angle through the passenger window.

  “I don’t see anybody,” he called over.

  The black cop kept weighing up the driver.

  “Anybody else comes outta there I’ll fuckin’ shoot you,” he said. “You take your hands off the wheel, I’ll fuckin’ shoot.”

  Tarbell nodded. The cop reached over and yanked the door open. Tarbell sat low and calm, fingers loose on the wheel. He blinked a few times.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  The cop glowered at him and told him to get out of the van and put his hands behind his head. Then he walked Tarbell around to the front and had him lay his palms on the hood. Cuffed him and frisked him. The other cops had the van doors open and called it out as clear. The ginger cop came around to the front of the vehicle and sent word through his shoulder-clipped radio that they had stopped the van and had the driver in bracelets. The third cop was searching the back of it.

  “You stay put,” the black cop said. “Don’t you move…”

  “Or you’ll fuckin’ shoot. Yeah. I got it.”

  The cop snorted and backed up. He holstered his pistol but kept the clasp loose. He brought Tarbell to the side of the road and sat him down on the curb. Then he went over to the ginger cop. The smaller officer had left the van and sat in the cruiser behind and worked at a dash-mounted laptop, talking into his radio all the while.

  “There’s nothing in the van,” the ginger said.

  The black cop shook his head.

  “Something’s wrong with him,” he said.

  The ginger cop eyeballed Tarbell for a minute. Rubbed at his mouth. The third cop got out of the cruiser and came over.

  “That van is clean,” he said. “Plates and all.”

  “Fuck off,” the black cop said.

  “I don’t believe it either,” the smaller cop said. “But he didn’t dump anything and he didn’t change those plates. All we can do is haul the van and hold him until we get a better look at it.”

  The cops all turned to where Tarbell sat at the curb. Still as could be. The black cop looked away, out across four lanes of city thoroughfare. Dark storefronts with their pavements swept. Travellers leaving the city or coming back behind halogen headlamps.

  “Have you seen him before?” the ginger cop said.

  The black cop shook his head. He drummed his holstered pistol with the pads of his fingers. He looked at their prisoner again. Tarbell sat up straight on the curb. He’d not taken his eyes off of the black cop. They stared at each other for a very long time.

  “There’s something wrong with him,” the cop said.

  By mid-morning Clayton dozed in the driver’s seat of his Cadillac. Sun through the windshield and creeping the interior. The windows were down. Wallace sat red-eyed in the passenger seat. He wore fresh clothes and he’d a baseball cap over his clippered head. They were parked inside a wrecker’s yard between mountains of gnarled metal. Sound of gravel shifting somewhere else in the lot. Wallace shook Clayton and Clayton opened one eye.

  “I was having a good dream,” he said.

  “You weren’t even asleep,” Wallace said.

  “Didn’t matter.”

  Clayton sat up straight and looked at the rearview mirror. The van rumbled into the yard with its tires spewing sand and rockpebble. It banked to the left and came up beside the Cadillac and stopped. The driver-door of the vehicle opened and stayed open as Tarbell set his feet down and came around the front of the van. His clothes were wrinkled from a night spent on a prison bench. Otherwise he looked no different. Had he slept or not nobody could have told.

  He walked up to Clayton’s window and stood there. Wallace spat to the ground and swatted a wasp against the side of the car. Clayton looked over at Wallace for a moment and then to his nephew.

  “You gonna get in?” Clayton said.

  Tarbell put his hands on the window frame and bent low to better see Wallace in the passenger seat.

  “You got my gun?”

  Wallace put a hand to his brow and kneaded his forehead. He said nothing.

  “Seems like a lot of trouble for a bit of canvas and bullshit,” the blonde said.

  Clayton nodded.

  “It does to you,” he said.

  Tarbell cleared his hands and went to the rear door on the driver side and got into the backseat. Clayton turned the key and peeled out of the lot. Left the van behind. They passed through the exit gate and Wallace waved at somebody in a makeshift office there and that man waved back.

  They sped north along the two-lane highway, thumping over baked and battered macadam. Wallace’s eyelids hung low and heavy. In the backseat, Tarbell watched the forest at the highway fringe. As soon as Wallace sagged in his seat Tarbell spoke.

  “Who do you think’s got more reason for hate?” he said. “An Indian or a nigger?”

  Clayton glanced at the mirror but once, and brief. He found the stereo knob and turned the volume up.

  SEVENTEEN

  Daniel worked long days and came home tired. Those afternoons welding bracket and pipe and girder wore on him different than his hours in the gym. His mind would not leave him be while he loosed lighting from his torch, built metals upon metals. He thought about things he didn’t want to think about and then he thought about them again. The men Daniel worked with kept their distance and he didn’t take it personal. He often ate his lunch alone at the tailgate of his truck and once in a while he sat with a few of the other welders and carpenters and talked about the weather and weekends and the work waiting for them when the ho
ur was up. If they talked about work they’d done in the past and places they’d lived and women they’d known he would smile and nod but he never gave back. If they did ask him something like that they didn’t ask very hard. Those among the men who’d grown up in that town at the same time as Daniel asked him nothing at all.

  If Sarah worked the mid-shift at the home, Daniel would stop at Murray and Ella’s house to fetch his daughter. The house sat on the corner of their long, country lane and the wider concession road that led to greater roadways. Town to the north. City to the south. That house was nearly one hundred and forty years old. Home to farmers and their families before the land they farmed had true names or boundary lines. Murray had been born on the island reserve and moved west as a younger man to make enough money to buy a house in town. He met Ella at a hotel bar in northern Saskatchewan while she was travelling with her cousins and he was on shutdown from his worksite in the Northwest Territories. She was part Plains Cree, the first he’d ever met. He took years coming back east. When he did return to Simcoe County she came with him and they were barely grown and worked as farmhands for a dwindling Dutch family and then managed the farm when the elders of that family died and their children left to find other lives. When the farm closed down, Murray and Ella moved into town. Five years later they bought the property at auction and took up their implements again. They tended small fields of corn and soy and ran a meagre tree nursery and otherwise they let the fields run wild. They grew older and kneeled in gardens and sat on porches. Kept whiskies and cold beer at the ready.

  Daniel drove up to the farmhouse in the early evening. He got out of the truck and stared up at the high-peaked roof where he’d helped set new shingles the year previous. There were two main floors and a triangular attic above. One lonely window had been lit on the second floor. Lamplight showed the front-decking and the cold soil and pale, flattened long-grass between the driveway and the house proper. The snow lay spare over the grounds. In a malformed bank where it had been shovelled off the frozen surface of a deep fishpond. Daniel took his filthy workcoat off and left it in the cab of the truck. He went up the steps to the front door. The finish had been stripped years ago and the bare oak wore pockmarks and scars of storms long past. He drummed the wood with his knuckles. When nobody came he knocked one more time and went in.