Ballistics (15 page)

It was like a nightmare. The darkness throbbed in my vision as if I’d myself suffered a concussion or gone into shock. Beneath me, the kid bucked and I patted down a flare of orange. Smoke hit my eyes, made me wind-blind, and I blinked water and saw the shadow of bodies surround me, guys my age and younger cooked char-dark in that blasted rice field. I heard a moan that sounded like my own. The sleeve of my arm was flaked away like old paint and the hairs on it had disappeared. The skin looked like grilling meat.

Move him
, Cecil yelled.

I came to, or snapped out of it—whichever. Cecil’d hauled some kind of fire-resistant blanket from his truck, and he shoved by to swathe the whimpering kid in it. He spent a moment on me, touched my scarred arm with his thumb, just under the wrist, father-like. The sleeve was intact halfway to my hand, the skin pink and raw. I felt the throb then, an ache deeper than bone—my old friend. Cecil lifted the boy from the ground and carried him through the gathered crowd. Me and Jack nudged people aside, the whole crew of them gone graveyard quiet while the kid moaned his suffering at us, so obvious it seemed baby-like, an almost-constant cooing. I should’ve seen it coming—those idiots winging gasoline on a fire. Christ. I’ve always had bad luck around fire, but that was just complacency,
again
. When you go complacent in a combat zone, people die.

THE HEADLINE SAID:
Bonfire Claims Two, One Dead
.

The
Valley Echo
had rushed the story and printed an unheard-of weekend paper, on a Sunday, barely a full day after the tragedy. I’d declined to comment and to have my picture taken. Nonetheless, my name appeared throughout the article, describing how I’d hauled the boy to my truck and driven him to the hospital where they pronounced him dead without a second’s thought. It wasn’t even accurate: Cecil’d done the hauling, and I just drove. I suspect he died with his head in Cecil’s lap. Someone was an idiot for letting this happen, the ER doctor said to me, as if I was somehow to blame. Fuck you, I told him.

I put the paper down when Linnea came out of her bedroom. She wore her checkered boys’ pyjamas, and she yawned a morning greeting. I hadn’t slept—hadn’t been sleeping—and my stubble had grown toward a beard. You get less and less invincible, it turns out, and not just physically. The body heals better than the mind—I know that one for fact, so does Old Man West—but even the body doesn’t always heal. For some guys, fear alone keeps them going, and I don’t say that with an ounce of judgment. That doesn’t make them cowards; that makes them normal.

You okay, Dad? Linnea said from across the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of orange juice.

Just tired, I said, and put my elbows on the table so I could lean my chin on my knuckles.

You don’t look just tired.

How do I look, then?

She sort of shrugged and sat down at the same time. Kind of shitty.

I laughed at that, had to. Thanks, I said.

No problem.

Jack teach you to talk like that?

Her fingers spun the orange juice in circles. Mostly, yeah.

She smiled, lips parted just enough to show her top teeth, her dimples. I figured in not too long she’d be able to melt hearts with that smile. Jack West was a lucky boy.

Well, I guess I’m going to have to go beat him senseless, I said.

Sure, Dad.

I’m serious.

He’s got Cecil on his side, don’t forget.

How’s that make a difference?

Well, she said, all mischief-grin so I could see her one canine. You know?

Cecil’s an old man.

I’m not sure you could take him.

I flattened my hands on the table with a slap, for effect. Like hell I couldn’t.

I’m just saying, she said.

I leaned forward, put one hand to my jaw as if thinking, as if interested. Saying what?

Linnea made a show of finishing her juice, an exaggerated
ahh
.

I was shot in the leg.

She said nothing, twirled the empty glass.

It is what it is, she said, and got to her feet, made to move past me to her room, to get dressed and ready, but I reached out and caught her around the waist. She strained against me but I squeezed her into a bear hug and lifted her off the ground so she kicked wildly in the air. She was stronger than I remembered. Once, she dislocated my shoulder with a foam sword that belonged to a friend of hers—hit me at the right spot where my arm was loose, and the ball just popped from its socket. I howled and she fled for cover, but it didn’t take long for her to come sleuthing back, anxious to prod the unnatural bulge under my skin.

I’m sorry I didn’t take you out with me, I said, putting her down.

Kind of glad you didn’t.

I guess so, I said.

Yeah.

We stood there, in the kitchen. She was as tall as my chin. A conversation can slip into awkwardness as if it is the natural state between humans. I wanted to say more, but she turned away, so like a teenager, and I watched her close the bedroom door with a gentle
click
. Sometimes, I envied the relationship Cecil had with Jack, for all its flaws. It’s like they had the capacity to talk to each other, being father and son; in theory there could be no secrets between them. But some details I simply couldn’t tell my daughter, some truths.

Those were grim minutes in my truck, the kid’s legs kicking to spasms and the air wheezing out his throat like from an untied balloon. Jack had climbed into the bed, and I could see him in the rearview pining for glimpses of the boy. Not even Cecil knew what to do save get him to a hospital. Couldn’t bandage him, couldn’t do anything. He kept calling for water and Cecil pressed a cold beer to his cheek and his eyelids fluttered, so maybe it helped. I remember the way his fingers curled, unable to even clutch at himself. So does Cecil, I bet. It reminded me of the things I’ve seen: black flaking limbs in hospital buckets, a man’s eyes bulged so wide he can’t even see. You don’t forget things like that. And you don’t need a reminder.

After we handed the kid off, Cecil disappeared into the men’s bathroom to clean up and, I bet, to kneel before the porcelain throne and
will
himself not to throw up. The whole time, Jack leaned on a lime-green wall, hands in his pockets and his eyes on the bathroom door—portrait of a diligent son.

