Fireball

by Tyler Keevil

  ‘What do you think? Should we jump one of those mothers?’

  ‘Fuck off, Jules.’

  Julian loved talking about cliff jumping, but he hardly ever did it. Heights terrified him. Also, he didn’t like taking off his shirt. Not because he was fat – he had huge muscles from all the protein powder he gobbled – but because of his birthmark. He had this weird, fist-sized birthmark in the middle of his chest, right over his heart. It was bizarre. It freaked people out, including me, and Jules knew it. He kept that birthmark under wraps.

  ‘Come on. It’ll be sweet.’

  I said, ‘Go ahead, man.’

  He didn’t, of course. None of us did. We just sat there. Chris lit a smoke. The sun coated the canyon with a thick yellow glare and the rocks beneath our towels felt hot as a grill. Above us and to the right, clumps of people had gathered on the cliffs, waiting their turn. They went in one by one, like lemmings, and after each jump there was always a lot of hooting and cheering and applause. Some were jumping Superfly. That’s nothing. Even Julian had jumped Superfly. A few others were jumping Logs. It’s twice as high and pretty sketchy, but not too bad. I never go higher than Logs. Actually, hardly anybody goes higher than Logs. To jump Cooks, you have to climb onto this stump and leap blind through all these tree branches. Then you still have sixty feet to go before you hit water. Even if you land perfectly, you always touch bottom jumping Cooks. That’s what Chris told me, anyway. And if you land wrong, you just straight up die – which is how it got its name. People started calling it Cooks because that was the name of this kid who got killed doing it. Not the rich kid. Some other kid.

  That afternoon, a couple of guys were jumping Cooks.

  ‘Look at these clowns,’ Julian said.

  They were older than us and had those fake, doughy muscles that the guys from West Van develop by pumping tons of weights without actually doing anything else. One wore a pair of shiny Diesel swim trunks that probably cost about five hundred bucks. The other had on this raunchy little Speedo, so tight you could practically see his balls popping out the sides. I glanced over at Chris, just to see what he thought. He sat and watched them, the smoke dangling from his lips, his face totally blank.

  In the shallows across from us these Barbie-doll blondes were cheering them on.

  ‘That’s wicked, guys!’

  ‘Come on, just one more!’

  It wouldn’t have been so bad, except you could tell they were only shouting to get everybody else’s attention. So their boyfriends were jumping Cooks. So fucking what? It wasn’t like they were the first people to ever jump it. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the girls pulled a camcorder out of their beach bag, to record this great event. Every time the guys swaggered out of the water following a jump, they’d give each other a high-five and say something stupid into the camera, something like, ‘How about another one, babe?’ It was like watching two guys masturbate in public. Seriously. There was no stopping them.

  Finally, Chris decided to put an end to it.

  He stood up. He didn’t look like those guys at all. He was almost scrawny, his skin pulled tight over hard knots of muscle. Without saying anything, he flicked his smoke in the water and made his way up the cliffs. Everybody was already looking that way. Now the audience was all his. The steroid monkeys and their girlfriends stopped goofing around to watch. When he reached Cooks, he climbed up onto the stump. There was a moment – this moment when everybody sensed that something insane was going to happen – and then it did.

  ‘Holy shit!’

  He jumped stomach first, his arms and legs spreadeagled like a skydiver. He hung in that position as he dropped through the air. At the last possible second, he bent at the waist and pulled his arms and legs in, pointing them straight down at the water. That was how he hit: jacknifing through the surface without making any splash at all. When he surfaced, there was no hooting or cheering or applauding. The canyon suddenly went all quiet, like a funeral parlour – just the way Chris liked it. He’d pulled a suicide off Cooks. Nobody did that. Superfly, sure. Logs, maybe. But Cooks? You’d have to be insane to try it. That’s what all those people were thinking as they watched Chris slosh over to the bank. The thing is, Chris didn’t give a shit about impressing them. Like I said, he hated show-offs almost as much as he hated turtlenecks. He was just sick of those guys and their screeching girlfriends.

