Circus (14 page)

My parents were in the audience for our event. Instead of an orange grove, this time mum had packed a massive red foam finger with a maple leaf printed on the palm, which looked
enormous on her tiny hand as she waved it at me after the race. Coach was there, too, wearing a full suit of Olympic clothing in place of his usual NBA track gear. He looked like he was ready to keel over with pleasure as he handed me a bag of unopened Jujubes. I got all the colours this time. He kept hugging my dad, who made no move to return the affection, and wore nothing festive but the crow’s feet by his eyes. They were so proud it didn’t even matter that we were standing there beside them, rather than up on the podium where Team Austria now stood. As if I was still lying in the sled, I closed my eyes and felt the swell.

Our race was early in the Olympic schedule, which meant that we were allowed to do what we liked for the rest of the games. After the over-scheduled days of training, it was a strange sort of freedom, and I felt adrift within hours of finishing the race. What was I supposed to do now? What I needed were instructions for how to have fun. Around me there were concerts and fireworks and strange unidentifiable mascot creatures holding up their maple leaves to flutter in the wind. It was as if the super-bright technicolour of sliding was starting to bleed into the black and white of everyday life. The first night after our event, I went drinking with Ron and even stayed out later than the rest of the team. For once, I wasn’t the grumpy sound guy. I was another character altogether, bobbing along to the music with Ron, who wrapped a giant Canadian flag around us and sang along with Beyoncé. I flirted with a bartender, who grilled me about why I was into luge. “I’m not,” I found myself
saying, “I’m into dancing!” and shimmied my shoulders, dipping my head back to inhale an acrid hit of smoke machine air. We stayed so late and drank so much that I was sick in the snow. The last thing I remember is Ron propping me up against him and steering us back to the athletes’ village.

On Day 10 of the games, slightly wilted by a hangover, I went for a run that lasted an entire morning. I wasn’t running to keep up with my training, I just wanted to get back into myself, to shake my muscles loose after the event and feel the ground beneath my feet. I jogged in loops around the ski resort, weaving between tourists on the boardwalk, trying to find stretches of space to be on my own. Eventually, I came to a steep hill and started climbing it, working from my hips and quads, and pushing my way upwards against the wind. It was hard, for once, to focus exclusively on the tightening of my legs and the rough ground under my shoes. All I could think was that I was jump-a-thon good at something now. The world had just told me so. But was that enough of a reason for Ron and me to continue sliding for another four years, and maybe another four years after that? The German team, who won bronze this time, had been together for almost sixteen years. Looking at those guys, I could see how all those forty-five-second intervals can add up: to years that glide past before you even notice what is happening. What would it be like to keep track of time some other way? The higher I climbed, the more it became clear that simply carrying on, letting life whiz past me, would not be good enough. If I stayed in the sport, I would have to make that decision for myself. I needed to pause the sled long enough to decide if I really wanted to keep going.

After I finished my run, I procrastinated by Experiencing Whistler. I bought a miniature bottle of maple syrup shaped like a maple leaf and drank it. It was kind of gross and kind of delicious all at the same time. I went into a gift shop to browse and examined some novelty shot glasses on the bottom shelf of one of the many Olympic souvenir displays. The nylon tracksuit rustle of another athlete approaching made me turn around. Paresh was standing a few feet behind me in his Team Canada gear, browsing through a revolving rack of postcards and tapping his foot to some rhythm in his head. I had given up on ever seeing him again, so I just stood there. He was close enough to touch. I held still for a moment longer, counting down from forty-five in my head. Then, I stepped forward and hugged him. As soon as my hands left their rightful place in my pockets, I couldn’t believe I’d done it. But then he hugged me back, and once more with feeling. I took another breath, reached for his hand, and, without saying a word, led him out of the store and into the snow.

T
OGETHER THE BROTHERS PERFORMED, IN THEIR
slow and quiet way, the same daily duties they had carried out for nearly forty years. They tended the sheep, delivered new lambs, and coaxed ancient ewes through their last breaths. Willie was in charge of the clippers during shearing season, and George whistled complicated commands to the dogs. Sometimes it was hard to tell that the brothers were two separate individuals, since they always walked close together across the land, as though they were loosely conjoined twins, George’s free hand clutching one of Willie’s suspenders for guidance. Their practised way of moving was born out of necessity, though, since George was blind, and Willie was deaf.

