by D. W. Wilson
Outside, the air tasted like burned toast, and motes of char weighed on my tongue like grit. I put my hand on the Ranger’s dirty surface and circled to Archer’s side. The fog varied from ankle-deep to shin-deep and with each step I squinted in the dark to see it billow out and creep back, as controlled and organic as breathing. I’ve had one or two unnatural experiences in fog—seen a friend suddenly and inexplicably suffer a foot-long gash on his calf, just standing around at the edge of a streetlamp’s glare, for example—and I do not trust it.
I came around to Archer’s window and he raised one hairless eyebrow at me, and I wished I could have summoned the nerve to ask him to stop doing that. Gimme a hand down, he said.
Let me grab the chair, I said, but he reached through the window and caught my arm.
Just give me your shoulder.
You sure?
Fuck the chair, he said, and leaned on the latch as he did, and the door tumbled open and he nearly came out with it. But he caught himself, and not for one second did he look sheepish. I put my shoulder under his. He looped his arm over my neck. With baby steps he descended to the living earth, and without having to say so we shuffled toward that open cliffside until we stood like some partygoers before the view. Archer sat down, leaned backward on his elbows like a kid. I joined him. It seemed we could stare endlessly into the valley, as if it were meant for that. We didn’t say much. You don’t always have to.
I’m sorry about your dog, he said after a time.
It’s not only your fault.
Just hate to see him suffer. Anything, really.
The beer will help, I guess. How’d you know to find it?
Cecil always kept it there, for times like these.
How well do you know Gramps?
Not one bit anymore. He used to be my best friend.
He grunted as he said that, continued: It really sinks in when you say it, you know? Used to be.
The fog parted around my legs. It rolled on and over the cliff like a river, and I lifted and lowered my hand into it, transfixed. In the Ranger, Puck made a noise that sounded half snore, half gurgle. Archer and I sat and listened to it until he once again rumbled himself to quiet.
I can’t believe I was so stupid, I said.
It’s my fault, kid.
The whole thing, not just Puck. For leaving Toronto in the first place.
You don’t always choose where you go, even though you think you do. You end up going one way and for the life of you all you can do is make the best of it.
What are you talking about? I said.
I don’t know, he said. But there’s always hope.
The air pulsed. Fog pillowed at our fingertips.
He won’t make it, will he? I said. He’s too old and too hurt.
We talking about the dog or your grandad?
I nudged him with my elbow. He let himself smile.
The fog heaved in and out, up and down. It was like breath on your neck, some kind of predator. Archer rubbed his arm like a man trying to ward off a chill. He hung like that, midway in a self-hug, too unsure to lower his limb to the fog. Humans are afraid of what we don’t know, and we can’t know very much. Here’s something I don’t know: whether or not Darby could’ve been the love of my life.
WE MET ON A CP RAIL train ride, aged twenty, somewhere during the run over the wind-blind prairies. It was my second day of the trip, en route to commence my studies in the epicentre of the centre of the universe. Vancouver through Toronto, that train; it’d twist around B.C.’s mountainous Interior and then dash east across the Land of Living Skies. Cheaper to fly, but everybody flew, and Gramps liked the idea of sending me off in a vehicle he trusted the mechanics of. So I boarded in Banff, a nearby winter-sport town where two years earlier I had, like every eighteen-year-old boy from Invermere, first legally entered a bar. That time, we limped in and out of the place aboard a buddy’s refurbished GTO; this trip—with Gramps, toward my send-off from the valley—I sat in the passenger seat of his Ranger and marvelled at all the things-unsaid.
