Property Values

by Charles Demers

  “Why didn’t you try to get Korean customers then?”

  “You’re joking, right? You guys are more racist than them!”

  “That’s true.”

  “I’m just going to start eating with you looming.”

  “Do your thing, Scotty.”

  “Chinese restaurants seem to thrive in more or less any environment.”

  “Hey, how come Chinese or Koreans don’t eat Indian food?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we don’t need it.”

  “God, that’s fucking delicious. Your mom’s a genius, Par. You know, I think I like moussaka better than lasagne.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’?”

  “I don’t understand the connection.”

  “I don’t know, I mean—they’re both square? Stacked, I guess?”

  “Yeah, that’s true—they are both layered.”

  “Starch, nightshade, protein.”

  “Tomato’s not a nightshade.”

  “I think it is.”

  “No.”

  “He’s right, it is.”

  Pardeep, Josiah, and Scott were each removing their phones from their pockets to research the taxonomy of tomatoes when Gurdeep Dhaliwal entered the front door carrying close to twenty litres of canola oil between two hands.

  “Hey, goddamn it,” he yelled, “this is a business, not Star Trek. Get off the goddamn communicators and take these back to the kitchen.”

  “Jesus, Dad, don’t come in like that through the front door with the oil! Customers don’t need to see that—that’s why we got a kitchen door.”

  “You’re so worried about customers, tend to them instead of these freeloaders.”

  “Hello, Mr Dhaliwal.”

  “Hi, Mr Dhaliwal.”

  “Josiah, Scotty. Scott, you going to pay for that meal this time?”

  “Yeah, Mr Dhaliwal, of course. And for last time’s too, I just forgot to hit the cash machine first.”

  “Dad, I keep telling you—we need to take cards!”

  “Honestly, Mr Dhaliwal, he’s right—nobody uses cash anymore.”

  “Scotty, do I come to your house and tell you who you should let rifle around in your goddamn pockets?”

  “No.”

  “So then do me the same goddamn courtesy, hey? Visa, Mastercard—Josiah, I’m assuming you’ve heard the saying ‘thieves in the night’?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s because they don’t want to compete with Visa during the day. Thieves in the morning, the afternoon, thieves in the night—they don’t sleep. They’re goddamn tapeworms, wrapped around the neck of the small businessman.”

  “Tapeworms don’t—”

  “I didn’t get into business feeding white people in order to make Mastercard richer. I did it to leave an inheritance to my useless son.”

  “Just give me the fucking oil.”

  “Watch your fucking mouth, kutha chodu!”

  “I’ll pay up tonight, Mr Dhaliwal.”

  “Ah, your money’s no good here, you dumb gora.”

  As two generations of bickering Dhaliwals made their way into the kitchen, each carrying close to ten litres of canola oil, Scott continued to eat his moussaka and Josiah leafed through a tzatziki-splattered newspaper.

  “I’m picking up Counterinsurgency 4 tomorrow morning—you want to come by in the afternoon?” he asked, eyes still on the paper. Scott and Josiah had been playing video games against each other in the same basement, on the same street in Coquitlam, since not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Through late childhood and puberty, from 8-bit through to 16-bit right up to a degree of graphic immersion that gave some players motion sickness, from the hope and optimism of the end of Communism through to the more resigned realism of actual global liberty, the two had sat jostling almost motionlessly beside each other and in opposition to each other, faces impassive, thumbs a blur.

  “You don’t need to do any prep or anything?”

  “Prep for what?”

  “I don’t know, September?”

  “The prof I’m assisting for is in Prague until Labour Day. But it’s a Thursday evening class, so he figures we can meet after he gets back.”

  “Prague, nice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’ll be you some day.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Dr Kim.”

  “Yeah, man, geography is booming. Are you fucking drunk or something?”

  “Anyway, I can’t play Counterinsurgency, I got Michelle’s dad. Supposed to meet him about the house.”

  “Any developments?”

  Scott swallowed his moussaka.

