by D. W. Wilson
Yeah.
We stood there, in the kitchen. She was as tall as my chin. A conversation can slip into awkwardness as if it is the natural state between humans. I wanted to say more, but she turned away, so like a teenager, and I watched her close the bedroom door with a gentle click. Sometimes, I envied the relationship Cecil had with Jack, for all its flaws. It’s like they had the capacity to talk to each other, being father and son; in theory there could be no secrets between them. But some details I simply couldn’t tell my daughter, some truths.
Those were grim minutes in my truck, the kid’s legs kicking to spasms and the air wheezing out his throat like from an untied balloon. Jack had climbed into the bed, and I could see him in the rearview pining for glimpses of the boy. Not even Cecil knew what to do save get him to a hospital. Couldn’t bandage him, couldn’t do anything. He kept calling for water and Cecil pressed a cold beer to his cheek and his eyelids fluttered, so maybe it helped. I remember the way his fingers curled, unable to even clutch at himself. So does Cecil, I bet. It reminded me of the things I’ve seen: black flaking limbs in hospital buckets, a man’s eyes bulged so wide he can’t even see. You don’t forget things like that. And you don’t need a reminder.
After we handed the kid off, Cecil disappeared into the men’s bathroom to clean up and, I bet, to kneel before the porcelain throne and will himself not to throw up. The whole time, Jack leaned on a lime-green wall, hands in his pockets and his eyes on the bathroom door—portrait of a diligent son.
I TOOK MY SKETCHBOOK to the public beach and then toward the fur-trading fort where Crib gave Jack a black eye. The beachfront was Crown property—could not be owned by persons—but that didn’t deter those condo-dwellers from staking big signs in the sand that proclaimed ownership, threatened to prosecute trespass. There’d been an incident where a seagull tripped a bear trap some idiot had buried in the sand. It was a miracle that it hadn’t been somebody’s child, or dog.
With one or two notable exceptions, I had everything I wanted in those days—a daughter, friends, a job that provided me with the right mixture of freedom and exertion needed to pursue a trivial pastime. I say this as a man looking back at himself looking forward. When I was ten or eleven I watched our nearest neighbour, Mr. Halverson, in his yard, on an evening when the August light shone through the pine trees. I’d climbed one of those trees out of idle boredom. Mr. Halverson was a Bible-thumper and he worked long landscaper hours, and at the end of a shift he’d be dropped off at the base of his front yard where the grass gave way to gravel. He’d come into his yard with a big dog and a toddler and his wife. In my mind the dog is a mastiff—a man’s animal—and his wife is beautiful beyond the flexible standards of a ten-year-old boy. I picture burnt-brown bangs, a mole on her left jugular, and a habit of scrunching her nose, the kind of creamy skin you attribute to movie stars and the unattainable girls of your teenaged years. Mr. Halverson stood on a concrete landing at the foot of his back door. His house was only one storey, army-coloured siding, inadequate lodging for his many children. The toddler slept against his shoulder. In his free hand, Mr. Halverson held a moss-coloured tennis ball. His beautiful wife lounged in a plastic lawn chair. When he tossed the tennis ball the mastiff gave lumbering pursuit, horse-like in its gait. The late-afternoon light scattered through tree branches but Mr. Halverson seemed a beacon for it, was haloed by it. Each time he pitched that ball, as the dog trotted away, he hauled his shoulders straight and adjusted the weight of the toddler in his arm and eyed his wife. A giant, sweat-stained V shadowed his chest. Dark whiskers stubbled his cheek, and the dirty remains of his work dusted his hair, but he had this look about him—iconic. He smiled at his wife and he swept his gaze across the green, inadequate house and the dog that revered him and the yard he’d sculpted, as if to say: yes, this is mine, and I am happy with it.
His was not the ideal life, no—he worked a layman’s job, and rumours spread, as rumours do, about the simple, happy man with a wife too good for him. But it seemed to me, at ten years old, that what Mr. Halverson had at the foot of his back door was all any man should ever aspire to.
