Fireball

by Tyler Keevil

  ‘You fucker,’ I said. I think I was crying. Not a lot, but a little. ‘I hate you, fucker.’

  Pat laughed. So did his friend. If they’d been smart, they would have gone over to finish Chris off. Instead they stood there laughing like jackasses. I guess they thought he was all done. So did I, for that matter. They only stopped laughing when Chris moved. He got a hand beneath him, then a knee, and sort of peeled himself off the ground. Real blood dribbled from his mouth, smearing his make-up and covering his chin. All of a sudden he actually did look like a zombie, like something you couldn’t kill.

  Pat said, ‘You’re kidding me, right?’

  In answer, Chris took off his hoody and tossed it aside, almost casually. He raised his fists and spread his feet slightly apart. I knew that stance.

  ‘Okay,’ Chris said. ‘Let’s go.’

  They asked me – a bunch of times – why I got in the car with him that day.

  That’s why.

  When they took our photo for the paper, Chris wore that same outfit. Not the make-up, obviously, but the jeans and hoody. It wasn’t like he had tons of clothes or anything. Besides, having the jeans all cut up like that looked pretty sweet, even if he wasn’t trying to be a zombie. I still have a copy of the picture. I’ve handled it so much the clipping is getting tattered, and you can’t really make out our faces any more. Julian’s dressed in a suit. The medal is hanging from his neck and he’s beaming at the camera like a real champ. I’ve got mine around my neck, too. But I look uncomfortable and sort of confused about the whole thing. Then there’s Chris. He’s holding his medal at his side and looking off frame. The expression on his face is distracted, as if he’s seen something the rest of us haven’t. As if he already knows what’s coming.

  11

  Surreal. That’s the word for it.

  It was just like that Hayden song. You know – the one about the woman who locked her kids in their station wagon and drove it straight into a lake, killing them all.

  The car is rolling down to water…

  Why are we strapped in our seats…

  Except, in this case, it was the lady – not the kids. And she’d strapped herself in there. Plus, it was an accident. Or everybody thought it was. But basically, whenever I hear that song, I can’t help thinking about it.

  The beach at Cates used to be pretty sweet. It was never that crowded or anything, and the only people who went there were potheaded hippies and a few grimy beachcombers. But over the last few years it’s suddenly become the place to be, and all these treats have started turning up. I don’t even know where they come from. Probably Sentinel or Handsworth or one of the other shitty schools in West Van. It’s getting almost as bad as Kits Beach. The girls just lie there, oiled up with suntan lotion and trying to look like models. The guys are even worse. They’ve all got waxed chests, stiff limbs, and orange skin from popping too many tanning pills. They kind of look like department store mannequins, actually. The only difference is that mannequins can’t move. These guys are always moving. They prance around the beach, hucking frisbees and smacking volleyballs and laughing these super fake laughs. I don’t know why they drive halfway across the North Shore to show off at our beach, but watching them isn’t exactly an enjoyable experience. It wasn’t for Chris, anyways.

  Julian saw things a bit differently.

  ‘What do you think, guys? Want to toss the frisbee?’

  He started bringing this beach bag to Cates, filled with power bars and bottled water and at least four kinds of sunscreen. He even carried a frisbee in there, hoping that one day Chris and I would change our minds and play with him. Or maybe he secretly wanted somebody else to ask him. Maybe he was planning on becoming a mannequin all along.

  I said, ‘I don’t think so, man.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Fuck off, Jules.’

  Chris hated frisbee. He harsh sucked at it, too. He threw like a girl, with this very limp wrist. That’s because he never played. You can’t be good at something you hate. If he wanted to, he could have practised frisbee for a week and he’d have been better than anybody. He didn’t bother, though. Just looking at a frisbee made him want to fight somebody. So what we did at the beach was the same as what we did at the river: we lazed around. We’d find a sunny spot on the grass and put on our shades and light up.

