Slick (5 page)

“Watch your language!” Mom scolds. Her face starts its contortions of thought again. Then she calms. “Liza, I'm really very proud of you. You got all these girls together, you've planned an event, you're speaking out against injustice—”

She looks dreamily out the window. “Maybe I should join Voice of Women for Peace again,” she wonders aloud. “Or WILPF.”

“WILPF?” I ask. I jump onto the couch and start barking: “
Wilpf! Wilpf!
”

“Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, silly!” Mom laughs. She heads up the stairs to her office. “I'll just check out their website, see what they're up to after all these years.”

“So, Mom?” I call. “Are you going to tell him or not?”

“What? Oh. Liza, I can only promise that the company won't know ahead of time.”

That would have to be good enough.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, November 16, 2010

Attn. Media: Victoria Girls Demand that
Argenta Oil Respect the Law:
(Victoria, BC)
Kids may have the day off school, but there's no day off for justice.

GRRR!—Girls for Renewable Resources, Really!—will surprise Argenta Oil today with a rally at 10:00
AM.

Argenta Oil owes fifty Guatemalan families half a million dollars for damage caused by drilling on their land. For two years Mayan coffee farmers of the Ixcán region have asked Argenta Oil to pay up, as required by Guatemalan law. The farmers, with the support of the US group OilWatch, recently launched a court case, which they can't afford. Meanwhile, the CEO of Argenta received a $2 million bonus last year.

GRRR! wants Argenta Oil to do the right thing and pay what they owe.

This is GRRR!'s first protest. They expect a crowd of fifty.

For more information, contact Liza Maybird at [email protected]

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Jamaica!!!
I feel like a weary soldier returned from— yes—a victorious campaign! We won!

The Insistence, in detail:

7:00
AM
: Melissa sends press releases from her mom's fax machine.

9:50
AM
: The girls of GRRR! (minus my friend Olive) arrive at Argenta offices with thirty-six signs, a goldfish bowl for donations, pamphlets, and copies of my essay about oil exploration in Guatemala (I got an A+!).

9:55
AM
: I despair. It's a scrawny crowd: only six of us and a few parents. But then— wow!—girls start arriving from all directions, on bike, foot, in groups, solo. Our emails and texts and Facebook page got the word out! Next come the newspaper reporters, radio people with microphones, tv crews with cameras.

10:00
AM
: We raise our signs. People start blowing on their mini air horns. That gets us plenty of attention. I turn on the bullhorn Jennifer brought and start the chants. Workers inside the building rush to the windows. Most of them look confused, some angry, some thoughtful.

10:10
AM
: Two security guards exit the building. One's big and angry. The other smiles at me and winks.

10:15
AM
: A worker yells, “Get a job!” and another shouts, “Go away.”

Our fishbowl is filling with coins and bills. Total strangers join us. A worker on the third floor gives a thumbs-up through the window.

Slick, my mother's boyfriend, is nowhere to be seen.

10:20
AM
: Olive walks up, which is very cool because she had said she wouldn't join the protest. She grabs a sign and hands me a bunch of papers. It's a petition. Nearly every girl in her school signed. There are four hundred signatures. The friendly security guard nudges me. “I'll take that up to el presidente,” he says, heading inside.

10:25
AM
: The front door opens, and a man in a business suit exits, flanked by security guards. His mouth keeps opening and closing, fishlike. Of course, it's Gavin Helsop, the president; I know his face from the website.

Helsop raises his hands. The crowd silences. I offer the bullhorn. He looks at it as if it's covered in H1N1, but takes it.

He tries to tell the crowd it's just a misunderstanding, but everyone boos and yells.

Helsop's hands are trembling! I actually feel sorry for him. But then I see his gleaming gold cufflinks.

Everyone starts chanting, “Pay up! Pay up!”

Helsop backs toward the building. Maybe he realizes how sneaky he looks slinking away, or maybe he actually sees the light, because suddenly he looks calmly at the sky and raises the bullhorn to his lips.

