Ballistics (26 page)

That July, 1972, Cecil took Jack on a hunting trip southeast of town, on the pretense of wanting a crack at some cougars. I would have liked to tag along, to watch out for them, stupid as that sounds, and also for the opportunity to just talk with Cecil, but no invitation was ever extended. Cecil’d been almost as absent as Nora, and only rarely did I glimpse him in his bedroom, almost hunchbacked. One time he cinched his curtains, shirt off, showing his sinewy body that made me wonder if I could still take him in a fight. I detected unease in the West household, but Jack never filled me in, since we’d stopped talking like friends—he was that age; I was in his way. Cecil and Nora rarely left the house together or even by the same door, and Jack spoke to Linnea in a hushed voice that trailed to muttering when I entered the room. The wedding never happened when Cecil said it would—go figure—and I think they were feeling the strain. If you ask me, Old Man West had yet to recover from the death of his first wife. If that’s even something you can recover from at all.

She came to my door while her boys were out hunting, one hot, soupy evening after darkness had settled over the town like a quilt. She had her red hair loose and she wore a baby-blue dress that reached her knees and she looked about as good as I can rightly remember. Except for the initial surprised greeting, we had little to say. I didn’t even immediately think to invite her in, until she swooped her head up and down the street, crossed her arms under her breasts, and said that small towns love a good gossip.

I’ve only got beer, I said.

That’s fine, she said.

Do you want one?

Yes, she said. At least.

She followed me to the kitchen. I fished two beer out of the fridge, and we sat at the table and sipped them and didn’t talk. Everything was weird—her, the light, even the taste of the beer that bubbled on my tongue like soap.

I’ve been thinking about you, I said, and scooped my hand under hers. She seemed to chew on that one. But she must have known.

She moved her hand aside. I finished my beer and grabbed another, and another for her.

Where’s Linnea? she said.

Camping with some friends. You picked a good day.

I guess I did. Pick a good day.

I’ve got whiskey too, I said.

I’ll stick with beer.

Me too.

She twirled the bottle on the table, round and round. An attached woman, according to the rules. A no-fly zone.

Are you sure you want to be here? I said.

Why are you asking me this?

I just want to make sure it’s what you want. I want whatever you want.

That’s just being cowardly, she said.

How?

Makes you not guilty, makes it so you can say I just did what she wanted.

I thought it was being polite.

She leaned over the lip of her chair, stretching. The legs scraped on the laminate and the wood creaked backward and I watched the curve of her, felt the wind of her sigh breeze over my cheek, warm like the summer, like getting a thing you’ve wanted.

You’re not guiltless in this, Archer—sometimes the hardest decisions are simply the hardest decisions.

And then, as if the conversation had not taken place, or as if it had some finality, I got up and put my hand around her waist and drew her close, and the world seemed about ready to tilt over, everything giddy, and I felt like a teenager with too many expectations and too much worry about what was at stake. I led her to the bedroom. There, a standing fan rattled at highest gear to cool the room to habitable and to keep mosquitoes from finding perch. We drifted to the bedside, and she sat on its edge, and then I sat beside her. Beneath her dress was pure softness, her breasts, her tough-but-not-perfect stomach that was perfect enough for me. One rib had been broken and healed off-kilter, made a bulge like the button of a denim coat. She shivered against the fan’s wind. Her tiny hairs raised and her skin tautened to gooseflesh, and I lurched to my feet to switch the machine off. My back turned, she pulled the sheets to her chin.
I still know where you are
, I wanted to say, but couldn’t find the words, didn’t dare waste breath on a joke. I climbed in after her. Her searching fingers scuttled across my chest, abdomen, found purchase. It was good to see that my blood remembered where to go.

