On the Up

by Shilo Jones

  “Yeah, cool. Funny, though. How it turned out. Me in this new truck and you—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Looking down on me now?”

  I stay quiet.

  “Didn’t think so. You lost. That’s the take-home. You lost.”

  “I think you’re right. I lost.”

  “Yeah. In the long run. They were wrong about us. The old man. School. Cops. You’re the one that isn’t shit.”

  Beneath cigar reek I smell work sweat, soaked Carhartts, chemical hair gel. I think about lighting another smoke, let the urge fade. Think about hitting the blow, maybe my first Oxy in Vancity, let that fade too. For a long time, I thought I understood my brother. Who he is. Who I am. What we are together. Then 2005 happened and everything changed.

  Clint knifes into the fast lane and accelerates up Granville Street. Blasts through a very red yellow and chuckles at me reaching for the bitch bar—

  “I’d…prefer not to die like her,” I say, meaning our mother.

  “If it’s your time.” Clint’s voice drops to an ugly growl. “My work is waiting for assholes to make the wrong move. We’re all just making moves, a’course, then we die. I see how afraid you are. But not me. A warrior doesn’t fear death.”

  I almost tell my brother his half-assed martial arts warrior junk is all bullshit. I was a for-real warrior once. Several lifetimes ago, but I remember how a C8 assault rifle feels. Bucking and popping. Feels like purpose, and for a lot of us that was enough. Holding that weapon…I was tapping into something legit for the first time in my life. But we rarely saw them. The OPFOR? The enemy? That’s what was weird. Thought I’d be shooting point-blank. Cutting them down, first-person-shooter style, blood misting my face, was afraid I wouldn’t have the stomach for it. Mostly we only heard them. Gunshots across a valley or on the other side of a village. Pock-pock-pock. Then hours and days of nothing. Hardly any calls or signals. We were shooting over barren fields. At concrete walls. Dirt huts. Ditches. Berms. Low and high spots. Positions. I never really saw who I was shooting at. Ghost stories? Bad guys? In the dust with the rest of my squad, shooting into hardscrabble orchards cut into a mountain. Shooting at boulders on the far side of a valley. Calling in coordinates for an air strike and cheering at the LIGHTROAR, GODFIRE. Laughing at a farm smote skyward by an invisible hand. Feeling we were doing good by winning, no, more than that, feeling we deserved to win, an inevitability to our triumph, our victory confirming an essential rightness in the world, killing as an act of faith in what we created, anticipating the songs sung for us heroes, all that.

  But we were shit scared every time we stepped off base. Maybe never seeing them made it worse, because they sure as fuck saw us, out in the open, patrolling Kandahar, squinting through metal bars welded across a LAV window…

  “Every warrior fears death,” I say, too quietly for my brother to hear, but as soon as I say it I wonder if it’s true. Maybe not. Fuck do I know? A guy can go to war and not learn a thing.

  There. Secret’s out.

  Shaughnessy properties blur past, thirty-foot cedar hedges and ornate iron fences hiding century-old Tudor and Georgian mansions. Blue-blooded money. Several are wrapped in orange construction fencing. Sales signs out front announce the opportunity to build your dream home—

  “See? Knock it down and bang it up,” Clint says. “People whine. Like they wouldn’t do the exact same thing. And before we paint the final coat sell it knock it down and start over. That’s good-paying jobs, the economy, food on the table…”

  We hit the crest of the hill that descends toward downtown Vancouver. High-rise condominiums and office towers mantled in low cloud, reflective floor-to-ceiling windows tinting the mist into polarized shades of teal and lavender, the city floating unreal and immaterial, making me want to stammer a prayer, give myself over, repent, pledge allegiance, swear an oath to something ancient that harkens the end of days. The rain starts up full on, coming down sideways. The truck’s windshield wipers knock back and forth. Clint points to a half-finished condo tower cloaked in green safety netting. The exterior’s unfinished concrete. In the dark it looks a lot like the bombed-out low-rises in Afghanistan: windowless and shattered.

  Knock it down and build it up.

  “—hooked up tight,” Clint’s saying. “Development company named Marigold Group. Guy’s name is Vincent Peele. Solid guy. Thief real estate lawyer. But we’re business partners. So it’s all good.”

  “Fucking lawyer?”

