Ballistics (35 page)

Since it happened, that is. I prefer the cold. Makes me more Canadian, right?

She scraped her fingernails through my hair. I cupped her shoulder.

I shouldn’t stay, she said, and lingered one more moment before sitting up.

She slid her pants on. It shouldn’t be a sexy thing but my opinion of her was so skewed. I thought she had nice knees.

It’s a good thing you don’t stink, she said, eyeing me sideways. Or else he might suspect.

Think he doesn’t?

He doesn’t want to.

Have you ever watched him cry?
Can
Old Man West cry?

He’d say he did all his crying when Emily died.

That’s not fair to you, I said.

It’s not about me, Archer, she said, in a way that didn’t invite comment. She gathered her hair in her fist, tugged on it, strained the muscles in her neck—a bouncing motion. I trailed my fingers along the ridges of her spine, rubbed my hand in one slow, strong sweep between her shoulders. She leaned her weight on my hand. Then, about as gently as I could, I lowered her back into bed.

Seven

Xenophanes:

All things are an exchange for fire,

and fire for all things.

Here’s a story about Archer Cole: In 2003 he sent me alone to my estranged father’s camp, unarmed save a ratbag jeep that’d barely start and a box of sentimental crap meant to bring epiphany to my progenitor’s eyes. Himself, he stayed behind with the dead and the gone—some remaining belief in devotion and justice—and though we’d meet again before the tumour in his spine bore him away, most of the Archer I came to know those two days on the road would remain forever in Owenswood, lost among the bleakness of it all.

I found my mom and Colton in the restaurant’s dining room, in a corner booth with a black coffee each. My mom had her head rested on the cushioned back so her chin pointed at the ceiling. Colton had wedged himself against the wall and kicked up his feet, and as I passed the carafe I hoisted it from its burner and shook it their way. With a grave nod, Colton lifted his hand and made a
come hither
motion with the fingers.

Thank you, he said when I arrived.

No worries.

My mom leaned forward. How’s my dad?

Pissy.

That means he’s fine.

What do you need, Alan? Colton said.

Can I phone Gramps?

Colton shifted to sit normally in the booth. He laced his fingers around the mug, took a loud, exaggerated slurp. Steam wisped off his forehead and he held the mug under his nose, as if it were a fragrant espresso, or even freshly brewed. Here I thought you were going to ask me if you can leave, he said.

Not yet.

Fair enough. We ain’t savages here. Lin, you want to show him, or should I?

Come on then, my mom said. She bid me follow her through the kitchen, where the two boys had vanished from and where she’d repaired her nigh-dead husband. It smelled like a hospital cafeteria. She’d earlier laid Colton on a steel island: no bloodstains à la some horror movie, but I clocked the first aid kit with its contents ransacked. That vague aura of iodine, the wrinkly smell of skin beneath a bandage.

Gramps had undergone similar patch-up; in fact, he all but made a habit of wounding himself miles from hospitals or help or even a bottle of hard liquor to use as sterilization, and though I personally never stitched him up I’d been present many of the times he’d done it himself. Once, he tore his leg calf to knee following an incident of four-wheeler-meets-log. Another time, he knifed his radial artery while slicing bread for a grilled cheese sandwich. One New Year’s Eve he leaped from the Dunbar cabin’s upper window and gashed his forehead on the wooden frame—a drunken misjudgment of depth. Each time, Gramps waved aside all offers of assistance and palmed the needle with a gleam of excitement in his eye. I think it reminds him of a time when the world was wilder and the potential for injury greater, when stakes were higher, and when attendance to your own wounds meant something. You could wind up scarfaced. You could wind up gangrened. His youth, I guess.

You’re going to go after Jack, she said. It wasn’t a question.

If I can.

Colt will arrest you. He’s a good cop.

I understand.

Will he be upset? Cecil, I mean. If you can’t do it.

No, but that’s not the point.

Then what is the point?

The kitchen light flickered and
tick
ed in its socket and my mom and I both looked up at it. We didn’t move, didn’t even flinch. The light
ticka-ticka-ticka
’d like a moth and in my peripherals, in those unreliable half-visioned spaces where what we see may not even be real, I saw Gramps lying deathbed in that shitty hospital room, only Nora at his side—if she’d even still be at his side. Animals don’t prefer to die alone; they just don’t know any better.

Gramps never asked me for anything, I told her, and knew it to be true. Imagine: three decades of selflessness, and now, after how many moons of him not caring about time left on Earth, now that he had at his side the woman he hadn’t spoken of for twenty-nine years—now the clock ticks down? Imagine, to wait so long for a woman and have her appear at your deathbed. Fear, outrage, loss, love. You can dodge a bullet so much more easily than you can dodge a heartache. That’s something Archer would say.

He’s always been there for me, I said.