  One of them said, ‘That was pretty slick, man.’

  Chris looked at him, in that way of his, and the guy shut up.

  After that they put their camera away.

  The rest of the afternoon was perfect. By ‘perfect’ I mean that nothing spectacular happened at all. We burned a fat one and joked around – totally mellow. A couple of girls came over, wanting to get high. They were pretty cute, actually, but they turned out to be harsh gnats. Eventually we gave up talking to them and just made fun of them until they left. Then we munched out on this giant bag of nachos. Also, I think we went to get some pop from the gas station on the way home. I don’t really know. But basically, that’s the last time I can remember feeling normal. The next day we went down to the beach at Cates Park instead of the river. We did that sometimes, for a change. Now I wish we hadn’t, of course.

  But there’s no use thinking like that.

  5

  After everything that had happened to us, there was no way Chris was going to let Bates arrest him. Fuck that. It all seems sort of inevitable now, but it wasn’t like we planned it or anything. We didn’t know Bates was going to turn up at the beach – and we definitely weren’t looking for him. We’d spent most of our summer trying to avoid him. Nobody believed that, of course. All the articles said that we jumped him, and people just assumed it was true. The thing is, Vancouver really only has two newspapers. There’s a few other little papers, but the Sun and the Province are the main ones – and they’re both equally shitty. The Sun described Chris as ‘a cruel adolescent with a penchant for violence’. Whoever wrote that is a total fucking idiot. Cruel? Cruel is about the last word I’d use to describe Chris.

  Take that camp trip. We went on this camp trip with all the kids in our grade. The first night, some dickheads managed to snare a raccoon that had been digging in the food bin. Everybody heard the commotion and came out to watch. The guys strung the thing from a tree and started spearing it with sticks. It was pretty sickening. The campsite was lit up with tiki torches, and the circle of flickering faces reminded me of that film we’d watched in English class – the one about kids killing pigs on a desert island. Their spears punched in and out of the raccoon’s belly, making these wet, meaty sounds. You could smell the blood. It was everywhere: all over the raccoon, all over the forest floor. That was bad enough, but the screaming was even worse. I’d never heard an animal scream before. It was fucked. After a while, the guys wore themselves out. They stood around, holding their spears and talking about how tough they all were. Meanwhile, the animal just hung there, mewling like a kitten.

  ‘You better kill it,’ Chris told them.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You can’t leave it like that. Finish it.’

  The guys looked at the raccoon, twisting and turning on the rope. They shuffled their feet and glanced at each other, hoping somebody else would want to do it. Nobody did.

  Chris pulled out his pocket knife, the one his dad had given him, and walked over to the animal. Holding it behind the head he pointed its nose towards the sky. Then he slashed it across the throat. Blood spurted out, black and shiny in the torchlight, and coated his hand. The raccoon stopped moving and didn’t make a sound. Of course, after that everybody in the grade was talking about how Chris had killed a raccoon.

  When his old man died, Chris lived with us for a while. His mom had always been a bit of a booze-hound and it only got worse after that. She was too messed up to look after him so he stayed at our house. My dad was cool about it. He rented us restricted movies, played street hockey with us in the driveway, and even took us paintballing a few
times. I mean, my dad’s not actually cool, but he at least tried to think of cool stuff for us to do. Eventually things settled down at Chris’s house and he went home. For a few months, though, it had been like my dad was a dad to the both of us.

  Chris’s death hit him pretty hard, too.

  ‘I don’t know how he could just punch a cop like that.’

  ‘It didn’t happen like they say.’

  But he knew that – I’d told him already.

  ‘Did he punch the cop?’

  ‘Sure, a bunch of times.’

  We were sitting in the living room. My dad was holding the Province up close to his face, staring at the article as if it was written in some kind of secret code. He had a tall-boy of German beer in one hand. I’m pretty sure he was hammered. He hardly ever gets hammered in front of me but the day after Chris’s death was an exception.

