Once You Break a Knuckle (14 page)

—Wanna head out on the boat? Sampson said.

—S'a two person, enn'it? Winch's dad said.

—Dally ken steer it. Let the boys have a go.

Winch's dad slurped from his beer, tipped his head and jiggled the can.

Sampson was leaning forward on his knees. —What'dya think, Dal?

Dallas mumbled to his chest.

—Didn't raise ya to be a chickenshit, Sampson said.

—Can go with our boys, Winch's dad said. —Take a turn. Might not mind a go muhself.

Sampson pitched his empty sideways along the porch. —Pfah, he said, then spat. —Least yer boy ent too chickenshit to go out. He stood and wrapped one greasy palm around the Winchester's barrel and caught Dallas by the collar. The two of them lurched to the lake's edge.

Winch's dad was half on his feet. Sampson planted the rifle in the sand and it fell over instantly. Waves lapped its heel. He had Dallas by the shirt and he swung his gaze from his son to the rifle. Then he smacked the boy with his free hand, just the fingers, but hard enough for Dallas to clench his teeth, squinch his eyes.

—What kinda feet per second this thing get, Doc? Winch's dad said, coming down the beach.

Sampson swayed sideways and released his son. He lifted the rifle in two hands and held it waist level like a gangster. —Fuck ef I know, he said, and blinked heavily. —Let's get the boys on the water, let 'em have some fun.

Winch's dad closed his fist around the Winchester's barrel. —Might be ya had enough to drink, Doc, he said.

Sampson tugged. —Fuck off.

—I'll just go put 'er back.

Sampson tugged harder. Winch's dad stepped forward heavily, didn't release. —Don't be an idiot, he said.

—Ricki said you were a dick, ya know.

—
Fuck
.
Her
, Winch's dad said.

—We're a pair now.

—Doc, let go of the gun.

—Fuck you Conner et's
my
gun.

His face was scoured inward but all at once it went lax, his lips drooped, eyes unsquinched. He smiled. —Eh, look at us. Let's just get the boys on the water an' forget about all this.

Winch and his dad shared a look. His dad's jaw went stiff but his eyes sagged and Winch understood he ought to take Dallas out, to get Sampson to shut up, distract him. —Come on Dal, he said.

Sampson kept his tin boat some ways down the shore, anchored to a felled tree with a carved-up trunk. The boat had a plastic bench from port to starboard and a rusted-out motor with a pull-cable so stiff and knotted
Winch could barely wiggle it. Behind them, his dad and Sampson stood off, too far for Winch to hear them talk. Occasionally, one would tug and the other would shake his head. Dallas untethered the boat and passed Winch a gnarled paddle and they pushed off and the underside scraped the lake bottom.

They paddled across the water, not out on the water but toward their dads, a shallow arc. The sun lit the lake's surface like a grease fire. Both men had changed positions: his dad had his back to the water now, shoulders rolled down and head hunched and fists at his side. Sampson had the .308 levelled at his dad's chest. From that range it'd blow a man's heart clear out. As Winch and Dallas paddled nearer, their voices skipped across the water, mere murmurs at first.

—Pretty dummuya, Winch's dad was saying.

—Don't have a choice. She said ya got a bunch of loose cash.

—Gave that up. She robbed me twice.

The boat rocked suddenly and Winch tore his eyes from the shore to see Dallas terror-gripped on the boat's edge. He was throwing his weight back and forth and his eyes were pinched shut and he made a humming noise.

—Dal, stop, Winch said.

—I don't like boats, he said.

Water sloshed over the tin edge and soaked his shoe. Winch tried to throw his weight counter to Dallas but it didn't seem to matter. The boat seesawed in the water, tottered, and splashed aright. Winch grabbed for the other
boy, tried to hold him steady, but Dallas had fear-strength and he was muttering to himself. Water sloshed over the gunwales. The hull rocked.

—Dal! Winch said.

—I don't like boats, Winch.

—Our boys are goin under, Winch heard his dad say.

—Ya gotta do it, Sampson said. —Ya gotta.

—Nope. Nope Doc.

—Y'owe me, Con man, y'owe me.

—I don't owe ya. I'm here aren't I. Wer square.

—Wer not square, Con man.

