“I WANTED TO become a cop because …,” Ralph stopped midsentence. It had been a long time since he’d had to justify or even explain his career choice. “And what does this have to do with that thing over there?” The Tim Hortons was bustling. The lunch rush was just ending, but the cold was forcing the street people and regular customers alike to search for alternative methods of keeping their bodies warm.
Denizens of Canada’s largest city passed their table, throwing the occasional puzzled look in their direction. A noticeably down on his luck, aged man sitting across from a youngish police officer, deep in conversation. For some observers, it was just another example of the egalitarian nature of Tim Hortons across the country.
“I asked you this before, and you didn’t answer. Do you know the person who drew that Horse? I’d like an answer.”
Harry drank his third ... or was it fourth, possibly fifth coffee of the morning, realizing the Western concepts of quantity were seldom relevant on a morning like this, all the time measuring the immediate scalding nature of the cup’s contents against the slow burn of the season’s cold bit, waiting outside the franchise’s doors. To him, they were two sides of the same coin. “You’d like an answer, would you? Everybody wants answers, but very few would think I have them.”
“You keep evading the question.”
“Maybe you keep asking the wrong question.”
Clearly frustrated, Ralph leaned back in his chair and then, just as quickly, leaned forward until he was centimetres away from Harry’s face, almost completely across the Formica table. “What question should I be asking, then?”
A few seconds passed as Harry looked deep into his double-double. For a moment, Ralph thought he’d lost the man in whatever world some street people occasionally lived in, but Harry looked to their right, at the table near the bathroom. A woman was sitting with a younger man, probably her son, talking animatedly. Harry watched them for a second, as did Ralph, trying to figure out what was so interesting about the couple that would draw Harry’s attention. The constable was about to inquire when Harry broke the silence between them.
“That woman. Had a very bad childhood. There’s a war constantly happening inside her between what happened to her and how it sometimes affects her own life as a mother. Always on the edge of letting the dam she built up break and becoming her own mother. I see that all the time in people. Who they were and who they are. Who they’re struggling to be. People can be really fucked up.”
The woman looked normal and fine to Ralph. “How do you know this? Do you know her?”
Putting on his best are you kidding face, Harry laughed. “You silly man. How would I possibly know her?”
“Then how do you know what you just told me?”
Returning to the woman, Harry sipped his coffee. “That man, I think that’s her son. That’s the connection I get. At times, I see tentacles and tendrils coming out of her, wanting to hurt him, but they never quite reach him. It’s like she’s shadowboxing with him. Throwing punches that will never hit. Odd way to live, huh? She wants to be a good mother, but something inside doesn’t want her to be. It’s a constant battle.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why did you become a cop?”
This man, this Harry whatever-his-last-name-is, was truly a frustrating individual. It’s a game, thought Ralph. The man was lonely, on the fringes of society, wanting to talk to somebody, maybe even pull a trick or fool a police officer. It made sense. Quite possibly, he knew nothing of the Horse and who had painted it, re-created it, on that brick wall. What an idiot I am, concluded Ralph. Well, enough of this. Putting his hands on the table, Ralph got up, more frustrated with himself than with Harry.
“Okay. I’ve had enough.”
“Enough? We haven’t even started.”
Shaking his head, Ralph turned towards the door. This morning hadn’t turned out quite the way he had anticipated. The Horse was just a coincidence. It had to be. He’d read in school that Isaac Newton and a second, less famous man had both developed algebra at the same time in different places, and that Darwin wasn’t the only person to come up with the theory of evolution. Darwin published his book before Alfred Russell Wallace did, so the former was remembered and the latter forgotten. It followed that if complete strangers in different countries had separately come up with a complicated language like algebra, or something requiring years and years of research, like evolution, how much higher was the probability that two people more than twenty years apart could draw a very similar, though striking, image of a horse. With the same carbon copy image of a girl’s hand on the shoulder. The more Ralph thought about it, the sillier he felt. Under his breath, he even chuckled to himself. It was time to go home.
Looking out the window at the distant head of the Horse, Harry crumpled the empty coffee cup in his hand. “It was a woman. A girl. Actually, not a girl. It was the Horse. The Horse drew itself. But I’m pretty sure it was once a girl. It’s kind of hard to hide that. But I don’t think she exists anymore. And, how about this, she had the same colour as you.”
The world in the Tim Hortons stopped for Ralph. Sounds and people disappeared. The words Harry had said raised a lump in Ralph’s throat.
“What do you mean she had the same colour as me?”
Closing his eyes, Harry managed to pull the memory of the night the Horse had appeared on the wall and the person he’d seen call it forth. It had been a hot summer night, and Harry was down to a T-shirt and track pants, his usual uniform for a Toronto summer. He had been packing things up, late into the evening. Like many citizens of the streets, Harry didn’t really care for shelters. Too many nasty things happened there. He had a nice little nook hidden away in a construction site not far away. He’d been using it for the last couple of weeks, allowing him to stay out longer, long past the usual curfews set by the shelters.
He knew the alleyway that was to become the home of the Horse. Lots of people frequented the walls there, spreading their messages of dreams and creativity across and along its dingy surface. Many strange and unusual persons had frequented those alleys of the imagination, but none like the bringer of the Horse. He himself had wandered that potholed and broken pavement many times before. It used to remind him of the beauty that could exist in the city. But it had been a long time since he’d been between those brick and aluminum walls.
His eyes still closed, Harry answered Ralph’s question, his right cheek twitching. “The woman … the girl was Indian. The Horse is Indian. If horses can be Indian. I know some Indians can be jackasses …” Suddenly Harry burst out laughing, startling Ralph.
If this guy is wasting my time, thought Ralph, but before he could finish, Harry looked at him, directly in the eye, as lucid and focused as anybody Ralph had ever met in his life.
“Sit down. I’ll tell you more. But you have to tell me, why did you become a cop?”
Not knowing what else to do, Ralph once again sat down.