Ballistics (21 page)

I jerked my chin toward the exit to the cabin’s clearing. Road’ll take you to the highway.

Well, who’da thought, the guy said, but he didn’t make as if to leave. Then: This’s Cecil West’s place, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Then who the hell are you?

He sniffed as he said it, his nose jerking up and down, his eyes anywhere but looking at me—all the signs of a guy who might strike you at any moment. Behind me, I heard Nora go still at the sink, the creak in the wood as she faced the door, imagined the way she’d look right then, a couple loose sprigs of hair near her ear, arms plywood-straight at her sides, bunches of fabric in each fist. The guy thumbed his front teeth and I noticed that they had a forward tilt to them, an outward tilt, as if he kept constant pressure on them with his tongue. I couldn’t see a damned thing in the darkness behind him, not even the lining of the trees.

Why don’t you ask me again, I said. More politely.

The guy smiled—a wide, almost sideways twist of his mouth that pulled his lips as high as his gums. He ran his hand down his face, traced his goatee with his index and thumb. A scar cut horizontal on the cheek beneath his right eye, and he had a kink in his nose that probably indicated an old break—which meant if I hit him there, coming sideways at the bridge, it’d break again. Then he clacked his teeth together, twice in quick succession. Been in the bush too long, he said. Forgot my manners. Name’s Morgan.

He extended his hand. I shook it even as I linked that name to the general store owner, and then to Crib. I’m Archer, I said. Where’s your nephew?

Washing his boot in the lake. Stepped in a pile of shit. You are what you walk in, or whatever.

Amen to that.

Morgan crossed his arms, rocked forward as if innocently, but more likely so he could scope out the inside of the cabin. Pretty cold out here, he said. In the cold.

We were just going to bed.

Seems a bit early.

Early risers.

You don’t look it, Morgan said, leaning on his heels. What’d you say your name was?

Archer.

That a first name or a last?

First.

What’s your last?

I don’t believe you said, I told him.

Morgan pinched his tongue sideways between his teeth so the veiny underside bulged like a sack of meat. I couldn’t read his expression, but it doesn’t take a genius to know when you might get into a fight. He had broader shoulders than me but a paunch, soft-looking deltoids, and a chest drooped with age—and no hand-to-hand training, if I was forced to make a guess.

Lane, he said, stretching it as though to make it more than one syllable. Odd I don’t know you. I practically own this town.

He flashed me the kind of arrogant smile that rich people do, the kind any working man would love to smear off his face. He pretended to wipe his nose, kept looking anywhere but at me. I listened for the sound of boots in the darkness that would indicate Crib’s approach through the mud.

Then Nora placed her hand on my back, right between my shoulder blades, a touch so light it bordered on accidental, and then she stood beside me in the doorway, her red hair pulled through the trucker cap’s latch and half her body leaning on mine. Morgan’s face went from scowl to neutral to something like a blush almost in the span of a breath. Hello Morgan, Nora said, squeezed my arm. We can probably offer you a beer.

Thank you
ma
’
am
, Morgan said. You are about the last person I expected to find out here.

I could say the same.

He mopped a hand over his scalp. Just, didn’t expect to find you here. Aren’t you with Cecil?

Nora smiled, only the corners going up, her eyes wide and round. She didn’t look like somebody having a good time. I had no idea what was going on. The three of us ducked inside. There, Morgan sagged into a chair and lifted the rifle off his shoulders and leaned it on the table, and I lowered myself across from him. Out of her bag—that she’d begun to hastily pack—Nora produced three beer and rattled them onto the table.

All we got, she said.

Sucks to be my nephew, Morgan said. That’s what you get for not watching where you step.

Morgan swiped his beer off the table, all flourish. He looked around for an opener, but I had no idea where Cecil’d keep one, or if he even kept one at all. Nora went to the sink and pulled on a drawer and
hmm
’d, as if surprised to find it missing. She turned back to us, flipped a stray strand of hair off her cheek, and said, Must’ve misplaced it.

I thought about Linnea and Jack upstairs, tucked under the fold-out cots with their arms around duffle bags—to mask their human shape, a basic camouflage trick I hoped I’d mentioned in passing. Then I thought about Crib, out in the darkness and likely to come banging on the door himself, cadet hat turned sideways, field coat packed with smokes and shells and coin. Last time we’d met, he was as wide as me, and he couldn’t have gotten thinner, or weaker, and he had the same combat training and, now, a rifle.

So, with Nora at the kitchen counter and no choice apparent, I tipped the edge of my bottle’s cap against the wood of Cecil’s hand-built table and smacked it with the heel of my palm. A primary striking point, the heel of the palm—tougher even than knuckles. They taught me that in special tactics, among others. Strike a guy upwards with that bone, right under his nostril, and he’d be tear-blind.

I thought you were with Cecil, Morgan said.

She is, I said, and took his bottle to open.

What’s your connection then, he said.

Nora pulled up a chair kitty-corner to the two of us. Put two army guys in a room and there might as well be no one else there, she said, and pressed her lips together. I could see her dimples, which were pretty nice dimples. Her knee knocked against mine and stayed there, pressing on my leg, longer than a simple tap, longer than by accident. I gulped my beer, saw Morgan do the same. I wondered what she was doing, and I just sort of wondered—at nothing, at the situation, at Nora as a whole.