  ‘Man, what a scorcher.’ Jules took off his hat to wipe his forehead. Underneath his hair was all wet and spiky, like a baby chicken’s. ‘How’s that bowl coming, Chris?’

  ‘It’s coming in your mouth.’

  The sun had stopped dead, directly overhead, like a white-hot nail pounded into the sky. Light smashed down against the water, shattering into these blinding shards. Stepping onto the sand was like sticking your foot into a pit of coals. That’s how hot it was – too hot to move, too hot to doze, too hot to do anything but lie there and get ridiculously stoned.

  ‘Hit this, Razor. It’s blazing.’

  Chris handed me his pipe – one of those glass pipes with psychedelic patterns in it. I sucked hard on the mouthpiece. Smoke scalded along my throat and filled my lungs. I didn’t exhale. I just sat there with a tingling tightness in my chest as the pipe passed from me to Julian to Chris. When it came back to me, I coughed up smoke and took another hoot, and another, holding it in longer each time. After the next one my head rush didn’t wear off. I knew what that meant.

  ‘Razor?’

  Chris offered me the pipe. It had come full circle again.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m good, man.’

  My skull had gone all light, like a balloon. At any second it was going to lift clear of my shoulders and float straight up, leaving the grass and sand and surf miles below. Chris and Julian kept smoking. I ran a hand through my hair, feeling the strands all damp and stringy with sweat. I began to notice things. I noticed the seaweed smell of low tide and the reek of food frying at the concession. I noticed the lazy burr of mosquitoes and the lap of sea on sand. I noticed the total still­ness of the day – the way the heat seemed to stifle everything.

  And I noticed that car.

  It was long and low and ancient – some kind of old-school sedan. It cruised along like a glossy-black landshark, coming down the road that connects Dollarton to the parking lot. Sunlight flashed off the chrome and windshield, as if the whole cab was glowing.

  At that point, you couldn’t see the driver.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  Chris and Julian looked at me.

  ‘They’re going too fast.’

  We were sitting next to the boat launch so we saw exactly how it happened. There was no wild swerving or braking or honking. That’s what some people said but they were lying. When I’m baked I remember things way better so I’m sure about this. The car just kept going, picking up speed. It flew past the parking lot and headed straight towards the boat launch. There was this moment when I thought to myself, It’s not going to stop. And it didn’t. It rolled down the ramp and slipped into the ocean, smooth as a submarine.

  Chris said, ‘Shit.’

  The three of us stood up together to watch. The car cleared the ramp and floated about ten feet further. Bubbles boiled up around the doors and bumpers and steam started hissing out from under the hood. Now we could see the driver at the wheel, just sitting there.

  Someone on the beach screamed, ‘Oh my God!’

  Then everybody started shouting and running around. It reminded me of that saying: like a chicken with its head cut off. There were about six hundred chickens on the beach that day and they’d all had their heads cut off. I guess one of them had the sense to call for help, since Bates turned up a little bit later, but other than that they were pretty much useless. They were great at tossing frisbees around or rubbing each other down with suntan oil, but when it came to something like this their mechanical limbs short-circuited and their robot brains blew a fuse. The thing is, I wasn’t much better. I was so fried I might have stood and stared with the rest of them, hoping somebody el
se would know what to do.

  Somebody did.

  Chris said, ‘Fucking come on.’

  Then he sprinted down the boat ramp and dove in.

  I followed.

  She’d had a stroke. That’s what the doctors said, and I believed them. There was no other explanation for why an old lady would drive her car into the ocean like that. She’d felt it coming on and turned off Dollarton highway. Then she’d lost control – of her body, of the vehicle – and ended up in the drink.

  Everybody agreed on that.

  Of course, there’s no way to be sure. I mean, did she actually have the stroke while she was driving, or did she have it after she’d sucked back a few litres of seawater? Nobody asked that question. They just assumed it was an accident – like with Chris’s dad. I guess they didn’t want to think about the alternative. I thought about it, though. I thought about it before we ran into that guy at the funeral, and after what he said I thought about it even more.

  I still do.

