Ballistics

by D. W. Wilson

  Praise for Ballistics

  ‘Beautifully observed’

  TLS

  ‘Forest fires are raging, to match the fiery passions of a hard-nosed, hard-boiled, basically hard cast . . . Packs a manly punch’

  Daily Mail

  ‘A lean and powerful book about quiet, emotional people. It animates a world that any smalltown North American could identify in a moment, yet it transcends this environment to evoke something universal’

  Guardian

  ‘Ballistics is a profound and haunting novel that won’t let you alone’

  Spectator

  ‘Flinty coming-of-age story . . . Wilson can make a simile and a verb out of pretty much anything . . . Description is the gift he is keenest to cultivate – rightly’

  New Statesman

  ‘A hot shot of a novel . . . Panoramic drama and epic scope’

  Tatler

  ‘Well-written, confident, and often compelling . . . Engaging’

  List

  ‘An unusual and assured novel that dives into the hinterland of human sadness, and the ways masculinity finds or fails to deal with it’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘One of the great pleasures of the novel is the way it surprises at every turn. None of these twists feels forced, however: each is grounded in realistically drawn, vital characters who behave as human emotions and frustrations dictate, rather than conforming to the expectations of the reader . . . It is a harrowing, often brutal read, but it is also emotionally potent and resonant. Simply put, it’s one of the finest novels of the year’

  Georgia Straight

  For Loon

  This is the faith from which we start:

  Men shall know commonwealth again

  F.R. SCOTT, “A VILLANELLE FOR OUR TIME”

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Also Available by D. W. Wilson

  One

  Empedocles:

  Having seen a small part of life, swift to die,

  a man rises and drifts like smoke,

  persuaded only of what he has happened upon

  as he is borne away.

  On a Friday evening in September, some time ago, a friend of mine spilled a bottle of lager across her lap and slurred her curiosity about how it all began, that summer I spent in a scour across the Kootenays. She doodled her finger through the caramel froth yeasting on the surface of her thighs. I thought about getting her a paper towel, but I thought about a lot of things. We were taking potshots at empty beer cans with my grandfather’s .22 calibre, and I’d lost my aim to nerves and thoughts and the restlessness that endures when adventures come to an uncertain close. I touched a scar on my cheek, about as long as a pocket knife, and wondered a moment after the dead and the gone.

  How it all began—that’s a good question. That’s a philosophical question. It’s like asking when a bullet starts toward the beer can. Is it at the moment slug exits muzzle? When I lean on the trigger? Somewhere among those hours spent checking and rechecking the chamber? It could be the munitions line, or the semi-trailer hauling cartridges down Highway 1, or the clerk at the hardware store who retrieves the carton from the glass. It could be strictly mechanical—hammer strikes casing, spark, ignition, trajectory—but over seventy parts make up the firing mechanism of a bolt-action rifle, even more if you count the bones of the human hand, the arm, the muscles and nerves and the synapses each themselves firing. And then, getting really philosophical, there’s the Gunsmith’s Paradox: to reach its target, a bullet must first travel halfway, and to travel halfway it must first travel a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth, smaller and smaller, such that it will never reach its destination, such that it won’t even start to move. This means nobody can ever be shot. This means no journey can ever end.

  How it all began? Well, I can trace Gramps’ defects all the way to his childhood: shrapnel he blocked with his sternum when he was seven, the result of a dud artillery round on a beach not slingshot range from home; a welding arc that dashed across his chest while he tempted his body’s conductivity in the rain; smoke inhalation, steam scalds, stress levels, and a consistent blood-alcohol for all those years strapped inside a Nomex jacket with Volunteer Fire stencilled across the shoulders. That’s his history, but if I were to pinpoint the moment when everything Began, capital B, the summer my family’s past came knocking, I say this: at eighty-two years old, Gramps had his heart attack.

  IT WAS A POORLY VENTILATED evening in May, the kind that encourages a man to splay himself along a loveseat and wear musked-up muscle shirts from his childhood. Gramps’ house offered little in the way of airflow, so we’d wedged the stormdoor with a Gore-Tex boot and unshuttered the windows, and something like a breeze tickled my pits and the skin on my topmost ribs. Earlier, Gramps had salvaged a blastworn industrial fan from his storeroom, but I lacked the technical savvy to revive a guttered servo, and Gramps lacked the sobriety. We’d settled onto the furniture in his den to suffer through UFC exhibition matches as we waited for the approaching dark.

