Ballistics (18 page)

I lifted out the first shelf, set it beside me. The truck’s engine hissed, and in the passenger seat Archer shifted, tried to get me in his line of sight. From my vantage, I could see Puck’s flank lift and ripple as it settled down. Lift and ripple. Probably, if I put my ear to him, I’d hear wheezing, the bubble of blood and fluids putting weight on his lungs. I retrieved the shotgun, a weapon that once may have been worth collecting, and brought it to the cab. It was too long to fit anywhere except on the floor, ominously near Puck.

How old is he? Archer asked, when I got in.

Eleven.

That’s a good age for a mastiff. That’s a good age to die.

You sound like Gramps, I said, and pulled off the shoulder, down the highway toward who-knows-what. I tried to picture myself lining Puck up in the irons, my finger on the trigger, the sonic
thwap
and then the far worse sound of the big dog going down. And of course I’d have to be the one to do it; that’s how it always went. Dog owners leaned on their own triggers. Fathers unplugged iron lungs with stoic, unshaking hands. Captains rarely went down with the ship anymore, but always had a crucial part to play in their scuttling. I wonder if Archer would have done it, had I asked, and I wonder, in the end, if that would’ve been a kindness to both him and the dog.

Now, I said to Archer, feeling sober, feeling like I’d opened a hole in the world. You start talking. That was the deal.

He reached under the cab for the yoke of beer, tore one off and fought to crack it.

Been a long time since I had a beer, he said, trying to hook his thumbnail beneath, the tab
ta-tink
ing. Ahead of us, somewhere, the highway to Owenswood was closed, and I hoped Archer could make good on his claim to remember the logging roads, because soon the day would slide to twilight, the dying hour, and I preferred to dispense with the offroading before night settled. Archer grabbed a nickel from the dashboard and wedged it under the tab, finally got the beer open. His first pull was a long, slow slurp of shitty beer overdone with sentimentality. Puck breathed behind me. A layer of dust caked the windshield of Gramps’ Ranger—a product of the moistureless summer, the very topsoil flinting away—so I hit the wipers to smear it clean, to get an unobstructed view of what was to come.

Alright, Archer said as he lowered the beer to his lap. Here’s a story about Jack West.

In the spring of 1972 Linnea came down with a killer flu for three weeks. It would’ve been bad news if not for Nora: Jones & Sons worked me through the bleeding hours and Nora didn’t teach until the afternoon, so with her help we could get near full sickbay coverage. She’d head over just before five a.m.—Cecil would already be a half-hour along the road to the sawmill, last and longest job he ever took as a welder—and let herself in. Sometimes I’d be heading out at the same time, and we’d do-si-do around the hallway and the cramped boot room with all my winter coats piled in the corners. She probably wished she had a daughter of her own—would come pretty close, one day—so I bet Linnea drew her there.

On rare occasions I still saw Crib, each time with a different girl riding shotgun, one time with bullet-hole stickers up and down the car’s flank. He’d swapped his plates for B.C. blues, which meant he’d taken residency, but nowhere in Invermere—Cecil wasn’t the first guy to damn near beat him pulpy, and I wasn’t the only guy who came close to throwing him off a bridge. Far as I knew, he’d fled town to another Kootenay metropolis, but he came back, always came back, as if drawn to good old Invermere—and even though Nora called it paranoia, each time he came through town he
just happened
across the house Jones & Sons had been contracted to paint. I’d watch him inch along, dressed in his field coat and big, dark sunglasses or a gunmetal cadet’s hat, this way of rolling his shoulders as his car bounced over the potholes on the town’s ratty streets. There was at least one more confrontation brewing between me and him. No way around it.

