by Sam Wiebe
“That’s not creepy—I mean, you telling me isn’t creepy. Thanks.”
“Okay.” His eyes searched my face for a second and I felt a little thrill for some reason, like this was a movie and something amazing was about to happen. “Your chin.”
I remembered my split lip, and rubbed the dried blood off my chin.
He nodded, and pushed off on his skateboard, looking back at me once before he disappeared out of the streetlights.
Three nights later, when Ben and I drank a lot of beers in the backyard, and he smacked me across the face for breaking his second-favorite pint glass, and then cried for nearly an hour, I took off again. This time it was closer to two a.m. Eyes peeled for any dudes who looked like they might want to grab me, I found myself smiling at the approaching sound of wheels clicking on the sidewalk cracks.
“You again,” Diezl smirked. “Living dangerously.”
“I’m looking for some action,” I said, and then immediately worried that he might think I was hitting on him.
“You better come with me then.” He picked up his skateboard and we walked down an alley, past several of those slightly-fancier-than-average Vancouver Specials. Special Vancouver Specials. From the sixties to the mideighties, these boxy beauties were filling up neighborhoods, until they were considered an eyesore. This isn’t a very old neighborhood, at least from a colonial perspective. If you check Wikipedia, that’s where the history starts—when the first colonizers arrived in the 1800s. Henry Cambie was an engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The land was given to the CPR by the government, which is funny, because it wasn’t theirs to give. It was xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory. Forest and salmon streams. Some people call that untamed wilderness, and some people call it home. Diezl stopped in front of a boarded-up rancher. He put a finger to his lips and we snuck into the backyard through a space between the tall construction barriers.
“You’re not a cop, right?” he whispered.
“Uh, SkyTrain police.” My punch lines always come one second too late. He laughed anyway. That was nice. Ben only laughs at his own jokes.
This place must not have been empty too long—the backyard was clean, grass mowed. Developers are supposed to keep the acquired houses tidy, but they don’t. Diezl put his backpack on the ground and pulled out some spray cans.
“Hey, you aren’t Fukit, are you?” I asked. “Kitten, perhaps? With asterisks?”
“They’re South Cam,” he said with a sneer that suggested more of a friendly rivalry than any actual distaste. “This is Langara, baby.” He deftly outlined a juicy-looking Diezl on the back wall, between two boarded-up windows. “I’ve never done this with somebody. You want to fill it in?”
“I’ll fuck it up,” I squeaked, and Diezl shushed me as a light went on next door.
We squeezed up next to the house and crouched low beside the bushes, my heart beating like crazy.
“Nah,” he whispered, “go ahead.”
We waited for the light to go out—“Probably just the bathroom,” Diezl said—and he handed me a can. Purple, maybe—it was hard to tell in the dark. I held my breath and got to work while Diezl supervised.
“What room do you think is on the other side of this wall?” I asked.
“Bedroom, probs,” he said.
“Ever go inside?” I cringed as a little paint dripped outside the lines.
“Nah. Hold the can farther away and it won’t drip.”
I wanted to tell him that I’d been planning to break into a dead house at the end of my block. Maybe invite him along. But I concentrated on spraying in the lines instead.
Afterward, Diezl offered to walk me home, but I wasn’t sure he should know where I live. So we just walked around. Strange to see what affordable housing used to look like. Even the roads are sprawling, with big grassy boulevards. It’s kind of obscene, all that space.
* * *
Our place is quiet when I let myself in, except for the hum of the fridge. I pull a bag of blueberries out of the freezer and dump them and some protein powder into a Magic Bullet and fire it up. This wakes Ben, and he waves groggily on his way to the bathroom.
Even a smoothie is hard to get down; I can’t get the smell of that house out of my mind. Diezl’s smell. What am I going to do with that kid? Call the cops, so they can return him to his dad? The first night we broke into an abandoned house together—a little hobbit house that I’d watched the family move out of three days before—he asked about my lip. Then he told me about his dad. Then we compared cuts and bruises.
