ache from stomping the shovel. It tired me out enough to sleep and then morning would come and it would start again. All the days merged into one, or maybe the same day enacted repeatedly. A kind of penance. It was what I had needed, but when I came back things had changed, and my brother had changed, too.
‘I’m sorry, man,’ I said.
‘I started it.’
‘I mean for bailing like that.’
He leaned back and blew a slow whistle of smoke upwards, like a steam train.
‘I appreciate that.’
‘But you got to be straight with me about this.’
‘Who says I’m not?’
I sipped my whisky, by habit sipping from the teacup as if the liquid was hot and might burn my tongue. ‘You should have told me Maria was involved.’
‘Her involvement doesn’t change things.’
‘Like hell. I know what she means to you.’
‘But not to you, right? She’s just my crummy ex – some troublesome chick.’
‘Hell, Jake.’ I stared at my hands. They were all grimy and cut up from scrapping in the dirt with him. ‘You know that ain’t true. I cared for her, too. She was like family to me.’
‘And to Sandy.’
‘But she drifted away, man. That junk meant more to her than us, in the end.’
‘The end hasn’t happened yet.’
He stood up and went to peer down at the alley. The wind caught his bandana and blew it sideways and he seemed to sway with the motion. I had this terrible image in my head of him leaning forward, letting himself go over the edge. A long fall into the dark.
‘What else haven’t you told me?’ I said.
‘What else is there?’
‘What the hell we’re stealing, for one thing.’
He tipped back his teacup, draining it. When he finished he backed away from the ledge, took a few running steps, and threw the cup in a long lobbing arc, over the roof of the next building. A few seconds later I heard the distant shatter-pop, delicate and irreparable.
‘A horse,’ he said. ‘We’re going to steal a racehorse from Castle Meadow.’
I didn’t even answer. I couldn’t. I just lay back on the roof and stared at the stars. The concrete was hard and cold beneath me and those stars looked impossibly far away.
The next morning Jake announced we were going to see her, this horse we were meant to steal. I’d already told him that I didn’t want any part of it but no doubt he’d expected this kind of resistance: it was why he’d held off telling me for so long. So he cooked me a fried egg on his hotplate – just an egg, no toast or bun or anything – and convinced me to at least come out to the stables with him, as if that would somehow bring me around to the scheme. I also had a brutal hangover, and when I went to take a shower I stumbled across an old lady in a housecoat smoking crack in the bathroom on Jake’s floor. When I walked in she smiled at me, bashfully, and offered me a toke. Overall it was a terrible way to start the day.
We took Jake’s Mustang to Castle Meadow. During the drive Jake assured me he’d ‘scoped out’ the situation (he was already talking like that) and claimed it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Security at the stables was minimal, he said. A night watchman, a couple of CCTV cameras – that was all. It wasn’t like at the racetrack, where they were paranoid about people tampering with the animals. At Castle Meadow they didn’t worry about horses getting stolen because it just wasn’t something anybody had ever done.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘and there’s a reason for that.’
When we arrived, we wheeled past the clubhouse – where we’d had a drink the other night – and parked closer to the stables. They were long clapboard structures with corrugated tin roofing. Nothing fancy.
‘This isn’t going to change anything,’ I said.
‘Just come check it out.’
He whistled idly through his gap tooth as we crossed the yard. We entered the stables through a garage door, big enough for vehicle access, and walked along a concrete alley between the stalls where they kept the horses. The air smelled of manure, hay, and animals. At that time – mid-morning – a lot seemed to be going on. We passed stable hands mucking out the stalls, and grooms measuring scoops of feed, and riders saddling up their horses. A few of the riders looked small enough to be professional jockeys, although they weren’t dressed in their full get-up like you see at the track. Some of the workers nodded at Jake, but for the most part we were ignored.
Jake stopped at a stall, with a tin nameplate nailed next to it: Shenzao. It was empty.
‘She must be out for a run,’ he said.
He took me through another door that opened onto the training grounds. I hadn’t been able to see much the night we came out. The main enclosure was about the size of a lacrosse box, the turf mucky from recent rain and cratered with the impressions of horseshoes. At the far end a set of bleachers rose up, but the seats were empty. A few spectators sat at tables on the clubhouse patio, and others leaned up against the perimeter fence, observing the grounds. A dozen horses were prancing around out there, doing laps or jumping over obstacles. Their hoofbeats thudded dully across the big space. As we watched, one barrelled towards us: a big dappled grey. It snorted and steamed as it ran, bearing down on us before peeling away along the fence-line, kicking up clumps of turf in its wake.
‘How do you like that?’ Jake said.
‘That’s the horse?’
‘No. I don’t see her yet.’
We leaned against the wooden rail. The morning was misty and dreary. I stared sullenly into the middle distance, across that pit of mud, and tried to find a way to say it.
‘I’m out, man,’ I said. ‘I can’t do this.’
‘This isn’t the kind of thing you back out of, brother.’
‘You didn’t tell me what we were doing.’
‘Sure I did. Pick-up and delivery.’
‘I thought it would be drugs or money or stolen goods. Not a horse.’
‘Would you keep it down?’
About twenty yards away, an elderly woman – tiny and grey-haired, possibly Asian – was watching the horses through a set of opera binoculars. At her side stood a man in a grey overcoat and dark sunglasses, even though the sun wasn’t out. They made for an odd pair.
‘They can’t hear us,’ I said.
Jake got out his crumpled pack of Du Mauriers and tapped one free. Lighting it, he blew a plume of smoke into the morning cold, and nodded slowly, as if in understanding.
‘I get it,’ he said. ‘You’ve got cold feet.’
‘I’ve got cold everything. It’s madness, man.’
‘It’ll feel a lot better once we’re dancing.’
It was something Sandy used to say to us, as a joke, when one of us – usually Jake – had gotten into trouble or screwed something up. But it was a cheap trick to use under these circumstances, and I just shook my head.
‘I’ll come see Ma with you,’ I told him. ‘Then you’re on your own.’
He reached over and grabbed my bicep. ‘Here she is,’ he said.
He pointed to the far side of the enclosure.