Flagged Victor (4 page)

We played games of street hockey or baseball in an undeveloped cul-de-sac called the Horseshoe. We went swimming in a lake called Oathill, which was long and narrow and surrounded by forest. Sometimes we cut through a different forest to Penhorn Mall and played games of Asteroids or Space Invaders in the arcade, bought an Orange Julius or a bag of bulk broken chocolate bars if we had extra scratch, or just wandered the wide
corridors past all the stores without any good reason or objective. If it was only me and Chris, we often ended up in the bookstore. We spent a lot of time in the fantasy and science fiction aisle judging books by their covers. We particularly liked covers with half-naked women or muscular swordsmen. I also judged books by how closely they adhered to stories I had in mind. I tested some of those story ideas out on Chris, and, through his grunts and supportive laughs, I understood he believed every one to be worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I remained in a sling all summer. I broke the arm two more times, once falling from the rafters of a half-built house, once tripping violently during a game of hide-and-seek. I was still a new kid, but I now had special status as some kind of fallen soldier. My status had been lifted by Chris, who was respected and yet treated me like an equal. This, undoubtedly, puzzled many since it flew in the face of my obvious deficiencies. A true friend is someone who hangs with you no matter what everyone else thinks.

At
first, I did not walk to the new school with Chris but with the neighbourhood boys who were my own age, like Franky and Derek. We collected at the base of Somerset Hill and moved forth together, a troop of weary soldiers, and gained a little levity as the distance got covered and the curse words became more inventive and amusing. We wore blazing white Stan Smith sneakers in the fall, and we clomped and scuffed in Kodiak workboots in the winter, the laces always untied. Downy vests of enormous bulk were popular, and preferable to full-sleeved
winter coats. Nobody wore a hat or gloves unless their mother was in sight. To carry our books and lunches, we used vinyl brown Adidas bags that looked like dachshunds without legs. Inevitably, the bags got so full over the course of the year that the straps could no longer take the strain and snapped. When one strap broke, you tied the loose end to the other strap, and you could loop it over your shoulder and carry the bag like a backpack, the weighty contents bulging out the bottom. If both straps broke, you were fucked. When there was ice on the ground, we flung our Adidas bags along the road like curling rocks.

I was unsatisfied with the boys in my own grade. They didn’t cut it and I hungered for a different kind of companionship. By the end of the year, through the dint of many demonstrations of cruelty, violence, and mayhem, I was permitted to occasionally walk with the older, tougher boys, including Chris. Once in a while, it was just me and Chris the whole way.

My
parents were the detached rulers of my life, overseers who asserted authority without much sympathy or interest, having many more important things to do.

My father worked for the Royal Bank of Canada. There were five major banks in Canada then, and the Royal Bank was the largest. While my personal status was bolstered by the dominant power of this bank, I was secretly bothered by the vigour of its number three competitor, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, or CIBC, whose yellow and brown colours I quietly preferred. One day, I decided I wanted to open my own savings
account. Chris, Derek, and Geoff thought that was a good idea, too, and it was one of the few times anyone followed my lead. Instantly, however, I was paralyzed with anxiety. It made sense, given my father’s job, to open an account with the Royal Bank, but there was no branch at Penhorn Mall, the only place within walking distance. Penhorn was CIBC territory. I worried myself sick for days about this, even as my idea took on a horrible momentum with the other boys. They kept trying to get us all organized with a lump sum to bring over to the bank and open savings accounts. Finally, I worked up the courage to ask my father if I could open an account at CIBC instead of at his bank. He okayed the idea without much comment, but I could feel immense disappointment in his indifferent shrug.

My account passbook was small and vertical, brown and gold, and blazing with guilt. But I liked to put even small bits of money in to see the numbers go up, and I liked to get the passbook updated every month or so to see how much interest had accrued, each new series of numbers punched unevenly into the page, like a telegraph message from some distant and lawless country. Twenty-three cents might be added in, or $1.62. Once I got over seven dollars in interest in a single update. I couldn’t believe it. Seven freaking dollars showing up out of nowhere. I wanted to tell Dad how good that felt but feared bringing up the bank betrayal thing again.

