by Shilo Jones
Clint stabs his index finger into my arm, tells me to stop fucking chewing my fingernails. I say I’m chewing my knuckles and nail folds, not my fingernails, you ignorant idiot. Clint says piss off, just stop it, Marky, it’s creeping me out, the scritching-rat-chewing sound, takes a solid hit, cough-laughs, says fuck me I thought you’d be better, dude. I set my head against the cold window, close my eyes, tell him I think I am better because I can’t tell if I’m me anymore? Clint stops laughing, says what the fuck, shut up, always your problem, nattering instead of getting shit done.
We’re perched over Vancouver, the downtown core nestled in the darkness of Burrard Inlet. I try to pay attention, see things straight, the people down there living their lives, day to day, normal people…but then I get a not-cool suffocating feeling because none of it feels real, the city, the ocean, even the leather upholstery under my ass, like there’s some kind of…wall between the world out there and me in here, and it takes a considerable amount of effort to remind myself Clint’s alive, whatever that means, and me too…and the effort of trying to keep it straight leaves me rundown and ragged—
“Wait a sec,” Clint says, flicking a gold Zippo to flame and lighting two incense sticks. Stinking too-sweet smoke curls inside the cab, hits the roof and spreads outward, descends when it reaches the windshield, settles around our waists. I wipe my nose on my sleeve while Clint lets the incense burn down. We don’t say anything for a long time. Smoke fills the cab. My eyes water. A city. A small town made good. People living their lives. Decent people? People with hopes and dreams and loves is what I’m supposed to believe. Someone might’ve won something? We won? They say we won, which is why those people down there are free to live their lives. Another victory for the righteous, we made it, LIGHTROAR, thank heavens that’s over, it was a close call but we triumphed, DEATHFIRE, we the magnificent-ascendant, we the blessed who are meant to be—
Clint closes his eyes. Cups his hands, pulls incense smoke toward his face. It’s an odd gesture for my brother. Measured. Serene. He takes a few slow breaths, drawing the smoke into his lungs. His face slackens. A muscle that twitches constantly, at the hinge of his jaw, relaxes. My older brother. Handsome like a LAV III. Built with martial intent.
“Seen what you’re doing,” I tell him, not meaning to sound so bitchy.
“What?”
“Seen it in Thailand. It’s Buddhist. You saw it on TV. You’re looking like you’re meditating.”
“Doesn’t make it less true. So fucking what, you went to Thailand? Hey, if you could be born at any time, what would you choose?”
“Two thirty-eight p.m.”
“No, I mean age, smartass. Era. You know?”
“Now seems pretty good.”
“But there’s no code. No honour. I’d choose the warrior nobility of Japan. Buke. Samurai? Shit was for realz.”
“They weren’t all samurai. Most of them were peasants.”
“Not me. I’d be a—”
“You said you had somewhere for me to sleep?”
“Feeling tired?” Clint opens his eyes. Tosses the incense out the window, drapes his arm over my shoulders. “Little bro need some shut-eye?”
“Yeah, jet lag.” Weird to have my brother’s arm across my shoulders. The weight of him. The bulk. His heart pumping shared blood. He’s always been bigger than me. Used to pin me down and leak a long drip of spit in my face, then suck it up before it dropped. “Jet lag, I guess. And Oxy. And weed.”
“And blow. Smarten up. Glad you’re here. Family.”
“Me too.” Nothing else to say.
“Means something.” Clint squeezes my shoulders. His breath smells of cigar. He’s not a bad guy. That’s what I was wrong about, growing up. We all were. I let him take the flak. Be the black sheep. Then that thing in 2005. He pulled me off my first target. Saved that sick fuck’s life. So Clint’s not the bad one. I think I am. It’s me. I’m the bad guy here. All the shit I’ve done, it must be me. At least Clint believes in honour, family. Takes care of our old man. Paid his medical bills while I fucked off. For a long time, I told myself I did it to impress Clint. Nearly beat that sicko to death. Lied to myself. Blamed my brother.
When what he gave me was—
“You feel it?” Clint whispers. “This town? The opportunity…”
To be what I am.