  “Just that I’m even further away from being able to buy him out than I was six months ago. That I can’t keep up.” In the Chinese style, Josiah filled Scott’s water glass for him—though water, especially iced, already marked the meal as well outside of the Chinese style—and Scott responded with the almost imperceptible gratitude of a finger tapping the table, also a Chinese custom. The first time Bojana had seen him doing it, tapping the table like a blackjack player, she couldn’t believe how rude her son was being until Josiah, then maybe fifteen years old, had explained to her that it was politeness, a bow in miniature, and she had laughed for a minute and a half before giving Josiah a long kiss on the forehead, flushing his narrow cheeks before she left the kitchen. When Scott had poked his head into his parents’ room a few minutes later to ask if he could move his father’s work stuff off the ping-pong table downstairs, he could see that Bojana had been crying. All through Scott’s bucolic multicultural adolescence, Bojana would watch as her once-beloved Yugoslavia was reduced nightly to a lie on the news; she remembered the Serbs and Croats and Montenegrins and Muslim Bosnians she had grown up with, and every time her son’s far-flung schoolmates gave some exotic-to-her reminder of their Canadian admixture, she tended to get sentimental.

  “The house is worth probably a hundred-twenty grand more than it was a year ago. One year, Joe. That’s another sixty fucking grand I owe him. I’ll never be able to buy out his half if it keeps growing like that. It’s like owing money to the mob.”

  “So then what happens?”

  “We have to sell the place and each walk away with our half.”

  Josiah swallowed softly, staring down at the newspaper, preparing for an uncharacteristic delicacy.

  “Would that be so bad?”

  “It’s—” Scott managed, before trailing off, scooping a few forkfuls of eggplant and trying to force it past the growing lump in his throat. Holding a vinegar-soaked towel, Pardeep approached the table again, trying to make sense of the uncanny silence between his ball-busting friends.

  “What’s up?”

  “Scott was just—”

  “I mean, that’s all that’s left, you know? Not just all the memories in the house, my whole life there. If I sell that house, that’s it. I have nothing left of her.”

  “Who are we talking about? Michelle?”

  Scott took a sip from his water.

  “No.”

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” offered Josiah. “You say the house is worth a hundred and twenty thousand more than it was a year ago. And you say it like it’s a bad thing.”

  “Fuck,” said Pardeep. “I remember when my dad used to brag to his cousin in Saskatoon that our house was worth a hundred and ninety.”

  “That’s still pretty impressive for Saskatoon.”

  “Par, let him finish,” Scott said, leaning forward.

  “If Michelle’s dad were invested in any other stock that had gone up twelve percent last year, was guaranteed to go up that or more next year, and the year after that—would he cash out?”

  “I don’t know. I guess not?”

  “Why would he? Guy bet the right number on a broken roulette wheel.”

  “Well—they wouldn’t keep spinning it.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t understand,” said
Pardeep. “In this scenario, the casino guy, he just keeps spinning? He doesn’t fix it?”

  “I don’t think I can work with this kind of stupidity.”

  Pardeep snapped the vinegar-wet towel against the side of Josiah’s neck. “Bhenchode!”

  “Ow! Goddamn it, that hurt.”

  “Would you two shut the fuck up? Joe, what are you saying?”

  “He’s saying Michelle’s dad has no reason to want to cash out. Fuck, man, that’s probably what he wants to see you for.”

  “You think?”

  “Why would he? You said yourself, it’s like he’s the mob. The vigorish is going to keep growing—if he’s sixty grand richer after just a year, in five it’ll be more than a quarter million.”

  “That’s actually true,” Scott said, a wave of relief pushing several bits of moussaka to his mouth in quick succession.

  “What the goddamn hell is wrong with you!” It wasn’t spoken as a question, but as a declaration from the door to the kitchen, directed at his son. “I sent you to get Josiah, not to convene a bloody meeting of the United Nations. Chulloh!”

  “Oh, right—Joe, my dad wants you back there.”

  “What? Why?”

