Ballistics

by D. W. Wilson

  Alright, Archer said as he lowered the beer to his lap. Here’s a story about Jack West.

  In the spring of 1972 Linnea came down with a killer flu for three weeks. It would’ve been bad news if not for Nora: Jones & Sons worked me through the bleeding hours and Nora didn’t teach until the afternoon, so with her help we could get near full sickbay coverage. She’d head over just before five a.m.—Cecil would already be a half-hour along the road to the sawmill, last and longest job he ever took as a welder—and let herself in. Sometimes I’d be heading out at the same time, and we’d do-si-do around the hallway and the cramped boot room with all my winter coats piled in the corners. She probably wished she had a daughter of her own—would come pretty close, one day—so I bet Linnea drew her there.

  On rare occasions I still saw Crib, each time with a different girl riding shotgun, one time with bullet-hole stickers up and down the car’s flank. He’d swapped his plates for B.C. blues, which meant he’d taken residency, but nowhere in Invermere—Cecil wasn’t the first guy to damn near beat him pulpy, and I wasn’t the only guy who came close to throwing him off a bridge. Far as I knew, he’d fled town to another Kootenay metropolis, but he came back, always came back, as if drawn to good old Invermere—and even though Nora called it paranoia, each time he came through town he just happened across the house Jones & Sons had been contracted to paint. I’d watch him inch along, dressed in his field coat and big, dark sunglasses or a gunmetal cadet’s hat, this way of rolling his shoulders as his car bounced over the potholes on the town’s ratty streets. There was at least one more confrontation brewing between me and him. No way around it.

  By this time I saw Nora more often than I saw Cecil. I just bumped into her around town: we’d nearly collide in grocery store aisles, buying dinner at the same time; the teachers tended to take lunch at a restaurant down the street from the highschool, where the guys at Jones & Sons grabbed coffee at ten-fifteen and three-forty-five. A couple times during the three weeks when all Linnea could eat was soda crackers and ginger ale, I slept late and was running behind and Nora even gave me her own packed lunch and a wallop on the shoulder, for prosperity. I’ve said it before, but any woman like that.

  Spring in Invermere is muddy, and though the temperature rises enough for a man to bare his arms without discomfort, the meltwater that runs down the glaciers makes the lake icy, and the wind breezing across it renders the morning chill. Everybody wears gumboots and puts their trucks in four-wheel and avoids the gravel and dirt roads—like the one behind Cecil’s place—for fear of workplace jibes. You hear stories about massive benders at the gravel pits and guys ditching cars over the cliff up there, the lawlessness of it, like the Wild West. The town fills up with more kids and fewer skiers. Lawn chairs are hauled from toolsheds, families eye their firewood and their hotdog pits, and in the evenings people host bonfires that make whole neighbourhoods smell like a chimney’s smoke.

  Jack found me one such evening, on a fold-out chair, roasting a hotdog with a coat hanger I’d unbent to a spit. I had a beer on the go and two empties done; Linnea was out for the night with some of her friends, and I had no impressions to make. Jack tossed a wave my way and vaulted over the fence and rubbed his neck. I figured he’d evac soon as I told him Linnea would not be home.

  Linnea here? he said.

  Nah, I told him. Want a hotdog?

  Okay.

  I straightened another wire hanger and pointed at the bag of dogs. He skewered one widthwise, the amateur way. Then he sat down on an upturned log beside me and we roasted our food without talk. He’d have been sixteen at the time. Cecil’d told me of his antics, that he’d been given the boot from all of his classes at least once, that he had a hard time keeping any friends, and that he’d never attended a school dance, never mentioned any girl save Linnea.

  Can I have a beer, Jack said all of a sudden.

  Straight to the point, I see.

  Sorry.

  Nah, I said, and ripped one from the six-pack under my chair.

  Thanks, he said.

  Don’t tell Cecil.

  He cracked it and slurped from it and I eyed the state of my hotdog. Eventually I pulled it off the spit—golden brown—and Jack’s ripped in two and fell into the fire. I tore mine in half and gave it over. He didn’t say thanks, but he didn’t need to. I thought about giving Cecil a call, maybe have him and Nora over for a drink. The poor bastard worked so damn hard at the sawmill welding job.

