Ballistics (34 page)

Not like this. Not by choice. I’m real sorry, Archer.

Not your fault.

I think it partly is.

I fucked up, man, I said.

Crib?

Linnea. Hit me with a wine bottle.

He didn’t crack the joke. Why?

I searched my hands, inspected the gouges on the knuckles and the gravel burns on the palms and the dirt and grit beneath the nails. It felt like inspecting someone else for wounds, the foreignness of my own goddamned limbs. They furled to fists and unfurled and I don’t even know if I was in control of the motion, that act.

Because I was going to kill him, I said.

Cecil knocked on the porcelain of the sink, for the reprieve of any sound, any distraction. That won’t leave this room.

I got nothing left now, I said, damn near naming his fiancée. Not nobody.

A grandson, Cecil said.

Yeah, I guess that means something?

He made a sound, not quite a grunt, the kind of sound that accompanies a sad smile. I heard his arms cross, his foot
tap-tap-tap
the laminate floor.

You okay otherwise? Not bleeding anywhere you shouldn’t be?

I patted my bicep, thought I could feel the ripple of its gnarled skin through the cotton.

What happened, anyway?

Fucking friendly fire. That’s what does you in, what you never see coming.

He grunted, didn’t say a word, and bless him.

I rolled up the sleeve of my shirt, bared the biceps and its scar to the steam. It felt, like it always does, as if constricting, as if the skin had gone taut.

I hate fire. Scares the almighty out of me. Couldn’t do what you do.

God made firefighters so soldiers would have someone to look up to, he said, though he was just a voice, my vision so blurred and fogged.

The shape of him moved forward, opened the bathroom door. Lisps of steam funnelled out.

Cecil, I said, and he turned, but I couldn’t see his face, just its outline, and I didn’t know what the hell else to say. You know.

He might have nodded, and went out the door. I stood and wrestled my shirt off and the cotton glued to my skin like neoprene, and as it came over my head I caught a good look at myself in the mirror: the blueing bones around my eye, the yellowy bruises and cuts potholing my chest, beer gut and pasty flesh and scraggly hairs and muscles sagging like a man my age. My stubble was bristly with dirt and blood, and Nora had swept my hair back so she could inspect my forehead for injury. I could have been a beat-up action hero without all the good looks and bad puns. I could have been a man who’d been struck down by his daughter, who’d come very close to making a mistake he’d never set right. Sometimes, it’s hard to look yourself in the eye.

I got into the shower and let the water thrum against my back, let the warmth bleed forward. When I lowered my head the heat stung gashes, so I opted against shampoo—just massaged splashes into my hair and watched the water run ochre. The streams thumping on my face put the ache to rest, too, but that could have been the painkillers.

I came out of the bathroom to a shadowy house, a lone glowing lamp in the living room with its shade like a hot-air balloon. There, Nora had curled into the couch with her feet tucked beneath her. She rested her cheek on her wrist, eyes closed, but they eased open as I tiptoed out of the hallway. I hefted my ruined clothes and she gestured at the kitchen, where I deposited them into the trash.

Cecil gone to bed? I said.

Works early. I can wake him, if you want.

That wouldn’t be fair to the guys he works with, I said, and sat down on the far end of the couch so there was a full cushion between us. I tried not to look at her, because she was so good looking and because she was Cecil’s fiancée and because Cecil, with one or two exceptions, had everything he wanted. Sitting there, in his house, on his couch, I understood what had to happen, eventually.

No fire burned in the room’s small wood stove, inset on a brick heat sink. Not that a fire ought to have been burning but I wouldn’t have complained, right then. Paintings hung on either side of it, and a tapestry. Nora had told me that one of those paintings—a panda bear stuffing its face with bamboo—was her sister’s, and her sister’s first, given as a gift for all the support she’d shown during the process of its creation.
I find it fascinating
, she’d told me, the first time I realized I had something she wanted, something Cecil didn’t have.
The creative process, all that kind of stuff.

