Ballistics

by D. W. Wilson

  And then Nora would realize she loved Cecil instead? That’s pretty tunnel-vision of you.

  Don’t patronize me.

  Someone has to.

  You think I’m being selfish, I said.

  No, Dad. I think you’re being stupid.

  Don’t talk to me like that.

  You’re not in a—

  I’m still your father, I said, and slapped the table. And I wouldn’t talk to you that way.

  That seemed to get through. She looked at the woodgrain. I’m sorry.

  Me too. You gonna tell Jack?

  Yeah, she said into the back of her hand. She blinked at me—two heavy flutters of her eyelids.

  Unless?

  Linnea rubbed her eyes. Maybe it’s not easy to blackmail a loved one.

  Unless you do something for me, she said, and it was barely spoken, barely breath. She looked, and sounded, a helluva lot older than nineteen. She didn’t look or sound anything like the girl I’d always known her to be.

  Then I was alone at the table with her empty mug rattling on its rim and the darkness descending around me like a blanket, and then I was on the concrete steps in my slush-covered yard sketchbook in hand. On a neighbour’s porch, a trio of teenagers talked in voices that carried over Invermere’s shitty, black-iced streets. I didn’t go far. I didn’t take a coat—up the road to the gully’s edge where kids killed time and played at war and adventure, and I drew aimless searching circles and lines that meandered without purpose and wondered if there was something hidden beneath my own scratching, if my mind or my subconscious would offer a way forward. I sketched until my fingers numbed with cold and I couldn’t feel the charcoal between them. I sketched as if to find an answer.

  I’m pregnant, Linnea said to me from that kitchen table. But I can’t stick around to raise a kid with Jack. I’m sorry, Dad. You’ll have to let me go.

  Six

  Heraclitus:

  It is hard to contend against the object of one’s heart;

  for whatever it wishes to have

  it buys at the cost of the soul.

  Archer and I crashed above the Verge in converted living quarters where, all night, the heating vents secreted cooking fumes—a smell more burned toast than pig fat—and the never-quiet freezers growled beneath the floorboards. Earlier, my mom and those two boys had gurneyed Colton through the saloon doors to the kitchen, and I glimpsed his naked chest beyond the swing, the whole wide middle of it gone blue and mushy with swell. I knew a thing or two about ballistics, how even a nine-millimetre handgun can produce over three hundred pounds of stopping power—about pressure waves in soft tissue and the theoretical risk of hydrostatic shock. Colton had taken a bigger round than from a handgun, and it was no small feat that he’d gathered the stones to flop inside his jeep and make an escape. When he saw me, he forced a grin that split his face like some slasher-flick killer. He touched his own injury, a few ribs gone plasticine soft. Breathe short, I heard my mom bark at him. Breathe slow.

  Before bed, I went to check on Puck. We had one more beer to feed him, but when I opened the Ranger’s door he did not stir. His great sock-like face had converged in a dog-smile, and I slid a hand on his flank to feel for breath that I knew would not come. He had his eyes closed, and I let myself believe that he’d passed away in his sleep. I touched his pancake ear, soft as puppy fuzz. A breeze whooshed over the parking lot and ruffled my hair, cooler than the world around me, and I imagined Puck’s last proud howl gusting by me in its wake. He saw the world in a different way, old Puck. He could do what he wanted.

  Many years ago, Gramps ran down a pregnant elk on Westside Road. I wasn’t even eight yet, and he hit her while reaching for a coffee thermos. The truck umpfed like a winded man and my seatbelt squeezed against me and the whole vehicle dragged forward as if against a current. The elk collapsed barely off the road, its hip and hind legs ruined. Gramps blamed himself mercilessly, called it a rookie error and a waste of life. He took the truck out of gear and fetched his shotgun from the back seat. It was the last he’d ever use that shotgun; afterward, it got buried at the bottom of his toolbox, beneath his pliers and ratchets and scrap metal deemed unweldable. I remember how he looked, the gun held barrel-to-earth and the elk in a heap at his shins: not angry, exactly, and not immediately sad—just a man who would benefit from a nap. The wounded beast knew not to look at him; Gramps couldn’t have pulled the trigger if she’d been looking at him. We’ve never spoken about it, but that’s the way of things between me and Gramps. Animals, he told me after, prefer to die alone.

