Trickster Drift

by Eden Robinson

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2018 Eden Robinson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Alfred A. Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Robinson, Eden, author

  Trickster drift / Eden Robinson.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780735273436

  eBook ISBN 9780735273450

  I. Title.

  PS8585.O35143T75 2018 C813’.54 C2018-900467-3

  C2018-900468-1

  Book and cover design by Jennifer Lum

  Cover images: (feathers and geometric pattern) © Tanor;

  (birds) © art4all, all Shutterstock.com

  Interior images: (feathers) © Tanor / Shutterstock.com

  v5.3.2

  a

  For John Robinson.

  Always in my heart

  Coolly and deliberately I let go of Lucucid

  Grieve the parking of my original language

  And bury it inside my bones.

  —Lee Maracle, “I’m Home Again”

  Cover

  Also by Eden Robinson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. That Old Black Magic

  2. Life Is a Highway

  3. Sarah, Interrupted

  4. The Inevitability of Death Threat

  5. A Brief Overview of Vancouver

  6. The Compound

  7. Nana Issues

  8. Orca Yoda

  9. Forgive and Forget

  10. Ominous Warnings from the Dead

  11. Dolphin World

  12. Chronicle of a Crash Foretold

  13. Promenade Sentimentale

  14. My Boo

  15. Dysfunctional Coping Mechanisms

  16. Hex Key Therapy

  17. First Day of Class

  18. Hole

  19. Oh, Full of Scorpions Is My Mind

  20. Spook

  21. Someone I Used to Love

  22. The Sartorial Resistance

  23. Open Doors

  24. Ghostapalooza

  25. Always Something Different Going Wrong

  26. Fireflies Redux

  27. I Didn’t Choose the Mod Life

  28. Super Fly

  29. Neeka

  30. When Furry Aquatic Rodents Ruled Turtle Island

  31. Through the Veil

  32. Detached

  33. Snacks Are a Many-Splendoured Thing

  34. You Say You Want a Resolution

  35. Weird-Ass Chats with Rabid Dogs

  36. The Rupture

  37. Day One

  38. The Angry Bitch That Lives Inside Us All

  39. The End Is Nigh

  40. Someday

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1

  The clouds finally broke into a sullen drizzle after a muggy, overcast day. Jared Martin flipped up his hood as he turned the corner onto his street. His mom’s truck was in the driveway. The house he’d grown up in was two storeys high, white with green trim. The large porch was littered with work gear. His mom rented out two of the rooms and the basement to pay the bills. Most of her tenants were sub-subcontractors, in Kitimat for a few weeks and unwilling to shell out for a pricey furnished one-bedroom or a motel room. Or they were hard-core smokers who wanted to be able to light up in their rooms and found a kindred spirit in his mom, a dedicated two-packer who hated being forced outside.

  He paused on the sidewalk, listening. Things seemed quiet. Which didn’t mean it was safe to go in, but Jared went up the steps and opened the front door. Not visiting his mom before he took off for Vancouver would save him a lot of grief, but it would be such a douche move. She’d never let him forget it.

  “Mom?” Jared said.

  “In here,” she said, her voice coming from the kitchen.

  The kitchen windows were all open and moths fluttered against the screens. She was frying a pan of meatballs, her cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth.

  Her hair was in a ponytail. She wore her favourite ripped Metallica T-shirt over jeans and flip-flops. He could see all the little muscles working in her face as she inhaled. She was losing weight again. He hoped it was just coke.

  Jared put his backpack down by the table and then hopped up to sit on the counter. His mom salted a pot of boiling water and cracked in some spaghetti.

  “Nice of you to show up,” she said.

  Jared swung his feet, staring down at them. “Where’s Richie?”

  “He is where he is.”

  Her boyfriend sold the lighter recreational drugs. They used to get along, but Richie seemed suspicious of Jared now that Jared was sober, like he had suddenly turned into a narc. When they were forced together by his mom, Richie wouldn’t talk to him for fear of incriminating himself.

  Jared watched her resentfully making him dinner. She hated cooking. He wished she’d just ordered a pizza. He tried to think of a safe topic of conversation. His Monday night shift at Dairy Queen was normally dull, but his new co-worker had kept stopping to sob into her headset. “Work was nuts. I had to train my replacement. She does not handle stress well.”

  “Not many people survive the soft-serve ice-cream racket.”

  Ball-buster, his dad called her when he was being charitable. His adoptive dad? His dad. Philip Martin, the guy who had raised him when his biological dad turned out to be a complete dick.

  She stirred the pasta. “What? No snappy comeback?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Yeah, looking down on all us alkies and addicts must be exhausting.”

  “Are we going to do this all night?”

  “Get the colander.”

  Jared hopped down and grabbed the colander from the cupboard above the fridge.