“Compensation will be paid by the end of the month,” he says. “You have my word.”

Joy! For ten minutes we scream and jump and laugh and hug. I did interviews for an hour. There's going to be lots of press. No way will Argenta be able to go back on their word!

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Liza!
Awesome! Way to go, girl!

You'll be hearing from some very happy Guatemalans. I called them today.

Peace and jubilation,

Jamaica

P.S. My twelve-year-old daughter Libby— for Liberty—is starting a Seattle chapter of GRRR!

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Hola!
My name is Isabela Cardoza. I'm a lawyer in Guatemala working on behalf of the fifty families awaiting compensation. I would like to thank you very, very much for your wonderful work in Canada. Gracias! If ever you are in Guatemala, please visit—I have a ten-year-old daughter who would love to meet a Canadian hero.

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Senorita Liza Maybird,
Our hearts are full of thanks. We have worked a long time to get the oil company to listen. But you got good and close to their ears!

We will be thinking of you at the fiesta tonight as we dance to the
marimba
and eat
tamales
. We only wish you could be here too.

En solidaridad,

Los Campesinos de la Riviera Selequa

Chapter Ten

It turns out that Slick wasn't at work the morning of the protest. He was hiking up Bear Hill.

“What a day,” Slick says as he sits down to dinner. “Beautiful weather. The sun always recharges me.”

“So you're solar-powered?” I tease.

“I heard about your protest, Liza,” Slick answers, his voice gravelly. He stares straight ahead. “On the radio, as I was driving back into town. I nearly had to pull over, I was so completely shocked.”

The air in the dining room seems to go hard. None of us move. Slick glares into the distance. He seems to be thinking too. Is it possible to glare thoughtfully?

“The strange thing,” he finally says, “is that I was proud of you.”

Then he brings Mom's hand to his lips, and she makes that weird smile she gets when he's around. My stomach lurches. I realize there's a side of Mom that she doesn't share with me. But I'm too excited about the protest to mind.

“Kiss,” Mom singsongs, then narrows her eyes challengingly.

Silas doesn't miss a beat. “Smooch.”

“Peck,” Leland cries out.

“Smack,” I say, making a smacking sound.

“Pucker up!” Slick makes fish lips at the fish in their tank. We laugh.

“Lock lips!”

“Make out.”

“Buss.”

“Neck.”

“French.”

“Swap spit.”

“Tongue.”

“Ugh!”

A few weeks after the protest, Mom flies to Northern Alberta to appraise a rancher's collection of two hundred and twenty-eight boot scrapers. Yep, boot scrapers, like, to scrape mud off yer boots! The guy's oldest scraper is four hundred years old. One was once used by Canada's first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, and one was a murder weapon! Mom helped the same rancher sell a stirrup collection a few years ago.

While she's away, Slick picks me up from field-hockey practice. Here I am in the passenger seat of his roomy suv, with gps, iPod dock, surround sound, automatic tissue dispenser…It's weird, riding high above the other cars. I feel like we are royalty. When he stops for gas, I don't bite my tongue.

“How many kilometers do you get for a liter?” I ask.

“Seven,” he answers, mumbling.

“
Seven
? We get twenty-five!”

“Yeah. Your mom's always rubbing it in.”

“No kidding. You're wasting money. And spewing tons of carbon into the atmosphere.”

“Your car isn't perfect. You're still spewing carbon too,” he says.

“Yeah, I know. Biking is best.”

Slick hands his Gold card to the jockey. He looks thoughtful, then turns to me. “Hey, why doesn't your girls' group hold a bicycle workshop? You bring your bikes, learn to oil the chain, tighten handle bars, clean brake pads…”

“We'd need someone to show us how,” I say doubtfully.

“Darryl in my running club runs a bike shop. He'd do it. Maybe even for free.”

“No, we'd do a trade!” Trades are totally DIY. “Ask him if he'll take five bars of all-natural soap made by me. It lasts twice as long the commercial stuff. And three cool hand-knitted toques for, say, a two-hour workshop.”

