Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  With that he disappeared into the night, and in the elongated silence that followed we could hear the waters of Lynn Creek churning through the gorge below the water-pipe bridge as the snowpack far above melted in the July heat. Already it had claimed a young man, the season of playing chicken with the creek only just begun. We could almost hear the melt.

  Sure, we knew men like him existed. But we’d never had a chance to observe one in such close proximity. Karlheinz confessed to thinking of him as a specimen, and we nodded in agreement.

  We have often wondered what Darwin would have made of the summer-long struggle for existence on our cul-de-sac. If he’d lived here, would he have taken the role of observer or participant? By all accounts he was a bona fide gentleman, didn’t partake of arguments, even kept his own counsel when the Beagle’s mad Capt. FitzRoy expounded at length during dinner—as if daring the naturalist to differ—on the Book of Genesis. (Once, only once, did he weigh in, when the captain was explaining the trickle-down benefits of slavery, proving our hero did have a backbone.) Did he float above the chickpeas and rice in the captain’s mess, a benign smile shielding his face, lost in barnacle dreams? Did he clutch his stomach and plead seasickness and flee to his cramped quarters?

  Something we can be certain C.D. didn’t consider: reaching across the table and throttling FitzRoy until the man’s eyes bulged from their sockets.

  We found his backyard well-kept, albeit oddly quaint. (“Holly Hobbie chic,” Stefan called it.) Garden gnomes stood here and there (“Gnomically,” Patel later said, as if reciting a Zen koan rather than a bad pun) amongst towering delphiniums and various mulleins. Lobelia and other generic annuals spilled from a small weathered wheelbarrow, and a blown-glass hummingbird feeder hung from the coral bark maple.

  Surely the W-Cs couldn’t have left these things? But it was even more inconceivable that they belonged to him. (It now seems laughable that we wasted so much time over the following week debating the question of whether he had bought all this in earnest or whether he had an understanding of its kitsch value. Karlheinz had posited the most plausible theory: “It could be they were his mother’s and he maintains them through a sentimental streak.” That we could understand, although Marcus couldn’t help reminding us that sentiment is anathema to design.)

  The “Q” stood in the centre of the yard like a Mayan shrine in the cloud forest of Cobán, feathered in smoke and snapping and spitting as fat hit the fire. Mosquito torches on bamboo poles flanked the barbecue. (Trevor’s wife deemed this “thoughtful.”) The patio table was laden with platters of raw meat, the variety defying categorization, but our host was all too willing to lead a tutorial. There were slabs of porterhouse steaks, rib-eyes, short ribs, spareribs, pork loin chops, lamb shoulder chops, and lamb leg steaks. He eschewed terms like “well-marbled” in favour of “nice and fatty” and smacked his palm down soundly on cuts he deemed particularly “bodacious.” We hardly need point out that there wasn’t a rub or a marinade in sight.

  REO Speedwagon blasted from what looked like car speakers attached to the balustrade of his deck. He later came strolling through the sliding doors with a guitar, yodelling “Ring of Fire” as a prelude to dishing up his Voodoo Chili, a recipe he had evidently learned in a squat on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. He promised us his chili would fire up visions of Erzulie Dantor, the Haitian goddess of sex. She would make love to us in our dreams. His way of putting it of course involved more colourful terminology, in a dialect Patel, our own Henry Higgins, recalls as “Thunder Bay, 1977.”

  We will admit to the record that he was an attentive host that evening, exuding a kind of ruffian charm in his own milieu. He even kept his talk of body mounts and adjustable shocks to a minimum. It also bears mentioning that this was the closest we ever came to being chummy. At one point he and Trevor engaged in a tête-à-tête about the ultimate burger. (Trevor swears by a knob of frozen blue cheese encased in the centre of 275 grams of hand-chopped Kobe sirloin.) “No shit,” he kept saying, sounding genuinely impressed as Trevor pulled out his BlackBerry to do some quick temperature conversions (our host not having mastered the move from imperial to metric back in grade school). “No shit.”

