By Lake Lacustrine
Kim Harrison
Fire is Jimmy’s great love. He’s forty two years old living in his own constructed hell. He’s never had a real relationship with a woman, or become close to anyone else except his older brother Barry and I, and his mother, Jeanette who passed away a month ago. Jeanette paid for everything, Jimmy only had to procure his own drugs. Barry and I bought Jimmy out here to Lake Lacustrine, to the old homestead cabin to be we three together again, the same as twenty years and more ago.
I use matches and light the paper, but for Jimmy the flame never finishes. He’s always pushing. The cast iron stove’s glowing red hot, he shoves in another block of creosote covered railway tie. That billowing orange black fire bursting up the chimney pipe makes him howl in ecstasy. Yes, to watch it rise and plume, “it’s not hot enough in here,” he yells.
“Bring on the wood ,” he laughs. His wide face patterns all wrinkly now, with the candle light on his skin, his hair short to the scalp, he shaves it himself, and he’s usually in the mood to shave, any kind of fidgeting helps him pass the long hours, relieve the boredom and tension of the day to day.
I start playing the Yamaha guitar in the corner. I think the temperature's more sweat lodge than devilish. For healing, not hate. That’s what Barry and I intended. Force out the toxic water from your body and soul. But then, I’ve always been an optimist. "We should’ve bought some rocks to steam.” I say.
A bug drops from the ceiling, spinning and burning on the stovetop. Jimmy calls out “Radio CKIX” that’s his imaginary radio station. Jimmy makes a deep radio voice, maybe he could’ve been an announcer at one time. “Here’s the Barry and Harrison duo singing their own songs tonight."
I’m Barry’s best friend from the childhood years. We two have never sniffed gasoline from a tractor tank. We have not mainlined speed. We have not dropped LSD into the unsuspecting beer mugs of elderly pub patrons, to watch them become high and crazy. But yes, Jimmy would like us to join him, he wants the world to join him with his wild, damaged mind, imagination is the key to psychosis or freedom. It just needs a little fire.
I’ve been a drinker, but more a man inside his own head. I’ve snorted coke but not crack, smoked the tobacco but rarely the doobie, drove a car to the rim of a cliff but never over the edge. I’ve lain on the railway track and waited, always rolling out when I heard the vibrations rising through the rails. No, I never followed through. Not the same way as Jimmy.
Barry used to drive drunk and crazy, smoke marijuana with his wine, and babble incoherent diatribes, his anger loud, but acted only in his driving recklessness. What he didn’t do was as big a signal as what he did. Not coming home weekends, not paying the bills, not taking his wife anywhere, leaving her at the trailer on the mountain or at his mother’s place while he staggered away drunk to party and pass out. His kids wild and ragged, casualties of the unpredictable.
After the marriage split, he lived with Jimmy in the old family trailer for a while but couldn’t sleep with his brother up all night pacing, Jimmy pulling back the baseboards or crawling under the trailer with insect spray “got to kill the bugs under the floor, man.”
Barry's camping out of his van now, and working casual labour. He’s off all the vices. I believe that it’s his mother’s death and burnout and just being tired of the old highs, and the sense that his kids are adults now and he’d like to at least see them to say hello and how are you without shame.
Barry and I come to the shores of Lake Lacustrine to escape the traffic and the streetlights and the conventional, to catch up on the past and absorb wild nature and to reconnect with Jimmy. In the summer, there are dragonflies shimmering above the white, cracked alkali crusted along the beach edges. By the fall, and especially by now, November, the leeches are burrowed in the mud, the methane’s risen and passed, and the land smells fresh after the sleet and rain. It’s quite amazing to regard the sky so full of stars arcing above the low hills, and sacred sagebrush grows all over these hills, and if your eyes reach far enough, there seem to be no gaps in the grey and silver, between the sage and the stars. When we arrived, we checked the darkness out for a few minutes, from the truck to the cabin. I’d have liked an hour to absorb the outside, before going in, but Jimmy insisted. He obsessed to start his fire asap.
Nearby, just up the hill, there are partly filled holes, pits dug two hundred and more years ago by the Interior Salish people, for winter shelter. In the old days, they built circular wood structures, called Kekulis, over the pits, with strong poles to withstand the winter weather. A smoke hole opened in the middle, at the top of the wooden pyramid, to funnel out the fumes and excess heat. People lived beneath the surface, in the pits in the dark season, with their families, fires and stories. Their altered state was natural, concerned with season and weather. Their gathering was done out of survival, to eat, sleep, and talk of legends under the heat of the Kekuli home fire, built in the centre of the wide dugout.