Derek’s father owned a sports store, though Derek and his father hated sports. Paul’s father was a dentist. We avoided him, and his overly clean hands, as though he were a leper and treated Paul, too, with such disdain that he gradually stopped hanging around. Franky’s father was supposed to be a salesman
of some sort, but even Franky didn’t think it worthwhile to figure out what his father plugged. Geoff’s father worked at the oil refinery, and he seemed so red-faced and angry, we pictured him surrounded by boilers and pipes, clanking them madly with a heavy wrench, screaming for the hissing to stop.

Most of the other fathers did nothing special for their jobs, they just worked. Everyone’s mother seemed to be a nurse. Except for Sheldon’s mother, who was uncomfortably attractive and worked as a stewardess and part-time aerobics instructor before settling on real estate.

Chris’s father, on the other hand, was a police officer, a distinction that set him apart. Better, he was RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Mr. R worked in an office now but he had done a lot of straight-up policing earlier in his career, some of it in tough, remote communities up north, and to further bolster his bona fides, he had a collection of weapons, ranging from pistols to semi-automatic rifles, in preparation for the end of the world. Briefly, he’d even owned a grenade launcher and a genuine Nazi dagger. Sometimes he took Chris and me shooting at the armoury gun range. He carefully taught us how to handle guns, how to aim and fire, how to clean them and care for them. I was a decent shot, but Chris was a sharpshooter, a long-range assassin, and he also had a knack for the mechanical aspects of loading, breaking down, and cleaning. Sunday afternoons, Mr. R cleaned his guns on the kitchen table on a green felt cloth, and we would watch and ask him what certain guns could do to a person.

He told us: This one will pop a three-quarter-inch hole in your chest and churn around inside, in the process causing
enough internal damage to bleed you out within thirty minutes. Approximately.

What about that one? Chris asked, pointing to the stainless steel .357 Magnum with the fitted rubber grip, which we both thought was the coolest handgun in the known universe.

No internal bleeding with that one, Mr. R said. Tends to blow the head clean off the shoulders.

And that became one of our favourite jokes. We laughed with pure pleasure every time it came up. Tends to blow the head clean off the shoulders. Ha ha ha.

Mr. R and Chris had the same laugh: a deep, rolling cackle that grew in cruelty and mirth until you thought of evil geniuses hatching plots while wringing their hands.

One
day, Mr. R drove Chris and me to school in a squad car. As an officer, Mr. R needed to do a day in the squad car every six months or so, even though he worked at a desk. We loved sitting in the back, behind Plexiglas and cage wire, but it was even cooler when Mr. R sounded the siren. Some guy in a beat-up Mercury Monarch had rolled through a stop sign and Mr. R thought it would be fun to pull him over and show us what it was like to give a ticket.

He stepped out of his car and walked to the front driver’s side window, then he returned with the offending driver’s licence in hand. We were out of our minds with excitement.

Mr. R called the licence number into dispatch and waited. He listened as the dispatch announcer gave him a long explanation. It was unintelligible to us. But Mr. R didn’t explain what
she said. He stepped out of the car, handed the licence back to the driver, and the big car pulled away.

When Mr. R sat back in the driver’s seat, Chris asked him what was wrong.

He was flagged victor, Mr. R said.

Before we got to school, we learned what that meant. The
V
was for violence. The driver had been flagged as a violent offender. And so, Mr. R let him go rather than continue his stunt with two children in his car.

We felt like we’d had a close call. Like we’d accidentally bumped into Jesse James.

Flagged victor
became one of our secret code-word expressions ever after. Doing something wrong, getting away with it, grinning an evildoer’s grin. That was very FV.

Mr.
R had a
Playboy
collection in the basement, and it was okay for us to go down there and look through them. The issues were all from the early to mid-seventies. The women stood differently then, often on tiptoes, their calves straining, like awkward ballerinas reaching for something on the top of some imaginary shelf. Their breasts were different then, too, starting higher on their chests, sinking lower and hanging rounder, and their shoulders and hips were wider and fuller. Beyond their bikini tan lines, their pubic hair was far, far bushier, a wide swath of mysterious wilderness.

