Ballistics

by D. W. Wilson

  What did you want, Nora?

  She laced her hands together on the table, straightened up. A strand of her red hair flopped against her eyebrow but she let it hang there, let it curl around her eye and frame it and make me look at her and realize that she was as good looking as the day we met, the day I first kissed her and slept with her and held her in my arms—god fucking damn it, there could not be a better woman on this living earth.

  I wanted Cecil to be more like you, she breathed.

  And now he is, I said, bitterly.

  Then someone banged on the front door.

  Archer? Jack called, and I yelled for him to come on in. He swung through dishevelled-looking, his hair askew and balloons under his eyes and his hands bunched to fists. He came to a hard stop when he saw us. Nora?

  Just escaping the chaos for a moment, she said. You okay?

  I can’t find Linnea, Jack said, and I felt the world widen, felt a great pressure in my throat, the lights flicker, lose brightness.

  Is she here? Jack was saying. I can’t find her.

  I FOUND HER at the Greyhound station at the edge of town, near the base of a large slope where the road turned from asphalt to dirt to asphalt again in the span of a hundred yards. Across the street was a one-storey party shack with a yard that opened to a great, wide marsh. The lights in the shack were dim but music blared through its thin walls and teenagers staggered outside to vomit on the floodplain. The Sevenhead cut through town near the station, and whenever the party quieted I heard the river hushing.

  Linnea had her hair tied in a bun and her backpack one-strapped on her shoulder. She looked older than nineteen, but that could have been the sodium streetlights that make everybody’s skin seem as washed-out and yellow. It was dark enough for her to not recognize my truck approaching, but she’d have known that I’d come looking. Both of her hands cupped her stomach, just above her pelvis. I don’t know what that meant, if anything. Somewhere along the line I’d made a grave error of judgment, but pinpointing that exact moment is a futile and pointless game. It doesn’t matter how something starts, or even how it progresses. What matters is how things end.

  Linnea leaned on the station’s brick wall as I stepped down from the truck and scratched my neck and thought about what I could possibly say. I wished I’d brought Nora. For all my wisdom and prostrating, I am useless in the face of emotion. When it comes to tender hearts, I am about as useless as Cecil. He, at least, has felt real grief. He has watched his loved ones disappear around corners and over hills. He has known what it is like to lose.

  What’re you doing here, Dad? she said.

  I sat against the hood of my truck, crossed my arms. Could ask you the same.

  I can’t stay.

  Why?

  You know.

  No, I said. Tell me.

  She pulled at a strand of her hair, like it was a habit, but I’d never seen her do it before.

  You think Jack’ll make a good dad? she said. A good husband? He’s a boy.

  I chewed on that one. Across the street, somebody banged through the front door of the party shack and the night got loud with the noise of music and young people hooting. Cars zoomed by, in and out of town, and I waited for the sound of their engines growing distant. Every set of headlights could have been a bus. All conversations have expiry dates, but you rarely think of them, and when you do—when at any moment your daughter could hike her pack and leave you, forever, there’s no time to manoeuvre. You just say what you have to say. Maybe it makes them truer.

  I think he wants to be, I said.

  I’m not staying here.

  Okay, I said, almost whispering, afraid to let my voice crack. I wished I had my sketchbook, or a bottle of sherry. Problems are easier to solve when they are things.

  Have you got money?

  Some.

  My eyes burned, like from staring into a fluorescent bulb. I pulled a wad of money from inside my coat.

  Here, I said, and after a long second of me standing arm-outstretched, Linnea pushed off the wall. She came close, reluctant—my own daughter. Did she think I’d grab her? Hit her? Christ, what did people think of me?

  You’re not going to try and get me to stay? she said.

  I’m doing my best.

  That made her wince back tears. Me, too. She stuffed the money in her jeans. Then she stepped forward and pressed against my chest, and I laid my chin on her skull, cupped her shoulders in my palms. She shuddered, a long breath, but no tears soaked my shirt. Daddy’s little soldier.