I don’t think I’m alone in this want. Given the choice and the proper consideration—given riches and fame, a limitless credit card—I think a man will pick a dog and a daughter and a hard day’s work, that tightening sensation in your shoulder blades, the scent of grime caked to your hands by sweat. We’re all mostly the same. Cecil, me, Jack, Linnea, Nora, even Crib, I’d bet—we all have our Mr. Halversons. We all have moments tucked away for safekeeping: Cecil and Nora tobogganing at some big hotel’s hill, their first date; Jack making desperate calls from a phone booth in Owenswood and the relief when, at last, one is answered; if I’m lucky, some soggy memory of those weeks in the British Columbia wilds when Linnea and I camped among the trees. They’re like photographs from a better life, those moments, there to dig up and unfold and just lounge in the memory of. They’re comforts for those times when the horizon seems grey as charcoal, when the air weighs on your tongue and tastes of metal and static and thunderstorms, when you can’t shake the sensation of unavoidable things approaching as surely as a shift in the wind.
Four
Demanatus:
One stray note does not ruin chorus,
just as one stray act does not ruin character.
Men are the sum of their habits.
Archer had dozed off before Invermere even cleared the rearview. As we drove, his legs kicked like a dog’s and he drooled on himself and dragged his chin over his denim collar. I swear Puck watched him as if to give appraisal, himself squatted in the back, his body off-centre to balance his weight over that muscly third limb.
You get guys who never escape a place like Invermere, and you get guys who escaped and came back. Two of my best friends stayed behind to shove lumber at a sawmill forty minutes south, and though their ambitions burn with less intensity and their stars circle considerably closer to the ground, they are nonetheless dreamers.
We neared Golden, The Town of Opportunity, where I intended to stop and piss and let Puck do the same. He won’t defile the inside of a vehicle—too instilled with his bizarro canine honour—but he has his own ways of making a journey unpleasant, like the range and rankness of his breath. Golden’s big, punny sign swept into view as the Ranger topped one of the highway’s many hills, and I marvelled at the absurdity of those slogans. Alberta: Wild Rose Country. Saskatchewan: Land of Living Skies. Ontario: Where the Women Are More Frigid Than Our Beer.
I tapped the brakes to miss a squirrel—Bambi effect—and Archer snorted awake, so much like Gramps, and I realized I didn’t know the proper way to address him. Should I call him Gramps, too? Would it get confusing?
Can I look in that box, he said, dopey with sleep. His finger waggled at Gramps’ shoebox and he manoeuvred himself around, shrugged the seatbelt off his chest and under his shoulder, which, I knew from CPR training, would tear the aorta from his heart.
Well it’s Gramps’ secret cache.
Archer took the shoebox from the seat between us. He positioned it in his lap and let his hands linger on the lid before he lifted it off. At the top was the sketch of my mom that I’d kept, and he grinned upon seeing it. I was a damned good artist, he said.
He touched the contents so gently, with so much care, that his hands trembled from the effort. The cap gun caught his attention and he hefted it to nose level, blew across it, thumbed the metal ridges—of course he’d be most interested in the gun. Jack’s, he declared, which was pretty obvious to me from the get-go. Then he pinched the eagle-adorned Zippo, laid it flat in the palm of his hand and stared.
This is like being in someone else’s dream. I never thought Cecil’d be the cherished-childhood type.
The things you learn, I said.
Wish I’d given him the chance, he said, and closed the lid. He set the picture on the dashboard, the revolver on the seat between us. Jack might want this.
I think Gramps gave me the box i
n case Jack doesn’t want to come. Leverage, or something.
Jack’ll come.
That’s not the point.
Yep, Old Man West always was a crafty bastard, Archer said. Then, almost without pause: You got a girlfriend or anything?
I don’t know, I said.
How’s that the case?
We sort of hate each other.
Sounds like every marriage on the planet, he said, which was a bit cliché. Still, I gave him a one-sided smile; you humour old guys.
She’s a handball player, I said.
Is that a joke?
They are terrifying to behold and overly sensitive to sarcasm.
What happened, then? he said, and sounded—finally—like a grandfather.
I’d rather not discuss it. Brief me on my dad.
