by Shilo Jones
“Well?” Clint says.
“Fuck sakes. Trying to sell me a lot? I said I like it.”
And even if there is no subconscious fear, no passing doubt, the long-term strategic goal of PSYWAR is to infiltrate and spread the infection. That’s where we’ve been going wrong. Can’t attack this thing head on. Protests, singalongs, prayers. Too late for that. Asymmetrical warfare is the only viable tactic. You have to force-feed the beast its own tail, offer it your children, your spirit, feed it everything you are, remake yourself in its poisonous image. You sacrifice yourself to it. That’s how you survive.
YOU MADE ME.
Clint smiles. “Glad you’re coming around. Fucking commie. The old man was half right—”
“That’s more than usual.”
“—without land, you’re shit. But without money, you’re sweet fuck all.”
* * *
Self-transformation. Every guerrilla op requires a fluid identity, even if it’s only a fake ID and a pasted-on accent. My brother standing in his boxers on a Persian carpet in the middle of a windowless oak-panelled room on the top floor of a brick three-storey walk-up in Gastown, arms spread horizontal while a white-haired tailor takes his measurements with a focus bordering on meditative. I’m seated on an antique high-backed chair, its dark hardwood lacquered to a gloss that matches the shine in Clint’s gold money clip. Classical music piped in from hidden speakers. A real class act, this cash-only tailor of Vincent Peele’s.
The tailor lifts his lanky frame, exhales, says he has something that will work while Clint waits for the bespoke, vanishes. Clint lowers his arms, tries to look like he’s comfortable here, but I know better.
“How close to getting that land for Peele?” I ask.
“Acquisition. Assembling smaller parcels and bidding on the largest property. There are competitors.”
“Shocker.”
“Dude named Scott Charles Booth owns three-quarters of the property. Grandfather was a lumber baron. Big player. Established. Doesn’t need the money, and so has to be offered other incentives.”
I’m about to ask incentives like what when the tailor glides in, sets a charcoal-grey jacket against Clint’s chest. I’m having a hard time making things gel, watching my brother get dolled up for the in-crowd, thinking about Daree and my daughter and somehow that makes my blown-up leg start hurting. The tailor gives Clint his new slacks, tells him to put them on, takes a measurement, says they need a quick hem. Clint sits beside me in his boxers, picks up an Architectural Digest, flips through it. “You should visit the old man. Sooner than later.”
“Why sooner?”
“Cuz he’s expecting you.”
I take this in while the tailor returns with Clint’s slacks and they discuss shirt and tie colour and pattern combinations. Apparently there are guidelines for these decisions, protocols, a world of masculine knowledge Clint and me were never privy to. If men’s fashion were the only way the old man failed us maybe I’d go see him. Clint begins getting dressed. It’s a nice suit, glen plaid in muted grey-brown, understated, not too slick.
“Second time I’ve worn one, not counting that piece of shit yesterday,” Clint says, posing in front of a gilded full-length mirror. “First was when mom died.”
“I remember that thing,” I say, standing. “A rental, right?”
“Sure.” The tailor makes some adjustments, fiddles with Clint’s collar. Says he wants to try another tie. Clint waves him away. “Felt awkward as hell. Goofy shoulders riding up to my ears.”
“And now?”
Clint smiles at his reflection. “Feels fuckin’ mackin’.”
“Mom should see you.” My brother hands the nameless tailor a hefty stack of bills. “She wouldn’t even recognize you.”
* * *
The railroad tracks ran straight through the middle of Chilliwack to a sorting yard behind a bottle depot that reeked of stale beer and a warehouse where guys like us but a couple decades older made concrete culverts. Nights after mom died we used to sneak out, although with the old man down for the count by nine or so what we really did was make sure he wasn’t going to drown in his vomit and then yup that’s us strolling out the front door, ashamed and laughing it off, lighting smokes before we made it out of the yard.
I was seven or around there, Clint nine.
