Ballistics

by D. W. Wilson

  My dad disappeared when I was a year old. My last memory of him—if it is indeed my memory—is the two of us watching a house fire across the street. He had one hand tight on my small shoulder. We’d have been watching Gramps do the fireman thing, the way the old guy wrestled with a water hose, the people he might have dragged kicking from the flames. It wouldn’t be the only fire that has taxed Gramps to his limits, but sometimes he talks about it when he drinks. He hated how close it came to home; If the wind had been unlucky, he’d always say, and shake his head. The whole time, as I watched it, my dad kept that smoky hand on my shoulder, not tight enough to hurt, but enough that I couldn’t shimmy away. Likely, he pointed things out: fire truck, Grandpa, hydrant. If Gramps is to be believed, Jack was an alright dad for the year he stuck around. He’d have been twenty-something in that memory.

  And then he was gone, like my mom before him, and Gramps never filled me in. Years ago, I found a pencil sketch of my mom in the garage, stashed in a steel-bound chest amid an unexplained hoard of charcoal landscapes. Gramps said he was holding them for a friend. The sketch—I kept it—shows my mom balanced on an uprooted log in a knee-length skirt, sleeves cut at the elbow. Beside her: a dog that resembles Puck before the trap accident. She must be seventeen in that sketch, less—hair draped on her shoulders, an exaggerated freckle the artist had dotted below her left eye in a softer, deeper carbon. The caption read Linnea—72, and the initials A.C. were scribbled in the corner.

  I’ve inquired after my parents a couple of times: in grade two when, for a Father’s Day project, I needed to know if he was more like a hunter, a golfer, or a fisherman; while Gramps and I crossed the blastland Yukon one winter when I was ten, en route to visit an ailing comrade; at the start of my teenage years, hating everything, when Gramps just told me to shut my yap and go collect dogshit. There’s not a lot to tell, he’d grunt, or he’d thumb his canines—a nervous tic, I think—and say it didn’t matter, that they’d ditched and he’d done his best, and wasn’t that enough?

  The other fire, the one that nearly killed Gramps, happened at the cusp of my grade eleven year. He was the only firefighter on shift, and he’d gone solo to investigate claims of smoke billowing from the upper windows of an unfinished timberframe home. The house had a deck overlooking the vast lake and firebrick heaters suspended above, but those heaters weren’t the culprit: they found traces of varnish—accelerant—and blamed the painters for ditching oily rags in a garbage bin. Gramps, while doing a quick one-two for people on the second floor, noticed angel fingers licking the ceiling and a pitch-coloured smoke that thickened around furniture like muck—signs, I guess, that firefighters notice when something really bad is about to happen. He took the nearest exit—the master bedroom’s window—and the landing hospitalized him for a broken scapula and a leg that went garden-hose at the hip. He described a fire that stunk of sulphur, that lit nearby houses the colour of beryl, so intense and loud that as he clawed through soot and calcite he sensed the flames like breathing at his ear.

  I didn’t hear about his injury until the next day, and when I arrived at the hospital there was another man at his bedside, a heavy-shouldered guy with jagged cheeks and grey, pushbroom hair. He had morning stubble, his forehead set into the nook of his hand, a brownish moustache with its bristles freshly cut like straw. His clothes were nondescript greens, army-coloured pants, a wool coat and Gore-Tex boots. He straightened as I entered, nudged Gramps’ good leg—a single, sharp motion that made the old man gurgle but not wake.

  Got him on some heavy painkillers, the man said to me, unfolding from the chair. He kept his gaze on Gramps and brushed his thighs as though he’d just recovered from a fall. Then he offered a handshake with a half twist, flourish-like, so I could stare down into a tundra-scarred palm. I’m Archer, he said.

  I clasped the hand, felt the pressure of his grip, the tough skin inside the thumb, like my own. I told him who I was, and we stood in each other’s presence and waited for Gramps to wake from the injuries he should never have sustained. Gramps was too old, even twelve years ago, for that kind of feat and that line of work, but back then he lacked the ineffable quality that would let me label him a bluehair. It’s something like stubbornness, but not merely so—an understanding of limitation and a deliberate testing thereof, maybe.

