The Fortunate Brother (7 page)

“Nothing's perfect, Kyle. What would we sing about?”

“Pissin' in the rain?”

“Pissing's good.”

“Let's hear a song, then.”

She shook her head. “Not tonight. Go on home now. Might want to check on your father—drinking and driving. Saw the cops out earlier.”

“Father? You seen Father tonight?”

She stopped strumming and gripped the neck of her guitar as though it were an irksome pet, laying it aside.

“Kate, you seen Father tonight?”

“Yes. Earlier.”

“He was here? He was here, Kate?
Sonofabitch!
” He stumbled to his feet.
Sonofabitch, sonofabitch, he left her alone. When she was so needing someone with her.
Holding on to his ribs, he staggered across the gravel flat and turned down the black stretch of Wharf Road, cursing. Water suckled over the beach rocks to his left and suckled down the black cliff wall to his right. It suckled from his eyes and through his nose and his mouth and he felt like he was being corroded by water and he wiped at his eyes and his face, trying to make it all stop before he dribbled into bits by the roadside.

He got to the wharf and softened his step. No need to wake her. He crept to the door and stumbled. Christ! Felt like he was getting drunker. He reached for the doorknob, but then noted a sliver of light coming through the drawn curtains and peered in. Bonnie Gillard. Sitting at the table with his mother. Their heads were bent towards each other like two crooks in a crowd exchanging secrets. He couldn't see his mother's face, but he could see Bonnie's. She was bawling. He pressed closer to the window. His mother took Bonnie by the shoulders and gently shook her.

He looked around but there was no sight of Bonnie's car. Then he remembered. His hand instinctively went to her keys in his jeans pocket. She'd tried to off herself, that's what. And was now bawling to his mother about it.

He staggered sideways, near fell. Clutched onto the windowsill to hold himself steady. Good. Good then, his mother wasn't alone.

He stumbled to the side of the house and slumped down against it. Good. He didn't have to go sit with her. He couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear another thing. His mouth was parched; he wanted water. He turned his head and pressed his throbbing jaw against the cool of the clapboard. Fucking Clar Gillard. He slid sideways and was half sitting, half lying, keeping his ribs from
touching the wharf. To hell with it. He let himself fall to the wooden planks and near cried from the pain and then stared up at the fogged-in night, wishing for stars.

He shifted for comfort. He groaned, his ribs aching. He was shivering. What the fuck. He opened his eyes. Had he slept?

He tried to sit up. A dog was barking and snarling, its nails scrunching through beach rocks. He leaned sideways to see through the dark and felt himself falling, falling over the wharf, and as he clung onto the grump he stared in astonishment at a dolphin's head flickering white out of the water. The dog—Clar's dog—danced on the water's edge, snapping and snarling, and then plunged into the water towards the dolphin.
Get back, get back,
Kyle yelled and the dolphin threw back its head and made its
tic-tic-tic
-ing laugh. It sank back into the sea and now Kate was looking down at him,
tic-tic-ticing
with a steel slide on her guitar, and she was crying, her tears dripping thick and bloodied onto his hands. He cried out, scrubbing his hands clean on the rough, splintered planks of the wharf, but her tears kept bleeding down her face and the night behind her morphed into a blacker shadow of itself, threatening to engulf her. He tried to say her name but it warbled in his throat and the dog's barking grew mad, frenzied, its nails cold, hard, gritted with sand as it scampered over his hands.
Ee-asy boy, ee-asy
…

A cold ashy dawn shouldered him awake. His body hurt and he was shivering uncontrollably. His bloodied hand rested beneath his cheek. He raised his head and pain cut a sickening streak through his skull. He lifted a hand to his jaw, flicked his tongue around his teeth—they were all there. He ran his tongue over lips
that were crusted with dried blood and tasted like stale water in a rusted rain barrel. Clar must've busted his mouth.

He tried to sit up and moaned. His ribs! Like shards of bone jabbing through flesh. He fought his way from beneath the bulky weight of a tarp. What the fuck—where did that come from? He pushed himself onto his arse and was jolted fully awake by his father's hulking frame leaning against the side of the house, staring down at him.

“What, you tucking me in, now?”

“Your mother's up. Time to go in.”