Jimmy and Barry’s families have inhabited this area for generations. Their ancestors wintered in the ancient Kekulis. Local people named the lake; the name the old ones gave it is lost.
Barry has changed a lot over the past year. He no longer becomes incoherent talking word salad unhinged, with the hash and the wine. Without it he can still diatribe and project, blame the world for all his troubles, but now he just feels the beat along with me as Jimmy paces up and down the cabin, treading planks from window to window, following our rock and roll. The drumming takes him out of himself and into our sober world, and that’s one reason we bring him up to Lake Lacustrine, though he always says he can drag us down to his own level.
“I don’t need your f…. charity. You guys are so holy clean.” Jimmy takes a swig of beer.
I think to myself... If we were hanging out in a downtown east side alley all shooting up together, he’d be friendlier…
Jimmy’s used a lot of meth. And he always asks why doesn’t Barry go into the crystal? Because, says Barry, he’s almost been there, “it’s too far a fall for a fifty-year-old.”
Meth’s a colorless flame, it is smoking darkness, burning ice. I’ve been tempted myself, to have that cold limitless energy, that chemical connection. Fear of the results prevents me, like my rolling from the rails before the train. Rhythm has been the way I’ve dealt with everything. I join with the two brothers in music, for hours rhyming lines, playing with improvisational meanings, sudden changes. I am with them through the sound, it rises and falls like fire behind them. It’s catharsis in wild balance, ambiance.
The cabin is sweat lodge steaming, as I try to find different chords and beats, mostly rhythms, because with perspiration dripping there’s no subtlety of feeling for melody. Barry picks up his old Yamaha and uses it like a bongo drum, first tapping on the top, then banging and rocking with both hands. Jimmy begins to chant about Stephen Fonyo, the troubled one legged runner who ran across Canada back in the nineteen eighties, Jimmy always goes back to the troubled Fonyo, who was in his prime when Jimmy was, too.
“If I was on the bus in Manitoba and if I saw him stagger by the window I’d throw a beer bottle at him, maybe.”
He laughs, like he’s kidding, but he’s not.
For me, I’m kinda meditating on sound pulses, with one ear on words, the other on tone. Out of control seems an extreme locale to me now. If you’re in that wild space, you don’t want to shove another log on the fire, you want to make it a gas driven pyre, then an inferno, arc the energy like burning another sun, so pop another pill, keep the flame high. My distraction’s in the music now. It can take you to the edge, into trance resolution without side effects, to the limit of movement and beat. I forget the worries. Just play, let the sound merge you into the world, out of your own head.
Barry’s bongo drumming his guitar and he’s laid the saucepans out and snares on them with the occasional flourish. I think of us from the outside, as spirits from the old days boogying over the shores of the lake while it hears our song, where black smoke rises, a serpent whirl up through the wide dark sky, and maybe that serpent whirl dancing too, all the way to the stars, like the Kekuli fires long ago.
“I did it,” sings Jimmy. “I did it I did it.”
He’s smoking a joint, with that wide and manic smile between puffs. Offers it to me As usual, I say “No thanks,” and Jimmy just grins, keeps singing. Yes, I’m pulling in second hand smoke, but I’m refusing first hand.
We’re chanting along with him now “I did it, I did it!” and in between Barry sings out “What… What did you do?”
“I drove my cars into the ground!“ Jimmy yells. “I won the gold, I’m the weightlifting champ of the world, I’m North America’s greatest DJ!” He flourishes his hand. “I burned down the Silver River Hotel!”
One out of four isn’t bad...
The Silver River Hotel fire was over twenty three years ago. A long ways to reach. The bouncers wouldn’t let Jimmy in, according to Barry. He didn’t have I. D. In those days, not the right I. D., anyway. Jimmy lifted weights, he was built then, he drew fists at the bouncers and they struggled to push him out, the hired hands up against his solid frame and energy, Jimmy screaming profanity “why is is just me… you let all those other guys pass!” and when the strong men tossed him forth to the street they aimed consciously and banged his head against a light pole a couple of times, and wow he was out for a few moments and apparently blood gushing and he came to and didn’t say a word, just righted himself hands clutching the post, then staggered down the street, not even holding his head, leaving behind red smudges and a dripping trail. A few nights later, the hotel went up in flames.
Barry told me all this before. I took it in, but just on the surface, and I didn’t really believe it. Or just didn’t want to. Now something seems revealed, in the rhythm we play, the words uttered to an improvised beat, some kind of scat, a confession and a boast. “I did it.”
After a few moments, Jimmy’s back to puffing the doobie, his face at the window, peering out at the shape of the night lake as candles burn behind him.
