No Good Brother

Mark finished with the fly press, hopped up, and patted his belly.

‘Trying to get rid of this goddamn jiggle-ball,’ he said.

‘Ladies like a man with a little padding,’ Jake said.

Mark laughed. ‘Fucking Jake Harding. Come here, man.’

He met Jake halfway and gripped Jake’s hand and they did a shake and punch. Mark started talking right away about how glad he was to see Jake, and have him on board.

‘How are things at the stables?’ he asked Jake.

‘I’m getting on all right.’

‘See, Novak?’ Mark said, looking beyond us at the other guy. ‘I told you Jake would make it work. Novak here thinks you’re gonna screw this job up. He thinks it’s a bad idea.’

Novak just smiled, or seemed to. His teeth were not nice to look at: yellowish and square and standing out from the gums. Skeleton teeth.

‘Nobody’s gonna screw anything up,’ Jake said.

He sounded very confident, very convincing. At the time, even I believed him.

‘That’s my boy. Send those fuckers a message. Pull some Coppola-type shit on them.’ Mark snapped his fingers. ‘Hey Novak – why don’t you see if that cake is ready?’

‘Cake,’ Novak said, as if considering it. ‘Yes, I will get the cake.’

He slipped out the door, eel-like, and shut it silently behind him.

‘Don’t mind Novak,’ Mark said. ‘He’s a crazy Slav. But useful.’

He led Jake and I over to the card table. It had four chairs around it and on top, in the middle, was a crokinole board. The board was carved from mahogany and so were the discs. I’d never seen a board like that. Mark noticed me studying it and rapped on the edge.

‘We just got into this. Crokinole. My bro’s obsessed with it.’

‘We used to play as kids.’

‘Oh yeah?’ He sort of perched sideways on the edge of the table, in a way that didn’t look particularly cool or comfortable, and eyed me up and down. ‘Jesus, Jake. You didn’t tell me you were bringing the Angels in on this deal. What chapter are you with, buddy?’

I told him I wasn’t with any chapter. I wasn’t with the Angels. I sort of got that he was making fun of me but I still didn’t understand it. Then Mark laughed. His laugh was really something: a high-pitched, squeaky giggle, like a teenager before his voice breaks.

‘Shit – I’m just messing with you. I meant the outfit.’

I was wearing my watchcap and goose-down jacket and work boots.

‘He’s on the boats,’ Jake said, clapping my back. ‘Fishing and shit.’

‘At the docks? We got some guys down there.’

Mark rattled off a list of names, but I didn’t recognize any of them, since I didn’t actually work at the docks he had in mind. This seemed to disappoint him momentarily, and he looked at me anew, as if I might not be a fisherman at all but a guy posing as one.

‘So this is your brother?’ he asked Jake.

Jake introduced me, and Mark held out his hand to shake mine. As we did, he noticed my fingers and turned my hand up so he could get a better look. He bent over it as if he were going to kiss it.

‘Jesus Christ. You get bit by a shark or what?’

‘No – I got bit by your mom.’

I do that, sometimes, when I’m nervous. I say something completely inappropriate and out of line. Mark let my hand drop. For a second it seemed as if it could go either way, but Mark laughed again – that squeak of a laugh – and said something about me having balls, to make a crack like that. Then he stopped laughing, and gave his earlobe a gentle pinch.

‘Just don’t say anything like that around my brother, okay?’

‘Where is your brother?’ Jake asked.

‘He’ll be here. We got a few minutes to kill.’

He took a seat and we did the same. While we waited he wanted to see our crokinole skills. We divided up the rocks and took turns shooting twenties. Mark wasn’t that good but he was very enthusiastic. We did that for ten or fifteen minutes, until headlights flooded the office. A vehicle had turned into the drive: another SUV, a big Durango. As it pulled into the garage beneath us the thump-thump of heavy bass beats made the whole room vibrate. Then the music cut out, and a few moments later Patrick Delaney made his entrance.

‘What’s the fucking dilly, yo?’ he said.

Pat had Mark’s features but he was heftier, all muscled up, with a crew cut and the kind of wide-shouldered, swaggering walk tough guys develop. It should have been comical but there was undeniably something intimidating about him. Jake and I both stood up, since the situation seemed to call for it. Pat ignored us. He had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder and he went right to the desk and dropped it. It landed heavily.

