Ballistics

by D. W. Wilson

  Ahead, the highway—the very asphalt, the fact of the road—was heaved skyward, as if some beast had burst from its prison of soil and tar. It looked like a skateboard ramp, as steep as the snow-and-gravel toboggan jumps kids erect at the base of hills. This was what I’d missed Radio Man talking about in Golden, what had been meant by the mutters and glares from those shoulder-parked cars. The road had split in two. It was tectonic—one side of the highway shoved the other away with all the finality of rock.

  I geared down, crawled the Ranger to the ridge’s lip and killed the ignition. Archer woke up, jerked from sleep by the kicking of the truck’s transmission. The crack cut through the highway and the dirt beneath it—wood-chop-esque, like it’d been hewn with an axe, like Paul Bunyan had had special occasion to come out of retirement. Why wasn’t the highway closed off? What if it’d been night?

  I got down from the truck. Puck scrambled after me.

  You want a closer look? I said to Archer, and he gave a single nod, so I pushed him and the chair to the edge. Ridiculous—if I stomped on the asphalt the vibrations loosed tufts of dirt. There was only a short fall to the other side, a few feet, but also a chasm into the maw of the Earth, dark like the kind of place a demon would dwell.

  That adds a few hours to the trek, I said. It meant doubling back to Golden, continuing north and cutting west along one highway or another, and frankly I’m not even sure you could get to Owenswood any of those ways. Gramps would have known, but Gramps always knows. That’s his mutant power—to always have an answer. He doesn’t deal with problems, he once told me. He deals with solutions. I wondered what he and Nora were doing right then—fighting, if history had taught me anything. Old friends, Nora had said, but it doesn’t take a philosopher to spot a misdirection.

  Archer scuffed his feet over the broken rock. This from the fire?

  The drought, I said. Has to do with moisture transferring through the soil. Like a shrivelling apple, how the skin’ll just slide off.

  He sucked a loud breath through his nose. The sun had descended toward the Purcells and the air looked dusty, like someone had peeled out with bald tires, like the residue kicked by a drag-racer on a tinder-dry course. The sky was the shade of wood chips, the mountains red-rimmed like a watercolour. Was it actually getting hotter as we headed west, or is that my imagination?

  You figure a three-foot drop? Archer said.

  Give or take.

  Foot and a half forward?

  I’m not jumping Gramps’ Ranger, I said. Thing barely has shocks.

  So it has ’em? he said, and grinned up at me like a devious grandfather. You ever caught air off train tracks?

  Puck leaned over the edge, planted his good leg on the vertical face as if to ease his drop to the lower plane. He sniffed it too, the muscles in his neck stretching as he dared his nose down and down. I snapped for him to quit it, and his big head swung toward me. But why?

  Of course I have, I said.

  Well, it’s the same.

  That’s not the point, Archer. It could blow the tires, or the alignment, or we could skid over the cliffside.

  He dragged his teeth over his upper lip, then grimaced. Probably unused to its smoothness—probably used to having a moustache. We’re just turning around? he said.

  Even if we jump it, and the truck survives, how do we bring Jack home? I said. This is a one-way trip. This is the point of no return.

  All or nothing, like you said. I need to make things up to Cecil.

  You’re not seriously going to pout.

  What if this is the biggest mistake? What if you get old and regret this? he said, and then he played the guilt card: You owe Cecil, too.

  His eyes had gone watery and he rubbed the heel of his wrist into them. Puck straightened, fixed us with his big eyes, his posture as regal as an old general. Archer’s teeth jawed in circles and he lifted his hat to mop a hand over his dappled scalp. Ahead of us: the blastland highway, the final voyage of Archer Cole, the fires, my dad, my mom, some triumvirate of emotion so outside my ken as to be alien. Behind us: Gramps, Nora, my thesis and future and the girlfriend drama that would haunt my waking hours. Fair enough, Archer; I did owe Gramps. He set me on the path out of Invermere—and at what point does a bullet start toward the beer can?

  If we do this, you’re going to tell me what I’m walking into, I said. I’m sick of this need-to-know bullshit.

  Okay, he rasped.