  When he handed it to her, she stared at him a moment. Then her lips went thin, the lines around her mouth deepening. “I don’t want you staying with Death Threat,” she said.

  Death Threat was the nickname of one of her exes, Charles Redhill, a low-level pot grower who said it would be okay if Jared bunked in his basement while he was going to school in Vancouver, if he didn’t mind working a little security detail in exchange.

  “People aren’t exactly lining up to let me sleep on their couches,” Jared said.

  “He’s a fuckboy with delusions he’s Brando.”

  “Stel-la!” Jared said, trying to make her laugh.

  She ignored him as if he wasn’t standing beside her. She took the cigarette out of the corner of her mouth and let the pasta drain in the colander in the sink and then dumped it back in the pot. She poured in a jar of Ragú spaghetti sauce and stirred and then added the meatballs. She crushed the last bit of her cigarette out on the burner and tossed the butt in a sand-filled coffee can near the sink. He carried the pot to the table. She pulled some garlic bread out of the oven.

  They ate in silence. Or, more accurately, Jared ate in silence. His mom smoked and picked at a meatball with her fork, slowly mashing it into bits.

  “Where’s Death Threat’s place?” she said.

  Jared shrugged. He was hoping against hope
that Death lived near his school, the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Didn’t matter, though. Nothing beat free.

  “Nice. I’m your mother and you don’t trust me enough to know where you’re fucking staying.”

  “He’s away in Washington State right now. I’m booked at a hostel for the first week. Just text my cell.”

  “He told you where he lives, right?”

  “He’ll show.”

  “He’s a fucking pothead. He’ll forget you exist. He forgets where his ass is until someone hands it to him.”

  “I can handle myself.”

  His mom sucked in a great impatient breath.

  “Can we just have a nice supper?” Jared said.

  “Can you not live with the spazzy fucktard who calls himself Death Threat?”

  “Chill, okay? I just need a free place until my student loan comes in, then I’ll find a room or something.”

  “Buttfucking Jesus on goddamn crutches.”

  “Mom.”

  “Don’t Mom me, genius. This is a crap plan.”

  “It’s my life,” Jared said, pushing the plate away.

  “Jared, you can barely manage warding. What’re you going to do if you run into something really fucking dangerous?”

  His mom was a witch. For real. As he had found out definitively, just before he swore off the booze and the drugs. He’d always thought she was being melodramatic when she told him witch stuff. Then he was kidnapped by some angry otters and his shape-shifting father/sperm donor stepped in to save him, along with his mother. He only lost a toe. Her particular talent was hexes, though she preferred giving her enemies a good old-fashioned shit-kicking. Curses tended to bite you in the ass, she’d told him, and weren’t nearly as satisfying as physically throttling someone.

  “Who’s going to bother me?” Jared said. “I got nothing anyone wants.”

  “You’re the son of a Trickster,” she hissed.

  “There’s a billion of us.” On one website he’d found 532 people claiming to be the children of Wee’git. Either Wee’git couldn’t keep it in his pants or a lot of people wanted to appear more exotic.

  “You think you’re so fucking smart,” his mom said.

  Jared recited the Serenity Prayer in his head. She shook another cigarette out of the pack and lit it off her butt before crushing it out on the full ashtray in the middle of the table. The TV went on in the living room. The recliner squealed.

  “I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow,” Jared said. “You can forget you ever had me and party yourself to death.”

  “You are testing my patience.”

  It was always a bad sign when his mom stopped swearing. Jared focused on the tick of the kitchen clock to stay calm.

  “You think I don’t love you,” she said. “Is that it?”

  “I don’t think I’m high on your priority list.”

  She got up and stood over him. She took her cigarette out of her mouth and he half-expected to get it in his face. He must have flinched, because her eyes narrowed dangerously.

  She grabbed his chin. “You shoulda been a girl. Wah. Mommy doesn’t fucking love me. My feelings. My feeeeeelings.”

  He shoved her hand away. “Get off me.”

  “Are we done emoting?”

  “I am.”

  She backed up a step. “So I asked my sister if you could stay with her.”

  Holy crap. Jared was stunned. His mom hadn’t spoken to her sister since…forever. God. She really didn’t want him to stay with Death Threat.

  “I dunno,” Jared said.

  “Mave’s willing to put you up,” his mom said. “But be careful. She’s deaf to magic. Don’t bring it up around her. She’ll think you’re nuts and try to get you on antipsychotics.”

  “I thought you hated her.”

  “I do.”

  She took a piece of paper out of her jean pocket and handed it to him. His throat tightened when he saw the name and number. His aunt, Mavis Moody, had tried to get custody of him when he was a baby, figuring her sister would be bad for any baby. His mom had married Philip Martin to avoid losing Jared. He couldn’t meet his mom’s eyes knowing how much of her pride she’d sacrificed to find him a safer place to crash. He dropped his head.

