Ballistics (11 page)

I finished dialing. After a moment of emptiness, the first ring rattled around the silence. There seemed to be a lot of space between the first ring and the second. It felt like holding my breath. Through the glass of the kitchen’s sliding door, I could stare out at the road that wound behind Gramps’ house—still gravel, despite Gramps’ great war against road taxes. It’s a steep slope, that one, and I have fond memories of piling into a wooden buggy with my idiot friends and bobsledding down it at a velocity humans are not meant to move. Somehow, none of us ever got hurt, but a wheel loosed from the buggy’s axle mid-descent, and it splintered to a husk at the hill’s base. For many years after, its rain-warped carcass sat beneath my buddy’s tree fort like a memory, like something from a time when things were better all around.

The phone’s second ring hit and I exhaled and watched poplar trees sway in neighbours’ yards. Gramps never liked Darby, but I don’t think Gramps would have liked any girl I could bring before him. It’s the idea of girlfriends—of relationships—that Gramps mistrusts. But I suppose he’d lived long enough and worked hard enough to earn the right to hold baseless suspicions. Then on the third ring, as I admitted defeat, Darby picked up.

At first she didn’t say anything—we had call display; she’d have recognized Gramps’ number.

How are you doing, Alan?

About as well as, well, I said, unable to be sarcastic.

Getting anything done?

Bit of a change in plans.

Nothing too distracting, I hope.

Gramps had a heart attack.

Fuck, she said.

On our last night together, after I thought we’d rekindled our love life, I wiggled my head into the space beneath her chin and she kissed the crest of my skull. I could hear her heart beat through all the sweat and sheets and breast between me and it. Then Darby combed her fingers through my hair and pushed me sideways, breathed deeply enough to fill her chest.
Alan
, she’d said, way too throaty, like a woman fighting tears, and I roused from the dopiness she’d lured me into with warmth and sex. She was looking at me as if I was underwater, and I understood—way too late—that Darby hadn’t spent our last night trying to rekindle the relationship; she’d been searching for a way to end it.

Somewhere behind me, in Gramps’ dead-empty house, Puck blundered into furniture. He is not exactly the most graceful of all living creatures, but his heart is in the right place. I cleared my throat into the phone. Darby would be wearing her men’s pyjamas. She’d be perched on the edge of our bed with her legs crossed and a chopped-up orange on a small, flower-painted plate.

Gramps is alright, I said. And bitchy as ever.

That’s good?

I guess it’s marginally better than him being dead.

She hissed into the phone. Disappointment, resentment. I don’t blame her, not ever. Right then, I wished Puck would appear from around the corner and wrestle me to the ground and devour the handset whole. I wished the fires would come blazing over the mountains and end this phone call in a blaze and cackle.

I’ve been watching the news, she said. I’d fallen silent, was actually thinking about Missy and my run-in with her, at the hospital. If I hadn’t left Invermere, that toddler might very well have been mine. Darby said something about canoes. She said something about air pockets. The fires aren’t getting better, she said.

There’s the Purcells between us, I said.

I heard about trouble in the Rogers Pass, Darby said, and made a swallowing noise into the phone. Is that near you?

It’s northwest.

So it doesn’t trap you?

The Purcells will keep the fire away.

I’m just … concerned, she said, sounding very uncertain.

That
’
s
a nice change, I said.

Don’t be a dick.

Were you sleeping with someone else?

No, she snapped.

Did
you sleep with somebody else?

Stop your fucking word games.

