Ballistics (20 page)

I rowed us farther onto the lake and Jack pulled a pocket knife from the folds of his coat and used it to scrape dirt from his fingernails. When we were deep enough he flipped the blade closed and slipped it inside his coat and got the fishing gear ready. While he worked, I studied the landscape around the lake, ran my fingers over my stubble that had grown out in patches—never could grow a decent beard, which Cecil never ceased to ridicule me for. I like the dusk hours, especially on a lake, when you can’t really distinguish individual trees from the forest, save those positioned to catch the last burning light of the day, their tips glowing orange like stove pokers.

Jack worked with a single-mindedness that bordered on suspicious, but maybe he felt as awkward as I did. It reminded me of when I first spent any real time alone with my ex-wife, on a camping trip with her family, while her folks went out for a walk and I had to mind the tents with her, the two us saying absolutely nothing and looking anywhere but at each other.

A mosquito landed on Jack’s cheek and he brushed it away. When I was a kid my friends claimed they could pinch the skin where the bugs were sucking and they’d get stuck and explode, but I never could pull it off. I’d grown used to the stick-thin flashes in my peripherals, the feather landings on my cheeks and arms. The only time it pissed me off was when mosquitoes went for my hands—nothing in the world is as bad as itchy fingers—or, worse, my arm: I don’t like the idea of a bug having a go at my mangled skin. And I can’t even bugspray it, because it stings like an ulcer.

Jack reached under his seat for a can of bugspray and doused himself in it, offered it over. He had so many scars on his hands, even for a kid of sixteen: his knuckles were uneven from all the fights he got into at school, the hands nicked and burred from clumsy injuries working on things with his dad—he once hammered his thumb so hard with a tin mallet that it had dislocated toward the centre of his palm. At rest, that thumb curled beneath his index finger.

You ever see Crib? Jack said.

Sometimes.

He skewered a piece of bait on the hook and in one strong motion cast his line out into the lake. It hit the water with a
ploop
, beyond my field of vision. The evening had deepened to that time I call the dying hour, when everything is more or less the same shade of grey. Jack sniffled. His face was barely visible to me, but I could sense his posture, his one knee bent at an angle across the other—a very appraising pose.

I’d like another crack at him.

That’d be a waste of blood.

His hands worked gently on the reel, drew it in, quivered it—I liked watching a man fish almost as much as I liked to fish.

You weren’t there, Jack said.

It doesn’t matter.

How can you say that, he said, and leaned forward, almost quick enough to be hostile. After what he did? To Linnea.

Pick your battles, Jack.

I pick this one.

My old man used to tell me violence is the last act of the incompetent, which didn’t quite make sense, but I got the gist. Jack scratched his temple. He wouldn’t look you in the eye. Sometimes, I had a feeling like Jack knew things we didn’t, that he was a collector of information but that he was too young and too inexperienced to know how to use it.

It’s not worth it, I told him.

You say that now.

I’ll say it then, too.

No you won’t, Archer.

What does
that
mean?

Jack shrugged his shoulders forward, lowered his chin. If you get the chance, you’ll get him back.

No, Jack. Because that would turn me into him. That can’t happen. Me, you, even your dad—we have to be better than guys like him.

That’s what Dad says.

Your dad’s right.

Jack hawked into the water but the spitball didn’t fly in the arc he wanted, and he had to wipe his chin with his sleeve. If you say so, he said.

We slithered across the water. Above us, an owl perched in a tree. If it had been Linnea sitting across from me, I would have drawn her eye to it. The owl’s wide eyes tracked me and Jack across the lake and I could feel, if not see, Jack’s gaze locked on me. It’s hard for me to say what Jack wanted, even now. Then, almost like an omen, the owl swooped out of its tree and snagged some poor beast from the shore, and I watched the arc of its flight, the last jerk in its talons.

When I turned back to Jack I saw that he’d laid the fishing rod horizontal over the boat. I couldn’t discern the expression on his face, but he’d tilted his head sideways, ear out, as if listening. I started to say something but he raised his hand. He pointed toward the shore, said, in a whisper: You hear that?

I held the paddles as steady as my arms would allow. Things I heard: water, the waves on the tin, distant, chirping creatures—nothing I shouldn’t. But Jack had fresh ears—ears undamaged by time or the sounds of war. The boat idled in the water. Waves pushed it, nudge by nudge, toward the shore. With a delicacy I didn’t know his young hands possessed, he took the rod and silently reeled in the line.

And as we neared the shore I saw two men up on a ridge above the lake.

One had his back to me, a rifle slung over his shoulder, a backwards cadet hat that made the hairs on my arms stand to. The other had a bald head that shone like an egg under the dim light, a checkered shirt, and the strap of another rifle across his chest like an ammo sling. He was a big man, even at a distance—as stocky as a logger.

Then the two men swung something out over the lake—something heavy that flailed as it splashed into the water. The waves rocked our little boat and we tried not to bang around the sides. The object bobbed to the surface, shapeless, island-like. The two men—one had to be Crib—brushed their hands on their thighs like boys. They had the posture of men who’d gotten away with something big: Jack and I were all but naked on the water, but the boat had drifted close enough to the shore, maybe, to be camouflaged by shrubs and driftwood, the drooping branches of trees.

I caught Jack’s eye. He raised a finger to his lips.

The two men hovered at the edge of the ridge and peered at the lake. They exchanged words that hit my ears as murmurs. I took the paddles in my palms and nodded to Jack, and he nodded back. Then I rowed us along the water’s edge where the flora and overgrowth would keep us hidden, keep us shapeless. As we skimmed over the lake, Jack stared at the floor of the boat, and, watching him, I didn’t know what needed to be said, if anything. In my mind: the limbs, the darkness, the meaty splash.