Outside, a gust howled against the window and the crabapples on Nora’s frail tree jittered but didn’t fall. Raindrops
tink
ed the glass, were shushed away by the wind. Nora looked at me and then at the couch we were sitting on.

If you’re too cold to go home, she said.

I shouldn’t stay.

She looked at the couch, and I marvelled at the gap between us. I thought that maybe her heels had come untucked and that her socked feet were closer to mine than when I first sat down.

Okay.

I just shouldn’t, I said, and leaned forward, put my elbows on my knees. I turned my hands over, and over again. The knuckles showed blue and nicked like a raw piece of whittled pine, like they used to look when I was younger, fierier, when I’d lean over the steel basin in my laundry room while the ex massaged iodine in the cuts, winched gauze across my palms like ammo slings. Those were some times, just the bullshit of them. Maybe you miss the worst parts of people the most.

Your
knuckles
, Nora said, and reached to touch them. Her words were all breath. She took my nearest hand and flipped it in her palm. Her skin was cool, looked soft, and the warmth of her bled into my hand like the heat from a cup of morning coffee. Christ, she was such a good-looking woman, such a good woman—my eyes burned just trying to keep her in focus, to not get all swoony.

She slid across the couch and I smelled her—the outdoors, rainy air, that scent of no flowers or all of them, the kind of scent that attracts bees. Even clean she smelled like that, just naturally. Her fingers traced my swollen fists, the purply edges of the gashes that were like tightly pressed lips. Her pyjama sleeve was bunched above her elbow and I counted the freckles that dotted her arms, the soft, invisible hairs.

It’s okay, she said.

I don’t know, I told her.

I won’t tell Cecil.

Fuck Cecil.

He wouldn’t care anyway, she said, close enough that her breath tickled my collar, the stubble on my jaw. Outside, the drumbeat of raindrops on the road and the roof rose in tempo, rattled on the shingles and the hood of Cecil’s old truck, and then eased off. The baby—Alan, my grandson—loosed a brief, high-pitched yawn, and then he, too, went silent. Somewhere on the dark highway out of town, Crib pressed against the passenger door, gathered his field coat around him—he’d be damp, he’d be cold—and tilted his cadet’s hat over his eyes, kicked a boot up on the dashboard of his star-spangled car. Then he’d release a deep, relieving breath that could easily be mistaken for a sigh, for a balm against pain, and not what it truly was: contentedness, satisfaction, because he had what he wanted, what I could not have. He had my daughter. Nothing scares me more than loneliness.

Nora brushed a tear off my cheek. I don’t know when I’d started to cry.

Cecil’s too much of a father to care, she said. Then she clamped her hand on the nape of my neck and tugged my head to her shoulder, and I inhaled the full scent of her and squeezed my eyes and felt the moisture bloom in the cotton of her shirt. Her fingers combed through my hair, scraped along my scalp, almost like Crib’s but so much different. Why are acts of affection so similar to acts of violence—or is that just me?

It’s okay, she whispered, and it felt like she was telling the truth, that Linnea would be back, that I’d hear Crib’s muffler-less car sputter into my driveway across the street. Me and him would shake hands; a misunderstanding after all.

I reached for Nora. My hand slipped against her belly and her elbow cinched down over it, her body twisted sideways, her fist balled in my hair and gently torqued, leveraged my chin up, my mouth open. I could taste her, almost, the earthiness and my own tears and the grit unwashed from the ridges of my gums, the crevices between teeth, places of dirt and gravel. Somewhere, a car carried my daughter over asphalt, over distance, carried her away and away and away.

What’re you doing, Nora said, as if through closed lips. I felt the bulge of her ribs, the one she broke that had healed funny—her perfect inadequacies, the things that made her beautiful. The things that made her
her
.

Archer, she snapped.

Nora, I said.

He’s in the next room.