  “Property development. Next level.”

  “I just want to run crews. Clint? Can I? At night, I want to sleep—”

  “—we get Peele that property—”

  “—work hard during the day, honest work—”

  “—Peele’s a lying cheat fuck but as long as we out-lie and out-cheat him—”

  “So you get this lawyer the property. How?”

  Soften the target.

  “Dude’s a twerp, but he’s tapped into real money. Like movie stars, yachts, all that. You won’t believe the shit I’m going to show you.”

  Without meaning to, my hand slides over the puckered scar above my left knee.

  “Still hurting?”

  “Feels weird is all. Like I’m living in someone else’s skin?”

  Clint gives me a look like he’s questioning something while pain radiates from my healed-over wound, up my thigh, settles into my groin. For a while I thought I’d never have kids. Then Daree got pregnant. Shocker. The floor of the LAV ripped loose by the explosion. Pressure cooker shrapnel, red-hot metal moving fast through flesh. Not even an enemy to aim at. Where are they? You see them? No. Ghosts, demons, fear or the carefully crafted idea of fear. Or not even that. Signals. Someone a few blocks away dialled a number on a cellphone, triggered—

  I make an effort to swallow, breathe, tell my brother I’m not going to see our old man.

  Clint grunts. “Focus on the now. Past means nothing to a warrior. Been working on my mindset. Takes discipline. Thought being the army dude you’d get it.”

  “No discipline can stop an IED. It only is.”

  Clint scoffs. “If you walk, just walk. If you sit, just sit. But whatever you do—don’t wobble.” He tosses the wolf tooth on the seat. “Hear me? Enough wobbling, Marky. You need to say you’re ready to work for Vincent Peele.”

  Daree. Sarah. A red-hot bit of metal moving fast. 2005 and everything changed. We never saw the enemy. The current target lives in Point Grey. Kids piled against the factory door burning. What I owe, what I am, and then I say it, I’m ready, and Clint seems psyched, almost happy, and for a moment I feel like I did the right thing for once, got my brother’s back, and that has to be the right thing—

  Carl “Blitzo” Reed

  Friday night dinner Naam restaurant: shirataki Dragon Bowl, macrobiotic special with miso gravy. Microbes. Peristalsis. Happy what I ingest makes me better than most. Happy to be here, mostly. Spider plants climbing trellises to honey-stained oak rafters. My old pal Michael Zenski’s talking vencap acquisitions. I think about Holdout snorting around in my Tesla, sniffing out my stash. Suddenly envious of that potbellied pig, also feeling itchy, too hot, concerned my macrobiotic gravy exists more consciously than me, lives more in the moment. Michael says something about a tech start-up out of Williams Lake. I ask him where the hell that is, to see if he knows.

  “Up north. Past Whistler.”

  “Are the roads paved? Does a litre of milk cost ten dollars?”

  Two or three kids, Michael says, returning to the point. Damn smart kids who have no idea how smart they are, which makes our job easy. Michael says he wants an eighty-five per cent stake for throwing a few grand their way. I ask about the social sphere—are we staying true to community—fret about Michael mentioning stakes. Is he a latent vampire? Cutting-edge tech something or other, Michael answers, talking over me. Could be an app, maybe a socially responsible video game, cloud this or that. Michael can’t seem to remember precisely what the Williams La
ke tech geeks are pimping.

  “Early stages anyway,” he says. “At this point it’s more about synergy, correct? Embodied potential? Are we still searching for the big idea?”

  I slurp a healing noodle, admire a cheery server girl named Star, start to say something about beautifully embodied potential, but before I can make a sound Michael asks me again about the big idea—

  I tell him if you talk about it long enough, something will materialize.

  “Sure. But is that something saleable?”

  “That’s your expertise.”

  “I’m going to use a word, Carl. To describe these kids.”

  “Don’t use it.”

  “I’d like to.”

  “Don’t.”

  Michael pauses, tongues the threshold of the word visionary, apparently thinks better of it and retreats. That word has heavy history. Once, it applied to our groundbreaking venture capital firm, Green Lead.

