Ballistics (19 page)

So that’s what I was remembering, of all things, when the tree cover fell away and the road devolved to a mud pit as deep as my Ranger’s wheel wells. We pitched forward and I felt Jack brace his forearm on the rear of my chair, and then I laid off the clutch, and with a kick we lurched into the open glade where Cecil’s cabin stood a vigil. The glade was boggy with mud and milkweed and deer droppings and the truck’s tires made a slushing sound as we rolled toward the cabin. That’s spring in the Kootenay Valley—all deer shit and wet grass and the cold earth gone soft enough to dig your boots in. I parked the truck on what looked like the firmest ground, and the four of us hopped down. Almost instantly, Nora sank ankle-deep in the mud.

The cabin slumped like someone’s wounded dog. Nearby, a pumpkin-coloured jeep rusted out its end of days. At the lake’s edge six chopping blocks were upturned to stools, and Cecil’s dinghy bobbed in the water’s swell, tethered to a lightning-cracked pine that reached like a great V toward the sky. I peered through the windshield and the mud my wipers had smeared on the glass. Jack climbed out behind me and as he straightened beside the truck he gazed up at that cabin like a man looking at a place he is no longer welcome. The air was thick with the nectary scent of the mountains and a stickiness that gummed up my mouth like sap.

Jack jerked his chin toward the pine.

That caused a fire, he said. Flaming half landed on the cabin. Dad got knee-deep in rubble prying open the trap door to rescue his guns.

Took him a week to get the soot out of his fingernails, Nora said.

That’s because he never washes his hands, I said.

Jack once told me how everything about the cabin sucked the bones from him: the soil-coloured chimney bucket that had never been cleaned; the poly-patched window in the loft he and the old bastard once blared a hollowpoint through; even Cecil’s jeep, sure to pucker with gasoline. Cecil had taught him to drive on that jeep, on fishing trips when the two of them would spend days casting for trout and chewing whitetail meat Cecil’s workmates had cured to jerky in their sheds. Jack said he intended to teach his own son how to drive there, at the cabin. He talked about guiding his son in lazy circles around the clearing and, when the boy’s small palms had a feel for the clutch, could handle like a teenager, along the riverbeds with their muck and the dogwoods that drooled across the rapids like mastiffs.

We carried our gear from the Ranger’s bed to the cabin, and once inside Jack climbed up to the loft and we passed him Nora’s and Linnea’s packs. There weren’t enough beds for the four of us, so me and him would have to spend the night in the truck or on the floor. The inside of the cabin was unfinished, the walls undrywalled but packed full of fibreglass insulation and covered with sheets of frosted poly. Cecil had built all the furnishings himself—and it showed—save an out-of-place rug with a picture of a wolf and her pups.

Above the doorway, in a dirty picture frame that looked burned at one corner, was a picture of a woman far younger than me. The photograph inside was almost wholly obscured, save the outline of her hair, a big smile, a dress that could’ve been worn at a wedding. Jack slid from the loft with the arches of his feet cupping the ladder rails, one quick motion. He landed and brushed his hands on his thighs.

That’s my mom, he said. In case you’re wondering.

I was wondering, I said.

She got hit by a logging truck.

Sorry, Jack.

It’s okay.

Cecil never said.

Jack’s lip twitched up at the corner, as if I ought to be surprised Cecil didn’t talk about the women of his past. He looked at Nora. I don’t remember her, he said. Or what it’s like to have a mom.

Nora worked so goddamned hard for the West men, and all I ever saw her take was shit from Jack—mean, petty shit like you’d dish out to somebody who’d been sleeping with your wife. Right then, in that cabin, as Nora sucked a deep breath and leaned against the wall, her hands in the pockets of Cecil’s flannel coat, her head tilted forward and eyes downcast—right then I could have smacked Jack West if I were at all inclined toward that kind of upbringing. I bet Cecil would have, if Cecil were there and if he was observant enough to realize what’d been said.

Apologize, I said.

Both Nora’s and Jack’s heads snapped up. I’d even surprised myself, to tell the truth.