  Jack said: I think I might want to marry Linnea.

  I swallowed the whole of my half-dog and nearly choked, but for all the wrong reasons. Jesus Christ Jack.

  Sorry, he said immediately.

  Look, you got a lot of time.

  Yeah.

  Yeah, I said. I emptied my beer and yanked another one free—figured I’d need it.

  Sometimes I think about it though, he said, taking a sip, awkwardly.

  Are we still talking about marriage? I said.

  It’s just thinking.

  I’m Linnea’s dad.

  Sorry, he said. He prodded the fire with the spit, gave it some oxygen so it flared up for a second, threatened to burn off the delicate log stacking I’d built to last the evening.

  Why don’t you talk to your dad about this, I said, and he gave me a look that said he wasn’t a fool but that I might be. What about your mom?

  She’s not my mom.

  I mean Nora.

  She’s not my mom, he said, and sipped his beer again, eyeing me over the can.

  Sorry, I said.

  That’s okay.

  We watched the fire a while. Jack planted his forearms on his thighs and leaned toward the flame, hands together in the space between his knees. Occasionally he’d slurp the beer—a hesitant, quick tilt of the can that made me think he didn’t particularly like the taste. It wasn’t late enough for the flames to really make things glow, but I could still see them reddening Jack’s cheek. It seemed possible to see in his face the sketches of the man he would become, when his features would harden and pull inward, tighten around the chin and tug his forehead up—a man more calculated and prepared for what lay ahead, but also sadder, lonelier, and aware of exactly these differences whenever he remembers the boy he was.

  I’m not sure what you want, Jack, I said.

  Me neither.

  Don’t do anything stupid.

  Like what, he said, and gave me this single, affirmative nod, and it was my turn to glare at him over my beer can.

  I’m serious, I told him, maybe a bit too stern. I let you get off with shooting me, but if you fuck up my daughter’s life.

  I won’t, he said, and I believed him.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  There’s one more beer.

  He nodded and polished his off. Hey, don’t tell my old man.

  No shit.

  You want to go up to the cabin sometime?

  Jack, I’m not your dad.

  I mean with Linnea too, and Nora. Dad’s so busy he never has the time.

  I’ll think about it, I said.

  Nora won’t take us alone, said she’s afraid of bears.

  Well—

  Look Archer, he said, leaning forward like I’d seen Cecil do, his spitting image, blue ballcap and denim and dog-brown hair around his ears. He flashed a wide salesman’s grin. But he didn’t finish the sentence.

  I’ll think about it, I told him, and he bobbed his head and raised his beer as if toasting, goading me to do the same.

  A COUPLE WEEKENDS later Jack organized the cabin trip with Cecil’s blessing, and the four of us took my truck along the logging roads to Dunbar Lake. The kids crammed in the rear and Nora rode shotgun in a flannel overcoat that must have belonged to Cecil, because it drooped around her shoulders and its excess sleeve coiled in her lap like a cat. She’d cut her red hair short and donned a John Deere trucker cap that sunk all the way to her ears. As we drove she kicked one boot up on the dash, crossed her arms. If I’m allowed to make
this call, I’d say she looked happy, sitting there—but hell, I was happy too. It would have been nice if Cecil had made it out.

  Nora had packed enough food to last us and some liquor that Cecil may or may not have approved of parting with—the last fifth of his bottle of whiskey, one or two six-packs—and Jack tackled the gear we’d need for fish, said Cecil stashed equipment and canned things in a cellar beneath the cabin, accessible by a trap door hidden beneath the kitchen table. Jack also carried a shitty bolt-action rifle of Cecil’s, on Nora’s request, in case we had to scare off a bear, but both me and him knew—and kept it to ourselves—that it’d take a way bigger gun or a whole lot of providence to take one of those beasts down. I knew a guy who managed to kill a grizzly with a nine-mill Smith & Wesson—lucky bullet to the jugular as it charged, an all but impossible shot—but the best I hoped for was a loud enough bang.