  “The electrician is here, Tanaka. He thinks if you’re back there, Tanaka will give him a discount.”

  “Well, congratulations—that’s maybe the most offensive thing I’ve heard all year.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your dad doesn’t know much about Japanese-Chinese-Korean relations, huh?”

  “You can tell him yourself. But as long as somebody’s referring to him as an Arab on at least a weekly basis, I doubt he’s going to feel too bad.”

  The boys stood from the table, heading back to the kitchen, Pardeep playfully slapping Josiah’s newspaper against Scott’s chest as they left. Flush with cautious optimism, Scott was already giddy, bouncing his knee rapidly and picking at the Greek salad on the fringes of his plate when he looked down and saw the pencil drawing of Angelique Bryan, the Vancouver Star’s stalwart crime reporter and biweekly law-and-order columnist. There was something about Bryan’s Caribbean features that made even the shoulders-up drawing which accompanied her pieces impossibly sexy to Scott, and he would often read her columns even though he hated her politics. It wasn’t that she was openly conservative, a political philosophy forbidden to him not so much through his own line of inquiry as from an osmosis inheritance of values from his mother, who never stopped bragging about the Partisans in her family tree who had jumped down from the thick branches to slit Nazi throats. Bryan didn’t demonstrate any of the free-marketeering or immigrant-blaming hallmarks of bellicose right-wingers; she just seemed to share their zeal for locking up bad guys and losing the keys. She was smarter than the shock jocks, too, building elegant sentences and elegant arguments, augmented in their persuasiveness, for Scott, by the face next to the byline. Already half smiling, and a quarter excited, he began reading.

  WELL, THERE STAYS THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

  Angelique Bryan

  Okay—that’s one way to do it.

  For what feels like eternity, the supposed greatest policy minds in the world have been helpless before the Sphinx’s riddle of Metro Vancouver’s overheated housing market. But the residents of Raven Place, a quiet Surrey street like almost any other (except for a few infamous neighbours) have learned that it may take a hail of bullets to stop Lower Mainland real estate from moving.

  The brazen daylight murders of alleged Da Silva Brothers soldiers Brody Miller and Wayson Tam sent shockwaves through local law enforcement circles. It appeared to many worried observers in blue that the uneasy alliance struck four years ago between the alleged crime family and their outlaw biker rivals, the Underworld Riders, might be coming to an end. That’s no surprise—we’d expect law enforcement to be wary. But realtors?

  “I’ve really never seen anything like it,” offered one local real estate agent who—a first in the history of realtors—asked to remain anonymous. “We’ve got multiple units along Raven Place that should be moving incredibly quickly. Amazing redevelopment and rezoning opportunities, as well as some units that are perfect as is. But we can’t even get viewers, let alone offers.”

  Imagine that—a house in Greater Vancouver worth leaving standing after you buy it! How is it possible that a gem so rare could be stuck on the market?

  Well, would you like to meet your new neighbours?

  It would appear that the black hole of Raven Place real estate prices is a wide, pink, two-storey home that isn’t even for sale. The home is registered to a Magdu Da Silva, 67. But anyone on Raven Place will tell you who else lives there: her notorious nephews, Danny and Nicky.

  With reports that the Da Silvas are taking major security precautions, stationing cars full of large men outside a property already patrolled by a family of pearl-grey pit bulls, it would appear that prospective buyers have cooled to the once peaceful area.

  “It never used to be a problem,” one neighbour tells me, also asking not to be named or described. “You almost never see them, and the aunt seems very sweet. Guys come and go from the house, but there were never any big parties or nothing. One winter, these big guys shovelled out everybody’s driveways on the block. To be honest, in a way we felt safer having them there.”

  But the appeal of that, shall we say, unorthodox, Neighbourhood Watch has clearly waned.

  “I know one family, the dad got a job in Calgary, but they haven’t been able to sell the house. Nothing’s moving for blocks. Nobody wants to be caught in the crosswires.”

