Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  Robbie followed her downstairs, on tiptoe. They sat in the covered porch overlooking the lake. Alone with her like this, he felt unspeakably physical, overcome with the naked feeling he associated with concealing guilt. Why guilt? He watched her. She was beautiful, but tired and tense, the very bones of her head somehow strained, as if all the pressure of her life were squeezing the skull smaller. He wondered how different from other old ladies she’d look in twenty years. He remembered the first time he had inspected the lines on her forehead. Eight years old, and his navel had opened up and given off a sicksweet baby smell. You could see right in. He stood up and showed it to her at the dining-room table. Her forehead was at his eye-level as she stared back down the umbilical tube of her first and favourite son. Now he understood: he was aware of having been born by her. Weird, why would he feel guilty about that? For the pain he put her through back then? Or since? He had always raged about wasting his life away, his precious adolescence, but now he wondered how many years had he robbed from her. He broke the silence.

  “Barnabus OK, Mom? What’s he got?”

  “Well, probably just asthma. I’m giving him Ventolin until he learns to wake himself up. He had such a rough time around the lake last summer, after Mendoza was put to sleep. Then he had indescribable food poisoning from a fish he caught around the Hogsback. Then one morning, after another night on the dock in his sleeping bag, well – he coughed up blood.”

  “Chrissake!”

  “It’s simple, in my mind – he breathes in acid mist for several hours every morning and then his little bronchioles are eaten right through. But really, I don’t know any more. I may be alone in this. I’m told I get hysterical. I can’t get a straight answer from anyone.”

  Weird thing about that Monday in March was, it turned out to be the first day of spring, after all. The temperature stayed high, the blackflies rioted, and Mom and Robbie had no idea whether to plant and risk frostbite to the root of the vegetables, or wait for the snowstorm and risk missing this freak spring altogether. It was the talk of the countryside; you couldn’t pass a farmer on the road without stopping to discuss it. And that burnt-meat smell was definitely not some bonfire; Robbie checked around, and everyone was curling up their nostrils. It was as bad as being in the city; you wanted to stay indoors with the windows closed.

  Dad took the kids back to school in town, but Mom and Robbie stayed out, for Mom had a plan. Robbie was mightily impressed by her energy; in one afternoon she pulled together half a dozen locals – all with maple trees on their property – and set a date for a community sugaring-off party to be held on the field, right outside the gates of EPX Chemicals Corporation. She had to argue fiercely, for most of the farmers had long abandoned maple-sugaring; their trees were producing only small amounts of sap these days, and it wasn’t only the maples that were blighted – the beech and birch, too, and higher up on the Hogsback, the spruce and the fir. Several said they weren’t inclined to take on such pointless work, and one was particularly bitter; he had built a sawmill on his land, and several times his saw teeth had been sheared right off by old forgotten sugaring nails buried in the butt logs of maples. And his son had lost an eye to a piece of flying metal.

  In spite of all that, Mom arranged for a temporary sugar-house to be built, and managed to borrow a disused evaporator so maple sap could be boiled at the party. She and Robbie drove out to barns collecting old cedar buckets and newer tin ones, patching them up if they needed it, and redistributing them to the farmers who were going along. They found spouts that hadn’t rusted, and several augers for drilling into the bark; they polished up the sugaring arch and painted its metal frame a fresh fire-engine red, and even hauled out a rotted sled and scrubbed the mud and cobwebs down. They borrowed twenty trestle tables and long benches, and hammered together a low stage.

  All the while, Mom explained to Robbie the art of mapling. Robbie never knew how abundant sap could be; when she first snapped off a twig, so much dripped out he feared the tree might haemorrhage; what maples were healthy were just about bursting, and to Robbie the land suddenly flowed with honey. He helped her stuff dozens of invitations, which went out not only to friends and neighbours, but to the mayor and sundry politicians, the Kilborn police station, environmental groups, and all the media friends she had made during her years on TV.

  A week to go, and Dad was on the couch drinking scotch, watching the hockey; whenever he did make it to the country on weekends, he was so knocked out he was good for nothing. Robbie considerately asked if he was preoccupied with his latest contract, something – was it? – related to exercise.