Winch gulped a mouthful of air as Dallas stood up and the boat flipped. He hit the water cheek first and the shock of the chill nearly drew the breath from his lungs. The boat beat his calves as it overturned and Winch propellered around until he could stop himself. The boat's base cut the lake's oil-lamp surface. They weren't far from the shore but no one had ever taught him to swim. He kicked out. He raked his hands through the water. His shoes weighted his feet and his clothes shucked against his skin. That gulp of air hung in his throat, right at the soft divot above his breastbone, and already he felt pressure building. Sunlight pierced the darkness under the water. Sediment and tackle-like debris lit up like stars.

He found himself in a sphere of light as though in a candlelit room. His gums shrunk inward with the cold. His eyes stung. He swished water in his mouth and tasted seaweed, clamminess, the eel-like texture of his inner cheek. At the cusp of his vision a weatherbeaten truck rusted at
the bottom of the lake. Algae eked along its sagging tires and the exposed metal under paint. Corrosion had eaten the hood, and the engine and all its parts sparkled when the water's surface shifted. The driver door faced him, loose on its hinges, as though the man behind the wheel had bailed in a hurry. Winch knew stories about guys who lost their trucks to the frozen water. The side said:
Chevrolet
. It was like no Chev he knew anyone to drive. Old. It had to be old. He once saw a burnished-bronze truck trundle into a parking space between two baby pines, on the main street, outside the candy shop, and as the engine wound down it had stuttered, violently, and backfired a clot of exhaust with a loud
KA-BLAM
, muffled thunder, deep but loud enough for Winch, suspended under the water, to hear and wonder at.

Then he was rushing upward and air whispered on his cheek and then mud sucked at his hair. His dad towered above him, ballcap gone, damp hair combed over the crest of his skull, his jeans and checkered shirt watersopped and heavy. Winch coughed and spewed lake water and pushed onto his elbows. His dad had one arm pressed to his side and his lips peeled over his teeth and his greying hair matted to his head. Blood smeared his open hand and the flannel overcoat where his arm snugged fabric to torso.

—Y'awright? Winch heard himself say.

His dad nodded. —Ya need a minute?

—Throat hurts.

Winch got to his feet and tucked his shoulder under his dad's armpit and his dad let weight onto him. Sampson
was spreadeagled on the shore. Waves licked the soles of his steeltoes. Dallas shivered beside him.

—Get the keys, Winch's dad said, and Winch eased from beneath the arm and his dad tilted sideways, winced. Dallas kept still as Winch rifled through Sampson's pockets. A
Go Flames
dog tag dangled from the key chain. The .308 lay half-submerged, waterlogged, spent.

—Get the gun too, his dad said.

Winch fetched it, felt the weight in his hands like a baseball bat.

—Might need you to drive, his dad said.

—Is he dead? Dallas said, and tapped Sampson on the chest.

—Choked out. He'll live. Get inside where it's warm.

Winch drove his dad to the hospital. The doctors phoned his gramps and the old guy showed up without the fake eye. He clutched the hem of his checkered coat. Those big hands were bone-white and the empty socket, rinsed and wet with saline, glistened like a mouth.

THEY STITCHED HIS DAD
. That same day, the three of them sat in the backyard and his gramps laid the .308 Winchester across his knees. He cleaned it of water and sand. His dad cradled a mug of coffee in his lap and Winch listened to his gramps's hands clack the mechanical parts, jimmy the bolt to oil it.

—I useta be a pretty good shot, his gramps said, and rubbed a gummy rag along the barrel. —Y'ever fired one of these? he asked, and when Winch shook his head his
gramps came over and looped those old arms around him. —Keep et tight against yerself.

Winch pressed the wooden stock to the crook of his arm, cupped his hand around the trigger and steadied the muzzle with his palm.

—Ef ya don't keep 'er tight, this'll happen, his gramps said, and touched a crescent scar on the lower cusp of his ocular, about the size of the eyepiece. —S'not a lot of meat between the scope and yer bone, he said.

It felt good, not the weight of it but the power. Winch narrowed his vision to a span the size of a thumb. Things entered that tiny window and then disappeared. When he swung the rifle the world whirred like a slot machine and Winch counted objects as they skipped by: wood chipper, junky Studebaker, oil drums. His finger curled around the trigger. A group of crows rose to the sky, wheeled, pitched toward the Rocky Mountains. His gramps laid a hand on his shoulder. Winch squeezed and held his breath and waited for the rifle to snarl.