One day, I was exploring the woods around Oathill Lake with Derek. Together, we found a stash of pornographic magazines. There were no
Playboys
in the pile, only titles we’d never heard
of before with pictures inside that were far more graphic than anything we’d ever seen. There were around thirty magazines total, so we each claimed approximately fifteen and worked on a plan to get them home without detection. We decided to risk hiding them in the forest until that night. Then Derek, who had a bedroom on the ground floor, would sneak out of his house, grab the loot, and deliver my share to me at my front door.

I woke myself up at two in the morning, the designated time, and crept downstairs. I stood looking out the glass of our front door for about ten minutes until I saw a dim figure in the haze, running down the middle of the street. I opened the front door when Derek arrived, breathing hard, with my stack of magazines in his arms. He handed them to me without a word, then took off again, running just as fast.

Oathill
Lake was our main destination for recreation, winter and summer. In the winter, we skated and played hockey there. Early in the season, the water around the fringe of the lake was barely frozen, so we tossed our skates onto the more solid inner ice and hurled ourselves after them, hoping the surface would hold. If the ice was wet and your jeans got soaked, they’d freeze and you could stop a puck or take a whack with a stick against the shins and feel only the dull thud. In the summer, we swam from the pier on the wooded shore out to the floating dock in the middle of the lake and played there for hours, cannonballing into the water, rocking violently side to side to tip others off, or lying on our backs with our hair afloat like weeds, enthralled by the way the sky got turned into an inverted bowl of blue. I had
a rubber dinghy, a heavy vulcanized beast that I carried on my own to the lake most days. To manage this, I lodged the rubber seat against my sweaty forehead, straining my jaw and neck to keep it in place, and got into a rhythmic bounce with the bottom end
thwock-thwock-thwock
ing against my heels, a sound like a rock ricocheting around the inside of a metal pipe. The dinghy summoned all light and heat down to it. Some days, we just lay within, frying in the sun. Once or twice at the beginning of each summer, I burned so horribly that only hours in a cold bath could stop my feverish shivering. Some afternoons, we used my boat to row across the lake and explore the other shores. We found the old lock that way, a stone sluice overgrown by marsh reeds and muck, as mysterious as the remains of a lost temple or city. The swamp around the lock stank so badly of raw unfiltered fart that it earned the status of a forbidden zone, an unmapped region where the only life was mutant and evil. We braved it whenever we could.

We liked to go snorkelling and look for sunken treasure. We liked to pick blueberries on the marshy sides of the lake, and we liked to kill frogs. At first, we killed frogs by throwing rocks at them, but this gave most of the advantage to the frogs, who disappeared with a splash at the first miss. Then we made the move to slingshots and we became better killers. Eventually, Chris and a few of the older boys graduated to BB guns, and a wholesale slaughter ensued. We could, with the high-powered pellets, even kill the large pollywogs that hovered like elongated eyeballs below the surface of the water. Chris lent me his rifle and told me to aim slightly below the pollywog’s trajectory to account for any deflection caused by the water surface. I braced
the butt against my shoulder, as I’d been taught, and took careful aim, until the pollywog and I were the only two sentient beings in the universe.

It’s either you or him, Chris said, when I still had not fired.

So I squeezed the trigger, and when the cloudy water cleared, I saw my handiwork. Chris congratulated me with a pat on the shoulder.

Good kill. Very FV. Now you have to drink its blood to let the spirit of the frog into you.

Fuck that, I said, and lined up another amphibian to deaden my horror at what I’d done.

Chris seemed to feel no such pangs. Some days, I could tell whether he’d been down to the lake before me by the number of pollywog and frog corpses floating on the water, little grey holes in their heads. Eventually, we no longer heard the bellow of frogs in the evening. I honestly think we wiped the entire population out.

We
built our forts in dense thickets of forest, out of old wooden shipping pallets and found boards and odd-shaped pieces of plywood and throwaway cuts of shag carpet, tar paper, and plastic. The best fort I ever helped build was constructed over a pit in the ground that had been created when a giant tree fell and ripped up the earth with its roots. This fort was at the edge of the swamp close to Penhorn Mall. Derek and Franky and I built it, without the knowledge of Chris, Geoff, Sheldon, and the other older boys. It had multiple rooms, and in one room you could lift up the floorboards and descend into the cave beneath.
I decided the cave was a good place to store my porn magazines, since I’d become too nervous to keep them in my bedroom any longer, and offered them magnanimously to the members of our fort.