“You’ve got a lot more than me,” I said.
He shrugged. “Some of them are from skateboarding.”
The hobbit house still had some life breath; it felt like any minute someone would come down the stairs and demand to know where all the furniture went. The carpet was still clean, though it smelled a little like cat piss. Wires poked out of the walls from where the fixtures had been.
Diezl dumped his spray cans on the floor. “Ready?”
I threw some devil horns, and then realized kids probably don’t do that anymore. “Ready.”
We propped up some flashlights and tagged the whole living room; I probably inhaled enough paint to take fifteen years off my life. I tried my hand at a tag, but it was kind of stupid. #FatLip. Who the fuck hashtags a tag? Maybe people do, who knows. It was all I could think of at the time, and it’s what brought us together. We laughed a lot at that, and Diezl said it looked good. It felt nice to believe him, but he was probably full of shit. Anyway, I was glad it was inside, so nobody would see it except for us. I joked that maybe we should move into that place, and he looked around for a long time.
When we crawled out the window into the street, it was two a.m. A security guard from the building site next door walked by, holding a coffee. At the time, that high-density heaven was nothing more than a few stories of girders, but they sure do grow up fast. Streetlights threw its skeleton profile over the hobbit house, and that was the first time I really noticed how close the condos were getting. I went back by myself a few nights later to check out our work, but a demolition crew had already ripped the place apart and widened the construction site barriers around its memorial.
What am I going to do with this kid who showed me a fresh burn on his arm yesterday, when we met up to tag the back wall of Oakridge Mall? He told me that the cops had picked him up for skateboarding and insisted on driving him home, and then his dad held him down and drove a cigarette into him.
“Do you know what burning skin smells like?” he asked. Nobody wants to hear the answer to that question, so we walked in silence. I should have hugged him, or put my arm around him or something.
Well, something has to happen now, some kind of observance. I don’t have any sage. There are a couple of tea lights and a piña colada–scented candle in the bedroom—that’ll have to do. Line them up on the coffee table and light each one. Watch the candles flicker and try to think cleansing thoughts or whatever, but instead I think about a place past Diezl’s neighborhood, deep into Marpole, called c̓əsnaʔəm. That’s hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language. People who can’t be bothered to learn the original place names given to this land call it the Great Marpole Midden. Midden means garbage pile.
This spot is an ancient xʷməθkʷəy̓əm village and burial site that’s at least four thousand years old. The “midden” was uncovered in 1884, around the time the first settlers arrived in the area. It contained the ancestral remains and cultural artifacts of the Coast Salish peoples. The remains were removed by two white guys, who gave them to the Natural History Museum of New Westminster, which is funny, because this wasn’t theirs to give. Another white guy found seventy-five more human skeletons in the midden, and gave them to the museum too. In 1898, these remains were destroyed in a fire. There’s more to the story, but I’ll get to that later.
* * *
Diezl and I never even got around to tagging the mall yesterday, and this was kind of a relief. I wanted to show him I was ba
dass enough to do it, but that would have been undeniable vandalism, not like the dead spaces. A mall is a living organism—pushing shoppers through arteries like leukocytes. Of course, too many of those little white cells in the blood is a sign of disease. Not enough, and the whole system breaks down. Diezl said he wasn’t into it. He said he’d rather just hang, so we went back toward South Cambie. He always seemed to want to be in my neighborhood.
This time we hung out in one of the new construction sites, after we watched the old security guy do his rounds and disappear back into the trailer. We climbed up onto the second floor and found a shadow to hide in, right in the belly of the beast. A beast with an insatiable appetite. In 2011, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm learned that a 108-unit residential condo development was being planned for c̓əsnaʔəm. The following year, an intact burial of an adult ancestor was found at the site. Developers wanted to move it. Seven hundred burial sites had already been removed. The xʷməθkʷəy̓əm people fought hard to have the land honored as the national heritage site it was supposed to be. Eventually they won, which is funny, because it was always their unceded ancestral territory.
