Blood Sports (34 page)
Authors: Eden Robinson
“Push comes to shove,” Jer said. “You push back.”
Jer reached under the passenger’s seat and pulled out Betty, Firebug’s pistol. He twirled it like a cowboy and held it, grip facing Tom, an offering.
“I can’t,” Tom said.
Jeremy spun the pistol again and then held it in front of Tom’s face. “Other people walked away from me when I needed them. You understand loyalty, and that’s why you’re not in the ground, Tom.”
Tom couldn’t take his eyes from the barrel.
“Is this the life you really want?” Jer said. “A job a monkey could do with brains left over to fart. Bills you can’t pay. Kids you can’t feed. A girlfriend one card short of a full deck. Playing Mother Theresa to schitzy freaks in the skids.”
Tom raised his eyes, gauging the distance between them.
“There’s my killer-diller,” Jer said. “Not far from the surface, is he?”
“You’ve been following me,” Tom said.
“I’ve had you followed,” Jer said.
“Did you know where we were all this time?”
Jer shrugged. “I heard. I still have to report back in the evenings.” He raised an ironic eyebrow. “I’ve got a weekend pass to help Aunt Chrissy look for you. I think your mom’s read one too many Agatha Christies. She just expects the cops to haul me off because she has a bunch of bad transcripts. She thinks I don’t know she’s hired another rinky-dink
PI
to –”
“You knew where we were. You didn’t help us,” Tom said. “Why?”
“Why did you move the bodies? Why did you take the tapes?” Tom flinched.
“Exactly. You don’t trust me. And I have to say, Tom, after all we’ve been through, I’m hurt,” Jer said, not sounding hurt. Sounding smug and cheerful now that he was holding all the cards again.
“I don’t want to kill Firebug,” Tom said.
“You reap what you sow,” Jer said.
Tom didn’t know what that meant, if it was a message intended for Firebug or for him.
“Mel and Paulie don’t go anywhere until you clean up your mess.” Jer offered him the pistol again.
The weight of the gun was strangely comforting. Tom hugged it to his chest. “They go home.”
“We all go home. We never speak of this again,” Jer said. “And everyone lives happily ever after.”
The hefty man opened the back doors of the van and the cage shrieked as it was dragged along the van’s floor. Paulie nursed Mel in the passenger’s side of the van, guarded by the skinny man. Leo lay on his side, his eyes locked at a point directly in front of him.
“Little men with big mouths and greedy girlfriends,” Jer said. “But hey, who am I to judge? A girl needs her stash, and Leo’s not exactly boyfriend of the year.”
They followed the long parallel drag marks leading off up the slight incline. Flies buzzed around bright red splotches that matted the bent grass. A small plane throbbed overhead, a yellow button of colour low to the horizon. Firebug’s pistol was heavy and slick in Tom’s sweating hands.
“Ready?” Jeremy said.
We never took any home videos of Mel, Tom thought. Lack of time, lack of money, lack of energy, but now she was almost one, and they had no movies of her. (Crows caw nearby in a tree unseen by the camcorder. The sun beats down at them from a steep angle. Firebug kneels. His hands are cuffed behind his back. His bare feet are nailed in place with spikes. Yellowed grass sprays between his feet.)
They had a scattering of pictures, snapshots of her at other kids’ birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s Eve. He kept Mel’s newborn picture – grumpy and blotchy and swaddled in hospital blankets – in his wallet and people made forced “ooooh” sounds. He’d made a mental note to go get a new picture of her so people could see her in all her jowly-cheeked, fuzzy-haired glory. (Jeremy takes Firebug’s face in his hand, helpfully draws a large red X on his forehead with a Magic Marker.) They had a set of pictures, the Deluxe Package, waiting for them in Wal-Mart, and were saving up to pay for it so they could give everyone a Mel picture at her first birthday party. Paulie was going overboard: a magician, for Pete’s sake. A tarot card reader. A psychic juggler. All volunteers, Paulie’s friends, people who balanced their chakras and ate raw food to counterbalance years of using. (Firebug refuses to play for the camera, is stubbornly mute as the camcorder light picks up his sweat and mean, glittery-eyed stare.) They had a park picked out, and Paulie had asked Jazz to go early in the morning to claim the barbeque pit. Paulie had a menu. Paulie had found a Cinderella cake pan in the Sally Ann and was watching the Food Network for pointers on decorating the birthday cake, high baroque, curlicues and gilding. Late nights after exhausted days staying up to carefully print the invitations with a calligraphy pen, blue ink and ribbon, pink paper, decoupage and vellum. (Point and shoot. Point and shoot. Point and shoot. It’s
almost idiot-proof.) I was born last, Paulie said, after three brothers. I never got any birthday parties. She overcompensates with Mel, but Tom enjoys it, a taste of normal. (The tape is short. Tom walks into the frame. He presses Betty against Firebug’s forehead to muffle the sound. The unseen crows aren’t disturbed and continue to argue in the background. The recording stops.)
NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR
1. Made the Whole Thing Up
I prefer the older, bloodier versions of fairy tales. Set in Vancouver and surrounds,
Blood Sports
is an homage to the original
Hansel and Gretel
, the version where Hansel uses a finger bone from a previous victim to convince the witch he’s still too skinny to eat.
For those who are curious, this story is not autobiographical or based on anyone that I know. Although I borrowed shamelessly from the stylistic conventions of social realism, this is a dark fantasy.
2. Couches I Have Slept On
Many thanks to the following for their financial support:
The Canada Council for the Arts, the B.C. Council for the Arts, the Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence Programme at the University of Calgary, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Yukon
Archives & Education Writer-in-Residence Programme in the Whitehorse Public Library, and, last but never least, my parents, John and Winnie Robinson.
3. Patience Is a Virtue
My creative process involves copious drafts and partial drafts. Sometimes, deadlines notwithstanding, I abandon entire manuscripts and submit a new first draft altogether. Many thanks to my agent, Denise Bukowski, and my editors, Ellen Seligman and Jennifer Lambert of McClelland & Stewart. You are all extremely virtuous.
Eden Robinson
Kitamaat Village, B.C.
2005
READING GROUPS
1. Eden Robinson has referred to
Blood Sports
as a contemporary retelling of Hansel and Gretel – the original, ultra-gory version of the tale. In what ways, if any, do you find Robinson’s novel to be similar (in form, for instance, or in its underlying view of the world) to the traditional fairy tale?
2.
Blood Sports
is packed with references to popular culture – from brand-name products to street slang to characters who might have appeared in a
TV
detective show. Does this affect the book’s status as a literary novel? Does serious fiction have an obligation to be lofty, or should we applaud Robinson for attempting to capture contemporary textures in her work?
3. The novel’s opening section is presented in the form of a letter that Tom writes to his daughter some time – possibly years – after the events in the rest of the book have taken place. Why do you think Robinson chose this strategy of, in
a sense, beginning with the ending? How did this affect your reading of the ensuing story?
4. Jeremy is a deeply troubling character – a homicidal master criminal – and yet he is both charming and hugely successful, at least in material terms. Is this purely a cartoon, or on some level a reflection of real life?
5. From the book’s earliest sections – like the chapter in which Tom and his family get a portrait taken at a Wal-Mart photo studio – family is front and centre. What do you think the book is saying about the role of family in our lives? Is Tom misguided in clinging to the idea of family as a source of meaning, even as his family relationships seem on the verge of destroying him?
6. Eden Robinson comes from an aboriginal background. She is Haisla, and currently lives in her ancestral village in northern British Columbia. Keeping this in mind, does it surprise you that much of her work –
Blood Sports
included – focuses on non-native Canadians living in urban settings? Should it?
7. Robinson often includes shocking material in her stories. Which scenes in
Blood Sports
stood out to you as the most disturbing, and why? What do you think are Robinson’s artistic reasons for including shocking material in her work?
8. What do you make of Tom’s behaviour over the course of the novel? Is he a decent person who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, or is he somehow complicit in the mayhem that follows him wherever he goes?
9. In something of a departure from her previous work, Robinson has written
Blood Sports
in a patchwork of different styles and voices – including standard narrative, script format, a letter, and so on. There are also several sudden jumps backwards and forwards in time. Why do you think she chose to write the book in this way, and how might the experience of reading it have been different if she’d used a more conventional structure?
10. Robinson has said that she often thinks of the situations she writes about – even many of the violent and troubling ones – as being, on some level, comical. Did you find yourself chuckling at any uncomfortable moments while reading
Blood Sports
? If so, what do you think is the significance of this kind of humour, and is it “healthy”?
11. On the surface,
Blood Sports
doesn’t seem to have much in common with most well-known Canadian novels – though Robinson says she’s a voracious reader of Canadian fiction. How is this book different from, and similar to, other Canadian novels you’ve read? Do you think that the concepts of CanLit, and of Canadian identity in general, are useful when discussing a work like this?
12. In interviews, Robinson has mentioned that she watches a lot of movies, and that she’s been influenced somewhat by contemporary directors like David Cronenberg. In what ways, if any, do you see the influence of film in
Blood Sports
? Conversely, in what ways is
Blood Sports
distinctively bookish and un-movie-like? Could a story like this ever be filmed?
13. “Hate is everything they said it would be and it waits for you like an airbag.” Is the sentiment expressed in the novel’s epigraph (quoted from a book of stories by Canadian author Mark Anthony Jarman) confirmed by the story as a whole?
14.
Blood Sports
is a sequel to an earlier novella of Robinson’s, “Contact Sports,” which describes Tom, Jeremy, and some of the novel’s other characters at an earlier period in their lives. Recently, Robinson has said that she has considered writing yet another story about these characters. What might happen in a sequel to
Blood Sports
, and why do you think these particular characters hold so much allure for the author?