Mark said, ‘You got them.’

‘Check it,’ Pat said, and unzipped the bag.

There were black vests inside. They were puffy and heavy and when Pat pulled one out I realized it was a bullet-proof vest like cops wear. Mark held it up to his chest, checking the size, then undid the Velcro and strapped it on, over his sport coat.

‘Yeah, motherfucker,’ he said, and thumped his chest.

‘You’re invincible.’

They played around with the vests a while longer, and I got the sense that this was largely, or partly, for our benefit: they were showing off their toys. Then Pat deigned to notice us. Or notice Jake. He came over to the crokinole table and stood in front of him.

‘We ready to roll on this, Jake?’ he asked.

‘We’re rolling like dough,’ Jake said.

Mark patted Jake’s back. ‘Jake’s got full run of the place.’

The four of us sat down and Pat didn’t mess around with preamble. He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a white envelope and placed that on the table, beside the crokinole board.

‘There might be a key in that envelope. If there is, it might fit a vehicle that will be parked in a particular location tomorrow night.’

‘What kind of vehicle?’ Jake asked.

‘I don’t know. I don’t even know what’s in that envelope – get me? But whatever it is, it’ll be what you need. Once it’s there, ready to be picked up, you’ll get a call on this.’

He slid a cellphone across the board. It spun and came to a stop near us: a black clamshell Nokia. Jake took the phone and envelope and tucked them in his jacket pocket.

‘You drive it over,’ Pat said, ‘and when you get there, and everything’s a go, you give us a call just to let us know. We’ll make sure the next phase is in place.’

At that point, I assumed it was money. Or dope. That was what I’d been expecting all along: some kind of drug run or delivery with us acting as mules or couriers or whatnot.

Pat asked, ‘You sure you can gain access?’

‘I got clearance.’

‘If you screw any of it up, you’re fucked, and we don’t know you. You take the fall. That’s how it works. Can you handle that?’

‘We can handle it.’

Pat looked at me. I’d been frowning, trying to follow it all, but when he looked at me I smiled instead. I smiled in what must have been a weird and extremely unconvincing way.

He said, ‘Your brother doesn’t seem so sure.’

I said, ‘It all sounds pretty vague.’

‘That’s called being smart. That’s called deniability.’

‘Deniability,’ his brother repeated, and giggled. He was still wearing his vest.

‘We can handle it,’ Jake said.

‘Good. Maria said you’d get it done. She said you were reliable.’

‘Maria?’ I asked.

I couldn’t help it. It just popped out. They all looked at me, expectantly.

‘Like Maria O’Connell?’

‘That’s her,’ Mark said. ‘That a problem, Relic?’

‘I just didn’t know she was involved.’

Pat jerked a thumb at me, and asked Jake, ‘He gonna be all right?’

‘He’s fine.’

Mark was giggling again. He started telling a confusing anecdote, the overall point of which seemed to be that Maria had set fire to his brother’s Hummer, after an argument.

‘She was always a firebrand,’ Jake said.

‘She’s turning into a goddamn liability,’ Pat said to him. ‘You’re gonna see her and her brat down there. Do me a favour and make sure she’s not too strung out, will you?’

‘I’ll look after her.’

There was an edge to how Jake said it. Pat didn’t miss that. He jerked his chin.

‘You two used to have a thing, didn’t you?’

‘Years ago.’

‘You’re lucky the bitch dropped you.’

The door opened and that guy, Novak, came back in. He’d brought the cake and four plates. He laid the cake in the centre of the board and from his pocket slid out a slim blade, a stiletto, which he used to slice four pieces, getting the sizes exactly the same. With the flat of the knife he lifted each piece onto a plate, then went to take up his position by the door again.

‘Our mom makes the best fucking cake,’ Mark said. ‘Try this shit.’

Pat took his piece and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth. I ate mine more slowly, pretending to really appreciate it. I have to admit: it was good cake – lemon and poppy seed.

‘Golden,’ Jake said.

Pat grunted. Then his phone buzzed, and he checked the screen.

‘I got shit on,’ he said. ‘We good here?’

‘What about our money?’ Jake asked.

‘You’ll get your money on delivery.’

