Fireball

by Tyler Keevil

  I nodded.

  She pushed the twixer towards me across her desk. I reached out mechanically and dumped rum down my throat. It didn’t taste as good as it had before. There was lipstick all over the bottlemouth that gave it a bitter cherry flavour. Also, the rum was warm and oily, as if it had been simmering away on a stove. Super nasty. After one swig I dropped the bottle back on her desk, as far from me as possible.

  ‘How long have you known him?’

  ‘My whole life. Since preschool.’

  She felt around beneath all the papers on her desk until she found her ashtray and cigarettes. The ashtray was loaded with old butts – all mashed together like a pile of dead maggots. She had two smokes left: one for her and one for me. We leaned together and lit them over her lighter.

  She asked, ‘What are your favourite memories of him?’

  I puffed on my cigarette, but didn’t bother to inhale. I just wasn’t into it.

  ‘Hanging out, I guess,’ I said. ‘We rode our bikes around and rented movies. This one time we got high on nutmeg and saw the Northern Lights. We messed around with my dad’s video camera a lot, too. Making skits and films and stuff. That was cool. And we never got in fights. Not with each other, at least.’ I trailed off. I mean, there was no way I could put all my memories into words. It just sounded lame. ‘We went swimming, too. We swam all the time. In the river, in the ocean, in Julian’s pool. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Sounds like you were water babies.’

  ‘Sure. I guess.’

  ‘My daughter loved to swim, too. I think that made it even more of a shock, the way she died. I imagine it constantly. It’s difficult not to. She was a tremendous swimmer for her age but she didn’t have much chance.’ She reached for the rum again. She could really suck it back when she got going. ‘I can’t decide if it was a good way to go or not.’

  I thought of Mrs Reever, and Chris’s dad, and the long, cool drinks they’d taken.

  ‘Drowning’s okay,’ I said. ‘Better than almost any other way.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘I didn’t used to. Sleeping pills always seemed pretty nice. Or doing that thing with the running car and the exhaust pipe. As far as suicide goes, I mean. I wouldn’t hang myself, or cut my wrists. It’s too sick and melodramatic. People who pull that shit mostly just do it for the attention, anyways. I’d hate it. The only thing worse would be to die in a super lame household accident – like slipping in the shower or electrocuting yourself changing a light bulb. Dying that way would harsh suck. Dying any way would harsh suck, actually.’ I took a nervous little drag on my cigarette. I got pretty worked up talking about this stuff. ‘But if I had to go, like Chris, and if I really had the choice – like if somebody came up and asked me how I want to die – I’m pretty sure I’d say drowning. Actually, I know that’s what I’d say.’

  As I finished, she leaned forward to pick up the picture frame from her desk – the one with the photo of her daughter in it. She didn’t say anything for a while. She just sat there, tracing her daughter’s features through the glass, as careful as a blind person reading brail.

  She said, ‘You’ve obviously thought about it a lot.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  She smiled and put the picture down, making sure to get it at the proper angle. The rest of her desk was a mess of pens and papers and cigarette ash and spilled booze, but she was intent on getting that frame just right.

  ‘Do you think Chris wanted to die?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’ I sat up, because my back was getting all sweaty in that chair. It was hideous. ‘He wasn’t suicidal or anything. I just don’t think it was a big deal to him.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  She rested her hands behind her head and stretched both legs out on the desk. Her ankles were right there, directly in front of me, and she wasn’t wearing shoes or socks. Normally that would have made my day. There was one problem, though. Her soles. I’d never seen the soles of her feet before. They were rough and calloused and dry. Also, she had a wart on her heel. It was like finding out that your favourite piece of pottery – a mug or a bowl or whatever – has a chip. Her feet were chipped pottery. I couldn’t believe it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  She must have seen my face – but I pretended I didn’t know what she meant.

  ‘Well,’ I said, looking away, ‘my best friend is dead, and now I don’t feel like doing anything. I don’t feel like eating or sleeping or getting up in the morning or even breathing.’

  She leaned forward, reaching past her toes to pick up a pen and pad of paper from her desk. Then she settled back, pen ready, and started scribbling down notes.

  ‘That’s perfectly understandable. Chris’s death has made you realise that life is futile, that nothing really matters, that it’s all pretty pointless, etc. Sound about right?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘You could find religion. That’s what my husband did. My ex-husband.’

  ‘You left him?’

  ‘It was a little more complicated than that. People handle their grief differently.’ She tossed her notepad on the desk, and I saw that she’d sketched a cartoon picture of me – like the ones street artists do for money. It was pretty good, too. ‘My husband handled his by going to church and praying for our little girl. It’s a natural psychological reaction, but not one I was willing to deal with. You’re welcome to give it a shot.’

  I tried to imagine myself, kneeling in some boiling hot church.

  ‘I don’t think that’s for me.’

  ‘Fall in love, then. Or pick a career. Whatever you do, don’t think too much. That’s the best advice I can give you. And listen to music. Say, how about some Lennon?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, even though I wasn’t that stoked. ‘Put that guy on.’

  She brought her feet down and tugged open her top drawer. Her movements were all slow and deliberate, like a diver working underwater – but eventually she got the Discman started. It was that same song again. I guess it was her favourite or something.

