by Tyler Keevil
At one point Sandy and Maria came up together, and Maria ordered them both a Bloody Mary. This was a unique opportunity because Sandy hardly ever drank, due to the demands of being a dancer, and even when she did it was seemingly impossible to get her drunk. Our sister was always focused, severe, in complete control – both of herself and us. She was the only one who could keep Jake reined in, seeing as our old man was no longer around, and our ma, well, she’d had it tough for a while. And since Sandy took care of all of us, she never relented in what I would call her vigilance.
That night we made a good go of it. Jake mixed the Bloody Marys and dumped a good splash of vodka in both. He served them the real way – over ice, with salt around the rims – and Maria scooped hers up and raised it high to toast and passed on what some local hotshot choreographer had just told her: he’d said that Sandy getting in with the Compagnie Cléo de Mérode was the same as if she’d won the gold medal of modern dance.
‘Gold medal winner,’ Maria repeated.
‘Solid gold sister,’ Jake said, and kissed her on the cheek.
Sandy laughed it off, but the phrase stuck with me, and the memory of the night. Sandy had two more Bloody Marys and sat Jake and I down, very solemnly, and laid out her plans for moving the whole family to Europe so we could stay together. Jake could make his music and I’d apprentice to be a carpenter and Ma would sit on our balcony and have coffee and croissants every morning. Maria claimed she wanted to come too and Sandy said that was fine, but she – Maria – would have to marry Jake and when they had kids Sandy would be the godmother. Then once Sandy hit thirty she would retire and marry a French plumber and start a family of her own and we would all move back home and buy an acreage in the Okanagan, and I could build houses for each of us and her husband would fit the plumbing and together we would set up polytunnels and vegetable fields and start our own farm.
She had all these plans, crazy but brilliant enough to believe in. At the time, we had an unquestioning faith that Sandy could shape our future through her force of will, and even now it doesn’t seem to me as if that faith was naïve.
Later in the night, when Jake and I had abandoned our posts at the bar, we built this makeshift sedan out of broomsticks and a kitchen chair. We put Sandy in that and hoisted her up on our shoulders and carried her around the party, with Maria clearing the way in front of us. When we passed everybody cheered and applauded, and Sandy played her part perfectly: sitting upright, looking stern and commanding as Cleopatra, our golden queen and champion.
Chapter Three
Jake had his truck at the Firehall but he was too far gone to drive (he was very particular about that, on account of what happened) and instead we took a cab down Granville and west on Marine Drive towards the Southlands area. There are some huge spreads out that way: big rancher-style houses with sprawling yards, which might have been smallholdings or farmsteads back in the old days. We cruised past those and I had no idea what we were doing, or why, but something in me – my brotherly pride, I suppose – refused to pester him about it.
Jake told the cabbie to drop us at a place called Castle Meadow Stables and Country Club. The sign out front was small and discreet: just a brass plaque mounted on a gateway beside a curving drive. We walked up the drive in the dark, crunching gravel beneath our bootheels. At the end of the drive was a parking lot, and the clubhouse. Over to the left were the stables, still and quiet at this time, and beyond them a field or paddock or what have you.
As we approached the front doors, I finally gave in and asked, ‘You going to tell me what we’re doing way the hell out here?’
‘Just getting a drink,’ Jake said, and pushed through the doors.
They opened into a foyer, leading on to the clubhouse and bar: a big room with low ceilings and hardwood floors. The walls were lined with wainscot panelling, and above the wainscot hung black-and-white pictures of old racehorses, presumably famous ones. The place felt like an old-time golf club, crossed with a western-style saloon. In one corner a cluster of video poker machines bleeped forlornly.
It was getting on near ten o’clock and the only other customers were a bunch of good old boys wearing plaid shirts and cowboy boots and, sitting a little apart, two younger guys in suits. At the bar Jake ordered us two more Molsons and two shots of Crown and asked the bartender to put it on his tab. The woman smiled at him and punched it into her screen, and I figured this was partly why we’d come out here – just for me to witness Jake order on a tab.