What hits me is that we’re all doing some kind of sweat lodge here. Some kind of winter Kekuli ritual. And it’s supposed to heal...When I hear these dark words boiling from Jimmy’s brain…they shock me, or maybe I’m freaked out by their sound utterance, the fact the words are on the loose. In the end, it’s a way for us to move closer. A way for him to tell us he’s not afraid to share, as the gurus say, when he’s out of his mind and body and the darkness is a few steps beyond the walls, where that mud deep lake will drag you down into the quicksand and leeches and the cold elements will freeze you. He’s safe inside and laughing, with his brother and I and the rolling music heat. And I wonder, should I tell anyone?
It’s better to be safe, I think. It’s safe just to let things be.
Barry keeps drumming. He grooves into what he hears as part of the ritual, his head down, all words pass over, Jimmy does the call, Barry does the response, the world is what it is out there and it can wait til tomorrow, now its time for fun and abandon, as much as a forty six year old can handle, anyway.
When do we choose to reveal our trespasses? In the middle of a ceremony, with dancing and music and drugs, let the inner animal rise, let the beat burn it forth, there’s no one else Jimmy knows well enough to tell. There’s talking in tongues and there’s rapping in rhyme. Jimmy perceives that we’ll hear his confession, as that rap, and besides it’s not really a confession, more of a boast. And that fits in with a rap too. Because he told those bouncers and those nightclub managers, not in words but in action, disrespect begets humiliation, then revenge, and he poured gas on their edifice, and let it burn, and he won and was never caught.
It comes to me that I haven’t completed anything really evil against others. Never had reason to. I kept to myself all my life, never needed to strike out, except against my own mind. Jimmy’s crossed the line so many times, he’s accomplished a lot of vengeance. Yet Barry’s concerned for his brother, after all these years of anarchy and sin. And I ask myself what am I doing still hanging around with these guys?
It’s history, and because of Barry. Our families go way back. Barry’s dad was a logger and small farmer like my own father, his mother a Salish native. Her people roamed these mountains for thousands of years. I went to school with these brothers, Barry the joker and Jimmy his rebel sidekick, Barry and I could hike in the mountains for hours, wandering, burning up energy, getting lost. our purpose to find ourselves again in the wilderness.
I’m here because of imagination. These guys free flow, Barry’s always been fluid with the music, free with the playfulness, into lack of planning and the hope of serendipity. No structure, no boundaries. We’d ride the truck north, end up in Edmonton and come back the next day, before the work week, just to be high with the high Rockies, and then there’s all the bands and legion halls we used to play in, all the drunk nights and country western songs, the girls and the midnight white lines, riding by another town. All the improvisations on our own lives played out in rhythm. And now, we’ve stopped the music and he turns in my direction and says “Let’s go for a walk in these hills.”
Like we used to do as kids.
“Hey, Jimmy, do you want to come with us?”
“No way. I don’t want to go out in that damn night cold.” He’s recovered from his laughter fit, and already cracking more pine branches over one knee. He doesn’t seem slowed down at all by the heat. “Who’d want to go out there now? You guys can freeze all you want.”
Barry takes the guitar. He grabs his backpack, too. It’s so cold outside, I can hardly wait to arrive. Fresh air just past the door.
“You guys just go, then, just go. Leave me here,” Jimmy’s grinning and pacing with that wild look in his eyes, we pass by him with his smoke and matches and walk along by the lake.
We talk about the Silver Lake Hotel. Should we tell anyone? I wonder.
Barry shrugs. He puts his backpack by the tiny strip of white alkaline beach, walks to the edge of the lake and looks out into the dark. “I’m sick of him… he’s like a child.”
“Yeah” I say, surprised by his tone, his change of mood. “two people were burned.”
Barry nods. “Yeah.”
Two innocent hotel guests were seriously injured. That’s something that can’t be discounted, a person can be contrary, but there’s a line.
I think about how much time has passed since then, as Barry and I hike up along the side of the lake, towards the outline of the hills. Barry sounds stronger now. He’s stronger in everything he says, whereas Jimmy’s declined, he’s gone contrary, drinking and drugging even more to escape himself. I ponder if there’s anything virtuous about him now.
I’m glad I brought my parka, but I still feel all the heat from the cabin shimmer off me.
Barry walks, skinny and shadowy ahead, pony tail and cowboy hat, guitar still round his neck…
It seems like he’s a man from a different place, in this age of cel phones and internet. He’s slow, deliberate, he takes his time, grace in movement over this past sober year. “Let’s go over by the Kekuli pits,” he says.
