Ballistics (2 page)

Where’s your brother? she said to the toddler.

Went to get a Coke.

And left you here, she said, and looked right at me when she did. Alan?

Hey, Missy, I said.

She curled an arm to her hip. Nobody calls me that anymore, she said, but didn’t seem upset. You alright?

Gramps had a heart attack.

Jesus.

Yeah.

Don’t worry, if I remember your Gramps, he’s too stubborn to die.

Thanks, I said.

She pressed the back of her wrist to her nose, and I thought I recalled her doing that in highschool.

You gonna be around long?

Just the summer. Or what’s left.

She bent to scoop the toddler under her arm, pried a stray block from his pudgy hand.

Danny’s a cop, she said. That’s my husband.

I don’t remember him.

You either, she said—a retort, but I’m not sure what she meant. She made a
gotta go
motion with her head and disappeared through the door, and I sensed that I would not see her again. Outside, in the courtyard, the double-bent man raised himself to height, Dalmatian by his side, and together they scuttled toward the care home’s rear door. Gramps had told me, time and again, that he’d rather die than spend his final days locked up with a bunch of bluehairs. If he got that bad, I was to drive him to his cabin in Dunbar and there’d be a hunting accident involving a twenty-gauge shotgun—a weapon that reminded him of his days across the pond. Couldn’t do it himself, he told me, else he’d get eternal damnation. At least once per visit he and I swung into his truck—an old four-by-four reeking of hides and the rusty scent of bled animals—and drove down Westside Road, past the ostrich farm, to the gravel pits where highschool kids built bonfires big as campers, and there we’d waste the day and a carton of rimfires on emptied tuna cans and paperback books Gramps had deemed uninteresting at best.

When I was finally admitted to Gramps’ room, I found him upright in an aquamarine hospital gown, spotted with sticky discs and wires that relayed iridescent spikes to an ECG. Gramps’ heart, I would discover later, hadn’t stopped due to cholesterol or disease or blood pressure: like breathing, I guess, the heart is on a cyclical firing sequence, and his had simply misfired. Gramps shifted in bed. Deep lines drew along his cheekbones and wrinkles bundled like metal shavings in the corners of his eyes. He peeled his lips over his gums in what could have been a smile.

No flowers? he said.

I only bring flowers for good-looking girls.

I’m in a gown.

And it brings out your eyes, I said, and sat on the edge of his bed. He seemed very small beneath that sheet.

You doing okay? he said.

What kind of question is that.

I’d hate to ruin months of self-pity just by having a heart attack.

You are such a dick, I said.

He grinned, downward. But seriously, he said. You okay?

I’m okay, Gramps, I told him, with as much conviction as I could muster.

He cast his eyes to his hands, fiddled with them in his lap. I chewed a hangnail on my thumb. He looked old, too, all of a sudden—moisture filmed his irises and his cheeks sagged at an angle off his jaws, bespeckled and age-worn, and what little hair remained seemed wilted and thin, like the strands you find gummied to the tiles of a public shower. He looked, I guess, like a grandfather on his deathbed.

I’m dying, he said.

No you’re not.

It’s like approaching a wall.

I nudged his thigh with a fist. He flashed his teeth.

I’m not just traumatized. A guy knows when the time is up.

What’d the doctor say?

It’s coming, Alan. I can feel it.

No. You can’t.

I need you to do something for me, Gramps said in a drawl I didn’t like. And I need you to do it without asking any of your ridiculous philosophy questions.

Then I was outside under the fluorescent lights that lit the asphalt parking lot like an ice rink, and then I was in the Ranger with its smell of Old Spice and sloshed beer and everything else my grandfather. From the radio, a monotone voice droned factoids about the burning Interior. I drove the long way around Invermere’s lake, like I used to do when I was sixteen and desperate to ogle the girls whose folks had come from Calgary to spend their summer in the great, untamed wild of the Kootenay Valley. At the beach, kids half my age gathered under a streetlight. They dabbled toes in the water and sloshed vodka on their gums and I cringed at the idea that kids were now half my age. Home, I went to Gramps’ bedroom, like he instructed, and inched a shoebox from beneath his bed. It was maroon and covered in dust and dog hair and inside I found a trove of sentimental items: a tarnished cap revolver with a sulphur-scorched hammer stained as though by ochre; a dehydrated poplar leaf big as my hand; at least two mouths’ worth of baby teeth, some my own; a wedding band too large for any of my fingers; a silver Zippo lighter adorned with the American eagle. And there, at the bottom, I found an address with the name
Jack West
scrawled in my grandfather’s blocky script. I ran my fingers along those letters and, lifting the paper from the box, felt the passing of a burden. What goes around comes around, they say, but I’m not so sure. Never really leaves, maybe.

I need you to find your dad, Gramps said to me from that hospital bed. Because I don’t know how much time I’ve got left, and there are some things I need to say to him before I go.

Here’s a story about Jack West: In ’69, when he was a stupid kid, he shot me in the leg with a .22-calibre rifle—our very first introduction. Him and his old bastard Cecil had lodged the night in a copse of trees a short distance from the cabin they owned out at Dunbar. Cecil’d caught wind of a series of break-ins, and upon inspection found stuff missing: a couple old plates, fistfuls of cured elk, one or two sixers of beer. The cabins that lined the Sevenhead River were easy prey for scavenging, and though I could’ve foraged to keep myself alive, I had my daughter, Linnea, with me. Maybe I got cocky, too: the night Jack shot me was the first night I didn’t do a full search of the bushes that ringed the cabin and its field. Same carelessness could get a man killed in war, I’ll tell you that.

