Ballistics (10 page)

I didn’t poke my head in the slide; I booted its metal shell with a kick worthy of the NFL. Inside, Jack screamed like a boy.

Found you, I said, crouching at the door.

Go away, he said.

The slide smelled like an outhouse. I bet Jack forced himself to stay there out of some juvenile form of penance. Come on out.

You’re not my dad.

He was looking for you too. I’m just a better looker.

He said nothing. It was worth a shot. I appreciate what you did, I said.

What do you mean.

You stuck up for Linnea.

Didn’t do any good, he said. Crib just beat me up.

You can’t win them all.

I couldn’t see his face, but his voice warbled, and not just because he was in a giant tin cylinder. My dad can.

That’s just dumb.

He beat
you
, Jack said, shouting—probably to fight tears.

Only after you shot me, I told him, absurdly.

He wouldn’t lose.

You’re missing the point.

Linnea thinks I’m a wuss.

And that, of course, was the truth behind his shame. She told me you hit the American
for her
. She’s worried too.

He was silent. His boots scuffed on the stairs, landed on the soft earth. Okay, he said, and stepped into the night where I could see him. He looked pretty bad. He’d stopped crying a long time ago but blood and snot crusted his face. His lip was split, and as he breathed through his mouth I saw a missing tooth. When his fingers touched his face he winced. He smelled like blood and breath.

I laid my hand on his shoulder. He straightened under my touch.

Come on, I said.

I TOOK THE LONG WAY
home. Jack didn’t have much to say beyond a simple thanks, but he lowered his window as far as it’d go and leaned his forehead into the wind. I figured both him and me would benefit from a little time to cool off before facing down the women. The American kid was on my mind. I couldn’t shake the thought of him—who he was, where he’d come from, what he’d done, and not only to me.

At my house, the living-room lights still glowed through the window, and as I slowed the truck to a stop, and as the engine shuddered quiet, a figure rose and silhouetted herself behind the glass. Both me and Jack looked straight at her—it was Nora; Linnea had a girl’s meatless build—but I got the impression we were wishing and seeing two different things. He hopped down from the truck and marched across the grass to the front door, and I let him get some distance on me. I’m not sure why.

When I came through the door Nora had Jack at the kitchen table and with a cloth she wiped dirt and blood and whatever else from his cheeks. Her hands worked with such delicacy, in small, scrubbing motions that made Jack wince with an inhale of breath. He didn’t complain, even if he scowled. Linnea sat next to him, her knees near enough to knock with his, in blue plaid boys’ pyjamas. She had her elbow on the table, her cheek resting against her wrist. Jack hazarded the occasional glance at her—a quick shuffle of his head, barely enough for him to see past the swell around his eyes. Linnea’s other hand lay near a knot in the wood, fingertips inches from Jack’s arm. I felt so out of place in that kitchen.

I poured myself another whiskey—a gentleman’s second drink—and it seemed like every
tink
of glass, every knock on the wood, every creak from my boots on the lino, was as awkward as if I’d started yelling, and I half expected to see them all with their eyes upon me. With drink in hand, I pressed myself into the corner where the counters meet—couldn’t bring myself to cross the floor to the table. In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing I had to find Jack: if I’d come home to a calm house after my run-in with Crib it’d have been a beeline to Cecil’s place, and me and the old bastard would’ve gone manhunting. Cecil, in my shoes, would only have let Crib get within rifle range.

Jack touched his cheek where Nora had rubbed it clean. The skin had gone purple, veining. My face hurts, he said.

Well stop blocking punches with it, I said, and grinned over my glass.

Jack gave me the coldest stare, but I just kept grinning, and then a smile tested the tenderness in his cheeks. Not a word of sympathy, he said. Not even a word.

You know what they say about sympathy, I told him, and opened a cupboard to take out three more glasses. I splashed a bit of whiskey in two, a bit more in the third. It’s in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.

Jack snorted; the women rolled their eyes. I brought the drinks over—just a smidge for Linnea and Jack and a good enough one for Nora. Linnea gave me this look like she didn’t recognize me as her dad. Jack accepted the glass with his fingertip, balanced right in as if fit to a size. Don’t tell Cecil, I said, passing the last to Nora.

Maybe that was the start of something. Nora finished cleaning Jack’s face—why she didn’t just let the boy have a shower, I’ll never know—and he and Linnea turned to each other and locked us from their conversation. They sipped their splash of whiskey and cringed. It was past five in the morning, still dark, but feeling as if the very air was bloodshot. Then, almost without me noticing, Nora put her hand on my elbow, and if I weren’t so goddamned bagged I’d have startled. I looked from her hand to her face—staring right at me.

You did a damned good thing tonight, she said, and, just as quick, her touch slid away. That one physical act—it made me think I’d done things right. It made me think everything was aces and spades.

Three

Plutarch and Heraclitus:

Fate leads those who follow it

and drags those who resist …

Every creature is driven to pasture with a blow.

