No Good Brother

by Tyler Keevil

  ‘Well,’ he said, kicking a foot up on the dash, ‘if that’s really the case then this might be a one-way trip for me. Instead of a cabin in the interior, it might have to be a ranchhouse down Mexico way. Or Guatemala.’

  ‘This isn’t Butch and Sundance.’

  ‘No – it’s Poncho and Lefty.’

  He exhaled smoke through his gap tooth, making it trill. The smoke disappeared out the window, snatched away in the rush of wind. Partly it was an act – Jake will always strive for a kind of theatrical bravado – but he also seemed genuinely gleeful at the idea.

  ‘Damn,’ I said.

  ‘So long as we make it across the border,’ he said, ‘we’ll be fine.’

  We had about thirty minutes to go. I drove at exactly the speed limit and the road markings strafed by and alongside us telephone poles flashed past like fence pickets. We passed the turn-off for Vancouver Zoo, and crossed the intersection with the Fraser Highway at Aldergrove. From within the cargo box, every so often I heard Shenzao move – and could feel the van shift under her weight. She was restless, anxious, as if she’d picked up on our mood. We came into that long straightaway leading to the border, where there’s nothing but farming fields and a few big greenhouses and plant nurseries. As we were driving by them, the phone rang. The Delaneys’ phone. For a while Jake let it ring, vibrating in the glove box. I didn’t ask him why.

  Eventually, though, he reached in there to open it.

  He said, ‘What’s up, Mark?’

  There was a pause, and he said, ‘I hope I didn’t hear you right. Say that again.’

  Then he said, ‘I’ll call you back.’

  He snapped shut the phone and opened the glove box and shoved the phone inside, locking it away out of sight. Then – and this was typical of Jake – he opened the glove box again and very deliberately snapped the door off at the hinges and flung that out his window like a square-shaped Frisbee, and shouted curses into the night with a genuine sense of indignation.

  Then he took a drag of his cigarette and said, ‘There’s an APB out, for a white van. Their man won’t get us through the border any more.’

  I could actually see the border now, up ahead: just this glimmer of twinkling lights, tantalizing and taunting us. We’d almost made it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  We found a highway turn-off that led down to a parking lot and rest area beside a stream, surrounded by tall sitka spruce. As we rolled in our headlights panned across tables and benches and grass and the water beyond. It looked real picturesque: the kind of spot Tracy and I might have gone for a little picnic lunch, to eat potato salad and strawberries and these salami sandwiches she was fond of making. Of course, such thoughts of her now seemed all the more dreamlike and beyond reach, in the dark of the deserted lot, with our inept plan unravelling and the stolen horse weighing us down like a curse.

  I parked near a barbecue pit and turned off the engine.

  Jake told me to hold on: he was going to phone the Delaneys back. He shoved open his door and got out and I got out, too. I stood and leaned with my back against the side of the van, feeling the coolness of the metal through my shirt, and gazed at the stream. The surface roiled and simmered over hidden stones, as if stirred by a mass of herring. I listened to Jake saying things like, ‘I thought this was all set up. I thought you had this guy in your pocket. Do you remember saying that?’ To me he was illuminated in flashes as he crossed back and forth in front of our headlights, and when he wasn’t in a beam he was gone, a shadow.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Jake said. ‘I’ve got a stolen horse, here.’

  As if she’d heard and understood they were discussing her, Shenzao began to neigh and whinny as she had done before. The sounds echoed within the van, and since my head was pressed against the metal, the vibrations seemed to resonate right through my skull.

  Jake flapped his free hand at me, signalling that I should deal with her.

  I went around to the side door and opened it and when I did the horse went still and quiet, watching to see what I’d do next. I shushed her and said her name repeatedly and tried to touch her, but she nickered and shied away. The van smelled of her piss and sweat and manure and fear. I thought she might be thirsty. The only thing we had that was suitable for holding water was Jake’s aluminium frying pan, which he’d brought from his room. I took that down to the stream and crouched and rinsed it several times (it still had fried egg in it) before filling it to the brim. I carried that sloppily back to the van and placed it in front of the horse. She sniffed at the pan, dubious, then lowered her nose and began slurping away.