Then she hung up, and I slumped at the kitchen table to enjoy a moment of self-pity. Earlier, I’d left Gramps’ shoebox on the table in case he came home and wanted to find it. With nothing better to do but wallow, I hauled it over and dug out the cap gun revolver. It was a damned fine toy gun, of a completely different grade than the plastic crap they produce for boys nowadays. The body looked nickel-plated, and the grip was a solid piece of white porcelain made to resemble ivory, as though it’d have been neat, as a child, to imagine an elephant had died in the making of your toy. The mechanism that operated the hammer hung loose and lifeless, missing a spring, and the door that snugged over those quarter-sized rolls of caps dangled unhinged. It needed a few bolts and a new spring and some attention to tedious work. I could’ve fixed it—I fancy myself a desperation handyman—but before I could mobilize to do so Puck popped his head around the corner. He’d caught Gramps’ orange tom in his wide mouth and the beast sagged in his jowls like a crescent moon. It would just let itself be carried around like that. I started telling Puck to let the cat go, and then, as if in a scene from a horror movie, the cat bent up sideways—seemed to come alive—and mewled at me like a creature being gored.

I donned one of Gramps’ ballcaps, grabbed a half bottle of Canadian Club—possibly the shittiest whiskey in the world—from his liquor cabinet, and went out the door. During highschool and just beyond, my buddies and I used to night-wander Invermere’s asphalt streets with the scent of lake swell and vegetation on the breeze and the aftermath of cheap vodka on our breath. The streetlamps are few and far between in Invermere, and the residential roads that run through Wilder Sub lead implacably to the beach, so you can make your way there with only the incandescent spill from living rooms and porch lamps to guide you. It’s something I missed about small towns—how the roads are built with people in mind, how they lack yellow lines, traffic signals, those high-pitch buzzers that sound at crosswalks so the blind can find their way. There’s a quiet and a ruggedness and a rearrangement of value—guys can throw down over a debate about insulation, movies arrive in the Toby months after release, families are closely knit and gossip just one chatterbox away. The valley air tastes of nectar, and spruce, and folk have a habit of leaving things unsaid.

The Kinsmen Beach closes at night, mostly for the safety and benefit of tourists. I traced my way along the water’s edge. Dog owners often brought their bigger dogs there so the great beasts could pound up and down the waterfront. We used to do that with Puck, and he lost a leg because of it. At the far end of the navigable beachfront, probably a full kilometre from the public sand, there’s a dilapidated fur-trading fort and a concrete wall that holds it above the water. Frontiersmen used it to ferry beaver pelts along the Sevenhead River in the early days of settlement. Nowadays that fort sags sideways as if under a strong wind, and the inside reeks of charcoal and marijuana.

The sand around the fort is bare of rocks, because years ago some rich Calgarian paid local highschoolers to rake it smooth, thinking to turn it into his private beach. There’s also a bench there, on a raised concrete slab, erected in honour of some old, dead lobbyist who protested against the commercialization of Invermere’s beaches. From that bench you can stare across the water at the mountains, a sky the colour of watery eyes.

I brushed dirt off the bench and sat down. Nearby, the remains of a small fire were half-buried, the deepest embers hinting orange. Probably everybody I grew up with had a story about that fort; first time I kissed a girl was outside it, on a Halloween night that saw us both dressed like train conductors. Then a kid shot himself with his dad’s shotgun—wedged it under his jaw and fired a deer slug through his skull. I can’t remember his real name, but we all called him Junior—he’d seemed happily mediocre. Not enough remained of his head for an ID, and that’s probably what scared me most when I found him. The bullet had blasted him face down—or I guess, chest down—in the water, and waves broke upon the body, tussled it against the concrete retaining wall that kept the fort from sloughing into the lake. There wasn’t even a lot of blood; by the time I stumbled across him, it’d drained out, seeped into the sand and swell. Just strings of tendon and meat. His clothes were slimy and dank and the cotton balled unnaturally in my fists when I took hold. Water squeaked through the gaps between my fingers and the fabric made a sound like an orange being juiced. The girl with me—Missy, incidentally—didn’t get a chance to see the body. She’d stopped to pick burrs off her skirt.

Gramps found a suicide note near the corpse. It didn’t say anything profound. Girl troubles, of course—why
else
does a guy that age pull the trigger? After he read it, Gramps folded it into a little square and knelt with his knuckles against his teeth. He wore his hunting vest, had yet to lose his last strands of hair, but the first of those age-splotches had crept down from the border of forehead. The note dangled from his other hand, its corner touching the ground. I know what he had to be thinking: was it worth letting anyone see the note? Did the kid’s dad—an exterior painter whose own father Gramps had known in the good old days—need to read it? It’s not like it’d give him closure.

