Better Living Through Plastic Explosives Read Free Page B

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,