  It turned out that among his many adventures he’d spent some time in the Australian outback. “Kangaroo,” he told us, “is a beautiful protein.” Patel’s wife, who is an ear, nose, and throat specialist, said she found that poetic. (A less generous person might have said, “She wouldn’t know poetry if it bit her on the ass,” but Patel wasn’t that kind of guy.)

  Other things we learned that night: Chicken isn’t meat. Medium-rare is for chumps. Boys who can burp the Lord’s Prayer at age eight retain the ability, like a vestigial limb flaring to life, well into their thirties.

  The night was alive with smoke and fire. Insects were held at bay. Blood pooled on his plate. Stefan’s wife leaned forward and dragged a finger through it and then exaggeratedly sucked. At the time, we erroneously believed she was mocking him.

  For a while after that, things were good. Almost too good. Kim’s wife turned to him in bed the night of the barbecue and said, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.” He told us her overbite had glinted in the bedside light like the teeth of something feral. We all knew what he meant. Even Marcus’s wife, who has a no-nonsense air about her and is an avid golfer, started running her fingers through her cropped hair in a manner some of us found disconcertingly attractive. (During those brief, heady days, more than one child walked in on a mid-afternoon scene in a rec room or kitchen that elicited hysterical giggles or cries of “Gross!”)

  We found it impossible not to notice that by the third week of July the hair on our neighbour’s chest and shoulders looked thicker, more pelt-like than the springy bed of curls that had so freely dripped sweat the afternoon he moved in. Throughout the first half of the summer it seemed he was out there every day tinkering with the truck and later with the Ford Ranchero pickup that joined it on its own blocks on his front lawn. From time to time he’d wave to us with a monkey wrench or soldering iron. “Now that he’s discovered fire,” Stefan quipped one morning while squeezing into Patel’s Mini Cooper with those of us who didn’t telecommute or weren’t on paternity leave, “maybe he’s trying to reinvent the wheel.”

  His property became a magnet for the kids. They played in the trucks, roughhoused with Gido, abandoned their tennis racquets and unicycles and junior geologist kits in favour of slingshots and handmade blow-dart guns. (“This is how they kill in the Amazon!” Trevor’s five-year-old informed us, adding that all they now needed were poison arrow frogs to toast over a fire like marshmallows, the venom oozing to the surface like a toxic froth.) They showed waning interest in the computer-animation camps, father-son mini-triathlons, and Urbane Kids Cook! classes we’d pre-enrolled them in months back. We feared they’d soon be running wild in Lynn Canyon, engaging in some kind of Lord of the Flies one-upmanship with rival cul-de-sac kids. They came around in the late afternoons saying they’d already had a snack “at Gido’s,” their breath redolent with the after-effects of processed meats and root beer, their eyes narrower than the last time we had looked closely at them.

  Were we neglectful fathers? Were we secretly relieved to find more time on our hands after work and on weekends than we’d ever thought possible post-fatherhood? There was something in the still-childless Kim’s eyes that made the rest of us feel guilty, but he never levelled any accusations. Kim was always the quiet one, the exemplar of those still waters they say run deep. Our wives assured us that unstructured time was what childhood summers used to be all about, but we couldn’t help suspecting that their uncharacteristic nostalgia hinted at a buried desire to revert further into an idealized past.

  Chas, as we’ve taken to affectionately calling Darwin, was understandably discomfited by the natives of Tierra del Fuego. In lean times, he was told, they would devour their grandmothers while sparing their dogs. He was apparently misled by a young trickster, as
later reports dismiss the notion that the Fuegians were cannibals.

  But why even think of this now? There are still grandmothers in the world and there are still dogs and there are places on earth where the former are abused and the latter venerated. And vice versa.

  By early August the trucks stood neglected in his front yard and the Camaro seldom left the driveway. He now took his Harley Low-Rider everywhere—the deadening percussion of the altered muffler competing with the stench from the rendering plant for most-obnoxious-emission status. His favourite T-shirt—or at least the most frequently sported—read Loud Pipes Save Lives. Gido perched on the back, small ears flattened in the wind, happy as a gargoyle, roaring down Mountain Highway.

