Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (10 page)

The noise in her head is like one of those fireworks kids
launch all through the night at Halloween, a high-pitched squealer that ends, not quite with a bang, but with a loud pop.
Greetings, fellow misanthrope, now get the hell out of my way!

She heads straight for the French Fry Guy as if he's the finish line, ski poles flailing to the left, to the right, to the left. A woman yells, “Curtis!” and yanks a Jack Russell on an extendable leash out of Nina's way. Poles high in the air now, well over her head, sweat coursing from her armpits like ill-fated bison streaming over the last rise at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. With a warrior cry, Nina slams into the man and bounces backwards off him as if she's a character in a Saturday-morning cartoon. You can practically hear the requisite
Boing!

“Mascot busts a move!” someone announces, DJ-style. Nina's head should be cracked open, her durian fruit of a brain fouling the sea-spiked air, but the marmot suit has cushioned the fall. She staggers to her feet to scattered applause, woo-hoos!, and the insistent, machine-gun laughter of someone going off his meds. The salmon eaters think it was all part of her act.

As she straightens, Nina sees the same little boy in the private-school uniform from last week standing in front of her, like a miniature security guard in his blazer with its cheesy golden crest. The light behind his head is dazzling, reminding her that it hasn't rained for several weeks; the reservoirs are unusually low, and residents have been asked to share baths and take short showers. Dan and Patricia no doubt still fill their Jacuzzi tub to the brim, hot water tumbling unchecked from the gilded modernist faucet. Nina pictures Dan sliding in behind Patricia, kneading the knots in the small of her back as she releases a tight little sigh, reluctantly, as if she'd never willingly let go of anything.

The sun fires the tips of the boy's hair into a spiky penumbra,
a hazy crown of thorns. He gazes up at Nina with something approximating concern in his eyes and reaches out.

A little hand in hers. It would be so easy.

Of course, there are those who say, “The mountain is angry.” The disappearances of the North Shore houses now number in the high hundreds, and as downtown hotels fill up with the moneyed homeless, letters to the local papers speak of Gaia's revenge or God's displeasure. To voice these kinds of beliefs in the wake of the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina would have invited instant censure. But here the victims are people of means, not the already downtrodden, so the notion that they're being either cosmically punished or held up as “a warning to us all?” (
Vancouver Sun
editorial, October 16, 2006) is debated in the mainstream media by pundits with straight faces.

And that slurry of twittering that can be heard around every corner? That'd be the sound of
schadenfreude
.

Unlike those who act as if they're on speed-dial to the Earth goddess—those men on recumbent bikes and those women who rub baking soda into their fuzzy armpits and think fetal-monitoring machines are the work of the devil—rationalists who've always harboured a secret penchant for Greek mythology know full well that Gaia is in fact the daughter of Chaos.

Still, there is talk of healing. The chief of the Squamish Nation is invited to say a few words over the deep hole where a house had stood, a place that was once tribal land. The event evolves into something rather ecumenical, with smudge sticks, button blankets, trickster stories, and didgeridoos. As a dog howls forlornly, the elder quotes from Chief Seattle's famous 1854 speech. “It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will come,
for even the White Man … We may be brothers after all. We will see.”

And the mountain in answer? Not so much as a burp.

“I didn't know marmots could drive!” The boy twists and turns in the passenger seat of Nina's car, punctuating each breathless pronouncement with body language. He has proved to have an insatiable appetite for all things marmot and an endless arsenal of exclamation marks. It's as if he's cornered the market on enthusiasm and is doling it out without regard for the niceties of supply and demand.

Nina envisions the look on Patricia's face as she turns from applauding Byron-from-England's Houdini-like escape from a straitjacket and padlocked chain to find her Cracker Jack prize of a son gone, and feels a rare frisson of self-satisfaction.

She is finding it hard to keep her paws on the steering wheel, and shoulder-checking is impossible with the mascot head still on. She doesn't usually drive if she can help it and her mid-'70s Toyota Corolla is practically in its death throes, but this morning she was running late after a savage bout of insomnia, and trying to make her shift by bus was not an option. The walk back to her car, parked on a side street just outside Granville Island, felt impossibly long, with the boy chittering away at her side as he trotted to match her pace. But there were remarkably few people about and she's fairly certain no one saw them get in the car and pull away.

