Ballistics

by D. W. Wilson

  What’s going on? I said.

  I could barely see her, a thin outline glowing amber with the hazards. She put her hands on her hips, all deathstare and posture, and in a second the jeep’s engine shuddered down and the door kicked open. A figure slid from the driver’s seat, pitching for the gravel, but my mom managed to get between him and the ground. He sagged against her, and she helped him slouch around the jeep’s grille. He wore straight military greys, and over his chest he’d strapped a blocky navy vest that I recognized as Kevlar. His hair was cut short and a pair of dog tags had come uprooted from inside his shirt; they tangled themselves with a tarnished brooch. He had wide shoulders and arms whose shape you could see through their sleeves: the build of a guy who could push you around. Sharp jawline, a mark of some kind under his eye—surgical scar maybe, or a patch of skin burned brass-smooth. Older than me by a generation: that fifty-something droop to his jowls, skin wrinkled the colour of hide, and facial hair turned a few too many shades of sun-bleach. A leather gunbelt hung from his waist, dark and tugging with weight, and I clocked a set of handcuffs and a pouch for pepper spray and the lethal telescopic baton the RCMP wore sidearm. This was Colton, and he was hurt.

  His hand touched the centre of his chest and his teeth clicked together, and with much effort he unzipped a pouch in the centre of his vest. From it, he withdrew a metal plate, and even in the badly angled glow of headlights I could see the dent. Colton took a moment to wide-eye it, his breath strong enough to flutter his lips. Then he tossed it aside, my way, and seemed to finally notice me.

  Lin, he said, and sucked wind through his teeth. Who’s that?

  His name’s Alan West, she said. He’s my son.

  He looped his arm over her shoulders. Well, he called, huffing like an asthmatic. I’m your stepdad. Welcome to Owenswood, hoss.

  Great to meet you, I said.

  He winked. I’ll bet.

  What happened to you? my mom said.

  Colton rubbed his hand down his chest—one tender pass. I had an altercation.

  The restaurant looked empty as a prison, but all at once its doors flung open and the two boys from earlier scrambled into the open air. They rushed to Colton’s side but my mom waved them off. One of them—the bigger one, with short hair and limbs too awkward for his torso—had the presence of mind to hold open the door.

  Colton bared his teeth. I stood and watched, because I had no idea what in the hell I’d gotten myself into. My mom adjusted her husband’s weight on her shoulders and ferried him toward the Verge’s front door and left me standing outside, forgotten and unsure. I squinted at the darkness—the same way, I realized, that my mom had earlier. The air parched my mouth. Not thirst—too bitter. Fear.

  The last coughs of exhaust from Colton’s jeep plumed skyward. Moonlight came nailing through the cloudscreen and the gravel around me turned the colour of sludge. On the passenger seat of the jeep lay a nine-millimetre Smith & Wesson with its two radium sights aglow with phosphorescence. Along its barrel, toward the trigger, it’d been misted with thin splatters the pale light made black and innocent as ink.

  At my feet lay the metal plate Colton had pried from his Kevlar. I picked it up: quarter-inch thick, steel or possibly titanium—a slug-stopper. The RCMP’s crest was stamped in a lower corner, away from the dent that bowed out a circle wide as an eight ball. He’d been shot with something decent-calibre. I ran my fingers over the bulge, big and misshapen like your own hipbone.

  The jeep’s engine ticked cool and in its wake came the stink of diesel, a smell so gummy it stuck to the roof of my mouth. All of a sudden the whole damned parking lot reeked of it. Marked territory, Archer might say, and at the thought of it I wondered what’d become of him. Through the Verge’s window, I saw my mom jab her thumb toward the kitchen, where the two boys scuttled ahead of her. She nodded once—I don’t know to who—and drew her lips upward on one side—a smile, but not natural, as if it’d been tugged that way by a marionette’s string. Resignation, maybe. Or irony. Then she disappeared through the kitchen’s saloon-swinging doors, and I saw Archer sitting in one of the booths in the dark. He gazed across the parking lot, at the jeep and the Ranger and at me, but not at me, more like at that portion of space I happened to be occupying. His face had bottled right up: the jaw seized and the cheeks sucked in so you could see his rifle-stock cheekbones, the curve of his upper lip hardened to a point. He seemed to be shaking his head. He seemed to be saying, It just can’t be.

