Property Values

by Charles Demers

  “So, you been watching this shit with the Canucks?” Scott asked, trying to shift the focus of the conversation, attempting to delay any news of Michelle or any questions about the house.

  Darryl briefly made a disgusted face which suggested that he had, in fact, tasted the Canucks. He shook his head no.

  “No, Whitecaps.”

  “Soccer,” Scott smiled. “Football, well. The person who would have loved that was my mom.” Darryl smiled with half his mouth. “She loved that Michelle played. It was like a second chance. She said she was ready to coach for her grandkids.”

  Both men sat for a moment and wondered why Scott had fucking said that. Darryl drank his coconut water.

  It had been two-and-a-half years since Michelle had tried to get Scott to come to a game, any soccer game, during their six-month backpacking honeymoon across Europe, but he had always begged off. Each of the cities they had stayed in for any serious length of time—Manchester, Rome, Istanbul—were football-crazy, but Michelle had gone alone each time. Scott had been mystified at the Turkish airport when Michelle, wearing a Galatasaray T-shirt, was cheered by half the airport security staff and booed loudly by the others, but had smiled when he saw that she, and they, were laughing.

  All in all, it had been a beautiful trip, relatively affordable due to a combination of bohemian accommodations and a joblessness at home that meant that the time away came without opportunity costs. It was half a year full of sex and museums—even a few days in Belgrade at the end to visit Scott’s aunts and uncles, who collected the new couple ashen-faced from the airport, full of sympathy, followed by confusion, until the realization that only they knew what Bojana had been unwilling to ruin her son’s honeymoon by telling him: shortly after his take-off from the Vancouver International Airport, Bojana’s long-term gastrointestinal discomfort finally screeched past the point where she could bear it in her Balkan stoicism, and the doctor, very nearly angry at her, asked why she hadn’t come in before the cantaloupe-sized tumour in her stomach had reached Stage IV. Bojana died while her furious and terrified son was over the Atlantic, rushing home no faster than the rest of the passengers on his plane.

  Scott arrived not only to a dead mother but to a father, Peter, who had entirely collapsed. Hospital staff informed him that Peter had at one point gone two months seemingly without any sleep whatsoever and had lost as much weight as his wife, who wasn’t able to eat. Although they assured him that Peter had been hysterical, sometimes to the point of needing sedation, Scott saw only a placid, loopy, peaceful version of his father when he returned. After losing his wife, he had found Christ—Christ in a particularly austere and radical, fifteenth-century German peasant Anabaptist form. The newly minted widower standing smiling in front of Scott, trying to reassure him that Bojana was sitting at God’s feet, had months ago renounced all earthly, material concerns; had stopped showing up for work, was living amongst his new Brethren on a biodynamic farm in the sticks, and had allowed the house on Driftwood Crescent where Scott had grown up—that the Clark family had worked like dogs to buy from the family that had rented it to them for almost twenty years—to go into foreclosure.

  It was Darryl who had stepped in and been a parent to Scott when he had had none, having lost one to cancer and another to the belief that the Ten Commandments and juicing were the only ways to fight it. Between the bit of money that Scott had inherited from Bojana’s death and the liquidation of Peter’s assets, he’d had half of what he needed to buy back his childhood home. Darryl supplied the rest.

  But when the marriage dissolved, the clock started ticking down to Scott’s two options with regards to his business partner: to buy out his half of the equity, or else to sell the property and split the take down the middle. But Josiah, in his brilliance, had outlined a third way.

  “Mr Chong—”

  “Scott, don’t be stupid.”

  “Sorry. Dad—”

  “Well …”

  “Darryl.”

  Darryl nodded.

  “Darryl, I know we’re closing in on the end of the year here. And I think you know—I just don’t have the money to buy out your half.”

  “It’s a very difficult market, Scott.”

  “It is.”

  “But when we sell the house, you are going to have a leg up that almost nobody your age has got. You’ll be able to buy a condo practically cash.”

  Scott knew that if he started talking about the house, what it meant to him, which memories were living there rent-free, he would cry. But there was no need to talk about the house in sentimental terms; this was business.

