by Shilo Jones
“Me too!” someone shouts.
“I like it!”
“I’m a huge fan!”
A kid dressed in a burlap sack stands, spreads his arms, asks if he can prick my brain.
“Say what?”
The kid laughs, pretending he didn’t slip up, making light of a tense situation. Weather booms and thunders. My staff vibrates, dowsing the treasonous source. Mount Currie’s going nuts, dropping f-bombs, threatening to avalanche the valley if we don’t get rid of the narc. Then the kid in burlap explains he heard fireside rumours about a so-so commune in the early eighties, an idea well past its due date, way up Bute Inlet, direct action against a logging camp, spiked trees and sand-filled fuel tanks, and oh-shit-looky-here my current wife now in politics, the Establishment, hobnobbing with the power elite, how times change, and my vencap company hooked up to Tesla, well-known haterz and fascists, and all that has to mean something, right?
Elect to deliver a cutting rebuttal. “Well, maybe not really?”
“So you deny it?”
“You calling me a sellout?”
Burlap Sack takes a nibble of heritage parsnip, chews. “I’m calling you out.”
“Ooh, you are so not our tribe,” Holdout says into a gust of chill wind while I wave my staff at the sky and thunderclouds gather above the assembled and a killer tornado forms wrathful in my mind.
Michael-the-Puddle, now re-formed into a creature resembling a human being, apparently realizes we might’ve been set up, threatens to call the brewery deal off unless Burlap Sack can recite the St. Paul Principles.
Burlap Sack stares at his nose, looks as smart as three dumb people, doesn’t answer Michael’s question about the StPP. We were almost duped! I reach inside my robes, grab a satchel of garlic powder and a backup supply of something cooked crystalline—
“Frauds,” Holdout growls, which is cool, I didn’t know pigs could do that. “Spy fuckers! Querulous lollygaggers!”
Michael tells Holdout to settle down while steering me to my seat. The wrathful tornado clouds thin, disperse, too bad, could’a been cool.
“So. You kids want to hear it from the horse’s mouth?” Michael dips his pinkie in a mountain of powder, runs it over his gums. Not quite like the old days, but it’s a start. “Was April of eighty-three, first of all, you lying McParland—”
“Not them,” I say, slumping inward. “Not now. They don’t deserve it. Please?”
“They can’t touch us,” Troutman says, a worrisome line, an echo. “And besides. Love and light? We’re role models. The story’ll serve as a warning.”
Lay my head on the table, close my eyes, let my mind unspool while Troutman says the kids have no idea who they’re dealing with. Tells them the story of the Bute Eight. How we made it a full three years up that godforsaken inlet, eating peanut butter from five-gallon drums, killing mosquitos with fly swatters. A man on grizzly watch every night. But bears weren’t the only things hunting us.
“What happened?” Pumpkin Girl asks, a question still seeking an answer.
“There was me,” Troutman says, “and Blitzo here, and his girlfriend the Vulcan, and two more I won’t name. We were in from the beginning. The rest drifted in, Tincan Bill and Larry, Marjorie and Coral. Drawn to the idea, see? The potential. Like flies to shit, it turned out, but we didn’t know that then. This was when believing took commitment. Sacrifice. We were decades late, living in the shadow of those who came before, conscious of the big shoes. Most of the early crew, the Yippies and so on, subversive if ineffectual pop artists of our tribe, were already working in Vancouver, hawking junk bonds on Howe, or nestled in the Slocan, experimenting with advanced hybrid strains. The fervour had passed. The fashion. In a way it was a good thing. Culled poseurs from true believers. But we went up that inlet anyway. Blitzo here had us all primed to begin again. Said there’s nothing more intriguing than a dead idea. Said the evolution of human consciousness is a circle—”
“Oval,” Holdout corrects.
“What?”
“Elliptic,” I mumble into my arm. “Circles are unlikely. That degree of precision—”
“Aren’t ellipses precise too?” Pumpkin Girl wants to know.
“Some kind of mostly spherical shape? Anyway, we’re talking a clean slate, kids.”
