The Greyhound (3 page)

“That’s Stan, one of my more senior students,” Bob said, gesturing to a hulking teenager with a brown belt, who looked around eighteen or nineteen, working with a group of younger students. They were working through a series of basic judo moves. The walls behind the group were panelled with wood, arranged in a brickwork pattern of cubes and rectangles in what must have been considered artistically pleasing back when the building was constructed. Danny had been told the building had been here when his father was a kid, and he doubted it had changed much in the intervening half-century or so. It was like the architecture in the old library in Danny’s hometown, and recalling this detail made him a little sad. The other walls were built of solid blocks of concrete and painted with several coats of white and orange —the kind of paint that dried to a shiny, polished sheen, like the glazed icing on a cookie. There was Japanese lettering painted in black on one of the walls. “It says ‘Here we work’ in Japanese,” Sensei Bob explained. On a far wall, and positioned high up, about eight feet above the mat, was a black and white photograph of Jigoro Kano, the creator of judo. The final wall was glass, with several sliding doors. Light from outside filtered through the pine trees that lined an outdoor patio that was outfitted with a few round plastic tables and a picnic table that looked like it had been there for a hundred years. The natural light gave the dojo a feeling of being bigger than it was.

The
tatami
, the thick woven mats on which the students practised, were bright, colourful — several of them were arranged in a square in the centre of the dojo. Around these were evergreen-coloured mats, arranged like the tiles of a mosaic. Even before he entered the dojo, Danny could hear a distinctive
Shhhh-thump
,
shhhh-thump
of students tossing each other onto the mats, their bare feet sliding across the textured surface of the
tatami
before they threw — or were thrown by — their sparring partner.

“You have a good build for a
judo
,” Sensei Bob said, glancing at Danny’s shoulders. “Low centre of gravity.” He reached out to take hold of the heavy quilted sleeve of Danny’s
gi
. “Here, grab my
gi
.” Danny did as he was told. “Steady yourself. Yes, good grip. Try throwing me. Try the
osoto-gari
. Something basic.” Danny quickly moved one foot inside, into the space between Bob’s feet, sweeping it down by Bob’s ankle, turning and moving, tugging downwards on the sleeve of Bob’s gi. He could feel the fluidity of the motion, like water coursing over a dam. He moved into the space formerly occupied by Bob, shifting and easily tossing his new teacher onto the mat.
Shhh-thump
. Bob sprung up.

“Good, good. Your technique is not bad at all. A bit of work to do, yes, but you will do fine.”

DANNY PLANTS HIS GARDEN

The next day, Danny set to work planting the tomatoes, onions, green peppers, and cucumbers that would be the mainstay of his garden. He and Jack bought old railway ties to use as a frame for the garden, and Danny spent the day before turning and working the soil. He sweated for hours to get the soil to loosen up: it had a lot of clay in it, making it tough to turn. He added bags of manure to it, and Father Rivera brought over bushel baskets of topsoil. Behind the wheel of his navy blue pickup truck, the padre didn’t look like a parish priest. He was wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt and looked the part of a landscaper. He had on an old straw hat that reminded Danny of the straw hat that his grandfather used to wear fishing. Grandpa had been dead for ten years and Danny barely remembered his face, but he never forgot the old hat.

“Hi-ho, Danny,” Father Rivera called. Danny and Jack came over to take the baskets of topsoil to the backyard and dump them on the garden.

“Keep working, my son,” Father Rivera smiled. “You’re making some good progress. This earth around these parts is tough, at first, but when you find the right combination, it will give you the best tomatoes, red as rubies, fat, and full of flavour, and crispy cucumbers. And you remember to invite me over for a salad when they’re ripe!” The Father tipped his hat and left Danny to continue his work. He added some peat moss to the mix of topsoil and manure: he’d heard that peat moss would help break up the clay.