The condos are coming for us too. I wonder what will come next.
I’d bought us some beer, thinking I’d need the liquid courage to tag the mall, so we cracked them.
“Are you going to leave your boyfriend?” Diezl asked.
“Why?”
“Because he’s a dick, and because you can.”
“You want to run off together?” I asked, poking his leg with the toe of my shoe.
He looked at me then, and I felt awkward, like something intimate was happening. Not romance—more like we were brother and sister.
“I can’t go anywhere,” Diezl said. “You’re lucky. You have options.”
“You’ll have options soon. After graduation?”
“No, I won’t.”
I tried to read his expression in the gloom. Everything always seems so dire to teenagers, but you’re not supposed to tell them that. He didn’t want to say goodbye, even when we walked back to my place, so we sat on the front steps for a few minutes before I got worried Ben might wake up and find us.
Oh shit, now I remember his eyes in the porch light. Green. And so sad.
* * *
A half hour later the tea lights are done; only the piña colada candle is burning. I’m just sitting, trying to get ahold of things. Ben comes out of the bathroom, dressed for a run. Maybe he’s finally going to get his shit together. He kicks his runners toward the front door, opens it, and comes back.
“Where were you last night?” he says.
“Aren’t you going for a run?”
Ben moves closer. “Any new hobbies?”
“Huh?”
“Skateboarding?”
“What?”
Ben narrows his eyes a little and motions toward the front door with his lips. “C’mere.”
Diezl’s backpack and skateboard are piled on the step.
“Weird,” I croak, avoiding Ben’s gaze, “I’ll take them out to the garbage.”
His grip tightens on the knob, and I realize how tuned in I’ve become to his every move. “Leave the board. Maybe I’ll take up skateboarding.”
“Okay, I’ll get rid of the bag. Put some coffee on.”
He just stands there and watches me. “Any new boyfriends?”
“Don’t be stupid. Put some coffee on.” I nod toward the kitchen, but he doesn’t move.
* * *
Dead spaces look different in the daytime. Light filters in from cracks and holes I never would have noticed at night. The smell of Diezl’s body is stronger now. I cover my mouth and take the bag over to him. Pull the zipper so hard it catches on the fabric and sticks, so I just yank on the thing until it rips open. Dump out the spray cans, let them roll across the floor.
At the bottom of the bag is Diezl’s sketchbook. In the front pockets there are some smokes and a five-dollar bill, but nothing else. I open the sketchbook.
Diezl had shown me some of his art before: doodles and tattoo designs, and increasingly elaborate versions of his tag, incorporating stars or sometimes flames, depending on his mood. On the last page, BURN AFTER READING is drawn in an elaborate script. I close the book. Lay it on Diezl’s chest.
“Okay, buddy.”
* * *
Ben’s standing in our backyard holding two mugs. “What were you doing?”
I don’t have to answer him. Maybe I’ll just drink the damn coffee and not say anything.
But he scoots in front of the door. His eyes are brown and wounded, but he turns everything to rage.
“You need to get out of the way,” I say.
“Taryn!” he shouts after me. “Taryn, what the hell?”
A mug whizzes past me and hits a wall that’s in such bad shape, it makes a sizable dent. But when I return fire, with a pitching arm that seems to belong to someone else, my mug smashes into the fridge.
“Whoa,” Ben says. We look over each other’s shoulders at the carnage. Coffee everywhere.
I open the cupboard over the sink, where we keep the booze. Sambuca definitely lights up pretty good; I’ve done a few flaming shots in my time. Oh, and Bacardi 151, that shit is high-test.
Ben keeps saying my name over and over, and I don’t think he knows for sure whether he should be pissed off or scared. I rip a dry dishcloth in half and stuff the pieces in the bottles, leaving a little wick. There’s duct tape in the cupboard under the sink. A lighter on the table.
“Taryn, Jesus fuck.” Ben grabs both my arms with his death grip, nails dig in. “You’re being crazy.”
