The Greyhound (7 page)

Authors: John Cooper

“Have you ever heard of someone named Dale Carnegie?” she asked.

“Who is
she
?” Danny said. The only Dale he knew was a distant cousin of his mother who lived in Moose Jaw. And
that
Dale was a woman. Mrs. Rowcliffe gave him a strange look.

“Dale Carnegie was a
he
. He once said, ‘When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ In other words, make the best of a difficult situation. He wrote a book called
How to Win Friends and Influence People
.” She passed Danny a soft cover book. A bland-looking man wearing glasses, his arms crossed in front of his chest, peered out from a photograph on the cover. He looked like ancient history,
and lame
— Danny had little doubt about that — and
his
time, Dale Carnegie’s time, was obviously some big, long gap of time before even Danny’s own father was born. Maybe his grandfather knew who this guy was. But still, Danny liked the sound of the quote. “You can hang onto this,” the guidance counsellor said.

Danny took the book home and read a big chunk of it that night. He liked another quote in it: “If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.” Suddenly the bland man seemed to be making sense. He worked his way through a few more chapters.

Get the work done
.

The next day, Danny went over to the church. Long Shot padded along beside him. Father Rivera was outside, surveying the fenced-in area that was going to be used by the children in the church daycare very soon. The playground was an expanse of grass and sand. Thick wooden timbers anchored in concrete poked out from the ground in what at first appeared to be a haphazard fashion.

“Hullo, Danny,” the padre said and gave him a big smile. “What can I do for you today?”

“I’d like to know if there’s anything that I can do for you, actually. You know, help out around here a bit.”

Father Rivera’s eyes glinted and his thick black eyebrows popped up. “Your timing couldn’t be better!” He swept an arm towards a pile of cardboard boxes that were stacked neatly alongside the red brick church. “I need someone who can put together some playground equipment. Mr. Romeo donated his time and some of the materials, and was able to get the timbers set in concrete last weekend, but he didn’t have the time to put the equipment up. If you’re willing to do it, I’ve got all the tools.” Danny remembered that his father had mentioned that there were plans to get the playground equipment up, but that Sal Romeo would be doing it. He figured he could handle it, though. With that, Father Rivera hustled into a storage shed just inside the building and came back with a big red toolbox.

“Everything’s in here,” he said, and paused. “You
do
know how to use power tools, eh?” He gave him an inquiring look.

“
Of course
,” Danny said, hoping his little fib wouldn’t be noticed. “Not a problem. However, I work best with a plan. Are there instructions to go with the equipment?”

“No problem, everything’s in the boxes. Mr. Romeo marked all of the timbers to indicate which parts of the equipment are attached to each timber. Box A, B, C, etc. You shouldn’t have a problem with this at all.”

“One more question, Father. Can I let Long Shot run around inside here? She won’t get into any trouble.”

“Absolutely,” smiled the priest, kneeling and massaging the dog’s ears. “She’s a real beauty.” He went inside and Danny surveyed the boxes. He laughed to himself as he saw “S. Romeo” on the box.
Wherefore art thou, Romeo?
he thought, then remembered that the priest had pronounced it “Roe-
may
-o.” It was still funny, though.

He began putting pieces of the equipment neatly on the ground.
One step at a time
, he said to himself. He opened the first box and metal pieces and a sealed bag of nuts and bolts clattered out. Along with it came a sheet of instructions.
Just follow each step, one step at a time
. He remembered the Dale Carnegie quote. “Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities.” This would not be impossible, he hoped.

He worked for two and a half hours, drilling, measuring, and hammering things into place. By the end of this first day he had put the first stand-up pod together — the pod looked like a small clubhouse perched on top of the timbers, and he had assembled and attached a bright yellow slide to it. He came back the next day and added monkey bars and swings. By the third day he had put up the second standing pod, and assembled and attached a hanging bridge that connected one pod to the other. On the fourth day he added ladders and a rope swing to the equipment.

Each day, Long Shot accompanied him. She’d sniff around the playground perimeter, play with a chew toy Danny brought along, and then settle down in the shade for a nap. When Danny was done, Father Rivera came out to take a long, careful look at the colourful combination of wood, metal, and shiny plastic.

