No Good Brother

by Tyler Keevil

  All we could do was keep going. So that was what we did.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  By the time we reached the other side it was past midnight. What should have been a four-hour journey had taken us eight. The storm never really abated but we grew accustomed to its particular brand of tempestuousness. It became more a matter of enduring the onslaught, and riding it out. The horse was sick, and Jake too, but we made it without running aground, capsizing, or sinking. I can’t say we reached our destination, as that was hazy from the get-go. I didn’t actually know where we had ended up: only that it was on the south side of the strait. I’d been aiming for Port Townsend but Port Townsend is a sizeable settlement and in the bay we entered there looked to be only a few scattered lights on the surrounding hills.

  I navigated the Lady into the centre of the bay, where we had some shelter from the storm, which continued to rage and thrash behind us. I didn’t want to go any further in the dark, since we’d lost the GPS navigator and depth sounder, which increased our chances of running aground or coming up against some rocks. Seeing as we didn’t know our specific coordinates, the charts only served as a rough guide.

  So we dropped anchor there, and went to check on the horse. In the galley, an inch of seawater covered the floor, having poured in through the broken window during the storm. The water churned sloppily with manure and horse-puke and (presumably) urine, creating a putrid mess. The tarps floated atop it, soiled and streaked. Shenzao knelt in the middle of all that, her head bowed and eyes half-closed. Her coat was filthy, her mane scraggly, her tail wilted. She looked embarrassed and frightened and humiliated, and shivery from the cold.

  I said, ‘We’re gonna pay for what we’ve done to this poor horse.’

  ‘I’m already paying for it.’

  ‘You look it.’

  ‘I feel just about as rough as her.’

  Jake’s face had gone near-white, sickly with sweat. Green around the gills, Albert would have called it.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s clean this up.’

  We did what we could. Jake coaxed her to her feet and I dragged the soiled tarps out on deck. While he mopped the water off the galley floor I shook the tarps overboard, draped them on the seine drum, and hosed them down (Albert had a hose on deck, connected to our freshwater supply, which we used for cleaning the holds). Every few minutes Jake trudged out on deck with a bucketful of foul-smelling liquid, which he dumped over the side. The rain still fell, relentless, rattling across the decking and soaking our slickers, and we both slogged through these chores in a kind of numb aftershock.

  When all the muck was cleared out of the galley, it left dirty stains on the linoleum tiles, which had buckled and warped. I went around, trying to stomp down the tiles, but of course that didn’t work. They would need replacing, like so much else in the galley. But when I commented on this in passing, Jake shrugged.

  ‘Who cares?’ he said.

  ‘Albert sure as hell will.’

  ‘I’m more worried about our horse.’

  ‘I’m not saying I ain’t worried about her.’

  ‘What are you saying, then?’

  ‘I don’t want to fight.’

  ‘I want a beer. You want a beer?’

  ‘I need a beer.’

  While Jake went to fetch the Olympia from the storage locker, I got some old sheets out of the crew’s cabin. I spread them on the floor in place of the tarps and backed Shenzao into her usual spot: with her hindquarters near the sink, and her head angled toward the table. She sat on her rump and let her front hooves slide over the sheet, easing herself to the floor, and then rolled and lay flat in the supine position. Her eyes had a glassy, glazed look.

  We put water and oats in front of her and sat with her, at the galley table, drinking our beer. The first ones went down easy, and Jake got us two more. As we drank Jake gave me his account of the moment that wave had hit me. Like a big wet palm, he said. Smack.

  ‘You saved my bacon, brother.’

  ‘I couldn’t steer this rig without you.’

  ‘I was going overboard, you know.’

  ‘I would have come in after you.’

  ‘Then we both would have drowned.’

  ‘Better that than lose you, too.’

  Every so often, we checked on Shenzao. Her temperature seemed to have come down some but that was about all that could be said, by way of improvements. She still looked sickly as hell.

  ‘She has to eat,’ Jake said. ‘She hasn’t eaten hardly anything.’