We sat down and knocked back our shots, which were tasting better and better. After being dry for so long it was going to my head and I felt very tender towards my little brother.
I said, ‘How’d you get membership in a place like this?’
‘I ain’t a member.’
‘How’d you get a tab, then?’
‘This is where I work.’
‘I thought you had a cleaning job.’
‘I do – cleaning stables.’
It took me some time to get my head around the notion of Jake cleaning stables, or being associated with that realm in any way. It just seemed so peculiar. But then, no more peculiar than delivering brake parts or laying paving slabs or working on a seiner or any of the other jobs we’d both done over the years.
‘So you’re like a stable boy?’ I asked.
‘Hell no. Stable boys actually look after the horses. They groom them and feed them and dress their injuries and crap. I’m not even really supposed to go in the stalls. I just clean the alleyways between the stalls, hose down the drainage troughs, carry loads of horseshit out back to the bin. Make sure the stable boys and trainers have everything they need.’
‘How in the hell’d you land a job like that?’
‘Connections I made inside. A lot of the gangsters are into horses.’
He nodded significantly at the two guys in suits. They were eating chicken wings and talking earnestly about something and didn’t appear drunk at all. If Jake hadn’t pointed them out I would have assumed they were businessmen.
‘What – they ride them?’ I said.
‘They ride them and breed them and race them. This is one of the places you can keep them, if you don’t have a ranch of your own. And I clean up their shit. Literally.’
‘I guess hard work is honest work,’ I said, ‘as Albert would say.’
‘Work sucks. But it’s something. And I get a tab.’
‘A tab you’ve got to pay.’
‘Not tonight I don’t.’
He looked up at the TV above us. There were half a dozen spread around the room. The screens were all the same size – thirty inches or so – and they were all showing the same image: a long shot of a racetrack in some exotic location, where the skies were dreamily blue and where everybody wore white linen clothing and wide-brimmed hats and carried parasols. It made me think of Monte Carlo or Casablanca. Some place that we’d never see, anyway.
‘Mostly it’s a farce,’ Jake said. ‘Hardly any of their horses get into real races, let alone win.’
‘But the bigshots need something to do with all that money, eh?’
‘You got it.’
We touched glasses and drained what remained of our beers. It was warm and flat and tasted almost soapy, like watered-down dish detergent. As I finished I heard a buzzer going off, and the TV screen images changed to a close-up of the starting gates, springing open. In the faraway country the horses were racing now. At a nearby table, this beefy guy with a mullet started shouting at one of the horses, telling it to come on, come on. But even before the home stretch he’d given up on that and sat watching morosely. He was all on his own.
‘How’s Ma?’ Jake asked.
‘No worse, but no better, either.’
‘I was thinking of going over there this weekend, if you want to come.’
‘I usually do, when I’m not on the boat.’
‘The model son.’
Jake picked up a bar coaster and drummed it repeatedly on the table, tapp
ing out a rhythm that I recognized but couldn’t quite place. I knew he was holding something back.
I said, ‘Down at the plant you said you needed to talk to me.’
‘I’m going on a little trip and I just wanted to see you and Ma before I go.’
‘What kind of trip?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘I’m not worrying.’
‘Worry about your other family, and your little fishing girlfriend.’
‘Her name’s Tracy. And she ain’t my girlfriend.’
‘Sure – she’s your mermaid.’
‘I don’t know what you got against them.’
‘Forget it. Tonight, I just want to have a good time with my big brother.’
Hearing that, more than anything else, made me start worrying in earnest. Jake hopped up and took our empties back to the bar and returned with another round of whisky and beer. This time when he knocked back his shot I left mine standing there.
‘Lefty,’ I said. ‘Are you in some sort of jam or what?’
‘I’m always in a jam, Poncho.’
‘How bad a jam?’