‘And then Jake’s square with you, right?’ I said.

Pat held out his hand, palm up, as if to say, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?’ and they all laughed. When the laughter settled, Pat reached over and thumbed a crumb off his plate.

‘Sure,’ he said, popping it in his mouth, ‘and then Jake’s square with us.’

Chapter Nine

Once we had left the Delaneys’ and were alone in Jake’s truck, cruising back along the Upper Levels towards the bridge, I didn’t say a damned thing. Not at first. I sat with my arms crossed and stared out my window at the concrete barricade that divided the highway from the houses and yards and normal lives that lay on the other side. I was trying to demonstrate my rage and general ire at the mess my brother had once again gotten himself into, and me along with him. In addition, I was trying to work out the whole thing in my head, but didn’t have much success. A lot of what I’d heard in there hadn’t made any kind of sense. But one thing had stood out.

‘Maria,’ I said. ‘Your Maria.’

‘She ain’t mine any more.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me she was part of this?’

‘She isn’t, really.’

‘That’s not what it sounded like.’

‘She’s with him now. Big slick.’

‘When did that happen?’

‘Few years back. You know Maria. She’s got her needs.’

When it all went haywire after Sandy’s death, he and Maria had both gotten into a lot of different shit. Jake went clean, eventually, but Maria didn’t. And apparently still hadn’t.

‘I knew she was rolling with some shitty people,’ I said. ‘But that boner?’

He flicked his cigarette out the window. ‘Why do you care, anyway?’

‘I care because you told me this was about you paying your debts.’

‘It is.’

‘Now it turns out Maria’s involved, and brought you into it, and that we happen to be working for her boyfriend, who’s a total fucking Carlito. Don’t tell me that’s a coincidence.’

‘Of course it’s not, you turnip. You heard him: she suggested me.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘Maybe because she knows I need a chance to pay them back.’

‘Or maybe because her boyfriend needed a patsy, and she knew you’d do it.’

We were on that section of the Cut with a wide shoulder. I told Jake to pull over and, after a second’s hesitation, he swung in and shoved the stick into park and killed the engine. The rain spattering the roof and hood seemed to crescendo, like the roar of applause, or laughter.

I said, ‘Are we doing this for her or for you?’

‘It’s not that simple, man.’

‘It’s simple enough.’

‘It’s not like it was all laid out. It’s not like they called me up and said, “If you don’t do this you’re dead.” She recommended me and they asked me and I said yes because these are not people you say no to, and because I owe them, okay?’ He paused, and shifted in his seat, as if he’d sat on a pinecone or prickly pear. ‘And I owe her, too.’

‘You don’t owe her anything.’

‘You weren’t even here.’

‘Weren’t here when?’

‘When do you think? Some brother.’

I couldn’t talk to him like that, all twisted sideways in the cab. So I got out. I got out and he got out and we started shouting at each other across the hood of the truck in the rain. I pointed at him and demanded he take it back, but he said it was the truth and that at the time I hadn’t been much of a brother, and I told him that was a cheap and low-down thing to say.

He said, ‘Sandy dies and you skulk off like a total shrew, and go tree planting for God’s sake. You were up there for like three months, having your little blue-collar bonanza. What the hell do you think was happening back here, aside from Ma having a stroke?’

‘I know what was happening. You and Maria were playing Sid and Nancy.’

‘Fuck you we were. We were looking after Ma, getting her treatment.’

‘That sure worked. Did you inject heroin directly into her brain?’

Then something shifted in his face and I understood we were going to fight, right there at the side of the highway. And it came as a relief, that realization. It was inevitable and probably had been since he’d first arrived at the boatyard.

Jake walked around the truck and started trotting towards me and I stepped into him and we sort of crashed together like that, like a couple of rams or bucks, both of us hard-headed and bone-stubborn, and both of us just as dense and senseless as the other.

I know exactly what my brother will do in a fight and he knows the same about me. He has a penchant for chokeholds and grappling and I prefer to punch him repeatedly in the ribs and torso. We rarely hit each other in the face unless we’re drunk or insane with rage, which sometimes happens – so perhaps by rarely I mean less often than not. He tends to get my head under his arm and squeeze down so my chin touches my chest and my windpipe gets cut off, and now the tendons at the back of my neck click repeatedly from having suffered this technique so often. But I also know how to wriggle out of it, just as he knows to cover his sides with his elbows to avoid the body-blows with which I aim to hammer him. It’s worth noting that my punches are much less effective than before the accident with my hand but in truth even before that I wasn’t much of a puncher. My hands are too small.

