Ballistics (25 page)

Sorry, I said, dusting off. Didn’t realize.

Of course not. It’s just an evening stroll for me.

With her teeth, my mom torqued off a scrap of hangnail. Sorry, kid, she said with her mouth mostly closed. I default to sarcasm.

In the distance, the mountains flashed with ochre, but no thunder pounded down from them; that phenomenon, I guess, only Archer and I would share. My mom plucked the chunk of nail from her tongue and flicked it aside. She jerked her chin toward the Verge and set off. I followed.

The whole town’s been evacuated, she said between breaths. Colton’s here on evac duty. We’re running a skeleton crew from the diner.

You said Colton was a park ranger?

I never said that.

So he’s RCMP?

She reined up. She didn’t look at me. Her gaze swung in a slow arc around the darkness, as if she expected an ambush. Uphill, the Verge had darkened, castle-like, and nobody milled around inside.

I think he prefers
last man standing
, she said after a time, with an emphasis at the end, like exasperation but more than that—like the way you’d say
enough
when you say, I’ve had
enough
.

We went the last few hundred metres in silence. I’d heard about those leftover squads of guys who, during an evacuation, defend people’s homes from criminals. The tales were all severed radio contact and last-minute dashes down a highway with the raging blaze mere seconds behind. When we reached the Verge’s parking lot, I caught the low growl of a diesel engine, and my mom turned to face the invisible grumble.

She nodded at the darkness. The engine got louder. It took me a moment to realize that whoever was driving was driving without lights.

That’s Colton, she hollered, and when she spoke her cheek twitched up, under her eye.

Everything okay? I said.

She took the time to look at me. I don’t know if it meant anything.

I won’t lie to you, kid, she said, but never finished, because Colton’s hazards came on—so as not to blind us, I suspect—and my mom stepped toward them even as the vehicle took shape in the dark. A jeep, with an engine that chortled the deep, hacking coughs of an aged bully. It ground to a halt beside Gramps’ Ranger, and the headlights very briefly illuminated me and Owenswood behind me—a shantytown of rough brickwork and houses built squat as a child’s cushion fort.

Shit, my mom said, and bolted for the jeep.

What’s going on? I said.

I could barely see her, a thin outline glowing amber with the hazards. She put her hands on her hips, all deathstare and posture, and in a second the jeep’s engine shuddered down and the door kicked open. A figure slid from the driver’s seat, pitching for the gravel, but my mom managed to get between him and the ground. He sagged against her, and she helped him slouch around the jeep’s grille. He wore straight military greys, and over his chest he’d strapped a blocky navy vest that I recognized as Kevlar. His hair was cut short and a pair of dog tags had come uprooted from inside his shirt; they tangled themselves with a tarnished brooch. He had wide shoulders and arms whose shape you could see through their sleeves: the build of a guy who could push you around. Sharp jawline, a mark of some kind under his eye—surgical scar maybe, or a patch of skin burned brass-smooth. Older than me by a generation: that fifty-something droop to his jowls, skin wrinkled the colour of hide, and facial hair turned a few too many shades of sun-bleach. A leather gunbelt hung from his waist, dark and tugging with weight, and I clocked a set of handcuffs and a pouch for pepper spray and the lethal telescopic baton the RCMP wore sidearm. This was Colton, and he was hurt.

His hand touched the centre of his chest and his teeth clicked together, and with much effort he unzipped a pouch in the centre of his vest. From it, he withdrew a metal plate, and even in the badly angled glow of headlights I could see the dent. Colton took a moment to wide-eye it, his breath strong enough to flutter his lips. Then he tossed it aside, my way, and seemed to finally notice me.

Lin, he said, and sucked wind through his teeth. Who’s that?

His name’s Alan West, she said. He’s my son.

He looped his arm over her shoulders. Well, he called, huffing like an asthmatic. I’m your stepdad. Welcome to Owenswood, hoss.

Great to meet you, I said.

He winked. I’ll bet.

What happened to you? my mom said.

Colton rubbed his hand down his chest—one tender pass. I had an altercation.

The restaurant looked empty as a prison, but all at once its doors flung open and the two boys from earlier scrambled into the open air. They rushed to Colton’s side but my mom waved them off. One of them—the bigger one, with short hair and limbs too awkward for his torso—had the presence of mind to hold open the door.

Colton bared his teeth. I stood and watched, because I had no idea what in the hell I’d gotten myself into. My mom adjusted her husband’s weight on her shoulders and ferried him toward the Verge’s front door and left me standing outside, forgotten and unsure. I squinted at the darkness—the same way, I realized, that my mom had earlier. The air parched my mouth. Not thirst—too bitter. Fear.

The last coughs of exhaust from Colton’s jeep plumed skyward. Moonlight came nailing through the cloudscreen and the gravel around me turned the colour of sludge. On the passenger seat of the jeep lay a nine-millimetre Smith & Wesson with its two radium sights aglow with phosphorescence. Along its barrel, toward the trigger, it’d been misted with thin splatters the pale light made black and innocent as ink.

At my feet lay the metal plate Colton had pried from his Kevlar. I picked it up: quarter-inch thick, steel or possibly titanium—a slug-stopper. The RCMP’s crest was stamped in a lower corner, away from the dent that bowed out a circle wide as an eight ball. He’d been shot with something decent-calibre. I ran my fingers over the bulge, big and misshapen like your own hipbone.