  The drive to Cecil’s cabin lasts barely an hour if you don’t miss the turnoff to the logging roads. On my own I’d never have found it, but Jack showed me the landmarks to watch for: a long-deserted eagle’s nest on top a power pole; a white cross on the roadside with flowers all around it, tipped sideways with neglect; a patch of skeleton trees where a flash fire had erupted and then extinguished, almost directly opposite the turn. If you hit the General Convenience Store, you’d gone too far. That place, Cecil had told me, stayed open late to sell booze to minors, was owned and run by Morgan Lane, which should have said enough. You know how he is, Cecil’d said, and then shrugged his but-what-do-I-know shrug. Not the kind of guy you want to run into on a dark night.

  The logging road leading to the cabin sloped down and down almost to a point in the valley where the roots of two mountains meet. You couldn’t see anything through the tree cover—it was damned near to driving blind, but the road was wide and the shoulders not too deep, and evidence remained of times when trucks like my own had swerved into the ditch around a curve. It reminded me of a trip with my ex-wife, probably the last good memory I have of her, when her and me planned a two-week camping trek into the Bitterroot Mountains, bombing west down the I-90 in an Estate Wagon, before Linnea was born. My ex had the tiniest ears and freckles that dotted all the way down her neck. Not three hours through the first day of our hike, I caught my toe on a tree root and sprained my ankle so bad it swelled big as a boxing glove, and the two of us spent those weeks in a motel room in Missoula, Montana, living on trail mix and pork and beans and tap water rationed from canteens.

  So that’s what I was remembering, of all things, when the tree cover fell away and the road devolved to a mud pit as deep as my Ranger’s wheel wells. We pitched forward and I felt Jack brace his forearm on the rear of my chair, and then I laid off the clutch, and with a kick we lurched into the open glade where Cecil’s cabin stood a vigil. The glade was boggy with mud and milkweed and deer droppings and the truck’s tires made a slushing sound as we rolled toward the cabin. That’s spring in the Kootenay Valley—all deer shit and wet grass and the cold earth gone soft enough to dig your boots in. I parked the truck on what looked like the firmest ground, and the four of us hopped down. Almost instantly, Nora sank ankle-deep in the mud.

  The cabin slumped like someone’s wounded dog. Nearby, a pumpkin-coloured jeep rusted out its end of days. At the lake’s edge six chopping blocks were upturned to stools, and Cecil’s dinghy bobbed in the water’s swell, tethered to a lightning-cracked pine that reached like a great V toward the sky. I peered through the windshield and the mud my wipers had smeared on the glass. Jack climbed out behind me and as he straightened beside the truck he gazed up at that cabin like a man looking at a place he is no longer welcome. The air was thick with the nectary scent of the mountains and a stickiness that gummed up my mouth like sap.

  Jack jerked his chin toward the pine.

  That caused a fire, he said. Flaming half landed on the cabin. Dad got knee-deep in rubble prying open the trap door to rescue his guns.

  Took him a week to get the soot out of his fingernails, Nora said.

  That’s because he never washes his hands, I said.

  Jack once told me how everything about the cabin sucked the bones from him: the soil-coloured chimney bucket that had never been cleaned; the poly-patched window in the loft he and the old bastard once blared a hollowpoint through; even Cecil’s jeep, sure to pucker with gasoline. Cecil had taught him to drive on that jeep, on fishing trips when the two of them would spend days casting for trout and chewing whitetail meat Cecil’s workmates had cured to jerky in their sheds. Jack said he intended to teach his own son how to drive there, at the cabin. He talked about guiding his son in lazy circles around the clearing and, when the boy’s small palms had a feel for the clutch, could handle like a teenager, along the riverbeds with their muck and the dogwoods that drooled across the rapids like mastiffs.

  We carried our gear from the Ranger’s bed to the cabin, and once inside Jack climbed up to the loft and we passed him Nora’s and Linnea’s packs. There weren’t enough beds for the four of us, so me and him would have to spend the night in the truck or on the floor. The inside of the cabin was unfinished, the walls undrywalled but packed full of fibreglass insulation and covered with sheets of frosted poly. Cecil had built all the furnishings himself—and it showed—save an out-of-place rug with a picture of a wolf and her pups.

