Ballistics (22 page)

The Ranger had suffered significant damage when we cowboyed across the breach in the road: the clutch seized, the engine stalled on steep climbs and kicked up a true and dirty fight upon reignition. At the onset of evening, Baritone Radio Man offered one final and cryptic warning: It’s Hell out there, gents. Per his earlier soothsayings, the highway to Owenswood was landslid and impassable even to our sense of heightened bravado, so Archer took over navigation and led us by gut off the beaten path. The lumber roads carved along the mountain’s face and a rhinestone moon lit the trees so pale and luminous they looked like prison-bar steel.

For an ex-marine, he did things that made no sense to my ingrained cynic: he used gnarled, devilly trees as landmarks, which might have been okay anywhere but within a forest; he got disoriented by the darkness, as if his mind muddled the concepts of ascending hills and then descending them, as if up and down and over had become camouflaged together; he spent far too much time worrying about our destination when it was the journey that mattered most. That last I attribute to the fact of his impending death. It would, like Gramps had said, be like approaching a wall. Perhaps, in general, dying men make poor navigators.

Sometimes, we came so close to the highway you could all but smell its gravel. There were no cars, nobody so careless as us. Between the trees my headlamps rolled shadows like a movie reel over the asphalt. The last canvas of night draped low overhead. You could see the edges of things—the lines that blurred in and out of one another under the wildfires’ sawdust glow.

The forest was in the middle stages of rebirth. Parts of it had been consumed by a blaze in the eighties, and adolescent trees stood calf-like among the charred carcasses of their forefathers. That’s the machine of the world, how past meshes with future: dig deep enough or wait long enough and you’ll find the bones of a dead thing. Kids consume the legacies of their parents. People found cities over unmarked graves. Civilizations rise up from the ruins of those that trailblazed before them. Whole histories are built on the leftovers of older worlds.

The truck clipped a bump with its useless shocks and Puck loosed a whimper. I’ve seen that dog endure a lot, even lose a leg to yuppie stupidity, but with each muffled yalp I grew more and more certain he’d suffered a wound he would not recover from. Archer emptied a second beer into Puck’s bowl and held it while the dog lapped it up with his wide flapping tongue. We had one more beer among us, and Archer spun it round and round in his ancient hands. The truck’s tires spat mud and loose stones at the undercarriage, and with each ping Archer
tink
ed the beer’s aluminum tab. Then he tucked it under the seat and lowered his window and sucked a strong sniff of air.

I sensed our approach to Owenswood in my gut and chest, even in my arms and hands and knuckles—like that eerie weightlessness on a swing set when you swing too high for the tensility of its chains. They say men seek, in women, someone who’ll act as a mother; maybe my ignorance in this regard is why I did so poorly with Darby; I’d never even had a stand-in for a mom.

Archer rubbed his face, palms going up and down so the skin pulled taut, sagged, pulled taut. I wondered if he was in constant pain. You holding up? I said.

I’m tired, kid.

Nap.

You’re not a full tank either, he said. His hands squeezed his lips like that joke about bus doors. Archer raised his window. He rubbed his hands over his arms. I saw the pink flesh on the underside of his eye socket, a quick, moist gleam in the darkness.

We descended a hill that traced the gradient of Rogers Pass, and as we got lower a fog built around us, so dense it scattered the Ranger’s highbeams. I flipped them off. The fog settled below the truck’s bumper, and I navigated by the curl of the trees on either roadside. It rendered the ground invisible, made it impossible to brace for water divots or potholes, road sheers, even animals that lay dormant and hidden. Gramps bragged that, one terrible winter, he got caught on the highway in a blizzard so thick he could only progress by sensing the different churn of his tires—one on the gravel shoulder, and one on the asphalt. He liked to claim that he’d driven more miles backward than I had forward.

