Phantom of Fire

by Peacock, Shane;

  I waited until they’d gotten it all out. That’s all you have to do, allow them to let off a little steam, and then say you kind of get it, or act mad at them (they don’t like that; worries them) and then just go on with your life.

  This time, though, they threw a curveball.

  “We are planning a family trip,” said Dad.

  “Eh?”

  “A family trip,” said Mom. “A family is a group of related people. And a trip is a journey across a section of the earth or a body of water.”

  We hadn’t done one of those for a long while. We used to do them all the time. The first one was to Newfoundland to an amazing place that really fit my imagination: a deserted town on an island called Ireland’s Eye. That may have been where my dead-people thing really ramped up because I actually saw someone like that there, I think. The trip to northern Ontario where I met Wyn and the one to Alberta where I got to know Dorothy were “family” things too, and the BC trip where I met—or made up—You Know Who.

  “Well, good luck with that,” I said, with a smile. “When are you going? Can I stay home alone?”

  “We,” said Mom.

  “Eh?”

  “We,” repeated Dad. These two like to work as a team on you. “WE are going together, you and Mom and me. Next week. Heading out on Saturday, to be exact.”

  Today was Thursday, just a day away from Friday. I was counting the now just under twenty-four hours until I could settle into a nice weekend. I was only a week and a half into grade ten. It was not going well. Lousy, really. I wasn’t optimistic about making new friends this year. Not that I had any of real value last year either. And the girls, man they looked awesome. They seemed more awesome every year, which was both a good and a bad thing. But how were WE going on this family trip, if I had to be in school?

  “We are pulling you out of classes for the week, maybe ten days. We think it will do you good.”

  “Right.” It didn’t make any sense. I was pretty sure they’d get over this in a couple of days. There was no way they would really pull me out of school.

  “We just think,” continued Mom, “that it would be nice for us all to get away for a while, together, regardless of what else is happening in our lives. I am taking time away from my own school and your father has told his clients that he is incommunicado for a little while. He will be leaving his phone behind, and so will I. Right, John?”

  “Yes…yes, absolutely, Mom.”

  I hate it when he calls her that.

  “It will just be the three of us on the trip out. We will have time to talk and when we get to where we are going, an amazing, quiet, beautiful place where we will be with friends, we’ll have some time there too.”

  “So, where are we going?” Really, if I were to tell the truth, I should have said, “Where do you think we are going?”

  “Uh…” said Dad.

  “To New Brunswick,” said Mom

  “...New Brunswick?”

  So, remember when I said Canada is weird? There are some exceptions.

  Nothing weird ever happens in New Brunswick.

  2

  Calm Before the Storm

  Okay, I was wrong, I went with them. They made me go. I had no choice, mostly because Mom refused to cook anything and leave it behind for me. When I was putting up a fuss about going with them, she basically cleaned out the fridge and then let me have a look at it. It was terrifying. I could feel my stomach rumbling just staring at it. I don’t have any money either. I used to have a job in a fast food place, but I quit. Bad decision, because not being gainfully employed has put me at the mercy of the parental units for funds. So, unless I wanted to starve for the ten days they were gone, I had to go with them.

  And to be honest, deep down, I think I wanted to go. Can’t explain that one.

  Dad used to have a Jeep and Mom had a mid-sized Toyota. Now they both have hybrids, little cars that give me about as much leg room in the back seat as an NBA player in a matchbox. I’m kind of built like a stork right now anyway, legs about twice the length of the rest of me. This has only been the case for maybe six months. I’m growing like a weed. My feet look like pontoons on the end of my legs and I trip over just about anything and run into everything. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and swear I’m a foot taller than when I went to bed. It’s like I’m a monster in a Guillermo del Toro movie. I can eat anything at any time of any day. I can pulverize a snack that Mom has left out for me, then destroy an entire meal, seconds and thirds included, and then inhale a couple of bowls of cereal about half an hour later. I might be exaggerating a bit, but I need fuel, constantly.