I lift my head. “Nothing’s clean. Nothing and nobody. That’s what’s so beautiful.”
Pumpkin Girl, captious eyebrow cocked: “That right? Because—”
“Everyone’s some kind of horrid. It’s what makes us worth loving.”
In unison: “Ick! Ew! Ick!”
“Ever try loving someone better than you? I mean light years better? Damn near impossible. Think of the Almighty. No one really loves that fucker—they just want to please him. Striving, falling short, striving, feeling unworthy, guilty, resentful—nah. Way easier to love someone who’s worse. Christ had it easiest of all, loving us fallen, being all smug and beneficent, all like wow look at how much I love these losers. A world full of perfect people—know what that is?”
Michael kisses my neck. “A world without love.”
“Can I go pee?” Frisk asks, shy.
I say yes, ask him how long he’s known Burlap Sack, who vouched for him, then make a hurry-up motion at Michael, tell him to get on with the Bute Eight if he must—
“Where were we?” Michael asks.
“Clean slate,” Pumpkin Girl says, diligent schoolgirl.
“Right. The ancient urge,” Michael continues, running his fingers through my hair, “to start over. Be reborn. That’s why we headed into the Canadian wilds.”
“Ooooo…the Canadian wilds…,” moans the whole table. “Aaaaah…the great outdoors…”
crazydays18 preens his faux-hawk. “By a clean slate you mean, totally empty?”
“You scared?” Holdout says.
crazydays18 nods, nuzzles Pumpkin Girl. I say come on over here you two, check out these robes, secret pockets, tucked-in illicits.
Michael shoos them away. “Impossible, right? Idealism is always about death, either fear of or lust for. Attempting to begin again—you’re taking aim at immortality. To become godlike. Of course the enterprise is doomed. Death is the only achievable human perfection. We learned that the hard way, out there in the cedars and sphagnum.”
“Life must’ve been so ick back then,” Pumpkin Girl says. “Everything’s perfect now.”
“Attainment,” I say. “On demand.”
Frisk returns, says he had the best pee ever.
Holdout tells him happiness is appreciating the little things.
“Blitz spent—how long in Auroville?”
“Two lifetimes,” I mumble, waiting for an opportune moment to snort something. “It didn’t stick.”
Troutman laughs. “You feel that, kids? Two lifetimes sweating his bodyweight every day, a guru’s finger lodged deep. Thing is, Blitzo here had—has—the one thing we lacked. Vision. We had the desire, but we were scattered. Was easy…” Troutman’s voice falters, gets scratchy, “…to follow this man. Believe what you will.”
A tableful of doe eyes focus on me, trying to reconcile fantastic rumour with let-down reality.
Pumpkin Girl counts with her fingers, frowns. “But that’s nine.”
Troutman sighs. “What?”
“Nine people in the commune,” she says. And then she carefully recites our names one by one.
“My Gia, child!” I yell. “Forest for trees? We did that to fuck with the Tool!” I shake my staff, shower myself in tinsel, try and lift my head off the table, fail, feel a eulogy in the breeze, not quite ready to call it a life.
“Was a time of cross-pollination,” Troutman continues, his voice billowing over the fields. “No right or wrong path. We’d read Abbie and Abbey. But we were years late and way up Bute. Nearest road was three hundred kilometres south. North was empty until Bella Coola. Ends of the earth. Still is. But not empty, heck no. Not a blank slate, not by a long shot, and never was. In the f
ootsteps of that murderer, Al Waddington, and his failed colonial project to put a road through them thar hills. Haunted by Klatsassin’s war cry and gavel strike of the Hanging Judge. The valley felt impenetrable. It wasn’t. Thought we’d chosen a spot well out of the way of the logging companies. We hadn’t. Crown land got sold, a backroom deal putting our camp smack in the middle of a timber lot.”
“It wasn’t that long ago,” I tell him. “You don’t have to do that gothic-horror tall-tale voice?”
The kids are quiet, enraptured by Michael’s ghost story. I lean into him, feel his warmth, try not to hope for more.
