Once You Break a Knuckle

by W. D. Wilson

  —Nup, his dad said, and lowered him. The fist relaxed, unfurled. He brushed Winch’s shoulder, as if to remove dirt. —I won’t be that guy.

  He faced Miss Hawk. She’d started the Rocket and pulled around to leave. Winch leaned on the tree, a wide trunk, but not the one they built the tree fort on – too old, unsure roots, too much risk. His dad, facing the Rocket, turned his hands out as if to say, who could’ve known?

  IN THE MORNING, Winch found his dad hunched at the kitchen table and his gramps pressed into the wedge where counters intersected, arms across his chest. It smelled like charred toast and burned eggs left to soak in the pan. Outside, what little snow they’d had was melted to a great bowel of mud and salt. Condensation pooled on the windowsills and the weak sun beat his dad’s shoulders. His gramps plucked the glass eye from its socket and set it on the countertop. It lolled on its side.

  —Winch, I didn’t mean to scare ya, didn’t mean to hurt ya, his dad said. He stared straight ahead and set both his hands on their ridge, fingers stacked upright. —Got some things comin back to me is all.

  —Happens, Winch said.

  —Might be I need a break, ya know?

  His gramps cleared his throat and the phlegm caught like a stalled engine. The glass eye tinked against a ceramic mug. He drew his thumbnail down the scar bisecting his socket.

  —Sure, Winch said.

  —Didn’t know Millie was yer teacher, is all.

  —You had a thing?

  —Were bad times.

  His dad looked anywhere but at him.

  —Where ya gonna go? Winch said.

  —Won’t be away a long time.

  —How we gonna get money?

  His dad clicked his teeth and his hands rose level with his nose. He pressed them together. —Left yer gramps a stack of cash, sompthen I been savin, just in case.

  Winch noticed the hiking pack on an adjacent chair and the puffy balloons of skin hanging over his dad’s cheekbones. His hair was greasy and it matted his ears, greyer than Winch could remember, but also thinner, like he’d been tugging at it. His beard had grown and the whiskery hair stained his face like soot.

  —I didn’t mean to hurchya, Winch.

  —Boy knows that Conner, his gramps said.

  —I gotta make sure he does.

  —He does.

  —I’m not leavin fer good, his dad said. He twisted in his chair to face the older man.

  His gramps reached for the glass eye, rinsed it under the tap, and popped it in. His eyelid fluttered for a moment and the orb spun. —Winch dodn’t know that.

  —I just told ’im I’m not.

  —Awright.

  —I just told ’im! his dad said, and slammed his palm on the table.

  Winch put his shoulder in the door frame. —Where’re ya goin? he said.

  His dad slung the pack over his shoulder. It jingled and tinked with items that didn’t sound like food and clothes. —Might be I just need a break, his dad said.

  After he was gone, Winch stayed in the dark kitchen with his gramps cross-armed at the counter. The old guy watched the floor, chin to chest. Then he plopped the glass eye into his palm and reached for a wallet-sized bottle by the sink and squirted a line of saline solution in the socket. His gramps blinked and wiped a channel of liquid at the corner and said, —Fucken shit always makes my eyes water.

  At school Miss Hawk wouldn’t look at him. She was in her jeans and roughing shirts, but as he worked wood under a lathe or fit elbows and scored razor edges, Winch pictured her in that yellow dress, the way her face glowed from the ice reflection. —Millie, he mouthed to his metal. —Millie. He tried staying late, but she told him he had a key now, he could lock, and he spent four hours alone in the garage.

  He took up shooting again. Him and his gramps played Donkey, like the basketball game but with rifles. They took turns propping empty Kokanee cans in obscure places on the shooting range: peeking over the lip of the Studebaker’s box; half-visible among the branches of a willow tree; suspended on chicken wire so it swayed in the wind like an arm. Winch figured the lone eye gave his gramps an advantage, because the old bastard iron-sighted shots Winch couldn’t gamble with a scope. They stocked ammo in a tin cigar case and after their games his gramps rattled the dwindling contents and looked up the road.

  Each day he checked the entryway for his dad’s steeltoes.