“By golly, Danny, you did a wonderful job. Your parents will be proud of you.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Father, please don’t mention this to my folks. I just wanted to do something,
make something
, you know? I just wanted to be helpful.”

“Well, my son, this is a great help to the church and the daycare. The little children will really enjoy it. You’ve done a wonderful job.” He offered Danny a firm handshake. Danny winced slightly — the priest was stronger than he looked — and Danny’s muscles felt a satisfying fatigue.

BEN’S PRESENTATION

Ben stood stock still at the front of the class. If he looked nervous, it was because he was nervous. He began haltingly, his voice a low, hollow whistle; it sounded like air being blown through the neck of a soda bottle.

Everybody had to do this assignment
, Danny thought.
It’s only eight minutes. Come on, Ben
. His friend had worried about the assignment for weeks. The civics teacher, Mr. Townend, had been kind about it, but clear: “Tell the class something about your life. Tell them something about your family history. Relate the story in a way that people will be able to identify in some way with your experience.”

Danny had stumbled through his the day before, talking about judo — not very convincingly — and how it was about standing up for yourself, being focused, and taking charge. He meant it as a metaphor for his life. People had listened politely, and he hoped that Nicole, who sat at the back of the class, would like it, but she really didn’t seem to have paid much attention.

“I come from a country in Africa called Sudan. The region I come from is called Darfur, which is in the western part of the country. It is a different culture there to here, but we do have some similar beliefs. We believe in the importance of family and treating your friends with respect. I would play with my friends in the village. My father was a farmer and tended cattle and goats and grew millet and sorghum. Millet is a seed and if you own a budgie or a canary you might even buy millet to feed your bird. We also ate nuts and okra and tomatoes. It is dry in Darfur, most of the time, except during the summer. Then it rains and in places where it was dusty and dry, things suddenly become green, and lots of things grow.

“My family lived a good life. I had three sisters and four brothers. We have bigger families in Darfur than you do here, but that is what is normal there. I would play with my friends and we would go to school, which was about two kilometres from where we lived. Everything we did for fun, we did outdoors. Everything was quiet and peaceful. I would watch my mother grinding grain and preparing food for us. She would tell us stories about our family, going back many years.” Ben paused, and no one in the room looked away. No one giggled. No one was even drawing idly doodles to pass the time. They were transfixed by Ben. His voice became stronger. He straightened slightly, seeming to add another two inches to his already impressive height. Mr. Townend looked downright tiny sitting at his desk, looking up at Ben.

“Then the janjaweed came. They came on horses and with guns, into our village, shooting the men and sometimes the women. There might have been thirty or thirty-five of them. The sound of the horses coming frightened us, because we were not used to the sound. The sound of their hooves pounding against the earth was like drumbeats coming from a long distance away. They charged into our village and killed two of my older brothers and grabbed my sister, who was thirteen at the time, and rode off with her. My mother was shot several times and lay gasping for breath. Then she stopped breathing. There was blood on her white dress. My father’s body was found behind one of the huts. He was also dead. I cried, then screamed, then it was like I had no feeling anymore. Things just stopped inside of me. I began to run. Then the janjaweed captured me and made me work as a slave.”

Ben told the story of how he was taken to a farm far away, where he was forced to work and live. The farmer was cruel and yelled at him, sometimes kicking him, but not so hard that he would injure his slave. Ben slept in a corner of a small tool shed, with a ragged blanket that was so short it didn’t cover his legs. He lived that way for more than a year, and learned Arabic to survive. He was kicked and beaten by the farmer, and kicked and beaten by the children of the family. Then there was his escape, along a dirt road, running at full tilt, never looking back, but half expecting at any time to hear the pounding of horse’s hooves on the packed earth, feel a hard hand on his shoulder, stopping him from reaching freedom. But he managed to find his way to a bigger road, and then joined others “displaced persons,” as they were called, and made his way to a refugee camp. Life in the refugee camp was difficult too. “At the refugee camp, we waited to see if there would be food. It was about living one day at a time.”

There were sniffles in the classroom. One girl in the third row sobbed.

Ben reached behind Mr. Townend’s desk and brought out photographs he’d had enlarged and pasted onto boards. “Here are some pictures that show the destruction of the villages, just like mine, in Darfur. These were taken by an agency from this country that tries to help our people.”