I’D QUIT PAINTING
for Harold and Jones & Sons in the winter of ’72, in favour of driving a logging truck for the same lumber mill Cecil made his money at. I had an air brake licence the American military had paid for, and that—alongside a few appraising grunts from Cecil, over beers—was all the managers needed to be convinced. The hours were more to my liking and the pay a whole lot better, and I learned my way around the breakneck dirt roads that wind between the mill and the highway. The steadier income meant me and Linnea moved into a house across the street from the Wests, such that I could look into Cecil’s bedroom from the window in my den. Me and him joked about setting up a tin can phone. I had more weekends off in the first month than Harold had given me in three years, and I made a habit every Sunday of tucking my sketchbook under my arm and heading to the nearest outskirts of the valley. One time I sat on a little hilltop and traced the outline of clouds. Another, from my window, I drew some little black bird as he hopped around the yard and fell down a groundwater heating pipe—I had to rescue him, no small feat, even for a man of my ingenuity. If I was a competent tree climber, I figured there’d be some good vantages to be had.

Everybody who knew of my hobby thought it a waste of time, except Nora. She took an interest, sometimes asked for a slice of paper so she could try her hand at it, and the two of us would sit in my basement or in my truck or off somewhere—like the gravel pits, or the cliff jumps at Twin Lakes where worried mothers had cordoned off the tallest jump, damned near eighty feet—and listen to our pencils
skitch
on the paper. I’d sketch the mountain vistas with their egg-white tips and Nora would do portraits of me—something I didn’t quite like but couldn’t summon the heart to deny. One time, she drew a picture of me and Jack, using two separate photos as guides. In it, the two of us are standing side by each with Cecil’s old cabin in the background. It was a pretty damned good effort, if I’m anyone to judge, even though you’d have trouble identifying us at a glance. It could just as easily have been Jack and his old man. I stashed these drawings under my laundry hamper—beneath the bed is too obvious—in a camouflaged tin box, the papers rolled to tubes and the box fastened with a small silver lock flaking around the keyhole. After these sessions, we’d make love or we wouldn’t. It didn’t seem to matter. Either way, I was happy. I probably owe that to Cecil, too, since he got me the job. But when all the hands are dealt, I owe him a whole goddamned lot.

The house we moved into was twenty-four hundred square feet, two storeys, and built into a slope so the basement exit led to the backyard. The master bedroom was at the rear—unusual placement—and you’d have to cross the den to get from my room to Linnea’s. Right away, she started bitching about a lack of privacy—she was coming seventeen that year—and it didn’t take a genius to figure out she’d want to move downstairs. The basement was unfinished, the externals a mess of ripped poly and pink fibreglass insulation bulging through the tears in tufts. Floor joists and electrical feeds lay exposed overhead. Bare drywall had been screwed to the inside walls. Cecil agreed—actually, he’d strong-armed me into agreeing—to help me make the basement habitable, and during one of his early visits the two of us strolled from one end to the other, beers in hand, inspecting. He clucked his tongue at what he identified as structural faults: two inch-wide holes bored through a load-bearer; no pony wall beneath the bathtub (That’d make a hell of a splash, he guffawed); a darkening of the lumber on the floor joists, beneath my bedroom, that could have been water damage but upon touch felt dryer than bone.

Hope it’s not rot, he told me, and kicked my boot. Or else you might step outta bed one night and fall right through.

On the day things started to go bad, Cecil showed up at my house in a pair of Carhartts and steeltoe boots, with his ballcap tilted low over his eyes and wearing a shirt that said
London: Done It
. It was February, the coldest damned month of all, and a Sunday, and his pounding on my front door roused me from the dopey sleep I’d slipped into. Waking, I couldn’t remember the time of day. The sun had set, the sky gone the colour of antifreeze. I fumbled my hand across my bedside table in search of the lamp switch, heard loose change rattle against the wood and some of it
plump
to the carpeted floor. The room smelled like the ink from a ballpoint pen—the air sticky and heavy enough to feel the weight on your lips. Condensation whitened the inside glass of the window, meltwater pooled on the sill. Cecil pounded in a methodical four-beat loop.

Come on, Archer, I heard him say. Get your lazy ass up. You don’t work that hard.

