A Mercy

It was an awful Friday.

Some hot Friday. And I was with my brother-in-law who rides a marathon bike all over town to stay healthy and says he loves it but then he also cusses under his breath anytime a car passes too close to him. Or too fast by him. Or he thinks one of those things might have happened or be happening. He yells, Jagoff. Or, Cocktoucher! He yells at everything. Everything. Even at the state birds that drop from the powerlines and pick at the blown-out possums and flattened snakes.

Anyways.

Once he yelled hard at our mother. We had a family dinner on the Google Calendar and Mom was coming from the side of town where they grow grapes in the front yards and have floodlights that burn you with white light if you get close to their mailboxes. And he––Alec––his mistake was he didn’t recognize our mother’s cream car.

So.

When she got to my sister’s, my mother waited on the lawn for us all to come to her. Like she was sick. Or dying. Her head bowed in contrition. Somberish. Sad, like when she read Dad’s will in the garage. She explained that she’d passed Alec on her way down Federal Lane and he’d yelled and then kept mouthing the words “Dog Bitch,” even when she got really far ahead of him and could only see his mouth shape. She said she could tell he was still doing it by the way the little black mouth circle never deviated.

Then Alec rolled up on the lawn. Cheeks mottled with the different pressures that accompany exertion. His body steaming and breathless, he looked like something newborn. Gardenia bulbs and leaves were dangling from the branches that were twined between the spokes of his tires.

“Found a shortcut,” he said, smiling.

Then his smile turned.

He could tell it was about to get rough.

And boy it got rough.

Lots of yelling about yelling. About tempers and anger. Inner demons. My sister cried and asked if he was drinking again. She asked if it was like grad school and if he needed to be sent somewhere for real help. That place in the mountains between the lakes.

Alec sat on the couch.

And at some point took off his helmet.

No smiling. No frowning. Just his hands folded on his knees.

Until.

In the kitchen I handed him a water bottle and breathed out like I was tired for him.

So. I knew we were cool.

It was a few days later he called and asked me what I knew about horses.

Then that Friday he took me to the track for the first time.

And kept taking me.

And taking me.

Which he liked.

And I think I liked.

Until. That hot night.

The bad one.

Where Alec and I already had a stack of losing tickets between our feet.

But Saint Shackleton was running against Stalin Dream, and we hadn’t lost on Saint in months. So we went big. No box-bet. No wheel. Straight up. Saint Shackleton to win. Big money. Real money. Which made Alec clap his hands and drink his Diet Coke at ninety-degrees. He drank it like something else. Something else. Then crushed the can between his palms and ordered two hotdogs. “Dragged through the garden,” he said to the kid in the red-and-white soda cap, whose blonde curls were doing all they could to duck out from beneath the paper hat. One swoop in particular like a rogue ocean spume. And it made me, for a moment, imagine a person with hair made of only ocean water. Which then made me imagine an ocean made of something else. Which of course ended with me thinking about what a skyscraper made of the white parts of an eyeball would look like if it had eyelashes for windowsills.

“What?” asked the kid.

He pulled out his headphones and dropped them into his apron.

“What” said Alec back, the way you do before a fight.

“Want something?”

“Nothing you’ve got,” he said, turning himself away from the kid, towards the entrance of the bleachers.

Which is the last thing I remember happening before the bad. 

Me and Alec sitting down without hotdogs.

With only tickets. 

Ready.

To be made whole.

Winners.

Winners.

That’s what we were going to be.

Saint looked good. 

We could see his muscle stretched over his bones from the top deck.

His coat shiny. 

Sharp.

He reflected sun, even under the cloud-filled sky.

Alec grabbed my shoulder.

Like: this is it.

And the pistol.

___

If a horse comes up limping at the track it will be dead within the hour. 

A mercy.

They call it that. A mercy.

Then the handlers, the trainers, they load the horses like snowmobiles. Moaning. Catching. Dying snowmobiles.

And they.

They take the stallions and geldings and mares and fillies.

Out to where the river used to run.

Not far.

Just on the other side of the parking lot, beside the horseboxes and big trucks. Where there are bees flying between the trailers. And crickets. And Catalpa trees running themselves against the wind.

___

Alec and I ran through the all-mud.

We jumped the fence.

To where the water used to be. To see Saint Shackleton one last time or moment.

Whichever it was.

And we did.

And he did––Saint––he looked at us as we broke through the grove.

His eyes wide, excited. 

As though he was winning something.

But he was dying.

But it can look like that if it’s just in the eyes. Winning and dying. 

It looks like something big is happening to you.

Then the wranglers did their work.

And we saw.

What we didn’t want but needed to see for some reason.

“Shit,” said Alec.

“I know.”

“We lost.”

“Yeah.”

“Your sister asked me to leave,” he said, and his eyes were wet.

“I know,” I said. “I’m supposed to drive you somewhere.”

___

Sam Berman is a writer living in Boise, Idaho. His work has been featured in X R-A-Y, Forever Magazine and Maudlin House.