There were pictures of dead villagers and scorched huts, of refugee camps with hundreds of people gathered in small groups, the aid agency workers walking among them. “I was lucky to be sponsored by someone from one of the agencies that came to help. They gave me a chance to come to school here. And I take it as my responsibility to tell people what happened, and to try to go back someday to help my people. To find my sister who disappeared, but I don’t know if I will ever be able to.

“People have to know what is happening in Darfur. There has been too much suffering in my country. It needs to be made … right. To have a chance to heal.”

The students gave Ben a standing ovation. “All right, all right, settle down” said Mr. Townend, restoring order. “That was a very moving presentation, Ben. Let’s open the floor to questions.” It seemed as though everybody had a question to ask, and Ben tried his best to answer them all.

JULY

The man arrived in a small car, a lime-green hybrid. It hummed as it pulled into the driveway, then went silent as the driver turned off the engine. Danny was cutting the front lawn with the push mower. It wasn’t a big lawn and his father was trying to conserve energy, so he’d paid $99 for a push mower from the Home Depot down the street. It made a neat, snip-snip-snipping, swish-swish-swishing sound as Danny pushed it across the grass, so that he felt like the barber for a green-headed monster,
snip-snipping
away at the mass of green hair.

Danny had been expecting the man, but not that he’d drive up in a hybrid car. Danny thought that he’d arrive in a big gas-guzzler, maybe some kind of SUV with long cattle horns on the front. The man looked the part of a racing man, a gambler, dressed in a cream-coloured suit with such sharp creases in the pant legs they looked like they could cut through a tin can, like the commercials for the Ginsu knives on television. He had a bolo tie pulled around a checked dress shirt and his jacket was open to reveal a rounded but tight belly. The man was built like an old football player, with broad shoulders and a nose that looked like someone had pushed a wad of putty across his face. He rose from the car slowly, easing the cramps out of his aging knees.

“Dave Langley,” he said strongly, putting out a hand. His hands were leathery, but his grip gentle. “You must be Danny.” His face was ruddy and he looked like he spent too much time in the sun, but when he stepped out of the car Danny had felt a blast of cold air that chased away the summer heat. The cowboy hat on his head was tilted back to reveal a broad forehead, and his dark eyes caught the sunlight, glinting like he had a secret.

Jack opened the front door. “Dave!” he called. “Good to see you.”

They looked ridiculous: this bear of a man and Jack, skinny and tall, looking like he should be on a hippie commune, greying hair tied in a ponytail, Bermuda shorts, and sandals. He had a bruised toenail; it was ugly and purple in the bright sunlight.

“Why you old son of a gun.” Dave rattled the words out quickly, making Danny think of cactus, mirages, and rattlesnakes. The words buzzed from Langley’s lips. “Good to see you again!”

The two men went inside. Danny went around back to check his tomato plants, carefully pinching away new leaflets. The tomato plants’ yellow flowers — at least some of them, it was still early in the season — were starting to bulge with small globs of green fruit beneath them. A honeybee, ignoring Danny, buzzed past. Danny could see, through the kitchen window, the figures of the two men sitting at the table, his father with a cup of coffee, Langley with a can of iced tea. Every once in a while they would laugh, his dad’s laugh was light, Langley’s the full-blast belly laugh of a man who didn’t seem to take life too seriously. Jack had told Danny that he and Dave Langley had done business together years before: they had served for a year together in a resettlement program for refugees in Central America. Despite his appearance, Langley had a caring heart.

Danny went back around to the front and finished cutting the grass, then sat on the front stoop with a can of Orange Crush. A half hour later the two men came to the front door.

“See you soon, Dave. Thanks for coming by.”

“Good to see you again. We’ll see you again in a couple of months.” The hybrid hummed and pulled away.

At dinner that night Jack told the news of Dave Langley’s visit. Rosemary sat beside a stack of reports — she intended to eat dinner, then move to the enclosed veranda at the back of the house, sit in the big wicker chair with the purple cushions, sip iced tea, and finish her reports.
Mom never seems to get flustered by things
, Danny thought.
Even when Dad’s drinking was at its worst, she just sits like a raven-haired Buddha-woman, listening and never shutting people out
.