Outside, a rifle blast cracked through the air and my head twisted toward the sound, my eyes searching through the open window. I expected to see the dark shape of Crib approaching. But Crib didn’t show, and Morgan scowled, his pudgy face bending into a series of fleshy bulbs. Wasting my ammo on ghosts, the dumb cunt, he said, and his eyes widened and he touched his lips and looked at Nora. Pardon my French,
ma
’
am
.

At the same time, the floorboards in the loft creaked and I muttered about the workmanship. Jack says he caught a glimpse of Crib, and that it made him rock backward on his heels. Crib came out of the forest, not moving toward the cabin but parallel to the woods, as if stalking something across the glade. He had his rifle against the meat of his shoulder, Jack says, and under the moonlight his iron crab brooch glinted silver. Then Crib spun toward the cabin, rifle levelled, his eyes at the sights, and looked straight up at Jack in the loft window. He couldn’t have seen a thing—pitch-black in there—but Jack swears he mouthed the word
bang
.

Morgan took a long pull from his beer, swished it through his teeth.

Cecil is a hard man to get along with, he said.

He’s stubborn, I’ll give you that.

You out here with his wife. Seems a guy’d know what was going on.

That’s a lot of presumption.

It’s good to be here, Ar-cher, he said, dragging on both
r
’s. He wasn’t even looking at me, but at Nora. We should run into each other more often.

Too busy, the both of us.

Isn’t that the truth, he said. So
much
to do, he said, and winked. Guys like us, Archer. No rest for us.

Morgan sucked his teeth without making a noise, just ran his upper lip across the enamel, over and over, like a lathe. He looked right at Nora, stared for a two-second count, and then rolled a grin in my direction. Nora’s knee pressed harder against mine.

Good thing Cecil ain’t here, Morgan said. Don’t like hanging out with guys dumber than me.

Both his drink and mine were half-empty, Nora’s less so. You almost done that beer? I said.

Yeah, about, Morgan said, and tipped it up and held it there while his Adam’s apple rose and fell like a pressure gauge. When it was empty, he wiped spill off his chin with a sleeve. You guys eating for four? he added, and jerked his thumb at the plates stacked beside the sink. Or you hiding something?

He didn’t wait for an answer, got up and grabbed his rifle fast enough to almost make me lunge. He went to the door and I followed, Nora walking stiffly behind, and the three of us stopped outside the cabin, in the open field where Crib would have a clear shot. I scanned those swishing trees and bushes and the angle of the moonlight, desperate to glimpse unnatural motion, the shape of a human. Jack doesn’t think anyone was going to shoot anybody that night, it being Canada and all, but I have a bullet scar in my leg.

Well thanks for the beer, he said, and pushed past us—
between us
—toward the road to the highway, and as he did, blocking me, he placed his hand flat on Nora’s ass. There are things I don’t understand about that series of events: why he thought he had any clout to throw around, and why he thought I wouldn’t pound him into the mud and deer shit; and how Nora caught my arm at the bicep, with her elbow. She’d anticipated it—my reaction? His grope? All of it?—and tangled herself against me, and Morgan vanished into the night unscathed.

We stood like that, pressed that close together, just breathing. My heart beat like a kid in love.

What the
fuck
was that about? I said down at her, suddenly aware of the position of her body against mine, our arms locked together, as if we’d been do-si-doing. She smelled like beer, and a fruity shampoo, and the gamey scent of the outdoors. And then it happened, for better or worse: I opened my mouth to ask
why
, again, and then she was kissing me, or I was kissing her. It lasted a moment, maybe, the two of us in the darkness, but maybe
that
moment was when it all began, and not years earlier at the same cabin. Maybe it began with a kiss instead of a bullet.

Above us, the loft window was empty and dark—Jack and Linnea had stayed out of sight, I guess—but, looking up at it, I felt a flutter in my gut, right at the base of my ribs, as if I was driving too fast around a curve.

Five

Parmenides:

You must learn all things, / both the unshaken

heart of reality / and the notions of mortals

which lack all genuine conviction.

For a long time, I’d hoped to roadtrip across the country with Darby in a canopied pickup that we’d drive in plotless tangents off the Number 1. We’d eat Babybel cheese and deli sandwiches and live that journey wholly off each other, so that at every rest stop or campground or Walmart parking lot we could stretch and make eyes and understand that this is
it
—
this
is where we were meant to be. Maybe we’d hit the Frank Slide and gaze over that tundra of deadly rock. Maybe we’d coast the hundredth meridian and blare Tragically Hip songs from shitty speakers, or drink mindlessly in mining towns whose resources had run dry. Maybe, I hoped, we could just travel—wander without plan, without destination. It would be the opposite of my manhunt across the Kootenays; there would be no target, there would be no end in sight, no shadowy father on the far side of the river with one or two truisms to tell. See, if you travel without a destination, your journey becomes the destination, becomes an endless regress of destinations. On a line, the only thing between point A and point B is another infinite series of points. Once a bullet hits your calf, its trajectory no longer matters—we never speak of the path it took to get there, unless it ricochets off something interesting on the way. And like that bullet, we start with a thousand thousand trajectories, we aim—or we’re aimed—and we set out, and we end up on the far coast or in a foreign country, or we go nowhere at all. We don’t exist over a span of time; we exist instantiated in the
now
. If you think like this, if you disregard the ethos of a journey, then wherever you might be or wherever you end up is the place you’d always been meant to go. Except you didn’t go there; you just were there. To undertake a journey without a destination is to haul your destination with you, is to not undertake a journey at all.