We walk up, hiking round the sage, its scent arising from the darkness. Across the valley other hills loom, then more behind them, no lights except the arcing silver in the sky. We stand overlooking the lake, just below us the steeply curving pits, and further across there’s the shadow of the cabin, pale yellow candlelight through the windows.
“I just had to get out of that room,” Barry says. “I’m can only stay inside so long.. Mom’s gone, and I can’t make other people happy. The last time I saw her, in that bed, in a tiny curled up body, her voice said “I want you to take care of Jimmy.” It didn’t even seem like her.”
He looks over at me. “You seem more like my real brother, Harrison.”
He strums the guitar, a melody, complex fingerpicking with the right hand, just on one chord. I breathe deep, and it feels like nature stops momentarily for this music, the tone and serenade breaking out from inside a man, one note sounding towards the next, blending and separating, strengthening and fading, Barry’s making a song for this time, he and I along the trail. A slight wind makes me feel every outline round myself, I’m standing supported by the cold air, hearing the guitar sound from Barry's fingers, and his wrist drumming, rhythm on the wood.
“There’s different kinds of happiness,” I say.
We stand on the rim of the Kekuli pits, curving sharply beneath us, down about fifteen feet or so, and I think of families living there all winter, keeping the fires lit under near twenty-four hour darkness, how could they stand it, and each other. So closed and hot inside, in an underground bake oven with up to twenty family members. Everyone would stay and be together under the roof, or they’d all freeze. They’d have to go out to find fuel, and hunt, but there would be no tolerance for deviance, for nihilism. Everyone depended on everyone else.
Barry points towards the lake, “What the hell’s he up to now?”
We watch a small figure walking backwards from the cabin door, stepping in reverse towards the truck. Through the opening of the cabin, there beside the lake, a dull orange glow, looks like Jimmy’s let the stove door free.
I feel a franticness, and want to rush down there, but that’s only part of me. The other part’s the observer, what I’ve been my whole life, whether drunk or sober. Watching life burn through others, watching them choose their life to burn, witnessing the chaos and imagination of others’ existence, compared to mine. I’m always standing, looking over.
I feel Barry’s presence beside me in the dark, he’s a changed and resolute persona, and I wonder how he did it, how he stopped being out of control. It echoes through my mind: He says I’m his true brother now.
Jimmy continues walking backwards from the shadows to the truck, away from the flame, he carries a flashlight which he shines in front of him… we stand watching this light, and Jimmy’s outline from the hill “Hey!” yells Barry, “Hey,” there’s no answer, but there’s a short shining of the light in our direction, and when Jimmy arrives at the vehicle he opens the door and steps in backwards. We hear the engine roar loud, and then he reverses the truck up the long driveway, steering fast towards the main road and us. Then he backs too far to the left and into a fence, there’s a bang and the vehicle stops. We hustle down through the sagebrush, Barry’s guitar touches branches, sounding random notes from its strings.
When we reach the truck I shout at Jimmy. I’m mad at myself because I left the keys on the table. “It was an accident,” Jimmy yells back, he’s sitting there hands still on the wheel, doesn’t look like much damage though, he hit a fence, maybe some paint scratches.
Barry turns and we witness the entire cabin on fire. The noise reaches us before the smoke, the orange behind the windows shattering the glass. It burns like an oil field, black smoke billowing out, into the clear night. This is the cabin Barry goes to when he’s not working, when he lives in his van. Where he plays and shares his music. Why does Jimmy burn his brother’s life away? No one owns the cabin, it’s on Indian reserve land, no one owns anything here, but it was a place we could be together. “Wow, look at her go!” Jimmy’s out of the truck now. “Look at her burn!”
Barry’s laughing strangely. He’s motioning me forward, he throws the guitar in the back of the truck, and I run with him and Jimmy, the three of us, running together towards the fire. I feel the wind brought heat.
“I didn’t mean it,” Jimmy shouts at Barry. “Stuff gets away.”
Barry motions at Jimmy. “I’m gonna tell everyone everything about you, man,” Barry says, as we stand in front of the blaze. “How you wipe the slate clean. You take no prisoners.”
“You do that,” says Jimmy. “You just do that.”
I have never seen Jimmy with such a big smile. The only other times he smiles are when he’s pretending, to be a DJ, to be a macho man, to be half ways normal, but now he’s in the rhythm of it, with this piece of destruction, he’s dancing around waving his hands as the cabin blows away, wood heat to ashes its essence cast upon the night wind, lighter pieces drifting over Lake Lacustrine to the Kekuli pits above, silver grey specks in the sage, settling on the past.
