Ballistics

by D. W. Wilson

  If I had to pick one thing, I’d say this is where Cecil and I differ: I wouldn’t have left Jack without explanation. For weeks the poor kid lived in anxiety, wondering about all the ways he might have messed up. It’s too good-ol’-boy, I think, and borderline cruel. Maybe it’s different if you’re raising a son. Is the urge to lessen your kid’s doubt reserved for parenting of the opposite sex? Maybe, or maybe Cecil just got some things wrong. For all his dogged insistence that men be judged by their actions, he won’t acknowledge that a man can be measured by how well he has reared his offspring. It’s one of the few times I’ve known Cecil to be inconsistent, but given how it all panned out, given it all, I’m not about to begrudge him one or two acts of self-delusion.

  I WOKE EARLY and roused Linnea with a hand on her ankle. She blinked sleep from her eyes and I got her up and folded the cots into storage shape. Then I climbed downstairs for a drink of water and so I could dump a wad of American bills on Cecil’s half-varnished table. My leg ached like nothing in the world and it took a while for my body to grind itself to motion. It felt like being an old man. Linnea gave me a look but I just shrugged and she shrugged right back.

  When Cecil came through the door he pointed at the bills on the table.

  What are those?

  Payment, I said.

  The leg alright?

  A little bruised, I told him, and rolled up my pant leg to reveal the calf blued and blood-run like a cabbage head. Not my worst injury by far.

  What’s the worst?

  Lit my arm on fire once, I said, and patted my bicep.

  Cecil grunted, seemed to consider. Truck seats three, he said. So if you want to come into town we can say you’re my cousin or something.

  And the kids’ll stay here?

  Jack and your girl can fish off the dock.

  He’s not gonna shoot her, right? I said.

  I’ll take the gun with us.

  What’s the town?

  Invermere. You can use my shower when we get there.

  What’re you getting at?

  You smell like a dogshit, Cecil said, and laughed.

  Linnea came over to me and I wrapped my arm around her torso. She tried to push away but I held on. Cecil sniffled and looked anywhere but at the two of us. I let her go.

  I hear about guys who settle up here, I said. Don’t ever go back.

  I dunno about it. My fiancée might.

  He scratched his neck, then shook his head at the bills on the table, so I scooped them up and shoved them into a zippered pocket above my knee.

  You got skills? he said, winced. I mean, if you need work.

  I’m a painter.

  Good, that’s good. I know a few painters.

  I stood up and swung my leg forward, tested my full weight on it. Well, she won’t buckle, I said, and loped through the door behind Cecil. We passed Jack, who stared at the ground. I climbed into Cecil’s truck and he rolled down his window.

  See if you can get a fish or two, he told Jack as the engine sputtered. And for God’s sake don’t shoot anyone.

  Then he put the truck in gear and we hobbled over a fallen log, up a dirt road that led to the highway. It’s all forest and bedrock and pine trees, the valley, snug between the Purcells to the west and the Rockies to the east, and in ’69 you wouldn’t have seen any clear-cuts on those mountain faces. You could climb most of the peaks too—spend a gruesome eight hours testing yourself against physics, and then relax with a vantage overlooking the whole valley. I’ve done that once or twice; the view is not easily challenged. Up there I could pitch a tent and live happily in the red hours of the morning with the valley and its towns below me in a well of darkness. I’d pack my sketchbook and a handful of charcoal pencils and I’d sit and draw. Sometimes I’d holler off a cliff and wait for the echo to swoop back to me. I can’t explain why—simply felt compelled. Cecil’d blame it on the artist in me, but landscapes have a certain solidity, a certain, unquestionable reliability, and the echo is their earmark. It takes distance for the sound to splinter and scatter, to slow down enough for rocks to gather shards of voice and put them back together. It takes scope. An echo hints at a great wisdom—bluecollar wisdom. It departs and returns, departs, returns. A wisdom of reliability, I guess.

  As we drove, Cecil bent his elbow out the window, gripped the wheel at its twelve-o’clock with one loose hand. He wore a blue ballcap with a bunch of burrs along the rim, a checkered T-shirt beneath his grey vest. He had his share of wrinkles around his eyes and a mouth that bent easy into a scowl but did so less often than you’d expect. No real scars to note besides a few spark burns on his chin. He looked like a highschool gym teacher.

  I like the landscape here, I said.

  Nice to be able to go outside. I was in London for a while—it felt like always being indoors. I don’t know how city guys do it.

  Different values. My wife was one.

  And she isn’t here.

  Thank God for that.

  Cecil slid one eye my way and his cheek twitched to a smile. You won’t find city guys here, he said. We run them out of town.

  Make a game of it, I bet.

  We keep score, too.

  The road wound through a gap in a canyon wall where the rock face was the colour of clay and high enough to block the morning sun. On the other side, we rolled through a tourist town called Radium that was built around natural hot springs. Its main drag had a liquor store and half a dozen hotels, each with their vacancy sign lit. Beyond that, the highway curled along the lip of a gully that stretched to the horizon. From our view I could see a lake and small crops of houses dotting the water’s rim and, in the distance, the sulphury glow of lights—lanterns, houseboats, truckers grinding miles in the first hours of the day.