  Here’s a story about Cecil West: In the first weeks of 1973 he sold his business for a quarter million dollars, joined up with Invermere’s crew of volunteer firefighters. Firefighting was a long-time dream of his, mixed up with a healthy dose of fear, but Cecil faced down all his fears head-on, Cecil stared gift horses in the mouth, stuck his thumb in mousetraps twice. He’s not one to talk about the things that scare him, but in a rare moment of bared hearts he told me a story about a time when he worked in an aircraft hangar outside London, during the Battle of Britain, where he mended Hurricane Mark I’s that had been cheesed with bullet holes. There, he watched as a fellow welder’s flame-retardant suit paid lip service. The wick effect, Cecil called it—where burning clothes feed off human fat like candle wax. I’d seen the same thing on napalm victims—people’s flanks broiled like haunches of meat, knuckles and kneecaps sunburn-pink and glistening with the oily fluid of bone.

  About the same time that Cecil styled himself a fireman, I caught Jack in Linnea’s bedroom with his shirt off and his pants unbuckled, and I hauled him off her by his elbows. His spindly body weighed no more than the two-dollar sacks of soil you buy from hardware stores, but he kicked and thrashed like a boy being gored. He yelled at me to fuck right off, and to stop his flailing I bear-hugged his arms to his sides. Then I pitched him out the front door. He landed ribs-first on my lawn, made fists as he climbed to his feet. I chucked the T-shirt at his head and it wrapped full around, like a jellyfish or something.

  Any other guy would beat you pulpy, I told him, and tapped my finger on his meatless chest. He smacked my hand aside, his heavy eyebrows pulled together, and his lips showed his twisted canines. We stayed like that until he stomped off fuming, but it’s not like I wouldn’t see him again in a day. My ability to intimidate him was slipping. It didn’t help that I’d been sleeping with his dad’s fiancée for half a year, and any threats I uttered would always be one part bluff. I had no idea what Jack knew. I had no idea who he’d tell, if he did.

  I didn’t see Nora for weeks following the spring confrontation at Dunbar, and for those weeks I was almost unapproachable. We hadn’t talked about what happened between us—not at the cabin, or on the ride home, or after—and as far as I knew she was content to leave it at that, just a moment of weakness, a sudden flood of meaningless, desperate relief, and then back to Cecil, who deserved her more than I did. Still, I moped around the house like a teenager, answered every phone call with my heart in my throat, wasted hours and days drawing landscapes I couldn’t care about one way or another. I sketched a two-by-three charcoal likeness of the nearby east-facing mountain, because it had a kidney-bean hole on its rocky surface that never changed colour. I returned to the road bridge where I first encountered Crib, and there I drew the marshland and the train tracks that speared into them and added the shape of a body in the reeds. At the lake, from shore level, I did a panorama of the horizon that looks just like every other body of water ever depicted in art. Those weeks between when we parted ways and when we eventually spoke—those I spent with my stomach fluttering.

  Jack and Linnea spent a decreasing amount of time together, so that when I did encounter them it would only happen on the couches in my living room, or on their way out of Jack’s house, or just sounds of them—voices scraping upward from the basement, from the yard. Seeing them together made me realize just how alone I was, not that I’m one to wallow in self-pity. They reminded me of me and the ex, not because they acted anything like the two of us had, but because of
the sheer generic fact of their attraction. Most young love, I think, follows a predictable arc, and most of it ends the same. There is nothing remarkable about the path my marriage took; it simply falls under the category of general sadness of life. Like Jack and my daughter, I met my ex when we were still in highschool. She was older than me by three years, and a farmer’s daughter, and rarely can I recall, in those early years, seeing her with hands cleaner than mine. Unlike Jack and Linnea, her father was not at all impressed with me, so our meetings were few and usually outdoors, often near the creek that ran through my parents’ acreage. And unlike Jack and Linnea, it was me who eventually left her.

  Occasionally, I’d see Nora across the street, in her yard, or on the sidewalk, and damned near every nerve in my body told me to orchestrate a meeting. One time she saw me in the window and waved, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my own wave was as shaky as a boy’s in love. There are two kinds of courage in this world, and having enough of one doesn’t make up for lacking the other. It didn’t help that Cecil was my best friend, but it didn’t hurt as much as I wish it had. If our situations were reversed, you can bet that Cecil’d have suffered his aching heart and coveted not his neighbour’s wife. You can bet that he’d still have grown old and lonely. He probably never expected to end up alone, but I doubt anyone ever expects that.