Eventually, Jack said, hushed: That look like a body to you, Archer?

We both watch too much TV.

Figure it was a deer? Shot out of season, he said, which sounded feasible.

Yeah.

Then why are we rowing away?

There are points in life, maybe, when we simultaneously learn a great truth about another person and a great truth about ourselves—not revelations so much as things we’ve denied up until a point. It happened with my ex-wife in the year leading to our separation, when I watched from the driver seat of our Estate Wagon as she watched two men fighting outside a bar. My ex looked mesmerized by the fight, drawn to it—she leaned forward with just her head and shoulders, an almost bird-like pose, a fierceness around her small, pretty, tightly drawn mouth—as if
that
, the fighting, the violence, the most basic one-upmanship, was the standard to test a mate. And watching her, there in my truck, one hand on the wheel and one on the palm-bald gearshift, seeing that, seeing
her
, seeing her
want
that, made me have to quell an urge to waltz right up to those two men and join in, crack some skulls and knuckles and taste the sheetmetal flavour of my own blood. And after everything I’d seen on tour?

Jack, perched there in the boat while I worked the paddles, had made me realize two things: first, that he was smarter than me, or at least would be; and, second, that I was not anything near comfortable with the idea of him marrying my daughter.

There’s a heavy fine for shooting a deer out of season, I said, thinking:
fuck you, kid
.

So?

These are guys you know better than me, Jack. What do you think?

After a time, he said: Okay.

Okay, I said, and rowed.

AT THE CABIN
, Jack went through the door and propped the fishing rod against the wall in the corner, but he was unable to get the balance, and the rod kept yawning sideways like a pool cue. The whole time, while he fumbled it, he glanced back and forth at Nora and Linnea. They were playing cards and had mugs of lukewarm tea on the table in front of them, no steam rising—but they’d paused mid-hand, probably registered the urgency in the way we came through the door.

What is it? Nora said when I stepped into the cabin. Jack held the fishing rod with his fists one above the other, as if to wring its neck.

The American kid, I told her. And somebody I don’t know.

They threw a body in the lake, Jack said. He quivered there in the corner—fidgeted his hands and tapped his fingers to a tune playing in his head. You could see his excitement: the way his eyes stayed wider than natural, the way he couldn’t keep a loose grin off his face, the way, for the life of him, he couldn’t balance that fishing rod. That’s how kids get around catastrophes, around danger—a blindness to it, but also this
need
, this compulsion to seek it out. I remember when my brother took a dive off a grain silo at twelve years old. His leg snapped in two places and those of us with him—a group of us—for a good few moments just stood gawking at the angles of his leg. Nothing draws a crowd like somebody getting hurt.

A deer’s body, I told Nora. Probably shot it out of season.

Might not’ve been a deer, Jack said.

It was a deer.

Should we get out of here? Nora said, and as she did I saw Jack’s shoulders droop, his thick eyebrows bend together under the brim of his fisherman’s hat—as if he didn’t want to hear that, as if he hadn’t accounted for that as a possibility. And right then I wondered what was going on.

Did you know he’d be up here? I said to Jack.

How could I?

You came up here to have another crack at him—at Crib.

Jack held the fishing rod at an angle with one hand and with the other he picked at the hem of his vest, shifted his feet. Then he looked up, to Linnea, for support.

You dumb fucking kid, I told him. Out here—he could fucking kill us and who’d know?

My dad—

What if he’s here to send me back? I said. What if he’s here to send Linnea back?

Nora’s hand touched my arm and I jerked away. Jack scratched his temple, over and over. I worked my hands in and out of fists, madder than I’d been in years, madder than I’d been since my last tour in Vietnam when stupid kids did stupid shit that got other kids killed. If anything happens to my daughter, Jack, it doesn’t matter how bad you feel because I’ll make you feel worse.

Nora put her palm flat on my shoulder then, and I turned toward her. Linnea chewed her lip and Jack went over to her, but they didn’t say anything, just settled down in one another’s presence. That close, Nora was a head shorter than me but it felt like looking up to her. Her mouth pinched tight and her eyes squinted a tad—the look of somebody giving you one last chance. Her hand slid off my shoulder but I felt its imprint in my shirt, that tingle.

Let’s clear out, I said.

Then it seemed like everything hung without motion, the three of them at once perplexed and frantic by the turn of events. Jack tottered in place. Linnea, beside him, turned her head around as if scanning for a task. Eventually, she nudged Jack with her elbow but the two of them didn’t move. Nora reached for some personal items in her immediate vicinity: a book, one of Jack’s damp socks, a scarf I didn’t recognize but which Linnea claimed with a nod. I’d seen this kind of putzing around among new guys in the army, this high-strung, get-it-done approach that got nothing done—like ratcheting a socket wrench in the wrong direction. It only lasted an instant, that bout of confused energy, and then the three of them set off and I went to Jack’s shitty bolt-action, to check the breech and the action and to lean it on the wall nearby because I didn’t know what was coming my way.

WHEN THE KNOCK CAME
, Jack and Linnea were upstairs and Nora was at the sink. Jack’s head popped over the edge of the loft and me and him shared a look—hell if I know what kind of expression I gave him—and he disappeared, I hoped, to get him and Linnea to the far back of the loft. Whoever was at the door—I had an idea—knocked again and I called, Hold on.

I opened the door to the man from the lake, the one I didn’t know, bald as a chicken plucker and wearing a checkered flannel shirt. Wider than me and just as tall. He had a goatee that ringed his mouth like a biker, and a red, raw patch of skin on the underside of his jaw, spreading down his neck and beneath the collar of his shirt. Strapped to his back: a 30-30.

Sorry to bother, the guy said, in the husky, quick-syllabled way of a man not sorry at all. Me and my nephew been out cougar hunting, got a little lost.