  ‘You can’t just hit a cop.’

  ‘Bates started it.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘As soon as you do that, you’re crossing a line.’

  It really bothered him. He couldn’t get over it. The way he talked, you’d think knocking out a cop had killed Chris – not driving into a blockade at a hundred miles an hour. I guess it’s because my dad’s got this enormous respect for the law. He’s a lawyer, after all. I know what most people think about that. They think it means we’re rich, and that my dad’s an asshole. But here’s what they don’t understand. He’s not a typical lawyer. To be a typical lawyer you need to join a firm and work in a giant skyscraper downtown, on the top floor so your clients have to climb about thirty flights of stairs to reach your office. And then, when they finally make it up there, you charge them a grand just for saying hello. But my dad couldn’t do that. He tried it and he hated it. He hated all the other lawyers in the firm, too. So he rented an office above a bakery and started a private practice way the hell out in Ladner, where he does commercial work and land claims for the Natives. He cuts his clients pretty sweet deals, and in exchange they give him tons of smoked cod and sockeye salmon. I’m not complaining – it’s great salmon. But basically, my dad isn’t an asshole. He can act like a bit of an asshole sometimes, but that’s different from being one. And we’re not rich. I mean, we get by. I can’t deny that. But we’re not rich like people in West Van are rich, or like Julian’s family is rich. Jules is crazy rich. His dad’s a sports agent and his mom’s into some kind of pyramid scheme and every time I turn around they’ve got a new car – a Porsche or a Beamer or a Lexus. It’s like they’re planning on starting an auto mall in their garage.

  Occasionally, my dad’s obsession with the law can be a pain – like when he made me turn myself in. I understand now, of course. Doing that was probably the only thing that saved me from going to jail, or juvie, or whatever. I mean, Bates knew us both. We’d been arrested together earlier that week. It was only a matter of time before they came looking for me. When it happened, though, I felt like my dad was selling me out. He’d turned me over to the enemy.

  ‘Officer Bates claims you attacked him together.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you hit Officer Bates?’

  I shook my head.

  Two cops took me into this room with metal chairs and a metal desk, and kept me there. Totally alone. My dad warned me ahead of time about what to expect, but all their questions still caught me off guard. I felt like Alice when she comes face to face with those two fat guys. You know – the ones in the bow ties and beanie hats. Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

  ‘Are you saying Officer Bates is lying?’

  ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  I can’t pretend I wasn’t scared. The two of them stood on either side of my chair, looming over me. I kept my arms crossed and my head down. It was obvious how much they hated me. I couldn’t stop shaking – as if I’d suddenly come down with hypothermia.

  ‘I… didn’t… hit him.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit us, bud.’

  I gritted my teeth. Their faces blurred in front of me, and I had to sort of wipe at my eyes to keep from crying. I tried to think of what Chris would do. He wouldn’t let these cops push him around. Fuck that. He’d stare them down and tell it to them straight up.

  ‘Bates made a grab for Chris,’ I said. ‘Chris hit him. He kept hitting him and Bates went down. That’s what happened. I don’t care if you believe me or not.’

  It would have been awesome, but my voice cracked a little when I said, ‘or not’. Still, those cops were surprised. They drew back, blinking like I’d shined a flashlight in their eyes. Up until then they’d been putting words in my mouth, coaxing my story out of me – like they did with Karen and Julian. Now I knew how to handle them. After that, I stuck to my story.

  They can only push you around if you don’t push back.

  6

  The cop stood there, shouting to us from shore.

  ‘Break a window! See if you can break one of the windows!’

  We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. It was like trying to stop a boat from sinking. Except, in this case, the boat was a big black Cadillac with an old lady inside. And we weren’t really trying to stop it from sinking – we were trying to get her out of there.

  In other words, it was nuts.

