Tyler Keevil - No Good Brother

‘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.’

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 part 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.