Archer spent the afternoon telling tales of his adventures in the Marine Corps and beyond: he showed me a gimped thumb he caught in the door of a semi-trailer, many moons ago when he drove a logging truck around the Purcell Mountains; he touched a scar below his earlobe where his daughter had cracked him with a wine bottle; he rolled up his pant leg to reveal a chicken-thin calf with splatter-pattern scars in the meat, and with a wink told me to ask Gramps about that one. He’d survived two tours in Vietnam and played the part, and he talked about camaraderie, about how his buddies tortured each other to eke through the days. His voice had a twinge of reminiscence I wouldn’t have expected from a veteran, though my sole comparison was Gramps, and Gramps only ever spoke about his time in the British Army when his blood-alcohol hit saturation, and even then he’d spit after every second word to curse the names of captains and colonels unencountered in the history books. Periodically, Archer sipped his orange juice and chewed the pulp and stared past my shoulder at the horizon beyond. His fingers twirled the glass round and round, like that joke about single women in a bar, and if our roles were reversed I bet he’d be thinking the same. He said he’d felt a similar companionship with Gramps, long ago, after settling in the valley. Then his lips curled up on one side in a smile that strained the malleability of his skin.

As the evening deepened, Nora shuffled outside and told Archer he had best turn in, and though he closed his eyes and exhaled a long, defeated breath, he didn’t protest. I followed them through the stormdoor to the front entry. There, with the interior lights on, I could see that
all
the walls, not just the hallway, were covered with charcoal drawings like the pile I’d found in Gramps’ garage years ago. None of the drawings included people—just landscapes, horizons, the valley rendered like a giant, dark pond.

Kick Cecil in the teeth for me, Archer said, and reached out to shake my hand. Nora closed in for a hug, and her arms lingered around me like a mother’s.

Then I opened the front door, and Archer’s arm shot out and he caught my wrist, way harder than friendly. I jerked to pull free but he’d locked on with a soldier’s grip, with all his wiry, desperate strength. His handlebar cheeks cast shadows in two triangles toward his mouth. I saw the redness on his lip where the hair follicles had fallen out, a lifetime of missteps and childhood bumbles mapped by the notches on his scalp. He didn’t have long to live, anyone could see that.

It was good to see you, he said, and swallowed hard.

You too, I told him, not understanding. He released me and his hands hung in the air near my arm as if the muscles had seized, and I looked at him and he looked at me and it felt like I should have said something else, that he expected me to make some kind of offer. Nora loomed over him, brow drawn in: she must’ve known what he wanted. Eventually, he lowered his hands to his lap and slumped his shoulders forward. Nora wheeled him out of sight.

I sat in Gramps’ Ranger for a while. The radio blared power ballads from the nineties and I thought about the state of things, about Darby and Gramps and B.C.’s burning Interior. Archer had given me the name of a trucker’s stop in Owenswood—a town as far west as you could get without leaving the Kootenays—where he said my mother worked. Owenswood was on evac warning, and local news cameras had already filmed the heartbeat glow reddening the sky over that slice of the Purcells. I had a momentary premonition of rolling into Owenswood just as the retreat horns blared and five thousand people crammed the highways for a French Advance.

That’d be a trip for another day: I needed to talk to Darby or squeeze answers from Gramps or, at the very least, get more shitfaced than I’d been in a very long time. It’s so easy to lose your grip, or I’ve got a weak grip to begin with—who’s to say? On the way home, hailstones pummelled my windshield with globes the size of coat buttons, and during the last stretch into town, I passed a semi-trailer that’d skipped the guardrail over a precipice. The cops had it flagged off, waiting for the wind to sweep it into the bellowing, rain-gorged gully below.

I ROLLED INTO INVERMERE
at ten-thirty, well past visiting hours at the hospital, so I drove straight home. There, the tomcat mewled over and over, and even though I hated the beast more than any creature alive, I doled more food into its bowl. Puck danced in circles until I let him outside and he caught his only front leg on the sliding door’s rail and faceplanted into the deck. If it fazed him, he didn’t show it. He is the toughest dog I have ever known. He is like a redneck in dog form. Elsewhere in the house, water dripped from a tap, the sound incessant and tinny and menacing like the
tick-a-tick-a
wasps makes when they blunder against light bulbs. I was struck by how lonely the house seemed in Gramps’ absence, by the way I expected to bump into him every time I rounded a corner.

There was one new phone message. As I stood over the answering machine, mesmerized by that red blinking light, Puck limped over and leaned his heavy body against my knees. He’s the best dog, old Puck. I scratched behind his ears and he just stood there, diligently, aware in his own dog way that the devil’d come around with his handbasket. Puck is the second mastiff we Wests have kept in our employ—the first, his grandad, was by all accounts a lumbering behemoth even by mastiff standards. His name was Lucas, but I never met him: his great size killed him early—a too-big heart. There’s a lesson in that, but I’m not one to push morals. Puck was past eleven and mostly unchanged even after his leg got mangled. That must’ve happened a decade ago, while I was still doing my undergrad on the west coast. The vets wanted to put him down but Gramps couldn’t stomach the thought. He called me long-distance from the vets’ office, blubbery with guilt. He cared about that dog in a way I don’t quite understand, as if they have a secret between them more intimate than lovers. The vets amputated Puck’s wrecked leg at the shoulder. Watching him navigate stairs those first groggy days was an activity that could entertain a man for hours. For his part, Puck didn’t seem to carry a grudge.

Anyway, he leaned against my thighs and I got the phone message playing, and man and dog listened to someone—had to be Darby, had to be—breathe on the other end. When the message cut out, Puck howled and sauntered off in pursuit of the cat. I picked up the phone and dialed the first digits of Darby’s phone number, even though I knew where she’d be, who she’d be out with. The phone would just ring and ring. She and I used to spend whole days in bed together, blazing through box sets of seventies
Twilight Zone
and endless brooding seasons of
The X-Files
, and sometimes she’d text her friends, to get them to call, only so we could lie among the blankets and ignore the buzzing phone and just breathe the earthy smell of each other.