He folded his hands and rested them on the table. He looked at them for a long time and then he looked up at me. Greasy strands of hair hung out the sides of his bandana, and his jawline was shadowed with stubble. Then there was that gap tooth. But he still had this innocent look about him, somehow, which he hadn’t lost since childhood.
He said, ‘We never talked about my time inside.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘I’m not laying a guilt trip on you. I’m just trying to explain.’
Jake jerked his head at the mullet-haired race fan, as if implying he didn’t want the guy to overhear. Jake got up and I followed him out. He led me through the clubhouse to a set of glass doors that opened onto a patio overlooking the training grounds. They had tables and chairs out there, but no heaters or lights. Nobody was sitting in the cold.
We smoked in the darkness next to the paddock and Jake explained what he could. It was as if he needed the shelter of the shadows to let some of it out. He said that a lot of what you saw on TV and in films about being in jail was bullshit. But not all of it. It was true that sooner or later you ended up needing protection, and when you accepted that protection you were expected to repay the favour some other time.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ he said.
I said I did, or thought I did. At the same time, I didn’t understand at all.
‘What do they want you to do?’
‘Just one thing.’
‘A big thing.’
‘Not so big I can’t handle it.’
‘And then?’
‘That’s it. I get paid and that’s it.’
I said, ‘It’s not legal, though.’
‘That goes without saying.’
I leaned my elbows on the railing, and stared at the empty field. It was mostly hard-packed dirt and on the far side a few show jumping obstacles seemed to hover in the dark.
I said, ‘I just don’t get it.’
‘It’s not complicated.’
‘I mean how this is happening. How this has happened to you. We’re not bad guys. We had a decent family. A pretty nice house, even. Hell, we had a fucking vegetable patch.’
‘That’s all gone and you know it. It’s as gone as that hand of yours.’
I flexed my broken fingers, feeling the sting of the cold. Sometimes, I almost get used to the injury. Other times it catches me off-guard and I see it for the first time, or I see how people react to it. Then I wonder: what the hell is this mangled thing at the end of my arm? But Jake was right. It had all happened and this was where we were at, him and me.
I tucked the hand in the pouch of my hoody, warming it.
I asked, ‘What exactly are you supposed to do?’
‘That’s hard to say, at this stage.’
‘Well, when will you know?’
‘By the weekend. Saturday. It’s happening Saturday.’
‘Why Saturday?’
‘It just has to be Saturday.’
‘I hope you don’t expect help from me.’
‘I don’t expect anything from you.’
‘I’m working till Saturday, and then I’m heading up to Albert’s cabin, with Tracy.’
‘I know you got your other life, now. I just wanted to let you know what’s going on in mine.’ He patted me, a little too hard, on the shoulder. ‘Come on. Let’s have another shot and play the slots.’
Chapter Four
By the time the clubhouse closed we’d lost about fifty bucks – most of it mine – playing video poker and since we didn’t have enough cash left to pay for another cab we had to ride the night buses back across town, by a route that seemed circuitous and convoluted to me in my drunkenness but which I now suspect was deliberate. Jake’s bartender friend had sold us a mickey of Seagram’s for the road and we passed that back and forth between us as we rattled along Victoria. We were sitting side-by-side and I could see our reflections in the window across from us. We looked pretty haggard: just a couple of bums, beat-up and worn-out.
‘Can you believe,’ Jake said, ‘that these places are worth a million bucks?’
He was looking beyond our reflections at the passing houses: one-storey clapboard or stucco boxes, with rusty fences and overgrown yards. But Jake was right about their value.
I said, ‘Every house in Vancouver is worth a million bucks or more.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘No way we’d ever be able to afford a place.’
‘You make decent money.’
‘It’s seasonal. And there’s Ma.’
We got out near Hastings and instead of waiting for another bus just started walking. By then it was past midnight and everything was closed except a few late-night pho noodle houses. A car tore down the strip and the passenger lobbed a half-empty can of beer in our direction. It skittered across the sidewalk at my feet.
