No Good Brother. Tyler Keevil

of one of Sandy’s dancer friends and all the people there were either dancers or choreographers or artistic types of one sort or another, aside from me and Jake and Maria, who he was still with at the time, and who has her own part in this story.

      Jake and I were working the bar, mixing cocktails and pouring drinks and generally acting like jackasses. It was magical and heavenly to be surrounded by, and serving, all of these lean-limbed, long-necked women with perfect posture, who seemed to float from room to room and every so often stopped to order from us and teasingly flirt with us because we were Sandy’s little brothers and in that way were little brothers to them all.

      At one point Sandy and Maria came up together, and Maria ordered them both a Bloody Mary. This was a unique opportunity because Sandy hardly ever drank, due to the demands of being a dancer, and even when she did it was seemingly impossible to get her drunk. Our sister was always focused, severe, in complete control – both of herself and us. She was the only one who could keep Jake reined in, seeing as our old man was no longer around, and our ma, well, she’d had it tough for a while. And since Sandy took care of all of us, she never relented in what I would call her vigilance.

      That night we made a good go of it. Jake mixed the Bloody Marys and dumped a good splash of vodka in both. He served them the real way – over ice, with salt around the rims – and Maria scooped hers up and raised it high to toast and passed on what some local hotshot choreographer had just told her: he’d said that Sandy getting in with the Compagnie Cléo de Mérode was the same as if she’d won the gold medal of modern dance.

      ‘Gold medal winner,’ Maria repeated.

      ‘Solid gold sister,’ Jake said, and kissed her on the cheek.

      Sandy laughed it off, but the phrase stuck with me, and the memory of the night. Sandy had two more Bloody Marys and sat Jake and I down, very solemnly, and laid out her plans for moving the whole family to Europe so we could stay together. Jake could make his music and I’d apprentice to be a carpenter and Ma would sit on our balcony and have coffee and croissants every morning. Maria claimed she wanted to come too and Sandy said that was fine, but she – Maria – would have to marry Jake and when they had kids Sandy would be the godmother. Then once Sandy hit thirty she would retire and marry a French plumber and start a family of her own and we would all move back home and buy an acreage in the Okanagan, and I could build houses for each of us and her husband would fit the plumbing and together we would set up polytunnels and vegetable fields and start our own farm.

      She had all these plans, crazy but brilliant enough to believe in. At the time, we had an unquestioning faith that Sandy could shape our future through her force of will, and even now it doesn’t seem to me as if that faith was naïve.

      Later in the night, when Jake and I had abandoned our posts at the bar, we built this makeshift sedan out of broomsticks and a kitchen chair. We put Sandy in that and hoisted her up on our shoulders and carried her around the party, with Maria clearing the way in front of us. When we passed everybody cheered and applauded, and Sandy played her part perfectly: sitting upright, looking stern and commanding as Cleopatra, our golden queen and champion.

       Chapter Three

      Jake had his truck at the Firehall but he was too far gone to drive (he was very particular about that, on account of what happened) and instead we took a cab down Granville and west on Marine Drive towards the Southlands area. There are some huge spreads out that way: big rancher-style houses with sprawling yards, which might have been smallholdings or farmsteads back in the old days. We cruised past those and I had no idea what we were doing, or why, but something in me – my brotherly pride, I suppose – refused to pester him about it.

      Jake told the cabbie to drop us at a place called Castle Meadow Stables and Country Club. The sign out front was small and discreet: just a brass plaque mounted on a gateway beside a curving drive. We walked up the drive in the dark, crunching gravel beneath our bootheels. At the end of the drive was a parking lot, and the clubhouse. Over to the left were the stables, still and quiet at this time, and beyond them a field or paddock or what have you.

      As we approached the front doors, I finally gave in and asked, ‘You going to tell me what we’re doing way the hell out here?’

      ‘Just getting a drink,’ Jake said, and pushed through the doors.

      They opened into a foyer, leading on to the clubhouse and bar: a big room with low ceilings and hardwood floors. The walls were lined with wainscot panelling, and above the wainscot hung black-and-white pictures of old racehorses, presumably famous ones. The place felt like an old-time golf club, crossed with a western-style saloon. In one corner a cluster of video poker machines bleeped forlornly.

      It was getting on near ten o’clock and the only other customers were a bunch of good old boys wearing plaid shirts and cowboy boots and, sitting a little apart, two younger guys in suits. At the bar Jake ordered us two more Molsons and two shots of Crown and asked the bartender to put it on his tab. The woman smiled at him and punched it into her screen, and I figured this was partly why we’d come out here – just for me to witness Jake order on a tab.

      We sat down and knocked back our shots, which were tasting better and better. After being dry for so long it was going to my head and I felt very tender towards my little brother.

      I said, ‘How’d you get membership in a place like this?’

      ‘I ain’t a member.’

      ‘How’d you get a tab, then?’

      ‘This is where I work.’

      ‘I thought you had a cleaning job.’

      ‘I do – cleaning stables.’

      It took me some time to get my head around the notion of Jake cleaning stables, or being associated with that realm in any way. It just seemed so peculiar. But then, no more peculiar than delivering brake parts or laying paving slabs or working on a seiner or any of the other jobs we’d both done over the years.

      ‘So you’re like a stable boy?’ I asked.

      ‘Hell no. Stable boys actually look after the horses. They groom them and feed them and dress their injuries and crap. I’m not even really supposed to go in the stalls. I just clean the alleyways between the stalls, hose down the drainage troughs, carry loads of horseshit out back to the bin. Make sure the stable boys and trainers have everything they need.’

      ‘How in the hell’d you land a job like that?’

      ‘Connections I made inside. A lot of the gangsters are into horses.’

      He nodded significantly at the two guys in suits. They were eating chicken wings and talking earnestly about something and didn’t appear drunk at all. If Jake hadn’t pointed them out I would have assumed they were businessmen.

      ‘What – they ride them?’ I said.

      ‘They ride them and breed them and race them. This is one of the places you can keep them, if you don’t have a ranch of your own. And I clean up their shit. Literally.’

      ‘I guess hard work is honest work,’ I said, ‘as Albert would say.’

      ‘Work sucks. But it’s something. And I get a tab.’

      ‘A tab you’ve got to pay.’

      ‘Not tonight I don’t.’

      He looked up at the TV above us. There were half a dozen spread around the room. The screens were all the same size – thirty inches or so – and they were all showing the same image: a long shot of a racetrack in some exotic location, where the skies were dreamily blue and where everybody wore white linen clothing and wide-brimmed hats and carried parasols. It made me think of Monte Carlo or Casablanca. Some place that we’d never see, anyway.

      ‘Mostly it’s a farce,’ Jake said. ‘Hardly any of their horses get into real races, let alone win.’