Late eighties, before the internet and smartphones and social media made staying indoors, holed up in your bedroom, a bearable option. Bunch of us kids on the streets back then. Indians from the reserve, some younger than me, who I hadn’t learned to look down on yet. Other broke-ass fuck-ups from the apartments around where we lived. I was beginning to think about the places I saw on TV, Hawaii and New York, London and L.A., even Vancouver, big places that meant something because they were on TV, and I was beginning to see me and my brother and the kids out on the streets weren’t shit to anyone, and I was beginning to be okay with that.
Least I understood my place.
And something else was going on in my murky prepubescent brain. From the railroad tracks, low in the valley, on the floodplain of the Fraser River, I could look up to the nice neighbourhoods, Little Mountain, Chilliwack Mountain, Promontory, where the kids had new clothes and backpacks at the start of every school year, where parents drove down the hill to take their kids to soccer games, music recitals, and I was beginning to get that foul taste in the back of my throat, acidic and bitter, and even the first sign of pain in my temples, physical manifestations of rough, unformed, and unnamed emotions that had nowhere to go, and I remember, even back then, thinking—although thinking isn’t quite right, because this was very pre-thought, instinctual, a hardwired survival signal—that the motherfuckers on that hill were the cause of me being shit, if not directly, then at least in spirit. It was an emotional truth. Nothing logical about it. But we all felt it, and what I didn’t know was that we’d all react differently to that shared instinct, and that how we handled it would end up shaping our lives.
So we’d wander around, break into cars, smash things, light shit on fire. Kid whose name I forget got gasoline spilled on his leg and his buddy lit him up. Nothing cruel to it; just curiosity. Once the burns healed he drew little eyes and mouths on his shiny-smooth scar, pretended Freddy Krueger was emerging from beneath his skin, scared the shit out of us. We’d pummel one another, steal candy and chips and pop from the 7-Eleven beside the high school by running in en masse and snatching whatever we wanted.
But mostly we’d hang out at the rail yard. There was a chain-link fence we’d scramble under. Security patrolled sometimes, though they were rare and fat and underpaid and we’d always see their flashlights way before they got near us and besides, the off chance of getting busted only added to the attraction. We’d climb on the parked trains, stunned they were actually silent and still, sit on top of boxcars and smoke cigarettes or pieces of hollow grass, maybe some weed stolen from someone’s parents if we were lucky. The air smelled of engine oil, creosote, overheated brake drums, horse manure. I remember thinking about those giant trains, where they came from, but I couldn’t imagine much farther than say Hope to the east and Vancouver out west. The world was one big question I was afraid to ask.
Sometimes we’d break into the grain cars and play around in the mountains of grain inside. A kid found out he was allergic to the dust or fertilizer or some shit and his face swelled until he couldn’t breathe; we dragged him out the top entry port and carried the poor fucker to the road, flagged down a car, and took off through a field when it stopped. I think he was okay.
We’d steal shopping carts and load them full of rocks and leave them on the tracks to watch the trains plough into them, then go digging through the blackberry, searching for the mangled shopping cart, in awe of its tortured metal, testament to a power that would eventually wreck us too. There was a parking spot where the older kids with cars used to take their girls, a road that dead-ended at the tracks, pavement littered with fast-food wrappers, crushed beer cans, cigarette bu
tts, and spent condoms, and we’d hide in the blackberry and wait until the windows steamed up and throw rocks at the car, those nice, uniform-sized crushed rocks they lay the rail lines on. Some dude would burst out of the car—usually a lowered Mustang or a jacked Ford 150, sucker probably spent almost everything he made on the payments—right pissed, half-naked, tucking his prick into his ginch, screaming, and we’d take off running while he thrashed through the blackberry toward us, getting even more worked up when he realized there was no way he was gonna catch us and maybe sensing that was his whole fucking life right there.