  The restaurant’s background noise rises up, mercifully, to drown out Michael’s pitch-man voice. I watch his lips move, nod into drawn-out silences, chopstick-stab noodles. Thoughts come in and out of focus. Williams Lake tech geeks with greasy skin and glued-on third eyes. Democratization of information, if not industry. Tetris played retroactively in mouldy basements. A pile of crushed Red Bull cans. Trick is to get in early. This is scraping the bottom of the business barrel, which is saying something. But who knows? Could pan out. Stay positive, manifest dreams—

  “What’s nice about this project is the low overhead,” Michael says, sipping ethically sourced strawberry leaf, nettle, and licorice-root tea. “Capital costs nil. Zero risk. We set them up in a storage unit, throw a space heater in there, a couple laptops. In a few years, they might come up aces. It can happen.”

  “Huffing happens,” I say, feeling perky. “Meth happens.”

  “How long to huff five thousand dollars in gasoline?”

  “Ask Harper. Fume-addicted imperialist zombie.”

  People in Naam look happy from a distance. I’ve never pulled the trigger on a firearm of any make or sort. I’m curious about how that feels. I’m happy the people around me seem happy. I think we’ve done some good. Somewhere?

  “Potential,” Michael says, a shopworn personal buzzword, almost a threat. Subtext: we need in on this deal.

  “Is that right? How does the Williams Lake tech…align with Green Lead’s core values?”

  Whoa! It’s genius. Or at least nearly coherent. Core values? WTF? Maybe the most cutting question I’ve asked about a vencap acquisition in a decade. Michael startles, sets his tea down, spills some over his thumb, brings his thumb to his lips, sucks. Looks like a spoiled toddler for a half-second, or a porn girl dressed like a Japanese anime doll—

  “I believe their project can be nurtured. Guided? Toward something—shit, Carl. Do you even remember what Green Lead’s core values are?”

  Got him. “There’s only one. Green Lead invests ethically.”

  Michael waves me away, but something in my meal’s micronutrients, precise ratios of this and that, the restaurant’s socially elevated timbre, the itty-bitty speedball I injected while ensconced in my Tesla—all combine to make me feel prickish, and instead of taking the high road I press on, capable and quick, focused like a starship laser, needling my oldest friend into submission. “Michael? Who am I?”

  “Quit messing around.”

  Set down my chopsticks. Give him a serious face. “I mean it this time. Who is I?”

  “You’re too old, is what.”

  Feeling honed, mercenary. “Do not patronize. Paternalize? Either/or, do not. I asked you a question. Answer me.”

  Michael rubs his forehead, smudges his concealer. “Sole majority owner and CEO of Green Lead Investment. Happy?”

  “Over the moon. But bear with me. If I am majority owner and CEO, that makes you—”

  “Coo, coo,” Michael whispers, and then it’s gone, my moment of unfettered will, ascendant ego, petty one-upmanship, because it seems Michael’s merrily cooing at me in an attempt to hurl me way off my game, and a guy with lime-green dreadlocks slouching at the table behind us yells caw, caw and Star goes meow from over by the bar and the entire restaurant erupts in animal sounds; the big bearded mofo waiting to be seated rumbles a bearish baritone growl amid more howls and caws, hisses and hoots from the patrons and I go rigid in my chair while the awful screeching barking zoo-shrieks wash over me, gritting my teeth, eyes closed, hands clamped on the table, riding this one out, thinking maybe the speedball wasn’t so itty or bitty, dreaming of my Tesla’s warm, womb-like interior, thinking safety, operational security, concrete-walled safe rooms, thinking maybe I’m about to bolt out of the goddamned Naam and then poof! yee-haw! the animal noises vanish and there’s only silence and Michael looking upset with me or maybe unhappy with his veggie-nut patty?

  “Uh…pardon?” I manage. “Coo?”

  Go for a noodle slurp, try and regain the flow, noodle slips from my chopsticks, flicks miso in my eye. Blink it away, conscious of more than a few sideways glances—

  “C-O-O. I am Green Lead’s C-O-O.”

  “Ah! Gotcha.”

  “Do you? It’s an acronym. Chief Operations Officer.”

  “No, it’s an initialism. Google bet?”

  “Mother of—”

  “So…second in command? After me.”

  “You asshole.”