  When I returned to the Verge, the two teenaged boys bounced a navy ball between them, and if it lurched astray they’d gun each other with stares until one broke off to retrieve it. I thought about asking their names, but couldn’t summon the nerve. Rarely, one said or did something to draw a smile from the other. After almost every bounce, they’d turn to the swinging doors.

  Of my mom I saw little. She banged in and out of the kitchen for hours: once, she emerged with a string of gut and a ski needle brandished before her, fingers tipped red; another time, she yanked a first aid kit off the wall and emptied its contents on the restaurant’s counter—I don’t know what she wanted, or if she found it among the cluttered bandages and antiseptics with their labels aged yellow. Occasionally, Colton’s murmurs slipped from among the fridge hums like parents whisper-fighting in a bedroom. I worked to catch stray words spoken too loud, recognized a few: lawless was one. Gun, another. Die.

  Throughout, Archer had fallen uncharacteristically quiet and had deigned to withhold his infinite wisdom. Each time my mom came out of the kitchen, he straightened in his chair and his chin tilted off his chest. She never so much as winked. We didn’t belong there; we’d stepped out of our depth. I wanted to voice exactly this, but Archer’s silence made me hold my tongue. He knew something. There was little to do but wait, and sleep.

  Puck captivated my dreams with his dumb-dog smile and graceless gait, and he howled and gave great chase and his body cast no shadow, looked more mist than flesh, weak and iridescent as memory. Gramps appeared too—younger, restored. He shoved his hands in his pockets and hunched away from me like a beaten kid. I did not approach him; he did not turn to me. When I tried to call to him I found my mouth so parched I could form no words, and he walked away until he was a dot on the visible horizon, less and less consequential despite his rejuvenation. Before I lost sight of him I felt a jerk in my chest, as if he had been removed not only from the world but from my life as a whole, and I knew with certainty that he feared this more than death, and that I did too. It meant he and I both had nowhere left to go, and no one left to go with, if we did.

  I WOKE AFTER only a few hours of sleep, feeling dopier than a drunk. Condensation had formed on the inside of the window above my bed, and I dragged my palm over the moisture to smear the glass bare. Dawn tinselled the sky, and in the early-morning greys I looked downhill at Owenswood. It was an urban morass, heaped with tire treads and rusted vehicles and oil drums stacked horizontal like pontoons. I saw some collapsed rockwork. The streets hadn’t even been paved and every building was square; in places, front doors opened onto dirt roads as if built in ignorance of the combustion engine.

  Archer snored nearby on a fold-out cot, and I worried after bedsores and numbness and the hushed torment of the immobile. Drool pooled on his shirt, Puck-like. In the darkness, I listened for the movement of others. Below, something metal tinked over and over—a fridge on uneven floor, maybe, or a loosely threaded water pipe. The smell of diner food hovered just below the threshold of detection; if I moved my head too quickly or put my nose too near the bedsheets I’d whiff that mix of fried egg and burned coffee. Archer gurgled, mumbled sounds that might have been words. The skin on his forehead drew together like the folds of a canvas vest. Even asleep, he looked like he was trying to solve a problem.

  I touched my feet to the floor. The bed squealed beneath me. That you, Alan? Archer said.

  Yes
. Can’t sleep.

  Strange dreams, he rasped.

  Same here. Must be the air.

  His voice softened. Never sleep much, anyway.

  Sleep when you’re dead?

  His arms rose above him, two muscly pillars in the low light. He turned his palms over and over, studied them. I wondered what he saw in them, his own hands, the scars and histories mapped like topography on those knuckles, that wrinkled skin.

  I never thought I’d see him again, Archer said.

  Colton?

  We called him Crib. I saw the brooch—crab-shaped. Unmistakable.

  He shuffled around on the cot and the sheets made a sound like you’re supposed to hear inside a conch. Then he asked me to help him sit up, which I didn’t expect him to do. His skin was clammy and the bones jutted from beneath it, hard and obvious as the bedsprings he lay upon. I propped him against the wall, so he could see out the window. Then he gave his thighs each a strong smack, one after the other.