The moon shone full force that night and the cabin’s front door was clear for thirty yards in all directions. I intended to camp just inside the entry because it was March, and chilly, and I could smell rain on the horizon—that scent like gravel that is universal across the world. I’d also whiffed the sourness rising through the collar of my shirt, and hoped to snag a bar of soap. My daughter didn’t seem to care, but a guy needs to have his own standards—we can’t all be bushmen, regardless what Cecil West has to say. As Linnea and I skulked through the forest I grunted warnings to watch for the tree branches and their pine needles, because I’d seen a guy lose an eye in Vietnam after he got whipped in the face by a bamboo stalk.

I crouched at the border of the tree line and did a slow, one-eighty scan, though in hindsight I can’t guarantee thoroughness. If I’d really been searching I might have noticed the mud marks at the base of the cabin’s door, or the footprints in the mushy earth where Cecil and Jack had earlier done an inspection. I sniffed the air, tilted my ear to the quiet, for Linnea’s benefit, mostly. She was fourteen back then and unimpressed with anything I had to say. Partly, I hated myself for hauling her along, for putting her through that. I squeezed her shoulder for reassurance then exited the tree cover and bolted for the cabin’s door.

Jack was fifty yards upwind. He tells me he can’t remember the events that led to the gunshot—they’re obscured to him, a mishmash of adrenaline and instinct, and I believe him. He was pubescent and he had a rifle in his hands, felt empowered, bigger than fourteen years old. He was no stranger to the outdoors: at school, during games of manhunt, Jack hid among the thick bushes outside the schoolyard’s ringwire fence. Protocol forbade him from romping through those wilds, but Jack West was never really a kid to bend to any rules besides his father’s. He liked the wilderness, and he liked to hunt, and he was not unaccustomed to firearms. He knew how to handle a gun: never maintenance a rifle with the action shut; a firearm’s safety is true in name only; to avoid eyepiece gouges on your cheek, nestle the stock on the muscley part of your shoulder, right where the deltoid curls like a rope to your pectoral.

Here’s what I think went down: Jack got scared. I darted from the tree line like a burglar and Jack traced me with his irons. I know the sensation of having a person in your sights, that flutter where your throat meets breastbone. Jack would never admit it, but he struggled in the shadow of his old man, so maybe he saw a chance to chin up in Cecil’s eyes, a chance to have the old bastard give a father’s approval. And in Jack’s defence, I didn’t exactly look like a guy who didn’t need to be shot. My clothes were bushworn and sedimented with God knows how much mud and I was stalking toward his cabin, hunched like a guerrilla. I reached the door and jimmied a kinked nail in the lock and jostled it around, and the whole time Jack had me trained in that thumbnail space between the sights.

A .22 has about as much kick as an impatient cat. As I twitched the nail around the tumblers, the woods were quiet. I vaguely recall the sound of my own breath. Then there was a small
whump
across the valley, and the bullet snagged me in the calf.

It’s blurry after that. I hit the wooden wall of the cabin and scrambled around the side for cover. The adrenaline was in me. Cecil came tear-assing around the cabin in pursuit and his gumboots left skid trails in the mud and he slid enough to touch his knuckles to the dirt. The whole time, I’m nowhere near to finding cover and I’m hearing gunfire like popcorn in my skull, as though I’m back in the jungle, so I plant my feet and kick a rock aside in case it trips me up. Fight or flight, as they say. I test the turf, the give, how much slick I have and how well my boots bite into the mud and bloodweed and parched knotgrass. And there’s Cecil bearing down on me, the first goddamned Canadian I’d met since crossing the border, this maniac with a cadet’s hair and a menacing way of moving forward, as if he knows how to handle himself, as if he’s going to rip me a new asshole.

Get away! I barked to Linnea, and drew my hunting knife from its sheath on my thigh.

The gap closed. Cecil ditched the rifle—no time for him to reload it—and I lashed the knife. He twisted mid-lunge, deflected the blade along his ribs and cinched his elbow down on my arm in a trap straight out of some British Army textbook. I rammed my forehead into his nose and he dug his knee into my gut. We meshed together, held each other like wounded men. But flawless victories are for the Bruce Lee movies: people don’t go unscathed; people don’t stay calm. We’re desperate and cowardly and we scramble like beasts—a man would betray his own son if it meant one more shaky breath. Cecil cracked me with his elbow and I gouged his eye with my thumb and the whole time my knife flapped useless, pinned.

We stumbled apart. I smeared blood and snot on my palm and Cecil squeezed juice from his eye.

I think you’ve got the wrong idea! Cecil hollered. He lifted the rifle from the ground.

You shot me.

My boy shot you.

Yeah?

Cecil levelled the rifle. I tightened my grip on the knife.

You ain’t gonna shoot me with that, I told him.

That so?

You didn’t reload.

Cecil ran his tongue along his teeth. He gave a nod and planted the gun’s butt in the dirt. You’re right, he said.

Get outta here.

This is my cabin.

Hell if I care.

Put the knife down.

Gimme the gun.

Cecil didn’t move, leaned on the rifle as if breathless. You’re bleeding, he said. I can help. Where’d it get you?

Calf.

Lucky. Hollowpoints. It come through?

I shook my head, felt the warmth sticky against my leg.

I have beer, and some fishing line, Cecil said. It won’t be fun, or pretty, but you can strike it off your list of things to do before you die.

For a moment I didn’t respond, sensed my daughter’s eyes on me, knew, whether I liked it or not, that I was at this man’s mercy.