  It seemed that logistics and common sense had seen an end to the mistake that happened at the cabin, and I am speaking with full conviction when I say this relieved me. Days slid into weeks slid indistinguishably into the drone of a multi-axle truck, into forest roads and guys with a simpler outlook in whose company a love-struck army vet can let his throbbing heart dull. Like all things, what passed—and dissipated—between me and Nora came to bother me less, or at least in a different way. The heart is resilient, the heart is insistent. My waves to her became less shaky. I thought about asking how she kept her crabapple tree in such good shape.

  That July, 1972, Cecil took Jack on a hunting trip southeast of town, on the pretense of wanting a crack at some cougars. I would have liked to tag along, to watch out for them, stupid as that sounds, and also for the opportunity to just talk with Cecil, but no invitation was ever extended. Cecil’d been almost as absent as Nora, and only rarely did I glimpse him in his bedroom, almost hunchbacked. One time he cinched his curtains, shirt off, showing his sinewy body that made me wonder if I could still take him in a fight. I detected unease in the West household, but Jack never filled me in, since we’d stopped talking like friends—he was that age; I was in his way. Cecil and Nora rarely left the house together or even by the same door, and Jack spoke to Linnea in a hushed voice that trailed to muttering when I entered the room. The wedding never happened when Cecil said it would—go figure—and I think they were feeling the strain. If you ask me, Old Man West had yet to recover from the death of his first wife. If that’s even something you can recover from at all.

  She came to my door while her boys were out hunting, one hot, soupy evening after darkness had settled over the town like a quilt. She had her red hair loose and she wore a baby-blue dress that reached her knees and she looked about as good as I can rightly remember. Except for the initial surprised greeting, we had little to say. I didn’t even immediately think to invite her in, until she swooped her head up and down the street, crossed her arms under her breasts, and said that small towns love a good gossip.

  I’ve only got beer, I said.

  That’s fine, she said.

  Do you want one?

  Yes, she said. At least.

  She followed me to the kitchen. I fished two beer out of the fridge, and we sat at the table and sipped them and didn’t talk. Everything was weird—her, the light, even the taste of the beer that bubbled on my tongue like soap.

  I’ve been thinking about you, I said, and scooped my hand under hers. She seemed to chew on that one. But she must have known.

  She moved her hand aside. I finished my beer and grabbed another, and another for her.

  Where’s Linnea? she said.

  Camping with some friends. You picked a good day.

  I guess I did. Pick a good day.

  I’ve got whiskey too, I said.

  I’ll stick with beer.

  Me too.

  She twirled the bottle on the table, round and round. An attached woman, according to the rules. A no-fly zone.

  Are you sure you want to be here? I said.

  Why are you asking me this?

  I just want to make sure it’s what you want. I want whatever you want.

  That’s just being cowardly, she said.

  How?

  Makes you not guilty, makes it so you can say I just did what she wanted.

  I thought it was being polite.

  She leaned over the lip of her chair, stretching. The legs scraped on the laminate and the wood creaked backward and I watched the curve of her, felt the wind of her sigh breeze over my cheek, warm like the summer, like getting a thing you’ve wanted.

  You’re not guiltless in this, Archer—sometimes the hardest decisions are simply the hardest decisions.

  And then, as if the conversation had not taken place, or as if it had some finality, I got up and put my hand around her waist and drew her close, and the world seemed about ready to tilt over, everything giddy, and I felt like a teenager with too many expectations and too much worry about what was at stake. I led her to the bedroom. There, a standing fan rattled at highest gear to cool the room to habitable and to keep mosquitoes from finding perch. We drifted to the bedside, and she sat on its edge, and then I sat beside her. Beneath her dress was pure softness, her breasts, her tough-but-not-perfect stomach that was perfect enough for me. One rib had been broken and healed off-kilter, made a bulge like the button of a denim coat. She shivered against the fan’s wind. Her tiny hairs raised and her skin tautened to gooseflesh, and I lurched to my feet to switch the machine off. My back turned, she pulled the sheets to her chin. I still know where you are, I wanted to say, but couldn’t find the words, didn’t dare waste breath on a joke. I climbed in after her. Her searching fingers scuttled across my chest, abdomen, found purchase. It was good to see that my blood remembered where to go.