The jeep’s engine ticked cool and in its wake came the stink of diesel, a smell so gummy it stuck to the roof of my mouth. All of a sudden the whole damned parking lot reeked of it. Marked territory, Archer might say, and at the thought of it I wondered what’d become of him. Through the Verge’s window, I saw my mom jab her thumb toward the kitchen, where the two boys scuttled ahead of her. She nodded once—I don’t know to who—and drew her lips upward on one side—a smile, but not natural, as if it’d been tugged that way by a marionette’s string. Resignation, maybe. Or irony. Then she disappeared through the kitchen’s saloon-swinging doors, and I saw Archer sitting in one of the booths in the dark. He gazed across the parking lot, at the jeep and the Ranger and at me, but not at me, more like at that portion of space I happened to be occupying. His face had bottled right up: the jaw seized and the cheeks sucked in so you could see his rifle-stock cheekbones, the curve of his upper lip hardened to a point. He seemed to be shaking his head. He seemed to be saying,
It just can’t be
.

Here’s a story about Cecil West: In the first weeks of 1973 he sold his business for a quarter million dollars, joined up with Invermere’s crew of volunteer firefighters. Firefighting was a long-time dream of his, mixed up with a healthy dose of fear, but Cecil faced down all his fears head-on, Cecil stared gift horses in the mouth, stuck his thumb in mousetraps twice. He’s not one to talk about the things that scare him, but in a rare moment of bared hearts he told me a story about a time when he worked in an aircraft hangar outside London, during the Battle of Britain, where he mended Hurricane Mark I’s that had been cheesed with bullet holes. There, he watched as a fellow welder’s flame-retardant suit paid lip service. The wick effect, Cecil called it—where burning clothes feed off human fat like candle wax. I’d seen the same thing on napalm victims—people’s flanks broiled like haunches of meat, knuckles and kneecaps sunburn-pink and glistening with the oily fluid of bone.

About the same time that Cecil styled himself a fireman, I caught Jack in Linnea’s bedroom with his shirt off and his pants unbuckled, and I hauled him off her by his elbows. His spindly body weighed no more than the two-dollar sacks of soil you buy from hardware stores, but he kicked and thrashed like a boy being gored. He yelled at me to fuck right off, and to stop his flailing I bear-hugged his arms to his sides. Then I pitched him out the front door. He landed ribs-first on my lawn, made fists as he climbed to his feet. I chucked the T-shirt at his head and it wrapped full around, like a jellyfish or something.

Any other guy would beat you pulpy, I told him, and tapped my finger on his meatless chest. He smacked my hand aside, his heavy eyebrows pulled together, and his lips showed his twisted canines. We stayed like that until he stomped off fuming, but it’s not like I wouldn’t see him again in a day. My ability to intimidate him was slipping. It didn’t help that I’d been sleeping with his dad’s fiancée for half a year, and any threats I uttered would always be one part bluff. I had no idea what Jack knew. I had no idea who he’d tell, if he did.

I didn’t see Nora for weeks following the spring confrontation at Dunbar, and for those weeks I was almost unapproachable. We hadn’t talked about what happened between us—not at the cabin, or on the ride home, or after—and as far as I knew she was content to leave it at that, just a moment of weakness, a sudden flood of meaningless, desperate relief, and then back to Cecil, who deserved her more than I did. Still, I moped around the house like a teenager, answered every phone call with my heart in my throat, wasted hours and days drawing landscapes I couldn’t care about one way or another. I sketched a two-by-three charcoal likeness of the nearby east-facing mountain, because it had a kidney-bean hole on its rocky surface that never changed colour. I returned to the road bridge where I first encountered Crib, and there I drew the marshland and the train tracks that speared into them and added the shape of a body in the reeds. At the lake, from shore level, I did a panorama of the horizon that looks just like every other body of water ever depicted in art. Those weeks between when we parted ways and when we eventually spoke—those I spent with my stomach fluttering.

Jack and Linnea spent a decreasing amount of time together, so that when I did encounter them it would only happen on the couches in my living room, or on their way out of Jack’s house, or just sounds of them—voices scraping upward from the basement, from the yard. Seeing them together made me realize just how alone I was, not that I’m one to wallow in self-pity. They reminded me of me and the ex, not because they acted anything like the two of us had, but because of the sheer generic fact of their attraction. Most young love, I think, follows a predictable arc, and most of it ends the same. There is nothing remarkable about the path my marriage took; it simply falls under the category of general sadness of life. Like Jack and my daughter, I met my ex when we were still in highschool. She was older than me by three years, and a farmer’s daughter, and rarely can I recall, in those early years, seeing her with hands cleaner than mine. Unlike Jack and Linnea, her father was not at all impressed with me, so our meetings were few and usually outdoors, often near the creek that ran through my parents’ acreage. And unlike Jack and Linnea, it was me who eventually left her.

Occasionally, I’d see Nora across the street, in her yard, or on the sidewalk, and damned near every nerve in my body told me to orchestrate a meeting. One time she saw me in the window and waved, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my own wave was as shaky as a boy’s in love. There are two kinds of courage in this world, and having enough of one doesn’t make up for lacking the other. It didn’t help that Cecil was my best friend, but it didn’t hurt as much as I wish it had. If our situations were reversed, you can bet that Cecil’d have suffered his aching heart and coveted not his neighbour’s wife. You can bet that he’d still have grown old and lonely. He probably never expected to end up alone, but I doubt anyone ever expects that.

It seemed that logistics and common sense had seen an end to the mistake that happened at the cabin, and I am speaking with full conviction when I say this relieved me. Days slid into weeks slid indistinguishably into the drone of a multi-axle truck, into forest roads and guys with a simpler outlook in whose company a love-struck army vet can let his throbbing heart dull. Like all things, what passed—and dissipated—between me and Nora came to bother me less, or at least in a different way. The heart is resilient, the heart is insistent. My waves to her became less shaky. I thought about asking how she kept her crabapple tree in such good shape.