  Archer bit down on his lip and lowered into the chair. I’m his emergency contact, he said after a time.

  You are?

  His cheek twitched at the edge of his mouth, enough to expose teeth. It might have been a smile.

  Yeah. Decades of silence and then you get a call. You ever notice how people have a way of saying your name right before they tell you something bad?

  Mr. West, I said, baritone, gravelly.

  Archer did smile. Just like that, he said.

  We fell into the silence that comes when you’ve run out of easy things to talk about, and back then I was not so adept at small talk. A pretty nurse with hair that curled below her ears popped in and did whatever it is pretty nurses do. When she left, Archer and I made eye contact and he lifted his eyebrows as if to say, Well?

  How do you know Gramps? I said.

  He helped me get settled in the valley.

  When was that?

  Archer scratched a thumbnail along his jaw. I’m not sure, he said. Thirty some years.

  You’d have known my dad.

  He grunted, or snorted, a sharp flex in his gut. Yup, he said, and emphasized the p.

  And my mom.

  He nodded.

  I don’t know much about them, I said.

  It’s not some huge mystery, if that’s what you’re wondering.

  I’m just wondering.

  He glanced sideways at Gramps.

  Your dad made some bad calls.

  And my mom?

  Must’ve seen it coming. It’s really not my place to talk about this.

  Archer sucked a deep breath that filled his gut. I thought either he and I were about to have at it or he was going to tell me more, but instead he deflated, resuming the languid, hunched-in-chair posture as his wind trilled out his nose. Eventually Gramps came to. He squinched his eyes at the light and did a survey of the room. He wriggled upward so he could sit straight and then he noticed Archer in the chair beside his bed.

  It’s official, Gramps said, not incredulous. I’m in Hell.

  Next best thing, Archer said.

  What’re you doing here?

  You nearly killed yourself so I showed up to your rescue.

  That’s unlike you, Gramps said, and he didn’t smile.

  Archer bulged his tongue into the gap between his teeth and lip.

  I suppose so.

  Gramps turned away. Archer rose, tugged the bottom of his coat like someone my age who didn’t know what to do with their hands. He looked at me, then Gramps, the door, rubbed his hands together. You talk to Jack ever? he said.

  That’s his call.

  Not sure it is, Cecil.

  Gramps bit down on his lip, hard enough for the skin to turn white. What do you know about family, he hissed.

  Archer combed his fingers through his short hair.

  I thought maybe we were old enough to move on.

  Gramps stared steadfast into the linens. Not by years.

  Archer didn’t move. His fingers picked lint from the hem of his wool coat and I saw loose fibres where that action had worn the fabric threadbare. It was nice to meet you, Alan, he said, touching his temple, and then he went out the door.

  Gramps? I said after Archer had disappeared.

  Go home.

  Who is that guy?

  Are you fucking stupid, he said, twisting so he could face me. Go home.

  I was sixteen and not about to back down, but before I could lay into him he snapped his eyes to the sheets, his chin to his chest. Too sad to even look at, let alone argue with—like a dog who has given up playing fetch. So I did the only thing I could do: I left him to his solitude.

  THE MOR
NING AFTER Gramps’ heart attack, I woke to the sound of the cat yowling outside my bedroom door. It was six-fifty-six in the morning and the sky through my window swirled the colour of merlot. Downstairs, Puck’s awkward footfalls rat-TUM-tatted along the kitchen laminate. My window shone with dew, and outside I saw the grass and asphalt slick with rime. Across the street, deer fleeced crabapples from a neighbour’s tree, a wobbly two-pointer among them, and as I watched those animals I felt a twitch in my sighting eye, the unmistakable stillness that happens when you’ve exhaled all your breath and the only motion in your chest is your doddering heart. Not that I’ve ever been much of a gamesman—Bambi effect, I guess—but I like the weight of a rifle, and not just its physical mass. I like the weight of a rifle. In the bathroom mirror I saw that I’d slept on the cordless and its buttons had silkscreened their schema into the skin of my pectoral. For a ridiculous second I thought it might not make a terrible tattoo.