50 Cent’s on the stereo, talking shit about bitches. My brother’s forehead settles against my temple. His arm’s still draped over my shoulders. We’re real close. Holding each other. Not saying anything. Condensation rises up the windshield. It’s still raining. Thrumming. There’s a forest outside. Trees. Dirt. Canada? I’m not sure. Living things? Animals? Veins pulse along Clint’s forearm. He was always more veiny than me. More muscular. Breathing his sour smell. Hold me. The two of us alone in the truck, breath settling into a matching rhythm. The smell of my brother like childhood, like memory. The time, ten years old, he ate shit on a buddy’s Yamaha and I fireman-carried him to the nearest gravel road. He was crying even though he was the one who never did. His chest shuddering as he tried to keep the tears in. The smell of him then, same as now. The weight. The animal aliveness of him. The stubborn warmth. The Dodge diesel spitting and growling beside the deserted golf course. A real sweet truck. Polished chrome rims. Big mudders. A grand per tire. Rolling around town, running crews, boss man, my brother. Me and Clint aren’t talking. He made something of himself. I love you, brother. What a sweet fucking truck. Please help me. I’m getting choked up. It’s nice. I feel you’re alive, brother. Unstable. Give me some more blow. We’re still holding one another, breathing together. Saw the LAV vc with the steering wheel blown through him. Saw the factory outside Bangkok. Saw inside everything. Can’t think about the war. Need another Oxy. My wife and baby daughter. OPFOR pushed a button on a cellphone. Hold me. I don’t want to blame them. We did this to me, not them. Marky got all blowed up. BLOOD RAIN. GODFIRE. Making bank. On the up. The city lit bright. I’m sorry. The city on fire. I’m sorry. The children in the factory on fire. Please, no. My brother’s weight heavy against me, his breathing slow, his skin too warm. I’ll kill you for this truck. Rain hitting the windshield, hissing in flame. My brother’s arm across my shoulders, embracing and pinning me down. We’re in this together. Could’a been any dumb bastard on top of that bomb. Turned out it was Marky. I KILLED FOR YOU. Hold me. YOU MADE ME. Living things, a dark forest to roam through, stolen territory, the triumphant kill. Where’s the enemy? Don’t ask me to. Help me. Please, my brother—
“No one knows you like I do,” Clint whispers.
We’re still touching.
I don’t want to let go but it’s better if I move first or he’ll call me a fag, so I do.
“No one ever will,” Clint says, moving to the far side of the truck. “We’ve been through it. I’m talking blood. Everything flows from that. Blood loyalty. Buke. It still matters. You ready?”
“I’m…real thirsty.”
The light changes, or I change how I’m seeing the light, and my older brother, the one who held me because he knew I needed it, is gone.
“Get us a drink right now. Rich prick’s house.” Clint rolls his head, slow, then side to side, stretching.
“Now? Just flew in…I can’t…what?”
“Don’t be a dogfucker, Marky. Don’t be that guy.”
Clint takes off his rings and chains, drops them in the centre console, pulls a balaclava over his head. His eyes bulge white in the holes cut in the mask. Night creature. Takes me a while to realize what he’s doing. Gearing up. Home invasion. Truth is I’ve always liked how it sounds. Covert. Daring. A late-night insertion. OPFOR. A raid on a fortified compound. A filthy rat dragged from a hole. Better than shooting at rocks across a valley.
Clint drops something in my lap. Looks like a baseball torn apart at the seams. One end heavier than the other. Loaded with steel pellets. My hand tightens on the SAP. Cold leather yields to warm grip. Clint shrugs a black hoodie over his head. I w
ant to say something. I shouldn’t be here. Don’t ask me to. This isn’t who I am anymore. Have a daughter and—
Clint nods toward the city. “See? Fucking told you. Best place on earth.”