What a fucking waste, Gramps said, and laid the note on the kid’s chest. Then he rose, hands on his knees, and came over. He stopped only a few inches away and looked at me across his shoulder. Did your girlfriend see it?

She’s not my girlfriend.

He shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked his shoulders forward.

You okay? I said.

I don’t know, he told me.

Then he reached out as if to give me a hug but jerked to a stop, his whole body seizing against the action. He jutted his chin toward his Ranger. I thought he might have some advice to give; he’d fought in a war, and he was old. The truck wouldn’t start right away but I could hear a
thunk
each time he torqued the key, which Gramps had taught me meant the solenoid was doing its job. Thank you solenoid, he always said.

I WOKE ON THAT BENCH
with an erection and a kink in my neck so severe as to require manual realignment. Dew had slickened the seat and dampened my clothes, and each motion rubbed soggy denim or soggy cotton or soggy vinyl against my skin. I tasted whiskey and hangover at the back of my throat. The sky was cobalt, deeper than the water below it, and across the glass surface of Windermere Lake I could see the first flares of orange: fishermen on houseboats stumbling by light of oil lamp, piss-desperate, to their ships’ edge; white-collar condo-dwellers uncinching the curtains of their waterfront villas; my mind imagining sparks raining down as if by precipitation, as if by embers condensed to dollops—napalm, firewater, Archimedes’ flame.

I walked home. There, I loosed Puck and climbed out of my soggy clothes and showered with the last of the toiletries Gramps had relinquished to my disposal. I shaved with a throwaway razor and a salt-shaker-sized can of shaving cream and dried myself with the same face towel Gramps had given me when he showed me how to wield a razor. That was in eighth grade, when the girl whose locker was beside mine—she had too many piercings in her ear and they’d started to grow over, like a tumour, like something out of a sci-fi flick—pointed at my upper lip and told me I had a
perv ’stache
. Gramps thought she was dumber than the nine hells, but I have never let grow my facial hair since. He hooked me up with a throwaway blade and showed me the basics and laughed when I loped from the bathroom bleeding as if I’d taken a beating. He was an excellent stand-in for a father.

I climbed into Gramps’ truck with my mother’s address folded into the ass pocket of my jeans. Baritone Radio Man recited the latest news about the forest fire: it’d skipped the highway near the Sevenhead and outmanoeuvred the bushworkers’ blockade, and a cadre of those men were digging ditches to save their lives; the eastern highway out of Owenswood had been shut down by rockslide, so if the fire breached the Purcells there’d be no way to evac save airlift. The Armed Forces were on standby and the flippant broadcasters called it Operation Infrequent Wind. I can’t imagine facing that; it’d be like weathering a siege. In the sky, waterbombers rocketed westward, having drunk their glut on Lake Windermere. Valley folk watched those planes with a sense of their potential fate: the quicker those things departed and returned, the closer and the angrier the fires burned. In lineups around town, people told the same story, over and over, about a scuba diver found in full regalia in the deepest region of the forest interior—scooped up by a monsoon bucket and ferried hundreds of miles and dropped to his death upon the flame.

I stopped off at the hospital to check on Gramps. He looked better, maybe. His cheeks had filled out, or regained some colour. I could have been imagining it. Someone had bought him a bouquet of flowers but nobody had removed the tag. Gramps was propped semi-upright with his hands folded above his solar plexus—put him in a suit and he might as well have been resting in peace.

You just gonna stand there admiring me? he said, and opened one eyelid a sliver.

I see someone brought you flowers. Another grandson?

Not my fault if the ladies can’t resist. They’re only human.

I lowered myself to a nearby chair and he twisted onto his side, cursed when he got tangled in the monitoring wires.