  “No, Robbie,” Dad said. “Excise. Customs and Excise, you lunkhead.” He punched him in the shoulder, right on the sore muscle with the fresh tattoo.

  He must really be drunk, Robbie thought, to touch me for no good reason. The Canadiens scored on a power play, Dad shouted, but Robbie wasn’t really watching. His brain was buzzing angrily: every year, Dad comes back from his fishing trip on the Moise and says, Well, the salmon aren’t spawning this year, like it’s just a freak of nature, at best something that merits aum, a study. Robbie wished he would think microscopically for once; if the old man had ever dropped acid – the psychedelic kind – then he’d appreciate life’s tiny secrets. But instead of struggling with words and fighting him, Robbie pretended to enjoy the game – Cournoyer scores! He punched the air. He had something better up his sleeve.

  Although the local police had given her no more than a warning after her arrest that winter, Mom had obviously acquired some notoriety since her show was taken off the air. The weekend of the cabane-à-sucre, Robbie and Miriam and Barnabus went down with her to the site, and though it was not yet noon, a horde of camera crews had already set up camp, and the EPX Chemicals Corporation had deployed security guards along the fence. The fields were busy with farmers’ families stringing up striped tents and pastel bunting and tables to display their maple-sugar products. Two trestle tables were laden with pots of steaming beans and deer stew, and the air above a row of barbecues was wobbling. Robbie sat on the edge of the stage, closed his eyelids to feel the glorious sunshine warm them over his eyeballs, leaned back with his palms on the hot planks, and took the sounds in: the flapping of canvas in the wind, the ping of sap as it dripped into the metal buckets hanging on the trunks of trees, children giggling as they stuck their tongues out under the dripping spigots, a radio scraping out Tam ti de lam on a fiddle. He breathed in deeply, and for the first time in weeks he couldn’t smell the sour rotting odour on the wind; only the pungent fragrance of boiling maple sugar. He opened his eyes and went to help.

  Because the snow had melted so early on the lower ground this year, he had to hitch a ride with an old farmer in a pickup to the top of the Hogsback. It was the same old guy who had driven him that battered Xmas Eve; he still had the bottle of beer wedged between his thighs.

  “Enwoye,” Robbie said, and shook his huge knotted hand. “Ça va bien? Good to see you, guy.”

  Together they shovelled snow into the back of the pickup, and from the crest of the hill Robbie surveyed the fabulous 3-D topographic map of the Townships. What a high; natural, too. They drove back down and transferred the snow to a trough set up in the shade of a canopy by the lakeshore. Soon people would dunk sticks in fresh-boiled maple syrup, roll them in the snow, chew the hardened stuff like taffy, and lose all their fillings in it. Robbie stood back, put his fists on his hips, and admired the unsullied whiteness before anyone started dunking.

  The field rapidly filled with people milling, people catching the rays, people linking arms in fours and dancing on the grass, and people dipping their toes in the lake and lining up for the hogfest of maple-sweetened stew, waffles and maple-baked beans, maple-glazed squash, eggs and sausages and ham drowned in pure maple syrup, maple apple crisp, maple tarts and maple-fried bacon rinds that curled up like ears – les oreilles du Christ, as Robbie’s old farmer buddy called them.

  While people ate, severa
l men set up a pretty big sound system on the stage. When they were done, Mom introduced herself to the crowd. The mob of reporters jostled for a view, and if you were sitting on the grass to eat you could hardly see her at all. Robbie sat and listened as she did her number: sulphate deposit acid mist aluminum phosphate indigestible to trees EPX air pollutants, and so on. It was passionate, and Robbie was proud. Barnabus got up and said the immortal word POOLUTION. Then, one by one, the farmers took the stage and, hesitating, described how their woods were depleted, how their livestock were falling sick – how their cuts weren’t healing good – how the air smelled like an abattoir, how brown foam was washing up on their shores. The crowd applauded and waved banners and booed EPX and made disgusted faces for the cameras, and in the heat and excitement, the sweet afternoon air bent and stretched.

