No Good Brother

by Tyler Keevil

  ‘Thanks, Brenda,’ Jake said. ‘We owe you. We can take our girl from here.’

  He reached for the reins, and Brenda let them go reluctantly.

  ‘Are you sure everything’s all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Perfectly under control – as you can see.’

  That made them laugh. And, to be honest, I had to laugh too.

  ‘But you’ve got a horse,’ she said, ‘on a boat.’

  Jake tucked his hands beneath his armpits and looked at me. For all his nonchalance his shoulders were shuddering uncontrollably, from the cold of the water and the wind-chill.

  ‘What do you think, Poncho?’ he asked. ‘Should we tell them?’

  ‘You told that kid.’

  I figured we’d better stick to the same story, for simplicity’s sake if nothing else.

  ‘We stole her,’ he said. ‘We stole her to save her from a life of servitude and cruelty.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘We’re animal rights activists.’

  That was more than a little hypocritical, considering what we’d put Shenzao through. But it was all we had, and in a way I wanted to believe in it myself: that we actually were the good guys, performing a generous and altruistic act.

  Jake said, ‘Her owners were running her into the ground.’

  ‘We had to get her out, before she got injured.’

  ‘That’s amazing!’ one of the women cried. She had a feather boa draped around her shoulders, and a bottle of champagne tucked in her saddle bag. She hadn’t dismounted. I figured it had to be the bride, Kelly. She leaned towards us, swaying in the saddle. ‘You’re doing a great thing.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Jake said. ‘We like to think so. Now if you don’t mind, we’ve got to get her back on board.’

  Kelly said, ‘Can we watch? Nobody will believe this happened at my hen party.’

  ‘Don’t see why not. Watch away.’

  Jake led Shenzao around, and I went with them. We stood with our backs to the group for a moment.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘I have no idea. Let’s just load her up and get going.’

  ‘That there’s a log jam. She’ll break a leg if we try to take her on there.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying we got no way to load her back on the boat.’

  Jake lowered his voice. ‘Goddammit, Poncho.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You’re the captain.’

  I looked down the beach. At the stern of the boat, I could see the crane and seine winch.

  ‘There might be a way,’ I said.

  I left Jake and Shenzao with the hen party and went to fetch the boat. I wobble-walked out across the log jam, cast off, and puttered back parallel to shore till I drew level with them. Pivoting around, I threw her in reverse and backed up as close to the beach as I dared without bottoming out. I had one thing working in my favour: the seabed sloped up at a steep angle, which meant the water got deep quickly. I dropped anchor, keeping the chain taut so the boat couldn’t drift. Then I went down to the gear locker. The full-size seine net, which we used during the fisheries, would be far too heavy for what I had in mind, but on board Albert kept a smaller beach seine, just for our own purposes and recreational use.

  I dragged that to the stern. On shore, the rest of the women had dismounted. They’d brought out some wine glasses, and cracked open Kelly’s champagne. Even Jake had a glass. They’d lent him some clothing, too: to go with his boxer shorts, he now had a scarf, a fleece jacket, and one of the pink hen party tuques.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted.

  ‘You ready, Poncho?’

  ‘I need help with this net.’

  ‘Sorry ladies,’ Jake said, ‘but duty calls.’

  He took off the scarf and jacket, but kept the tuque. He waded out to meet me. The water rose up to his neck. When he reached the stern, I unfolded the beach seine and dumped the bulk of it into the water. I told him to spread it out a ways, laying the net flat on the bottom. He took hold of two of the floats on the edge and began to tug. While he did that, I attached the handles of the beach seine to the hook on the single-fall on the boom.

  ‘Is this how you catch herring?’ he asked.

  ‘It ain’t at all how you catch herring. But it should work.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Now go get the horse.’

  He went back up. Brenda had been holding his glass, and the horse’s reins. He took both from her and knocked back the champagne, then strutted his way down to the surf with Shenzao. She didn’t shy from the water. She’d had her taste of freedom and, I suppose, had realized she was very far from home and any place else she knew. Jake led her into position.