* * *
I was the smart one, people said when we were growing up. Teachers said it, if not in so many words. I was the Ward brother that had potential if I stayed out of trouble. I was going to rise above. Took me a long while to realize they weren’t talking about me in particular but more of an idea. Equal opportunity. Work hard and you’ll succeed. I was also the talker. Loved drama class. Played Hamlet in Hamlet. Kept them entertained. All eyes on me. Stage lights beaming down. People will say anything if they know you come from a shit family. Makes them feel better just saying it. You got a good head on you. Shit like that. You’re not like your older brother. Tried to build me into something special, something they could tolerate. Invest every waking moment in your own happiness and other people’s unhappiness begins to feel like a personal affront. The truth of things poses a threat to your carefully constructed paradise of self-aggrandizing bullshit. Unhappiness is ugly, and real, and of the dirt and body, of earth and death, and completely distasteful unless it’s being used to sell something, as some sort of cynical strategy. Which is fine, because fuck them. Trouble is, I believed what everyone said. But something happened along the way. Wish I could say it was Afghanistan. The war changed me. No. Wasn’t that. Wish it was. That’s something people could get behind. I could go silent. Give them a thousand-yard stare so they’d nod and say uh-huh, yeah man, that must’a been hard. But that’s not it. Wasn’t the war at all. War felt a lot like our shithole town in the Fraser Valley, only more outright. More honest about what it was, about who was getting fucked. War felt nothing but familiar.
The lines clearly marked. Us and them.
* * *
Out in the darkness, out in the rain. Following Clint as he slides down a gravel ditch and climbs over a chain-link fence securing the golf course. Ten seconds after we leave the truck we’re strolling across a manicured green, footsteps squishing in soaked grass, not hurrying, not worried, nearly invisible. I’m taking it in, the rough balaclava against my throat, the SAP’S reassuring weight, nerves and anticipation, allure in the wilful rending of routine. Good or bad, it can go either way, and inviting the unknown is half the joy.
It’s cooler on the mountain. Rain thickens to sleet. I think about the guys strolling the golf course on a weekday morning in June, wearing cutesy pastel, thirty grand in clubs, laughing, life’s good.
And now here we are. Trespassers.
The first time me and Clint broke into a house I was nine and he was eleven. Got in through a bathroom window. In Chilliwack, a suburban wreck an hour outside Vancity, up in a neighbourhood of ranchers spread out on big lots on a hill called Little Mountain, an isolated enclave for the town’s better-off. Elevated above us commoners stuck in the floodplain with our laid-off fathers and apartments with mouldy walls and tobacco-yellow lamps and single-pane windows glazed thick with winter ice.
I went in first. Nine years old. Punched out the screen and wormed into that pretty bathroom. Slipped off the toilet and nearly brained myself against the marble vanity. Inhaled the aerosol lilac stink of the wife’s hairspray. Family’d left only five minutes earlier. Me and Clint, hidden in the ornamental hedges, watched them drive off, made our move.
And the silence in that first house. Welcoming. Opening its arms. So much space I almost got lost in the bathroom. Marble and fancy-assed stone tile around the claw-foot tub, shining silver fixtures, real nice for back then. For a moment that fancy bathroom was mine. The nice things in it were mine, not the empty fridge back home, no-name ketchup and peeling lino, a TV that never worked right, smashed-in fake wood panelling and the stink of my old man’s failure. I stood in that fancy person’s bathroom letting the expensive smells sink in, enjoying being somewhere I shouldn’t, doing something I shouldn’t. And dreaming of being someone I wasn’t. Freedom’s different things to different people. Might be casting a ballot. Getting a decent job. For me growing up, freedom was standing in a house I had no business being in, smelling lilac hairspray, waiting to hear the homeowner’s car pull into the driveway, waiting to run for my fucking life. So to celebrate the occasion I grabbed the wife’s hairbrush, stuffed it in my pocket.
I still have that hairbrush. Took it overseas, kept it tucked in my tacvest. Her rich-lady smell is long gone. But I remember leaving the bathroom, walking alone through that silent house, the feeling like approaching a cathedral altar, awed at all the shit that family owned, how new it was, wanting to stop and try out the Sega, play some Sonic, then letting Clint in the front door. Nodding as he slipped inside, conspiratorial, like we’d uncovered a secret tomb stuffed with treasure. It wasn’t my brother’s first house. Clint made right for the jewellery. Now I know the real treasure is feeling almost equal, if only for a few stolen seconds.
So yeah, my blood’s surging as we stroll across the golf course, although the feeling’s dulled some over the years. Just another mission, soldier. The SAP held loose in my hand, brushing my thigh as I walk. Every step brings a jolt of pain from my ruined leg, keeps me sharp.
“Show you something,” Clint says, whirling to face me.
His phone lights up his balaclava, his shiny gloves, and I imagine the sight from a distance, fucking strange, two masked men trapped inside a ghostly sphere of light in the middle of a pitch-black golf course—
“Heat, dude. Put that shit away.”