  ‘Lennon’s the best, man,’ she said. ‘The absolute best.’

  She snapped her fingers to the beat, totally into it.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Too bad he got capped.’

  ‘Did you know his killer sat down to wait for the police? Wanted to be famous.’

  ‘What a treat.’

  She nodded. ‘He was carrying The Catcher in the Rye in his pocket, too.’

  ‘What’s The Catcher in the Rye?’

  ‘A book you’ll read one day.’

  A little while ago, I found a copy in the library. I liked it so much I didn’t take it back. I just told them I lost it. I mean, I could have bought my own copy but what the hell.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Listen to this.’

  Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV…

  ‘Isn’t that a great line?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’

  We kept listening, but I had a hard time paying attention. It was too hot and bright in there and I was getting a super bad headache. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and I guess she couldn’t either. After a bit, I started hearing these strange, nasal sounds beneath the music. She was snoring. Her head sank to one side, flopping against her shoulder. I stared at the sweaty mask of her face and the longer I stared the worse I felt. She was one of the best I’d met and all she had to offer me was booze and smokes and music, and a few witty words. I butted out my cigarette in her ashtray and got up, then crept over to the door. I only looked back once. She hadn’t moved. The light from the window stretched across her desk but couldn’t reach her.

  I shut the door.

  59

  Somebody filmed the crash.

  It must have been a bystander, because it’s shot entirely handheld, and the quality is pretty bad. Of course, none of the networks screened it. Not CBC or City-TV, or even Global – and those guys love broadcasting sensationalist shit. I guess they weren�
��t allowed. I mean, you can’t put something like that on television. Maybe in the States, but not here. I managed to see it, anyways. I downloaded it from a website – one of those websites that are full of real accidents and shootings and bizarre deaths. I saw clips of this Colombian drug dealer being executed and a pizza guy getting hit by a truck and some kid falling off a five story building.

  And I saw how Chris died.

  It’s all shot in one take. First you see the barricade by the cliff, and the cops scurrying around to get in position. There’s no sound. At least, there wasn’t any sound in the file I downloaded. The camera holds on the roadblock and zooms in a bit, before swinging over to the left, way down the road. That’s when you see the car, snaking back and forth around all these tight curves, coming right at you. The windows are bright with white-hot sunlight, almost like the cab is burning up. You can see a figure behind the wheel but you can’t make out Chris’s expression or anything like that. There’s this one moment, though, when the car rounds the last curve and slows down – as if he’s seen what’s waiting for him. It’s hard to say what he was thinking. Actually, I doubt he was thinking of anything right then, or anybody. He just needed a second to figure out what the hell was going on.

  Then he decided: ‘Fuck it.’

  He starts accelerating, and the camera zooms out, until the car and barricade are in the same shot. Next comes the moment when all the cops realise that he’s not going to stop, and the lady filming realises the same thing. I know it’s a lady because the footage goes all jerky as she backs up, trying to get out of the way, and for a few seconds you can see her feet and sandals. But she doesn’t panic. She just retreats about ten yards and keeps rolling.

  That’s when the cops open fire.

  First they shoot into the air, and when that doesn’t work they try to take him out. If you pause it, at a certain point, you can see the windshield go. They claim they got him but that’s total crap. I mean, maybe they shot him and shit, but that’s not the same as getting him. It’s not like they actually stopped him or anything. In the video, he just keeps going faster and faster and faster, like a plane about to take off. At the last second, the cops give up with the guns and scramble away from the barricade like dozens of blue cockroaches.

  Then he hits it.

  I watched that clip almost a hundred times. To see how it actually happened, I had to slow it down and play it frame by frame. The sawhorses are the first to go. They just disintegrate into splinters of wood. Then the two cars blocking the road jerk back like a pair of pinball bumpers. The weirdest part is how the back half of Chris’s car bursts into flame – not the front. I guess one of the bullets hit the gas tank or something. But even that doesn’t stop him. He keeps going – right through the guardrail, right over the edge. For a second the car hangs in mid-air, burning like a meteorite. Then it drops out of sight.

  The footage goes all jerky again as the lady rushes to the side of the cliff. By the time she gets there he’s already hit the water. The whole car goes under but doesn’t stay under – not at first. It bobs back up, then sinks down a second time, more slowly. The camera zooms in, super tight, as the hood disappears, and the roof, and the police lights. For a few seconds you can still see the white shape beneath the water, like a miniature submarine. Then all these air bubbles burst on the surface. After that you can’t see anything, but the camera holds on the water for a long time, almost like she’s expecting him to come back up.

  He doesn’t, of course.

  Later on, that forensics expert in the turtleneck confirmed it: they’d shot him all right. They’d hit him twice in the chest and once in the arm. But the bullets didn’t kill him. Neither did the flames, or the impact. They figured that out because his lungs were full of water and bits of seaweed and crap. He’d drowned after all.

  60

  Like I said, Chris got his fireworks.