  At school, Winch kept with tweak-work on the Rocket, but the spring semester meant new electives he hated but needed to graduate, like art, and biology, and a course called Communication for kids too dumb for real English. The art teacher was a stout woman named Miss Mary Mason who wore a cooking apron and gave the best marks to clever pieces. A deathly skinny kid made a door out of jars and called it The Door is Ajar. The preacher’s son dismembered plastic dolls and fashioned himself an Armchair. Winch couldn’t draw and he couldn’t paint and he wasted the hour flipping through Layman’s Machinist, desperate for an idea. He read the article on the home-built biplane. It included a sketch of the product, so he hit Miss Hawk’s shop and tried his luck with a miniature. He bolted it together with nail guards, drywall anchors, and an EMT union so it could swivel at the base. Mason graded it a B, said it wasn’t art, but good craft. He pawned it to his gramps, who set it on his windowsill beside a banana-sized cactus and a set of dog tags.

  His gramps started telling him to make sure the lights were off, his heat dialed down. He started coughing too, at night and in the morning – low, sledge-like sounds while he mulled his coffee.

  A girl named Chris with hair the colour of motor oil asked Winch if he’d like to go to a movie. She had compact lips and a dimple more prominent on one side than the other. She said she liked the way he handled things. She said she liked his little biplane. Winch mumbled an acceptance and paid their way to the Toby Theatre on money his gramps thrust into his palm with a wink. The Toby’s seatbacks were padded with maroon shag carpet, and overhead, models of World War Two fighters swung from long threads. They pressed hip to hip in a two-person seat and Winch supplied the popcorn and halfway through Blazing Saddles they were tongue deep. She tasted like butter and she grabbed incessantly for his hands, and he didn’t know why.

  IN EARLY SPRING, Chris suggested they sneak to the natural hot springs at the Fairmont resort. One of her brother’s friends, a kid they called Squints, tagged along. Squints had curly, pubic-like hair and glasses as thick as a finger. Winch had ideas about the guy, but didn’t voice them, swiped his gramps’s only bush-lamp, a million-candle beast. When his gramps saw it tucked under his arm, he leaned forward on the couch, where he spent more and more time.

  —Ya gonna do sompthen stupid?

  —Prolly.

  His gramps coughed phlegm and with an apologetic look hawked into a ceramic mug with a picture of two old guys tending a bonfire. He was chalk-white. —I don’t wanna waste gas pickin y’up from jail.

  —I can hiket.

  —Worried about bears?

  —Nup.

  His gramps lurched upright, hands gripped on his thighs. —Winchester won’t stop a bear, anyway, he said, and fingered an empty .308 cartridge centred in a placemat on the table. He tapped his forehead where hair met skull. —Skulls so thick they ricochet bullets an’ whatever else.

  —Gotta catch ’em in the neck, Winch said.

  His gramps shook his head, opened his mouth. —Gums.

  Chris drove her dad’s Suburban. The journey would take forty minutes, another ten to zigzag to a point where they could hike for the springs. Winch inspected Chris’s tires before they hit the road. He remarked that they looked bald as all hell and she flashed him her dad’s BCAA card and told him to get in the fucken truck.

  They reached a toll booth where a man in a blue blazer wore circular glasses perched too far down his nose. He peered crow-like at them, slid his window open and dangled one tattooed hand menacingly out the booth.

  —Nope, he told them. —Springs are closed for tonight.

&nb
sp; —We’ve got friends at the resort, Chris said.

  —Don’t think you do.

  They retreated. Winch notched his seat forward. Chris hunched over the wheel like a rodent and Squints stayed silent in the backseat and Winch wondered if he planned to contribute anything to the entire trip.

  —Could get some booze, Chris said. She pulled onto the shoulder and flicked the cabins on. —I might not get ID’d.

  —No, Squints said. In the mirror Winch saw him stretch an arm along the seat. He nodded toward the box and his tongue passed along his teeth and his lip bulged with it. —We can get to the springs guerrilla style. Old guy won’t see us. I know some guys doin a party there. Pretend like we’re in Vietnam.

  —How long? Winch said.

  —Hour up, same down.

  They left the Suburban in the lot of an A.G. Foods grocery, under a sodium street lamp that lit the silver vehicle like a pumpkin. Squints declared his right to lead. Winch waved him by. As they embarked, Chris told him she’d watched an episode of Twilight Zone where a wild-eyed hunter prowled through the forest only to find himself prey to a terrible beast. He tugged her hip against his. When Winch flicked his gramps’s massive bush-lamp, Squints ducked as though under fire. —Keep it off, he hissed.