  “Absolutely, Darryl—I could. Or. It occurs to me that this contract, it’s between you and me. There’s no reason we have to do it any way but the one that’s best for us. We’ve owned this house together for two years now, and in the course of that time, I mean, on paper—we have both made a lot of money. I know that, you know, for more than a year now, it hasn’t been a home to Michelle, and I know that that was your primary motivation, helping us. And I will never forget that. But just, in purely market terms, I mean—your investment has gone up by sixty grand this past year. That’s just you, your half. Together, we went up a hundred and twenty grand. In one year! The house, I mean—the house is like a tenured professor on sabbatical, for Christ’s sake, it earned a hundred and twenty grand just sitting there. It’s going to keep going up. And look, I know a deal’s a deal. Michelle and I are divorced, and you’ve been incredibly gracious about the time to sort things out on my end. But look, putting all sentiment and whatever aside: there’s no reason we can’t keep this business relationship going. I am more than happy to have you stay on as a partner, and let’s let the equity grow. I mean, there’s no ceiling.”

  “Scott, Michelle is pregnant.”

  The first, instantaneous realization that Scott had when he heard the news was that he, himself, would never be a father. Beyond the idea that his ex-wife was now going to have the family that he hadn’t been ready to give her, he was choked by the clear understanding that he was the end of his own family’s line.

  “Congratulations, Darryl. You’re going to be a grandfather. A what, a Yeh-Yeh?”

  Darryl smiled. “Gong-Gong. Yeh-Yeh is the paternal grandfather.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Scott, my daughter and her new husband can’t afford to stay in this city. And I can’t stand the idea of being far away from my grandchild.”

  “No, of course.”

  “I’m buying them a condo. I’d rather they have a yard, a front door, but this is what I can do for them. I’ve done pretty well, but I don’t have the cash lying around to do it without liquidating my stake in your parents’ house. I’m sorry, Scott. You can still have until the end of the year, of course, but we will need to stick to the original terms.”

  “Of course. Of course, I understand,” Scott said. And then: “Congratulations, Darryl. Honestly.”

  “Thank you. I’ll tell Michelle you said so.”

  “Please.”

  Scott stood, leaving half of his decaffeinated London Fog, staggering through the parking lot, and driving the seven minutes home from the strip mall. Pulling in to Driftwood Crescent, the edges of the houses began to blur, a salty cloud forming at the outskirts of his vision as he sat in the driveway. Pulling the keys out of the ignition, he stared at the house, hyperventilating. Turning quickly, ashamed, his eyes lit on the NAM carved into the sidewalk. Without smiling, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialled.

  “Josiah?”

  “This game is insane, man. I just put down a Wahhabi rebellion, and now I have to fight a bunch of anarchists.”

  “Do you still have your dad’s old rifle?”

  4

  “I thought you told me he was going to kill himself.”

  “What do you want? Guy calls me in the middle of the afternoon, asks me for my dad’s rifle. I thought he was going to kill himself.”

  “You don’t have to ki
ll yourself in Vancouver, you just wait for the housing market to do it for you.”

  “This is—I just can’t emphasize this enough, this is an incredibly stupid idea.”

  “No, it isn’t. Read the papers.”

  “Scott, he’s right—this is nuts.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why? Why is it nuts?”

  “Well, for starters, nobody uses a fucking long barrel Winchester rifle for a drive-by shooting. Rifles are for hunting deer and for launching failed farmer uprisings against the British in Lower fucking Canada.”

  “Okay, well, for starters, the 1837 Rebellion was in both the Canadas.”

  “I mean, I don’t think the gun is really the biggest reason this is fucked up.”

  “See?”

  “Par, Jesus—I’m looking for your help here.”

  “No, I know, I am! But I just don’t think that the big question here is the gun. The gun could work. It’s doesn’t have to be Dick Tracy—I mean, we’re not using a Tommy gun to spell a message in a wall—you need what, five shots, maybe?”

  “Exactly! Just enough so that the neighbours hear it. First one, two, they’re going to maybe think it’s firecrackers, Diwali or whatever.”

  “Dude, Diwali’s in October.”

  “Whatever, you know what I mean.”

  “I mean, I’m here defending the rifle idea, and now you gotta say some stupid shit like people would think firecrackers going off in the middle of August was Diwali.”

  “So you’re defending the rifle idea now?”

  “I just think it’s the wrong thing to emphasize, Joe. The rifle is not the problem.”

  “We would do it—”

  “Stop saying fucking we, Scott!”