Kim Harrison
Fire is Jimmy’s great love. He’s forty two years old living in his own constructed hell. He’s never had a real relationship with a woman, or become close to anyone else except his older brother Barry and I, and his mother, Jeanette who passed away a month ago. Jeanette paid for everything, Jimmy only had to procure his own drugs. Barry and I bought Jimmy out here to Lake Lacustrine, to the old homestead cabin to be we three together again, the same as twenty years and more ago.
I use matches and light the paper, but for Jimmy the flame never finishes. He’s always pushing. The cast iron stove’s glowing red hot, he shoves in another block of creosote covered railway tie. That billowing orange black fire bursting up the chimney pipe makes him howl in ecstasy. Yes, to watch it rise and plume, “it’s not hot enough in here,” he yells.
“Bring on the wood ,” he laughs. His wide face patterns all wrinkly now, with the candle light on his skin, his hair short to the scalp, he shaves it himself, and he’s usually in the mood to shave, any kind of fidgeting helps him pass the long hours, relieve the boredom and tension of the day to day.
I start playing the Yamaha guitar in the corner. I think the temperature's more sweat lodge than devilish. For healing, not hate. That’s what Barry and I intended. Force out the toxic water from your body and soul. But then, I’ve always been an optimist. "We should’ve bought some rocks to steam.” I say.
A bug drops from the ceiling, spinning and burning on the stovetop. Jimmy calls out “Radio CKIX” that’s his imaginary radio station. Jimmy makes a deep radio voice, maybe he could’ve been an announcer at one time. “Here’s the Barry and Harrison duo singing their own songs tonight."
I’m Barry’s best friend from the childhood years. We two have never sniffed gasoline from a tractor tank. We have not mainlined speed. We have not dropped LSD into the unsuspecting beer mugs of elderly pub patrons, to watch them become high and crazy. But yes, Jimmy would like us to join him, he wants the world to join him with his wild, damaged mind, imagination is the key to psychosis or freedom. It just needs a little fire.
I’ve been a drinker, but more a man inside his own head. I’ve snorted coke but not crack, smoked the tobacco but rarely the doobie, drove a car to the rim of a cliff but never over the edge. I’ve lain on the railway track and waited, always rolling out when I heard the vibrations rising through the rails. No, I never followed through. Not the same way as Jimmy.
Barry used to drive drunk and crazy, smoke marijuana with his wine, and babble incoherent diatribes, his anger loud, but acted only in his driving recklessness. What he didn’t do was as big a signal as what he did. Not coming home weekends, not paying the bills, not taking his wife anywhere, leaving her at the trailer on the mountain or at his mother’s place while he staggered away drunk to party and pass out. His kids wild and ragged, casualties of the unpredictable.
After the marriage split, he lived with Jimmy in the old family trailer for a while but couldn’t sleep with his brother up all night pacing, Jimmy pulling back the baseboards or crawling under the trailer with insect spray “got to kill the bugs under the floor, man.”
Barry's camping out of his van now, and working casual labour. He’s off all the vices. I believe that it’s his mother’s death and burnout and just being tired of the old highs, and the sense that his kids are adults now and he’d like to at least see them to say hello and how are you without shame.
Barry and I come to the shores of Lake Lacustrine to escape the traffic and the streetlights and the conventional, to catch up on the past and absorb wild nature and to reconnect with Jimmy. In the summer, there are dragonflies shimmering above the white, cracked alkali crusted along the beach edges. By the fall, and especially by now, November, the leeches are burrowed in the mud, the methane’s risen and passed, and the land smells fresh after the sleet and rain. It’s quite amazing to regard the sky so full of stars arcing above the low hills, and sacred sagebrush grows all over these hills, and if your eyes reach far enough, there seem to be no gaps in the grey and silver, between the sage and the stars. When we arrived, we checked the darkness out for a few minutes, from the truck to the cabin. I’d have liked an hour to absorb the outside, before going in, but Jimmy insisted. He obsessed to start his fire asap.
Nearby, just up the hill, there are partly filled holes, pits dug two hundred and more years ago by the Interior Salish people, for winter shelter. In the old days, they built circular wood structures, called Kekulis, over the pits, with strong poles to withstand the winter weather. A smoke hole opened in the middle, at the top of the wooden pyramid, to funnel out the fumes and excess heat. People lived beneath the surface, in the pits in the dark season, with their families, fires and stories. Their altered state was natural, concerned with season and weather. Their gathering was done out of survival, to eat, sleep, and talk of legends under the heat of the Kekuli home fire, built in the centre of the wide dugout.