  ‘Good girl,’ I said, and touched her haunch, but she flicked her tail at me, as if to say: I’ll accept your water, buddy, but don’t expect this to change anything between us.

  Behind me, Jake said, ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  I went over to stand by him. He had one hand out in front of him, gesturing with it as if Mark (I assumed he was talking to Mark) was actually there in front of him.

  ‘Leave her?’ Jake said. ‘Just set her loose? That’s all you’ve got?’

  He listened for a moment and I heard the tinny voice of Mark, and Jake shook his head back and forth. ‘No no – just forget it. Let me talk to my brother. I’ll call you back.’

  He snapped the phone shut and said, ‘You heard what that wingnut said?’

  ‘Even if we leave her, you could still be ID’d. We’ll still have stolen her.’

  ‘I know. Goddamn. I didn’t want to tell him about the gas station, though.’

  Together we walked around the side of the van. We stood and watched the horse drink. Her slurping seemed to echo the noise of the stream. Even confined in a cramped van and surrounded by her own excrement she still looked noble and far more dignified than us.

  ‘It’s only a crime,’ I said, ‘if the horse is reported stolen.’

  He considered that. A bat whipped in a circle above our heads, and vanished.

  ‘You mean take her back?’ he said.

  ‘If we can.’

  ‘There’s the broken lock.’

  ‘They might not even care about that, if the horse is still there.’

  ‘There’s the CCTV footage.’

  ‘If they bother to check the tapes.’

  Jake crossed his arms. ‘So we give up,’ he said.

  ‘We tried. The Delaneys can’t blame you for any of this.’

  He scuffed the dirt with his heel a few times, and then he said, ‘Fine.’

  It was past three in the morning by the time we turned back towards the track. At the stables the work generally started early but Jake said he wouldn’t normally expect any stable hands to be in with the horses until at least five. So we retraced our route, believing that our new plan was feasible, and even plausible. After all, we’d stolen the horse without too much trouble, so we didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t sneak her back in using the same methods.

  ‘If this doesn’t work,’ I said. ‘We could go to the cops. Lay it all on the table, and explain the situation.’

  ‘You mean snitch?’

  He was still doing that: using the kinds of terms I’d only heard in movies.

  I said, ‘Whatever you want to call it.’

  He just shook his head, a quick jerk, and stared out the window.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Legion would kill us.’

  His tone was flat, monotonous – almost as if he was disinterested. I took hold of the gearstick and downshifted, accelerating to sixty, seventy, eighty. The van shuddered like a shed in a hurricane.

  ‘Don’t get all pissy with me,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to talk it out.’

  ‘There’s no talking it out.’

  ‘No shit. The plan was stupid from the get-go. Bunch of wannabe gangsters with their penny-ante Godfather scheme, and you and me the patsies dumb enough to sign on.’

  ‘It could have worked.’

  ‘How could it ever have worked?’
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br />   Jake pawed at his face, running the palm over it. He looked tired, beaten, defeated.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You actually said that like you mean it.’

  ‘I do mean it.’

  We pulled alongside a big freight truck, slowly overtaking it. It was hauling a trailer laden with chicken cages. Through the wire mesh you could see sad and sodden birds, their feathers tatty, and a few errant beaks poking out into the night.

  Four in the morning is probably the deadest time in any city: that hour between the closing of the night clubs and the earliest commuters. It’s particularly true of Vancouver, which isn’t like New York or Los Angeles or one of those cities that never sleep. As we approached the area on the southside around Castle Meadow, we didn’t see any other vehicles on the roads, or any other people out and about. It seemed promising. I started to really believe we could simply drop the horse back off and return to the way things had been: as if my previous life had been left behind like an old jacket, which I could go pick up again and put back on.

  In the back of the van, Shenzao had gone completely quiet.