The road looped to our right and, on the opposite side, the trees fell away to reveal a cliff. The fog poured over the edge in rivulets. Below us, a plane of darkness had settled into the bowl of the valley; it looked immaculate and thick enough to touch, and all the muddy evening shades bled into it, this great abyss. It gave me the sensation that at any moment the truck could plummet through the fog on the ground. On cue, we hit a moment of seesaw that brought the rear wheels in a fishtail toward the cliff. I slowed to a scuttle, pushed instinctively against my own seat. Archer hooked his fingers around the oh-shit handle. He scrubbed his forearm in small circles. His mouth opened and shut, mere millimetres, only visible in the darkness by profile—a cud-chewing motion. All of a sudden, the truck smelled like an old man: a non-specific liquor, wads of two-dollar bills bound in rubber bands.

Archer? I said.

He touched his face. Mind if we stop for a sec?

Not one bit. Stretch our legs.

I’ll sit.

That’s not what I meant, I said, and he tossed a wave of his hand.

I pulled the truck over to the cliffside and it gave an unhealthy kick as the engine wound down. It would inevitably betray me at a time of critical importance, like all those faulty vehicles that feature in the escape plans of Hollywood. Archer unhitched himself and reached out to graze Puck’s flank with his fingertips. For better or worse, the dog did not stir.

Outside, the air tasted like burned toast, and motes of char weighed on my tongue like grit. I put my hand on the Ranger’s dirty surface and circled to Archer’s side. The fog varied from ankle-deep to shin-deep and with each step I squinted in the dark to see it billow out and creep back, as controlled and organic as breathing. I’ve had one or two unnatural experiences in fog—seen a friend suddenly and inexplicably suffer a foot-long gash on his calf, just standing around at the edge of a streetlamp’s glare, for example—and I do not trust it.

I came around to Archer’s window and he raised one hairless eyebrow at me, and I wished I could have summoned the nerve to ask him to stop doing that. Gimme a hand down, he said.

Let me grab the chair, I said, but he reached through the window and caught my arm.

Just give me your shoulder.

You sure?

Fuck the chair, he said, and leaned on the latch as he did, and the door tumbled open and he nearly came out with it. But he caught himself, and not for one second did he look sheepish. I put my shoulder under his. He looped his arm over my neck. With baby steps he descended to the living earth, and without having to say so we shuffled toward that open cliffside until we stood like some partygoers before the view. Archer sat down, leaned backward on his elbows like a kid. I joined him. It seemed we could stare endlessly into the valley, as if it were meant for that. We didn’t say much. You don’t always have to.

I’m sorry about your dog, he said after a time.

It’s not only your fault.

Just hate to see him suffer. Anything, really.

The beer will help, I guess. How’d you know to find it?

Cecil always kept it there, for times like these.

How well do you know Gramps?

Not one bit anymore. He used to be my best friend.

He grunted as he said that, continued: It really sinks in when you say it, you know?
Used to be
.

The fog parted around my legs. It rolled on and over the cliff like a river, and I lifted and lowered my hand into it, transfixed. In the Ranger, Puck made a noise that sounded half snore, half gurgle. Archer and I sat and listened to it until he once again rumbled himself to quiet.

I can’t believe I was so stupid, I said.

It’s my fault, kid.

The whole thing, not just Puck. For leaving Toronto in the first place.

You don’t always choose where you go, even though you think you do. You end up going one way and for the life of you all you can do is make the best of it.

What are you talking about? I said.

I don’t know, he said. But there’s always hope.

The air pulsed. Fog pillowed at our fingertips.

He won’t make it, will he? I said. He’s too old and too hurt.

We talking about the dog or your grandad?

I nudged him with my elbow. He let himself smile.

The fog heaved in and out, up and down. It was like breath on your neck, some kind of predator. Archer rubbed his arm like a man trying to ward off a chill. He hung like that, midway in a self-hug, too unsure to lower his limb to the fog. Humans are afraid of what we don’t know, and we can’t know very much. Here’s something I don’t know: whether or not Darby could’ve been the love of my life.