Jimmy and Barry’s families have inhabited this area for generations. Their ancestors wintered in the ancient Kekulis. Local people named the lake; the name the old ones gave it is lost.
Barry has changed a lot over the past year. He no longer becomes incoherent talking word salad unhinged, with the hash and the wine. Without it he can still diatribe and project, blame the world for all his troubles, but now he just feels the beat along with me as Jimmy paces up and down the cabin, treading planks from window to window, following our rock and roll. The drumming takes him out of himself and into our sober world, and that’s one reason we bring him up to Lake Lacustrine, though he always says he can drag us down to his own level.
“I don’t need your f…. charity. You guys are so holy clean.” Jimmy takes a swig of beer.
I think to myself... If we were hanging out in a downtown east side alley all shooting up together, he’d be friendlier…
Jimmy’s used a lot of meth. And he always asks why doesn’t Barry go into the crystal? Because, says Barry, he’s almost been there, “it’s too far a fall for a fifty-year-old.”
Meth’s a colorless flame, it is smoking darkness, burning ice. I’ve been tempted myself, to have that cold limitless energy, that chemical connection. Fear of the results prevents me, like my rolling from the rails before the train. Rhythm has been the way I’ve dealt with everything. I join with the two brothers in music, for hours rhyming lines, playing with improvisational meanings, sudden changes. I am with them through the sound, it rises and falls like fire behind them. It’s catharsis in wild balance, ambiance.
The cabin is sweat lodge steaming, as I try to find different chords and beats, mostly rhythms, because with perspiration dripping there’s no subtlety of feeling for melody. Barry picks up his old Yamaha and uses it like a bongo drum, first tapping on the top, then banging and rocking with both hands. Jimmy begins to chant about Stephen Fonyo, the troubled one legged runner who ran across Canada back in the nineteen eighties, Jimmy always goes back to the troubled Fonyo, who was in his prime when Jimmy was, too.
“If I was on the bus in Manitoba and if I saw him stagger by the window I’d throw a beer bottle at him, maybe.”
He laughs, like he’s kidding, but he’s not.
For me, I’m kinda meditating on sound pulses, with one ear on words, the other on tone. Out of control seems an extreme locale to me now. If you’re in that wild space, you don’t want to shove another log on the fire, you want to make it a gas driven pyre, then an inferno, arc the energy like burning another sun, so pop another pill, keep the flame high. My distraction’s in the music now. It can take you to the edge, into trance resolution without side effects, to the limit of movement and beat. I forget the worries. Just play, let the sound merge you into the world, out of your own head.
Barry’s bongo drumming his guitar and he’s laid the saucepans out and snares on them with the occasional flourish. I think of us from the outside, as spirits from the old days boogying over the shores of the lake while it hears our song, where black smoke rises, a serpent whirl up through the wide dark sky, and maybe that serpent whirl dancing too, all the way to the stars, like the Kekuli fires long ago.
“I did it,” sings Jimmy. “I did it I did it.”
He’s smoking a joint, with that wide and manic smile between puffs. Offers it to me As usual, I say “No thanks,” and Jimmy just grins, keeps singing. Yes, I’m pulling in second hand smoke, but I’m refusing first hand.
We’re chanting along with him now “I did it, I did it!” and in between Barry sings out “What… What did you do?”
“I drove my cars into the ground!“ Jimmy yells. “I won the gold, I’m the weightlifting champ of the world, I’m North America’s greatest DJ!” He flourishes his hand. “I burned down the Silver River Hotel!”
One out of four isn’t bad...
The Silver River Hotel fire was over twenty three years ago. A long ways to reach. The bouncers wouldn’t let Jimmy in, according to Barry. He didn’t have I. D. In those days, not the right I. D., anyway. Jimmy lifted weights, he was built then, he drew fists at the bouncers and they struggled to push him out, the hired hands up against his solid frame and energy, Jimmy screaming profanity “why is is just me… you let all those other guys pass!” and when the strong men tossed him forth to the street they aimed consciously and banged his head against a light pole a couple of times, and wow he was out for a few moments and apparently blood gushing and he came to and didn’t say a word, just righted himself hands clutching the post, then staggered down the street, not even holding his head, leaving behind red smudges and a dripping trail. A few nights later, the hotel went up in flames.
Barry told me all this before. I took it in, but just on the surface, and I didn’t really believe it. Or just didn’t want to. Now something seems revealed, in the rhythm we play, the words uttered to an improvised beat, some kind of scat, a confession and a boast. “I did it.”
After a few moments, Jimmy’s back to puffing the doobie, his face at the window, peering out at the shape of the night lake as candles burn behind him.