Clint laughs. “Nah. Only us out here. Look.”
A few numbers flash on the screen.
“Know what that is? Old man’s vitals. App reads the vitals, sends them to me in real time.”
I peer at the phone, the numbers stacked along the screen, ask what the hell he’s talking about?
“That’s him. Dad. Heart rate right there. Blood pressure. I’m guessing he’s asleep. Which is good. Doesn’t happen much.”
It’s the closest I’ve been to my father in years. “…he’s all right?”
“Asks for you.”
The SAP now heavy in my hand. The intentional rending of routine. “Where was he, back when I was asking for him?”
“You going to feast on that forever? Mr. Perfect with the wife and daughter?” Clint pockets the phone, plunging us into darkness. We’re facing one another in the middle of the golf course, rain pounding, armed, angry. “I’ll get the app to text you.”
“Fuck off. He know about that thing?”
“Course not.”
“Yeah. Cuz it’d drive him up a wall.”
“He’s over the wall, Marky. Updates twice a day. And if anything goes wrong, a close call—blood pressure, heart rate—you get a warning beep and a suggestion about what’s going on.”
“He’s had close calls?”
“A few.” Clint starts walking.
Wiping the rain from my eyes when a not-awesome thought hits, because I’ve seen my brother clap a dumb motherfucker on the back at the same time he’s leading him into the woods. “What’s this thing tonight?”
“Worried? Maybe you should’ve paid up. What’s the soldier in you say?”
I think on that. Only one thing Clint wants to hear. “Family.”
We’re halfway across the golf course. A steep hill on the other side, densely wooded, leads to a cul-de-sac of mansions. “Wait. Can’t see proper. Light from your phone messed my eyes.”
“Putz. Give it a sec. You get used to seeing in the dark.” Clint hops another chain-link fence, lands in knee-high grass browned by winter. “Don’t steal anything. Don’t say anything. And for fucking hell, don’t let anyone out of the house.”
Scramble over the fence, catch my jeans, rip a hole in the calf. Clint makes a backhanded comment about stealth and the military. I ask about the target as we enter the woods and begin storming our way up the hill and my feet sink deep in rotten leaves and moss and I feel like I’m arriving into myself, consc
iousness, whatever-the-fuck but it feels okay, an animal aliveness, soaked forest scent crisp in my nose and is this feeling real, something I can count on? The tree canopy blocks the bulk of the rain, sends it down in heavy drops. I don’t really care who he is. A target. A victim. Just seems like a normal-sounding thing to ask.
“Deserves it. Trust me.”
We slow where the forest thins at the edge of the yard. Lower into a crouch. The house is huge, four storeys, gleaming white concrete, broad curves and bold cantilevers dug into a granite slope with a view over the golf course to the city beyond. Looks like a spaceship about to launch, something created by a secretive government program. Design like this used to stand for something. An idea, a hope. Now it stands for money and some rich prick’s pseudo-sophistication. We stay crouched in the woods for a long while, silent, watching. All the lights are out. Nothing’s moving.
There are a lot of things we could be. Subversive shit always comes smashing in from the dark. No one wants to acknowledge it, though. Not now, when it’s all about dialogue and discussion and socially oriented business partnerships and alliances and understanding. I call bullshit. We let them sweet-talk us. But we’ll see who remembers. I’m talking Narodnaya Volya. The motherfucking Mollies. Red Army. J2M. WUO. Direct Action in the eighties here at home. And dozens more around the globe. Exploiters and exploited. So it’s been a couple hundred years. That’s an eye blink. European monarchy lasted a thousand. We’re cutting our fucking baby teeth. Clint has his so-called Asian warrior philosophy. My inspiration’s more recent. There’s still a war going on. That was clear to me two decades ago when I busted into that bathroom and saw what money means. Until then I thought everyone went hungry at the end of the month. Thought it was normal to have the electricity shut off. I was nine. Didn’t know any better. For me and my brother that was normal.
Like us and the Afghans. Sweatin’ broke-ass brown people in their huts. Never sat right, especially when I was in it, my Colt Canada raised high, screaming Aram shoo! Aram shoo! at the frightened kids and worn-out women when we kicked their doors down, and how the older folks in the huts nodded and ignored us, their gaze never leaving their palaw pots they were so used to it—