  ‘And what she did she hurled up.’

  ‘She’s probably dehydrated, too.’

  He emptied and refilled her water dish, but she just lay there, eyeing it listlessly.

  I said, ‘We haven’t really eaten, either.’

  ‘Go on and get us some of that there food.’

  ‘You get it – I’ll cook it.’

  He pointed at the busted stove. ‘We don’t got the means.’

  ‘There’s a campstove for emergencies.’

  ‘This sure as hell counts.’

  Albert’s stove was a classic: a two-burner Coleman that ran off gasoline. By the time I fetched it from the engine room, Jake had laid out a full spread on the table: a loaf of bread and a pack of hot dogs and a tin of beans.

  Seeing all that, I said, ‘Hey Jake.’

  He looked at me.

  ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.’

  The stove struck and started, first time. We put a pot of water on to boil, and emptied the tin of beans into a saucepan. While we waited for them to heat up, Jake brought out one of the bottles of Old Crow that I’d bought. We filled up two mugs and sat there cradling them like cups of hot coffee. It tasted damned good. The liquor and the stove warmed us up and we peeled off our jackets and rain gear. As I did I remembered the passport: it had been in my pocket throughout the storm. I pulled it out to check it. The pages were stuck together and the cover felt soft, spongy. I placed it on the table and looked at Jake in apology.

  ‘Ah, hell,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’d forgot I had it.’

  ‘Well, maybe she looked after you.’ He picked it up. He peeled it open so it could stand upright, and then placed it near the stove, and the heat. ‘See if we can dry it out.’

  When the water boiled we dumped in the hot dogs, and by the time those had cooked we were good and drunk. We turned the heat down low and tore chunks off the bread. We didn’t have plates or bowls, so we just sort of scooped up beans with the bread, then laid a hot dog across that. It was messy as hell.

  ‘Damn, this is good,’ I said.

  ‘Reminds me of camping.’

  ‘Like that last trip we went on, down Oregon way.’

  ‘I remember.’

  It had been six weeks before Sandy was due to fly out to start training in Paris. Jake and I had wanted to take her camping, even though it was winter, as a last trip together as siblings. Maria came too and the four of us piled into the family van, an old grey Previa, rusty but reliable, which we’d had since our dad was alive. We took it on the ferry across to Vancouver Island, and camped at the beach in Tofino.

  Jake and I may have organized the trip but we didn’t really plan it, or think it through (this was always the case with us). We had no reservation so missed the first ferry, and we hadn’t checked the weather forecast. All through the first day it rained and rained and rained: practically a deluge. The tents that Jake and I had brought had no flies or groundsheets and so the four of us ended up huddled in the van, drinking wine from plastic cups and watching the rain and playing poker for pennies. Come nightfall the rain finally thinned to a drizzle and we walked down to the beach, which was completely empty, and completely ours. Sandy had thought to store some firewood in the van, to keep it dry, and we started a bonfire and Jake got out his guitar and while he played the three of us danced around, absurdly, dressed in our jackets and rain gear. That was the last time I saw Sandy dance. Even burdened by all tha
t cumbersome clothing she could not look clumsy, but moved with the same swift certainty she displayed on stage, only in this case she spun and leapt and twirled through the misty dark, kicking up sand, freewheeling amid the elements.

  Afterwards we hunkered down around the fire and had a semi-serious talk: the kind of talk you might have, when your older sister goes away. No doubt it was partly triggered by the complete and utter haplessness we had displayed on the trip. She looked at us and asked us what we were going to do without her, and wondered aloud who would take care of us. She asked Maria if she might, but by then Maria was half-cut and – as Jake pointed out – in no condition to take care of anybody, even herself. I remember that Sandy looked to me, and said: ‘Maybe it’s on you, Tim.’ Joking, but also serious. ‘You’re the next oldest.’

  It almost seems too pat, too perfect, that she would say that – though of course that is precisely the reason I remember it. A week later she was dead, and I failed to live up to the task with which she had charged me.