  Okay, I said, and whistled Puck to my side so I could help him over the heave. The truck, sadly, lacked the proper straps to batten down a dog, and I didn’t really want to get his drool and breath all over me and I didn’t want to see him launched through the windshield. So I climbed into the chasm and hoisted Puck into my arms. He was a heavy old bastard but I hugged him to my chest like a bag of soil, ferried him across, and walked with him to the shoulder. Now stay put, I said, as if I had any control over him. He seemed to nod.

  Then we were in the truck and I reversed to gain velocity from a run. Archer clutched the oh-shit handle and braced himself against the bench, and I cinched my seatbelt and dropped the Ranger into gear, felt the truck buck against me, the engine grumble, the tires grab the road. Wind dragged through the open window and whisked my hair in a whirl around my ears. The highway slithered on by. What a thing to do—what if we hit another heave? What if it was a heave in the wrong direction? Then we will find a way, I remember thinking—and thinking that was something Archer would say—as the front tires mounted the slope and our plane of travel travelled up, up, the Ranger’s nose like a breaching whale, the anticipation and adrenaline drumming in my throat as if I’d swallowed one of the engine’s pistons.

  And then weightlessness and butterflies like heartburn or the way your back itches when you’ve come down with a chest cold. We cleared that chasm, easy. Foot to clutch to combustion to torque, speed, trajectory. We could’ve cleared a chasm twice as big—right then, that surge of energy and awe, the boyishness of it.

  Neither Archer nor I had bothered to secure much of the loose stuff in the cab. That I attribute to a failure of forward thought. The two Coke bottles, now empty, cartwheeled up and banged the roof and one struck my lap. Scraps of garbage shook free from the plastic bag strung between the seats. The cap gun gravitated into the air and Archer smacked his palms to a clap around it. I pinned the shoebox to the bench. Archer: wild, wild grin. Archer: chin to chest but his head still lollygagging on his neck. Me: maybe set-jawed if I’m lucky, but more likely looking as scared as the child I felt like. I couldn’t scope myself in the mirror and thank God for that. I’d committed to something, had no idea what. Archer, for his part, didn’t seem to care—but then again, I don’t know how much Archer had to lose.

  I throttled the gas so the tires hit the ground chewing, held the wheel as straight as a sailor. Yee-haw, I wanted to shout, to land and kick a spray of gravel and dust and turn the steering column and jack the e-brake, slide to a perfect perpendicular pause as if we’d stopped to affect a pose. Then the truck galumphed down and Puck bolted from his position, charged toward us, charged to intersect the Ranger’s orbit.

  So I cranked the wheel. But the rear tires—rear-wheel drive, O blessed Ford—were still bouncing on their shitty shocks, hadn’t bit, hadn’t caught, hadn’t found purchase, and the truck beelined forward and I lost sight of Puck near my door, somewhere beneath the mirror and into my blind spot and peripherals and the places where it is easy to die. And then the tires caught, the steering wheel still cranked, me still lead-footing the pedal, and it’s a miracle the truck didn’t jackknife to a roll. Instead: massive fishtail, massive yaw. The end swung out on the driver’s side and I felt like watching the whole thing from third person: me pumping the brakes and overcorrecting, Archer two-handing the oh-shit handle, skid marks scorched on the asphalt where we’d set down, the air strong with the singed-hair stench of rubber. I winced in the expectation of a th-thump—of mowing down the family dog.

  In third person: Puck dan
cing around the Ranger and Archer’s face contorted and me, Alan West, daring the emergency brake, daring the resilience of the truck’s transmission. And then, me with my wits again, in the cab, in my own head—a whack, and a yalp, and the truck shuddered to a stall.

  The butterflies turned acid in my gut. The sky seemed darker.

  Puck was better than I expected but worse than I hoped. The Ranger had clubbed him as its tail swung out, knocked him ass-over-teakettle along the asphalt, but he’d somehow avoided getting run down. He was a mewling heap, though, without all the mewling, since he was the toughest dog walking. Scrapes were patched along his flank, and in places his short hair had scuffed off, breadcrumbed along the highway where’d he tumbled. He looked like an old butter-coloured couch, faded in places, foam out of seam. I put my hand on his head and he turned his snout to it. His side rose and fell quicker than relaxed, but I’m no vet, I didn’t know what that meant.

  His back leg bent weird.