  Julian hung off the driver’s door, yanking on the handle like a wild man. It wouldn’t budge. I’d scrambled onto the roof. The shiny paint felt hot and slippery beneath my knees. I tried bashing the windscreen with my fists, but from that angle I didn’t have the strength to break it. My eyes stung with salt and sweat and my vision was blurred to shit. When I looked at the shore, all I could see was this mass of bodies in bathing suits, with a cop standing at the front. There was a lot of yelling and screaming going on. None of it meant anything to me. We were all alone out there. Shielding my eyes, I leaned forward and peered through the windscreen. I could see the driver slumped against the steering wheel, half-submerged in water. There wasn’t much time. Actually, there was no time. If it wasn’t for Chris, we would have lost her for sure. While Jules and I struggled away, he dove down to the bottom and came up with that rock. It glittered in the glare of the sun, jagged and covered with barnacles and twice as big as his fist.

  ‘Give me some room, man.’

  Jules backed off as Chris paddled around to the driver’s side. Grabbing the handle for leverage, he smashed the rock through the window. It didn’t shatter like regular glass. It cracked into all these tiny pieces, like diamonds. Chris cleared the leftovers away with his hand. I think that was when he must have cut himself. It wasn’t a little cut, either. There was a gash on his wrist and streaks of blood all along his forearm. Chris didn’t even notice. He just reached through, unlocked the door, and yanked it open. As soon as he did, water rushed in and the car started sinking faster.

  ‘Come on!’

  I slid off the hood and splashed over to him. He propped the driver up, getting her head above water. At the time, we didn’t pay much attention to her. I mean, we were too busy saving her to notice much about her. I only remember seeing the white ringlets of hair plastered to her scalp, and the way her pink dress billowed up in the water like a parachute.

  Chris struggled among all that fabric.

  ‘This goddamn seatbelt’s stuck!’

  Most of the cab had gone under. Julian and I moved in to help. The two of us wrenched on the belt while Chris ducked beneath the surface to work the buckle. It was jammed, all right. Maybe from the water, maybe from the crash. I don’t know. But we pried it loose.

  Somebody shouted: ‘Get her out of there!’

  It was that cop again. He was full of great advice.

  Chris took her by the shoulders, Julian got hold of an arm, and I grabbed fistfuls of pink dress. We tugged and pulled. Somehow, we managed to drag her free of the car. This cry went up on shore. People were cheering for us. But she was a dead weight, limp and lifeless in our arms. It took all three of us to swim her back. As we drew close, the cop waded out to
meet us, full of encouragement. We didn’t know him then, but it was Bates.

  ‘Great job, guys – now bring her up here.’

  According to the Sun, we ‘helped Officer Bates perform a water rescue’. I laughed pretty hard when I read that.

  7

  People think I’m exaggerating when I talk about his fights. I mean, he wasn’t even fully grown. How tough can a sixteen year old be, right? They only say that because they never saw it happen. Chris didn’t swing and flail and throw haymakers like all those treats you see in internet videos. His punches sort of exploded out of him – these little bombs that blew up right in your face. Also, it was almost impossible to knock him out. I guess his skull was extra hard or something, because he could take tons of punishment without going down. It was like a special ability or a super power. Even when he should have lost, he usually won.

  ‘Hey Razor – what’s up?’

  ‘Not much, Kristofferson.’

  He’d called me from Lonsdale. We biked over there once in a while, to play games at the Hippo Club Arcade – back before it burned down.

  ‘You want to come meet me?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll come and beat you, all right.’

  ‘The old beat and greet, huh?’

  On the other end of the line, I heard somebody swearing. The voice sounded tinny but clear, as if they were shouting at him from nearby.

  Chris said, ‘Can you hold on a minute?’

  ‘Yeah. Who’s that?’

  But he was already gone. I heard more shouting, then some scuffling and this cracking sound, like a broom handle being smacked against concrete.

  Chris’s voice came to me faintly: ‘Are we done? Huh?’

  A moment later he was back on the line, panting.

  ‘So,’ he said, as if it was nothing, ‘where should we meet?’