Son of a Trickster

In the present, Jared has to take his pit bull, Baby Killer, to be euthanized, because she has heartworm. He and his mom bring Baby to the vet in the morning to sedate her. Jared scratches her head, and when she wheezes, his eyes water—until she licks his arm. Jared leans his head against Baby’s, and the vet gives them a moment. As Jared cries with his dog, his mom goes out for a smoke. He knows that if the vet wasn’t there, his mom would be telling him not to act like a “wuss.” Jared tells Baby that he’s going to miss her and hugs her hard.

The story flashes back to when Jared got Baby Killer a few years earlier. At the time, his mom is dating a guy named Death Threat, but he leaves suddenly because he owes debts to a violent biker gang. One guy from the gang expects Jared’s mom to pay the debts, and he pins a note to their door with a knife asking for the money. Jared’s mom dismisses the note, saying sarcastically that someone laid a monster hex on them.

Jared’s mom is struggling: following her and his dad’s divorce, many of Jared’s mom’s friends moved away when the paper mill, Eurocan, shut down. Now, she has trouble making the mortgage, and the fridge is only full of scraps from her job at the North Star. She watches Jared constantly, and he surmises that she’s worried about the biker gang.

The morning that Jared’s mom discovers the knife, Jared walks to the bus stop and sees a tall man in a leather jacket watching him with two pit bulls with him on chains. The man releases the pit bulls, and Jared drops his backpack to run away. Suddenly, however, Jared’s mom comes down the road and hits the pit bull with her car, squashing it under her tire. Blood sprays the snow. Jared’s mom tells the man to leave Jared alone, that their business should remain between the two of them. As they hear a police siren getting louder, she apologizes coolly for hitting his dog, but the man says that he has another. When a policeman approaches, the two of them put on a show, lying that it was an accident as though they’d been practicing for years.

After the cop leaves, Jared realizes that his jeans are splattered with blood and dog chunks, and that his homework has flown out of his backpack. Jared’s mom tells him that the man, Richie, could answer a lot of their problems if Jared keeps his cool. Jared tries to pull away from her, but she grabs him and says that she would “kill and die” for him.

Back in the present, Jared runs on the track during gym class. It’s raining and almost freezing outside, but he insists on running to train for the track team while the other kids do basketball drills. In reality, he just doesn’t want to explain his swollen eyes to them. When Richie moved in, his other dog—Baby Killer—immediately became attached to Jared. She crawled into his bed at night, nuzzling him and licking his face. She’d wait for him to come home from school every day and then follow him around the house.

As Jared stretches just outside the gym doors, Dylan Wilkinson approaches him. He’s Native, like Jared, but he lives on the nearby reserve, Kitamaat Village, and hangs around with the sporty crowd. Dylan asks if Jared is selling cookies, but Jared denies it, saying that his mom’s boyfriend Richie is the one who sells. Jared says that the only cookies he makes are for the track team’s bake sales. Dylan glares at him, annoyed that Jared won’t sell to him. Dylan leaves, and the end of-day buzzer blares. Not ready to go back to the vet, Jared lets the rain hit his face until he’s numb. He doesn’t want to “blubber like a dumb-ass again.”

After putting Baby Killer down, Jared and his mom sit in his room in the basement, drinking a six-pack of beer. Jared lives in the basement so that his mom can rent out his upstairs bedroom, along with two other rooms, to cover their bills. They dragged his mattress down, along with a toaster oven, a hot plate, and tote bags to hold his clothes. He also has a utility tub, a toilet, and a door that leads outside with its own lock. Richie put up a wall to separate Jared’s side of the basement from the laundry machines. With his paper route money, Jared also bought a mini fridge and a couch—but the basement is still damp, dingy, and cold.

Jared’s mom suggests that he spend the night upstairs with her, but Jared refuses, knowing that Richie would be annoyed at being made to sleep on the couch. They finish the six-pack and take shots of vodka before Richie drives them out to a logging road. Jared digs a grave and puts a blanket down, laying Baby on top of it. He’s pretty sure that he’s crying, but later, his mom tells Jared that he was singing “Like a G6.”