It seems he's only in kindergarten—what kind of people would put a five-year-old in a uniform, complete with blazer?— and that his teacher, whose name sounds something like Miss Peach (the boy talks so fast Nina can't make out everything he's saying), has made the Vancouver Island marmot the official class animal. “There's only about a hundred of you left in existence!”

Nina nods. She tells him she's come to the city as an ambassador for her fellow marmots, to make people understand that they have to stop hacking away at the old-growth forests and destroying their habitat.

“And they sent you because you're the biggest!!”

“And because I'm the only one who could drive a standard,” Nina says as the car shudders onto her street just off Commercial Drive. Breathing in her own expelled carbon dioxide in the confines of the car is making her giddy, as if her brain cells are multiplying too rapidly, spawning an overpopulated subsidized-housing project in her skull cavity.

In front of the just-completed reno on the corner, a hired gun in a surgical mask is blowing leaves from the lawn and the sidewalk with a backpack blower. They gust madly, whirling like the calendar pages in
Citizen Kane
before settling into the gutter. Nina can remember when there was a clear divide in the city, a line in the sand all parties respected. West of Main was where you found the leaf blowers, east of Main people still retained a genetic memory of how to wield a rake and a broom. But when property prices started spiking wildly there began a drift of Westside sensibilities into her formerly bohemian and Italian neighbourhood, along with their implements of destruction.

“Satan's little helper,” she says.

“What?” says the boy.

“The two-stroke terrorist.” She points towards the leaf blower.

The boy's eyes go wide. “My dad has one of those.”

She doesn't answer, letting him draw his own conclusions. The boy sucks in his lips until his mouth disappears. Nina can feel the sweat pooling in her ears as the car grinds to a stop in front of her place.

It's the leaf blowers that undo her every time. They're the reason she's trapped in this sauna-hell of a mascot costume in the first place. That day in late August, as Nina hurried along Napier to her shift at the food co-op, there was a woman out in front of the new heritage-style infill that towered over its neighbours; she was blasting a blower back and forth across her lawn as if she were divining for water. With her tidy silver-grey pageboy and batiked sarong wrapped around her sturdy, late-middle-aged body, she exuded an obnoxious serenity. The grass, smooth as a green sheet yanked tight over the yard and tucked in with hospital corners, appeared spotless save for a few stray leaves from a Japanese maple. Nina stopped, ignoring the warning in her head that was whooping like a car alarm, and stood on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips.

“I thought you might like to know,” she said loudly over the ear-splitting roar of the blower, “a leaf blower causes as much air pollution as seventeen cars!” The woman didn't even glance her way. Nina strode onto the lawn, yelling, “I said,
I thought you might like to know that a leaf blower causes as much air pollution as seventeen cars!
”

The woman trained the nozzle on the one remaining red leaf, which quivered slightly but stayed where it was. Nina wrenched the leaf blower out of the woman's hands and aimed it at her face. The pageboy lifted off the startled woman's scalp before she could grab it. The wig hovered overhead for a few seconds like an antediluvian bird before blowing off and snagging on a bare branch of the maple. The woman stood there, impossibly wide-eyed and bald, an anime character, as Nina screamed about carcinogens and decibel levels and the end of civilization while wielding the leaf blower like an AK-47. Later, Nina would recall that this was the moment she understood how something like Columbine could happen.

The woman pulled pale pink wax plugs from her ears and, backing away slowly, said, “I'm going to call 911.” Or maybe just mouthed the words before Nina lunged.

Honey sings to maintain her equilibrium, “Thome of them want to use you, thome of them want to get used by you …,” her long, black hair blowing across her face in the breeze from across the water. Driving over the Lions Gate Bridge always tightens her guts, but not as badly as crossing the Second Narrows does. That one, she's determined, is just plain bad luck. The Ironworkers Memorial Second Narrows Crossing, as it's officially designated, a name no one uses, was consecrated in blood. Whenever Honey traverses it she makes the sign of the cross in deference to the dead. The last time she took that route to the North Shore, she lifted her hands off the steering wheel at the halfway point and veered into the next lane, almost clipping a motorcyclist with a helmetless passenger.