“We started small. Slashed tires. Stole chainsaws. But those loggers…it was their livelihood. They responded the only way they knew how. Winter of eighty-five was setting in. We were bushed. Cabin fever. Plagued by violent dream-visions. Unlikely heroes rose, shifting alliances among the clans. Usually the logging crews were laid off in October. But the mucky-mucks on the board of directors were afraid if they left the Homathko camp unguarded we’d burn it to the ground. And they were right. Both sides were dug in. So the high-ups voted to keep a crew in all winter. Turns out the men they selected were…reactionary. Let’s say…hardened. Violent strikebreakers, entrenched neo-Nazis, right-winger paranoids. Not average working men at all. Full of hate, every one of them. Thugs were given a very specific task, understand? Defend our property, the suits said. The Vulcan, Larry, and Coral were smart, sensed the inevitable electrics, caught a boat in mid-December. That was a long winter. Socked in so thick you couldn’t see five feet. Felt like living in a deprivation chamber, and in the absence of coherent stimuli our minds started playing tricks. Time spring came around, Marjorie and Tincan Bill were dead. Plus three of the goon squad.”
Someone’s cellphone rings. A techno beat with a raven cawing.
“Fought the wrong war,” Troutman says. “Those guys weren’t our natural enemies. Another place, different social circumstances, they’d a been our brothers. Suits set us against one another. So Blitzo here walked into the courthouse, copped to two deaths. Other one went as an accidental drowning. But this man you see before you spent from eighty-six until—”
“February twentieth, zero-one.”
“—in federal prison. Not easy, staying quiet for fifteen years. The best part of a man’s life? Conceived his daughter behind bars?” Michael glares at the crew. “Well. Let’s just say…I hope you’ve been listening.”
Troutman presses his head to mine, whispers a promise I can’t hear. I respond, kiss his neck, tell him language is an impediment to communication, tell him I want to get preverbal, that I miss him, that he’s still fucking hot. Michael’s smile is so like yesterday, so like memory, it makes me forget the decades between us, how we fucked on the banks of the glacier-grey Homathko, beside spawning incarnadine salmon, feathers in our hair, mud-smeared, tender-bodied, lit by sunlight reflecting off the ice field, and now Michael kisses me, says he’s sorry, all these years, he never thought it would—and one of the moonbeam brewery kids tugs on my sleeve, interrupts, asks how come he never heard the whole story.
Michael pulls away, laughs, says because he made the whole thing up, careful who you let shit in your ear, son. A collective sigh. Drugs are passed around. Holdout wiggles his head into my robes, nuzzles his wet snout to my nipple, says it’s time to move on.
“So how’d you get all your money, Blitzo?” the kid wearing the burlap sack asks.
Holdout manoeuvres into battle position. “There’s a bomb surgically implanted in my belly,” he tells the kid. “One wrong word and I detonate.”
“That’s, uh, kind of a lot of pressure?”
Bomb. I think about my old accomplice Caltrop, how long it’s been, perhaps time to pay the devil a visit. Last of the real radicals. Fifteen years older than me. Escaped a second tour in ’Nam, snuck up north. An image of the former soldier moving through the mist, face painted green and black, crouched low, silent, hunting. Dude needs to get in on this action.
I decide Burlap Sack’s not a narc. He’s a strikebreaker and corporate spook. Deep undercover. Suspicions confirmed by a look he gives me, I dip my fingers in the garlic powder. The genealogical link between vampirism and union-smashing is strong indeed.
“That was a real cool story,” Burlap Sack says. “About trees and whatever? But can we talk marketing narrative, Mr. Blitzo?” The kid reaches down, slow so he doesn’t startle me, picks up a sketchbook, flashes a drawing. “We’ve done a few sketches for our brewery logo. Would you mind—”
“Show me!” I thunder, snatching the sketchbook and flipping through it. The spectrum changes. Burlap Sack has no idea what he’s stumbled upon. Tool of techno-corporate hegemony. But man, the kid can draw. “You’re an autodidact?”