He was kneeling down and getting ready to plant, when his mother joined him. “Here’s a good way of figuring out where you want to put the plants,” she said. “Cucumbers grow like crazy, so you’ll want to tie them to wooden stakes. That’ll train them up so they won’t sprawl all over and cover the other plants. The tomatoes can have a corner, opposite to the cucumbers so they won’t be overshadowed. The peppers can be in front, so they get some good sun.” She looked at the sky, reassessing the position of the garden. “This spot will get some good afternoon sun. Hmm … the onions need some space in front of the peppers.” She put the plants in their little pots in place.

They began digging the holes and planting the seedlings. Danny liked doing things with his mother. She never judged him, never corrected him unless he asked for her input. She was a quiet, diligent worker, and Danny imagined how great she must be at work, dealing with people high on drugs or angry or depressed, and how incredibly strong she must be, not to get angry or upset. Suddenly, he found himself asking a question he didn’t plan to ask. He just blurted it out. “Why did Dad start drinking?”

Rosemary didn’t turn to him but stayed focused on getting the plants into the ground. He could see the edge of her face, etched against the brown soil, and the expression on it changed, as if a shadow had passed over it suddenly. She looked like the daisies that grew wildly in the spring, bursts of yellow, white, and green, but then began to fade by mid-summer, seemingly before their time. She seemed this way more often since his dad’s drinking began to haunt the family. It was like a ghost that just wouldn’t go away, that kept knocking at the door, causing the floor to creak, waking them up at night with its lonely moans.

“Your father started drinking when he was young. Some people get into bad habits, and then those habits get out of control. And then they create excuses, or reasons, for pursuing those habits. It’s just like that. I wish sometimes I could tell you that something awful happened in your dad’s life that made him want to escape or kill his pain, but as far as I know that wasn’t the case. Your dad started on a path of behaviour, and neither he, nor anybody else, stopped him. I met him at a time when he wasn’t drinking that much, and he had certain qualities that I liked so I chose to ignore some of his less stellar qualities.”

“Like the drinking….” Danny was quiet for a minute.

“The first time I saw your father, he was swimming. He won the bronze medal at the regional finals in the butterfly. You should have seen him churning through the water. He had a great swimmer’s build — the wide shoulders and contoured body, like all of his muscles were specially designed for his sport. He was young and strong and had these bright hazel eyes that I thought were just, well, cute.” Danny shuddered. It was weird hearing his mother call his father “cute.” “I was a lifeguard at the community rec centre for the summer. Athletes trained there in the off hours in the Olympic-sized pool, after the regular crowd went home. He was a lot older than me, but he was intriguing and funny and smiled a lot. I went out with him a couple of times and he was a very sweet, very caring young man. Being with him was like … it was like the first time you see fireflies on a spring night, you know? When it’s warm and gentle and the air is sweet and the sun is just starting to go down, and as dusk settles in, there’s suddenly a hundred sparkling, blinking green and yellow lights in the bulrushes by the pond, and in the background there’s a chorus of frogs trilling and croaking. And even though you feel like you’ve seen them a hundred times before, it’s still an amazing feeling to see the fireflies again.… Anyway, your dad and I didn’t see each other again for years after that. And by then he’d been overseas, worked for a not-for-profit organization that helped people in developing countries start businesses and become self-sufficient, and was coaching swimming. Your father was already well into middle age when you were born. His life had been, at times, very unpleasant. Maybe it’s because I’m a social worker and I have to be an active listener, but your father opened up to me about a lot of things. Maybe it’s just because I was the first person he could trust in his life. But he told me a lot, and some of it I would have a hard time sharing with you: a lot of it was hard and full of suffering, but your father always struggled to help other people.”

Danny thought of the snippets of stories of his father’s experiences as a worker in central Africa, helping build houses and wells and installing pumps and teaching children to read, and how he would stop short of describing anything that even approached violence. But there was violence, Danny knew. It was like the violence that marked Ben’s life, which spread across his face like a shadow when he described the janjaweed.

