Shadow of the Mothaship | Page 9

Daisy, who has been
AWOL for three weeks, looking for her folks in Kitchen-Waterloo,
filled up with the holiday spirit.
"Baby, it's cold outside. Took highway 2 most of the way -- the 407
was drive-by city. The heater on the Beetle quit about ten minutes out
of town, so I was driving with a toque and mittens and all my sweaters.
But it was nice to see the folks, 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 fun hungry, 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 by me -- the neighbours split two weeks before. Morons from
Scarborough, thought that down in Florida people would be warm and
friendly. Hey, if they can't be bothered to watch the tacticals fighting in
the tunnels under Disney World, it's none of my shit.
"Sounds like a plan," I say.
We wait until after three, when everyone in the happy household has
struggled home or out of bed. We're almost twenty when assembled,
ranging from little Tiny Tim to bulldog Pawn-Shop Maggie, all of us
unrecalcitrants snagged in the tangle of Tony's hypertrophied
organisational skills.
The kitchen at Tony's is big enough to prepare dinner for forty guests.
We barely fit as we struggle into our parkas and boots. I end up in a
pair of insulated overalls with one leg slit to make room for my
knee/soccerball. If this was Dad and Mum, it'd be like we were
gathered for a meeting, waiting for the Chairman to give us the word.
But that's not Tony's style; he waits until we're approaching ready, then
starts moving toward the door, getting out the harness. Daisy Duke
shoulders a kegger of foam and another full of kerosene, and
Grandville gets the fix-bath. Tiny Tim gets the sack of marshmallows
and we trickle into the yard.
It was a week and a half after Hallowe'en when the vast cool
intelligences from beyond the stars zapped away. The whole year since
they'd arrived, the world had held its breath and tippytoed around on
best behave. When they split, it exhaled. The gust of that exhalation
carried the stink of profound pissed-offedness with the Processors
who'd acted the proper Nazi hall-monitors until the bugouts went away.
I'd thrown a molotov into the Process centre at the Falls 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
something primordial and cathartic. Which he does, even if he starts off
by taking the decidedly non-primordial step of foaming the side of our
squat that faces the neighbours', then fixing it, Daisy Duke whanging
away on the harness's seal with a rock to clear the ice. Once our place is

fireproofed, Daisy Duke switches to kero, and we cheer and clap as it
laps over the neighbours', a two-storey coach-house. The kero leaves
shiny patches on the rime of frost that covers the place. 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 for the jet of kero. Tony shuts down the stream, and I think for a
minute that he's pissed, he's gonna take a piece out of someone, but
instead he's calm and collected, asks people to sort out getting hoses,
buckets and chairs from the kitchen. 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 crouches down and carves a shallow bowl out of
the snow. He tips the foam-keg in, then uses his gloves to sculpt out a
depression. He slops fix-bath on top, then fills his 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 guy you 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 it off. The thing burns like a brazier, and Tony
the Tiger frisbees it square into the middle of the porch. There's a tiny
*chuff* and then all the kero seems to catch at once and