Time to go in.
Right, you old fucker, why didn't you stay with her last night, he wanted to yell, but couldn't. His father's stubbled face needed shaving and his scruffy hair told he hadn't been to bed yet, either. And the legs of his jeans: stiff, wrinkled, and damp-looking. Pissed himself agin.

He looked away. Never could bear the shame in his father's eyes after a night's boozing. Those times his father did catch him looking only added to his shame.

He tried to stand, his legs too palsied. He grasped onto the side of the house and rose and got the spins so bad he near fell over the wharf. The dog. Clar's dog. On the beach and staring up at him and whinnying like a sick horse.
Fuck's wrong with you.

Addie rose from her chair by the table as they entered. “What happened to your face? And your hand?” she asked Kyle.

“Fell down.” He gestured to the back of the house. “Coming down the path. Tree roots everywhere. Think I drove a tooth through my jaw. We should clean up that path—break a leg some night, coming down there.”

She listened as he rambled. Sylvanus pulled off his boots, the smell of damp wool rising from them. He took off his coat and Kyle removed his, and they stood before her like naughty boys
caught sneaking home after a night's shenanigans. Her face was pale, her hands, the skin on her throat—all pale, whitish, ethereal in the greyish light, as though she were already leaving them, fading beneath the folds of her clothes.

“I'm telling you this, Sylvanus Now,” she said, her voice low yet fervent, “and you hear me good. If not for you drinking yourself to death and taking Kyle with you, I'd take no treatments. Rather live out my days with hair on my head and my eyes open than traipse about like the living dead on drugs. That's the only reason I'll take this treatment—to keep another of my boys from an early grave. But I won't fight it alone. If you takes another drink, I'll stop the treatment.”

“Now, Addie.”

“Don't now Addie me. I'm doing this for you and Kyle and I wants something in return, I wants you off the booze, the both of ye. Do you promise me that?”

She was speaking to them both but it was Sylvanus she was staring at. Waiting. For him to lift his eyes, show himself. His shame.

Kyle tore past them and locked himself in the washroom. He twisted on the shower and stripped off his clothes. He stood in the hot steam and scrubbed his skin, scrubbing it clean, scrubbing it hard, trying to scrub out that knotted lump of upset inside his belly that couldn't be touched, couldn't be assuaged no matter how hard he scrubbed. Water. It could forge trenches through stone. It could wear skin to bone. But it couldn't so much as fray that knot of nothing in his stomach.

H
is father was sitting at the table by the window, drinking coffee, when he came out of the shower. Addie was laying a plate of beans and runny egg yolks before him and Kyle's stomach curdled and he lunged for the door. Holding on to the grump, he spewed into the water, his ribs spearing through his side like knives. He looked up, seeing two men in a boat paddling offshore from the outcropping of rock and cliff that blocked his view of Hampden. Hooker's father, Bill, and his grandfather. They were standing now, tensed, looking ashore towards the rock face. Their voices grew louder, alarmed. Bill grabbed the oars and, still standing, rowed furiously towards the cliff, vanishing behind the outcropping.

Kyle heard his mother coming to the door, calling him, but he eased himself down over the wharf onto the beach and trekked across the shoreline towards the outcropping. As much to escape her attentions as to satisfy his curiosity.

During high tide the only way around the outcropping was by boat. This morning the tide was out. He climbed across wet rock made more slippery by tide-abandoned kelp. He'd been climbing around here since he was a kid, shortcutting it to Hampden. The
front of the outcropping spanned a few hundred feet of rugged rock face, a small inlet forged into its centre. Hooker's grandfather was holding the boat steady near a clutch of rocks before the inlet. Bill was out of the boat and hunched over, looking down at something amongst the rocks, his face scrunched up as though tasting something nasty. Straddling the rocks opposite Bill was Clar's dog, whining and pawing at the head of a large pool of water left over by the tide. Something greenish was floating in it.

“What's going on?” called Kyle. No one looked at him. He came closer and then went down on one knee, his breath sticking in his throat. Clar Gillard. Half submerged. Flat on his back, arms and legs strewn out as though he were basking in sun-warmed waters. Blue jeans suctioned like skin to his legs. Greeny brown seaweed shifting with the water over his chest and bobbing around a face that was grey and frozen like clay on a winter's morning. His mouth was stretched open, his eyes wide and emptied. Clar Gillard did not look pretty in death.

“Teeth marks on his shoulder,” said Bill. “Looks like the dog dragged him ashore.”

