Free Kamikaze by Michael Slade

sunk, so streetlamps were doused, windows were curtained, and my route to work was almost as black as ink.”
    “Scary.”
    “All I had was moonlight to guide me there, and the moon was but a sliver. Of course, I was dressed in mynurse’s whites. I must’ve looked like a ghost slipping through the night.”
    “ Real scary.”
    “It was,” said Viv. “A wartime seaport. Sailors loose on the town. And some of them attacked women.”
    “Anything happen to you?”
    “Luckily, I was armed. My landlady loaned me a baseball bat and told me to follow the white line down the center of the road. If footsteps came toward me, she said, ‘Swing the bat like hell and knock his head out of the park.’”
    The black leather cover of Viv’s photo album was embossed with a golden sailing ship, its sails billowing in the wind. Stuck to the inside of the front cover was a time-worn shot of a little girl sitting in a farmyard of chickens, her mouth smeared with chocolate. On the first several pages were photos of beaux in the varied uniforms of the Second World War. Their eager faces made Lyn wonder how many survived.
    There was no picture of Lyn’s dad.
    The pages that followed the snapshots of Viv’s arrival in Vancouver were filled with photos that captured her first adventure on the golden ship of the album’s cover.
    Alert Bay was a Kwakiutl village on an isle just off the inland shore of Vancouver Island. It was home to a tribe of totem carvers, a place where the aboriginal potlatch once had spiritual grounding.
    Here was Viv tugging on a rope that sank into the sea off the deck of a coastal boat, the Columbia. Here was Viv among mythological monsters that had been carved up thetrunks of towering cedar trees, the wings of thunderbirds spread as if about to embrace her. And here was Viv sitting sideways on a windowsill in St. George’s Hospital, sunning herself with her eyes shut as if lost in Shangri-La.
    “I got that job,” Viv had said dreamily on the day they started her morphine drip, “soon after I arrived in Vancouver. Back then, Alert Bay was the real thing. Just a few generations earlier, the Kwakiutls were still initiating cannibals into their Hamatsa cult.”
    “Sounds thrilling.”
    “It was. The chief’s son carved me bracelets.”
    “Why’d you leave, Mom?”
    “To transport a patient. This old Indian woman was brought to the hospital with mental problems. She thought Baxbakualanuxsiwae—the cannibal monster on the totem poles—was trying to eat her. The doctor at the hospital asked if I would escort her here, to Essondale, for a psych assessment. So that’s how we ended up in bunk beds in a cabin on the police boat.”
    “Was she dangerous?”
    “We didn’t think so. I thought she was just a lonely widow in dowdy clothes. She wore a great big hat festooned with all sorts of strange plants. She was a patient like any other to me, so I treated her as if we were sailing down the coast for a physical. That was my mistake.”
    “Why?”
    “I was young and inexperienced. So, foolishly, I let her choose the lower bunk.”
    “That’s bad?”
    “You can’t hear the squeaks. When a patient climbs out of the top bunk, squeaks from the bed springs wake you up. When she crawls out of the lower bunk, she’s silently on the floor.”
    “That presents a danger?”
    “It does if she slides an eight-inch hatpin out of her festooned hat, then looms over you with her arm raised, ready to plunge the weapon deep into your heart.”
    “You woke up!”
    “No, I slept right through. But I had left the door ajar for fresh air. One of the cops onboard had come down to use the head. He peeked in, saw that I was about to get stabbed, and dashed in to grab the woman’s hand before it plunged.”
    “Wow! Another second and there’d have been no more you.”
    “And no you, ”said Viv.
    The photos from Alert Bay were the last shots in the book. When she docked in Vancouver, Viv had called the Canadian army to