Please.

Nora’s shoulders lifted and fell. She gathered her hair in her fist and tugged on it, a nervous habit maybe, and I didn’t take even a second to guess what must have been going through her mind. Tunnel vision, as they say. Then she got up and walked over the carpet without worry of noise, to their bedroom—hers and Cecil’s—and stopped in the doorway. She leaned into the frame, arms crossed and one heel raised so only the tip of her foot touched the ground. She could see Old Man West by light of the streetlamp—the same one that illuminated my house across the street. I just watched her there, breathing, watching her fiancé. Cecil rarely slept under covers—didn’t get cold at night—so she’d have seen the whole of him, the mountainous fact of him, all of him casket-like on the bed, fingers laced together on his naked stomach. I don’t know how long she stayed there. I don’t know if I was one sudden wake-up from finally losing her, if Cecil needed only turn over and blink sleep from his eyes and grin happily, sleepily, pat the bed where he expected her to join him, where he’d wrap his stubborn arms around her midsection and hug her close. She loved him. Anybody could see that.

But Nora turned away from that bedroom. She came to me, waited while I fumbled with my shoelaces and eventually padded along behind her with them untied. She grabbed one of Cecil’s work coats from its peg and draped it over her shoulders. We took care to let the door close without a sound. We took care to dart around the ring of orange light that lit the scabby street in a circle. We used the back door that led into the still-unfinished basement, sweet with the smell of sawdust and drywall. In that room, the old couch with its foamy guts spilling from the seams was too obvious to ignore. Nora discarded her work coat.

Then she was in my arms, or I was in hers, and she tugged my shirt over my head as I kicked off those unlaced shoes. She pulled me onto the couch, or I pushed her, our noises sharp and truncated, an intake of breath or a quick release of it—the intimate voices and motions and patterns nobody knew but us. I pushed her shirt up and her breasts appeared, and I put my mouth to them. She arched toward me. I got my hand under the elastic of her pyjamas. The ends of her hair spilled over my back, tickled my neck and shoulders and the old couch coughed up more lemony foam, enough for us to quicksand into the cushions, and as I entered her it was a moment of held sound, of quiet, of anticipation and then realization and then wonder—two gasps, one the echo of the other, and I saw her whole body like a landscape, the way air tickled over it, the shimmer of her skin like lake surface, the moguls of her ribs, pale and white but made amber by the streetlamp, the oaky muscles of her neck and her jaw and the clefts that formed in the corners of her eyes, the meeting place of arm and chest, all her hidden mysteries and the mysterious way she moved, now, out of sight of daylight and prying eyes. And there was no more need, no more worry—not right then. All things would be rendered new. All weary travellers would reach their destinations of rest and reconcile. This was always the only way it would end.

AFTERWARD, WE HUDDLED
together on the dying couch, sticky and cold but content to lie there and make each other’s arms go numb. I kissed a freckle on her shoulder, cupped my hand over her breast. I love you, I said.

She blew a long trail of air out her nose. So does Cecil.

What’s gonna happen?

I don’t know, she said, and shifted so that pins and needles prickled my arm.

What do you want to happen?

I don’t know that either.

She braced a wrist on my chest and got herself up on one elbow, pressed along the length of me. With her free hand she touched the wrecked skin on my bicep, shrivelled like an apple peel. Even the heat from her finger made flesh tighten, tingle—not painful, but almost.

Does it hurt?

When you touch it?

In general, she said, her voice low and growly. She put her lips to it; the warmth from her breath itched, like washing yourself.

Only around heat. But it’s not pain, really.

Cecil saw a guy get lit on fire, burned real bad.

He’s a braver man than me. Running into fires.

Don’t say that, she said.

I like the cold, I said, flexed the muscle there and saw, for a second, the way that arm looked when it first happened—bloodied and gobbed with juice or skin and yellow and so red it could’ve been black, the smell like roasting pork, swear to God.