“That would probably do it,” Slick nods. “Darryl likes hats. He's balding.”

Chapter Eleven

Two weeks later, Olive and I are up to our elbows making soap.

Olive cuts the last bar. “Hey!” she suddenly exclaims. “Isn't today the big day?”

She's right. It's the last day of November, the day Argenta's lawyers are supposed to hand over the compensation. We check my email. Sure enough, there's a letter from Jamaica. Subject line:
The Bill is Paid!!
Olive and I dance a polka around the kitchen, then read:

Dear Liza and the Girls of GRRR!

The money
in full
was wired to the campesinos' lawyers today. That's the good news.

The bad news is that tankers are moving in your province's coastal waters, even though they're banned. And you can expect a lot more.

A Canadian company is building a pipeline from the Alberta tar sands through your province to the ocean. Once the pipeline reaches the ocean, the oil will be shipped out to Asia and the US on supertankers.

Right now tankers are carrying thousands of liters of condensate, a flammable poisonous chemical, up your rocky coast, through Gitga'at territory. Condensate is used to thin crude oil—it's like molasses—so that it flows more easily through the pipelines.

You can bet that one day a tanker will smash against the rocky shore and spill enormous amounts of oil or condensate into the habitat of millions—no,
trillions
—of marine plants and animals.

We don't need a spill or an explosion.

Can GRRR! help raise the alarm? Oil and water don't mix!

In defiance of the oil industry,

Jamaica

“Wow,” Olive whistles. “She's intense!”

“The
news
is intense, Olive!” I point out.

“Well, we've got to find out how much is true,” Olive argues.

“Chickening out again?” I tease.

“No! I just want to know what's true and what isn't. And what is Gitga'at?”

The name sounds familiar. Then it hits me. “They're First Nations,” I say. “They live in Hartley Bay, in the Great Bear Rainforest, where we go every Christmas.”

“Yeah, you rent that little cabin. I always wish I could go too.”

“Last year Mom ordered clam chowder in the town restaurant, but they weren't serving any. The waiter told us that a big ferry had sunk nearby in 2006. It hit a huge rock and went down.”

“I remember that. Two people died, right?”

“Yeah. The waiter thinks the people at the helm were having a little romance. They had turned down the lights and were playing music. A warning alarm was turned off.”

“Uh, Liza, what does that have to do with clam chowder?”

“Well, the ferry has been leaking oil into the water ever since. The clam beds are badly polluted. The clams are basically poison.”

Olive and I spend the rest of the afternoon researching—googling
tar sands, condensate, tankers
and
supertankers, oil spills
. The best part was learning more about the Gitga'at. Their territory is huge, way bigger than Lake Michigan. Of course, the oil companies hadn't talked with them. They just barged in, exactly like the oil companies did to the Mayans.

According to the articles we found, the Gitga'at were frightened. Some saw the ferry sinking as an omen of things to come. A supertanker is way larger than a passenger ferry.

Olive and I open Google Earth and imagine steering a supertanker, which is even bigger than a city block, down the narrow shipping route. A supertanker needs three kilometers to come to a full stop. So what if the captain and sailors are expert? The ferry operators were professionals and had the best navigating technology, but sailed straight into a giant rock sticking way up out of the water.

I am pretty angry by the time I read the comment from scientist Janie Wray, who studies whales in the area. “If there is a major oil spill, it will be the end of the Great Bear Rainforest. It would be the end of the salmon, the eagles, the bears and the wolves.”

I am still mad when Slick comes over for supper. He mentions that he did some gardening that afternoon.

“Weeding?” Mom asks. “That's not fun.”

“I just spray stuff from a little bottle, so it's not too hard,” Slick says.

And my organic mother smiles at that! And later kisses him goodnight at the door, as usual.

“How can you kiss a guy who uses pesticides, Mom?” I ask while we wash dishes.

“I respect Robert's right to make his own choices.”

“Sure, like his right to spray pesticides?” I sputter. “Do people have a right to pollute?”