My truck was in the driveway, so Cecil wouldn’t likely give up.
Determined
falls a few degrees short of describing the level of that man’s persistence. Linnea wasn’t home either, else she’d have answered the door. My hand found the light switch and with a click the room turned amber. Beside me, Nora groaned and rolled onto her side and I saw the shape of her breasts, the ends of her red hair teasing her nipples. Then she registered Cecil’s knocking and hollering, only a few thin pieces of wood between us and his voice, and she bolted upright with blanket tucked to chin. Oh my fuck, she whispered.

My watch showed six-twenty-three in the evening. Nora was supposedly in Cranbrook—an hour and a half south—and the plan, before we dozed off, had been for me to drive her to her car to make the whole thing authentic. That’s how we rolled it, some days. She parked in a place Cecil had no reason to go, or she left vague notes about shopping that’d allow her to stay missing in action all afternoon. Even though she lived across the street, we saw each other once a week if I was lucky. In fact, it probably averaged out to more like once every two.

Nora lowered the blanket level with her armpits, brushed hair from her face. I sat on the edge of the bed and felt the fatigue in my arms and legs, the pleasant ache in my groin. Nora laid her palm flat against my back and I made myself focus on that touch even after her fingers had left. Cecil had no reason to suspect anything. He couldn’t have. I opened the bedroom door wide enough to fit my face through.

Give me a goddamned second, old man, I yelled, and Cecil chuckled, loud so I could hear him.

Nora had lain flat, turned onto her side so she could see me standing naked at the door.

Just distract him, she said, hushed. I’ll walk to my car.

He probably wants a drink, or to work on the basement, I said.

Or both.

Well, he’s your fiancé, I said, and immediately winced.

Twenty-six-ounce flu—that was what I’d tell Cecil. He’d drag me to the City Saloon for some hair of the dog, or he’d tell me to cowboy up and haul me to the basement where we’d mount drywall as he told stories of his workmates, since he actually had workmates for the first time in a long career. Either way, Nora would make a getaway.

Then the front door whined open, and I heard Linnea’s murmuring voice as she and Jack let Cecil through. His heavy boots stomped over the foyer and into the den. Nora looked up at me and I imagined all the horrible ways this could end, what, if anything, I could say to Cecil. He’d want to fight, but I wouldn’t have the heart to give him even that. There was just my bedroom door between us now. I don’t know why I hadn’t told Nora to take cover.

Dad, Linnea called, as she and Jack came through the door behind him. Mr. West is here. I’m supposed to call you lazy.

UPSTAIRS, JACK AND LINNEA’S
footsteps thumped around the living room and kitchen, and whenever the sound approached my bedroom door I had to swallow to loosen the tightness in my throat. Nora was trapped, and though I didn’t necessarily expect it to happen, at any moment Linnea could waltz into my bedroom. It’s not like the place was out of bounds.

Nearby, in the basement with me, Cecil balanced on the third step of a wooden ladder he’d commandeered from the fire station. He held an electric drill above his head, cord wrapped in a spiral down his arm, while he bored holes through floor joists for electrical feeds. Wood shavings rained in his hair and made the place smell like burned cedar. I don’t know where Cecil got the drill from or where he’d learned the basics of electrical wiring, but some mysteries must remain so. Periodically, he let the drill’s motor wind itself spent, and then he’d grin at me from high up. I’d set myself on a wire spool that looked like a giant bobbin. There, I faked hangover.

That door’s a fire hazard, Cecil said, referring to the one in the basement that led out into my backyard. It needed a key to be unlocked, even from the inside, so you could trap yourself. There was also a couch there, probably older than me, that Cecil had said I could have, and that spewed bits of yellow foam if you even looked at it. He said it, too, was a fire hazard, because regulations had changed since its upholstering. Since he’d started working as a fireman, Cecil saw deathtraps in playgrounds, in grocery stores.

Planning to change it, I said, to placate him.

You get trapped down here, that’d be bad news.