  Shit, boy, I said.

  He whined, for effect.

  He alright? Archer hollered from the truck. He’d pulled himself across the seats, so he could peer out the flapping driver door. I scowled at him for a good long second before turning to my dog. Maybe this was one of those things I would regret forever. Puck’s bone hadn’t pierced through, but beneath his skin the leg had extra rivets, crevices that warbled along the grain, and, of course, the obvious split. He tried to turn to look at the injury but I put my shoulder in the way and he settled down, licked his front shoulder, a ruddy spot there. It’d started to swell, too, that leg. But not much could be done about that.

  His leg’s bust, I yelled.

  Splint it, Archer said, and I heard him rustle around in the truck. What’s your bastard grandfather got in his survival kit? Any rope?

  Will you give me a second here.

  No, kid, I won’t. Stop being sentimental and come help me.

  If he weren’t so old, and dying, I’d have stalked over and punched him in the neck. It was like he didn’t even realize the part he played. I scratched Puck behind his ears and his jowls jiggled. Now stay put.

  Gramps kept a length of nylon rope coiled in the bed. It was as thick as a candy cane, and though Puck was a beast of legendary might, it would suffice to hold his leg straight. I cut a few strands and snagged a skinny length of plywood that I had to snap in two on the tailgate.

  This is going to hurt, I said, realizing.

  I can pin him with my weight, Archer said. He ain’t gonna like you.

  You can’t pin him, Archer, I said, which brought a grin to his lips, the idea that he’d get to wrestle the big dog. You can’t even kick a soccer ball.

  For a second his grin lingered and then straightened out, and I thought I’d lit a fire in his eyes, that he was summoning a great anger, but he looked down and away and put the back of his wrist to his mouth. The truth, of course, was that I’d have to hold Puck while Archer did the splinting. The mechanics couldn’t work any other way.

  I lifted him as gently as I could, not really sure how to gather that wounded leg, and he loosed a whine at me, an authentic, quiet one right into my ear. Then he licked me across the face, right over my mouth and nose and part of my eye and I felt his drool soaking into the shoulder of my shirt. His tail beat horizontal around my torso, and my hands felt the geography of his body, felt the bumps of his ribs that seemed notched out of joint, oddly spaced, and he whined again when I stopped to let my fingers probe.

  I lowered him into the truck’s back seat, which barely had enough room for him, but I didn’t think it’d be fair to set him on the cold metal of the bed. Archer had the good sense to manoeuvre himself around the hood, to the driver’s side, while I’d been carrying Puck—he did it without the chair, with two shaky hands and most of his chest pressed to the Ranger’s body, a comical shuffling motion, if things had been more comical. Now, with Puck in sight, he grazed the wrecked leg with his thumb, and the grimace that split his face had to be genuine. Lesson learned, old man.

  You’re splinting it, I’ll hold him.

  I’m sorry, kid.

  I shifted the driver’s seat forward as far it would go, wedged myself in the gap between that and the rear bench, and basically lay atop Puck. His neck and head were pinned beneath my armpit like a UFC wrestler, and my arms stretched along his torso. Each hand gripped a leg. I suppose it’d worked out in my favour that he only had three legs to begin with. Archer nodded, took hold of the awkward bend, the alien look of it, and then on a three-breath count, straightened it with a motion so fluid he had to have done it before.

  Puck kicked, and yelped, and then he growled and bit my face. When I say this, I mean my whole face, so galactic were his jaws. One moment I strained against him as he twisted, and the next he’d reared up and around—Jesus, how long was his neck?—and opened his mouth and encircled it around my head. His lower jaw cupped my lower jaw and his upper teeth touched somewhere toward my temple, and he used me like a human would use a piece of wood to grit against pain. At least, that’s how I choose to believe it. My mouth clicked shut and I squeezed a Puck through my clenched lips and his canines scoured a line down my cheek. My ear was somewhere in the unclaimed space between Puck’s tongue and the roof of his mouth. Deep within him I heard the low grumbling of his growl, like the way a fridge gargles at night to keep itself cool.

  Then the pressure on my face lessened, and Puck’s head eased down to the seat, and Archer blew a breath out his nose. I let go, tentatively, and Puck shifted enough to make himself comfortable. I touched my cheek, felt the red lines left there. Archer shimmied toward his side, and I got out of the truck and came around to help him along, my shoulder under his arm.