In the way of people who have long dealt with animals as working creatures, George and Willie felt about the sheep just as they did about the prairie sky and the fences they had built around the fields. Neither brother had ever understood how people could have relationships with animals as if the beasts had human personalities. No member of the flock had a name, and George and Willie neither mourned nor celebrated the creatures’ life events. George liked to joke about a cattle farmer they’d met at the fall fair, who had practically
written two-volume biographies of his cows. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he would say, “if the Murphys had a bovine section in the family photo album.” But George never looked into their own sheep’s faces and Willie never came to know their voices. They cared for the animals only as was their duty. If ever one of their flock escaped, the two men lumbered slowly after it, so attuned to one another’s movements that they hardly ever stumbled. At their age, they seldom caught the strays, but it was in their interest to see that none of their practices changed even though their bodies grew frailer as they neared the end of their eighth decade in the world. If anything, over the years George and Willie became more confident shepherds, and would tell anyone who cared to listen just how they managed, year in and year out, to see to it that everything was done properly, each praising the other’s handling of the animals and placing the accomplishment squarely on his brother’s shoulders.

The two men haven’t always minded this flock. In their youth, they worked for the Texas Ranger Division and were paid a dollar a day for their services, which, they often said, was more than they were worth. Presumably they chased down criminals and shot rifles and possibly even pursued Bonnie and Clyde (the timing would have been right), but no one knows much for certain about their doings in law enforcement. They left the States nearly fifty years ago, thinking they’d head to Alaska to prospect for gold. Sure, the Last Great Gold Rush had more or less lost its sparkle by the end of the nineteenth century, but the brothers were convinced that there was still work to be done in the North, cleaning up what
the stampede of hapless money-grubbers had left behind. They had driven up to the border, on through the Peace River, and then followed an old fur trader’s route to Fairbanks, almost four thousand miles from Texas. Like their Ranger days, their gold-mining period remained in some silent place in the brothers’ history. Since George and Willie preferred to stick to the shared piece of personal wisdom that it was better to live in the present than to dwell on the past, no one knew how they built their rumoured fortune or what they really did during their decade in Alaska. Maybe they had worked in a mine, or actually struck gold, or maybe they had robbed a bank. Despite the fact that they didn’t like to gloat about their worldly affairs or live in a way that suggested any kind of true wealth, there was a consensus among the locals that there had been great triumphs in the brothers’ past.

When George and Willie left Fairbanks, they thought that they were on their way home to Texas as they drove down the Alaska Highway in their black station wagon. Instead, they stopped at Mile Zero. On account of the car, James Callahan the saloon owner had first thought that the brothers were undercover agents on serious international business. Since they were not actually spies, they took up work on Samson Jacobs’s farm when he needed help tending his sheep after his own brother died following a mishap with a combine harvester. They’d planned to stay for a week while he found someone else, then two weeks, and after a while they stopped talking about leaving. “We liked the folk of the Peace on the way up, and I guess we liked ’em just the same on the way down,” Willie would say with a wink, exaggerating his
softened drawl. For forty years they remained on their own, no other family, no land of their own, and, after a time, no Samson either, with only the sheep to attend to and no problems to speak of. They saw themselves as the last holdouts of a dying profession, and Sandra Bird, the Hutterite woman who sometimes spun their wool into yarn, assured them that there had been no one in living memory who could match the skill and grace that the brothers brought to the job.

Karen has the face of someone who has swan-dived into love and never hit the bottom. Her eyes are blue and quite round, and her long dark hair is always in an artfully disordered arrangement on the top of her head. She is slim and wears plain, dark sweaters with skinny jeans, and there is a vulnerability about her that is most apparent in her delicate hands, which flutter and weave like sparrows as she speaks. Neither of Karen’s children looks anything like her. They are confident and plucky and olive-skinned like their father, and they cheerfully introduce themselves to strangers. Lately, they have taken to making up silly stories about their own lives and introducing themselves by false names. Sally’s favourite thing to say is that she’s twenty-three and works in a pet store. Karen is not sure whether to be amused or worried about the fact that, in addition to pretending to be in her twenties, her nine-year-old girl has suddenly become flirtatious: Sally has taken to wooing waiters in family restaurants by writing love letters on her napkins and tucking them under the tip. Six-year-old Jackson’s
imagination is more whimsical, and his preferred way of introducing himself is as a cowboy who rides a blue horse.

Sally and Jackson are playing together upstairs now, in the new master bedroom, with a cardboard box that has become a police station. Downstairs in the kitchen, Karen cradles her cellphone between her cheek and her shoulder, and draws the curtains despite the daylight, because she is trying to keep a secret about their new house from her kids.

“When a person buys real estate, she doesn’t expect to arrive at her new home, exhausted after a long drive, to find out that she has not only bought a house, she has also purchased two elderly shepherds.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I assumed you knew.”

“How, Karl? How would I know?”

“Well, Mrs. Schmidt, they were there when we viewed the property.”