  I’D QUIT PAINTING for Harold and Jones & Sons in the winter of ’72, in favour of driving a logging truck for the same lumber mill Cecil made his money at. I had an air brake licence the American military had paid for, and that—alongside a few appraising grunts from Cecil, over beers—was all the managers needed to be convinced. The hours were more to my liking and the pay a whole lot better, and I learned my way around the breakneck dirt roads that wind between the mill and the highway. The steadier income meant me and Linnea moved into a house across the street from the Wests, such that I could look into Cecil’s bedroom from the window in my den. Me and him joked about setting up a tin can phone. I had more weekends off in the first month than Harold had given me in three years, and I made a habit every Sunday of tucking my sketchbook under my arm and heading to the nearest outskirts of the valley. One time I sat on a little hilltop and traced the outline of clouds. Another, from my window, I drew some little black bird as he hopped around the yard and fell down a groundwater heating pipe—I had to rescue him, no small feat, even for a man of my ingenuity. If I was a competent tree climber, I figured there’d be some good vantages to be had.

  Everybody who knew of my hobby thought it a waste of time, except Nora. She took an interest, sometimes asked for a slice of paper so she could try her hand at it, and the two of us would sit in my basement or in my truck or off somewhere—like the gravel pits, or the cliff jumps at Twin Lakes where worried mothers had cordoned off the tallest jump, damned near eighty feet—and listen to our pencils skitch on the paper. I’d sketch the mountain vistas with their egg-white tips and Nora would do portraits of me—something I didn’t quite like but couldn’t summon the heart to deny. One time, she drew a picture of me and Jack, using two separate photos as guides. In it, the two of us are standing side by each
with Cecil’s old cabin in the background. It was a pretty damned good effort, if I’m anyone to judge, even though you’d have trouble identifying us at a glance. It could just as easily have been Jack and his old man. I stashed these drawings under my laundry hamper—beneath the bed is too obvious—in a camouflaged tin box, the papers rolled to tubes and the box fastened with a small silver lock flaking around the keyhole. After these sessions, we’d make love or we wouldn’t. It didn’t seem to matter. Either way, I was happy. I probably owe that to Cecil, too, since he got me the job. But when all the hands are dealt, I owe him a whole goddamned lot.

  The house we moved into was twenty-four hundred square feet, two storeys, and built into a slope so the basement exit led to the backyard. The master bedroom was at the rear—unusual placement—and you’d have to cross the den to get from my room to Linnea’s. Right away, she started bitching about a lack of privacy—she was coming seventeen that year—and it didn’t take a genius to figure out she’d want to move downstairs. The basement was unfinished, the externals a mess of ripped poly and pink fibreglass insulation bulging through the tears in tufts. Floor joists and electrical feeds lay exposed overhead. Bare drywall had been screwed to the inside walls. Cecil agreed—actually, he’d strong-armed me into agreeing—to help me make the basement habitable, and during one of his early visits the two of us strolled from one end to the other, beers in hand, inspecting. He clucked his tongue at what he identified as structural faults: two inch-wide holes bored through a load-bearer; no pony wall beneath the bathtub (That’d make a hell of a splash, he guffawed); a darkening of the lumber on the floor joists, beneath my bedroom, that could have been water damage but upon touch felt dryer than bone.

  Hope it’s not rot, he told me, and kicked my boot. Or else you might step outta bed one night and fall right through.

  On the day things started to go bad, Cecil showed up at my house in a pair of Carhartts and steeltoe boots, with his ballcap tilted low over his eyes and wearing a shirt that said London: Done It. It was February, the coldest damned month of all, and a Sunday, and his pounding on my front door roused me from the dopey sleep I’d slipped into. Waking, I couldn’t remember the time of day. The sun had set, the sky gone the colour of antifreeze. I fumbled my hand across my bedside table in search of the lamp switch, heard loose change rattle against the wood and some of it plump to the carpeted floor. The room smelled like the ink from a ballpoint pen—the air sticky and heavy enough to feel the weight on your lips. Condensation whitened the inside glass of the window, meltwater pooled on the sill. Cecil pounded in a methodical four-beat loop.