  Plants better suited to the bogs of the Carolinas (“Or the late Cenozoic period,” Stefan noted) began to spread across his property. Waxy-leafed vines twisted around the trucks, even creeping out through the exhaust pipes, their ropy tendons like the neck muscles of dehydrated bodybuilders. Moss bearded fenders and chrome grilles. Cobra plants and monkey cups and other flesh-eaters proliferated. Even dragonflies became ensnared, their death rattle unnerving. (“Like ice in a blender,” Marcus observed, swirling the dregs of a kiwi-and-peppercorn daiquiri.) Giant hogweed (“Heracleum mantegazzianum,” Karlheinz informed us, “with sap so toxic the skin reddens and blisters after contact before erupting in severe inflammation prone to infection”) soon shot up well beyond the roofline. We finally had a non-negotiable reason to forbid the kids to play in his yard.

  Trevor, who had gone into the backyard on the pretext of retrieving an errant Frisbee-golf disc, reported that it was almost swampy, as if the groundwater were rising. A crudely framed smokehouse hung with small carcasses was set up where gnomes had previously stood guard by the delphiniums. And behind the smokehouse, what could only be described as a midden of bones.

  What our summer had been reduced to: endless speculation. Spying on a neighbour. (Karlheinz, in fact, had begun to compile field notes—“evidence,” he called it.) Petitioning various city and provincial bureaucracies to do something about the at-times-unspeakable (and, we were told, cross-jurisdictional) odour infiltrating our cul-de-sac from the other side of the inlet. Our fitness regimens—let’s just say we were finding it more and more difficult to confront a full-length mirror most days. Our joie de vivre felt as if it were being sucked out of us one pore at a time by a super-strength vacuum cleaner.

  And from his backyard the continual haze of smoke rising.

  Whenever we complained, about the noise, the smoke, the smell, the sheer onslaught of it all, our wives absent-mindedly stroked our hair (or, in Marcus’s case, his aggressively shaved dome) as if petting cats, their thoughts, we assumed, on the demands their careers were making on their time. Our holiday plans were falling through, one after the other, collapsing due to inertia on our part and the fact that an unseasonable crunch time appeared to have hit the medical, legal, architectural, geological, and IT professions almost simultaneously. We’re still not in complete agreement about whether we were twenty-first-century men for not questioning our wives’ work commitments or whether we were dupes. (Trevor, ever self-flagellating, prefers the dupe theory. He is also the one who misses Kim the most.)

  Our wives no longer arched close while we watched HBO late in the evenings, angling for a deep-tissue massage or core realignment. It transpired that more than one of them had faked orgasms on multiple occasions. Patel told us his wife had called the tantric sex workshop we’d all taken in the early spring “a joke.” Marcus’s wife declared that cunnilingus was meant only for lesbians and cats.

  Our neighbour had taken to pulling the “Q” out onto his driveway in the early evening, dispensing goodies as if he were a hot dog vendor at the corner of Hornby and Robson. We could forbid the children from playing over there, but we certainly couldn’t forbid our wives, who drifted over to sample his wares. Karlheinz actually witnessed him laying a piece of deeply charred something or other directly onto Kim’s wife’s extended tongue, as if proffering a communion host. Our wives would come home, often after the sun had set, talking about things like “honouring the whole beast,” marrow smudges at the corners of their mouths.

  It cannot be said we didn’t pull out all the stops. We still maintain that “Operation Aphrodisiac” was executed flawlessly. Patel made his Lapsang souchong–smoked duck breast with pomegranate sauce. Kim made dolmades using grape leaves from his own garden. Then there was Karlheinz’s oyster foam– filled agnolotti, Trevor’s quail stuffed with raisins and quinoa, and Stefan’s saffron risotto with truffle oil and mascarpone. Marcus’s silky black cod with Pernod mole sauce (70 percent pure, fair-trade cocoa) filled the role of dessert.

  Kim even booked himself a spa treatment. (We’re still curious as to whether he went through with the rumoured “crack wax.”) At the time, we accepted this as further evidence that he was the bravest and most evolved of us all.

  [Our notes are sketchy at this point. Accounts vary too widely to be coherent.]