  ‘Now back on out of there,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll stay with her.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  ‘She’s been through a lot.’

  I threw up my hands, went over to the crane controls, and started the winch. The beach seine slowly tightened as cable fed through the boom. Shenzao grew antsy and restless but Jake held her and stroked her and talked to her. The floats of the beach seine cleared the surface, followed by the edges of the net, rising slowly, dripping water. The sides pressed in on Shenzao and Jake, squeezing them together, and lifted them up in a tangled, sodden mass. Essentially, we had rigged the beach seine into a makeshift cradle, to hoist the horse aboard.

  On shore, the women watched this, in awe and hysterics. They all had their cameras and their phones out and we couldn’t do anything about that. I just swivelled the crane over the deck, then lowered the load until they touched down. Jake lay squashed right up against Shenzao’s shoulder, and one of the horse’s legs was sticking out the bottom of the net. I made sure she came down on her side, with Jake atop her. A nifty trick.

  ‘Jesus, Poncho,’ he said. ‘Get me out of here.’

  I shut off the winch and went over there to disentangle them, but ended up having to cut them out with a penknife. I sawed around Jake first, and the two of us coaxed Shenzao to her feet. A few strands of netting still clung to her back, and she shook herself to clear them. They slithered off and landed on deck, like the final flourish of a magic trick.

  The ladies from the hen party applauded and cheered, as if the performance had been for their benefit. When the applause died down, Brenda called out, ‘Who are you?’

  Jake ran his hand down Shenzao’s neck, and patted her shoulder.

  ‘We’re Poncho and Lefty, ladies. The notorious desperados.’

  Kelly shouted, ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to marry me, ma’am. I’m a no-good horse thief.’

  ‘You’re heroes!’

  By that point Kelly, clearly, was pretty hammered.

  ‘Show us your face!’

  ‘Show us the rest of you!’

  They kept joking with us and hollering at us as we led Shenzao into her galley. She seemed surprisingly calm, all things considered. Either she’d gotten that oat-pep out of her system, or found the experience too overwhelming to process. We tethered her to the galley table and returned to deck.

  ‘Now ladies,’ Jake called. ‘I realize you’ll want to put this on social media. But if we get caught, our girl will go back to her owners, where they work her practically to death. Do you mind sitting on that footage for a day or two – to give us a head start – before posting it?’

  They murmured and nodded among themselves for a moment.

  Brenda said, ‘Okay, Lefty. It’s a deal.’

  Jake asked them if they wanted some Old Crow for their hen party, and they whooped in appreciation. He went to get one of the bottles I’d bought at Roche Harbor, and of course had to dive back in the water and swim it over to them. Once he got there, Kelly insisted on a photograph with him: she got him to kiss her, while all her friends snapped and filmed it.

  Shenzao stuck her head out the galley door, and sort of sn
orted at his antics.

  ‘I know, girl,’ I said. ‘He’s just like that.’

  She was gleaming white, and pristine-looking – shining with brine.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘at least we got you clean.’

  At that point, we had no idea if those women would keep their word about the footage. But they did. It came out eventually, of course, which partly triggered the final calamity down in Olympia. You can still see it, actually. It’s online and easy to find. Once the trial started it went viral and racked up millions of hits. There’s Jake, preening for the camera and flirting with the hen party. And in the background you can see me at the stern of the boat, standing nervously with this tea towel tied around my face. As it turned out, that towel didn’t matter a whit: the guard at Roche Harbor could attest to the fact that I was aboard the boat, anyway. They were able to prove that, but not that I’d been at the stables, which was crucial. Otherwise I’d be telling this tale from jail.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Once Jake had finished dallying with the hen party, we upped anchor and headed south, ploughing through the centre of Puget Sound. A north wind blew at our backs, and we had the currents, too: the narrow channels and estuaries became slow-moving rivers with the flux of the tide. I cranked the throttle and we managed a steady fifteen knots, ground speed. Low, wide swells rolled across the sound, and we loped over them with an easy rocking motion.