  Hit the peanut sauce. Beneath the table my legs are crossed and my foot rocks back and forth so fast I hear it hum. I’m about to shoot a ray of light from my eyes. It’s actually a tractor beam. Mentally summoning Star within touching distance, me squinty-eyed staring straight at her, leaning in my chair, brow furrowed, concentrate…closer now, come to me, that a girl…until Michael waves his hand in my face, shatters the spell—

  “Ouch! Do not do that! Very dangerous! Unleashed evil spirits. Opened netherworld portals—”

  “Shush! Enough, Carl. Seriously.”

  “You shush. I miss Holdout.” Blinking, searching for wickedness coalescing in a corner. “Management won’t let me bring him in.”

  “It’s a pig. It’ll be fine.”

  “He has hair, not fur. Like a person.”

  “But it’s not a person.”

  “He eats anything. A black hole of saggy pink skin, consuming all matter. I worry. What kind of creature eats himself sick? It’s unnatural. I once saw him eat a barbecue, propane tank and all. I was in the pool and couldn’t find my way out or I would’ve stopped him.”

  “The fact remains,” Michael sniffs, “it’s only a pig. Unsanitary. I wouldn’t want it in here—”

  “Pfft, stoolie. You know if he eats too much he won’t be potbellied?”

  “What happens?” Michael asks, mid-chew.

  “He just fuckin’ grows and grows.”

  Bit freaked out, thinking of big bangs, infinite expansion, hyper-market dynamics, a Godzilla-pig terrorizing Lotusland, me riding the swine’s back, shoulda seen me halter-break this bastard, white-knuckling the reins, loosing long-repressed urges, horrifying the squares—

  “Are you saying Holdout’s only potbellied and cute because you starve him?”

  “That offends me. He’s on calorie restriction. It’s healthy. Prehistoric. Feast or famine. How our nomadic ancestors ate when we roamed the veldt—”

  “We’re in Kitsilano. You see a fucking veldt? You starve the pig, so it eats. Imagine that.”

  “Those were the days? On the veldt? The internet makes me feel stupid. You offend me.”

  “You said that already.”

  “Worth reiterating.”

  “I want that Williams Lake deal.”

  “Holdout’s going to eat me alive. While I sleep. I’ve dreamed about it.”

  “Then you better eat him first.”

  “Macrobiotic special?”

  Michael smiles. I warm to him. He’s still handsome when I close my eyes and imagine what he looks like.

  “That was almost funny, C
arl. Let’s have more of that. You’ve been a dour dopehead recently.” Michael raises his tea in cheers. “To our original vision. To having fun. To it being all about the people. Remember? Which reminds me. This development deal…”

  I say nothing, stop listening, sink into Michael’s business-drone voice, try to balance a chopstick upright on the table while the waitress, server, wage slave, whatever, the one named Star—bleach-blond dreadlocks, twenty-three, UBC student, double major in environmental studies and corporate finance because we need good people in predatory industry—sashays past our table. A waft of air perfumed with youthfully progressive fragrance, like a tiny bluebell growing from a sidewalk and about to be trampled. Smart kid. Full of potential. Bright future, lots of upside. Unfortunately, Star seems intent on disturbing me, which is—no. Not okay. Dear? I lift a finger off the table to indicate, hun, not now. Business meeting. Important grown-up well-financed world-changing stuff. Come back later, though? Come back when I say. Star senses my dismissal, falters, retreats. Wowza. I’m hitting all the bases tonight. Exuding supreme confidence. Yelling over a hip-hop beat, in the Man’s face with a motherfucking gat—

  Michael waits until Star leaves, gives me another impatient not-nice look. “Completion of stage three will make the project the largest real estate development in the province, if not the country. Of course it’s early days. Still in property acquisition. I like it.”

  I’m becoming aware we’ve switched topics. Williams Lake greaseball techies? I shoo them away. Good kids. Perhaps a bit raw. A bit…lumpen. We need a business plan, kids. Come see us when you have sales.

  Michael’s talking money. Rate of return, blah. I pick up a cloth napkin, nibble the corner, slowly stuff the bulk of it in my mouth.

  “…project of a scale similar to Concord’s False Creek development. Marigold Group’s spearheading. We know them. Vincent Peele? I told him we’re interested. A fantastic opportunity to showcase…”

  I’d forgotten chopsticks and noodles could be so challenging. Getting frustrated. I ask Michael if we’ve come a long way.

  “Talking with your mouth full? A long way from your terrible twos?”