  We came off the highway at Marine and swung back down onto Macdonald Street – essentially following the path we’d taken on the way out. As we neared the entrance to the stables I flipped on my blinker and began to slow, and through the gate and perimeter fence I saw the police cars. There were three of them, but only one had its lights still on, glowing cherry-red and lazily rotating, like a hazard beacon, warding us off. There were other vehicles, too, including a CTV news van. And people moving about, some of them with cameras. We’d only been gone a couple of hours or so but of course that had been enough.

  I switched my signal off and coasted past. We carried on in a wide circuit, turning right and then right again so that we had eventually doubled back towards Marine.

  Neither of us said anything.

  I kept going and somehow ended up on Main, heading north, just driving now, not even knowing where I was going or if there was anywhere left to go. It just seemed wise to put some distance between ourselves and the stables. I suppose returning to the scene of the crime is another thing real criminals know not to do.

  Main led us down to the waterfront, and I headed over the traffic bridge that loops around to Crab Park, and the Westco plant. I did that mostly on instinct (I was so accustomed to taking that route) but it was also a good stopping point since it’s an industrial area sheltered from the city by the railway tracks. The Westco parking lot was empty at that hour and I wheeled in, rolling to a halt in one of the reserved spots overlooking the water.

  I turned off the engine and we sat for a spell staring out at the inlet. It was past four now and the sky was smearing to grey in the east, but the water was black and still as a pit, ready to swallow us. Beyond it you could see the lights of the North Shore, our home, and the shapes of the mountains outlined in silhouette against the sky. It looked very far away.

  Behind us, Shenzao whinnied, in the way she did whenever we stopped.

  Jake said, ‘You should get going. They can’t ID you.’

  ‘They’ll know there were two of us.’

  ‘I’ll tell them it was me. Me and Delaney. Take that prick down with me.’

  ‘Nobody’s going down.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ he said.

  Then Jake started going a bit overboard. He asked me to look after Ma and also Maria. He told me he thought that her suggesting him for this job had probably been a way of asking for help and that she needed help and always had, even if she didn’t know it, even if I didn’t understand it. He was trying to say all this in what you might call a stoic and resolute fashion but beneath that he sounded frustrated and scared. He sounded like my little brother. He went on like that for a while, as if to convince me and himself he was okay with it all – with impending imprisonment and possible death – until I said, ‘Just hold on a second, here.’

  I was looking down at the docks. I could see the Western Lady in her berth.

  I said, ‘There might be a way out of this.’

  He gazed at me mutely, and for a moment we settled into familiar roles: he having gotten us into trouble, and me, as the older and more responsible one, needing to get us out.

  ‘There’s the boat,’ I said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was a desperate, reckless, foolish idea – that’s a given – and possibly required even worse judgement on our part than stealing the horse in the first place. But though the idea of transporting a horse by boat might seem absurd and faintly ridiculous, in actuality it wasn’t totally impractical. And even though it meant adding to our crimes in the eyes of the law, for Jake it was clearly better than the alternative. It was as if we were going double-or-nothing.

  It didn’t take him long to come around to the idea.

  Once it was decided, we became very focused and pragmatic. Jake laced another banana with Sedaline, and we pulled open the door of the van and fed that to Shenzao, who ate it without any suspicion or reluctance. While we waited for the drug to kick in, I hustled down the wharf to ready the boat. Generally we loaded heavy supplies onto the boat using the crane, which obviously wasn’t an option when it came to a horse. So for me the main obstacle was the four-foot rise from the dock to the boat’s gunnel. The Lady was riding high in the water since the holds were now empty and we’d stripped her down.

  But we had the ramp from the van, and on the dock, alongside the boat, there were bollards: wrought-iron posts, fat and squat and black, which we lashed tie-lines around in mooring the boats. My idea was to brace the ramp against a bollard and angle it up to the boat’s gunnel, and after inspecting the height and distance I thought this seemed a reasonable proposal.