“As you know,” Jack said, and spread his hands out on the tablecloth, as was his habit when discussing important issues, “Dave Langley has interests in a variety of areas — advertising, environmental technologies, and racing. He tells me that our Long Shot is a former champ, in fact, one of the best racing greyhounds
ever
.” He paused after the
ever
for effect. “He has set up a match race that would bring together Long Shot and the top dogs of the last five years. He’s going to pay us $10,000 to run Long Shot — no tricks, nothing. Just the money and Long Shot runs.”

Rosemary stirred, put down her bowl of greens; she adjusted her glasses, fidgeted with her watch (a regular habit she’d developed), and said, “But Jack, Long Shot is almost six years old. Isn’t she too old to run?”

“I can see she still has it in her.” Long Shot, hearing her name, raised her head. She was sprawled out on her cushion by the brown sofa in the living room. “I’ve already told Dave yes. We could use the money.”

Rosemary knew she didn’t stand a chance arguing the point. “I just hope she’s up to it,” she said, and adjusted her glasses again before picking up her bowl of greens.

THE DIARY

Diary Entry for July 3:

Okay, so here it is. I don’t like writing about myself. I think this exercise is silly. I was told to just let the thoughts spill out of me like I was a bucket. Spill bucket, fill again, and spill.

My strengths: I am good at judo. I am good at writing, but I don’t like it. I have a good memory when it comes to geography and history. I am a slow runner (a runner like Ben can leave me in the dust!). I am lame at getting along well with other people. I have a bad temper. I hate my dad but I love him at the same time, and this confuses me. I wish I could talk to girls. Girls are a mystery to me. Haha, how dumb is that? I’m sort of surrounded by them. But Mom and Susan aren’t really girls, not that way. The shrink is an okay guy but he asks a lot of questions. But then I guess that’s his job. My friend Ben is what my mom calls an “old soul.” I had to look that one up. It means that he has a depth of experience and wisdom that is different from his age — he has gone through things that most people our age never go through, and has survived the experiences, which gives him wisdom.

* * *

Danny looked over the page. It was getting easier. The words just seemed to spill out of him. Write without thinking of who or what you are writing about. Write from deep inside, the shrink had told him.
Yeah
, Danny thought,
this is okay
.

* * *

I guess Long Shot is cool. She’s lying on my bed, and her eyes are half-closed. I wonder if she’s dreaming of being back on the track. Sometimes her paws twitch a bit. I won’t call her Rat Face anymore.

Sensei Bob taught me how to meditate. Why do people like Sensei Bob care about me? I’ve beaten up three people. I shouldn’t feel proud of it, but two were bigger than me and I was glad to take them down. None of them got hurt badly. I got a black eye once. It was a purple eye, really. Blotches of purple and yellow.

I like the new place; it’s not so bad. The plants I put in are getting bigger, stronger. I gave them plant food, but Mom said it wasn’t really necessary. Before school ended, the girl from Tim Hortons smiled at me in class a few times. We even walked down the hall together. She asked for my phone number. Maybe she’ll call me.

Ben has gone through a lot. I looked up the history of Sudan and Darfur. Ben went through hell. How many people can say they went through hell and survived? He’s got a lot more courage than me, but I guess I should find a way to learn from his example. My biggest problem is just trying to ask a girl out! I can’t even say her name! I’m so scared she’ll say no. I just have to think about how to approach her. Maybe it’s like someone said, “Just be yourself.” I will try to be just myself.

Long Shot is looking up at me. She’s like a mutant with mutant senses — she can sense how I am feeling. Mom is in the kitchen — maybe that’s what Long hears. Maybe she figures it’s time for dinner. I can hear Susan in her room, she’s playing something — Avril Lavigne. I don’t listen to that. Susan hates Dad, I think. Or maybe it’s not Dad – maybe it’s just her. Long Shot has left the room. I can hear Mom talking to her in the kitchen. “Good girl,” she’s saying. Long Shot is definitely crunching a Milk Bone.

* * *

Susan was at his door. “There’s spoon pudding in the fridge.”