  Sometimes feel the pressure, he said. Makes me miss walking.

  I had nothing to say to that. But he must’ve known, so he bounced his shoulders, not even a shrug, to loosen them up.

  What’s Colton’s deal? I said.

  He followed me here from the States. We think he was one of the guys sent to round up deserters and draft dodgers.

  We?

  Well, me, he said.

  They’re married, I offered.

  He smacked his thighs again, this time hard enough that the sound came out muffled, as if he’d punched a pillow, or dough. When he raised his fists for a third strike, I cupped my hands around the wrists. It was the right thing to do. His arms went limp in my grasp, and I lowered them to his side, knuckles down. He kept watching them, one before the other, his head on a pivot left to right.

  How did we end up here? he said.

  Jumped a hole in the highway.

  I hate him, Alan. I hate Crib so much. Why does he have to be here?

  Archer, I said. What happened?

  Crib happened.

  Come on.

  A breath, long like when he slurped his beer. He terrorized us, Archer said. He followed me everywhere, assaulted Jack. I lost everything because of Crib.

  Not everything.

  What do you know?

  Nora?

  His teeth came together with a click.

  He took Linnea.

  That might have been the root of it. I used to believe that love’s the only emotion that can keep a man chasing someone for three whole decades, but now I’m not so sure. He made a case for it, old Archer Cole, I’ll give him that. Every time the floorboards groaned or a door slammed or a draft cooed through a hallway he’d straighten on the bed and try his damnedest to look prim and proper as a suitor. It’d last seconds, his head craned forward and his eyes wide with anticipation. You could see how much he missed his daughter. It oozed off him. Christ, he even smelled like an old photo—like nostalgia, like want.

  I owe him, Archer said after a time.

  She’s not a prisoner.

  He took her. He assaulted Jack. Do me a favour?

  Sure, I said.

  He mopped a hand down the whole of his face, bald skull to chin—one single, slow pass. Bring me the gun, he said. The shotgun, in the truck.

  No way.

  I gave your grandad that shotgun, you know that? Might not mind seeing what he’s done with it all these years.

  No fucking way.

  He lowered his head to show me a pale wrinkle behind the temple—an old scar. This is what he gave me, he said. Crib. Smashed me with a wine bottle, side of the head, when I wasn’t looking. This is who’s down there.

  There’s more to this story, I said.

  Archer drew a deep breath, and on exhale his whole body shrivelled and seemed to recall his age: his shoulders drew down until he was hunchbacked; his head bobbed forward and the deep caverns of his eyes went dark, mole-like, and the skin of his face slackened so the pink beneath his eyelids glinted in the low light. Maybe he himself didn’t know what he wanted or why he’d come, had no idea what would happen, hadn’t played events over and over in his mind. Maybe, when we set out, he really did just want to repay a debt to Gramps. But I doubt that.

  He looked out the window. The turquoise sky, that last glimpse of stars.

  I guess I got in his way, Archer said, barely audible.

  In the distance, the mountains burned an eerie jade. We’d had our brief respite, our few hours of sleep. I got the sense that Archer had business here, a past as thick as mashed potato, and that he would come no farther in my company. Of course I’d end up alone in my search for Jack—how else?

  I’m old, he said. I’m old and by now I’m alone.

  You’re not alone yet.

  Listen to me, Alan: don’t leave your girl.

  You’ve still got Nora, and Linnea.

  That’s not a proverb, Archer said. Don’t leave your girlfriend. Cecil’d tell you the same.

  I gave him a once-over: a man who’d lost it all, or nearly.

  Wise men, I said, bitterly.

  You’ll regret it.

  I’m not sure you’re in a position to talk about regret.

  Archer’s teeth clicked shut. He cleared his throat. But you love her, right?

  Darby, then, would be alone in Toronto in her dumb robot pyjamas with her laptop on the bed, late-nighting some crap television series, episode after episode after episode. That’s what we used to do, even when one or both of us had to be awake for a dawn start. She’d have a mug of green tea going tepid between her palms, and she’d hold the ceramic at her lip until a moment of suspense, then slurp and gulp down her excitement. We’d fall asleep with an episode still playing, the laptop warm atop us. On the screen, some tough-guy cop dodged bullets to save the world. It’s sad going to sleep, Darby mumbled to me once. I wish we could be together when we sleep.