  —Awright Sergeant Squints Sir, Winch said, and saluted.

  Near the toll the old guy peered through his lenses as if he’d spotted movement. Squints swathed through the brush. Winch held his arm in front of his eyes to catch whipping branches. They appeared on a mountainous road and the resort’s lights brimmed in the night sky like fog. Squints passed rubbery water bottles around. Chris circulated a joint. Whenever headlights appeared they barrelled for the ditch, and Winch gashed his elbow in one of the dives.

  Chris prodded the skin. —You have thin blood.

  —And a thick skull, Winch said.

  —Best place to get hit with a beer bottle, Squints said, and rapped his forehead.

  Winch’s dad had a scar curled over the crest of his forehead, same spot Squints was tapping with his knuckles. After the house burned his mum disappeared, except for one night when she snuck in the rear door of his gramps’s place. Winch’s dad shovelled stew from his bowl and watched an episode of Dr. Who, and though his dad saw her coming, no man alive could have dodged that bottle. Winch looked on from the bedroom where he tucked into the corner with a stray cat named Kalamazoo. Biggest scrap his parents ever dug into, first time he saw real desperation, the way a man gets wild-eyed when he’s on the defensive. His dad spent a day laid out with a concussion and two bust knuckles. If he flattened his hand on a hard surface and lifted his middle finger, the bone would rear like a serpent.

  They crossed a bridge. Winch grabbed for the fibrous rail and it slickened his palm. A river howled beneath him and the trees on the water’s edge shuddered like a drying dog. He hadn’t trekked through wilderness for a while. The air hung with dew and the scent of snowfall and the bridge swayed and the moon scythed amid clouds. Halfway across he latched on to the rope rails and braced his legs on the net siding and hoped for a gust to whip the bridge like a sling.

  Squints led them down an embankment and Winch went first so he could catch Chris if she took a dive. The air smelled like gunpowder. Chris’s shoulder brushed his and he swung his hip into her playfully. Squints soldiered forward with renewed purpose, a bounce to his step like a man planning to get laid. When the springs finally swept into view Squints chortled and pumped his fist in the air. A waterfall splashed to a rocky pool and above it smaller, hotter pools bubbled and steam lilted off them and guys Winch’s age and older filled those pools, beer cans clutched talon-like, and empty bottles and cardboard littered around the springs like leaves. He recognized some as jocks, others as the welfare hicks who crowded outside Miss Hawk’s shop to catcall her when she walked between classes.

  —Squinnnssseeeeyyy, someone bellowed.

  In the moonlight a trio of men rose from the hot springs and shambled across the shale that lined the pools. Squints stepped toward them and they clasped hands and Winch realized he did not know Squints’s past, what he used to do, which groups he used to hang with. Chris was silent as all hell and she kept one shoulder behind him, her chin to her chest.

  —Who’s this? the centre man said, and lifted his bottle to indicate Winch. He was the oldest of the three of them, pushing twenty-five, and facial hair horseshoed along his jaw. All three were sleek with the hot water. Steam haloed them. The middle man had a tattoo inked along his neck and down his collar, looping his abs at the ribs, like a belt.

  —I’m Winch.

  The three men laughed. —Hoi Winch, I’m Lever, one of them said, and they laughed again.

  —An’ I’m Gearbox.

  —An’ I’m Stick Shift.

  —Good one, Butter, Squints said.

  The man in the middle – Butter – rubbed his nose and sniffled loudly. —Who’s the cute one in the back? Least ya brought some tail.

  —She’s a friend of mine, Squints said.

  —Open season, Butter said.

  A gruff voice in the background yelled and Butter twisted halfway, and his exposed cock swung and Winch saw the three men had been skinny-dipping. They all were. —Wanna come fer a swim, baby?

  Butter reached across as if for Chris’s wrist and Winch knocked his hand away. —Back off, he said.

  Butter fingered his beard. Squints sidled away and the two men on either side backed up. Chatter halted in the springs. These were guys who never showed their faces at school but would swarm like maggots at the first whiff of a fight. Winch listened to the waterfall splatter in the largest pool. His dad had told him to pick his fights, because there was no reason to take a shitkicking. A man can tell when things are out of control. In desperation there are no Queensberry Rules.

  —Huh, Butter said, as if considering.