  I’m pretty sure my source meant ‘crossfire’—but it’s fair to say that on Raven Place, the wires are crossed. A community that once found security, maybe even a vicarious thrill, from its proximity to local gangster royalty is finding the crown weighs pretty heavy these days.

  abryannewsblotter@vanstar.com

  Scott rolled his eyes, pounding back the rest of the water that Josiah had poured for him, smiling. At least now he had a Plan B.

  3

  Scott entertained deep thoughts about the masculinity of his drink as he waited at the counter for a decaffeinated London Fog. Directly behind him in line had been a looming young man, gargle breathing, and Scott could see now that he was very tall, and was as fat as he was muscular, which was a lot in either direction. The man wore two large diamond studs in each ear and a small purse that looked like nothing so much as underwear as it stretched to breaking underneath a mound that was half breast and half pectoral. The earrings and the purse should theoretically have been more feminine than Scott’s frothed milk and bergamot, but on the man, with his surfeit of masculinity, the womanly accents seemed almost satirical: this was a scrotum with pigtails. A post–9/11 era chinstrap beard went its way from his ears along his jaw, barely hours ahead of the stubble that rushed to catch up with it. Once he had his black coffee, the man poured half of it into a garbage can despite an advisory sign prohibiting same, filled the cup with milk and then multiple packets of sugar, which was childish, but nobody was liable to call him out on it because his T-shirt—which was working desperate overtime—read “You Are Here.”

  The You Are Here T-shirts had become the sine qua non of suburban sartorial machismo over the past several years. The copyright for the slogan was held by the legal, corporate office of the Underground Riders Motorcycle Club, and while a full-patch member wouldn’t need to sport it, the line of T-shirts, hats, and stickers were an easy way for aspiring associates to declare theoretical allegiance. In the tradition of shoddy gang cryptology, You Are was a barely coded pun on the club’s initials, and though wearing a You Are Here T-shirt didn’t signal anything beyond desire, it might be enough to make an average civilian think twice before talking back in a crowded movie theatre, say—in the same way that a black and silver You Are Here decal on a car window would make a junkie think twice about breaking in, or might even dissuade a counter-intuitively sympathetic cop from issuing a speeding ticket.

  S
cott walked outside to the almost-patio that had been willed into existence when someone put tables between the café and the parking lot, and watched as the fat, muscly man climbed into a raised black truck with tinted windows, being driven by a friend. The truck’s aesthetics were an inchoate and dialectical collection of elements stolen from hip hop and American redneck culture, and an unsurprising boom of rap-rock blasted from the vehicle as it gunned to life and drove away. Scott’s ex-father-in-law, Darryl Chong, watched the truck take off with a smirk on his face, beeping the locks on his second-hand Audi and waving to Scott with his key. Scott waved back weakly.

  Darryl Chong was among the coolest people that Scott had ever met, both in the colloquial sense of cool as well as being utterly dispassionate. At five-foot-three and a hundred and twenty pounds, he was packed, sixty-eight-year-old sinew, into black jeans and a blue golf shirt, and he nodded with his chin as he approached Scott’s table.

  “Hey, Scott,” he said, in a Cantonese accent that somehow managed to be entirely free of musicality. “You want anything to eat or drink?”

  “I’m good, I got a coffee inside.”

  “London Fog?”

  “Yeah,” Scott said.

  Darryl went inside for a coconut water and came back out sipping.

  “How’s work?”

  “Work?”

  “Yeah. What are you doing for work these days?”

  Scott picked a fleck of foamed milk from the side of his mouth.

  “Things get pretty quiet in the summer, but I go back to tutoring once school starts again—there’s, like, eight kids I work with. Their parents want their grades up for applying to schools once they graduate, so I help them with history, mostly, and a bit of English. Help them with their essays. One of them’s parents wants them to practise just, whatever, like conversational English. So they pay me another hour and a half to chat with the kid.”

  “And that’s—” Darryl started, then remembered that his daughter’s well-being no longer counted in any way on Scott’s professional prospects. “That’s good.”