  I’d only been in the valley a few days, having fled from an impending thesis and some girlfriend drama that for many months has been only a few bubbles shy of boil-over. It was to be the last visit before my indoctrination: a PhD in philosophy. Back east, my significant other, Darby—who I’d dated and not married for the better part of a decade—had taken to long nights at the university’s gym, training for handball, of all things; each night, calling her, I listened to the unanswered telephone and marvelled at the gap between us. There are a number of things a handball player can do late into the night, but only one of them involves the sport so named.

  Gramps went to the kitchen and banged open his fridge and I heard him grab a pair of bottled beer. Outside, the dusk light glanced off neighbouring roofs. Years ago, Gramps strung a mosquito net abreast the exterior window because brown birds tended to get drunk on the gemstone berries that grow on a nearby tree, and they’d kamikaze into the glass. One day he found a family of those birds piled at the house’s foundation, and when he lifted them in his palm their necks lolled like tongues.

  Pillow clouds swirled above the Rockies, and I smelled the pinprick sensation of lightning on the horizon. The sky had turned the colour of clay. Woodsmoke loitered in the air like breath—it clung to clothes and furniture, a scent like chimney filth, or hiking trips along riverbeds, or the charcoal that remains on a campground after the campers have moved on. The province was in flames. Folks in the Interior had fled their homes and each morning I woke expecting to see the town ablaze. Earlier in the month, the Parks had declared Fire Warning Red and everybody—locals and tourists, bluecollars and rednecks, cops’ sons, preachers’ boys, parlour philosophers, even the old, haggard men who huddle under the pinstripe tarp that sags off the bakery—doused their camping pits and boiled their hotdogs and darted amid traffic to stamp out cigarettes left to smoulder in the heat.

  Gramps set the two open beer on the coffee table and his maimed dog, Puck—an eleven-year-old butter-coloured English mastiff—lumbered from behind a pony wall. On the television, two long-limbed Muay Thai fighters lilted in half moons around each other, gloved hands at temples, knees drawing like longbows. Then one of those stick-men split-kicked forward, sailfish-fast, and Gramps made this noise like ununghf and when I looked over the old bastard had gone scarecrow. He lurched sideways and one hand clawed for the end table but fanned it, hauled a circa 1970 lamp down atop him, shade like a hot-air balloon. I knew a thing or two about emergency first aid, so I launched
into CPR and dialed 911 and, from the driveway, watched the paramedics green-light him for de-fib in the ambulance.

  The ambulance veered behind a panelboard house and out of sight. Neighbours from yards abroad lurked in my peripherals: a pear-shaped man hiked his crotch on his verandah; two kids, young enough to be my sons (I was twenty-eight), leaned on their bikes. Through the living-room window, beyond the mosquito net, Puck stood a vigil, his big head swooping as he looked from me to the empty road and back again as if to say, What are you waiting for?

  I rushed inside, grabbed Gramps’ keys from his hunting vest, and commandeered his Ranger. It was a three-minute drive to the hospital, up a hill with a sixteen percent gradient and past a rundown hostel ripe with the stink of dope and gamey thrill-seekers. As I crested that hill, driving straight west, I was struck by a clear view of the Purcell Mountains. For a moment, under the sunset, they looked to be on fire, the treetops glowing red and orange, and it seemed I could see past them, through that shield of rock and carbon, to the very flames that ravaged the province’s interior. I felt a gust of warmth in my eyes, like the dry heat from a wood stove, like a welding torch, as if from the blazes burning on the mountains’ far side.

  When I arrived at the hospital, a receptionist with curly hair sat behind a desk built into the wall.

  My grandfather had a heart attack, I said.

  Cecil West?

  That’s him.