  Maybe the toughest thing about the trip was being without my phone. Well, I actually wasn’t without it and neither were Mom and Dad. We all brought our phones. They were just out of reach. All three were in airplane mode, imprisoned in the glove compartment like a full-course meal sitting just out of the reach of three starving people. Well, one at least. Though I’m pretty sure that before we were even out of Toronto, Mom and Dad were ready to tear the friggin’ cover off the glove compartment to see what the heck was happening on their phones.

  But they pretended they weren’t thinking about it at all. I’d never seen them go for more than half an hour without looking at their screens, a fact that they would deny, since they were so caught up in how much I, the stupid “millennial,” was constantly on his. They had all sorts of theories about the effect these devilish little apparatuses had on my generation, what they were doing to our social skills and our imaginations and all that, but I swear Dad was glancing over at the glove compartment every few minutes. On the surface, he and Mom acted as if all was normal. Actually, it was hyper-normal, disgustingly, perfectly normal, like a scene from a 1970s family sitcom.

  “So, Dylan, tell me a bit about some of your friends this year,” said Dad.

  “Uh, just getting started at school this term, Dad. Haven’t really met anyone new yet.”

  I had my head pressed against the window trying with everything I had not to be bored right out of my skull or just fall asleep. The suburbs east of Toronto were passing by and Mom and Dad had some Beatles, Rolling Stones, and James Brown playing. Groovy. I had a map on the seat beside me—a paper one, a relic from a different time—that Dad had given me to follow where we were going. He is into that sort of thing, likes to know exactly where he is at all times, likes to know how far it is to each place we are going, the population of all the towns and cities, all that stuff. I must admit, I’m a bit like that too, don’t know why. Mom couldn’t care less. I guess she figures we will get where we are going without having to know the distance to each place and everything about it. She’d rather talk about real things going on in our lives. Gag me. That was what bothered me about Dad’s question; he doesn’t usually ask me that sort of thing.

  “Let’s talk about Thomas’s death,” Mom said.

  That’s what she calls Bomb. He was my winger, both in hockey and in life. Bomb Connors was an emotional guy sometimes, not always the brightest bulb in the candelabra, but a really good guy. Someone I wish now I’d talked to more—really talked to, if you know what I mean. He bought it in a head-on collision on the 401. He was driving with another kid who hadn’t had his license for very long and some guy going the wrong way on the highway ran into them. Poof. It was all over. It was pretty tough to deal with, but I think Mom and Dad make too big a deal about it. I’m just going through some things right now, being in a new school and losing Bomb. I’ll get over it.

  “Let’s not,” I said.

  “There is no use in keeping it all inside,” said Mom.

  “First of all, there is some use in that, trust me, and there isn’t really a lot I’m keeping inside anyway.”

  “Sometimes,” said Dad, “guys like to keep things to—”

  “Oh, don’t give me that manly crap, you two. It’s not healthy.”<
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  There was silence for a while.

  “Hey!” said Dad suddenly, as if he had just discovered insulin, “Kingston is the next place up ahead. You know, it was once nearly named the capital of Canada and the first Prime Minister came from here!” It went on from there. He launched into another one of his monologues. He is given to that kind of thing. Mom and I used to call his speeches the “John Maples Lectures.” We never told him. It was kind of our joke, together.

  I didn’t like the long stretches when there wasn’t much happening outside my window. Lately, silence and boredom had become my enemies. I start thinking too much, and about the wrong things. That was usually when Bomber appeared, and a couple of times on that road trip he did, sitting in the back seat hoping I would talk to him, sometimes looking kind of smashed up from his accident. I tried hard to keep staring out the window whenever he showed up. The drive from Kingston to the Quebec border, without a single stop and just kilometre after kilometre of highway, was difficult.

