Fireball

by Tyler Keevil

  Then they went and pulled the plug on her.

  Apparently she’d inhaled too much seawater. We’d brought her body back to life but her brain was completely wiped, like a broken hard drive. They could have kept her on life support forever and she would have stayed like that. There was nothing left. So her family gave them permission to let her die. The papers didn’t publicise that so much. It would have ruined their story. But it still got around. Then there was a weird period, when people didn’t know what to make of us. Were we heroes or weren’t we? Did it still count for anything if the old lady had died anyway?

  I don’t blame them. Not really. I didn’t know what the hell to make of it, either. Her dying didn’t change our actions, but it made them sort of pointless. I mean, we’d done our best, but we hadn’t actually accomplished anything. It was like this movie I saw – where some guy rushes into a burning building and lifts a lady out on his shoulders. He thinks he’s saved her life, and can’t figure out why all the other firemen are cracking up.

  Then he realises he’s carrying a dummy.

  20

  They were totally alone, in the quiet of that cabin, surrounded by all these flickering candles. Well, technically they weren’t totally alone – me and Jules had puked and passed out in the corner, like a couple of dead marmots. Drinking all that whiskey and vodka, and eating nothing but Pot Noodles, wasn’t the greatest idea we’d ever had. And in that state, we didn’t really count for much – so it was as if they were alone. Obviously something was going to happen, and it did: Karen took off her shirt. I mean, when it came to hooking up Karen didn’t mess around. She pulled it off, tossed it aside, and stood right in front of Chris with her hands on her hips.

  That’s what he said, anyhow.

  ‘Was she wearing a bra?’

  ‘No. No bra.’

  He told me about it down at the Hippo Club – this super shitty arcade on Lonsdale. It’s not there any more. Somebody burned it down. Right to the ground. Actually, now that I think about it, it was the kind of place that deserved to be burned to the ground. Most of the games just ate your quarters and the controls always felt greasy and sticky. The only people who went there were losers and loners and half-assed wannabe drug dealers.

  And us, of course.

  ‘Did you feel her up?’

  ‘Not at first,’ Chris said. ‘She just wanted me to look.’

  ‘That’s potent, man.’

  We were standing side by side, playing Space Invaders – that old-school game where the aliens march back and forth in little rows, dropping lower and lower, coming down to get you. I could see Chris’s reflection in the screen. Totally intense. He always got intense when we played Space Invaders. They had new games at the Hippo Club, too, but we both hated that stuff. We only liked games where the graphics harsh sucked – like where you can hardly even tell what’s happening half the time since everything is just blocky and weird.

  ‘So were they pretty sweet looking?’

  Chris patted his fire button. ‘What?’

  ‘You know. Her tits.’

  He said they were super pale. The rest of her was tanned but her breasts were almost white. Except for her nipples, obviously. Her nipples were dark. I guess because of her complexion or something. I don’t know. But he said they were sort of brown. Like little acorns poking out of her chest.

  ‘Watch out for that guy.’

  Only one alien was left. He’d turned red and started moving super fast. That’s what the aliens do when you kill off all their friends – they get ridiculously angry.

  ‘I got him covered.’

  I lined up my ship and kept firing until I hit him. Then we took a little breather, loosening up for the next level. Chris shook out his wrists and rolled his shoulders.

  ‘But you touched them eventually, right?’

  He shrugged. ‘Sure.’

  Chris wasn’t one of those guys who liked to brag about all the shit he did with chicks. Trying to get it out of him was pretty frustrating, actually.

  ‘Well, what did they feel like?’

  ‘I don’t know. They felt like tits, man. Soft and squishy and warm.’

  ‘Like fresh play dough?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Like that.’

  A new batch of aliens started crunching down the screen, and we picked them off one by one. We were on a roll. Neither of us had even lost a life yet.

  ‘Was that it? Or did you guys do some other stuff?’

  ‘I kissed her. She told me to kiss her so I did.’