What? Jack said.

Apologize to Nora.

Archer, Nora said, but I jerked my head:
no.

Jack’s brow twitched and his lip curled, only a tad—that unmistakable teenaged dilemma, the gulf between his pride and his getting what he wanted—whatever that might be. It was a damned good thing Linnea hadn’t come in, or else we’d probably have gone all the way to stalemate, Jack and I.

I’m sorry, he said, and without letting it linger—without letting Nora acknowledge it—he tramped out the door, close enough for me to feel the wind of his motion. Another inch and we’d have knocked shoulders. But maybe that was a confrontation for another day.

Nora and I didn’t move for a few long moments. She tapped her boot heel on the cabin’s floor and I gripped the back of a kitchen chair, pretended to stretch, to be unaware of her, there, red-haired and cross-armed and looking better than I’d seen her and knowing, me knowing, that I’d just done something she probably appreciated.

You didn’t need to do that, she said.

It wasn’t my place.

Jack’s just a dumb boy.

I’m real sorry.

Thank you, Archer, she said with a finality that made me clam up and not apologize any further. I must have sounded like a goddamned Canadian. And yes, Cecil has told him to smarten up before.

I never doubted Old Man West, I said, which was, of course, a lie, and Nora tilted her forehead down so she had to stare past her eyebrows to look at me, to indicate in no uncertain terms she knew I wasn’t telling her the truth. It’s not even discipline I’m talking about. It’s common courtesy.

He’s afraid of you, I think, she said, and eased herself into a chair at the table, sideways, with one arm across her knees and the other extended along the tabletop. That’s why he tries so hard.

That probably isn’t true, I told her. It made sense, of course, for Jack to be wary of me—I am the father of the girl he wanted to marry.

It is. I see it, the way he acts around the house.

I see it too. It’s normal. Harmless, even.

Sometimes, especially if Linnea is there, it’s like he sees you in her, like he wants to get away. You intimidate him.

I doubt he wants to get away from Linnea, I said, and then I sat down, across from her, my elbows on the table and my hands clasped together. But he might be intimidated. He’s just a boy.

For an instant, Nora made no noise except to
therrap
her fingers on the kitchen wood. She slid an eye my way, sideways, and her lips bent into something like a smirk, but not one that made me think I’d cracked a joke. I suddenly didn’t know what to do with my hands, why I was sitting in such a ridiculous position.

She said: I’m not talking about Jack.

My gut reaction was to say,
Then who?
but I figured I’d already made enough of a fool of myself. There are a lot of things I’d say about Cecil West, and a lot of ways I’d describe him, but none of those included the words
scared
or
intimidated
.
Stubborn
and
insufferable
, for sure.
Awkward
and
thick-skulled
, maybe. But this was a man who I owed all the comfort of my current life to, and I would not believe that I caused him such distress. I still don’t believe that—at least, that I didn’t cause him that much distress back then.

I don’t know, Nora. Me and Cecil just see things different.

That’s what I mean.

I don’t really know what you mean.

I love him, Archer, she said. And I just wanted you to know how you make him feel.

Has he said this to you? I said. This?

He says he doesn’t
get
you.

I don’t
get
him either.

She pressed her lips together, didn’t seem convinced. A few strings of hair had come out from under her trucker cap and she tucked them behind her ear in a long combing motion with her fingers trailing all the way from ear to chin. She was such a good-looking woman, and so
aware
, so on-the-ball. Why Cecil hadn’t married her by then is a mystery I sometimes still puzzle over. It seems to me that I should have figured Cecil out better than I did, and that I was in a position to do so—Cecil being my only real friend in the whole of the Great White North. But I didn’t, or I couldn’t, or I didn’t care to; in the end, they all meant the same damn thing.

