Fireball Read Free Page B

– and we definitely weren’t looking for him. We’d spent most of our summer trying to avoid him. Nobody believed that, of course. All the articles said that we jumped him, and people just assumed it was true. The thing is, Vancouver really only has two newspapers. There’s a few other little papers, but the Sun and the Province are the main ones – and they’re both equally shitty. The Sun described Chris as ‘a cruel adolescent with a penchant for violence’. Whoever wrote that is a total fucking idiot. Cruel? Cruel is about the last word I’d use to describe Chris.
    Take that camp trip. We went on this camp trip with all the kids in our grade. The first night, some dickheads managed to snare a raccoon that had been digging in the food bin. Everybody heard the commotion and came out to watch. The guys strung the thing from a tree and started spearing it with sticks. It was pretty sickening. The campsite was lit up with tiki torches, and the circle of flickering faces reminded me of that film we’d watched in English class – the one about kids killing pigs on a desert island. Their spears punched in and out of the raccoon’s belly, making these wet, meaty sounds. You could smell the blood. It was everywhere: all over the raccoon, all over the forest floor. That was bad enough, but the screaming was even worse. I’d never heard an animal scream before. It was fucked. After a while, the guys wore themselves out. They stood around, holding their spears and talking about how tough they all were. Meanwhile, the animal just hung there, mewling like a kitten.
    â€˜You better kill it,’ Chris told them.
    â€˜Huh?’
    â€˜You can’t leave it like that. Finish it.’
    The guys looked at the raccoon, twisting and turning on the rope. They shuffled their feet and glanced at each other, hoping somebody else would want to do it. Nobody did.
    Chris pulled out his pocket knife, the one his dad had given him, and walked over to the animal. Holding it behind the head he pointed its nose towards the sky. Then he slashed it across the throat. Blood spurted out, black and shiny in the torchlight, and coated his hand. The raccoon stopped moving and didn’t make a sound. Of course, after that everybody in the grade was talking about how Chris had killed a raccoon.

    When his old man died, Chris lived with us for a while. His mom had always been a bit of a booze-hound and it only got worse after that. She was too messed up to look after him so he stayed at our house. My dad was cool about it. He rented us restricted movies, played street hockey with us in the driveway, and even took us paintballing a few times. I mean, my dad’s not actually cool, but he at least tried to think of cool stuff for us to do. Eventually things settled down at Chris’s house and he went home. For a few months, though, it had been like my dad was a dad to the both of us.
    Chris’s death hit him pretty hard, too.
    â€˜I don’t know how he could just punch a cop like that.’
    â€˜It didn’t happen like they say.’
    But he knew that – I’d told him already.
    â€˜Did he punch the cop?’
    â€˜Sure, a bunch of times.’
    We were sitting in the living room. My dad was holding the Province up close to his face, staring at the article as if it was written in some kind of secret code. He had a tall-boy of German beer in one hand. I’m pretty sure he was hammered. He hardly ever gets hammered in front of me but the day after Chris’s death was an exception.
    â€˜You can’t just hit a cop.’
    â€˜Bates started it.’
    â€˜That doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘As soon as you do that, you’re crossing a line.’
    It really bothered him. He couldn’t get over it. The way he talked, you’d think knocking out a cop had killed Chris – not driving into a blockade at a hundred miles an hour. I guess it’s