  At the rate we were going, we’d reach Olympia by evening – but we still didn’t yet know where we would dock.

  Jake crouched in front of the heater, still wearing boxers and his hen-party tuque and nothing else. I told him he ought to go get changed, and to fetch the charts while he was at it.

  ‘Aye-aye, Captain.’

  ‘I’m gonna miss you calling me that.’

  He went down below, leaving me at the helm. South of Whidbey Island the sound opened up, stretching to eleven or twelve miles across. To the west, the Olympic Mountain range loomed over the coastline. We’d had a view of those mountains from afar since setting out but they now dominated the horizon, rising in a daunting wall above the treeline. Snow and glacial ice coated the peaks, aside from the steeper faces, which the wind had scoured clean and black as mica.

  When Jake returned he’d pulled on some jeans and a shirt, but was still wearing his hen party tuque. I ribbed him about that, asking if he really thought Kelly and her friends would wait to post their videos.

  ‘They said they would,’ he said.

  ‘Better hope they do.’

  ‘You were all covered up.’

  ‘You weren’t.’

  ‘Hell, I’ve already been identified.’

  ‘Nobody knows you’re in the States. It’ll give the whole game away.’

  He waved that off, but I could tell he hadn’t taken it into account.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we better deliver her before that happens.’

  ‘The Delaneys won’t be happy.’

  ‘I’ll deal with the Delaneys.’

  He didn’t explain how. He just slapped those charts across my chest. I asked him to take the wheel (the first time I’d allowed that since his little mishap at the border) and laid the charts out across the table. While Jake kept us on course, I hunkered down and studied the terrain near Olympia, a sizeable city situated at the end of a long channel called Budd Inlet. Warehouses, marinas, and industrial complexes lined the surrounding waterfront. It would be too exposed for what we needed to do. But on either side of Budd Inlet two other channels branched off: Henderson to the east, and Eld to the west. Together the three inlets appeared on the map like the tongs of a twisted fork. Both Eld and Henderson looked more secluded and less developed, and Eld seemed to have a public dock with vehicle access.

  Jake said, ‘Hey – Poncho.’

  I looked up. I expected something to be going wrong, since that always seemed to be the case. But thirty feet away, sleek grey shapes were arcing in and out of the water.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t ever seen dolphins up close.’

  ‘You still haven’t. Those are porpoises. Harbour porpoises.’

  ‘Hand me the binoculars, will you?’

  I passed them over and he trained them on the porpoises, scrolling the focus ring with his forefinger. They seemed to have noticed us too, and kept pace off the starboard side in that playful way they have. With each jump they cleared the water in bursts of spray, their dorsal fins cresting, and then nosed back under, real elegantly.

  ‘Are they common or what?’ he asked.

  ‘They ain’t uncommon.’

  ‘Damned pretty creatures.’

  ‘Almost as pretty as your ladies from the hen party.’

  He lowered the binoculars, and grinned his gap-toothed grin.

  ‘Were they lookers? I didn’t notice.’

  ‘You and Kelly were getting pretty frisky.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said, ‘I was hamming it up a little. But hell, brother, I had to do something. And I’ve been at sea for too long. I’m feeling all lustful and libidinous.’

  I snorted and started laughing, and pointed out that we’d only been on the boat for a couple of days, whereas typically during fishing season we’d be out for two or three weeks. I told him about the deckhand Albert had caught jerking off in the head, and how he’d dunked the poor kid overboard. We had a good laugh about that.

  Then Jake said, ‘A few weeks is still nothing compared to a few years in prison.’

  That sobered us up, some. Jake hadn’t ever really talked about his time in prison. We were both still staring out at those porpoises, riding sidecar with us, and something about that made it easier for me to ask if it was as messed up in prison as they say: with the gangs and the violence and the rape and whatever. Jake shrugged, both nonchalant and uncomfortable.