What hits me is that we’re all doing some kind of sweat lodge here. Some kind of winter Kekuli ritual. And it’s supposed to heal...When I hear these dark words boiling from Jimmy’s brain…they shock me, or maybe I’m freaked out by their sound utterance, the fact the words are on the loose. In the end, it’s a way for us to move closer. A way for him to tell us he’s not afraid to share, as the gurus say, when he’s out of his mind and body and the darkness is a few steps beyond the walls, where that mud deep lake will drag you down into the quicksand and leeches and the cold elements will freeze you. He’s safe inside and laughing, with his brother and I and the rolling music heat. And I wonder, should I tell anyone?
It’s better to be safe, I think. It’s safe just to let things be.
Barry keeps drumming. He grooves into what he hears as part of the ritual, his head down, all words pass over, Jimmy does the call, Barry does the response, the world is what it is out there and it can wait til tomorrow, now its time for fun and abandon, as much as a forty six year old can handle, anyway.
When do we choose to reveal our trespasses? In the middle of a ceremony, with dancing and music and drugs, let the inner animal rise, let the beat burn it forth, there’s no one else Jimmy knows well enough to tell. There’s talking in tongues and there’s rapping in rhyme. Jimmy perceives that we’ll hear his confession, as that rap, and besides it’s not really a confession, more of a boast. And that fits in with a rap too. Because he told those bouncers and those nightclub managers, not in words but in action, disrespect begets humiliation, then revenge, and he poured gas on their edifice, and let it burn, and he won and was never caught.
It comes to me that I haven’t completed anything really evil against others. Never had reason to. I kept to myself all my life, never needed to strike out, except against my own mind. Jimmy’s crossed the line so many times, he’s accomplished a lot of vengeance. Yet Barry’s concerned for his brother, after all these years of anarchy and sin. And I ask myself what am I doing still hanging around with these guys?
It’s history, and because of Barry. Our families go way back. Barry’s dad was a logger and small farmer like my own father, his mother a Salish native. Her people roamed these mountains for thousands of years. I went to school with these brothers, Barry the joker and Jimmy his rebel sidekick, Barry and I could hike in the mountains for hours, wandering, burning up energy, getting lost. our purpose to find ourselves again in the wilderness.
I’m here because of imagination. These guys free flow, Barry’s always been fluid with the music, free with the playfulness, into lack of planning and the hope of serendipity. No structure, no boundaries. We’d ride the truck north, end up in Edmonton and come back the next day, before the work week, just to be high with the high Rockies, and then there’s all the bands and legion halls we used to play in, all the drunk nights and country western songs, the girls and the midnight white lines, riding by another town. All the improvisations on our own lives played out in rhythm. And now, we’ve stopped the music and he turns in my direction and says “Let’s go for a walk in these hills.”
Like we used to do as kids.
“Hey, Jimmy, do you want to come with us?”
“No way. I don’t want to go out in that damn night cold.” He’s recovered from his laughter fit, and already cracking more pine branches over one knee. He doesn’t seem slowed down at all by the heat. “Who’d want to go out there now? You guys can freeze all you want.”
Barry takes the guitar. He grabs his backpack, too. It’s so cold outside, I can hardly wait to arrive. Fresh air just past the door.
“You guys just go, then, just go. Leave me here,” Jimmy’s grinning and pacing with that wild look in his eyes, we pass by him with his smoke and matches and walk along by the lake.
We talk about the Silver Lake Hotel. Should we tell anyone? I wonder.
Barry shrugs. He puts his backpack by the tiny strip of white alkaline beach, walks to the edge of the lake and looks out into the dark. “I’m sick of him… he’s like a child.”
“Yeah” I say, surprised by his tone, his change of mood. “two people were burned.”
Barry nods. “Yeah.”
Two innocent hotel guests were seriously injured. That’s something that can’t be discounted, a person can be contrary, but there’s a line.
I think about how much time has passed since then, as Barry and I hike up along the side of the lake, towards the outline of the hills. Barry sounds stronger now. He’s stronger in everything he says, whereas Jimmy’s declined, he’s gone contrary, drinking and drugging even more to escape himself. I ponder if there’s anything virtuous about him now.
I’m glad I brought my parka, but I still feel all the heat from the cabin shimmer off me.
Barry walks, skinny and shadowy ahead, pony tail and cowboy hat, guitar still round his neck…
It seems like he’s a man from a different place, in this age of cel phones and internet. He’s slow, deliberate, he takes his time, grace in movement over this past sober year. “Let’s go over by the Kekuli pits,” he says.