  “Hey, man,” Bomb finally said just east of Cornwall, “say something. Tell your parents how you’re feeling. Open up. I died. It happens.”

  “Go away,” I said in my mind. “No, don’t go away. Just…don’t bother me about this.”

  I remembered the day of the accident. Bomber’s mom actually called to tell us. I was home alone. She started to cry, told me all about the funeral arrangements. I think I said, “okay.” That was it. I didn’t go, of course.

  As the kilometres passed, Mom tried to tease me into talking a few times, telling me to “please keep it down and give the others a chance to say something.” I wouldn’t bite, though.

  I was glad when we got to Montreal, where we stopped for the night and stayed in a nice “boutique” hotel right downtown. They took me out for crêpes and a very Montreal-type meal in a café on one of those very Montreal-type streets where you can sit outside and eat and you hear French in the air, and it’s almost like the city is trying to tell you how much cooler it is than Toronto. Mom didn’t try asking me about Bomb again.

  “You know what I think,” said Dad, as he set his fork down after polishing off a chocolate-and-strawberry special, “I think it’s just great not to have my phone at my beck and call all the time. I really do. I’m getting used to it. It makes you want to talk to others. Being social is just so important in life, a great tonic!”

  Of course, really, he was just telling me how he thinks I should act. It was pretty obvious. He seemed a little jumpy, actually. Phone withdrawal.

  The next day we didn’t drive too far, just to Quebec City. We stayed at another boutique hotel and then visited the Old City, the whole place like a throwback to the 1700s, and there was even more French in the air and more outdoor cafés and it seemed as if Quebec City was trying to tell us how much cooler it was than Montreal. That’s a Canadian thing. We are like a whole bunch of siblings always competing with each other. A family though, definitely a family.

  The parental units kept trying to get me to talk. It was like they were hoping I was suddenly going to just pour out all my emotions and admit to all sorts of inadequacies and say I was going to do better in the future.

  “So, how do you like this?” asked Mom as we strolled along the wide boardwalk in the sunshine near this awesome old hotel called the Château Frontenac. It definitely looked like a castle. We could see out over the St. Lawrence River.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Nice,” I repeated.

  “Hey!” said Dad, “you know, this hotel was one of a chain of great railway hotels built across Canada. They put this baby up in 1893.”

  “Okay.”

  They hate one-word answers.

  “And this up here and kind of down below us is the Plains of Abraham. That was a where the fate of Canada got decided in 1759 in a gigantic battle between the French and the English. There was this guy named General Wolfe for the English and Montcalm for the French, and the redcoats came up the St. Lawrence over there.” Dad stopped and pointed up river. “They attacked the French and somehow climbed up the sheer cliffs below the fort right here and everyone just went at it, muskets and cannons blazing, bayonets out and hacking each other.”

  Now that sounded amazing.

  “That’s pretty awesome,” I admitted. Three words. Mom put her hand on my shoulder. I could just imagine that battle. I am pretty good at imagining things. I guess my face lit up a little. I leaned over the railing and looked down at the cliff. “I can almost hear the guns going off,” I said. “I wonder what it would really sound like. The soldiers would probably be crying out, wounded, and dying and all. It would likely sound pretty bizarre, the bullets zipping through the air, sucking into flesh, limbs getting sheared off, that sort of thing.”

  Dad smiled at me. Mom did not.

  “Violence never really solves anything,” she said. “Can we either talk about something else or at least tone down the blood and gore a bit?”

  Party pooper.

  The next day, we drove all the rest of the way to New Brunswick. We got up early, headed toward Rivière du Loup and then plunged down out of Quebec, past this place called St. Louis de Ha-Ha! I am not making that up—and the exclamation mark is part of the name, too.

  As I said, Canada is weird.

  We swept across the border into New Brunswick, past this little town called Edmunston and then swung east to go straight across the province toward the town of Bathurst on Chaleur Bay. That was where we were going to stay, with some friends of my parents’ from Toronto. These people had “given it all up,” moved out east, and had been bugging Mom and Dad to visit them ever since.