“Thanks.” Danny felt a rumbling in his stomach. Spoon pudding did that to him; he loved it. He’d called it spoon pudding ever since he could remember. Basically, it was instant pudding that his mom would make, whipping it up in the mixing bowl with milk and then pouring the thick chocolate mixture into cups. Sometimes she would make vanilla, sometimes strawberry. Danny and Susan would sit in front of the television and watch cartoons and eat their pudding, and it was one of the times that he remembered with a tinge of sadness and regret, because they had both gotten older and Susan had moved away from him — she didn’t seem to care about him anymore. (“It’s like being next to a person, but you can tell by their attitude that they’re really a million miles away from you,” he once told Dr. Feinman. “That’s what happened to Susan.” Dr. Feinman didn’t disagree; instead he said the same thing happened to him and his sister. “It seems like they’re gone far away, but you have to trust that they still care about you. And you’ll find that when you’re both adults you’ll be close again. But you have to trust that it will happen.”)

It was called spoon pudding because when Danny was young, he always complained that he could never find a spoon for his pudding. So, his mom had put a plastic spoon into the pudding cup in the fridge, standing up, so that he would always have it there. The name just stuck. Soon the whole family was calling it spoon pudding. Danny knew that when he opened the fridge the spoon would be there, sticking out of the chocolate pudding, and it always was. The puddings were at the back of the fridge, and Danny had to move the milk carton and the jug of Kool-Aid to get to them.

He heard sounds in the backyard and went to the window, watching as Long Shot
roo-rooed
at the neighbour’s cat, Mittens. Mittens sat passively (her tail madly twitching), on the top rail of the wooden fence, safe from Long Shot, who had given up, and sat back, giving a half-hearted
roo-roo
.

“Ha! You’re not going to eat my Mittens today!” Mrs. Sharpe, Mittens’s owner, said from her backyard. Danny wandered outside. He could just see Mrs. Sharpe’s full, round face through the slats in the fence. Mrs. Sharpe said the same thing every time Long Shot chased after Mittens. Danny hated to think what might happen if the dog ever caught the cat, but maybe they would just yip and hiss at each other and then each would go their own way.

“That’s true, Mrs. Sharpe. I think Long Shot really just wants to play with Mittens, though.”

“Don’t be kidding yourself, my boy. They would get along like oil and water. Cats and dogs just aren’t meant to be together.” She looked at Long Shot. “But maybe this dog is different.” As her eyes softened, she quickly changed the subject. “Come around to the front. I want to give you something to pass along to your mother.”

At the door, she gave Danny a crocheted tea cosy. Mrs. Sharpe made and sold them at a craft boutique at the farmers’ market on Saturday.

“It’s beautiful,” Danny said, looking at the bright cheery colours. “Thank you.”

* * *

School the next day was a drag. Danny’s physics teacher, Mr. Fischbacher, gave him a hard time and kept him after class. The students called him “The Moist Towelette,” because the pale and drawn Fischbacher was always covered in a thin layer of sweat that made his skin shine. “He looks like he’s gonna end up in a pool of water on the floor,” a classmate had said.

Fischbacher’s hands were particularly moist, and students dreaded the possibility that the Moist One would want to shake their hands. Fischbacher had big, liquid eyes that bugged out of his head, and he seemed particularly excited by anything that disturbed his sense of order in the classroom. A student came in late? Fischbacher would sweat. A student asked to be excused to go to the washroom? Beads would appear on the teacher’s upper lip. Danny was glad to get out of there.

There was a book sitting on his desk when he got home, with a note from his mom. “I thought maybe you’d remember this one,” she’d written. “I found it in a box of books from our old house.”

It was a kid’s book called
The Man in the Tin Can Van
. Danny had loved it when he was seven or eight years old and insisted that his father read it to him before bed every night. He turned to the first page, then read through it:

There once were some people

Who lived in a land

A far away land ’midst a desert of sand

A wondrous land called the Land of Flin Flan

They were a hardworking folk

They would work and they’d plan

For a wondrous event

Called the Flin Of The Flan

A celebration it was. This Flin Of The Flan

With acrobats, jugglers and a musical band

There were flinners and flanners and food from a can

And the sweetest of sweets served fresh from the pan