Gramps drove. Redneck radio twanged from the speakers. The whole journey, we barely spoke a word. Gramps spent a lot of time sucking his teeth and looking pensively at things in the distance; I don’t suspect I gave him a lot of encouragement to embark on a heart-to-heart. Behind us, wedged between the fold-down seats, I had a hiking pack and one roly-poly suitcase shoved full of my worldly possessions: loose-fit T-shirts and jeans with the hems trampled off; an electric razor Gramps offered up as a going-away gift; a few books, my laptop. As we drove, Gramps eyed the speedometer and refused to go even a tick above ninety, said he didn’t care to get pulled over, even though we both knew the RCMP didn’t patrol the national park. The trees reeled by on either side and the highway curved in wide arcs designed to keep you on-road if caught in an icy skid. The mountains swelled bigger and bigger and the radio cut out and somehow our silence got quieter, if that’s even possible. I wish I’d had the boullions to say anything, but that awkwardness seemed insurmountable. It still does, even in retrospect. I was leaving him to loneliness. He did such good for me, Gramps, and I know for a fact that back then—and more so as years went on—I was a poor stand-in for a son.
At the train station, Gramps carried the wheelable suitcase stiff-armed by his side. Still only passing words between us—a grunt of direction, one request for a loonie while he fished through the Ranger’s cupholders for parking change. Now, as we waited by the train’s closed doors and its carriages snaking off beyond sight, I felt the tug—that urge to just head right back where I came from. But I had Gramps there between me and retreat. He stood to my chin, or thereabouts, wore his charcoal-grey ballcap and denim vest and Gore-Tex boots. Wide-shouldered, wiry, somehow not-old. He looked like the kind of person you could ask to hold your coffee. The train doors yawned open before us and an attendant in a silly hat offered to help with the bags, but Gramps sent him skedaddling. Then he handed the suitcase my way.
Call me when you get there, Gramps said.
I shifted the bag on my shoulder. Of course, I said.
He thumbed a piece of truck debris off one strap. Here, he said, and drew a wad of money out of his gut pocket. I thought about a cheque, but this seemed more traditional.
I can’t take this.
Yeah, you’re supposed to say that, he said. Then he grinned.
Thanks, Gramps.
Don’t spend it all on hookers.
Just some? I said, and he levelled me one in the gut—a quick one-two.
He stood there smiling at me. I couldn’t think of a time when he’d been happier, and I didn’t know what to say to please him or what to do with my hands or if I should meet that smile with my own. So I shifted the backpack again. The train didn’t leave for another half-hour—time for a bite, or a beer.
Call me when you get there, Gramps said again.
Of course, I told him.
He nodded once. His smile flattened out. Right, he said, and we parted ways.
What remained? On that train, alone for the first time, I waited for the journey to start before I counted the money—five grand—and jammed it into the inner pocket of my coat. The mountains chugged by and I tried not to think of the things that wouldn’t come with me. It was late summer, some trees had started to ripen to their reds and golds, and the sun hit the mountains in great swaths. The railroad wound along the mountainside and you could look out the window and watch the wind thrash the conifers at eye level; when the needles shook free, they shimmied on the breeze like some strange, mossy snowdrift. I spent the first night alone in that carriage and sunk in and out of sleeplessness while the tracks trundled under me. Young, stupid, melancholy. We all know this sensation—the world widening before us, the past becoming just that. A twenty-year-old’s greatest fear is that the best has come and gone.
The next day, Darby boarded the train in Edmonton and offloaded her own baggage in the same car as me. My age, short but tough-looking, in khakis and a T-shirt that
hugged her triceps, hair braided through the clasp of an Eskimos ballcap, its tip thumping at her shoulder blades. She barrelled into a booth on the other side of the train, right in the union of window and chair, and kicked one foot up on the seat. She tapped a silver stud in her eyebrow, over and over with her fingernail, as if to a drumbeat. Above her toe, a very Canadian sign read: If You Put Your Feet On the Seat, You May Be Asked to Remove Your Shoes.
I did my best not to look at her but it wouldn’t have taken a spy to see my interest. The train eased out of Edmonton, onto the prairies. The long, flat haul—where you could watch your dog run away for two weeks. That’s an old line, but it still fits. The sky is different there, not just bigger but somehow deeper, as if it reaches closer to the ground, takes up more of the horizon. I looked for pillow clouds, signs of dangerous wind, but the plains rolled on, wheat fields as vast and flat as ocean.