Except one day, we were ten or eleven by then, I didn’t run. I stood on the tracks while the long-haired skid teenager raced at me, his pants undone, his Slayer shirt riding up over his flabby white belly. I remember he looked oddly feminine. Soft, even though he was screaming he was going to eat my heart, tear out my eyes, fuck me with a stick, all that. The guy gets to me and I call him something, I can’t even remember what, and he slams into me and that was the first punch I ever took that wasn’t from family. It sent me hard across the tracks, blinking against the ringing in my ears, and then the skid kicked me in the gut and I shrieked and the fight left him, which is when I learned most folks have a small tolerance for inflicting hurt. People talk big. But you stick a knife in someone’s hands, a gun, most of them won’t use it, and if they do it’ll ruin them.
That’s important to a guy like me.
Another thing we’d do is follow the train tracks to where they crossed the TransCanada at an overpass and climb out over the bridge beneath the tracks. Cars would zip by at a hundred or more beneath us and we’d cling to the steel girders, inching along until we were in the middle of the overpass. And then we’d wait. Semis with maybe a foot of clearance would roar beneath us and we’d have to hold on tight to the bridge or the shockwave would pull us out into space and we’d fall into traffic. We’d scream and thrash our heads back and forth when the semi-trucks hit, air frothing around us, wind roaring in our ears, whipping our hair around, prying our fingers from the girders—like being trapped inside a thunderstorm. But even that wasn’t the best. Best of all was when one of us felt the entire bridge begin to vibrate. We’d be calling it all night, hoping it did and didn’t happen. A fucking train’s coming! we’d shriek, panicked and psyched.
Most of the time it’d be a false alarm.
But sometimes, if we were lucky, the kid who called it would be right and a confluence of chance events would conspire to put a half-dozen shitbag kids under that fucking railroad track at the precise moment a fully loaded freight train roared through town. We’d wrap our arms and legs around the girders and wait in the dark, breathless, cheeks pressed to cold rolled steel, feeling the train’s power materialize in welded metal. There would always be naysayers. Nah, it’s nothing, piss-ass. But there was a point when the majority of us felt the overpass tremble in advance of the train, and then something switched and the kids who weren’t in it for real would scramble through the girders back to land, desperate to escape, and we’d call them every name and then some because my brother and me, the Ward Brothers, we stayed put for the freight train every single time, if for different reasons.
Clint stayed because he cared what people thought. He was already on the up by then, accumulating a posse of delinquents that—in a few short years—would be dealing dime bags and eight-balls, stealing cars and joyriding them into ditches, doing dope runs for established crews to Vancouver or Calgary, Prince George or Kelowna, humping backpacks full of weed over Zero Avenue in the dead of night, curbing rivals outside the youth centre and shithole bars like the Princess, and basically doing whatever he had to do to make bank except get a job making concrete culverts.
I stayed on that overpass because when a freight train hit, for the forty or so seconds it thundered over me I forgot everything about who I was and where I came from and where I was heading. Forgot me and most of my friends were beaten before we knew what the fight was about.
So there we were. Two brothers wrapped around these massive steel girders with semi-trucks roaring below while the overpass began to ripple back and forth from the shockwave of the approaching train, gradually at first, then faster, the entire span rising and falling, only an inch, maybe less, but it felt like the structure was suddenly adrift on a rolling ocean and the train would inevitably blow its whistle as it approached because the kids smart enough to bail were out there throwing rocks at it, pissing the helpless conductor off.
Maybe the train took a half-minute to get to the overpass, and in that time we’d go through it all: fear, regret, self-hatred, excitement, terror, resignation. We’d imagine the face of a loved one grieving over us, even if that loved one’s face was vague and unformed because, really, the fact we were out in the dead of night fucking around on a train overpass meant there wasn’t anyone specific. We’d scream that it was the raddest thing ever. A kid named Tommy Something would piss himself. Someone else would be crying, wishing he’d run when he had the chance. Me and Clint would lock eyes, daring one another without saying a word—
Now the fucking freight train hits, the diesel engine sinking the overpass under its barbaric weight and the vibration tearing through our chests, making our stomachs churn, and the smash of air forced downward threatening to blast us onto the TransCanada and our fingers slipping, shaken loose by the implacable might of old-school iron and industry, and holy shit now we’re screaming, this was a bad idea, oh fuck oh fuck, but there’s no escape, all we can do is hold on and pray we’re strong enough. The engines pass overhead and we get a respite until the bulk of the train crosses, car after fully loaded car rolling ten feet above us, making the rocking motion even worse, the noise like a mountainside cutting loose, throats raw from shrieking, someone throwing up and the vomit whipping sideways and then, if we’re real lucky, right then, right when the force of the freight train is about to hurl us onto the TransCanada, a semi-truck passes beneath us.