  “Don’t say I never did anything for you,” she said.

  Jared reached down, rifled through his backpack and gave her his grad picture.

  She frowned. “Are you throwing it in my face? I only have grade eight and you’re a fucking high school graduate? You think that makes you special?”

  “It’s just a picture,” Jared said. “Toss it if you don’t like it.”

  * * *

  —

  His bed was stripped. Clean sheets were folded on top of the dresser. Usually he had to shake out the used condoms and indiscriminate underwear, reminders of the parties that had gone on in his house while he was couchsurfing. When he first sobered up, he’d tried to ride the parties out, but when he was shaky, the temptation to join in was non-stop. And somehow, being sober alone at a party seemed sadder than being a barely tolerated guest on someone else’s couch. Also, as he became more comfortable with sobriety, he got tired of fighting randoms for his own bed.

  He studied the changes to his room. The floor was swept and free of discarded beer cans and roaches. His desk was cleaned out, completely empty. All the letters Granny Nita had written him were missing. He rechecked the drawers, just in case. He hadn’t hidden them from his mom, but he wasn’t exactly waving them in her face, since Granny Nita was the other close relative his mom hated with a passion. Granny Nita had always disapproved of her daughter’s hard-living ways and of her choice in men (Jared couldn’t argue with that). But Granny Nita had mostly written Jared about her legal woes trying to get compensation for what had been done to her at residential school. It didn’t seem like she had anybody to talk to about it—she and Mavis also didn’t talk: what was with the women in his family?—so she poured everything into her letters to him. She said there was no paperwork, no surviving evidence that she had been experimented on. Just the scars on her body, the masses in her lungs and her own testimony. She’d gotten compensation for her years of being in the Port Alberni Residential School, but not for her time in the preventorium where she’d been sent for a persistent cough that the doctors had said was tuberculosis. Her legal team was thinking they’d have to start a class action suit. But she worried. She didn’t want to sit in court and itemize everything that had happened in public, like she was a sideshow, there for everyone’s entertainment. If they were going to go forward on “an individual basis,” though, the lawyers wanted her to limit the adjudication to things they had witnesses and paperwork for, like the time the supervisors had burned her hand on the stove or when the doctor had punctured her eardrum with a scalpel.

  Sometimes Jared hadn’t been able to open her letters for a few days. He’d sit and steel himself to read her neat cursive writing. She wrote these things so matter-of-factly, as if everyone got their eardrum punctured when they came in for treatment one too many times for an ear infection, or had a bunch of women drag them into the kitchen and burn their hand because they wouldn’t shut up about what was happening to their cousins, who were getting picked out of bed in the night, leaving her to listen to them scream and scream and scream.

  God bless you, Jared, she always signed her letters.

  When she wasn’t writing about her adjudication, she was talking about her church, her church groups, her friends in God. How her faith helped her through her trials and she hoped one day he’d come to know Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.

  Always trying to recruit him—yeah, he could see why his mom had a bug up her ass about Granny Nita. Even if his mom had read the letters, there was nothing damning in them. She couldn’t be that mad, right? She would have mentioned it at supper if she was feeling homicidal. He’d have a knife through his hand or the Ragú jar bust over his head. He’d wait till morning to ask for the letters back. If the
re was a scene, he wouldn’t be stuck here afterwards. Still, he wished Granny Nita would learn to text like a normal person.

  Rain had begun pattering on the roof. Jared made his bed, then flopped down and checked his cellphone. Three texts: one from Bianca, a co-worker at Dairy Queen who went to the same AA meetings he did, and two from Crashpad, his only remaining friend in high school after he stopped selling pot cookies and giving kids access to his mom’s party palace. Nothing from Death Threat.

  Proud of you, Bianca had texted him. Keep it up!

  She’d attached a picture of an animated, dancing cake with a giant “1” candle sparkling like the fuse in a stick of dynamite. He texted back a quick Thanks!

  Why’d you grad early? Crashpad had texted. Whoz gonna sit wit me @ lunch?

  And then: This sux. Do your upgrading here! U can park in my room.

  Crashpad’s parents could stand Jared for a stretch of about a week, maybe two, before they started asking when he was going home. Or if he had relatives he could stay with. Or what his plans were. He couldn’t blame them. He’d probably spent half of this last year sleeping on a camping foamy on Crashpad’s bedroom floor, watching his DVDs and Blu-rays of science fiction and fantasy TV series. In part Jared wanted to go to school in Vancouver so he could watch a show where the hero didn’t wear Spandex or wasn’t battling obvious CGI monsters. Jared knew he was only welcomed back to their house because no one at school picked on Crashpad when Jared was around. Not because Jared had spectacular fighting skills or anything. Just a willingness to mouth off and a high pain threshold. Also, most people knew his mom’s reputation.