A BIG COP WITH
dark glasses and a sagging lip swung by with questions because he heard someone got shot. Winch's dad blamed his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his son. The cop nodded and departed, and Winch didn't see Dallas again. According to his dad, Sampson filled the truck with food and supplies and crammed his TV between blankets and a garbage bag of clothes, and with his son beside him he bailed for the East Coast. —Runnin from more 'en just the cops, he heard his dad say.

When Winch entered highschool he began half-hearted attempts at his homework. He passed his classes, if barely. He excelled at tech, woodworking and metal art, and the teacher for both was a dust-haired blonde named Miss Hawk who had enough wrinkles to make her mom-like. She wore scuffed jeans and weathered-down shirts and she had a habit of curling her lower lip over her teeth. Winch wasted hours in her shop while other boys lobbed shot puts, joined basketball teams. Miss Hawk taught him how to bore a stripped screw and the best way to countersink bolts through a steel sheet. Winch earned the right to the school's only chop saw and used it to shave a dowel rod into hexagonal posts for a bird feeder. During metal art he fashioned a wire-frame buggy with workable pistons that pumped when it rolled down a ramp. For machine tech he embarked on a project to rehaul a 1953 Rocket 88 Miss Hawk had rusting in her garage. She told him it belonged to her ex, a welder who took off with a girl half his age. It was the nicest car Winch had ever seen. Miss Hawk and him worked into the bleeding hours nightly. They sandblasted and rewired faults. They polished joints, and Winch recounted his experience of that ancient Chev on the lake bottom at Brisco, how it sort of lingered in his head. Miss Hawk listened with her thumbnail pinched in the corner of her mouth and one knee bent and resting atop a sawhorse. She tossed her hair over her shoulder as he lay on a skid, half tucked under the car. Her overalls swelled at the chest and his eyes could trace her figure despite the baggy clothes. He noticed for the first time the curve of pink skin at her neck so unlike her soot-stained hands. His ears heated and he was thankful to be buried to his ribs under the Rocket 88. For a long time, hers was the body he'd fall back upon in his loneliest nights.

Winch's gramps took to teaching him how to best fire the Winchester. When he came home he'd wing his homework on the kitchen table and head for the backyard. In the distance the Purcells reared ancient and corroded like riverbanks. His gramps set targets on all the junk accumulated on the lawn: oil drums, half a fridge, a trailer nobody ever used. Winch would check and recheck the Winchester, cock the bolting mechanism, and painstakingly blaze those empties to grain. With each shot he'd eject the spent shell and whiff the chamber and its breathy scent of scorched bronze.

At sixteen years old his friends wrangled him to a party at the gravel pits, where he shot straight vodka and finished in a sleeping bag with a pig-tailed girl named Mandy. Her hair smelled like tea leaves and her lips had that cabbage taste of marijuana. Winch had no idea what to do. She wasn't much encouragement. Amid the haze of alcohol and embarrassment and the low, bleating hum of love songs, the only way he could chance an erection was to imagine Miss Hawk with her lips at his cock. Afterward, Mandy jerked onto her side. Figures moved inside trucks and boys stole glances at girls who hadn't covered themselves. Winch listened to canvas and bodies rustle. One last shipping flat was hurled onto the fire. Country ballads rambled from a truck, the bass so thick his heart
quivered, and the whole place smelled like alcohol and anticipation.

FOR CHRISTMAS, MISS HAWK
presented him with a book called
Layman's Machinist
that contained the schematics for home-built contraptions: a self-making bed; a diesel-fuelled toaster that toasted bread in four and a half seconds; a two-person biplane with an aerofoil constructed from the scraps of a weathervane.

They were late in the shop as usual. Miss Hawk examined a stack of student-built toolboxes at a dinted wood desk, lit with a construction lamp. Winch lay on the concrete, elbow-deep in mechanics. He'd discovered a problem with intake, but with a barbecue lighter and a can of aerosol lubricant he got the engine chortling. Occasionally Miss Hawk snorted at a stupid flaw. She'd cut her hair short – ear length – and dyed it a deep maroon. She wore a yellow dress that hung to her knees. —I don't need to get dirty with you around, she'd remarked when she caught him noticing.

—Winch, she said, and he wheeled himself from beneath the car. —Let's take it for a spin.

Snow covered the ground, inches deep, and more fell from the sky in flakes the size of his big toe.