It was Darby who broke the silence. When I think about it, that may have always been the case—Darby initiating, Darby taking that first, blind leap.
Feeling okay? she said to me, as the light started to turn char. She’d unloaded some of a large pack, had it strewn around her table: a doorstopper book about the Canadian West, an old, heavy thirty-five-millimetre camera, a deck of cards. She squinted an eye at me—that photographer’s habit, even then.
Yeah, I said.
You look glum.
No, I told her. Just wondering.
She seemed to get this. She nodded like someone listening. Then she grabbed her camera and snapped a picture.
The first photo of the journey—hope it’s a good one. I’m Darby.
Alan.
We shook hands—our first touch—and she motioned toward her table with her head.
I’ll let you in on a little secret, she said, and raised her eyebrow—the right eyebrow, something I’d not seen anyone else ever able to do—and drew me toward her with the curl of her trigger finger. I’ve got some contraband.
She drew a wine bottle from the pack. It had a printer-paper label, a picture of two wrestling kittens. Homebrew.
I grinned, and so did she, and I could see all her lower teeth when she did. She unscrewed the cap, swigged it, and wiped her mouth with her wrist, like some girl from the frontier, like somebody I wanted to know.
She took one big gulp. This wine is the kind of wine that comes up and firmly shakes your hand. Oaky, with a hint of burning grassland. Come here, let’s play cards.
I did, and we did, all through the evening until we had to procure some food, which I paid for with a twenty from Gramps’ wad of money. I figured he’d approve of that, figured it was part of his plan. She ordered some gin-and-tonics, and I paid for that too—it seemed fair, for the wine—and we went right back to the card games. A first date, almost, though we’d have many more dates after that, and when we both got too drunk to stay awake there was a moment when I felt her hesitate, as if deciding to move to another seat, to get more space. But she didn’t, and we pressed awkwardly together, not quite back to back but close, the train’s metallic wall cold against my skin and the heat of her cheek on my bony shoulder. Her knees came up, knobs that fit in the palm of my hand, and her hair smelled like charcoal and fruit and pepper—what I thought all girls must have smelled like. At some point in the night her free hand reached behind and laced her fingers with mine, looped my arm around her, and I came to wakefulness as surely as a jolt of fear—and of our first absurd night on a cross-country train, there isn’t a whole lot more to tell.
ON THE CLIFFSIDE I sniffed the air, that riverbed scent. The sky lay abandoned of all colour save when the flares lit up behind that distant ridge.
Spinal cancer, Archer said, breaking the silence. He touched his lower back about level with his gut. I can walk, technically, but can’t feel my legs. Makes me clumsy as all hell, and I used to be a nimble bastard. There’s that used to again. One day you wake up and your whole life is past tense.
Sorry about that, I said.
You win some but you always lose in the end, he said, and swept his hands over his jeans so that his whole upper body moved with the action, his shoulders clunking around their sockets like those old machines that grind grain to dust. He looked himself over, turned his palms in the air like a baby would, like he was seeing them for the first time. Or, maybe, like he was sick of seeing them.
You can cheat death, but you can’t cheat getting old.
More of his wisdoms. I let him have them.
Then all of a sudden the clouds above the Purcells lit up with a flash of orange, bright enough to cast a glow on Archer’s face, and a great thunderous ker-ACK swooped over the valley to ruffle our hair and push wind in our eyes. Archer unslouched, and as he did another percussion pounded toward us. The sky throbbed as if in the grip of artillery fire. It came once more, methodical as construction work, the sound as big and hollow as a gong, and it seemed the valley below us—the very darkness, the very emptiness of it—seethed like a coal furnace. Warm air gusted over my cheeks, heavy with the stink of sulphur.
I hope we find Jack before we end up in the middle of that, Archer said.
As long as we find him.
You don’t sound worried.
I gave him the eyebrow. Neither do you.
I hate fire, he said. I fucking hate it.
Is that why you rub your arm?
