Fireball (2 page)

Maybe that way Chris would still be alive.

If it weren't for my dad, I'd probably think all the adults in the world are insane. At least he knew Chris. He liked him, too. That's why he saw through the bullshit. He didn't believe the cops or the press – not for a second. He could see that they just made up a story – the usual kind of news story – that everybody wanted to hear. The worst part was how Julian went along with their version. So did Karen, actually. They rolled over together like a pair of well-trained poodles and let people tell them what happened. Not me. I know what happened. I was there for most of it and Chris told me some of it and the rest I can imagine.

However much they lie, they can't change what I know.

3

‘I told her about the fireball.'

I looked at him. He'd never told anybody about the fireball, except me. I was a little bit annoyed, actually. The two of us were sitting by Julian's pool, cutting up a garden hose. For a long time we'd been trying to figure out a way to breathe underwater. It was like an ongoing, fairly casual hobby of ours.

‘Why did you do that?'

He shrugged. ‘She asked me about the trippiest thing I'd ever seen.'

‘And you said the fireball?'

‘Pretty much.'

Apparently they were at the lookout on Mount Seymour, in the back of her dad's Jeep. I've been up there tons of times, and even during the summer the air is thin and cool. At night they would have been able to see rows of shaggy pines dropping down towards the Cove, and the city lights glittering like stars that had crashed to earth. And off to the side, if it's clear, you get a wicked view of Burrard Inlet. The whole situation must have been pretty romantic. I guess, under those circumstances,
I could forgive him for telling her about the fireball. Besides, it didn't change the fact that he'd told me first.

After it happened, he called me as soon as he got home – in the middle of the night.

‘I was biking along Fairway – the bit just off the Parkway. It was totally dark. Then the sky lit up and on the horizon I saw this ball of fire. Fucking huge. Orange and purple and red – every colour you can imagine. Falling from the sky. It lasted for five or six seconds.'

‘Holy shit,' I said. I knew right away that this was serious. ‘Were you baked?'

‘Not even, man. A little bit drunk, but not baked.'

‘Maybe it was the Northern Lights again.'

‘It wasn't anything like the Northern Lights.'

He knew exactly what the Northern Lights looked like because we'd both seen them when we were super stoned on nutmeg this one time.

‘I guess you could have imagined it. Like an acid flashback.'

‘No. I know what I saw.'

He was still breathing pretty heavy. From biking home, I guess.

‘What was it, Razor?'

I felt like I had to give him an answer. Chris trusted me when it came to explaining that kind of thing – even when there was no real explanation.

‘It could have been a meteor. An extremely large meteor.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah. Don't worry. I'll look into it.'

The next day I phoned all the papers and weather stations, but nobody had reported seeing a fireball. That didn't mean anything, though. If Chris said he'd seen it, he'd seen it.

‘What did she say when you told her?'

Chris had shoved the hose over the top of his snorkel, and was tightening a little metal clamp to hold it in place. He was super good at putting weird shit like that together.

He shrugged. ‘She sort of laughed.'

‘She laughed?'

‘I don't think she really believed me. Come on. Let's try this thing.'

We'd attached the other end of the hose to a foot pump – the kind you use to inflate airbeds. Chris put the snorkel in his mouth and went underwater while I pumped air down to him. It worked, too. For a while. Then he started to get a bit of backwash and felt dizzy, so he came up. I was still thinking about it.

‘I can't believe she laughed at your fireball.'

‘Whatever. She probably thought I was talking shit to impress her.'

That was one thing she didn't understand about Chris. He never lied or talked shit to make himself look good. Most guys do – including me – but Chris didn't have it in him.

4

Up until all of this started, our summer vacation had been fairly casual. Mostly we went cliff jumping at Pool 99. We'd take Julian's car, or a bus to Riverside Drive, then hike in past the ‘No Trespassing' sign and follow a trail down to this stony, sun-baked beach by Seymour River. Technically, we weren't supposed to be there. Pool 99 isn't as sketchy as Lynn Canyon, but over the years a bunch of kids have still died there. They died hitting bottom, or landing wrong in the water, or being held under by currents. They died all sorts of ways, but none of them had been worth anything. Then a kid died who was rich and smart and played tennis, and it became this huge tragedy. The papers wrote it up and his parents tried to sue, so the district put this shitty wooden fence around the area and closed it down.

That never kept us away, or anybody else, either. Come summer, Pool 99 is always overrun by about eight hundred sweaty, noisy teenagers. If we got there early, before the crowds, it was all right. Otherwise there could be problems. Chris and crowds didn't mix. If you put him in a group of people, a little pocket would immediately form around him. Like on those soap commercials – when all the grease sort of moves away from the detergent.

If he felt like it, Chris could huck huge gainers and front flips and suicides. He was stoked on cliff jumping, but he couldn't stand being around all those treats, talking shit to each other and showing off for their girlfriends. So when it was packed, he never jumped. He just chilled. The three of us had our own spot, near the base of the cliffs, that people knew to leave for us. We'd throw down our towels and spark up a bowl and check out the girls through our sunglasses. Julian always wore this pricey Hawaiian shirt that he'd bought at a store in Park Royal, just in case any chicks came over to talk to us. Sometimes they did, too. He thought it was because of the shirt, but I'm pretty sure it was because of Chris.