  I could draw that, I said.

  Draw it?

  Keeps me out of trouble.

  Better than my hobbies, Cecil said.

  Used to draw people. That got me into trouble once or twice.

  Used to?

  After my last tour, just couldn’t keep at it.

  Cecil looked over at me. I don’t know what to think about this war, he said.

  None of us do, I told him, and stared out across the gully. I’ll tell you this, though: it’s our kids getting shot.

  Was the same with the Nazis.

  They deserved it, at least.

  Were you at Normandy?

  Ten years too young, I said, and patted my arm, the scar hidden there. We got bombed, our own goddamned guys.

  Friendly fire isn’t.

  You gotta watch for it. Guys’ll shoot you in the back, on purpose or not.

  Probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it.

  Tunnel vision, I said. That’s human nature.

  CECIL LIVED IN A heavily treed segment of town, down a steep hill, and close enough to the beach for him to claim he could see the water from his bathroom on the second floor. The road was gravel and dirt and Cecil, for years, would bitch about street taxes he never saw a cent of. Not even new gravel, he’d often say. The truck’s tires churned rocks and pinged pebbles against the undercarriage. Boys ran amok on the street and the shoulder and the yards that lined it, cap guns in hand, yelling bang and gotch your arm, and sometimes crouching behind tree stumps or old cars or among the knotgrass that grew unchallenged in the ditches. As we drove by, Cecil gave short, blurting honks to clear them from his path. They waved and stood on the roadside as if at attention, and Cecil bobbed his head, winked, and more than once saluted.

  His house was a small one with army-green siding that Cecil, colour-blind, called grey. He parked beside a cinder-block retaining wall with a dangerous lean. At the far end of the carport a stack of chopped lumber was dark with moisture. The lawn was green save a few patches of piss-puddle brown, which he blamed on neighbourhood dogs. We climbed a short flight of concrete steps to his front door, where he banged his boots together over a welcome mat, tried the doorknob and found it open, and went inside.


  Nora, he called as we entered. You here?

  In the kitchen.

  Can you put on some coffee? he said, and turned back to me with a shrug, as though to ask if he should have added anything else. I got someone with me.

  There was a pause, and then footsteps on linoleum and then his fiancée—Nora Miller—popped around the corner. She had dark red hair that framed her face and hung to her chin, a small nose with an upward turn at the tip, big eyes with eyebrows that seemed always on the verge of lifting incredulously. She glanced to me and then to Cecil and her nose scrunched up—hopefully not because I smelled that bad, but I may never know—and she reached for Cecil’s face. Her small hand touched his chin and she pushed his head sideways and examined the scratches lining his jaw.

  I take it something’s going on, she said.

  This is Archer, Cecil said. Archer, my fiancée, Nora.

  Hello, I said.

  Nice to meet you.

  Archer needs to use our shower, Cecil said.

  He certainly does.

  I’ll explain.

  Nora grinned: a wide, authentic, lovely grin that showed her molars. I’ve always thought the prettiest smiles are the ones that show the most teeth.

  Yes, you will. But let’s get Archer into the shower, she said, and turned to me. We’ll get you a set of Cecil’s old clothes, too. Those ones—likely beyond saving.

  They set me up with a pair of faded jeans and a plain navy T-shirt stamped with Smokey the Bear’s sombre frown. Cecil gave me a disposable razor and a bar of soap, and that was that. I stepped under the hot water and inhaled the steam and felt as if I could scrape the dirt off my arms with a palette knife. The heat throbbed through my scarred arm, through the wrinkled skin on the bicep, but it always does that—muscle memory, or something. It seemed unfair that I’d get to wash first and not my daughter, stuck at that cabin with Jack. The soap stung the cut and I prodded the wounds, inspected the pucker and Cecil’s handiwork. I’d be lying if I said it was a flawless execution, but I’d be lying if I said I cared.

  I came out of that shower almost a different man. My leg even felt alright, but that was probably in my head—I always feel better after a shower. I carried my ruined clothes bundled under my arm, into the kitchen, where I found Nora with her back to me at the sink. She fiddled with a disassembled water tap. I cleared my throat and she whipped her head sideways, enough to see me in her peripherals. Just toss ’em, she said, and, with a rubber-gloved hand, gestured at a garbage can in the corner.

  I did so, sat down at the table.

  Thanks for the clothes.

  She unstoppered the sink and the water gurgled down the drain. Cecil went into town, to see the doctor, she said, and pulled the rubber gloves off. A few bubbles of dishwater clung to her ear, but I didn’t say anything. She crossed her arms under her breasts, leaned on the corner where the counters met. You’re in a predicament.

  I figured so.

  Draft dodgers are one thing. Government gives them amnesty.

  I’m not a draft dodger.

  That’s what I’m talking about, Nora said. With her pinky, she hooked a string of hair out of her eyes and tucked it behind one ear. She had nice ears. And your daughter, too. We can say you’re Cecil’s army friend and your wife left you without any money.

  Not that far from the truth.

  That last bit was Cecil’s idea.

  I had a hunch.