  The cop was older than us, but only by a few years. His face was round and fleshy, like he’d never lost his baby fat. Also, his uniform looked one size too small. I don’t know if he’d just grown too chubby for it, or if they were cutting costs at the police department, but either way he didn’t fit that thing. He looked more like a kid who’d dressed up as a cop for Halloween.

  Basically, that was Bates. That’s what was waiting for us on shore. He waded into the water up to his knees, but he didn’t actually help carry her. He just ordered us around.

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

  I could barely walk. My legs felt like strips of liquorice and I was quivering all over. We managed to pulled her up the boat ramp. Soaking wet and limp as a doll, she must have weighed about five hundred pounds. Her dress dragged and slithered across the concrete, and left streaks of water where it touched. The beach mannequins gathered around us, pressing in and pushing against our backs. They wouldn’t shut up, either. They kept whispering and chattering like the whole thing was part of some reality TV show.

  ‘Back the hell up!’ Chris yelled.

  ‘Let’s remain calm, here,’ Bates said. ‘Everybody just remain calm.’

  We ignored him. Even then, we knew he was full of shit.

  ‘Over there, man,’ Julian said. ‘Not on the cement.’

  We stretched the woman out on the grass beside the boat ramp. She looked awful. Actually, she looked worse than that. She looked dead. The skin on her face was grey and puckered. Both eyes showed white except for a sliver of iris just below the lids. Her lips had gone all blue and her mouth was parted as if she’d just seen something really, really, horrible.

  Bates said, ‘Oh, shit.’

  Then somebody screamed. It wasn’t a girl, either. One of those big, beefy guys let out a little shriek, like a baboon.

  ‘She’s dead!’

  ‘She’s not breathing!’

  ‘What happened?’

  Chris shouted, ‘Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!’

  By that point, there must have been nearly fifty people surrounding us, all of them useless. Bates was useless, too. He stared at the lady with this frozen expression on his face, as if seeing her had turned him into stone. When I asked him if an ambulance was coming, he couldn’t even answer. He just stood there, like a total fucking pylon. In movies, cops are always the ones in charge. Not Bates. They printed it differently in the papers but the sight of Mrs Reever completely threw him. He didn’t know what the hell to do. We didn’t know what to do, either, but at least we did something. Chris started it. He knelt in the grass and pressed his ear to her chest, trying to listen.

  After a few seconds he said, ‘She’s not breathing.’

  I can’t remember whose idea it was. I mean, it wasn’t like one of us came out and said, ‘Let’s try to resuscitate her.’ We’d taken this stupid lifesaving course in gym class, and it all kind of happened automatically. We pulled it off, too. I don’t know how. In class, we screwed up every single time, but that day we were like this team of trained professionals. Jules held her shoulders, ready to flip her over if she choked. I knelt beside her and worked her heart with the heel of my hand. Chris was the one who breathed for her. He slipped a finger under her chin and tilted her head back, then pinched her nose with his other hand. It was pretty sick. There were little wispy hairs all over her chin, and yellow slime leaking from her nostrils. I couldn’t have done it. Not a chance. But Chris didn’t flinch. He leaned forward and put his mouth over hers – gently, as if he were kissing her.

  12

  The medals they gave us looked expensive. They were gold-plated, with a wreath etched all around the edges. Hero of the Week. That’s what it said on the front. Our names were engraved on the back. I guess the medals were kind of impressive and shit, but I wish they hadn’t made such a big deal out of it. We had to go downtown, to a conference room in City Hall. The air was rotten and dusty, like in the basement of a library. A bunch of people gave speeches and said how great we’d been. Then the old lady’s daughter got up and thanked us, all teary-eyed. Even Bates was there, getting a few words in on our behalf.

  ‘Every so often,’ he said, ‘kids can surprise you.’

  I bet he regrets saying that, now.

  They saved the worst part for the end. Everybody piled out onto the steps, where the press was waiting. There were reporters from the papers and a camera crew from City-TV, this local station. Nobody came from the CBC, though. We weren’t big enough news. Yet.