‘We could go see Ma next weekend instead,’ I said. ‘After I’m back from the cabin and you’re all done with your “little trip”.’
Jake made a vague sound in his throat. ‘I might be gone for a while, with this thing.’
‘Where the hell you going?’
He took a long pull on his smoke, the flare illuminating his jaw and cheekbones. He exhaled using an old trick of his: blowing smoke through his gap tooth, which makes this eerie whistling sound, high and long and lonesome.
‘It don’t matter,’ he said.
‘Then it don’t matter if you tell me.’
‘You got any cash you can front me?’
‘I knew you wanted something,’ I said.
‘That’s me. Always mooching. I’m the mooch and you’re the Scrooge.’
‘I give you plenty.’
‘Like all the money you gave me to help me get back on my feet.’
‘You still sore about that?’
‘I know you had some.’
‘That was for Ma’s care.’
I pulled up my hood and cinched it tight, using it like blinders to block him out. I walked with my head down and my fists tucked in the pouch of my hoody, cradling my bad hand with my good one. We passed a rundown apartment block and a couple of empty lots and in time came to an intersection, where Jake stopped. I looked up. I hadn’t been paying attention and I couldn’t understand why we were waiting there when the walk light was green. On our right was a used car lot and on the corner across from us was an auto repair shop. I knew those places. I knew that intersection. Hastings and Clark.
‘Oh,’ I said. Just that.
Tied to a directional sign on the meridian, on our side of the intersection, was a bouquet of lilies in cellophane wrapping. Some of the petals had fallen off and lay on the concrete divider. I removed my hands from the pouch and stared at the street and the asphalt, which the rain had left all slickly glistening, like the surface of a dark pool. I figured this final stop had been pa
rt of the night’s plan – just as much as the Firehall, and the stables.
‘You put those flowers there?’ I said.
‘You sure as hell didn’t.’
He walked to the centre of the crossroads and uncapped our mickey and poured what remained of it out on the pavement, the liquor glinting gold in the light of the streetlamps and spattering into a small puddle. It was a melodramatic gesture and no doubt partly staged for my benefit. When he was done with the ritual Jake went over to the meridian and laid the empty bottle at the base of the sign, beneath the flowers. He picked up one of the petals.
‘Fucking cheap bouquet,’ he said, which struck me as a very Jake thing to say. ‘I spent fifteen bucks on these shitty flowers and the goddamn petals are already falling off.’
He tried to throw the petal, and of course it didn’t go anywhere. It just fluttered to the ground and landed in a puddle.
Before moving to France Sandy had several more shows to perform with her old company at the Firehall. On that night, the last night, I didn’t see her dance because I was working as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant downtown. It was my day off but I’d offered to pick up a shift and of course that’s one of the things I can’t help thinking about, and hating myself for, because if I’d been at the show I would have waited for her and we would have driven home together, probably along a different route and definitely at a different time. Jake did see the show – we always saw her shows when we were free, even if we’d seen them a dozen times before – but he had Maria with him so didn’t wait around to say hello to Sandy afterwards, which I know is something that haunts him even more than my absence haunts me.
Since neither of her brothers was there after the show that night, Sandy changed and showered and had a glass of soda and lime with her friends and then left the Firehall at five past ten. She had a small white Nissan hatchback at the time and that was the car she was driving. She drove east on Hastings with her windows down, which she always did after a performance, even in winter, because it took hours for her core body temperature to fully cool down. She was going forty-five kilometres an hour, five klicks under the speed limit. I often think of those moments, of that drive with the open windows and the cold coastal air and the sea-brine stench of the city. In my mind and memory, I elongate that stretch, grant her just a little more time. I know she would have been filled with the feeling she always got after dancing, a feeling that she’d never been able to fully describe and which I can only partway imagine: riding that updraught of endorphins, gliding along like a hawk, the world all in focus, clear and sharp as cut glass. I let that elation last for as long as possible.