After a moment, she nodded and took off once more through the building. A rear flight of stairs led to my mom and Colton’s living quarters—separate from where Archer and I had slept, holdover from the days when the Verge had been a bed and breakfast—and we passed beneath a skylight, wedged open with a leather boot. The ceiling was low enough to touch with your elbow, not quite claustrophobic but bordering—a converted loft. Around me, the oddities of her life with Colton lay strewn through the stairwell and hallway and the floor in their living room: a wood giraffe with holes along its flank, for toothpicks or pins; volumes and volumes of great topographic encyclopedias stacked chest-high by the walls and some thrown open to pages that meant nothing to me—maps of the region with red-scrawled walking paths. I gazed at it all longer than I meant to and longer than was polite, but when I turned to her she had only crossed her arms and leaned on a wall. It might’ve been her go-to stance—a half-grin of exasperation-that-wasn’t, as if always in the rhythms of an inside joke. Taking it in: me, this creature that’d appeared in her life. Who knows.

I smell rain, she said, and raised one index vertical.

Above us air leaked through the open skylight and I sucked a strong sniff, that riverbed scent. Sure enough. A drop appeared on the glass and I thought it must mean something: that nature’s elaborate scheme had yet to unfold or that the rain gods had been appeased. It hinted at an end to things—that I could still find Jack. My mom’s eyebrows v’d together and, after a moment, she darted around a corner and out of sight. The suddenness of it—of her being gone—made me think that she had, somehow, disappeared for good.

I heard her pound around in the kitchen, bang shut a cupboard door, and she returned bearing two tin cups, and she tucked them under the skylight, onto the roof, as the rain came down. It was by no means a torrent—back home, my buddies would’ve called it a tinkle—but we stood and listened for the drops that
ploop
ed into those tin mouths. Some stray water moistened the window and a few drops gathered around the sole of the leather boot, slid over the length of it to hang off the low-hanging laces. I don’t know how long we stood there and watched it drip before my mom reached for the tins, each lined with a gulp’s worth of rainwater.

I put the cup to my lips. It takes like smoke, I declared with a laugh.

That’s what it is, my mom said. It’s smoked water.

She swirled the liquid in her mug before skulling it like a shot of liquor. My water had specks of debris along the edges—ash or dirt, the dust of her house. She took me to their kitchen, a room with one square window and stainless steel sinks, the faint afterglow-scent of vinegar used as cleaner. I tried to take it all in: people’s kitchens are portholes to their lives and oddities. Above the sink hung a sewn hen in a skirt, and the tails of plastic bags drooped from its ass. The wallpaper showed stencilled outlines of different dogs, and I clocked the unmistakable outlines of pit bulls and greyhounds, but the rest were mutts and undecipherable to my untrained eye. In the corner, an American flag was wrapped around its pole, its base dusted with disuse, and I imagined that they bust it out for occasions like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. The phone hung in its holster near the fridge—the old corded variety you can picture pressing to your ear as you tried to cook dinner. My mom went to it, checked for dial tone, and passed it to me in that straight-armed way people do in horror movies, as if to cryptically mutter,
It’s for you
.

I’ll be downstairs, she said.

Thank you.

She left me, and I faced the keypad. I dialed home and pressed the receiver to my ear and listened to the tinny rings roll out. Most likely they hadn’t released Gramps from the hospital, and I’d have to call there next, but for whatever reason I dialed his home number first. It was early, but he rose early every day because he loved his mornings, that underbreath of chill before the heat. At three rings I figured I’d let it go once more.

A woman’s voice: Hello?

Nora? I said. It’s Alan.

Hi Alan.

How’re you guys doing?

You know your grandfather, she said, but I couldn’t tell if she was making a joke.

Archer’s still kicking.

That’s good news. Did you find Linnea?

Yes.

From her end came a small
tick
, a fingernail rapped on mouthpiece.

Gramps awake? I said.

Is the American there with Linnea?

Yes.

She paused. Crib?

Yes.

I listened to her breath, rhythmic, unhurried. How’s Archer?

Still kicking, I said, very slowly.

Alan
.

He asked me to bring him a gun.

Did you?

No.

Okay, she said, sounding tired, or fed up. I’ll go wake Cecil.

Her footsteps droned over Gramps’ echoey floor. I still wonder how much she knew of Archer’s goal on that trip, what they’d talked about and if she’d deciphered, over their years together, what drove him. He’d pined for his daughter for three decades; at first, I thought it an immense act of love, of dedication unparalleled, but I realize now that it may been something else—those other, darker emotions that can sustain us. Jealousy, revenge.

Gramps manhandled the phone to his ear. The hell do you want? he said.

Thought I’d call to make sure you hadn’t gone lazy.

Big words.

I can’t punch you through the phone, I said. But I would.

He chuckled. Face to face, I’d have seen those spark burns on his chin rise with the hook of his smile. Things going alright?

It’s not a walk in the park, that’s for sure.

I don’t want you out there anymore. Too dangerous.

Sympathy, Gramps? From you?

I imagined his grin, the fire that enters his eyes when he spies a fight, even a silly one. You know what they say about sympathy?

The flak you give me, I said. After all I’ve done for you.

He loosed something like a sigh—that comfort of sinking into a routine you know well, a place you like. He had so few people, I realized.

Gramps.

You can head home now, he said, weakly.

The receiver scratched against his chin, the stubble. He didn’t know how to ask for help—I don’t think he ever really learned how. Archer die yet? he said.

He’s trying to help.

Gramps grunted, whatever that meant. Nora says there’s an American there.

Colton, yeah.

I knew him as Crib.