By this time I saw Nora more often than I saw Cecil. I just bumped into her around town: we’d nearly collide in grocery store aisles, buying dinner at the same time; the teachers tended to take lunch at a restaurant down the street from the highschool, where the guys at Jones & Sons grabbed coffee at ten-fifteen and three-forty-five. A couple times during the three weeks when all Linnea could eat was soda crackers and ginger ale, I slept late and was running behind and Nora even gave me her own packed lunch and a wallop on the shoulder, for prosperity. I’ve said it before, but any woman like that.

Spring in Invermere is muddy, and though the temperature rises enough for a man to bare his arms without discomfort, the meltwater that runs down the glaciers makes the lake icy, and the wind breezing across it renders the morning chill. Everybody wears gumboots and puts their trucks in four-wheel and avoids the gravel and dirt roads—like the one behind Cecil’s place—for fear of workplace jibes. You hear stories about massive benders at the gravel pits and guys ditching cars over the cliff up there, the lawlessness of it, like the Wild West. The town fills up with more kids and fewer skiers. Lawn chairs are hauled from toolsheds, families eye their firewood and their hotdog pits, and in the evenings people host bonfires that make whole neighbourhoods smell like a chimney’s smoke.

Jack found me one such evening, on a fold-out chair, roasting a hotdog with a coat hanger I’d unbent to a spit. I had a beer on the go and two empties done; Linnea was out for the night with some of her friends, and I had no impressions to make. Jack tossed a wave my way and vaulted over the fence and rubbed his neck. I figured he’d evac soon as I told him Linnea would not be home.

Linnea here? he said.

Nah, I told him. Want a hotdog?

Okay.

I straightened another wire hanger and pointed at the bag of dogs. He skewered one widthwise, the amateur way. Then he sat down on an upturned log beside me and we roasted our food without talk. He’d have been sixteen at the time. Cecil’d told me of his antics, that he’d been given the boot from all of his classes at least once, that he had a hard time keeping any friends, and that he’d never attended a school dance, never mentioned any girl save Linnea.

Can I have a beer, Jack said all of a sudden.

Straight to the point, I see.

Sorry.

Nah, I said, and ripped one from the six-pack under my chair.

Thanks, he said.

Don’t tell Cecil.

He cracked it and slurped from it and I eyed the state of my hotdog. Eventually I pulled it off the spit—golden brown—and Jack’s ripped in two and fell into the fire. I tore mine in half and gave it over. He didn’t say thanks, but he didn’t need to. I thought about giving Cecil a call, maybe have him and Nora over for a drink. The poor bastard worked so damn hard at the sawmill welding job.

Jack said: I think I might want to marry Linnea.

I swallowed the whole of my half-dog and nearly choked, but for all the wrong reasons. Jesus Christ Jack.

Sorry, he said immediately.

Look, you got a lot of time.

Yeah.

Yeah, I said. I emptied my beer and yanked another one free—figured I’d need it.

Sometimes I think about it though, he said, taking a sip, awkwardly.

Are we still talking about marriage? I said.

It’s just thinking.

I’m Linnea’s dad.

Sorry, he said. He prodded the fire with the spit, gave it some oxygen so it flared up for a second, threatened to burn off the delicate log stacking I’d built to last the evening.

Why don’t you talk to your dad about this, I said, and he gave me a look that said he wasn’t a fool but that I might be. What about your mom?

She’s not my mom.

I mean Nora.

She’s not my mom, he said, and sipped his beer again, eyeing me over the can.

Sorry, I said.

That’s okay.

We watched the fire a while. Jack planted his forearms on his thighs and leaned toward the flame, hands together in the space between his knees. Occasionally he’d slurp the beer—a hesitant, quick tilt of the can that made me think he didn’t particularly like the taste. It wasn’t late enough for the flames to really make things glow, but I could still see them reddening Jack’s cheek. It seemed possible to see in his face the sketches of the man he would become, when his features would harden and pull inward, tighten around the chin and tug his forehead up—a man more calculated and prepared for what lay ahead, but also sadder, lonelier, and aware of exactly these differences whenever he remembers the boy he was.