  That night in the galley Jake and I talked about that memory, and a good many others – so many that each one began to blend into the previous, and the next, since in some ways they were all the same memory, built up over time: an image of our sister that we kept close, held tight, like a picture in a locket. A picture made more radiant by the effects of time, and grief, and whisky: the burning in the throat, the stinging in the eyes, the smouldering in the chest.

  ‘It don’t make any sense,’ I said, taking a swig from the bottle. We’d moved on from pouring our drinks a long time back. ‘No sense at all.’

  ‘Sometimes I still dream she’s alive.’

  ‘Sometimes I still think she’s alive.’

  Jake took the bottle from me, and knocked back the dregs. His face was red, glowing.

  ‘I got something to tell you,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I wish it had been anybody but her.’

  ‘You mean me.’

  ‘Or me. Either of us.’

  ‘She would have looked after the other.’

  ‘She would have made it okay.’

  We were both looking at the burner flames, as if into a campfire or crystal ball.

  I said, ‘It’s like the sun went down and never came up.’

  Jake grinned. I was drunk and being dramatic and you could tell he liked that.

  ‘The sun is down,’ he said. ‘But it’ll come up in a few hours.’

  ‘Ah, to hell with you. Go and get your damned guitar, why don’t you?’

  ‘That an order, Captain?’

  ‘It sure as hell is.’

  He went up to the wheelhouse, and I sat there with Shenzao. I told her we’d been talking about our sister, and I told her a bunch of other drunken nonsense, which doesn’t really bear repeating. But I did have an idea. I dipped a chunk of bread in the hot dog water and mashed it up into a doughy ball and bent down and held that in front of her. She sniffed it once – testing – and licked it, and then folded her lips around it, slurping at my fingers.

  ‘Jake!’ I said. ‘Jake – come here, quick!’

  I heard him drop onto deck (he’d jumped) and he came rushing in, carrying his guitar and the half-empty bottle of Black Velvet he’d brought from Vancouver. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘She’s eating bread!’

  ‘I thought she might be dead, the way you were hollering.’

  ‘Watch this.’

  I repeated the trick, dipping and mashing, and she ate it again. Then she took a few slurps from her water bowl.

  ‘Should I give her more?’

  ‘Let her digest that first.’

  ‘Is bread okay?’

  ‘It’s just grain. It’s fine.’

  Jake settled in with his guitar and I went to work on the Black Velvet. I felt all belly-full and leaden-limbed and foggy-headed. He plucked at the strings for a while, tuning in that pernickety way of his.

  ‘Play the damned song,’ I said.

  He didn’t have to ask what song: the one he’d written for her. He’d been planning to play it at the funeral, but the night before he’d gotten drunk and started a bar fight and broke his thumb. I wouldn’t have wanted to listen to it that day, anyway. I’d hardly ever been able to listen to it. But I wanted to listen to it just then. Like all of Jake’s songs it sounded raw and wounded, as if the words were being pulled out of his throat on a rusty wire. Something that hurt to get out but would hurt more to keep inside, if that makes sense.

  Here’s the funny thing: the horse, she sat up to listen. That bread and water had done her good, and she seemed to like the song. She probably hadn’t heard much music at the race track, other than what they played over the loudspeaker. That could very well have been the first music she ever heard, and she listened, with her ears pricked up attentively.

  When Jake finished, he put the guitar to one side. I lowered my head on the table and stayed like that for a few minutes, as if in supplication, overcome with whisky and grief and stricken to the core. When I finally roused myself I sat back and picked up the passport. The heat of the burner had dried it some, and I opened it and flipped through it.

  ‘How is it?’ Jake asked.

  ‘It’s done,’ I said.