This makes our fights strangely futile. Neither of us can get the advantage because neither of us really wants to win. What we want, I suppose, is to annihilate the other and at the same time absorb or become him. We’re like conjoined twins, frustrated at being yoked together, grasping and punching and flailing both at our brother-double, and ourselves.

We scuffled like that for several minutes, flopping about in the wet gravel, caught in the glare of headlights as cars swept past. Some of the drivers honked (either disapprovingly or enthusiastically) and others slowed down to heckle us or just rubber-neck and have a look. Eventually one of the cars pulled over and an old-timer got out. By then we were spent and gasping and lying on the shoulder of the road like a couple of wounded raccoons.

‘Cops are on the way,’ he said, tipping back his cap. ‘You two better move along.’

‘You called the cops?’ Jake said.

‘My wife did.’

‘Damn.’

Jake picked himself up and sort of brushed his jeans off extravagantly. I sat there for a moment longer, still panting. I’d skinned the knuckles of my good hand on the asphalt and they were bleeding and Jake’s face was bleeding too. He held out an open palm to me, and after staring bitterly at it for a moment I took it. He tried to haul me to my feet, but I was too heavy, or he was too weary, and so instead I ended up pulling him back down beside me.

Jake wanted to buy me a drink to make up, but no bar would let us in looking like that so we took his Black Velvet up to the roof of the Woodland, where we sat on a vent in the cold and gazed over the alley to the inlet. The darkly shimmering water reflected back a broken version of our city, and we stared at that and drank miserably from his little teacups and nursed our wounds and didn’t speak. I must have smacked my head during the fight because my skull seemed to be buzzing, irksomely, as if there was a small insect inside it.

It was true what Jake had said, about me sneaking off after Sandy’s death. I signed on with a tree planting company based out of Quesnel and bought a Greyhound bus ticket for sixty-eight dollars and change and that was enough to leave behind what remained of my family. In the mornings we were assigned plots and given sacks of yearlings – baby trees – and I would take my sack and go to my plot and stab my shovel into the ground and make a hole with the shovel and put a yearling in the hole. Then I did that again, and again and again. And at the end of the day I would have blistered hands and a face swollen with bug bites and the arch of my right foot would ache from stomping the shovel. It tired me out enough to sleep and then morning would come and it would start again. All the days merged into one, or maybe the same day enacted repeatedly. A kind of penance. It was what I had needed, but when I came back things had changed, and my brother had changed, too.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ I said.

‘I started it.’

‘I mean for bailing like that.’

He leaned back and blew a slow whistle of smoke upwards, like a steam train.

‘I appreciate that.’

‘But you got to be straight with me about this.’

‘Who says I’m not?’

I sipped my whisky, by habit sipping from the teacup as if the liquid was hot and might burn my tongue. ‘You should have told me Maria was involved.’

‘Her involvement doesn’t change things.’

‘Like hell. I know what she means to you.’

‘But not to you, right? She’s just my crummy ex – some troublesome chick.’

‘Hell, Jake.’ I stared at my hands. They were all grimy and cut up from scrapping in the dirt with him. ‘You know that ain’t true. I cared for her, too. She was like family to me.’

‘And to Sandy.’

‘But she drifted away, man. That junk meant more to her than us, in the end.’

‘The end hasn’t happened yet.’

He stood up and went to peer down at the alley. The wind caught his bandana and blew it sideways and he seemed to sway with the motion. I had this terrible image in my head of him leaning forward, letting himself go over the edge. A long fall into the dark.

‘What else haven’t you told me?’ I said.

‘What else is there?’

‘What the hell we’re stealing, for one thing.’

He tipped back his teacup, draining it. When he finished he backed away from the ledge, took a few running steps, and threw the cup in a long lobbing arc, over the roof of the next building. A few seconds later I heard the distant shatter-pop, delicate and irreparable.

‘A horse,’ he said. ‘We’re going to steal a racehorse from Castle Meadow.’