WE MET ON A CP RAIL
train ride, aged twenty, somewhere during the run over the wind-blind prairies. It was my second day of the trip, en route to commence my studies in the epicentre of the centre of the universe. Vancouver through Toronto, that train; it’d twist around B.C.’s mountainous Interior and then dash east across the Land of Living Skies. Cheaper to fly, but everybody flew, and Gramps liked the idea of sending me off in a vehicle he trusted the mechanics of. So I boarded in Banff, a nearby winter-sport town where two years earlier I had, like every eighteen-year-old boy from Invermere, first legally entered a bar. That time, we limped in and out of the place aboard a buddy’s refurbished GTO; this trip—with Gramps, toward my send-off from the valley—I sat in the passenger seat of his Ranger and marvelled at all the things-unsaid.

Gramps drove. Redneck radio twanged from the speakers. The whole journey, we barely spoke a word. Gramps spent a lot of time sucking his teeth and looking pensively at things in the distance; I don’t suspect I gave him a lot of encouragement to embark on a heart-to-heart. Behind us, wedged between the fold-down seats, I had a hiking pack and one roly-poly suitcase shoved full of my worldly possessions: loose-fit T-shirts and jeans with the hems trampled off; an electric razor Gramps offered up as a going-away gift; a few books, my laptop. As we drove, Gramps eyed the speedometer and refused to go even a tick above ninety, said he didn’t care to get pulled over, even though we both knew the RCMP didn’t patrol the national park. The trees reeled by on either side and the highway curved in wide arcs designed to keep you on-road if caught in an icy skid. The mountains swelled bigger and bigger and the radio cut out and somehow our silence got quieter, if that’s even possible. I wish I’d had the boullions to say anything, but that awkwardness seemed insurmountable. It still does, even in retrospect. I was leaving him to loneliness. He did such good for me, Gramps, and I know for a fact that back then—and more so as years went on—I was a poor stand-in for a son.

At the train station, Gramps carried the wheelable suitcase stiff-armed by his side. Still only passing words between us—a grunt of direction, one request for a loonie while he fished through the Ranger’s cupholders for parking change. Now, as we waited by the train’s closed doors and its carriages snaking off beyond sight, I felt
the tug
—that urge to just head right back where I came from. But I had Gramps there between me and retreat. He stood to my chin, or thereabouts, wore his charcoal-grey ballcap and denim vest and Gore-Tex boots. Wide-shouldered, wiry, somehow not-old. He looked like the kind of person you could ask to hold your coffee. The train doors yawned open before us and an attendant in a silly hat offered to help with the bags, but Gramps sent him skedaddling. Then he handed the suitcase my way.

Call me when you get there, Gramps said.

I shifted the bag on my shoulder. Of course, I said.

He thumbed a piece of truck debris off one strap. Here, he said, and drew a wad of money out of his gut pocket. I thought about a cheque, but this seemed more traditional.

I can’t take this.

Yeah, you’re supposed to say that, he said. Then he grinned.

Thanks, Gramps.

Don’t spend it all on hookers.

Just some? I said, and he levelled me one in the gut—a quick one-two.

He stood there smiling at me. I couldn’t think of a time when he’d been happier, and I didn’t know what to say to please him or what to do with my hands or if I should meet that smile with my own. So I shifted the backpack again. The train didn’t leave for another half-hour—time for a bite, or a beer.

Call me when you get there, Gramps said again.

Of course, I told him.

He nodded once. His smile flattened out. Right, he said, and we parted ways.

What remained? On that train, alone for the first time, I waited for the journey to start before I counted the money—five grand—and jammed it into the inner pocket of my coat. The mountains chugged by and I tried not to think of the things that wouldn’t come with me. It was late summer, some trees had started to ripen to their reds and golds, and the sun hit the mountains in great swaths. The railroad wound along the mountainside and you could look out the window and watch the wind thrash the conifers at eye level; when the needles shook free, they shimmied on the breeze like some strange, mossy snowdrift. I spent the first night alone in that carriage and sunk in and out of sleeplessness while the tracks trundled under me. Young, stupid, melancholy. We all know this sensation—the world widening before us, the past becoming just that. A twenty-year-old’s greatest fear is that the best has come and gone.