  Above the doorway, in a dirty picture frame that looked burned at one corner, was a picture of a woman far younger than me. The photograph inside was almost wholly obscured, save the outline of her hair, a big smile, a dress that could’ve been worn at a wedding. Jack slid from the loft with the arches of his feet cupping the ladder rails, one quick motion. He landed and brushed his hands on his thighs.

  That’s my mom, he said. In case you’re wondering.

  I was wondering, I said.

  She got hit by a logging truck.

  Sorry, Jack.

  It’s okay.

  Cecil never said.

  Jack’s lip twitched up at the corner, as if I ought to be surprised Cecil didn’t talk about the women of his past. He looked at Nora. I don’t remember her, he said. Or what it’s like to have a mom.

  Nora worked so goddamned hard for the West men, and all I ever saw her take was shit from Jack—mean, petty shit like you’d dish out to somebody who’d been sleeping with your wife. Right then, in that cabin, as Nora sucked a deep breath and leaned against the wall, her hands in the pockets of Cecil’s flannel coat, her head tilted forward and eyes downcast—right then I could have smacked Jack West if I were at all inclined toward that kind of upbringing. I bet Cecil would have, if Cecil were there and if he was observant enough to realize what’d been said.

  Apologize, I said.

  Both Nora’s and Jack’s heads snapped up. I’d even surprised myself, to tell the truth.

  What? Jack said.

  Apologize to Nora.

  Archer, Nora said, but I jerked my head: no.

  Jack’s brow twitched and his lip curled, only a tad—that unmistakable teenaged dilemma, the gulf between his pride and his getting what he wanted—whatever that might be. It was a damned good thing Linnea hadn’t come in, or else we’d probably have gone all the way to stalemate, Jack and I.

  I’m sorry, he said, and without letting it linger—without letting Nora acknowledge it—he tramped out the door, close enough for me to feel the wind of his motion. Another inch and we’d have knocked shoulders. But maybe that was a confrontation for another day.

  Nora and I didn’t move for a few long moments. She tapped her boot heel on the cabin’s floor and I gripped the back of a kitchen chair, pretended to stretch, to be unaware of her, there, red-haired and cross-armed and looking better than I’d seen her and knowing, me knowing, that I’d just done something she probably appreciated.

  You didn’t need to do that, she said.

  It wasn’t my place.

  Jack’s just a dumb boy.

  I’m real sorry.

  Thank you, Archer, she said with a fina
lity that made me clam up and not apologize any further. I must have sounded like a goddamned Canadian. And yes, Cecil has told him to smarten up before.

  I never doubted Old Man West, I said, which was, of course, a lie, and Nora tilted her forehead down so she had to stare past her eyebrows to look at me, to indicate in no uncertain terms she knew I wasn’t telling her the truth. It’s not even discipline I’m talking about. It’s common courtesy.

  He’s afraid of you, I think, she said, and eased herself into a chair at the table, sideways, with one arm across her knees and the other extended along the tabletop. That’s why he tries so hard.

  That probably isn’t true, I told her. It made sense, of course, for Jack to be wary of me—I am the father of the girl he wanted to marry.

  It is. I see it, the way he acts around the house.

  I see it too. It’s normal. Harmless, even.

  Sometimes, especially if Linnea is there, it’s like he sees you in her, like he wants to get away. You intimidate him.

  I doubt he wants to get away from Linnea, I said, and then I sat down, across from her, my elbows on the table and my hands clasped together. But he might be intimidated. He’s just a boy.

  For an instant, Nora made no noise except to therrap her fingers on the kitchen wood. She slid an eye my way, sideways, and her lips bent into something like a smirk, but not one that made me think I’d cracked a joke. I suddenly didn’t know what to do with my hands, why I was sitting in such a ridiculous position.

  She said: I’m not talking about Jack.

  My gut reaction was to say, Then who? but I figured I’d already made enough of a fool of myself. There are a lot of things I’d say about Cecil West, and a lot of ways I’d describe him, but none of those included the words scared or intimidated. Stubborn and insufferable, for sure. Awkward and thick-skulled, maybe. But this was a man who I owed all the comfort of my current life to, and I would not believe that I caused him such distress. I still don’t believe that—at least, that I didn’t cause him that much distress back then.