Of course, there were times when it had gone the other way. In a single week in 2015—the first week of summer, as it happened—the US Supreme Court upheld Obamacare and ruled that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right, and the Confederate flag started coming down across the South as Amazon, eBay, Sears, and Walmart all stopped selling merchandise depicting it. Facebook was a sea of rainbows and high-fives. People who’d been hoping and praying for those very things said they couldn’t believe how quickly the tide had turned. That time, the light side of the Force had caught the wave; tonight, sadly, it was the dark side.
I saw Prime Minister Nenshi urging calm, and interviews with various mayors and chiefs of police exhorting people to stay indoors. Even the US channels were covering the Toronto riots, which looked to be running all along Yonge Street from Harbourfront to Bloor; it was an hour later there, meaning it had ticked past midnight, so that, as a commentator observed, this was technically the third day of rioting in Canada.
Eventually, I got up off the couch, taking my popcorn bag, a few unpopped kernels still rattling around in it, to the kitchen, and tossing it in the trash. And then slowly, sadly, I headed off to bed, hoping against hope that at some point soon reason would prevail.
33
The mayor of Winnipeg urged people to remain indoors the next night. No official curfew had been imposed, but I did stay in, watching TV news and surfing on my tablet.
By now, the violence was overwhelming local police everywhere. Canadian Forces personnel had been deployed to aid with riot control and to protect provincial legislatures as well as Parliament Hill in Ottawa; that city, as well as Calgary, had erupted in violence on this third night. The only thing that seemed to be keeping it from being a total coast-to-coast bloodbath was that so few Canadians owned handguns or automatic weapons. Still, the death count was into three figures here in Winnipeg, where it had all begun, and it was at least a dozen in every other city that had rioting.
Fox News was gleeful in its reporting: “All eyes are on Socialist Canada and its Muslim prime minister,” said Sean Hannity, “wondering what he will do to quell the unrest up there.”
Coverage of the continuing attacks on undocumented immigrants in Texas was all but absent on Fox, although MSNBC reported that the vigilantism was spreading, with three people turning up dead near Las Cruces, New Mexico, and two south of Phoenix, Arizona, states that had nothing like the McCharles Act in place.
Meanwhile, the body of another dead Indigenous woman had been found here in Winnipeg, and two more in northern Manitoba; also, two Cree men near Thompson had been killed by white teenagers in a drive-by shooting as they walked along the side of a road.
Boko Haram was still running amuck in Nigeria, and statistics released today showed that over 8,000 Jews left France for Israel in 2019. “You can smell it in the air,” said a Parisian rabbi. “A pogrom is coming here, mark my words.”
Thursday, I had a departmental meeting after my classes ended, but that was done by three. I got in my white Mazda and began the long drive to Saskatoon, a large coffee in my cupholder and a twenty-pack of Timbits on the passenger seat. Once out of the city, I didn’t turn on the radio; I didn’t put on an audiobook; I just drove in silence, particularly enjoying the times when the highway was empty and I could fool myself that I was all alone in the universe and nothing bad was happening anywhere.
But, once again, the illusion was shattered as a pair of high beams lanced through the darkness at me from behind.
I was doing a hundred klicks, but the guy behind me was closing. There was no one coming this way, though, so he had plenty of room to pass if he wanted to on the left, and I moved toward the shoulder to give him even more space.
The gap between us was narrowing. I hated assholes who didn’t dim their lights in circumstances like this, but his were like a pair of supernovae. He was maybe fifty meters behind me.
Twenty.
Ten.
And then, suddenly, he was right beside me, but—
—but he wasn’t passing me. He was pacing me, staying next to my car. I looked out, but my own night vision had been shot by his headlamps, and in the dim interior of his car, all I could make out were two silhouetted figures. I decided to ease up on the accelerator so my car would fall back, but when I did that, he copied me, and—
Fuck!
His passenger-side door scraped against my driver-side one. I tried to give him more room, moving fully onto the shoulder, but he kept slamming into my side, pushing me farther and farther to the right.
I hit the brakes, meaning his next attempt to push me off the road caused him to cut in front of me instead. He spun sideways, I skidded forward, and we collided, both of us pinwheeling into the adjacent field.
My airbag deployed, trapping me long enough that by the time it deflated one of the guys was out and had smashed my driver’s side window and opened the door. I felt myself being hauled out, the dome light in my car letting me at last see their faces—two kids, maybe eighteen or twenty, one in a jean jacket, the other in a leather one.
The man in leather was off to the side; I think he’d been the driver. He pointed at me, and said, “Finish him.”
And that’s when I realized the guy in denim was brandishing a length of metal pipe about as long as his forearm. I was in the gap between the two cars but jumped on the hood, pivoted on my ass, and took off into the field adjacent to the road, a flat expanse that went on to the dark horizon; I’d be more than content if they watched me run away for three days.
“Get him!” shouted the driver—the guy, quite literally, in the driver’s seat; probably a psychopath, with a p-zed stooge who would follow his every command.
I ran as fast as I could, which, with epinephrine coursing through me, was pretty damn fast—not that there was anywhere to go, but I hoped the guy would give up after a bit, and—
Jesus Fucking Christ!
My left foot went into a prairie dog’s burrow, and I pitched forward, smashing my face into hard, dry earth. Jean-jacket quickly caught up and loomed over me, the metal pipe raised high above his head.
I rolled on my back and lashed out with my legs, ensnaring my attacker’s right ankle, and even though the terrain was flat, I succeeded in pulling him off balance and he fell. I scrambled to my feet and, smashing one shoe down on his wrist, managed to wrestle the pipe from him, and—
And there was no one around, no one to help, no farmhouse, no anything. I thought the guy, seeing I had his weapon, would scurry away and leave me to catch my breath, but he didn’t. Leather-jacket had more—some!—sense, and had gotten back into their car and was now speeding off, but this guy was implacable; he had his orders, and he was going to carry them out. I was holding the pipe in both hands, the way a slugger would grip a baseball bat, but the guy pulled out a switchblade and continued to come at me, so I took off again across the field—but it was inevitable that he’d catch up; he was younger and had longer legs.
My heart was pounding, my lungs aching. Like Menno, I thought of myself as a pacifist—but a pacifist need not be a passivist.
And so I stopped running.
Turned.
Planted my feet firmly on the ground.