  Afterward, I spooled gunk into the cat’s dish and loosed Puck into the backyard for a BM in his corner behind the trailer Gramps swindled from the fellow who sold him the truck. The address in Gramps’ shoebox directed me to Cranbrook, B.C.—a city about an hour and a half’s drive. Gramps’ cupboards were filled with instant coffee, but I opted against that MSG-laden crud to avoid belching its acidity all the way yonder. There was a tube of Tums tucked in the Ranger’s glove compartment between Gramps’ bear spray and a zeta key set, but I figured there were better ways to roll up at my estranged father’s house than reeking of bile and the playground flavour of chalk. So, I swiped a banana from the fruit basket and sipped orange juice from a highball glass until Puck squeezed through the deck’s Swedish doors and pushed his drooly snout into my palm. I’ve never put much faith in portents, but it was time for me to mobilize.

  In the truck, I eased out the drive and down the road and chose the rear exit out Wilder Sub. Town seemed distant to me, less hectic than a summer ought, and the sunlight that should have been overhead scattered among wireless arrays and the telephone cables and the giant pretzel sign that looms on top the bakery like a crane. Once, I’d imagined taking my girlfriend along these streets, if only so she might understand the part of me that can handle a firearm and drive stick, that gets impatient halfway through movies because the Toby—Invermere’s slice of Hollywood—intermissioned all its film so the teenagers who’d come to spit-swap in its shag carpet loveseats would rise, groggy, and drop coin on pop. This—not the Toby, exactly, but this—is what I blame for my inability to eat sushi, my refusal to wear collared shirts except when cornered, my dogged insistence that macaroni be consumed from the pot with a wooden spoon. You can take the boy out of the small town, and all that jazz.

  Cranbrook is one hundred and thirty kilometres from Invermere. Landmarks of note include the longest uninterrupted straight stretch of highway in western Canada, beating out even the Number 1 until you reach the Prairies. There’s a filthy lagoon and a pulp mill that makes your car reek of cabbage. The shoulders are rumble-stripped, and they’ve jarred me from a dopey haze more than once. In what is one of the more mythical moments in my life, my friends and I once drove home through an evening mist filled with shapes that moved like bipeds, and though I don’t believe him, to this day my friend Mike Twigg claims he saw a garden-gnome-sized man chasing our truck. To this day, too, I get nervous in the presence of fog. I’ve mowed down three deer on Highway 95 and not once found their remains.

  The highway has always been dangerously hypnotic. It’s my go-to, my place of contemplation. Some men like showers, or the pub, or a tent pitched on a mountainside; I like to drive. There is some deep, unexplored truth in the metaphor that is the Trans-Canada—how you can roadtrip along it, can set out with no plans or goals but still move inexorably toward one destination. Before I ever left Invermere, I would clear myself of highschool drama in a big, nightowl loop around Lake Windermere and up Westside Road—the ancient, unpaved two-laner where rednecks drag-race and kids lose their virginity, where there’s a cliffside like a barbican above the gravel pits that is perfect for ditching a burning car. Mostly, though, there’s the dirt-shod highway and the ground slipstreaming beneath you and the mineral scent of rain on the horizon. Mostly, there’s enough time to get your head around things.

  I’d evac’d for Invermere on a morning when the light yawned off the sunshade above the rear entry of our basement suite. Darby and I had argued through the bleeding hours over the same old crap, and it wouldn’t be a gamble to suggest my fight-or-flight had triggered. I had a backpack one-strapped over my shoulder, a gym bag crammed with a week’s clothes and a collection of translated Herder texts needed for the thesis. I was in the backyard, sunlight behind me like a cowboy, wearing my only summer jacket: a windbreaker emblazoned with the crest of the university’s trapshooting club. I never did well at trapshooting—couldn’t anticipate the proper lead—but I’d kept on because the practice times coordinated with Darby’s handball team. After each session the two of us—her entire body sweat-drenched, my shoulders and back aching with recoil—would hit the campus great hall for slush puppies and specialty coffees with multisyllabic names.

  Darby was leaning into the open door frame, teenager style. Her mud-brown hair hung messy at her ears and she hadn’t changed from her pyjamas: checkered pants and a horrible T-shirt depicting two grizzlies chewing on human bones. She had a silver stud through her eyebrow and raw pockets above her cheeks and an athlete’s build—narrow shoulders and tight legs that could longjump her deep into the goaltender’s crease when she dove to score a point. She rubbed the heel of her palm into her eye, smacked her lips. I adjusted the weight of the duffle bag on my shoulder.