  Archer tapped his thigh again. I let him. I used to, I said.

  That’s something.

  Enough?

  Enough to keep trying, Archer told me. And who knows.

  OUTSIDE, THE AIR PRICKLED with that morning damp and when I pulled a deep breath the moisture tasted like coal. My mom was perched on an upturned log, faced toward town. I had a few puzzles I thought she might help me put together, and I needed to bury my dog. The wind flung dust our way as I approached, and she put her cheek to it so the motes danced like ricochets off her skin. She wore a sheepskin coat unbuttoned, and its separate sides fanned outward at her hips. Hands in its gut pocket, elbows wide, dishwater-blond hair jostling at her shoulders. She slouched, and when she squinted I saw the wrinkles at their corners, her age more obvious in the morning light. She had boyish cheeks, a mole near her jugular that puckered at the edges where she’d scratched and scratched at it. My mother, nonetheless.

  Sleep well? she said, but didn’t look my way. In the distance, the sun teased the lip of the Rockies, highlighter orange. Four, maybe five in the morning.

  Archer snores.

  I got to watch over Colton all night. He’ll probably want breakfast, too.

  Fringe benefit of being shot, I guess.

  Her lip pinched a half-smile, humouring me, and her hands wormed so deep in her pockets that the sheepskin reached her forearms. It didn’t feel all that cold: somewhere under six degrees, since my breath churned warm fog. The light looked pale as a winter day. I smelled trees, that earthy scent of places where few people drive.

  I pulled up a log. How’s Colton? I said.

  He won’t complain.

  Sounds like everyone else in the family.

  My mom rocked on her log, one elongated thu-thump. Why’d you have to bring my dad here? she said.

  I thought you’d be happier to see him, I said.

  It’s more mouths to feed, she said. And he’s a cripple now.

  He helped. The highway’s fucked, and he knew the way through the logging roads.

  Good for something after all, she s
aid.

  Her hand slipped from her pocket, pinched a clump of dirt that had collected on the log. Downslope in the town, a blockade of crushed cars formed a wall as high as the buildings that pinioned them. They were all ancient vehicles from the days of steel and eight cylinders, when cars still equalled sex. Prized in their day. Shadows now—of their former selves and physically in the world. My own vehicle was parked nearby, and, looking at it, I felt a clot tighten in my throat that I had to force down.

  I need a shovel, I said.

  My mom followed my gaze. Ah, shit, she said.

  It’s okay.

  I forgot. Colton—

  It’s okay, I said.

  She stood up and pressed her knuckles to her spine in a bid to ease some tension, and lurched out of sight around the restaurant, limbering up as she went. Her body moved like an old hiker, like someone with a set of injuries that’d only get worse, all shuffles and hollow joints and tendons stretched like O-rings. She swore. She muttered something about the time of day. I heard her foot acquaint with metal. Probably, I should’ve fetched the tool myself, but by the time this thought dawned she’d already returned with the shovel brandished hip-height like a musket.

  She appraised me, like she had before—like a mother, maybe. You’d benefit from a shower. A shave, too.

  I felt my cheek and its steel-wool stubble. Been a stressful few days, I told her.

  A joke, kid. Lighten up.

  I’m just trying to make Archer jealous, I said.

  That’s his thing. Wears his jealousy like a bib.

  She crossed her arms, stared at the town. I got the impression she spent a long time staring at the town. Do you want to bring the dog now, or after?

  After.

  I followed her into the forest that circled the Verge. Branches draped low in our path and my mom trudged through them undeterred, and rarely did she pause to hold them for me. Pine needles cloaked the floor like playground mulch, not one among them green. The whole place smelled like the bonfires you light to burn piles of yardwork. I remember Gramps doing that: a stooped figure who shovelled chokecherries and grass into the back of an old truck, and, afterward, sat in the bonfire’s glow with a rifle dismantled across his knees, his hands clacking around the parts.