I TOOK MY SKETCHBOOK
to the public beach and then toward the fur-trading fort where Crib gave Jack a black eye. The beachfront was Crown property—could not be owned by persons—but that didn’t deter those condo-dwellers from staking big signs in the sand that proclaimed ownership, threatened to prosecute trespass. There’d been an incident where a seagull tripped a bear trap some idiot had buried in the sand. It was a miracle that it hadn’t been somebody’s child, or dog.

With one or two notable exceptions, I had everything I wanted in those days—a daughter, friends, a job that provided me with the right mixture of freedom and exertion needed to pursue a trivial pastime. I say this as a man looking back at himself looking forward. When I was ten or eleven I watched our nearest neighbour, Mr. Halverson, in his yard, on an evening when the August light shone through the pine trees. I’d climbed one of those trees out of idle boredom. Mr. Halverson was a Bible-thumper and he worked long landscaper hours, and at the end of a shift he’d be dropped off at the base of his front yard where the grass gave way to gravel. He’d come into his yard with a big dog and a toddler and his wife. In my mind the dog is a mastiff—a man’s animal—and his wife is beautiful beyond the flexible standards of a ten-year-old boy. I picture burnt-brown bangs, a mole on her left jugular, and a habit of scrunching her nose, the kind of creamy skin you attribute to movie stars and the unattainable girls of your teenaged years. Mr. Halverson stood on a concrete landing at the foot of his back door. His house was only one storey, army-coloured siding, inadequate lodging for his many children. The toddler slept against his shoulder. In his free hand, Mr. Halverson held a moss-coloured tennis ball. His beautiful wife lounged in a plastic lawn chair. When he tossed the tennis ball the mastiff gave lumbering pursuit, horse-like in its gait. The late-afternoon light scattered through tree branches but Mr. Halverson seemed a beacon for it, was haloed by it. Each time he pitched that ball, as the dog trotted away, he hauled his shoulders straight and adjusted the weight of the toddler in his arm and eyed his wife. A giant, sweat-stained V shadowed his chest. Dark whiskers stubbled his cheek, and the dirty remains of his work dusted his hair, but he had this look about him—iconic. He smiled at his wife and he swept his gaze across the green, inadequate house and the dog that revered him and the yard he’d sculpted, as if to say: yes, this is mine, and I am happy with it.

His was not the ideal life, no—he worked a layman’s job, and rumours spread, as rumours do, about the simple, happy man with a wife too good for him. But it seemed to me, at ten years old, that what Mr. Halverson had at the foot of his back door was all any man should ever aspire to.

I don’t think I’m alone in this want. Given the choice and the proper consideration—given riches and fame, a limitless credit card—I think a man will pick a dog and a daughter and a hard day’s work, that tightening sensation in your shoulder blades, the scent of grime caked to your hands by sweat. We’re all mostly the same. Cecil, me, Jack, Linnea, Nora, even Crib, I’d bet—we all have our Mr. Halversons. We all have moments tucked away for safekeeping: Cecil and Nora tobogganing at some big hotel’s hill, their first date; Jack making desperate calls from a phone booth in Owenswood and the relief when, at last, one is answered; if I’m lucky, some soggy memory of those weeks in the British Columbia wilds when Linnea and I camped among the trees. They’re like photographs from a better life, those moments, there to dig up and unfold and just lounge in the memory of. They’re comforts for those times when the horizon seems grey as charcoal, when the air weighs on your tongue and tastes of metal and static and thunderstorms, when you can’t shake the sensation of unavoidable things approaching as surely as a shift in the wind.

Four

Demanatus:

One stray note does not ruin chorus,

just as one stray act does not ruin character.

Men are the sum of their habits.

Archer had dozed off before Invermere even cleared the rearview. As we drove, his legs kicked like a dog’s and he drooled on himself and dragged his chin over his denim collar. I swear Puck watched him as if to give appraisal, himself squatted in the back, his body off-centre to balance his weight over that muscly third limb.

You get guys who never escape a place like Invermere, and you get guys who escaped and came back. Two of my best friends stayed behind to shove lumber at a sawmill forty minutes south, and though their ambitions burn with less intensity and their stars circle considerably closer to the ground, they are nonetheless dreamers.

We neared Golden, The Town of Opportunity, where I intended to stop and piss and let Puck do the same. He won’t defile the inside of a vehicle—too instilled with his bizarro canine honour—but he has his own ways of making a journey unpleasant, like the range and rankness of his breath. Golden’s big, punny sign swept into view as the Ranger topped one of the highway’s many hills, and I marvelled at the absurdity of those slogans. Alberta: Wild Rose Country. Saskatchewan: Land of Living Skies. Ontario: Where the Women Are More Frigid Than Our Beer.

I tapped the brakes to miss a squirrel—Bambi effect—and Archer snorted awake, so much like Gramps, and I realized I didn’t know the proper way to address him. Should I call him Gramps, too? Would it get confusing?

Can I look in that box, he said, dopey with sleep. His finger waggled at Gramps’ shoebox and he manoeuvred himself around, shrugged the seatbelt off his chest and under his shoulder, which, I knew from CPR training, would tear the aorta from his heart.

Well it’s Gramps’ secret cache.

Archer took the shoebox from the seat between us. He positioned it in his lap and let his hands linger on the lid before he lifted it off. At the top was the sketch of my mom that I’d kept, and he grinned upon seeing it. I was a damned good artist, he said.