  He didn’t say so, but I bet he kissed her pretty hard – almost like he was smothering her with his mouth, sucking all the breath out of her. Super passionate. He’d tasted death and kissing her must have been like the exact opposite.

  ‘Here comes the blimp,’ Chris said. ‘Shoot that fucking blimp, Razor!’

  The blimp is this thing that floats above the aliens, right at the top of the screen. I moved my ship over to the right and squeezed off a shot. I nailed it, too. Afterwards Chris told me what they did next. It was like my reward for hitting the blimp.

  ‘You know that desk, in the corner of the hut?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. It was an old work desk. ‘What about it?’

  He said Karen got up on it and stretched out, like a patient on an operating table. Only, in this case, she was more like the doctor. She told him exactly what to do. She told him to kiss her neck and throat and shoulders, and she told him to kiss her belly and ribs and hips, right down to the edge of her jeans. She even told him to kiss her on the nipples.

  ‘You’re shitting me,’ I said.

  ‘No. Hey – look out.’

  But the aliens had got me. My ship made a little groaning sound and disintegrated. After that our game went downhill. I just couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking about them, hoping he’d tell me more. But apparently that was as far as it went. They both crawled into separate sleeping bags and drifted off, innocent as mice. Maybe it would have gone further if me and Jules hadn’t been lying there. It’s hard to say, really.

  21

  Days during last summer always started the same. I’d sleep until noon. Then I’d get up and eat some cereal and sleep a little bit more. After that, I’d call Chris or he’d call me, unless one of us was working. Now and again, I cut lawns and raked leaves for old people in our neighbourhood, and Chris sometimes did a bit of casual labour for his mom’s ex-boyfriend who was a carpentry and construction contractor.

  Otherwise, we were home free.

  ‘What do you want to do, man?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Did you talk to Jules?’

  ‘Yeah. I told him we were riding our Beamers to Lonsdale.’

  That was the best way to ditch Jules. The day he got his driver’s licence, he stopped riding his BMX forever. He wouldn’t even ride one for the sake of riding one. He thought biking was kid’s stuff. He didn’t want to be seen pedalling up and down Lonsdale, especially by his pals from the winter club. That was fine by us. Julian was our buddy and everything, but we had stuff we did without him, and he had stuff he did without us. Like play tennis.

  ‘What’s Karen doing?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s out shopping.’

  Karen was obsessed with shopping. So was Julian, actually. Come to think of it, the two of them had a lot in common. They were both rich, they were both shopaholics, and they both turned out to be fairly treacherous.

  ‘Screw it, man,’ I said. ‘Let’s bike to Lonsdale, then.’ I figured we might as well, since he’d already told Jules that’s what we were doing. ‘We can hit up the Hippo Club.’

  ‘Yeah. We could put the hippo in the tub.’

  ‘I’m feeling pretty tubby today.’

  ‘You’re sounding like a bit of a tub-thumper, all right.’

  That was how we talked when we were alone. Don’t ask me why.

  ‘I’ll be there in ten.’

  ‘Okay, tenpin.’

  It was another scorcher. That summer ju
st kept getting hotter and hotter. They talked about it on the news and everything. There was nearly a drought. That hardly ever happens in Vancouver. There’s about nine hundred rivers and lakes all over the Lower Mainland so having a drought is a pretty huge deal. Not to mention uncomfortable. Usually I love biking but that day it was murderous. I started sweating before we’d gone more than a few blocks.

  ‘Do you think you guys will do it?’

  ‘I told you I don’t know.’

  We took a break at the corner store just before the bridge. There was shade there, and pop. We drank the pop and sat in the shade and lit this super tiny joint, thin as a needle.

  ‘But she wants to do it, right?’

  ‘I think so. She talks about it a lot.’

  I took a quick toke and washed it down with some pop.

  ‘Yeah? What does she say?’

  ‘You know. Weird stuff. “I want your first time to be with me.” Stuff like that. And how she thinks about giving me gummers.’