We walk up, hiking round the sage, its scent arising from the darkness. Across the valley other hills loom, then more behind them, no lights except the arcing silver in the sky. We stand overlooking the lake, just below us the steeply curving pits, and further across there’s the shadow of the cabin, pale yellow candlelight through the windows.
“I just had to get out of that room,” Barry says. “I’m can only stay inside so long.. Mom’s gone, and I can’t make other people happy. The last time I saw her, in that bed, in a tiny curled up body, her voice said “I want you to take care of Jimmy.” It didn’t even seem like her.”
He looks over at me. “You seem more like my real brother, Harrison.”
He strums the guitar, a melody, complex fingerpicking with the right hand, just on one chord. I breathe deep, and it feels like nature stops momentarily for this music, the tone and serenade breaking out from inside a man, one note sounding towards the next, blending and separating, strengthening and fading, Barry’s making a song for this time, he and I along the trail. A slight wind makes me feel every outline round myself, I’m standing supported by the cold air, hearing the guitar sound from Barry's fingers, and his wrist drumming, rhythm on the wood.
“There’s different kinds of happiness,” I say.
We stand on the rim of the Kekuli pits, curving sharply beneath us, down about fifteen feet or so, and I think of families living there all winter, keeping the fires lit under near twenty-four hour darkness, how could they stand it, and each other. So closed and hot inside, in an underground bake oven with up to twenty family members. Everyone would stay and be together under the roof, or they’d all freeze. They’d have to go out to find fuel, and hunt, but there would be no tolerance for deviance, for nihilism. Everyone depended on everyone else.
Barry points towards the lake, “What the hell’s he up to now?”
We watch a small figure walking backwards from the cabin door, stepping in reverse towards the truck. Through the opening of the cabin, there beside the lake, a dull orange glow, looks like Jimmy’s let the stove door free.
I feel a franticness, and want to rush down there, but that’s only part of me. The other part’s the observer, what I’ve been my whole life, whether drunk or sober. Watching life burn through others, watching them choose their life to burn, witnessing the chaos and imagination of others’ existence, compared to mine. I’m always standing, looking over.
I feel Barry’s presence beside me in the dark, he’s a changed and resolute persona, and I wonder how he did it, how he stopped being out of control. It echoes through my mind: He says I’m his true brother now.
Jimmy continues walking backwards from the shadows to the truck, away from the flame, he carries a flashlight which he shines in front of him… we stand watching this light, and Jimmy’s outline from the hill “Hey!” yells Barry, “Hey,” there’s no answer, but there’s a short shining of the light in our direction, and when Jimmy arrives at the vehicle he opens the door and steps in backwards. We hear the engine roar loud, and then he reverses the truck up the long driveway, steering fast towards the main road and us. Then he backs too far to the left and into a fence, there’s a bang and the vehicle stops. We hustle down through the sagebrush, Barry’s guitar touches branches, sounding random notes from its strings.
When we reach the truck I shout at Jimmy. I’m mad at myself because I left the keys on the table. “It was an accident,” Jimmy yells back, he’s sitting there hands still on the wheel, doesn’t look like much damage though, he hit a fence, maybe some paint scratches.
Barry turns and we witness the entire cabin on fire. The noise reaches us before the smoke, the orange behind the windows shattering the glass. It burns like an oil field, black smoke billowing out, into the clear night. This is the cabin Barry goes to when he’s not working, when he lives in his van. Where he plays and shares his music. Why does Jimmy burn his brother’s life away? No one owns the cabin, it’s on Indian reserve land, no one owns anything here, but it was a place we could be together. “Wow, look at her go!” Jimmy’s out of the truck now. “Look at her burn!”
Barry’s laughing strangely. He’s motioning me forward, he throws the guitar in the back of the truck, and I run with him and Jimmy, the three of us, running together towards the fire. I feel the wind brought heat.
“I didn’t mean it,” Jimmy shouts at Barry. “Stuff gets away.”
Barry motions at Jimmy. “I’m gonna tell everyone everything about you, man,” Barry says, as we stand in front of the blaze. “How you wipe the slate clean. You take no prisoners.”
“You do that,” says Jimmy. “You just do that.”
I have never seen Jimmy with such a big smile. The only other times he smiles are when he’s pretending, to be a DJ, to be a macho man, to be half ways normal, but now he’s in the rhythm of it, with this piece of destruction, he’s dancing around waving his hands as the cabin blows away, wood heat to ashes its essence cast upon the night wind, lighter pieces drifting over Lake Lacustrine to the Kekuli pits above, silver grey specks in the sage, settling on the past.