  “We would do it when everybody’s home, eight-fifteen, right in the middle of Celebrity Dance Squad or whatever. Crack, crack—the first two get people’s attention. Prick their ears up. Two, three more—one in the car, one in the living room window, so there’s something to see. Then you drive away.”

  “In what, my car? The car everybody sees parked over here five days a week?”

  “Yeah, I mean. I don’t know. You guys would probably have to steal a car.”

  “Okay, we’re finished with this conversation. Good conspiracy, guys. Good work.”

  “What if we used a Car2Share?”

  “Hey!”

  “Pardeep, what the fuck? I know this is foreign to you, but can you act like an adult here for three fucking seconds and help me talk our friend out of shooting up his goddamn house?”

  “It’s not going to be my goddamn house anymore, Joe!”

  “I’m just saying that if we used the Car2Share, nobody could ID the getaway car.”

  “Getaway car. Jesus.”

  “Just hear me out—they’ve got those reserved car-share spots at the mall, right? You always see them in clusters. I take one out, pick you up at your place with your dad’s gun—”

  “I’m not—”

  “Just let him talk, fuck’s sake.”

  “—I pick you up at your place with your dad’s gun. We pull up in front of Scotty’s, and you let five rounds off in what? What’s realistic? Twenty seconds?”

  “Thank you, Oliver Stone.”

  “That sounds right to me. About twenty, twenty-five seconds. People hear the first couple, they wonder what it is, they go to the window, maybe they see the last couple shots.”

  “Exactly. You get back in the car, rifle goes in the hockey bag, we park in a cluster at the mall, and walk back over to your car.”

  “And then Car2Share uses their GPS system to see which of their cars was on or near Driftwood Crescent that night.”

  “Oh.”

  “Right.”

  “So you rent a U-Haul.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Actually that’s true, though, U-Haul’s old as shit. They don’t have GPS. All they care about is the odometer.”

  “I’m serious. Par drives, Joe, you’re in the back with the hatch unlocked, with the rifle. He stops, you pop out, hit the house a few times, then disappear. Tell me how that doesn’t work?”

  “That actually does sound pretty good,” said Par. Josiah bit his lip.

  “Even if we did this, even if, what makes you think that the story would get out that it’s gang violence?”

  “That’s a two-step. What are the two different ways the newspapers let you know that something’s gang-related, that you shouldn’t worry too much?”

  “Giving an Indian name seems to do the trick for most white people,” said Pardeep.

  “They either say ‘the victim was known to police,’ or else they say ‘the victim is not cooperating with police.’”

  “Yeah,” said Josiah, with an air of admission.

  “So I won’t cooperate with the cops that show up.”

  “What’s the other step?”

  Scott smiled. “I get to send an email to Angelique Bryan.”

  “And what do you think this does, Scott?” Josiah asked. “Ultimately, I mean—what does this accomplish? What does it buy you?”

  “At the very least, it sinks the property values. We get the number down to a place where we can start thinking about how to buy out Darryl’s half.”

  “But you don’t have any money, Scott. You don’t have any fucking money! I mean, even if you drop the price by twenty percent, thirty percent—it’s an abstraction. You don’t have it.”

  “Fine, fine,” Scott said, lurching mentally, stinging from the accurate humiliation of Josiah’s assessment. “Then Darryl decides that it’s not worth selling now, at the loss he’d take, and we buy some more time.”

  “And in the meantime,” Josiah pushed, “where does Michelle live with her baby? Just to be devil’s advocate here.”

  Pardeep looked to Scott, and Scott looked to the floor.

  “Michelle’s not the devil.”

  “I know, Scotty. That’s kind of what I’m saying.”

  Scott stood, clearing the three glasses of water from the granite kitchen counter and into the glare of track lighting by the sink.

  “I just need time, guys. There’s nothing left of anything, after this house. Michelle’s gone, my dad’s on the fucking moon, my mom. I just need to hit pause here, catch my breath.”

  Josiah’s breathing in the back of the U-Haul was shallow as he tried to figure out a way to hold the rifle without soaking it with his palms. Every time the truck turned, he lurched, performing dozens of balance-salvaging micro-movements to maintain his squat. He wanted to be ready to jump out without worrying about his legs going to sleep when Pardeep pounded on the back of the cabin to let him know that no one was out walking their dog, that no one would see his face, but even so, he wore sunglasses and a Mariners cap. Josiah was a Blue Jays fan, and he felt that this might grant him an added layer of deniability. He cradled the rifle in the crook of his arm as he watched the blurring sliver of pavement through the bottom of the unlocked hatch.