The kid looks sheepish. Too young to be properly afraid.
“Channelling secrets,” Holdout says, agreeable, his hoof blurring a charcoal print. I shove him off the drawing.
“Inadvertently, of course,” Michael says, looking over my shoulder, maybe sensing something. “Which is the only way secrets should be channelled.”
I’m flipping through the sketchbook, engrossed. Plans, blueprints, schematics. It’s all right here. I must contact Caltrop. Time is narrowing. A window, some kind of opportunity? My staff vibrates. The air’s suddenly turbocharged. I ask Michael to remind me who wants the North Vancouver property?
“I told you. Bo Xi.”
“Bo Xi?” Frisk says. “Heard of that guy. Super-rich businessman. Big into—”
“Me too!”
“—corruption charges, African blood diamonds, all sorts of nasty.”
Michael, quiet, so close his lips brush my earlobe: “You see it now, Blitz? You see it?”
“All these years. Is it really him?”
“Yes. All this time. And now he’s close.”
“You know this dude?” Pumpkin Girl asks, snoopy-snoopster. “He sounds like total bad vibes.”
Michael grabs Burlap Sack’s banjo, feeds it to Holdout. “Lotsa people have heard of him, but no one really knows who he is.”
I flip through the sketchbook. Pencil drawings. Secrets. Schemes. Caltrop will know what to do. A soldier should always have answers, otherwise he’s just an asshole. The dream materializes. I’ve always trusted dreams; they’re the only things worth waking up for.
“Kid,” I mumble at Burlap Sack while studying a so-so drawing of a horse in a field, realizing it’s an emu but the perspective’s off ten degrees and that makes all the difference. “You’re going to take us through time.”
“So Mr. Blitzo,” crazydays18 says, plucking a pierced eyebrow, grubby financial mercenary, sticking it to me despite the olive branch on offer, “you buying the farm?”
Mark Ward
The Alma job ends up being a shitshow. Clint halted work a few weeks back because the customer wasn’t paying, and between then and now the partially excavated trench running along the foundation caved in and filled with freezing mud-water. I send Ryan into the trench with an electric water pump to try and expose the foundation footing where our drainage pipe needs to run. Kid ends up soaked to the waist, shivering, but he works hard down there in the muck without a single word of bitch so I let him sit in the Ford for a while to warm up. The old guy, turns out he’s a Guatemalan named Ramon, heads toward the corner store at coffee break and never makes it back.
Lunchtime, me and Ryan sit in the Ford with the engine idling and the heat blasting. I eat a tuna sandwich, another pulpy apple, drink coffee from a Thermos, and am about to eat another sandwich when I realize all Ryan has is a chunk of soggy Subway that looks pulled from a bin. Give him half my second sandwich, a bag of chips, another smoke, some coffee, telling him he better not be a mooch motherfucker cuz I hate those. He waves me off, asks if he can get on the saw.
“What saw?”
“Concrete saw. It’s in the truck.” Ryan takes a bite of tuna sandwich, looks at the torn-up front yard like it’s the most fascinating thing eve
r. “Paving-stone patio around back. Half finished. Whoever was here had no clue. You should let me rip the stones up. All slumped in anyway. Rebuild the patio. Cut the edge in. Bet I could finish that patio this afternoon, you stay out of my way.”
I tap the steering wheel, crank the defrost to defog the windshield, try and find a way to be pissed off at the kid. “You’re here to dig.”
“Okay, you’re the boss, but just sayin’ that’s a waste of money. Clint’s not paying me fifteen bucks cash to dig.”
“Saw weighs more than you.”
Ryan gives me a look like now he’s certain he should be running crew, not me. “Been doing this since back home. Longer than you I bet.”
“Clint let you run the saw?”
“No.”
So for telling the truth I say, “All right, go work on the patio. I hate that ditch too. But I see you run the saw dry or sink the blade into the dirt, it’s over. Diamond blades cost fifty bucks a pop.”
“They cost fifty-eight.” Ryan looks at the clouds. “Ditch is going to keep filling with water. You need a new pump.”