  The mayor made a lame speech and hung those medals around our necks, like a hangman preparing the noose. All these flashes went off, right in our faces. The mayor shook hands with each of us, smiling this super fake smile at the cameras. I don’t think he said anything to us. He said stuff about us, but not to us.

  He said, ‘If only we had more citizens like these young men.’

  After the photo session, the reporters asked us a bunch of questions, but they didn’t want to sit down and actually hear our version of things. They just needed a couple of easy quotes to put in their article. My dad told me how it works. They’ve got a quota for all the different sections in the paper: sports, news, politics, human interest. We were the human interest. The TV networks are the same. Nothing else had happened that week so we became this huge deal. Thanks a lot, dickheads. The guy from City-TV was pushier than all the others. He shoved his microphone right in Chris’s face.

  ‘How does it feel to be a hero?’

  Chris swatted the mic away. ‘I don’t know. All right, I guess.’

  They didn’t print that, for obvious reasons. I think they printed Julian’s answer instead. He said something very polite, something like: ‘We were just glad to be of assistance.’ That harsh cracked me up. But I don’t blame Jules. Not really. It was easy to get caught up in all that, and think we actually were the heroes they made us out to be. The press can make you believe anything. We’d pulled her out of there and revived her and got those medals so we had to be heroes.

  Two days later she died anyways.

  13

  They called him a dropout, which was another lie.

  Chris didn’t drop out of a single school. He got kicked out of at least six, but he never dropped out. That didn’t stop them, of course. They chased down all his old teachers, and each one said the same thing: that Chris had a history of bad behaviour. By ‘bad behaviour’ they meant that he didn’t do every single thing they said. He smoked weed. He skipped classes. He got in fights. It was like the reporters had a little list they needed to tick off so Chris would fit their shitty profile. All the staff they interviewed hated Chris, anyways – except maybe our principal, Mr Green. And Mrs Oldham. She was the band teacher. Me and Chris both joined band in grade eight. I think it was my dad’s idea. He had these clarinets stashed in the attic from when he played as a kid, and he gave them to us. We used to get super baked and meet in the music room at three o’clock with all the other band geeks
. Neither of us could play worth shit. We’d just sit there, making these shrill sounds on broken reeds and laughing our asses off. Mrs Oldham didn’t seem to mind. She was about eighty-nine years old and deaf as a skeleton. She always said she liked our enthusiasm. After Chris got kicked out, Mrs Oldham would sometimes ask me about him – even when I stopped going to band. She’d accost me in the halls, or catch me at my locker.

  ‘How’s your friend Chris doing these days?’

  ‘Oh. Okay, I guess.’

  She’d nod – sort of sagely – and keep walking. She was pretty cool, in a weird way. And she was the only teacher who didn’t say anything bad about Chris. If everybody else is saying something bad about a guy, most people will try and get in on the action. But Mrs Oldham kept it pretty real. She just told them Chris was a music enthusiast. That harsh cracked me up. It also made me cry, actually. I mean, when your friend dies, you expect to miss all the obvious things about him. But what you don’t really expect is to miss all the little things, too. Like the way he played the clarinet. Chris played his kind of backwards, with his right hand above his left instead of the other way around. He only knew about five notes, and they were never the right ones. That didn’t bother him, though. In the middle of a recital, you would hear Chris blaring away, making up his own music as he went along. I didn’t have the guts to do that. Maybe in practice, but not during a performance.

  I always just sort of faked it.

  Our old school, Seycove, used to be pretty rad. Since I left apparently they’ve fucked it up and made it like all the others, but when we first arrived in grade eight it was just this giant chunk of concrete, painted blue and grey, with dirty linoleum floors and battered steel lockers. There was never enough space. They kept having to add portable classrooms and extensions to accommodate all the students. Our sports teams always got their asses kicked, and when it came to exams and academic standings and shit like that the teachers at Seycove kept things fairly casual – which was fine by me.