  It was shortly after what Patel christened our Failed Feast of the Satyricon that our wives started dressing differently. (“Their slut phase,” Trevor would later call it, reminding us how mutable this thing we call the “personality” really is.) At first we thought it was the dry heat, something none of us were used to. The day Kim’s wife headed out to a pre-trial discovery dressed like Britney Spears’s little sister, her Nunzia briefcase incongruous alongside the terry cloth short shorts and baby-T, we could no longer deny that some kind of deleterious mutation was taking place. For once we were glad we had only sons and no daughters.

  We thought at the time that this was all to do with meat. Could too much unmediated animal protein cause a chemical disturbance in the frontal granular cortex, we asked Karlheinz, who simply shrugged. He was as lost by then as the rest of us, science no longer the bulwark against disorder that he had believed it to be. (Karlheinz had, by then, started attending Mass again.)

  “I just don’t see why meat has to be the main event!” Kim Fischer detonated one day, seemingly apropos of nothing. We nodded fervently, as if at a Free Methodist revival meeting. Someone, most likely Stefan, added, “Amen, brother!”

  No one was yet speaking in tongues.

  Then Gido killed Karlheinz’s agoutis. That was the official story. The supposition, anyway. The hutches were open, the agoutis were gone. But, nihil fomeus cannone, Patel said, the best he could come up with in Latin for “no smoking gun.” Without sufficient evidence (“Or balls,” Trevor later said) we could not confront our neighbour. Not then.

  We inspected the blood-smeared grass, stomachs contracting. We could smell murder. All day long the boys yelped in the ravine edging the backside of the cul-de-sac, something distinctly tribal in their ululations. The women, strangely, weren’t disturbed by the carnage. They didn’t even come by to check out the blood on the grass, which by the evening was thick with flies.

  They told our children, “When animals kill each other we don’t call it murder.” Our lovely, brilliant, Darwinian wives.

  We determined that the trapped smell, that wilful pong, was a result of a geo-architectural force, like the buffeting wind tunnel downtown created by the arched, open corridor to the Vancouver Public Library’s northeast entrance. Trevor was all for cutting down the Sitka spruce grove that towered over the cedars and silver birches along the ravine. Although a couple of us wavered, we finally came down adamantly against. Those trees were not even our property. “But it’s our stink, right?” Trevor maintained.

  What we feared: Trevor, with his refined sense of smell, would go off his nut in the night and take a chainsaw to the trees.

  The black-bear signs had been up for weeks. The dry summer caused sporadic wildfires farther up the North Shore Mountains, and no doubt berries were sparse. Whereas other kids learned to dial 911 at an early age, ours had committed to memory 604-990-BEAR. Lucy, as we were calling him by then, scoffed at the signs and the directive: Remove all
bear attractants (food). “Gido could take them out,” he boasted. As if taking a bear out was what was required, as if our cul-de-sac were a kind of gladiatorial arena where a wandering cub and a Down’s-afflicted mongrel could grapple to the death while we laid our bets.

  Helicopters juddered by overhead almost daily. A fugitive was suspected of hiding on Mount Seymour, although he was later found in a tool shed near Indian Arm. A woman tossed her child from the Capilano suspension bridge, but it miraculously survived. Two Japanese exchange students wandered off three-quarters of the way up the Grouse Grind arm in arm and disappeared into the trees.

  We no longer communicated with our children except through a kind of sign language. They spoke in coded grunts and shrugs. Stefan’s twins talked to each other in clicks and clacks of the tongue, like the bushmen of the Kalahari. They drew on the garage walls with the charred ends of sticks and charcoal briquettes as if drawing on the insides of caves—of the things they imagined, or the things that had yet to happen, it wasn’t clear then. A small figure emerging from bushes on what looked like an enormous turtle. Men with sharp implements converging on a cowering beast. Tangles of foliage and fire. Rain.

  Sightings of our neighbour became rare, his comings and goings much less of a show, perhaps achieved under the cover of darkness, the revving of the Harley less and less frequent, until the bike was permanently dry-docked. Gido had such a disappointed air about him that Karlheinz suggested taking him for a ride on Marcus’s Vespa so he could at least feel the wind in his ears.