Her older friend Judit's father was one of the workers who died when the bridge collapsed during construction, Judit fresh in the womb, her mother maddened by the loss. Judit dreams every so often of falling men, she's told Honey,
men falling from the sky like bad rain
,
like laundry
.

Dear Judit, who still works at the Subway franchise where they met, despite her advanced cake-decorating certificate from the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts and her uncanny ability to retain statistical information. She doesn't have Honey's drive (as Judit's admitted more than once, with admiration but not envy), which is of the old-fashioned sort, almost Presbyterian in its austerity. Honey has never taken a vacation, doesn't have time to devote to dating, and still lives in the salmon-coloured stucco townhouse under the SkyTrain line near Nanaimo Station she'd shared with her late mother and Charity, the trains juddering overhead at intervals as reassuringly regular as her paycheques. But Honey is nothing if not aspirational. And when she launches her home-decor shop after this Decourcy Court sale closes, she'll have jobs for Judit and her sister. Jobs that allow you to lift your chin sky high,
you can bet your sweet bippy
, as Judit liked to say.

Far above Honey, the lights strung along the Lions Gate's suspension cables,
Gracie's pearls
, haven't winked on yet. When night comes they'll resume their siren call to distressed souls.

Just last week, another suicidal person jumped from the bridge to the absolution of the frigid waters below. Honey believes in fortitude, but fortitude is sometimes not enough. This is why the Blessed Virgin filled with holy water stands on her state-of-the-art dash. Honey likes to cover all her bases. You can bet your sweet bippy.

“Is this where you live?” the boy asks as they round the side of the house to the entrance that leads to Nina's basement suite. She tries to see it through his over-privileged little eyes. The back fence, chicken wire, sags low with the weight of accumulated morning glory, now dying, revealing a rutted back alley strewn with KFC carcasses the raccoons have freed from garbage bags. There's more than one abandoned upholstered chair, the stuffing festively mounding out like popcorn.

Next door, her neighbour, a well-muscled, mulleted thirtysomething on permanent disability from complications involving a cuckolded husband and an illegal firearm, practises his nanchukas. He's part of a subterranean tribe of basement dwellers that emerge blinking into the mid-afternoon light from their illegal suites like small nocturnal animals long after those with more conventional circadian rhythms have scattered for the day.

“Cool,” the boy says.

The man looks over and grins, wiggling his Fu Manchu moustache. “Wherever you go, there you are.” The guy has a paperback of Carlos Castaneda's
The Teachings of Don Juan
spread-eagled on a vinyl lawn chair beside an ashtray, a roach clip holding the still-smouldering twist of a joint perched on its rim. He tokes for medicinal purposes, he's confided to Nina more than once, as if she gives a shit. As if every second house on the street wasn't a grow-op. Nina is tempted to tell him she's the one who blew the whistle on the operation the Grow Busters pot squad raided two blocks over last year, the one that turned out to be a federally licensed medical-marijuana site—even though this isn't true. She just wants to knock the co-conspirator look off his face, the one he always gives her when they happen to come up out of their suites at the same time.

He either doesn't notice or doesn't care that Nina is dressed like an oversized rodent, but he's very interested in the sharp kirpan fastened to the boy's belt. There's also a cloth covering the small bun on the boy's head. A
patka
, a sort of pre-turban turban for Sikh youths, the boy explained to Nina in the car, as she madly tried to recollect if his parents had looked even remotely South Asian. When had she stopped looking at people, really looking rather than simply noticing the things about them that drove her crazy?

“Little man, they let you wear that to school?” the neighbour asks. The boy pulls free the dagger and starts citing some B.C. Supreme Court case. “So, when you have a culturally diverse society,” he concludes, “rights and obligations sometimes conflict!”