He brushed his hands over his jeans, a full-bodied action, like operating a belt sander. I could see stitches along his jaw, near his ear, and a scar under his elbow, white like a patch of freezer ice, and I wondered what kind of cancer plagued him, mostly out of a primal self-cataloguing. On Gramps’ side I had a misfiring heart, bad teeth, a genetic predisposition to say and do stupid things. Blissfulness, I’ve heard it said, is ignorant. Then Archer seemed to notice Puck’s big head gooing drool over the base of the gearshift. You talk like Cecil, he said, looking at Puck. I miss talking to Cecil.
What happened?
Tunnel vision, he said, and gazed out the window at the Purcells, at the ochre, glowing ridge of them. According to Baritone Radio Man, the wildfires had split into two distinct blazes and the current regiment of troops (he called them) was incapable of stopping both. So they’d deployed the Armed Forces—protect the cities, let the country burn, which had the hipsters threatening protest and boycott. Save our trees, they chanted, and some sane-sounding fireman explained that the fires were nature’s way of coiling the slack, nature’s Great Recycling Plant. And it’s not like we want the trees to burn, he added with a preachy drawl. They’re the economy.
Meanwhile, on the CBC, a broadcaster with a graver-than-funeral-rites voice queried people on what they’d save if they could save only one thing. Photographs, one grandmotherly type said, and in the background a communal awww. My baseball cards, said some guy who sounded like he worked in the salt mines, who sounded like the sort of man who lived alone despite his suave charm, his decent soul, the sort of man who would sift through his librarious collection of posterback cards—each in a protective polypropylene sleeve—and sniff their old-booky smell and remember a time when he didn’t expect to die alone. My dad, said a kid.
I pulled us into an Esso station at the top of another hill and loosed Puck. Archer shouldered his door open and swung his legs over the side and looked around for his wheelchair. It was in the truck’s bed, and he eyed the asphalt and the yellow line of the parking stall and the distance to the tailgate: only a few steps. What does a guy like that think? You labour so long and work so hard, and then the very act of mobility—that first of all gifts—is taken away. And not even by something you can test against the strength of your arm, but by wasting. I bet he could still do a lot of chin-ups. I bet he liked to arm-wrestle.
I brought Archer his chair and he mumbled thanks. Sitting down, he was no taller than Puck, and when he wheeled himself around he came face to face with the beast, with Puck’s crazy eyes and those jowls like a pair of waterlogged socks.
I like this guy, he said, and pushed past. Puck lingered a moment and I thought maybe I was reading too much into it. After he’d done his thing on some bushes near a streetlamp, I opened the truck door and he got back in. He chose to sit in driver that time, and Archer shook his head. Puck could do what Puck wanted to do; he saw the world in a different way.
I kept stride with Archer as we approached the station. He made an alright clip, but his chest wheezed in and out, and I worried that he’d give himself a heart attack before asking for my help—a bluehair too stubborn to accept that he had limits.
Look, just let me push you, I said. You can carry the supplies.
Fuck you kid.
I got better things to do than deal with you dying.
Get used to it. I’m definitely dying.
We can strap you to Puck, I said.
Dogsled? A gimpo dogsled?
It’d be more of a chariot, I told him.
He didn’t even let me get the door for him. At least, he attempted to get the door open without my help, and in a more vindictive state of mind I’d have stood by and let him struggle. Inside, he moved around like somebody his age and condition should. It occurred to me that I didn’t know how old he was, but as his aluminum wheels eeked along the station’s dirty laminate floor—leaving, in their wake, a line of displaced grime, like contrails—I ballparked him at seventy-seven. A good age to die, Gramps would say, but he’d been saying that since I turned eighteen.
Baritone Radio Man had followed me inside, but he spoke of nothing interesting, droned statistics about square kilometres burned and grizzlies driven north to mate with polar bears and the shifting velocity of the wind. He mentioned something about the Rogers Pass but I only caught the tail end, hoped we wouldn’t find it closed or backed up with traffic or something else, else it’d be north to the Yukon for us. I recalled Darby talking about the Rogers too, wished I’d been paying attention. Kamloops was entering evacuation standby, Radio Man said, which meant people were ready to ditch home at a moment’s notice. The RCMP had begun drills for looter duty—a job that could very well be the loneliest on the planet. Imagine driving those empty streets knowing any movement meant malcontents. Even their dispatch would be a skeleton crew—the brave and the stupid and the mortally unlucky. Imagine the tinny radio silence. Imagine the taste of the air.