  Albert kept a spare set of keys in the storage locker outside the galley, in case the master set – his keys – ever got lost overboard. I had the combination to the locker, since he of course trusted me, or had trusted me, and could not have imagined I would ever take the keys or the boat without his permission. Up until then, I had been thinking of the boat as partially mine, something I had every right to borrow, but in reaching in to touch those keys I began to feel the import of the decision, and had a premonition of the possible repercussions.

  I used the keys to unlock the galley door and propped it open and stepped inside. I tried to imagine a horse in there and I couldn’t. I didn’t even know if she would fit.

  From the storage locker, I pulled out a couple of canvas tarps that we used whenever we were painting or priming, to protect the decking and woodwork. I laid these out across the vinyl floor tiles, and atop them I spread a few sheets of newspaper. It wasn’t much – and not nearly enough – but it was all I could think to do by way of preparation.

  By then it was light enough to see, and though it was the weekend and all the crews were done for the season, within an hour the first cannery workers would be arriving. The sorters worked seven days a week, once the herring came in, to extract and grade and pack the roe.

  Back at the van, Jake had already untied Shenzao and guided her down out of the cargo box. Standing so still, she looked stately and regal in the morning light, but as I got closer I could see her nostrils flaring, and her ears flicking back and forth, all twitchy with anxiety. Seeing me she jerked once on the reins, and Jake had to hold firm to keep her steady.

  ‘Did you give her enough of that stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘Adrenaline counteracts it, some.’

  ‘She looks a bit skittish.’

  ‘We’re all a bit skittish just now.’

  ‘Should we feed her another?’

  ‘Once she’s aboard I’ve got some Xylazine.’

  ‘I don’t know what that is.’

  ‘General anaesthetic. For surgery and shit.’

  ‘How in the hell did you get your hands on that?’

  ‘Let’s just hope it does the trick.’

  I hefted the ramp, which was made from solid aluminium, and must have weighed a g
ood seventy pounds. I carried it across my back, stooping over, and stumbled along like an inept hang glider trying to take off. Jake followed behind with the horse. I had some trouble negotiating the gangway that led from the wharf down to the docks, due to the narrowness of it and the awkward nature of my burden. I got the sense that, behind me, Jake was having troubles of his own in getting Shenzao down, but I couldn’t stop or go back up to help. By the time I’d reached the bottom, however, he’d coaxed Shenzao into motion, and the two of them started down the gangway together, her hooves clanging alarmingly on the metal grating. Jake talked to her as they descended. I worried that she’d take fright and end up in the water, but it didn’t happen. Partly that was Jake, and partly it must have been the Sedaline. But mostly, I think, it had to do with her temperament. She seemed to have an odd trust in us, despite our conduct, and even if that trust proved to be misplaced.

  Once he had her down on the dock, it was only a short walk to the Western Lady. The boat was moored with its port side towards shore, and Jake stroked the horse, keeping her relatively docile, as I got the ramp into place: bracing one end on the bollard and hefting the other end, like a weightlifter, to raise it high enough to reach the gunnel.

  The ramp was at a steeper angle than when we’d loaded her into the van, but it looked manageable. I held it steady and Jake hopped up, leading Shenzao by the reins. She came to the start of the ramp and stopped, leaning back. She turned her head sideways, getting a good look at him, as if to ask, ‘Do you really expect me to go up there?’

  Then a kind of tug-of-war began, with him straining on the reins – though trying not to do this too violently or viciously – and her pulling back, her hooves braced on the dock, and her head held rigid.

  ‘Give me a hand here,’ Jake said.

  I edged around behind and put my shoulder against her haunch (a trick that was becoming familiar) and I could feel her muscles quivering, either with nerves or strain. Jake and I were both talking to her encouragingly – come on, girl, come on – and this went on for at least a few minutes. It felt like trying to roll a boulder. It was clear the horse would only move if she wanted to. Finally, maybe because she’d grown bored, or realized we weren’t going to relent, she did move – and once she got going she stepped up quite nimbly, with no trouble: so quickly, actually, that Jake had to jump back to avoid being trampled.