  Should feed him some beer. Cecil still keep beer under the seat?

  I never knew he did, I said.

  Oh yes, he said, and sure enough: the last two-thirds of a six-pack of comfort beer. Archer handed it to me to open, his hands all a-shaking, and then he emptied it into the dog’s water dish and put it on the seat next to Puck’s big head. Puck lapped at it. Dogs are, by and large, big fans of beer.

  That’ll help, poor bugger.

  I watched Puck in the rearview as I started the ignition. His flank still rose and fell in shallow heaves. I loved that dog. I think he’s got broken ribs too, I said.

  Archer said nothing for a long moment. He was from the army, after all. Once, in a similar situation, Darby’s mother called her to let her know the family cat had passed away at twenty-two and a half, and that’s how the conversation progressed: Darby’s name, an overlong pause, and then her mother’s voice like a ribbit through the receiver.

  He’s in rough shape, Archer said.

  There’s a shotgun at the bottom of Gramps’ toolbox.

  In the back?

  Yeah, I said. Puck nuzzled his head against his good front leg.

  Maybe go get it, in case.

  Gramps’ toolbox spanned the width of the truck’s box, and I climbed up and fiddled to find the right key until the padlock popped with a satisfying clunk. The shotgun lay hidden on the lowest level, beneath shelves of tinsnips and linesman’s pliers and ratchet sets (one of which I got Gramps for his birthday; it appeared unused) and other metal tools involved in the process of welding steel. Even that box smelled like Gramps, the sweetness of sawdust and oil and all those days he’d come home late and dirty and burned, in Carhartts and fire gear and one-strapping a heavy canvas bag on his shoulder. He’d given up full-time welding long before I landed on this planet, but he still did side jobs, still toyed and tarried with fire. It occurred to me, right then, that Gramps had never taught me much in the way of his profession—I know my way around a toolbox as surely as an uncollared shirt, but a blowtorch? I don’t even know which end shoots the flame. You’d think a guy like Gramps would have set about setting me up as his mortal progeny.

  I lifted out the first shelf, set it beside me. The truck’s engine hissed, and in the passenger seat Archer shifted, trie
d to get me in his line of sight. From my vantage, I could see Puck’s flank lift and ripple as it settled down. Lift and ripple. Probably, if I put my ear to him, I’d hear wheezing, the bubble of blood and fluids putting weight on his lungs. I retrieved the shotgun, a weapon that once may have been worth collecting, and brought it to the cab. It was too long to fit anywhere except on the floor, ominously near Puck.

  How old is he? Archer asked, when I got in.

  Eleven.

  That’s a good age for a mastiff. That’s a good age to die.

  You sound like Gramps, I said, and pulled off the shoulder, down the highway toward who-knows-what. I tried to picture myself lining Puck up in the irons, my finger on the trigger, the sonic thwap and then the far worse sound of the big dog going down. And of course I’d have to be the one to do it; that’s how it always went. Dog owners leaned on their own triggers. Fathers unplugged iron lungs with stoic, unshaking hands. Captains rarely went down with the ship anymore, but always had a crucial part to play in their scuttling. I wonder if Archer would have done it, had I asked, and I wonder, in the end, if that would’ve been a kindness to both him and the dog.

  Now, I said to Archer, feeling sober, feeling like I’d opened a hole in the world. You start talking. That was the deal.

  He reached under the cab for the yoke of beer, tore one off and fought to crack it.

  Been a long time since I had a beer, he said, trying to hook his thumbnail beneath, the tab ta-tinking. Ahead of us, somewhere, the highway to Owenswood was closed, and I hoped Archer could make good on his claim to remember the logging roads, because soon the day would slide to twilight, the dying hour, and I preferred to dispense with the offroading before night settled. Archer grabbed a nickel from the dashboard and wedged it under the tab, finally got the beer open. His first pull was a long, slow slurp of shitty beer overdone with sentimentality. Puck breathed behind me. A layer of dust caked the windshield of Gramps’ Ranger—a product of the moistureless summer, the very topsoil flinting away—so I hit the wipers to smear it clean, to get an unobstructed view of what was to come.