LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘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.

      In reality she only made it ten blocks. At the Hastings and Clark intersection her car was hit broadside by a black Mercedes going a hundred and eight kilometres an hour. The whole front of her car was sheared away and the rest went spinning into the meridian. There is no doubt about any of this because it was not so late that there were no witnesses.

      At that point she was alive but unconscious.

      At eleven twenty-nine the emergency crew arrived. They examined the car and found that the driver’s footwell had collapsed inwards, crushing Sandy’s legs. The steering wheel was up against her sternum and most of her ribs were broken and her collar bone and breastplate and a lot of other bones, too. They had to use the jaws of life to cut her out. There was blood, of course. Her legs were mangled. They put a tourniquet on each, above the knee, and got her onto a stretcher and gave her blood and oxygen, and that was when she came to, waking into the nightmare of what remained of her life, and started to scream in pain and fear and shock.

      Jake and I squatted together on the kerb and stared at the spot where all that had happened. There was nothing to say about any of it and so we didn’t, but simply sat with our elbows on our knees, hands clasped in front of us like two men praying to a saint. I thought vaguely about whether Sandy’s blood had reached the pavement, mingling with the oil and coolant from the destroyed car. If that had happened it had long since been washed into the gutter and down the drain and out through the sewers to the sea. There was no trace here of the sister we’d once had and that fact was brutal and eternal and unalterable.

      Eventually Jake stood up and I did too. We crossed against the light and plodded on in a mute and morose daze. Jake was staying at the Woodland – this dive hotel further along Hastings – but instead of heading in that direction he walked with me towards the waterfront. Off to our right was the DP World shipping terminal, where industrial cranes loomed up like monstrous mechanical insects, soulless and indifferent. At Main Street we crossed over the railway tracks and circled back to the Westco plant parking lot. I could see the Western Lady in her berth, the windows dark.

      Jake held out his left hand and I took it, and we shook formally, like strangers.

      ‘I’ll be seeing you, Poncho.’

      ‘Just tell me what you’re up to.’

      ‘I’m up to no good – what else?’

      ‘Seriously.’

      He considered it, and said, ‘It’s better I don’t tell you if you’re not going to help.’

      ‘Do you need my help?’

      He put his hands in his coat pockets and kicked the ground. He looked at the water, and at the sky, and then he looked back at me. His features were softened by shadow and in that one moment it was as if he’d aged backwards, losing some of the edge and hardness that prison had given him. Back before Sandy’s death, and all that came after. Back before what Jake had done and what he had become. And when he spoke, it was in the voice of that boy.

      ‘You’re my brother,’ he said. ‘I’ve always needed your help.’

      He turned and walked away from me and then – maybe realizing that was a bit much, a bit too over the top – he flipped me the finger and called back: ‘Stay gold, Poncho.’

      ‘Nothing gold can stay.’

      I watched until he merged with the darkness and faded out of sight.

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