  I choked up smoke and glanced at him, just to make sure he wasn’t messing with me.

  ‘She’s a pretty potent chick, huh?’

  ‘Yeah. Come on – let’s keep going.’

  I didn’t want to keep going, but Chris was already getting on his BMX. He rode this silver Mongoose that he’d bought at a garage sale and totally fixed up. He’d done the same for me, actually. I had a Huffy – this fairly old-school Huffy with rainbow spoke beads.

  We pedalled along the low road, down by the train tracks. Just as we came off onto Esplanade, we heard this sharp blaring sound – like the squawk of an extremely fat goose. I knew that sound. By then it was as familiar and annoying as the school bell, or an alarm clock. We pulled over, still kind of hoping that the squad car might cruise past us.

  It didn’t, of course.

  After the speeding ticket fiasco, we just kept running into him. We’d be down at the beach, hanging out, and all of a sudden he’d be there – checking our pockets and rooting through our bags. Or we’d be chilling in the Cove and we’d spot him prowling around in his patrol car. He was all over the place, like there was more than one of him. He’d pop out of bushes, or appear behind you, or be waiting for you as you came around a corner. It reminded me of this movie we saw one time, about a psycho cop that starts killing people who break any little law: speeding or jaywalking or littering or anything. He pulls up to them and shines his flashlight right in their face and then blows them away.

  It’s pretty nuts, actually.

  And this thing with Bates was almost that nuts. We became his favourite hobby. Some guys collect stamps, other guys buy porn mags. Bates hassled us. He really got off on it, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if he drove down to the Cove specifically to hassle us – that’s how much he hated our guts. Don’t ask me why. I doubt he even knew why. It started after Chris lipped him off that night he gave us the speeding ticket, and just kind of snowballed from there. It was like he wanted to see how far he could push us. His favourite thing to do was confiscate our beer. He loved pouring the cans out one by one, as slowly as possible, making sure we watched. And if we didn’t have any beer, he’d think of something else. He’d think of something super lame and stupid, and hassle us about that instead.

  ‘Hey heroes,’ he said. ‘Where are your helmets?’

  No joke. He wanted to know where our fucking helmets were.

  ‘We don’t have any,’ I said.

  ‘It’s illegal to ride bikes without helmets.’

  Maybe it is. But nobody had ever told us before.

  Chris said, ‘So?’

  Bates swaggered over to him. He hated Chris most of all. He could push me around, and make Jules cry, but against Chris he was powerless – which drove him absolutely insane.

  ‘So maybe I’ll give you a ticket. How’s that sound, hero?’

  ‘It sounds pretty sweet,’ Chris said.

  He wasn’t being lippy, either. He just happened to be in this extremely good mood. I mean, he’d already hooked up with Karen and pretty soon they’d be doing it. Even Bates couldn’t rile him under those circumstances.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We love tickets. They’re awesome.’

  ‘Me giving you a ticket is awesome?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Chris patted me on the back. ‘Super awesome.’

  Bates sort of laughed. It was short and loud, like a fart coming out his mouth. ‘We got a couple of comedians, here,’ he said. ‘What a great combination.’

  He was trying to play it cool, but you could tell he didn’t know what the hell to make of us. I bet he thought we were high on some super harsh drug, like crack cocaine or crystal meth. When his radio started making noise, he looked almost relieved. He walked over to the car and picked up the receiver, keeping one eye on us as if he thought we might hop on our bikes and ride away. And as soon as his back was turned, that’s exactly what we did.

  ‘Hey Razor,’ Chris whispered, ‘let’s jet.’

  We eased away from the curb and started pedalling. Totally casual.

  ‘Hey! Get back here!’

  ‘Bite me, Batesy!’

  He had his car, but we had a pretty solid head start. Plus, we knew all the shortcuts around Lonsdale. We turned up behind the abandoned car wash, hung a right, and cut across this overgrown park filled with rusty hubcaps and old tyres. Then we zigzagged through a bunch of alleys and side streets. Bates hounded us the entire way. Sometimes his siren was close, other times it was far off, like an air raid warning in those old war movies.