  ‘It ain’t like they make out. I didn’t have to deal with too much shit, anyway. But it might have been a lot worse, without the Legion. I do owe the Delaneys that much.’ He turned and offered me the binoculars, adding, ‘And that was only because of Maria, you know. Why the hell else would they have had my back? She asked them to take me in.’

  I accepted the binoculars, and stood for a time holding them and fiddling with the neck strap and not knowing what to do or say.

  Jake pointed to the pod and said, ‘Have a look.’

  I trained the lenses on the porpoises. Jake’s eyesight is the same as mine, so I didn’t have to adjust the focus ring at all. The animals stood out in stark clarity, as vivid as a close-up in some nature show. I could clearly see their glossy-black eyes and smug little smiles.

  I said, ‘The two of you ain’t no good together.’

  ‘She looked after me. I got to do the same for her.’

  ‘We don’t even know if she needs that, or wants it.’

  ‘We’ll know soon enough.’

  ‘First it was about the debt, then it was about the money. Now it’s all about her.’

  ‘It’s a goddamn complicated situation.’

  ‘Maybe you got to make up your mind, little brother.’

  ‘Maybe you got to accept it ain’t clear-cut, big brother.’

  I let it go. One of those damned porpoises gave off this high-pitched whistle, gleeful and mischievous. I watched them for a minute longer. Each time they breached the surface, the water seemed to roll off their backs, slipping so easily from their rubber-slick skin.

  The wind coming down from the north brought an Arctic front with it. The temperature dropped to below zero, and the outside air had that crisp, distinct scent of impending snow.

  Jake stayed at the helm. He couldn’t stop shivering some from his stint in the water, so I went down below deck to fix us another coffee and check on Shenzao. I wouldn’t say she was doing fine, but she was doing better: she’d eaten more oats and drunk all her water and if anything her jaunt overboard seemed to have mellowed her some. While I brewed our coffee I replenished her water and chatte
d to her, talking her through our ideas for returning to land. She merely snorted, as sceptical as ever about our deluded schemes involving her.

  As the day progressed the coastline changed, slowly becoming more built up, more industrial. On the western shore rows of smokestacks pointed at the sky like rifle barrels, leaking gun-smoke pollution, and further along I could see cranes and wharves, and also a refinery yard covered in sulphur, piled up high in yellow pyramids, appearing pure and peculiar as fool’s gold. The air took on the stink of chemicals and burning petroleum.

  Boat traffic increased, too. Tankers and cargo ships powered north towards Juan de Fuca (the sight of them raising uneasy memories of our close-call) and ferries chugged back and forth from Bremerton, on the mainland, to Bainbridge Island. By midday we’d reached Elliott Bay and Seattle, which lay to the east. We stayed ten miles offshore so only glimpsed the city from afar: a colourful jumble of blocks and oblongs, crammed together along the waterfront. And on the left side rose the distinct tower of the Space Needle, capped by its observation deck, which made it look top-heavy and precarious as all hell, primed to fall.

  ‘Maybe we should roll on into town for lunch,’ I said.

  ‘Sure. Tether Shenzao on the dock.’

  ‘You could do some more interviews.’

  ‘Got to please our fans.’

  ‘Poncho and Lefty take Seattle by storm.’

  ‘Animal rights activists and outlaws spotted at Space Needle.’

  South, the sound looked even busier. Behind the various vessels you could see the streaks of wake-water, trailing like streamers. Tacoma lay in that direction and a fair amount of boat traffic ran between there and Seattle. Despite Jake’s confidence in the hen party’s integrity, heading straight on through all that activity didn’t seem like the most sensible thing. But to the west a separate channel branched off, between Vashon Island and the mainland. It ran in a straighter line and would cut Tacoma out of our journey entirely, and appeared to be a more discreet route.

  I told Jake to steer in that direction while I plotted the course. The channel (called Vashon Channel) would take us all the way down to Point Defiance National Park, and from there it would only be a few more hours to Olympia. I told Jake about the dock I’d sussed in Eld Inlet. We traded places again and he took a look at the map. He agreed that it seemed all right but said that we ought to check with Maria.