Rosemary looked across the yard at the neighbour’s cat peeking through the fence. “I hope that cat doesn’t poop in my flowers,” she said before continuing her story about Jack. “When he was young his own father was a drinker, and his mother was one of those women who create the image of a relationship where everything is okay, rather than truthful. Your grandfather would often be out drinking, so your dad would spend a lot of time on his own. One day when he was ten years old, his father challenged him to swim twenty laps in the pool at the community centre. Your father did it, and liked it, and found something he could put his energy into. He became a great swimmer, and eventually made it to the national level. He just narrowly missed the cut for the Olympics, he was
that good
.

“Your father was always striving to be the best, and he’s easily disappointed, so instead of using failure to build himself up, he let it drag him down. Alcohol becomes a refuge, a hiding place, for a lot of people. They use it to hide from themselves. So, despite what he saw and what he knew, and how good he could be, your father began a pattern of behaviour that was
not good
, despite having grown up around someone whose own behaviour had hurt his family so much. He drank, and then stopped, and then started again, and then stopped. Anyway, he was better for several years, and then your grandfather died and your dad didn’t take it well. Despite what happened when he was younger, your father was deeply attached to him. When he died, your dad set off on a path of self-destructive behaviour.”

Danny’s eyes felt moist. “I’m glad he stopped.”

“So am I. Every day, he lives with the difficult task of recovery. Each and every day he struggles. He does appreciates our support, but he knows that this is something he has to do on his own. Life is precious, and he’s working on it.”

Danny remembered an incident that took place a few days earlier: a bee had gotten inside the house and Susan wanted to kill it with a flyswatter. But he’d taken an old Mason jar, waited until the bee landed, and captured it, letting it go outside. Later his father told him there was an old legend from a tribe in the Yukon, the Tagish, that said if you save an animal’s life there’s a chance it will return the favour someday.

“Kind of like
Androcles and the Lion
, the guy who took the thorn out of the lion’s paw, and then the lion rewarded him later?” Danny asked.

“Kind of like that,” Jack had said. “So you never know. That bee might just help you out someday.”

His mother’s voice interrupted his thought: “Life is precious,” she repeated, her voice distant, like she was lost in thought.

“That’s true.” Danny eased a tomato plant into a neat round hole he’d dug with his scoop. He carefully pushed soil in around the roots and patted the earth down around the base of the plant.

“Almost done,” his mother said and smiled. “Remember to give them lots of water.”

“I will.”

* * *

A few years earlier, around the time that things were starting to look especially bad for Jack, a greyhound called Babs was giving birth to a litter of seven pups at a dog kennel in Florida.

“A lucky number, seven,” said Pops Mahoney, the kennel owner. He was a wiry man of medium height, with a sunburned face and leathery arms tanned brown from thirty years in the Florida sun. He’d come from Killarney, Ireland, the son of a greyhound racer, who was also the son of a greyhound racer.

“Greyhound racing’s in my blood,” he’d said to a
Tampa Tribune
reporter many years before when the reporter was doing a feature story on Mahoney’s kennel. “You can’t get it out, once it’s in. It’s been programmed into my DNA. I
just know
the look of a good running dog.”

It was true. For thirty years Mahoney, who ran a contracting business building many of the state’s highways and bridges, also ran dogs at the Tampa Greyhound Track. He had bred and raced dozens of top dogs over the years, and he was proud of the fact that he was gentle with his dogs. “I believe in lettin’ the good of the dog come out. Lettin’ it do what it loves to do — run — without having to be urged or forced into doin’ it.” He was thinking about that line as he watched Babs give a little push, and a wet puppy emerged into the world. One of the pups was bigger than the rest, a tough female that, even deaf and blind (she wouldn’t start to see or hear for ten days), was pushing the others away, struggling to be top dog.

“Aye, this one’s a keeper,” Mahoney said to Babs. Thunder rolled across the sky as he looked out at the palmetto trees on his property. He reached down and picked up the struggling wet bag of fur. “Aye, you’ll be a strong one. I can
feel
it in you.”