  Then, pretty soon, there were two sirens.

  ‘Damn, man.’

  ‘This is getting heaty.’

  ‘Let’s ditch the Beamers,’ Chris said. ‘We’ll come back for them, later.’

  We hopped off and threw our bikes over a fence. Then we started walking. We walked back towards Lonsdale and ducked into this pizza joint on the corner – one of those places that sells pizza by the slice and nothing else. There were no tables or chairs. Just pizza.

  ‘I’ll have a ham and pineapple.’

  ‘Me too. Two ham and pineapple.’

  The guy working behind the counter gave us pizza. It was terrible. The temperature in there was about five hundred degrees, and the pizza had been sitting in the heat for hours. The crust had gone all soggy and the cheese was soaked through with oil. I took one bite and that was enough. I mean, when it’s that hot and you’ve been running from the cops the last thing you want is a mushy, melting piece of pizza. What I really needed was a pop.

  ‘Hey – you got any pop?’

  ‘What pop you want?’

  The guy was foreign or something. He didn’t look foreign but he talked foreign.

  ‘Root beer.’

  He gave me the root beer, but it wasn’t even cold. It was warm, and a little flat – like hot syrup. I’ve been to some pretty bad pizza joints, but that was the worst one ever. And we were stuck in it. We stood around in the stifling heat, pretending to eat soggy pizza and drink warm pop. After about five minutes, a cop car cruised past. Then it turned around and came back, going slower. It rolled to a stop right in front of the pizza place, which had these big glass windows. We could see the driver staring at us, squinting a little.

  ‘Come on, Razor!’

  We started running. We’d only run about ten yards when another car pulled out of the alley, blocking our escape. There were cop cars all over the place: behind us and in front of us and on both sides of us. Bates had called out half the North Van police force. I think there might have even a been a few cops from West Van. When he saw that, Chris just started laughing. I did, too. I mean, obviously I was wetting the bed a little, but at the same time I’d never seen so many squad cars in one place. Pedestrians stopped to stare, as if they were expecting some kind of huge drug bust. It was a total shitshow.

  Bates was the last to arrive.

  ‘Yeah. That’s them. Those are the guys.’

  He walked over with three other patrolmen. They grabbed
us, in case we tried to run again. There was one tall guy with a moustache and grey hair who looked a little wiser than all the rest. For that reason, I’m pretty sure he was a North Van cop. They’re part of the RCMP or the Mounties or whatever, which makes them a little more professional than the killer cops from West Van. They hardly ever shoot anybody, at least.

  ‘Why’d you run?’ he asked.

  ‘We didn’t want a ticket.’

  That was me. Chris didn’t answer. He was still trying to catch his breath.

  ‘What do you mean? A ticket for what?’

  ‘For not having helmets.’

  The old cop looked at Bates, as if he’d just admitted to wearing diapers.

  ‘That’s what this is about?’

  ‘Well, they ran, didn’t they?’

  The old cop just sighed and shook his head. Then he turned back to me.

  ‘You two caused us a lot of trouble.’

  ‘Yessir. Sorry about that, officer.’

  I actually was sorry, too. I mean, I didn’t mind apologising to this guy. He seemed like a real cop. Not like Bates at all. For one thing, his moustache was huge – nearly as big as his entire face. Also, he looked pretty washed-up. The best cops are always the wash-ups.

  ‘Well, give them the ticket, then.’

  The other officers waited while Bates wrote out the ticket. By that point, he knew he’d really screwed up. He could barely write the ticket properly. Then, when he ripped it out of his little book, he tore the paper right down the middle. One of the cops – the one holding Chris – snickered and tried to hide it behind his hand. That got his buddy going. Pretty soon, most of the cops were chuckling. Pretty soon, most of the cops were chuckling – except for Officer Moustache. He stood there with his arms crossed, looking completely pissed off.