  Each paper wrote the story differently, and each managed to screw it up in some totally pointless way. The headlines were the worst of all. There was the one in the Province that read: ‘Hero’ Loses Control. That was bad enough, but the Sun was even worse: Delinquent Driven To The Edge. If there’s one thing I can’t stand about newspapers, it’s the stupid puns they put in their headlines. These days, whenever I see them playing around with words like that, I want to buy up every single copy and burn them in my backyard. I did that, too, with some of the articles they wrote about Chris. I burned as many as I could get my hands on except for this one small-press paper, the only one that tried to tell it straight. They ran a pretty simple headline, something like: Teen Dies After Stealing Squad Car. That didn’t piss me off so much. I mean, he had stolen a squad car. Also, he’d died. So at least that much was true. Those guys were the only ones who actually printed a picture of Chris, too. All the other rags went with photos of the roadblock, or the car being dragged out of the water. None of them cared about what he’d looked like when he was alive.

  The hilarious thing is, the most recent picture this paper could find was a copy of his school yearbook photo – from the time he decided to dress up as a sweet seventies porn star. At Keith Lynn, they don’t give a shit what you look like on photo day, so long as you bother to show up. I tried the same thing at Seycove and the photographer made me take off my wig and change my jacket. Chris got away with it, though, and he looked awesome. In the picture he’s wearing one of my dad’s old shirts, unbuttoned to the chest, with the collar flipped up to his ears. A super fake gold chain dangles around his neck and his eyes are covered by a huge pair of aviator glasses – those ones with reflective lenses. It’s hard to say whether he’s supposed to be a porn star or a cop or a pimp. I laughed so fucking hard when I saw that in the paper. Anybody who bought a copy must have assumed he was a harsh nutcase. I remember thinking how badly I wanted to show him, and that was when it really hit me. That he was dead, I mean.

  They’ve repaired the guardrail he went through.

  I saw it when I was driving around up there – this new bend of bright and shiny steel. Somebody had hung a bouquet of flowers on it. I have no idea who. His mom, maybe. Or one of his relatives. I guess it might have even been Karen. Either way it doesn’t matter, because the flowers aren’t there any more. I tore them down and threw them over the edge. I mean, Chris would have hated that crap.

  It’s the same with the website they’ve put up – this website in his memory.

  The school district sponsored it, apparently. Kicking him out of all those schools wasn’t enough. They had to get in on the action, too. So they created this site with a few photos of him, and a wall that any idiot can write on. Now, out of nowhere, all these treats are leaving messages like ‘Miss you, bud’, and ‘He was such a cool guy’, and talking about how they were in the same English class as him. It’s the most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t look at it any more. Actually, I’m not allowed to look at it any more. I got in tons of trouble for writing threats on the wall to anybody who tried to post something. I said I’d track them down using my computer and firebomb all their houses. I wouldn’t, obviously. I hardly even know how to use my computer, let alone track people down with it. But they didn’t realise that. It was pretty sweet. For about a week the wall was totally blank. I’d completely scared the shit out of all those posers.

  Then somebody reported it and I got banned. They phoned our house and tried to make me apologise and shit, but I wouldn’t. Now you need a password to get on, and for obvious reasons they won’t give it to me. It’s pretty hilarious, actually. I’m the only one who really knew him, and I’m the only one not allowed to visit the stupid website set up in his memory. Not that I care.

  61

  I’m lucky I didn’t end up in juvie. I mean, my dad said they could have charged me with a lot of things. As in, even though I didn’t touch Bates they could have prosecuted me as an accessory, or an accomplice, or something like that. You know – just for being there and shit. Also, I got in the car with Chris. For some
reason that was a huge deal. The way they saw it, it didn’t even matter who was driving. We were both in the car so we’d both stolen the car. That’s the bizarre thing about the law. They can always cook up some half-baked offence to pin on you. They probably would have, too, if it weren’t for my dad. Instead they just kept me locked up for a couple of days. They questioned me a bunch of times, too.

  ‘What if there’d been an accident?’

  ‘You and your pal might have killed somebody.’

  It was always those same two guys: Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Apparently they could talk to me alone since I hadn’t officially been arrested or charged with anything.

  ‘Hear that, bud? Somebody could have died.’

  ‘There was an accident,’ I pointed out, ‘and somebody did die. Chris.’

  That stopped them. Whenever you said something they didn’t expect, they took a couple seconds to get over it. It was like they had super slow processors in their brains.

  ‘Don’t get lippy, bud.’

  ‘Yeah – we’re not talking about that.’

  ‘We’re talking about innocent people.’

  ‘A little boy, or a pregnant mother.’

  ‘Anybody could have been killed.’

  ‘Your pal didn’t even have a licence.’

  ‘Didn’t know the first thing about driving.’

  They loved to finish and repeat each other’s sentences, talking in circles. It wasn’t like I didn’t tell them anything, either. I answered all of their stupid questions, but they weren’t really interested in my story. They just wanted to confuse me and trip me up.

  ‘Maybe you should think about getting a lawyer, bud.’

  ‘Yeah – a lawyer will probably come in handy.’

  ‘I’ve got a lawyer.’

  That was kind of a lie, but I figured my dad counted as my lawyer.

  ‘Good for you, bud.’

  ‘If we charge you, you’ll need your lawyer.’