I didn’t even answer. I couldn’t. I just lay back on the roof and stared at the stars. The concrete was hard and cold beneath me and those stars looked impossibly far away.

Chapter Ten

The next morning Jake announced we were going to see her, this horse we were meant to steal. I’d already told him that I didn’t want any part of it but no doubt he’d expected this kind of resistance: it was why he’d held off telling me for so long. So he cooked me a fried egg on his hotplate – just an egg, no toast or bun or anything – and convinced me to at least come out to the stables with him, as if that would somehow bring me around to the scheme. I also had a brutal hangover, and when I went to take a shower I stumbled across an old lady in a housecoat smoking crack in the bathroom on Jake’s floor. When I walked in she smiled at me, bashfully, and offered me a toke. Overall it was a terrible way to start the day.

We took Jake’s Mustang to Castle Meadow. During the drive Jake assured me he’d ‘scoped out’ the situation (he was already talking like that) and claimed it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Security at the stables was minimal, he said. A night watchman, a couple of CCTV cameras – that was all. It wasn’t like at the racetrack, where they were paranoid about people tampering with the animals. At Castle Meadow they didn’t worry about horses getting stolen because it just wasn’t something anybody had ever done.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and there’s a reason for that.’

When we arrived, we wheeled past the clubhouse – where we’d had a drink the other night – and parked closer to the stables. They were long clapboard structures with corrugated tin roofing. Nothing fancy.

‘This isn’t going to change anything,’ I said.

‘Just come check it out.’

He whistled idly through his gap tooth as we crossed the yard. We entered the stables through a garage door, big enough for vehicle access, and walked along a concrete alley between the stalls where they kept the horses. The air smelled of manure, hay, and animals. At that time – mid-morning – a lot seemed to be going on. We passed stable hands mucking out the stalls, and grooms measuring scoops of feed, and riders saddling up their horses. A few of the riders looked small enough to be professional jockeys, although they weren’t dressed in their full get-up like you see at the track. Some of the workers nodded at Jake, but for the most part we were ignored.

Jake stopped at a stall, with a tin nameplate nailed next to it: Shenzao. It was empty.

‘She must be out for a run,’ he said.

He took me through another door that opened onto the training grounds. I hadn’t been able to see much the night we came out. The main enclosure was about the size of a lacrosse box, the turf mucky from recent rain and cratered with the impressions of horseshoes. At the far end a set of bleachers rose up, but the seats were empty. A few spectators sat at tables on the clubhouse patio, and others leaned up against the perimeter fence, observing the grounds. A dozen horses were prancing around out there, doing laps or jumping over obstacles. Their hoofbeats thudded dully across the big space. As we watched, one barrelled towards us: a big dappled grey. It snorted and steamed as it ran, bearing down on us before peeling away along the fence-line, kicking up clumps of turf in its wake.

‘How do you like that?’ Jake said.

‘That’s the horse?’

‘No. I don’t see her yet.’

We leaned against the wooden rail. The morning was misty and dreary. I stared sullenly into the middle distance, across that pit of mud, and tried to find a way to say it.

‘I’m out, man,’ I said. ‘I can’t do this.’

‘This isn’t the kind of thing you back out of, brother.’

‘You didn’t tell me what we were doing.’

‘Sure I did. Pick-up and delivery.’

‘I thought it would be drugs or money or stolen goods. Not a horse.’

‘Would you keep it down?’

About twenty yards away, an elderly woman – tiny and grey-haired, possibly Asian – was watching the horses through a set of opera binoculars. At her side stood a man in a grey overcoat and dark sunglasses, even though the sun wasn’t out. They made for an odd pair.

‘They can’t hear us,’ I said.

Jake got out his crumpled pack of Du Mauriers and tapped one free. Lighting it, he blew a plume of smoke into the morning cold, and nodded slowly, as if in understanding.

‘I get it,’ he said. ‘You’ve got cold feet.’

‘I’ve got cold everything. It’s madness, man.’

‘It’ll feel a lot better once we’re dancing.’

It was something Sandy used to say to us, as a joke, when one of us – usually Jake – had gotten into trouble or screwed something up. But it was a cheap trick to use under these circumstances, and I just shook my head.

‘I’ll come see Ma with you,’ I told him. ‘Then you’re on your own.’