  Children in threes were carrying the heavy buckets of sap and sloshing it about and making the grass sticky, and what looked like a pack of Mendoza’s bastard pups licked the ground after them. A lone French-Canadian fiddler mounted the stage and scraped off tunes as fast as any heavy-metal guitarist Robbie had ever heard, stamping his foot on the bowing planks. People whooped and spun one another around, and already one local had had too much syrup and beer and was upchucking onto the ground. Plus there was an accident in the little sugarhouse; too many people had crammed in to watch the raw sap being poured into the evaporating pans, someone had jostled the hot arch, and the whole thing had tipped over. Maybe that had been Mom’s and Robbie’s fault, for in their haste they hadn’t set the contraption on a proper concrete floor; since the ground had only recently thawed it was still soft and uncertain, so the arch tilted over, sap spilling onto several pairs of pants and spattering the lens of one television camera, and the air quickly filled with the smell of scorched syrup. Robbie shrugged, went to the car, and with Barnabus’ help, unloaded his equipment.

  On a table by the microphone he laid out his things. It looked like a domestic or industrial trade show. Mom climbed the stage and introduced the afternoon’s final feature: ladies and gentlemen mesdames et messieurs the one and only Hell’s Yells!

  He plugged an Environments cassette into his tape machine and approached the microphone with deliberate slowness. As he approached, the sounds of nature were amplified louder and louder until the fields around EPX were alive with the chirruping of huge mutated insects and birds as big as cattle. Nature run riot. Some people looked at one another sceptically, some were amused. Most of the cameramen and reporters just stuffed their faces on all that free food. Robbie concentrated mightily on all the things that had ever made him angry. He knotted his cheeks up and fired at his temples and glared at the crowd through slitted eyes. For a start, he was saying with his magnificent glare, most industrialists should be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Several people in the field seemed to understand, for they had stopped smirking. He made an animal growl; if he were prime minister he’d stir up such shit he’d end up assassinated, but the things he’d do are what should be done by any decent leader in a dirty land. He picked up an aerosol can from the table and sprayed it into the mike. A jet-stream roar went out through the PA, and people covered their ears. He’d made himself clear. The camera crews were wiping their hands on their pants and picking up their equipment. He pictured himself as PM, his snarly face on a dollar bill, a halo of nails around his head. Kill an industrialist. That’s all there was for it. Hunt an executive down and fucking drag his spine out. Throw him down a chimney. Feed him to a smelter. Fess up, who’s responsible here?

  That was enough to get him going, and the crowd had pressed around the stage to get a better look, too. Cameramen were pushing children out of the way to get the perfect vantage point. He pulled the cord on a chainsaw and left it buzzing where it was. Gunned a lawnmower, too. And a hedgetrimmer. He thought of Ivy. To her, other people were always having a better time on other planets. He used to believe that was true, but now he had run out of energy to keep hating himself so much. You can threaten suicide for only so long, life is what you make it. He switched on an air-conditioner and a Mixmaster. Dinful! Plus an electric mosquito-zapper, and when insects were drawn to it they combusted in a snap and a flash that amplified unpleasantly and bounced off the walls of the EPX Chemicals Corporation. He suddenly understood how Mom, who loved nature so mightily, could find little pleasure in it, because she knew how fucked it was; when she raged at people’s indifference she raged not only for nature’s survival, but also the survival of caring. You had to care, you had to be angry, or you didn’t deserve nature at all, you could just rot in hell. ’Cause Mother Nature herself is mad as hell, he thought, you better believe it. Do people really believe that Nature in her pure state is some kind of Garden of Eden? People speak with regret about the way we’ve raped her. They talk of dead lakes, but mainly in terms of us and ours. Our health. But in reality, she’s not some sweet defenceless thing, some easy lay. The notion of Nature as something pure, Robbie thought, is science fiction. That’s what all those National Geo shows are on TV: SF. Nature cares no more than the average Bingo player about being in good shape. Nature can be a fat woman too, a smoker, a couch potato, someone who farts in public; she’ll eat white bread and Cheez Whiz, and be happy as a pig in shit. ’Cause it’s perfectly natural. Nature, Robbie discovered for himself, will exist in any state – acidified, radiated, inseminated with rusting stuff and plastic junk, cold all the time, quite indifferent to our needs – and still be Nature. Now he’s trying to project the idea tele-pathically to the crowd: use your braiins. When you dump on her too much, she’ll get vicious, volcanic, and primordial all over again. She’ll welcome the release, the chance to punch holes in some walls; she’ll burp it all back at you without thinking, break wind in your face, slap you around with a hurricane, let too much sunshine in. She’ll be an angry god, demand the sort of respect pagans once gave her. So Robbie’s offering sacrifices: plastic wrapping, aerosol cans – the kitchen counter as the altar of modern times. He’s starting his own career of caring angrily, and not just aiming at his own temple. This is his new thing. Cranking up a portable air-raid siren now, he screamed hard. Some children clung to their mothers’ legs. At the back of the crowd, he saw the family hatchback draw up, and it was Dad at the wheel, taking a conservative look, Miriam smirking in the passenger seat. Robbie wasn’t fazed, he was too far gone, now; his nose was running, his naked chest was slick with sweat and red with that nasty rash, he was bellowing, mostly meaningless raw-throated blue bloody baby talk, but with a nasty, tuneless refrain that came to him out of the sky:

  “STINGing in the rain, just stinging in the RAIN…”

  The crowd applauded madly, but he was barely aware of them. Some were singing with him, some just shouting. There was a bristling garden of upraised hands, the fiddler made his fiddle cry along, and now people began lobbing their hardened maple-syrup apples at the EPX security guards. Robbie thought of Rosie, and how her violent caring had always embarrassed him. Caring that strangled her, made her angry and petulant – had driven him away – but now he saw that without it, you’re nothing. A couple of farmers started up their pickups and gunned their engines. Many folks were hollering now, really venting their spleen. The guards looked nervous, one pulled out his pistol, and the cameras were pointing in every direction, gobbling it all up. And if Robbie wasn’t mistaken, there was Dad, pounding his car horn.

  22

  A STEWARDESS NUDGED HIM, AND HE AWOKE TO A HOT OK meal, smelling of soggy sneakers. He looked at the limp selection, presented with such gusto in individual plastic envelopes, and was struck by a burlesque echo of the adolescent’s sinking heart on being presented with life’s agenda: What you see is what you get, boyo, and lots of luck to you.

  He was flying to Ottawa, joining Mom for a rally, to help kick off a commission studying, among other things, the behaviour of the EPX Chemicals Corporation on Kilborn Bay. An environmental group had invited him. Well, they’d invited Mom, and when she got there she’d called to s
uggest he come along. The EPX party had gotten a ton of coverage on TV, and he’d bought a heap of bluespapers to see how he featured. Poolution was clearly in vogue, a hot topic, and everyone had found an angle: THE ‘DINFUL’ SPRING, said the Star – and it felt great to be quoted like that; there was a crowd shot in Allô Police, and he could just see the spikes of his hair poking up over the shoulder of a cop, with a list of the important people who’d been arrested for trespassing, and although he wasn’t mentioned by name, he was definitely one of them; even the National Investigator had an article about him – about the Loch Ness Monster’s cousin, really, being attracted by the noise to the surface of Kilborn Lake – with him saying, “It was farm out!”

  A couple of papers were critical of the mess left behind all over the field after the event, even though it was mostly the media who had done it in the first place, but Robbie thought that was cool; it was a lot like the garbage you see at the end of Woodstock, and it made him feel he had been a part of something, at last.

  The plane touched down. Having worked so hard for the past two weeks, and partied with the locals all night, then drunk as much in-flight liquor as the stewardess would give him, he was numb and giddy and savouring the euphoria of inebriate travelling. All those stories he had read of Keef’s twenty-four-hour binges, that tailspin lifestyle he had envied so, this is what it was like; once you’re over the hump of the first night, anything is possible. As he strode through the doors three teenage girls were squealing. One of them wore a wedding dress and a chainmail coat, another a tie-dye T-shirt and a green Mohawk, the third an industrial jumpsuit with glowing liquid phosphorescent bangles on her wrists and ankles. He smiled and waved, really getting into this. But the girls passed right by him, clutching one another and suppressing groans as if they badly needed to pee.