“Let go.”
“Taryn, put those fucking bottles down.”
“Let go.”
“What were you doing in that house?” Ben’s expression slides toward fear and his grip loosens a little. I try knocking my forehead against his nose. This definitely gets results, but it stuns me a little as well.
“Holy shit, I will kill you, you bitch!” Ben trails after me into the backyard, but he moves slowly, his nose bloody. He’s not going to kill anyone—he’s so full of shit.
I look around to make sure nobody’s close by, and of course nobody is. Dead neighborhood is dead. I turn the Sambuca bottle upside down to wet the wick, and I light it. It flares up, but not as much as I’d expected.
I should say something good, but all I can think of is, “Bye, Diezl.” Toss the bottle in the window, and do the same with the 151.
Ben stands beside me wiping his nose. “It’s not going to work.”
“Shut up.”
We watch a little bit of smoke pool inside the window, then dissipate.
“Taryn, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove—”
“Lift me up.”
“What?”
“Lift me up!”
Ben blinks, but offers a foothold and I take it, peering into the window. I’d expected an explosion, huge flames, something like a movie. The dead house seemed to absorb the fire; all I see is a scorch mark around a couple of paper bags. Diezl’s body sucks energy from the light—reaches out and demands action.
Below me, Ben’s voice is a bloody burble: “Alcohol’s not flammable enough.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
Ben doesn’t follow me back inside. He doesn’t follow me into the basement, where the hot water heater has been leaking onto the cement floor for weeks, maybe months. All those cold showers. Half underground, it smells like sweet rot. There are layers of dust and dead spiders on the crap we’ve been storing down here, trying to make a living home in a dead neighborhood.
I pull back an old tarp where the jerrican should be, and see the legacy of the rat poison we left out in the winter—a nest of dead bodies peeking out of a hole in the concrete. Ben doesn’t see this, but I do.
Shake that jerrican like it’s an adversary—only half full. I’m going to need a lot more gasoline.
Wonderful Life
by Sam Wiebe
The Drive is like a neighborhood in an older, more sophisticated city, where it’s the poor people who are left wing and a certain particulate violence sort of hangs in the air.
There’s a lost name for every place in the city.
* * *
The man breaking into my apartment looked to be about seventy. He carried himself with a beat cop’s bearing, his shoulders squared, but his clothes said assisted living—Velcro shoes, drawstring pants, polo shirt with the collar unbuttoned to display a thatch of white and silver hair. He was Asian, and he looked at me as if searching my face for a recognition that would jump-start his own. The man knocked the glass out of my patio door with a long-handled police flashlight, the same as my father had carried. He called me by my father’s name.
“Matt,” he said, “the hell aren’t you in uniform? You forget we’re on nights this week?”
Despite my credentials as a security consultant, I’ve never cared much about protecting my home. I live in East Van, on Broadway near Commercial Drive. I take it as a given that people will hop the fence, smoke dope on the patio, try the handle of the apartment door. If someone were to break in they’d probably swoon in disappointment—unless their dream haul is a half-decent Rega turntable, a few shelves of boxing books, and the dregs of a bottle of Bulleit.
The only possession with sentimental worth was my father’s MagLite. After his death I’d had the bulb switched to a high-powered fluorescent. Now I pointed the beam in the trespasser’s face.
The man squinted into the light. “Tonight’s the night, Matt. Or did you forget?” I turned the beam away. His vision came back quickly. He said, “You’re not Matt.”
“He’s been dead nine years,” I said. “Hit and run. Who are you?”
“Me and Matt are s’posed to do something tonight,” he said. “If you see him, say Joe stopped by.”
“Joe Itami?”
I’d seen him at the funeral, and a few times during my very brief stint on the job. I’d gotten the sense that he and my father had once been close. Joe Itami had gone the command route, attaining the rank of inspector, while Matt Wakeland had persisted as a beat cop until the car crash that killed him.
