Ballistics (31 page)

What’s going on? Archer said.

Truck full of guys. Some guns.

How many?

Three.

More in the tree line, out of sight. Probably.

Below me, in the parking lot, the older man wiped his mouth on one checkered sleeve.

What do you think this is? I said.

Some kind of grudge.

I suppose you’d know.

Archer’s mouth craned open but he didn’t speak. In the parking lot, Colton leaned his ear forward. The other guy spoke. This went on and the three men in the truck kept their hat brims low, kept their fists on their guns, hardly moved. The fires throbbed out of sight, the mountains aglow.

Colton returned to the house and barked an order from the doorway. If anyone moved to carry it out, I didn’t feel the buzz of their footfalls through the floor. Outside, behind him, the white-haired man reclined against the driver door and his mouth yawned wide enough to swallow a fist. He banged on the truck and in it the three guys laughed so their shoulders shook like old generators. He climbed inside. With a hawk of gravel, the truck sped away.

Go check it out, Archer said, his voice low so it wouldn’t carry downstairs.

He won’t tell me anything.

Archer loosed the slow, phlegmy cough of a smoker. He thumped a fist to his thigh. No, he won’t, he said. But you might learn something anyway.

I descended to the restaurant. Colton had donned his gunbelt and strung an RCMP two-way to his shoulder, and its spiral cord hung across his chest. He was leaning forward, wrists on the Verge’s stainless steel counter, this look of immaculate fatigue. Stubble greyed his jawline and beside his nose, on each cheek, a red crescent had flared up in a waxy swath. The dark sunglasses hung folded together from his collar. On occasion his chest rose in bursts but tended to stay deflated, because it would hurt like a bastard to breathe. That he could stand at all was an impressive show of grit: years ago, when Darby broke three of my ribs, I barely had the pain threshold to sit at a computer and type.

Sorry you had to see that, he said.

They didn’t look friendly.

Like I told you earlier, true gentlemen.

He scratched and cupped his ribs and tapped the tips of his teeth together without a click. With his chin to the radio’s mouthpiece, he said, Josh, do you copy?

Moments passed. We waited for a voice to respond through the receiver, choked with static—
Copy, this is Josh
, or
Go ahead, Colton
. But after a few more seconds of radio silence his head bobbed forward, and in the come-down from the anticipation he just stood there and rubbed the nape of his neck. His toe counted out a beat nobody could hear. I watched his elbow draw in and out as he massaged his neck, methodical as a piston.

Do you need a hand? I said.

I need backup, hoss. But thanks.

Where’s your partner?

His mouth pinched so tight the skin on his lip whitened. What’s that mean?

Nothing, I snapped. Josh—your partner? I just can’t imagine you have to run this on your own.

He exhaled with force. Sorry, he said without looking at me. We made some arrests a few days ago, and one of us had to take them to the detachment in Revelstoke. One of us had to stay here. Right about now it’s hard to say who drew the short straw.

Shit, I said.

Yeah. Haven’t heard from him. These kids—they’re his kids.

In the kitchen, my mom called Colton’s name and he hollered back. He rapped his knuckles on the stainless steel.

Think he’s okay?

I can’t exactly go looking for him.

Sorry, Colton, I said.

He waggled his fingers. Then he shoved off the counter. Listen, I know you’re going to make a move.

I haven’t decided anything, I said.

You will, he told me. It’s my job to know these things. But it’s also my job to stop you. So I will.

I’m not your enemy.

Never said you were. We’re just travelling opposite ways down a one-way road, and I’ve got a bigger truck.

My God, I said, and I couldn’t help it, I chuckled.

Colton chanced a grin. Thought you’d like that one. Made it up on the spot.

It’s a good one.

He offered a closed-lip smile, a nod of appreciation. Then his gaze flicked up past my shoulder to the stairwell, and he sucked on his lower lip hard enough that it released with a
pop
. I didn’t have to look behind to know what—or in this case,
who
—had caught his attention. Before I turned, I studied Colton, but he didn’t need his dark sunglasses to appear blank and unreadable.

Don’t you fucking get fooled by him, Archer called.

Colton touched that brass-smooth patch of skin beneath his eye. With the same finger, he scratched two hard lines near his temple. His eyes closed. A slow, centring breath trilled between his teeth. He lifted one foot and checked the sole, then the other, and a curl of dust shivered in the air, gaming with the scent of leather.

Archer, Colton said. What a genuine pleasure it is to see you again.

I got nothing to say to you.

That’s a change.

You ain’t worth my time.

No?

Not one second of it.

I never took you for the forgiving type, Colton said.

I ain’t.

Regular man of the cloth you are, Archer Cole.

You go fuck yourself.

Never held me in a moment’s thought.

Nope.

Even an iota.

Don’t you listen to him, Alan. Don’t you even listen to him.

Both men looked at me, as if I had to take sides or pass a judgment. But this fight was not mine.

Well I got things to see to, Colton said. Unless you’ve got something more to say, old man, another insult or accusation perhaps? A vague threat on my life and well-being?