AFTER NORA AND I
joined the kids outside, the day went about as smoothly as an event organized with ulterior motives can go. Jack fumed, his answers one-word and hostile and his hands stiff around whatever object he happened to be clutching or near. His constant gaze-shifting to Linnea was enough to make me want to throttle him. Somewhere along the line we’d engaged in a game of unspoken passive-aggression, and I suspect that, as part of the rules, Linnea was not supposed to know. I’ll never figure out how, if at all, Cecil handled Jack’s mind games. Possibly I’d missed out on learning some parental trick to deal with lippy teenaged boys, or possibly I was too damned soft. That could have been an accurate summary of me and Old Man West: one of us too dense to register bad attitude and the other a weak-willed pushover. Pair of stellar dads, the two of us.

Sometime through the afternoon I asked Linnea if she’d like to have a go at the rifle, and, when she displayed a bare kernel of interest, Jack leaped at the opportunity to show off his marksman’s eye. He was a good shot as a kid, at least in comparison to other kids. I let them go—even if Jack and his old bastard had an inferior Canadian way of shooting that I figured I’d one day have to breed out of Linnea—and dug into the alcohol Nora had brought along, and me and her, the adults, sat on the cabin’s porch and watched the kids at a good distance. They were at an age when they needed independence, I guess. Each time the rifle fired Nora or I would flinch, and then instantly grin as if we could overcome our animal tendency to startle at a loud noise. We didn’t say a whole lot. Our main point of conversation was Cecil, and we’d already talked about him. We took turns swatting wasps out of the air with our ballcaps, and I told her how each one we killed now was a thousand we didn’t need to kill later. Nora carried a six-pack to the water and submerged them, so they’d keep cool. When it came time to fetch one, we’d rock-paper-scissors and she’d beat me with rock, every time. It felt more like being a married couple than I’d have liked to admit.

We’re going to need some fish, Nora said, later, as the sun began to descend. Linnea and Jack had been at the waterfront all day, occasionally firing rounds, skipping rocks. Not enough food for the weekend.

Jack won’t want to go on the water with me.

Too bad for Jack, she said, and tweaked her eyebrows at me in a way that made me wonder how much she—and I—had had to drink.

She suggested I simply show up on the beach with the fishing gear donned and in hand, not give Jack a chance to negotiate. That, she told me, was how she dealt with him at home. If he got to pitch an argument, if he could latch on to an excuse, you were lost.

So I did just that. He and Linnea had given up on the rifle by then—the sky turning toward dusk—and sat on a rock the size of a car door, their shoes off and their toes in the water. A part of me feared to find them engaged in a more private endeavour, and though exactly that would happen many moons later—and that is
the
fastest I have ever seen Jack West move—right then the two of them just twisted around to face me, and Jack, noticing the fishing gear, noticing my intent, pulled on his socks and boots and whispered not a word of protest or discontent. He’d calmed right down. That’s what happens to a man when he spends quality time alone with a woman he has romantic interest in. Whatever savages the quiet beast, I guess.

We dumped the fishing gear in, untethered the boat from the V-shaped tree, and pushed off from the shore. As I moved the oars round the rowlocks, Jack’s eyes tracked Linnea on the shore. His shoulders slouched when she and Nora disappeared up the footpath to the cabin. The lake at dusk smelled like vegetation, and the driftwood rotting to soil on the shore gave the air a scent of fish scales, of cadavers. In his fishing cap and hunting vest and damp-cuffed jeans, Jack looked like a kid somewhere else—lost in one thought or another, maybe the early stages of a scheme to clear me out of his way. He scratched his temple, incessantly.

Jack has always put me in situations I don’t quite know how to handle. I like to think I’ve got one or two things worked out, like my priorities, or the general approach to the raising of my daughter, but Jack—Jack is something of a mystery, and not just to me. Anyone, even that old bastard Cecil, could see Jack’s motives for the weekend cabin trip. It’d nearly worked out perfect for him: if I had to guess, I’d say he’d probably intended it to just be him and Linnea and Nora, and that, when Nora said she’d like me or Cecil to come along, Jack hadn’t formulated a plan, had simply gone through with it hoping to find a fix later. So I didn’t know exactly how to handle it, there on that boat, what to say: he was a good enough kid, Jack West, and he may be the closest thing to a son I’ll ever have, but he isn’t blood. He isn’t a Cole.