  She directed me to a lobby with a window overlooking the courtyard of an old folks’ home. There, a double-bent man, out for an evening stroll, passed half a sandwich to a Dalmatian at his side. In the room with me, a toddler drooled on a Tonka dump truck he’d filled with alphabetized blocks. He wore a spaghetti-stained sweatshirt, and he mimicked an engine’s hum as the Tonka trundled left to right, where he dumped its cache in a heap against his knee. On those frequent trips to the hospital when I was a kid, Gramps never let me handle the scarce toys laid out in waiting rooms—germ laden and smeared by hands too long unwashed, I suppose.

  Then a tall woman my age, with blond hair tied in a bun and a square jaw like a boy’s, stomped into the waiting room and glared down at the toddler. She wore blue jeans faded in scruffs at the thighs and a grey T-shirt cut above her triceps. I recognized her as a fling from my highschool years. Missy, she used to be called.

  Where’s your brother? she said to the toddler.

  Went to get a Coke.

  And left you here, she said, and looked right at me when she did. Alan?

  Hey, Missy, I said.

  She curled an arm to her hip. Nobody calls me that anymore, she said, but didn’t seem upset. You alright?

  Gramps had a heart attack.

  Jesus.

  Yeah.

  Don’t worry, if I remember your Gramps, he’s too stubborn to die.

  Thanks, I said.

  She pressed the back of her wrist to her nose, and I thought I recalled her doing that in highschool.

  You gonna be around long?

  Just the summer. Or what’s left.

  She bent to scoop the toddler under her arm, pried a stray block from his pudgy hand.

  Danny’s a cop, she said. That’s my husband.

  I don’t remember him.

  You either, she said—a retort, but I’m not sure what she meant. She made a gotta go motion with her head and disappeared through the door, and I sensed that I would not see her again. Outside, in the courtyard, the double-bent man raised himself to height, Dalmatian by his side, and together they scuttled toward the care home’s rear door. Gramps had told me, time and again, that he’d rather die than spend his final days locked up with a bunch of bluehairs. If he got that bad, I was to drive him to his cabin in Dunbar and there’d be a hunting accident involving a twenty-gauge shotgun—a weapon that reminded him of his days across the pond. Couldn’t do it himself, he told me, else he’d get eternal damnation. At least once per visit he and I swung into his truck—an old four-by-four reeking of hides and the rusty scent of bled animals—and drove down Westside Road, past the ostrich farm, to the gravel pits where highschool kids built bonfires big as campers, and there we’d waste the day and a carton of rimfires on emptied tuna cans and paperback books Gramps had deemed uninteresting at best.

  When I was finally admitted to Gramps’ room, I found him upright in an aquamarine hospital gown, spotted with sticky discs and wires that relayed iridescent spikes to an ECG. Gramps’ heart, I would discover later, hadn’t stopped due to cholesterol or disease or blood pressure: like breathing, I guess, the heart is on a cyclical firing sequence, and his had simply misfired. Gramps shifted in bed. Deep lines drew along his cheekbones and wrinkles bundled like metal shavings in the corners of his eyes. He peeled his lips over his gums in what could have been a smile.

  No flowers? he said.

  I only bring flowers for good-looking girls.

  I’m in a gown.

  And it brings out your eyes, I said, and sat on the edge of his bed. He seemed very small beneath that sheet.

  You doing okay? he said.

  What kind of question is that.

  I’d hate to ruin months of self-pity just by having a heart attack.

  You are such a dick, I said.

  He grinned, downward. But seriously, he said. You okay?

  I’m okay, Gramps, I told him, with as much conviction as I could muster.

  He cast his eyes to his hands, fiddled with them in his lap. I chewed a hangnail on my thumb. He looked old, too, all of a sudden—moisture filmed his irises and his cheeks sagged at an angle off his jaws, bespeckled and age-worn, and what little hair remained seemed wilted and thin, like the strands you find gummied to the tiles of a public shower. He looked, I guess, like a grandfather on his deathbed.

  I’m dying, he said.

  No you’re not.

  It’s like approaching a wall.

  I nudged his thigh with a fist. He flashed his teeth.

  I’m not just traumatized. A guy knows when the time is up.

  What’d the doctor say?

  It’s coming, Alan. I can feel it.

  No. You can’t.

  I need you to do something for me, Gramps said in a drawl I didn’t like. And I need you to do it without asking any of your ridiculous philosophy questions.