“His truck's over on the wharf,” said the old man. “Was there all night.”

“He must've fallen overboard,” said Bill. “Drunk, I suppose.”

“Don't think he could swim,” said the old man. They both looked to Kyle as if he might know.

“He ain't never gonna learn now,” said Kyle. A wavelet lapped at Clar's face and trickled into his opened mouth. The dog whined and Kyle closed his eyes, dizzy. He held on to the cliff and got up.

“You'll call the cops?” he said without looking at Bill. He stumbled back around the outcropping and lurched across the beach, cursing the fucking tequila and whisky from the night before. Bad mix, fucking bad mix. He climbed gingerly onto the wharf and
crouched by the grump, legs trembling. Sylvanus came out of the house, buttoning his coat and hauling on a toque. Addie behind him.

“Clar Gillard's drowned. Caught on the rocks around shore.”

“Caught where?” asked Sylvanus.

“Around the cliff face.”

They both looked towards the cliff. Their faces were blank. As if he'd just told them about a piece of driftwood he'd found over there.

“He's dead,” Kyle repeated. “His truck is parked on Hampden Wharf.”

“Fell over?” asked Sylvanus.

“Don't know.”

“Probably drunk,” said Addie. “Hope they buries him outside the fence. Kyle, you'll have to drive me to the hospital tomorrow morning; Bonnie's car is in the garage. And—from what you just said—I expect she'll be wanting her privacy.”

The garage. He remembered the car keys in his pants pocket. The car sunk to its rims in mud. “When did she tell you that now, her car's in the garage?”

“Yesterday afternoon. When I last talked to her.”

“When you
last
talked to her?”

“Yes. Yesterday afternoon.”

Her words, uttered with such conviction, silenced him. She turned and went inside and he went after her, but she hurried into the washroom, closing the door, as though she knew he had questions. He got Bonnie's keys out of the dirty jeans he'd left lying on his bedroom floor and then stood outside the bathroom door.

“Mom?”

She didn't answer. His father tooted the horn, anxious to get to the site, thought Kyle, to get away from everything. From her. He looked at the closed bathroom door again and went outside. Climbing in beside his father, he clicked his tongue
disagreeably as Sylvanus rummaged around beneath the seat, pulling out a flask of whisky.

“She got through to you, hey,” said Kyle. “I'll not bloody cover for you and she'll keep her word. You can bet on that one.”

“Drive,” said Sylvanus, pointing a gnarled finger towards the windshield.

Kyle turned the ignition key and gunned the motor, seeing in the rearview his mother peering from the doorway. She was looking towards the cliff beyond which Clar Gillard lay drowned. The key to Bonnie's car dug into his leg from inside his pocket. His mother looked to the truck, near wringing her hands. He saw the worry on her face. Felt his father's growing impatience sitting there beside him, gripping that flask of whisky. He pulled the keys from his pocket and saw his mother's hand go to her heart, his father's finger jabbing at the windshield, ordering him to drive, and he felt the desperation of a landlubber on a sinking ship, trying to figure which of them was his captain.

He swore, let go of the keys, and stomped on the gas, speeding down the road.

“Well, what the hell happened to Clar, do you think?” he demanded of his father. “Fell over the wharf, drunk? What're you doing?”

Sylvanus was raising the whisky bottle with both hands like a priest wielding a cross to ward off evil. The bottle was still capped, the seal unbroken. Kyle braked. “What're you doing?” His father's shaggy dark eyes blistered with tears. Winding down his side window, Sylvanus flung the bottle into the sea with the same vigour Clar Gillard had hove the log for his dog to fetch just the day before. He screwed the window back up and jabbed his finger towards the windshield again.

Jaysus.

Kyle drove them up the road. His father's face was closed, too closed to speak, too closed to be spoken to. Kyle looked towards Kate's, and saw that her car wasn't there. He looked past it and down to the end of the gravel flat and the bed of alders beyond which Bonnie Gillard's car was sunk to her arse in mud. He swerved off Wharf Road onto Bottom Hill and then, partway up, he braked. That weird scream. The one he'd heard last night after rolling into the ditch. Bejesus if that wouldn't be Clar Gillard…

“Fucking nerves are shot,” he said to his father's startled look. Releasing the brake, he drove on.