Gramps knew landscapers in Invermere who had signed up to combat the blazes, backhoes and all, normal working-class guys stepping up to the plate, stepping up to save B.C.’s economy (the pay was very good). Other maniacs parachuted into forward camps, armed only with a camelback full of retardant, maybe the most basic tools. Gramps himself had never done bushwork—too old, and he’d be the first to admit it—but he knew all the theory, knew enough to understand that the might of human ingenuity couldn’t stop such destruction. Luck, he’d said. It’ll come down to luck, or nature will sort itself out.
In the gas station bathroom, above the urinal, someone had scrawled: I fucked your mom last night. Below that, in answer: Go home Dad, you’re drunk. At the front counter, Archer bought two Cokes.
The glass kind, he said when I came up beside him. He spun the bottle in his hand, and I figured he probably wasn’t allowed to drink Coke. Far as I can tell, that’s what relationships come to—a giant game of what can I get away with.
They’re the best, I said, and he offered the second bottle, and I took it. A touching gesture of grandfatherliness, or I’m being cynical. Anything else you want? After this, it’s Owenswood or bust. All or nothing.
Better get some water, be safe.
Survival kit’s in the truck.
Right, he said.
Gramps is never unprepared.
Archer scowled into his hands at that. His wedding band tinked on the Coke bottle and he struggled to twist the cap off, but I knew better than to do it for him, and in a moment it came off with a sizzle.
THE ROGERS PASS is as close to the mountains and as near to feeling wholly insignificant as you can get, short of climbing a mountain or, I don’t know, flying into space. The rock faces loom so close that the less iron-willed feel claustrophobic; it seems wilder than other places in the valley, less tamed, but that could be because I am unfamiliar with the geography. Traditionally, Gramps and I headed south for camping, east for roadtrips.
The highway up the Rogers winds under a series of tunnels bored through rock croppings, overhangs, impassable walls of carbon. On all sides, the vertebrae of the world rise as high as the late-morning sun. The cliffs are steeper than death; the steel and concrete barricades reek of insuffici
ency—you’d be surprised how easily metal bends against the impact of a yawing car. I have a friend who once complained about the Canadian tendency to erect highways that climbed around nature’s palisades, but there is no better option. You can’t just go through them; humans are not dwellers of the underground and the dark.
We passed cars that’d pulled onto the shoulder, and drivers scowled as I trundled by. Archer, predictably, had dozed off, but not before he justified his sleepiness by insisting that westward travel affected him in a special way—that it had to do with magnets and poles and, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear, the refracting angle of solar wind. Baritone Radio Man had gone silent, so I fiddled with the tuning knob and hoped to snag CJ92, Calgary’s Best Rock—Cowtown: Heart of the New West (not bad)—but, as far from the border as we were, my options were CBC’s classics or Puck’s musical pant.
We drove into a tunnel. When I was a kid, I held my breath through each of the underpasses, and wished. The Rogers is a goldmine of wish-granting tunnels, but I always thought that one spoiled wish—one breath not quite held—would thwart all previous and future wishes for that object of desire. If you couldn’t hold your breath it would never come true. That’s a grave game to play as a child, or even a teenager wishing, of course, for romantic success. I can remember blue-facing myself as Gramps cursed slug-moving semis; I can remember pounding my wrist on the dashboard and feeling that rush of expelled air, that rush of complete and inconsolable loss. What I can’t remember are the wishes themselves: what preoccupies the mind of an eight-year-old? Right then, as I held my breath while Archer gargled beside me, I wished for things between Darby and me to have gone differently than they did. Someday, I won’t remember even this. Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: that it isn’t what we desire that endures, but that we desire, that we are constantly reaching, hoping, pining, praying for the things beyond our grasp. Our desire is as perennial as the mountains.