‘What do you think? Should we jump one of those mothers?'

‘Fuck off, Jules.'

Julian loved talking about cliff jumping, but he hardly ever did it. Heights terrified him. Also, he didn't like taking off his shirt. Not because he was fat – he had huge muscles from all the protein powder he gobbled – but because of his birthmark. He had this weird, fist-sized birthmark in the middle of his chest, right over his heart. It was bizarre. It freaked people out, including me, and Jules knew it. He kept that birthmark under wraps.

‘Come on. It'll be sweet.'

I said, ‘Go ahead, man.'

He didn't, of course. None of us did. We just sat there. Chris lit a smoke. The sun coated the canyon with a thick yellow glare and the rocks beneath our towels felt hot as a grill. Above us
and to the right, clumps of people had gathered on the cliffs, waiting their turn. They went in one by one, like lemmings, and after each jump there was always a lot of hooting and cheering
and applause. Some were jumping Superfly. That's nothing. Even Julian had jumped Superfly. A few others were
jumping Logs. It's twice as high and pretty sketchy, but not too bad. I never go higher than Logs. Actually, hardly anybody goes higher than Logs. To jump Cooks, you have to climb onto this stump and leap blind through all these tree branches. Then you still have sixty feet to go before you hit
water. Even if you lan
d perfectly, you always touch bottom jumping Cooks. That's what Chris told me, anyway. And if you land wrong, you just straight up die – which is how it got its name. People started calling it Cooks because that was the name of this kid who got killed doing it. Not the rich kid. Some other kid.

That afternoon, a couple of guys were jumping Cooks.

‘Look at these clowns,' Julian said.

They were older than us and had those fake, doughy muscles that the guys from West Van develop by pumping tons of weights without actually doing anything else. One wore a pair of shiny Diesel swim trunks that probably cost about five hundred bucks. The other had on this raunchy little Speedo, so tight you could practically see his balls popping out the sides. I glanced over at Chris, just to see what he thought. He sat and watched them, the smoke dangling from his lips, his face totally blank.

In the shallows across from us these Barbie-doll blondes were cheering them on.

‘That's wicked, guys!'

‘Come on, just one more!'

It wouldn't have been so bad, except you could tell they were only shouting to get everybody else's attention. So their boyfriends were jumping Cooks. So fucking what? It wasn't like they were the first people to ever jump it. Then, as if that wasn't enough, the girls pulled a camcorder out of their beach bag, to record this great event. Every time the guys swaggered out of the water following a jump, they'd give each other a high-five and say something stupid into the camera, something like, ‘How about another one, babe?' It was like watching two guys masturbate in public. Seriously. There was no stopping them.

Finally, Chris decided to put an end to it.

He stood up. He didn't look like those guys at all. He was almost scrawny, his skin pulled tight over hard knots of muscle. Without saying anything, he flicked his smoke in the water and made his way up the cliffs. Everybody was already looking that way. Now the audience was all his. The steroid monkeys and their girlfriends stopped goofing around to watch. When he reached Cooks, he climbed up onto the stump. There was a moment – this moment when everybody sensed that something insane was going to happen – and then it did.

‘Holy shit!'

He jumped stomach first, his arms and legs spreadeagled like a skydiver. He hung in that position as he dropped through the air. At the last possible second, he bent at the waist and pulled his arms and legs in, pointing them straight down at the water. That was how he hit: jacknifing through the surface without making any splash at all. When he surfaced, there was no hooting or cheering or applauding. The canyon suddenly went all quiet, like a funeral parlour – just the way Chris liked it. He'd pulled a suicide off Cooks. Nobody did that. Superfly, sure. Logs, maybe. But Cooks? You'd have to be insane to try it. That's what all those people were thinking as they watched Chris slosh over to the bank. The thing is, Chris didn't give a shit about impressing them. Like I said, he hated show-offs almost as much as he hated turtlenecks. He was just sick of those guys and their screeching girlfriends.

One of them said, ‘That was pretty slick, man.'

Chris looked at him, in that way of his, and the guy shut up.

After that they put their camera away.

The rest of the afternoon was perfect. By ‘perfect' I mean that nothing spectacular happened at all. We burned a fat one and joked around – totally mellow. A couple of girls came over, wanting to get high. They were pretty cute, actually, but they turned out to be harsh gnats. Eventually we gave up talking to them and just made fun of them until they left. Then we munched out on this giant bag of nachos. Also, I think we went to get some pop from the gas station on the way home. I don't really know. But basically, that's the last time I can remember feeling normal. The next day we went down to the beach at Cates Park instead of the river. We did that sometimes, for a change. Now I wish we hadn't, of course.

But there's no use thinking like that.

5

After everything that had happened to us, there was no way Chris was going to let Bates arrest him. Fuck that. It all seems sort of inevitable now, but it wasn't like we planned it or anything. We didn't know Bates was going to turn up at the beach – 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.