In Hampden they passed by Bonnie Gillard's weather-wearied hutch where she lived with her sister. No lights on in there. Nor were curtains drawn. Perhaps they'd never had any—too strapped buying bingo cards, thought Kyle.

“Watch it!” Sylvanus grabbed the dash as Kyle swerved the truck, scarcely missing old Dobey Randall with the hitched-up pants and light-glazed glasses.

“Trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Shouldn't be on the road,” Kyle muttered, catching the old-timer's bewildered look in his side mirror.

“Perhaps you shouldn't be,” said Sylvanus.

“Fucking thorny this morning or what?”

“That's it now.”

“That's it now, what? Going to be an arse the coming days? Just what she needs.”

“Drive.”

“Right.”

He hauled a right at the bottom of Hampden Hill, glancing at Clar's truck parked on the wharf. Lyman and Wade appeared ahead of them on the road just before the Rooms, walking hard into a growing breeze, their windbreakers billowing off from their backs.

Kyle rolled down the window. “Where's your car?” he hollered.

“Broke down!” Lyman hollered back. They climbed into the dump, the truck still moving. “You hear about Clar?”

Kyle nodded and looked to the sky, wondering how the hell bad news travelled on the wind and good news waited for its turn at the supper table. The clouds were clearing, ponds of blue pouring light onto the greyish face of the sea and the dark stubble on his father's chin. He rubbed his own chin, hands too shaky to shave that morning. Chris's face, smooth as their mother's, passed before him. It was the one thing he had over Chris—whiskers. Might've started looking older than Chris had there been time. Soon he
would
be older than Chris ever was. He gunned past the cemetery where Chris lay beneath his sodden blanket and wished to Christ he could gun as easily through his own rutted thoughts of gloom and lament.

At the job site Sylvanus was out of the truck and heading across the lot, Wade and Lyman behind him, yammering about their father coming home drunk the night before and their mother driving him down to the basement to sleep with the horse.

“The horse? He got his horse in his basement?” asked Kyle.

“Kept it there all winter,” said Lyman. “Mother didn't like that either—he cuttin' a hole through the porch floor to throw food down to him, hey, Wade?”

Kyle stared at the young fellow as though waiting for the last line of a bad joke.

“He got him took out now,” said Wade. “Put to pasture on the road.”

“Ye going to stand there all day?” Sylvanus called, and Kyle tossed Wade the keys to the truck.

“Go up to Fox Point. Get more beach sand.” He went over to where his father was kneeling beside the corner footing. “Did you hear what they just said—about Uncle Jake having a horse in his basement?”

“Had a crow in his bed last year—ask your Aunt Elsie. Get the spades. We digs her down another foot.”

Kyle got the spades and started trenching away from his father at the southwest corner. The good stiff ground was easy to shovel and solid for building. The sun crept through cloud, filtering warmth on the back of his neck. He eased out rocks with the tip of his spade and smoothed over the holes and bent and measured the trenches, keeping them the same height. The wind brushed at his face and the sea washed over the shore and washed over his thoughts and the only time he felt content was when he was measuring, sawing, and hammering. He glanced at his father, who was kneeling by the trench and examining its depths and needing no ruler or marker to show him the dimensions. He was proud of his father's precision and irritated by the rumble of the truck returning and their work interrupted.

“Clar Gillard got knifed,” Wade was blathering before the truck door was shut behind him. “In the guts.”

Kyle let go of his shovel and Sylvanus rose as the brothers hurried towards them across the site.

“Murdered,” said Lyman.

“Right in his guts,” said Wade.

“Yup, murdered.”

“Bled out, not a stain in him.”

Sylvanus went back to his digging.

“Is the cops out?” asked Kyle.

“All over the place,” said Lyman. “And they're coming down now to talk to you, Kyle. Right, Wade?”

“Right. They heard about your fight last night. With Clar.”

Sylvanus stood back up.

“Is that what they're calling it. Fucker sucker-punched me,” said Kyle.

“Fred Snow seen it. He was in the can. By the time he got his belt done up, you were gone,” said Wade.

“Must've took time to fix his hair, did he?” said Kyle. “Never seen nothing till Clar's fist crunched my jaw,” he said to Sylvanus. “Woke up in the ditch across from the club.”

“Fred told a couple fellows,” said Lyman.

“But you was nowhere to be seen when they went out looking,” said Wade.

“And the cops were down to Bonnie Gillard's place this morning.”