  Guys climbed from the water and beads trickled down their legs to the pools. The air smelled like a bedroom with no open windows, like ten-ounce boxing gloves with cracked canvas palms. Winch pulled his gramps’s bush-lamp to his chest, as if to use it as a shield. Butter fingered his beard again and as he did he eyed Chris. In a few moments Winch would have a dozen other guys atop him.

  —Huh, Butter said again.

  —Wer leavin, Winch said.

  Butter’s tongue frogged along his teeth.

  —I said wer leavin.

  —Yeah? Butter said.

  —Didn’t know you guys were here is all.

  —Think yer takin yer lady friend with ya?

  —Thought it was empty up here.

  —An’ what if I’m gonna give ya a shitkicken fer comin up here? Butter said.

  Winch’s heart thrummed in his chest and he tightened his grip on the bush-lamp, considered its weight. He linked his fingers around the stiff handle and thumbed the rigid shank, the rubbery slats that provided him grip. It had metal edges, thin barn doors used to funnel light. Butter hunched like a zombie and stroked his fingers along his beard, tongue pinched in the gap between his teeth and his lip.

  —I’m just kinda hopin ya don’t, Winch said.

  —Hopin I don’t.

  —Yup.

  —Hopin I don’t take yer lady friend from ya too I bet.

  —Yup.

  Butter laughed, the other guys with him.

  —Yer a funny kid, Stick Shift. A funny kid. Where’d Squints find ya, anyway. Funny kid. Butter nodded toward him. —He’s a funny kid eh? The others laughed again and something like a bloodclot balled in Winch’s throat, at the divot where his breastbone became his neck, a hard, lumpy knot he had to swallow down.

  —Get the hell outta here, Butter said, swiping his hand under his nose. —Get out before I break all yer hopes an’ dreams. Y’owe me big, little man, y’owe me big.

  He and Chris left Squints with the guys and retraced their steps. Chris fished the remnants of her joint from an inside pocket and offered it, but Winch shook his head and she bagged it. They followed the
road. It took longer, and when they passed the toll booth the old guy slammed his palm against the glass. Chris’s Suburban still glowed like a pumpkin. They had barely said a word all the way down, the occasional warning at an exposed root or an overhanging branch. Winch slumped in his seat and Chris waited for two full breaths before she started the ignition.

  —Thanks, she squeaked, and he patted her on the thigh, an inch or two higher than they’d established as appropriate.

  At home, Chris let him out and rolled down the driveway in neutral, headlamps off. Winch pushed through the front door and kicked his boots into the closet. The living room was dark, but light spilled from the kitchen. He replaced the bush-lamp in the boot closet beside a long-unused fishing pole and a toolbox his dad used to haul down from the shelf before work. His gramps was asleep at the table, forehead to placemat, the .308 disassembled in front of him. Winch capped a tin of polish and a tube of oil and tugged a gummy cloth from his gramps’s fingers. He’d never watched the old guy clean the weapon to that extent, never seen the components separated. He recognized the bolt, the tension coil for the trigger, the chamber, and the slick cylinder that locked into the barrel. In his gramps’s open palm: a set of dog tags and a .50-calibre shell as long as Winch’s thumb – relics whose origins Winch did not know. The firing assembly lay apart, the screws that fastened it scattered, pin disengaged from hinge. Winch fingered the sulphur-scorched hammer and it rattled in its joint, limp, lacking the force he’d known to spark gunpowder.

  —Gramps? Winch said, way too loud, and couldn’t bring himself to take the old man’s pulse.

  PAWL

  Winch didn’t go to school the next day, or the next, or the next. He sat on the couch with the blinds pulled and the Winchester scattered around him. Reassembly of the rifle was beyond him. His hands combed over those scraps of foreign steel. He prodded oiled joints, traced notches, and his palms smudged with the smell of loose change. In tech class Miss Hawk had taught him to troubleshoot mechanics. Work from isolation. Work from causation. Why won’t the hammer rise, what’s catching the swivel, if he left it to last, would the recoil block still guard against impact? He pulled his gramps’s hunting rifle off the wall to deconstruct and analyze, but it was a lever-action, and he couldn’t reverse-engineer it. Chris left him messages every hour on the hour. She came by on the second night and he ducked upstairs, to his gramps’s room, and she only dared a few steps into the empty house. He wanted to call out to her, to be hugged and comforted by her, but nobody had ever taught him how to ask. It struck him that he was entirely alone.