  The seawater had warped the pages and drained away the colouring. Sandy’s face was faded and stained. It didn’t look much like her any more. Or maybe it did and I’d just forgotten. Maybe what she actually looked like was different to what I remembered. I closed it and gazed at Jake, and I didn’t have to explain it. I just removed the pot from the stove and held the corner of the passport over the flames. It took a while to catch, on account of the cover being vinyl, but when it burned it burned. The flames licked up hot to my hand and I dropped it in the empty pot. It gave off black smoke and curled up. The cover bubbled and peeled back and I caught a last glimpse of my sister’s face, before the flames consumed it.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Come morning, I awoke to the heavy, sweet, hot scent of horse breath in my face. After the drunken angst of the previous night, we had collapsed in the bunks: me in mine, and Jake in Big Ben’s. One of the holes Shenzao had kicked in the partition wall was right next to my head. Now she had her snout up against it, breathing on me. Her big nostrils, pink and hairy as a hog’s, flared at each exhale. I couldn’t see the rest of her head: just those nostrils.

  ‘Lefty,’ I said.

  A grunt. It was like being back at sea during fishing season.

  ‘I think our girl’s getting better.’

  He rolled over. His hair – which he hadn’t washed in days – stuck out in starfish snarls, and patches of stubble peppered his jaw. He looked like a greasy gigolo.

  ‘I knew she would.’

  ‘Lookie here.’ I pointed at the nose in the wall.

  ‘What a little pig nose.’

  She snorted, as if offended by the comment.

  I said, ‘Get her some food, will you?’

  ‘I ain’t the cook.’

  ‘I’m gonna find out where the hell we are.’

  He yawned. ‘We are where we are.’

  ‘That’s real deep.’

  ‘I’m going back to sleep, Poncho.’

  We’d ended up in Discovery Bay, between Diamond Point and Cape George. I deduced that from the nearby landmasses. We had unknowingly moored about five miles to the south of an island that had a distinct boomerang shape. After going over the charts I reasoned that it had to be Protection Island, which (appropriately enough) had provided us with some shelter from the storm. It was a national park and even from a distance I could see big masses of sea lions, sprawled like slugs on the rocks and outcroppings. To the immediate south, Discovery Bay tapered off, leading to a dead-end. To continue our journey, we had to slip around the cape to the east, and down past Port Townsend, into Puget Sound.

  Before setting off we made porridge on the campstove, and shared it with Shenzao. She managed to keep it down, along with some water. She looked much
improved – though she still stank and her coat was caked in a layer of dried filth. We’d cleaned out the galley but we hadn’t cleaned her. Jake wanted to take her on deck and hose her down properly, but I wouldn’t allow it. The shores of Discovery Bay were lined with houses, and a number of them looked to be lived in year-round. I figured that it would be better to hold off until we found somewhere more secluded, so as not to draw attention to ourselves.

  ‘I don’t want to leave her all dirty like that for too long,’ Jake said.

  ‘The south side of Whidbey has a few bays. We’ll stop there.’

  He thought about that, chewing at his porridge, which was undercooked.

  ‘How far?’ he asked.

  ‘Only a few hours.’

  ‘Okay. But no more than that.’

  Just before eight, we upped anchor and headed east, under a sky smeared red with wispy mare’s tails. The thermometer in the wheelhouse window read two degrees above zero. The strait had stayed stormy: off to port the wind-whipped waves chased each other in rows, but we only skirted the edges of that, and it wasn’t nearly so bad as it had been at its peak.

  Since Shenzao seemed to be improving, and accustomed to her new abode (she no longer seemed interested in destroying it, anyhow), Jake rode up top with me. He brewed coffee on the Coleman and we drank that in the wheelhouse, with the heater cranked. I had that jittery, partially euphoric feeling you get before the real hangover kicks in. The previous night seemed like a sort of psychotic episode that we had endured and survived, somehow.

  We rounded the point at Fort Warden State Park, and Puget Sound opened up before us, smooth and grey as wet clay in the morning light. Villages and refineries appeared along the coastline – that area being significantly more developed than the San Juans – and soon enough Port Townsend came into view. The waterfront had a pleasant, old-time feel, with redbrick buildings lining the shore, and rickety old wharves sticking out into the sound.