Archer’s jaw jutted forward in an underbite. These weren’t evil men, those two, but you don’t always have to be. Colton huffed. Archer repositioned himself in his wheelchair. They gunned each other with stares. For a second, I saw the glimmer of the better world that might have been, where both Archer and I got to know Colton and where he let me go on to find Jack because the two of them were buddies. In that world, my family had not been shattered thirty years gone, and I introduced those two men to Darby, now my fiancée. There’d be boyish grins, shadowboxing and fisticuffs on the shoulder, and Archer—not crippled by guilt, not riddled with cancer—would rise from his chair to shake our hands. I don’t know that I could’ve reconciled Archer and Colton, but I could’ve tried. Maybe a person’s fate is decided more readily by the decisions they
don’t
make—maybe being predestined meant ending up precisely where you never decided to be.

Archer said, Fuck you.

Colton touched his forehead in salute. Gentlemen, he said, and went through the kitchen doors.

I watched them swing on their hinges and waited for Archer to bellow out a one-liner like
Don’t let it hit your ass on the way out
, but, upstairs, Archer’s lips peeled over his gums and the skin of his jowls sagged like power lines. It was not a time for jokes, even for him. I ascended to help wheel him to the bedroom, but he rolled away before I mounted the landing. I followed him, leaned on the door frame while he positioned himself at the window. His past, as ever, darkened the world around him. With one meatless hand he dragged the sleeve of his logger’s coat up and bared his scarred arm, the skin off-white and scaled like layers of wax. He rubbed his palm over it, exhaled.

Leave me alone, he said.

Old man.

What?

You can’t go on like this.

He didn’t say anything. I moved across the room, tapped my fist into his wireframe shoulder.

Tell me what happened,
I wanted to say.
You can talk to me
. Instead: This isn’t gonna be easy.

His hand went up and down his arm, over and over. It probably hurt, same way he thumped on his legs. I’m sorry, he said, and rolled up his other sleeve. For a second, he compared the two arms, stretched scarecrowesque before him. The burned arm looked like one of those skinless mannequins you find in school laboratories, the muscle and gristle all candy-heart red and veined with grey capillaries. Archer turned his arms over one way, then the other. The scarring was marbled with streaks the colour of hide, and you could see dollops of white skin near his knuckles and above his elbow where the napalm had splashed at his covered face.

My good side and my bad side, he said, without irony. I’m like Two-Face, but better looking.

Not by much.

He didn’t smile. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. His arms smacked down on his thighs and his sleeves unravelled over his elbows, and with a grace that belied his age and condition he hoisted himself from the chair’s rickety aluminum frame and stood, perfectly balanced and upright so he could peer outside at the mountains and the fires in the distance. Morning had come into swing, and its colours flared through that small window like a thousand kerosene lamps. And Archer, soldier-straight and lit in the flickering reds and golds of sunrise, stared into that light as if about to charge headlong into a fire.

Alan West, my grandson, was born in 1974 under circumstances that plenty of families endure but that I would nonetheless change, given the chance. Cecil wasn’t fazed, or at least he didn’t show it. Nora mumbled sleepy observations into my chest, told me how proud he was, Old Man West, how she’d catch him grinning at himself in the mirror, boyish with anticipation, how he cut back on his drinking, how he cleaned out his storeroom of welding scraps and busted furniture he’d once sworn to repair and a shellshocked standing fan that ventilated their house in the summer.
Making a room
, he told Nora.
This basically turns us into brothers
, he said to me, and punched my shoulder.
This makes us partners.

Jack took a job pushing lumber at Cecil’s sawmill and blew his first paycheque on a barbecue. This was September, the twilight of the year, and south of the border the Americans had a new president and fiercer-than-ever opposition to the Vietnam War. About anyone who cared to look would see that the war effort was on its way down. That was a weird thing to realize, like getting your sense of self split in two. Cecil figured the idea of losing made me bitter. That’s not it: I wasn’t exactly a proponent of the war, but a lot of people died in that jungle and pulling out meant they really did die for nothing. We may have seen things from different angles, me and Old Man West, but I figured he would’ve at least understood what a waste it’d all been.

Nora pressured my daughter to move to the Wests’ home and I found myself often in an empty room, often visiting across the street enough for Cecil to suggest the possibility of pooling our resources. He was a practical man if nothing else. Sometimes at dinner we’d get talking about the war again, and Nora would let us go on for a while before laying into us. The world goes on and families go on around it, or something. More often than not Cecil and Nora spoke of the wedding, too, and I watched Linnea’s smile and swoon and wondered where she’d learned to be such a good liar. Jack mucked about trying to be a dad. He did his damnedest, anyone could see it. A long time ago I thought that’s all it took—a willingness to get your hands dirty, a willingness to put someone else first. Maybe I’m right about that, but I doubt it. An altruist is no use in a firefight; dead men can’t pull triggers. I probably should’ve warned Jack that Linnea was going to leave because he could have stopped her, but Linnea wouldn’t have been happy there in Invermere. At least, this is what I tell myself. Like Nora said, sometimes the toughest decisions are simply the toughest decisions.

Some evenings Cecil stayed late at the fire station and on those evenings Nora would find her way to my place. She never stayed long though, rarely past dark, and I saw her less, touched her less—some evenings we didn’t speak, some evenings she wouldn’t make it past the door frame, wouldn’t help me fill that empty house, and I woke one night knowing our time together would draw to a close. It felt like becoming suddenly aware—truly aware—that I would eventually die. I was losing her to Cecil; their newborn grandson had unearthed the man he was before his first wife’s death. Once, he even mentioned a double wedding, and Nora rolled her eyes and shoved him like a lover.