He undid the buttons on his wrist. I couldn’t see well in the low light, but he turned his forearm to the distant glow and touched the skin there, and it didn’t look like skin so much as some kind of resin, like rubber pencil erasers stretched so thin they’ll rip. Napalm, he said. Deadly shit.
You are a grab-bag of misfortunes, I said. Put that thing away.
He shoved me, a full-palm-to-shoulder, and let a grin widen his face ear to ear. His heart was probably in the right place, once you got past all the bullshit and posturing. Before us, the distant fires surged again and again, unleashed more deep, rollicking growls, and the mountain ridge reddened like the molten rims of some mythical forge. Archer raised his chin to it.
It’s like staring into the maw of Hell, he said, and clapped me on the leg like a grandfather, and I felt the power that lingered in those hands—old-man strength, same as Gramps.
Then he let go of my leg and I hoisted him to his feet, and together we hobbled to the truck. There, Puck lay curled up tight, and he did not stir as we loaded ourselves in and buckled up and braced for whatever obstacle—otherworldly or otherwise—awaited us farther down the road in the dark.
WHEN WE FINALLY BROKE onto the highway, Archer let me know that our destination was a trucker stop on the perimeter of town—a place called the Verge—where, luck willing, we would find my mother. It perched on the apex of a hill that sloped toward the town below. I pulled into the Verge’s parking lot, and as I did a pack of Harley-riding roughnecks swung out, their lone lamps like a swarm of glowflies. The last ground to a stop beside my window with his legs balanced akimbo, and he cupped a hand to his mouth to shout above the gurgle of his engine.
This ain’t the place to be, he called. He wore a sleeveless leather vest that showed a lifetime of stretchmarked tattoos and peppery arm hair. Something like a bandana covered his head and came to a knot at the base of his skull. Hang-nail beard, chops the King himself could abide—exactly who you’d expect.
There’s landslide, I hollered back, and he swooped his head from me to the road that lay before him. His lips puckered in what might have been a whistle—I couldn’t hear. We came through the logging roads, I added.
Can you manage them on a bike? The roads?
Depends on the biker.
That split him in a grin. His canines looked more fang than tooth. Don’t stay here long, he said, and torqued the throttle on his bike. It’s the end of the world out here.
Where you coming from?
West of it. Caribou Bridge—we’re all evacuating. Good luck.
You too, I told him, and he took off with a small spray of pebbles. I c
ranked my window up and put the truck back in first gear. Ahead, the Verge’s porch had a view of the mountains that stood as the last bastion for Owenswood. The town below was just an inky, light-spotted sea.
I rolled the Ranger between a pair of slanted yellow lines and killed the ignition, and the truck gave one last desperate heave. I waited in the lingering smell of exhaust and dog and my own sweat. Archer was convinced we’d find my mother inside. Her name: Linnea, after the flower. On the dashboard: that picture of her at seventeen with the dog who could have been Puck before the trap got him. I felt like I could have gone inside and pulled off something noir—glance at the photo and the waitress before me, maybe a slow dissolve between the two.
You should scope it out, Archer said to me. Let her know I’m here. I’ll keep Puck company.
Or you could come in with me.
He reached behind the seat, offered a hand to Puck, who lolled his sardine-tin tongue in the palm.
It’s been a long time since I saw her.
Few years?
Archer wiped drool on his jeans, three passes. More like twenty-nine.
Jesus.
He rubbed his bicep, that wretched arm. What if I don’t recognize her?
She’ll recognize you, I said.
I’ve gone a bit downhill.
Your smell will give you away.
People milled around inside the Verge. Shapes skirted past the windows or the glass front door. A kid wearing a hairnet and a maroon uniform appeared from the rear of the restaurant, half dragging and half humping a bag of garbage nearly as big as him.
We didn’t part ways on the best of terms, Archer said out the passenger window.
A shocking revelation, I said.
Fuck you, kid, he snapped.
Sorry, I said, and meant it. Poor timing.
Just do first contact. I need to gather my wits.