here?" Daisysays, at last.
"And perform surgery in the kitchen?" I say back. All the while, my knee isthrobbing and poking out from under my robe.
Daisy and Tony hang head and I feel bad. These two, if they can't help, theyfeel useless. "So, how you been?" I ask Daisy, who has been AWOL for threeweeks, looking for her folks in Kitchen-Waterloo, filled up with the holidayspirit.
"Baby, it's cold outside. Took highway 2 most of the way -- the 407 was drive-bycity. The heater on the Beetle quit about ten minutes out of town, so I wasdriving with a toque and mittens and all my sweaters. But it was nice to see thefolks, you know? Not fun, but nice."
Nice. I hope they stuck a pole up Dad's ass and put him on top of the Xmas tree.
"It's good to be home. Not enough fun in Kitchener. I am positively fun-hungry."She doesn't look it, she looks wiped up and wrung out, but hell, I'm pretty funhungry, too.
"So what's on the Yuletide agenda, Tony?" I ask.
"Thought we'd burn down the neighbours', have a cheery fire." Which is fine byme -- the neighbours split two weeks before. Morons from Scarborough, thoughtthat down in Florida people would be warm and friendly. Hey, if they can't bebothered to watch the tacticals fighting in the tunnels under Disney World, it'snone of my shit.
"Sounds like a plan," I say.
We wait until after three, when everyone in the happy household has struggledhome or out of bed. We're almost twenty when assembled, ranging from little TinyTim to bulldog Pawn-Shop Maggie, all of us unrecalcitrants snagged in the tangleof Tony's hypertrophied organisational skills.
The kitchen at Tony's is big enough to prepare dinner for forty guests. Webarely fit as we struggle into our parkas and boots. I end up in a pair ofinsulated overalls with one leg slit to make room for my knee/soccerball. Ifthis was Dad and Mum, it'd be like we were gathered for a meeting, waiting forthe Chairman to give us the word. But that's not Tony's style; he waits untilwe're approaching ready, then starts moving toward the door, getting out theharness. Daisy Duke shoulders a kegger of foam and another full of kerosene, andGrandville gets the fix-bath. Tiny Tim gets the sack of marshmallows and wetrickle into the yard.
It was a week and a half after Hallowe'en when the vast cool intelligences frombeyond the stars zapped away. The whole year since they'd arrived, the world hadheld its breath and tippytoed around on best behave. When they split, itexhaled. The gust of that exhalation carried the stink of profoundpissed-offedness with the Processors who'd acted the proper Nazi hall-monitorsuntil the bugouts went away. I'd thrown a molotov into the Process centre at theFalls myself, and shouted into the fire until I couldn't hear myself.
So now I'm a refugee on Xmas Eve, waiting for fearless leader to do somethingprimordial and cathartic. Which he does, even if he starts off by taking thedecidedly non-primordial step of foaming the side of our squat that faces theneighbours', then fixing it, Daisy Duke whanging away on the harness's seal witha rock to clear the ice. Once our place is fireproofed, Daisy Duke switches tokero, and we cheer and clap as it laps over the neighbours', a two-storeycoach-house. The kero leaves shiny patches on the rime of frost that covers theplace. My knee throbs, so I sit/kneel against the telephone pole out front.
The kids are getting overexcited, pitching rocks at the glass to make holes forthe jet of kero. Tony shuts down the stream, and I think for a minute that he'spissed, he's gonna take a piece out of someone, but instead he's calm andcollected, asks people to sort out getting hoses, buckets and chairs from thekitchen. Safety first, and I have to smile.
The group hops to it, extruding volunteers through a nonobvious Brownian motion,and before long all of Tony's gear is spread out on the lawn. Tony then crouchesdown and carves a shallow bowl out of the snow. He tips the foam-keg in, thenuses his gloves to sculpt out a depression. He slops fix-bath on top, then fillshis foam-and-snow bowl with the last of the kero.
"You all ready?" he says, like he thinks he's a showman.
Most of us are cold and wish he'd just get it going, but Tony's the kind of guyyou want to give a ragged cheer to.