  Sweat poured down Pardeep’s back as he listened to talk-radio in an effort to numb his nerves. The panel guests had been invited on to discuss whether or not superhero blockbusters with female stars were empowering, or to what degree they were if, in fact, that answer was a given, and Pardeep had trouble keeping track of which interviewee was the English professor from the university and which guest was the pop-culture blogger. He rolled the window down for a second, then rolled it back up in case anyone recognized him. He scanned the lawns and walkways of Driftwood Crescent, and though it was a clear and beautiful evening, he was able to thump the signal for Josiah that nobody was out.

  As the truck rolled to a stop, Josiah forgot how heavy the roll-down door was, that he couldn’t lift it with one hand, and so he held the rifle in place with his foot as he lifted it partway, just enough to roll out, catching his Mariners visor on it and knocking the hat to the ground. As he bent to collect it, the sunglasses slid off of his face and onto the pavement, and he gathered them each with one
hand and, swearing under his breath, threw them into the hold.

  The first crack of the rifle shocked Josiah with its power, as guns always had despite the best efforts of his father and grandfather. By the third shot, he was squeezing more confidently, and had forgotten about even the possibility of being made by Scott’s neighbours. He put bullet number four, as agreed, through the large living room window that faced onto the street, and the final round spiderwebbed the rearview window of Scott’s Jetta, which Josiah only now realized was a shot they never would have taken if they’d actually been trying to kill him. Holding the rifle, Scott rolled back into the truck, pounding the side of the cargo hold to start Pardeep driving, just as the first neighbours were coming to their windows against their better judgment.

  Scott had been lying on his stomach in front of the living room couch for fifteen minutes, and as the penultimate bullet punched through the window and crashed the glass frame of the Renoir print his parents had brought back years ago from Ottawa, he was sure that he could feel his heartbeat reverberating through the floor.

  He hoisted himself up as the final volley went into the car, as agreed, and was overtaken with a legitimate adrenaline rush as he threw the front door open, pounding out onto the street in bare feet so that no one would think he’d been waiting, chasing after the truck with anger and manliness, as if those were different qualities, putting a show of gangster toughness on for the neighbours.

  “Motherfuckers!” he screamed, trying not to smile, trying not to let the bouncing exhilaration he was feeling bubble their gang war over into obvious playacting. “Motherfuckers, I’m coming! Motherfuckers, I’m right here, you can’t move me! This is my house! This is my house, motherfuckers!”

  He stopped, halfway up the block, the top of his big toe ripped on the asphalt, breathing so deeply his torso looked mechanical, terrifying the neighbours whose names he still didn’t know. And now, he didn’t try not to smile.

  “This is my motherfucking house!”

  5

  As he waited calmly in the kitchen for the RCMP to arrive in the wake of the shooting, Scott realized that he didn’t know precisely what “not cooperating with police” meant; it was a phrase that he had heard, or read, dozens, maybe hundreds of times, a phrase around which he had built part of the edifice of his plan, but it only occurred to him as he heard the muted siren getting closer to Driftwood Crescent before reaching a shrill crescendo and a sudden killing stop that he only knew the sense of the phrase, the intention, and not any of its constitutive details. He had been perfectly relaxed until they’d arrived, but now this ambiguity plucked up the rate of his heartbeat. Did it mean refusing them access into the house? It probably didn’t mean that; they could probably arrest him if he didn’t let them in, couldn’t they? Did it mean complete silence? When people said that so-and-so “wasn’t talking to police,” obviously they had to mean that so-and-so wasn’t sharing anything of substance with them, right? As opposed to a blanket ban on, say, small talk? Scott worked his way through the various police procedurals he’d watched or read, mob movies, and also tried to calculate mentally what was feasible. His plan had been to let the constables knock twice when they arrived, on purpose, to keep them waiting as though he weren’t playing ball, but when the time came there was no pantomime, and he sincerely kept them waiting through three sets of knocks as he formulated a plan. Breathing deeply before opening the door, Scott settled on a decision to speak more or less curtly with the officers, but that his only solid rule would be to avoid directly answering any questions.