  You army guys, she said, and brushed past me out of the kitchen, and I smelled the air that breezed by in her wake—a scent of grapefruit detergent, of warm bread like someone who’d been baking all day, and something else, too: a tougher smell, like the outdoors, like axe heads and chopped wood and chimney smoke and big changes not so far around the bend.

  Two

  Anaxagoras:

  Men would lead quiet lives if these two words,

  mine and thine, were taken away.

  With Gramps’ shoebox never more than arm’s reach away, I phoned my girlfriend. Men, I think, typically white-flag it to their girlfriends or wives—or mothers, if all other women be in absentia—when the emotional shit strikes the Great Oscillator. It’s a primal thing, no different than the human discomfort around snakes and arachnids or our general dislike of other people’s feet. Men who confide, and trust primarily, in other men have learned to do so as a skill; just as instinct would have us pry a nail from our foot, so would it have us bewail our sorrows to the females in our lives.

  That night, my girlfriend didn’t answer, and I lay in bed and counted all the jocks I knew, like the guy with the triangular brainpan who directed the university’s intramurals, or the gymnastics instructor who could stand for a whole hour with his arms bent right-angle to his hips, chest inflated like a ghostbuster. I figured I would one day find her in their arms. The window in my bedroom was busted like a spiderweb where my buddies once blasted it with a propane-powered potato cannon. Through the glass, a streetlamp’s fossily light fell across the far wall where hung my modest collection of awards—medals for outstanding marksman, mostly, though also a certificate for first prize in a grade eight drafting contest (I snap a mean tangent), a trophy clock shaped like the state of Montana, and a brass-dipped Labatt beer can I won as part of a Barrel-Fill crew Gramps had slung together for Sam Steele Days. The Impressionable Lads, I think the team was called.

  The cordless rang against my ear and my girlfriend’s voicemail picked up. You’ve reached Darby, it chimed, way too cheery. I listened to my own breath and clacked my jaw in circles. For the first time in years I felt my small-town roots, that I could stay there, in Invermere, take welding lessons from Gramps, spend my days seven-to-three banging things together and then ten-to-one at the bar grazing elbows and buying drinks for girls I knew from highschool but had never dared proposition.

  Invermere is a town where sons take after their dads and teenagers in lift-kit trucks catch air off train tracks. Winters are cold and punctuated with sudden warmth that melts all snow, and grotesque snowmen vanguard front yards, half-thawed and horror-jawed like hellions from the seventh ring of Dante’s Inferno. Power lines slouch under snowfall and sully people’s mountain views. Rednecks redline their Ski-Doos across the frozen lake. In summer, teenagers burn shipping flats at the gravel pits and slurp homebrew that swims with wood ether, and at least one novice drinker goes blind swallowing the pulp. Vehicles courtesy-honk at kids meandering the roads, and those kids nudge each other toward alleyways and paths beaten through strangers’ yards. Houses sit back on lots. Properties are for sale by owner. Trees lay long shadows during dusk and dogs leap at fences to test the resilience of their chains.

  I had only a handful of friends growing up, most of whom are either dead or married now—Will Crease and Mike Twigg; Brad Benson who vanished one summer after a devastating fallout with his old man; Joe Brooks; others who joined our group for lengths of time. In those days a kid was judged by how fast he could run and how quickly he could scale a neighbour’s fence. A palisade rimmed our backyard, six feet high, and I could vault the slats and windstorm my legs overtop and disappear into a sprint upon touchdown. Parents watched me and their fences with a wary eye. One neighbour, a widow with skin that wrinkled horizontally, owned a bean-shaped pool, so she duct-taped a red warning line along the portion of fence that dropped into water. A crotchety Calgarian, whose liver eventually failed him during a Loop-the-Lake marathon, tire-ironed me off his property after I boarded his carport via a whip-like tree and a stunt out of Indiana Jones. Not infrequently through my boyhood, neighbours came knocking on our front door and Gramps would invite them in and sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking in murmurs unintended for my ears.

  I never thought untoward about any of this, but with the content of Gramps’ shoebox so close and my absent dad weighing on me like a thesis, I wondered whether the neighbourhood vigil upon my boyhood was conventional prudence or something more personal, the result of a lineage I never really sought after. History, in a pl
ace like Invermere, is not easily entombed.

  Our house had two storeys and jaundiced siding. In the backyard eight or so pines strained skyward, sturdy-trunked—trees from which a man could rescue his cat. Long ago, Gramps dug his own firepit, and in the evenings he lounged in a deck chair on the moist soil and just stared at the trees and the mountain peaks he could glimpse amid branches and other people’s homes. The awe of a prairie boy, I guess. A previous owner had buried a vertical PVC pipe, thick as my forearm, to its mouth in the middle of the yard, and Gramps guessed the pipe was an abandoned geothermal project, a relic of the groundwater heating fad that’d swept the valley around 1970. One summer, my dad rescued a shotglass-sized bird from the deeps of that pipe by intermittently heaping sand on the creature’s head. I have few memories of my father—glimpses of a moustached face, a man who flung footballs through a strung-up tire rubber, a certain scent of carbide and steel, maybe, though Gramps always smelled like an engine and it is through his stories that I know Jack West.