  The landscape got awfully boring awfully quickly. It was a bit interesting at first, kind of hilly, nearly mountainous. I had no idea there was anything even remotely like mountains in New Brunswick. Mostly, though, it was just trees. Evergreen, coniferous, whatever you call them. Trees and trees and trees and trees and trees and trees and trees and trees. It was so mind-numbing that Bomber didn’t even show up and I fell asleep. This wasn’t very promising. Even New Brunswick could not be this boring. It was like being in some sort of tunnel and I would come to my senses and then fade again, just waiting to surface at the other side. The only thing of any interest were these yellow signs with drawings of moose and cars on them…indicating that one of those bad boys might suddenly appear out of the fifty billion acres of trees and total your car…and you. Kind of cool.

  Finally, after a couple of hours, which seemed like about fifteen days, we emerged into semi-farmland and a few houses and finally we came to the city of Bathurst, though “city” is a very generous word. There wasn’t much to it.

  It was early afternoon. We stopped in at a Tim Hortons and grabbed some donuts and the parental units loaded up on coffee. I saw an old comedy skit once on TV with these guys dressed like typical Canadians, talking hockey and drinking beer, and wearing toques and named Doug and Bob McKenzie. Pretty funny. Well, everyone in this place looked like they were either them, or their wives or girlfriends, or related to them. It also seemed that everyone could speak both French and English. There were lots of people saying “eh” too, and being friendly and holding doors for other people. On the streets, they even stopped for pedestrians to cross in front of a car. In Toronto, every one of them would have been a corpse the second they tried that.

  We drove around a little after that so Dad could “show me the town.” That didn’t take very long. Even the big arena didn’t get me too excited, despite the fact that they have a Quebec Major Junior League team that plays in it, called the Acadie-Bathurst Titan. Kind of a cool name. Hockey is in my past now, though.

  All the signs in town were in both languages and for some reason there were also placards everywhere for local political parties.

  “I didn’t know there was an election happening,” I said.

  Mom was hap
py to explain. “It must be for a by-election, honey, one that takes place when a member of parliament dies or retires suddenly. This looks like a federal one.”

  There were blue signs for the Conservatives, red for the Liberals, orange for the NDP, and green for the Greens. But there were also lots of blue, red, and white signs promoting an “Independent” candidate, too. In fact, he had by far the most. I figured he was going to win. Maybe he and his gang were just better at getting lots of their stuff onto lawns. Theirs said things like, “VOTE FOR A REAL LOCAL GUY,” and “A FRIEND, A NEIGHBOUR, NOT A POLITICIAN,” or “KEEP ACADIE-BATHURST FOR ACADIE-BATHURST,” and “NO MORE ELITES!” The candidate was this guy named Jim Fiat and there were lots of pictures of him on his signs. He had perfectly combed blond hair, a big smile, and kind of looked like a salesman to me.

  Things appeared pretty working-class in town; it didn’t seem like they had too much money here. Then we headed out of the downtown area to the place we were going to stay. We drove through the suburbs, then out toward the water and saw the flat blue surface of Chaleur Bay, which was like a thick finger poking into the land out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

  We passed a fancy looking golf course and the houses started getting bigger and nicer, much nicer when we got near the beach and moved along a road that was parallel to the water. Dad was now leaning forward in the driver’s seat looking for the house. Despite myself, I started to get interested.

  “Who are these people, again?” I asked.

  Mom turned around and smiled at me, obviously thrilled that I was “engaging” for the second time in a short while. “Bill and Bonnie,” she said. “I don’t know if you remember them, but they used to live in Moore Park, about five doors down from us. Moved to the States for a while, and then came here.”

  “No.”

  “You were only little.”

  “Is it just them?” I was hoping for the smallest group of hosts as possible.

  “Yes. They’re wonderful. You’ll love them.”