A semi-truck is not a streamlined vehicle. A semi going over a hundred pushes a wall of air out in front, and this air spills over the top of the cab and curls behind the trailer in a roaring, violent mess. So when that semi passed under us, compressed air smashed up from below while the train bucked and thundered above, rocking the overpass back and forth, and for a second the two forces would come together in some ungodly clusterfuck of physical law and lift us into the air. We’d hover there, asses floating a few inches above the girders, arms and legs locked against a power that was now threatening to throw us upward into the train’s meat-grinder undercarriage. I’d be sure I was gonna die, maybe already had, bile rising in my throat, spittle spraying from my lips, road dust stinging me blind, and the strangest thing is that for kids like us the dying didn’t come until a few years later.
Jasminder Bansal
Tuesday morning. First time in an airplane, flying north, pitching like a pinball. The plane cabin is all eighties umber and exposed rivets. Spend most of the flight with the shade drawn, staring at the bolts securing the door, imagining the employees responsible for tightening them, how miraculous it is, given what fuck-ups we are, that any of this works at all. We smack down in Smithers, a town tucked against the Coast Range in Northern B.C. A local landowner named Les Hutchins picks me and four American investors up at the single-room airport. A coffee machine in the lobby burps black fluid into a plastic cup. I pile on the Splenda, buy an Oh Henry! from a vending machine, and call it breakfast.
We’re shown to a rental van. Les drives us into a cutesy faux-alpine downtown, shows off a life-sized chainsaw carving of a woodsman engaging an alpenhorn. Selfies for all. Then we drive into the mountains. The snow has melted into puddles that stretch across the gravel road. Les fishtails the van through them while yelling over his shoulder. We stop beside a partially iced-over river and climb out, turning three-sixties, marvelling at granite walls plunging sheer to the valley bottom, the stone dusted turquoise-white with ice and snow. I notice an urge to talk louder, assert my
self in the silence.
We skid and slide to the water’s edge. Les settles beside the river, oblivious to the silty mud staining his knees, props his torso like he’s doing a push-up, slurps at the fast-flowing water. He’s a big guy, thick, with a ruddy complexion and a shock of white hair clustered around his ears. A crow or raven, wish I knew for sure, squawks from the far shore.
I’ve never sipped water from a mountain river. The cold air, the flight, being hired full-time at Marigold—all combine to make me feel a welcome sense of future possibility. Mud squishes around my boots while the Americans chuckle, check their phones, mutter about the lack of service.
Cup my hand, bring glacier water to my lips. I feel far away from Knight Street particulate…but it’s still only water. I brush the sand off my palms, feeling let down, unsure what I expected.
A bald eagle arcs from a bleached snag. One of the businessmen, I believe his name is Donald-from-Arizona, tells Les the property will do fine, and two hours later we’re back in the shuddering twin-prop and I’m trying not to be sick and the Americans are discussing property rights, how the only way to preserve natural resources like air and water is to privatize them so there’s an incentive for conservation and that’s when Donald-from-Arizona whispers I always was curious about you squaws, long winters and all. I put a paper bag to my mouth and pretend to vomit. Later, in Marigold’s offices, Vincent finalizes the deal, and I realize I haven’t thought about Amar all morning.
* * *
Marigold’s offices overlook False Creek: Yaletown’s stately glass towers magnifying a chance ray of light in an otherwise overcast sky; boats in the harbour still neatly winter-moored, sails folded and tucked away; joggers and cyclists threading beneath cherry trees a couple weeks from flowering; the city tuned to spring, relieved another long rain is nearly finished; the changing season evident in faces turned skyward, hopeful.