  Then I was outside under the fluorescent lights that lit the asphalt parking lot like an ice rink, and then I was in the Ranger with its smell of Old Spice and sloshed beer and everything else my grandfather. From the radio, a monotone voice droned factoids about the burning Interior. I drove the long way around Invermere’s lake, like I used to do when I was sixteen and desperate to ogle the girls whose folks had come from Calgary to spend their summer in the great, untamed wild of the Kootenay Valley. At the beach, kids half my age gathered under a streetlight. They dabbled toes in the water and sloshed vodka on their gums and I cringed at the idea that kids were now half my age. Home, I went to Gramps’ bedroom, like he instructed, and inched a shoebox from beneath his bed. It was maroon and covered in dust and dog hair and inside I found a trove of sentimental items: a tarnished cap revolver with a sulphur-scorched hammer stained as though by ochre; a dehydrated poplar leaf big as my hand; at least two mouths’ worth of baby teeth, some my own; a wedding band too large for any of my fingers; a silver Zippo lighter adorned with the American eagle. And there, at the bottom, I found an address with the name Jack West scrawled in my grandfather’s blocky script. I ran my fingers along those letters and, lifting the paper from the box, felt the passing of a burden. What goes around comes around, they say, but I’m not so sure. Never really leaves, maybe.

  I need you to find your dad, Gramps said to me from that hospital bed. Because I don’t know how much time I’ve got left, and there are some things I need to say to him before I go.

  Here’s a story about Jack West: In ’69, when he was a stupid kid, he shot me in the leg with a .22-calibre rifle—our very first introduction. Him and his old bastard Cecil had lodged the night in a cops
e of trees a short distance from the cabin they owned out at Dunbar. Cecil’d caught wind of a series of break-ins, and upon inspection found stuff missing: a couple old plates, fistfuls of cured elk, one or two sixers of beer. The cabins that lined the Sevenhead River were easy prey for scavenging, and though I could’ve foraged to keep myself alive, I had my daughter, Linnea, with me. Maybe I got cocky, too: the night Jack shot me was the first night I didn’t do a full search of the bushes that ringed the cabin and its field. Same carelessness could get a man killed in war, I’ll tell you that.

  The moon shone full force that night and the cabin’s front door was clear for thirty yards in all directions. I intended to camp just inside the entry because it was March, and chilly, and I could smell rain on the horizon—that scent like gravel that is universal across the world. I’d also whiffed the sourness rising through the collar of my shirt, and hoped to snag a bar of soap. My daughter didn’t seem to care, but a guy needs to have his own standards—we can’t all be bushmen, regardless what Cecil West has to say. As Linnea and I skulked through the forest I grunted warnings to watch for the tree branches and their pine needles, because I’d seen a guy lose an eye in Vietnam after he got whipped in the face by a bamboo stalk.

  I crouched at the border of the tree line and did a slow, one-eighty scan, though in hindsight I can’t guarantee thoroughness. If I’d really been searching I might have noticed the mud marks at the base of the cabin’s door, or the footprints in the mushy earth where Cecil and Jack had earlier done an inspection. I sniffed the air, tilted my ear to the quiet, for Linnea’s benefit, mostly. She was fourteen back then and unimpressed with anything I had to say. Partly, I hated myself for hauling her along, for putting her through that. I squeezed her shoulder for reassurance then exited the tree cover and bolted for the cabin’s door.

  Jack was fifty yards upwind. He tells me he can’t remember the events that led to the gunshot—they’re obscured to him, a mishmash of adrenaline and instinct, and I believe him. He was pubescent and he had a rifle in his hands, felt empowered, bigger than fourteen years old. He was no stranger to the outdoors: at school, during games of manhunt, Jack hid among the thick bushes outside the schoolyard’s ringwire fence. Protocol forbade him from romping through those wilds, but Jack West was never really a kid to bend to any rules besides his father’s. He liked the wilderness, and he liked to hunt, and he was not unaccustomed to firearms. He knew how to handle a gun: never maintenance a rifle with the action shut; a firearm’s safety is true in name only; to avoid eyepiece gouges on your cheek, nestle the stock on the muscley part of your shoulder, right where the deltoid curls like a rope to your pectoral.