He digs the snow out from around the bowl and holds it like a discus. "Maestro,if you would?" he says to Daisy Duke, who uses long fireplace match to touch itoff. The thing burns like a brazier, and Tony the Tiger frisbees it square intothe middle of the porch. There's a tiny *chuff* and then all the kero seems tocatch at once and the whole place is cheerful orange and warm as the summer.
We pass around the marshmallows and Tony's a fricken genius.
#
The flames lick and spit, and the house kneels in slow, majestic stages. Theback half collapses first, a cheapie addition that's fifty years younger thanthe rest of the place. The front porch follows in the aftershock, and it sends aconstellation of embers skittering towards the marshmallow-roasters, who beat ateach other's coats until they're all extinguished.
As the resident crip, I've weaseled my way into one of the kitchen chairs, andI've got it angled to face the heat. I sit close enough that my face feels likeit's burning, and I turn it to the side and feel the delicious cool breeze.
The flames are on the roof, now, and I'm inside my own world, watching them.They dance spacewards, and I feel a delicious thrill as I realise that thebugouts are not there, that the bugouts are not watching, that they took myparents and my problems and vanished.
I'm broken from the reverie by Daisy Duke, who's got a skimask on, the mouthrimmed in gummy marshmallow. She's got two more marshmallows in onethree-fingered cyclist's glove.
"Mmm. Marshmallowey," I say. It's got that hard carboniferous skin and the gooeyinside that's hot enough to scald my tongue. "I *like* it."
"Almost New Year's," she says.
"Yuh-huh."
"Gonna make any resolutions?" she asks.
"You?"
"Sure," she says, and I honestly can't imagine what this perfectly balancedperson could possibly have to resolve. "You first," she says.
"Gonna get my knee fixed up."
"That's *it*?"
"Yuh-huh. The rest, I'll play by ear. Maybe I'll find some Process-heads to hit.Howbout you?"
"Get the plumbing upstairs working again. Foam the whole place. Cook one meal aweek. Start teaching self-defense. Make sure your knee gets fixed up." Andsuddenly, she seems like she's real *old*, even though she's only twenty-five,only three years older than me.
"Oh, yeah. That's real good."
"Got any *other* plans for the next year, Maxes?"
"No, nothing special." I feel a twinge of freeloader's anxiety. "Maybe try andget some money, help out around here. I don't know."
"You don't have to worry about that. Tony may run this place, but I'm the onewho found it, and I say you can stay. I just don't want to see you," sheswallows, "you know, waste your life."
"No sweatski." I'm not even thinking as I slip into *this* line. "I'll be justfine. Something'll come up, I'll figure out what I want to do. Don't worry aboutme."
Unexpectedly and out of the clear orange smoke, she hugs me and hisses in myear, fiercely, "I *do* worry about you, Maxes. I *do*." Then Bunny nails her inthe ear with a slushball and she dives into a flawless snap-roll, scooping snowon the way for a counterstrike.
#
Tony the Tiger's been standing beside me for a while, but I just noticed it now.He barks a trademarked Hah! at me. "How's the knee?"
"Big, ugly and swollen."
"Yum. How's the brain?"
"Ditto."
"Double-yum."
"Got any New Year's resolutions, Tony?"
"Trim my moustache. Put in a garden, here where the neighbours' place was. Startbenching in the morning, work on my upper-body. Foam the house. Open the roomsin the basement, take in some more folks. Get a cam and start recording housemeetings. Start an e-zine for connecting up squats. Some more things. You?"
"Don't ask," I say, not wanting to humiliate myself again.
He misunderstands me. "Well, don't sweat it: if you make too many resolutions,you're trying, and that's
what counts."
"Yuh-huh." It feels good to be overestimated for a change.
Tony used to work in the customer-service dept at Eatons-Walmart, the big one atDundas and Yonge where the Eaton Centre used to be. They kept offering himpromotions and he kept turning them down. He wanted to stay there, acting as aguide through the maze of bureaucracy you had to navigate to get a refund whenyou bought the dangerous, overpriced shit they sold. It shows.
It's like he spent