  You don’t have to go, she said. Are you sure you should go?

  Instead of what, staying for more mind games?

  You think you’ll be better off in Invermere?

  I got Gramps there.

  She flicked a dust bunny off her wrist—dismissive.

  I won’t have to stay awake all night wondering who he’s fucking, I told her.

  Darby made a croaking noise and pressed her forehead to the door frame. She scratched a tear off her cheek with her thumbnail. I was glad to see that, glad to see her actually show an ounce of emotion. Someone once told me that you only cry about the things you care for.

  Will you call me when you get there?

  Sure.

  I’m sorry, Alan.

  I’ll come back.

  Will you? she said.

  I didn’t say: I don’t know.

  The night previous, I was at my desk in our bedroom with the house lightless save my laptop’s blue. I’d built a collection of empty beer bottles atop the chicken-scrawl hard copy of my thesis. I’d strapped a reading lamp to my forehead like a miner so I could read in the darkness. As Darby stepped through the sliding door I swung my gaze in her direction and the phosphorescent LED lit her with an eerie cobalt glow I’ve long associated with the four-fingered aliens of science fiction. Her hair hung in whorls that wet her collar and her sports bra made a visible bump under her damp shirt. She’d taken to showers at the school, kept a locker stocked with the toiletries that once crowded our bath corners—gone were the days I would insomnia into the wee hours so the two of us might shower together before collapsing. It was two-forty-seven in the morning, and I honestly challenge anybody to find a handball team willing to train that late into the night.

  Darby sashayed toward the bedroom, slowing enough to kiss my cheek. She smelled like soap and muscle and vaguely like vodka, or I only imagined it. At that point, it was hard to know. She tapped the computer screen and muttered about me getting to work. On the laptop, in bold font, I’d changed the title of my thesis to Language and the Livestock of Things, the most progress I’d made in a week. Darby dumped her sports bag on a wicker chair near the television and ran herself a drink of water, stood with her back to the faucet and one arm cocked on her hip. She wore blue jeans and a burgundy top that revealed a bra strap. She’s
as tall as my trachea but tough—once, she cracked three of my ribs with her skull, Ironmanning down a toboggan hill. She has a compact nose with a downward curl at the end, a dip at the ridge of her ocular, just shy of the eyebrow, where she blundered into a utensil drawer as a toddler. Her lips are thin but her smile reveals her molars. Some years ago a dentist botched the jacking of her wisdom teeth, and at rest her jaw, unnoticeably, favours to the right.

  Darby flung the fridge door wide and flicked her hair over her shoulder. Want to order a pizza? she said.

  I couldn’t recall the last time she’d been so energetic in my presence. Weeks earlier, I’d clued in to her general unhappiness when she started to exclusively make chicken on her turns to cook—we alternated, and I hate chicken. We are, or perhaps were, a passive-aggressive couple: she might mince spices in the coffee grinder so my coffee would taste like cloves; sometimes, I left her favourite shirts out of loads of laundry.

  Pizza? she said again. And a beer afterward, take a break from that thesis.

  I gave a loose shrug. She rolled her eyes, playful, and swayed toward the bedroom. Her shirt hit the carpet in the hallway, empty arms outstretched like an invitation. She was acting like the girl who I once lay on a vinyl windbreaker and made love to atop a traincar, in a CPR compound in Aldershot. She was acting like the girl I’d begun dating years earlier, the girl who I played intramural dodge ball with, just so I could watch her pitch horizontal and land glamourlessly on the hardwood to evade incoming throws. After practices, her body would be potholed with bruises—hips, ribs, shoulders, knees—and if I touched those violet blushes she’d scrunch her nose and bite down on the soft skin of my ear.

  I’d been drinking for a while. Maybe I was spoiling for a fight.

  How many of you train this late? I said.

  Four or five. It’s mostly defensive drills.

  The bedsprings wheezed. The bedside lamp clicked on, and its energy-saving fluorescent light hit the stippled wall.