I’m not sure what you want, Jack, I said.

Me neither.

Don’t do anything stupid.

Like what, he said, and gave me this single, affirmative nod, and it was my turn to glare at him over my beer can.

I’m serious, I told him, maybe a bit too stern. I let you get off with shooting me, but if you fuck up my daughter’s life.

I won’t, he said, and I believed him.

Okay.

Okay.

There’s one more beer.

He nodded and polished his off. Hey, don’t tell my old man.

No shit.

You want to go up to the cabin sometime?

Jack, I’m not your dad.

I mean with Linnea too, and Nora. Dad’s so busy he never has the time.

I’ll think about it, I said.

Nora won’t take us alone, said she’s afraid of bears.

Well—

Look Archer, he said, leaning forward like I’d seen Cecil do, his spitting image, blue ballcap and denim and dog-brown hair around his ears. He flashed a wide salesman’s grin. But he didn’t finish the sentence.

I’ll think about it, I told him, and he bobbed his head and raised his beer as if toasting, goading me to do the same.

A COUPLE WEEKENDS
later Jack organized the cabin trip with Cecil’s blessing, and the four of us took my truck along the logging roads to Dunbar Lake. The kids crammed in the rear and Nora rode shotgun in a flannel overcoat that must have belonged to Cecil, because it drooped around her shoulders and its excess sleeve coiled in her lap like a cat. She’d cut her red hair short and donned a John Deere trucker cap that sunk all the way to her ears. As we drove she kicked one boot up on the dash, crossed her arms. If I’m allowed to make this call, I’d say she looked happy, sitting there—but hell, I was happy too. It would have been nice if Cecil had made it out.

Nora had packed enough food to last us and some liquor that Cecil may or may not have approved of parting with—the last fifth of his bottle of whiskey, one or two six-packs—and Jack tackled the gear we’d need for fish, said Cecil stashed equipment and canned things in a cellar beneath the cabin, accessible by a trap door hidden beneath the kitchen table. Jack also carried a shitty bolt-action rifle of Cecil’s, on Nora’s request, in case we had to scare off a bear, but both me and him knew—and kept it to ourselves—that it’d take a way bigger gun or a whole lot of providence to take one of those beasts down. I knew a guy who managed to kill a grizzly with a nine-mill Smith & Wesson—lucky bullet to the jugular as it charged, an all but impossible shot—but the best I hoped for was a loud enough bang.

The drive to Cecil’s cabin lasts barely an hour if you don’t miss the turnoff to the logging roads. On my own I’d never have found it, but Jack showed me the landmarks to watch for: a long-deserted eagle’s nest on top a power pole; a white cross on the roadside with flowers all around it, tipped sideways with neglect; a patch of skeleton trees where a flash fire had erupted and then extinguished, almost directly opposite the turn. If you hit the General Convenience Store, you’d gone too far.
That
place, Cecil had told me, stayed open late to sell booze to minors, was owned and run by Morgan Lane, which should have said enough. You know how he is, Cecil’d said, and then shrugged his but-what-do-I-know shrug. Not the kind of guy you want to run into on a dark night.

The logging road leading to the cabin sloped down and down almost to a point in the valley where the roots of two mountains meet. You couldn’t see anything through the tree cover—it was damned near to driving blind, but the road was wide and the shoulders not too deep, and evidence remained of times when trucks like my own had swerved into the ditch around a curve. It reminded me of a trip with my ex-wife, probably the last good memory I have of her, when her and me planned a two-week camping trek into the Bitterroot Mountains, bombing west down the I-90 in an Estate Wagon, before Linnea was born. My ex had the tiniest ears and freckles that dotted all the way down her neck. Not three hours through the first day of our hike, I caught my toe on a tree root and sprained my ankle so bad it swelled big as a boxing glove, and the two of us spent those weeks in a motel room in Missoula, Montana, living on trail mix and pork and beans and tap water rationed from canteens.