  My door, I said, trying to say is never closed. But that was so obvious. I rubbed her arms, smelled the shampooey smell of her hair, like a teenager’s. You can’t keep a person where they don’t want to be—that’s what prison is for.

  You gonna call me? I said.

  Sure.

  From where?

  She rolled her shoulders, something like a shrug. I believed her.

  When does your bus leave?

  I’m not busing, she said, and pushed away, and I sensed the crossing of a boundary, I sensed the approach of something sinister in the darkness around that Greyhound station. I used to have a nightmare where the wall above my headboard would open into an abyss, black as the mouth of an old paint can, and from that abyss I would see a dot growing, growing, into the shape of a monster with crustacean eyes and a maw like an axe wound, and I would tug on my blankets, try to tug them over my head, but never be able to find the strength in my arms. Right then, I felt like that nightmare had never left me, like it was warm-up, an elaborate and long-winded warning. Of course she wasn’t busing. Of course somebody would be giving her a ride. And I knew who it was, who’d emerge from the darkness. We had one more confrontation brewing between us—there had to be.

  He came to a stop with gravel churning under his tires, his headlights beaming on me and my daughter and my chest inflated with protectiveness. I stepped into the open, slow, calm—trying to look as menacing and in control of my rage as I could get. The lights flashed from high to low, high to low. Linnea leaned against the brick wall. The Fairlane’s driver door opened. A pair of army-issue boots crunched down on the gravel. It was too dark for me to see him clear, but I didn’t have to guess.

  It’s not what you think, Dad, Linnea said, but I barely heard her, even though what she said was likely true. I don’t know what happened at that beach fort, so many years ago, only what Jack told me, the story Linnea never confirmed nor denied. I don’t know why Crib kept running into me, why he seemed to hound me, what could possibly have been gained. Nobody has ever made it clear.

  I figured you’d be here, Crib said. He stepped around to the front of his car. The lights lit half of him. He had a cigarette pinched between his thumb and first finger, and he flicked it to the gravel, ground it under his boot. It was slow, methodical. I cracked my head over my shoulder.

  I guess you’re here to do the alpha-male thing, I said.

  Nup, Crib said, emphasizing the p. That’s your gig.

  He shrugged out of his field coat, folded it in two, draped it on the hood of his star-spangled car. It blocked one of the lights. He wore a white muscle shirt that showed his iron crab brooch and a scar across the meat of his chest—a grizzly thing that zigzagged from his right collar and disappeared along the curve of his left pectoral. After a moment, he swiped the cadet hat off his head, placed it neatly in the bedding of his coat. He looked exactly as a military kid should.

  I probably should have thrown you off that bridge, I said.

  He flashed his teeth in what looked like a genuine smile. If I had a penny for the number of guys who’ve told me that, he said.

  You’re not taking my daughter anywhere.

  I know, old man, he said. I’m not taking her.

  I squeezed my hands as hard as I could. A couple knuckles popped. Crib’s shoulders rose and fell, as if sighing, as if he hadn’t been after this the entire time he’d been in the valley.

  Well, he said, came toward me. I supp
ose there’s no talking you down.

  Nup, I said, emphasizing the p. This was one fight I couldn’t avoid and sure as shit didn’t want to.

  CRIB GRABBED ME by the lapels and shoved. I tried to react, flung a punch that sailed wide and comical in the air. I landed on my wrists in the wet gravel. The dampness budded through my jeans. Stupid of me to watch the hands, like an amateur, like some highschool kid scrapping. Crib assumed a linebacker’s hunch, arms bent at nineties like the idiots who watch karate flicks and think that’s how things get done. His fists curled and uncurled. I wanted so much to hit him, to bludgeon his face until all that remained was a swollen, bruise-battered hump of flesh and snot.

  I pressed my tongue against my teeth until I tasted blood, got to my feet, whipped wet dirt off my fingertips.

  Do you even talk to your daughter? Crib said.

  I stepped through Crib’s haymaker and hammered my knuckles into the plush spot at the cusp of his nose, put my weight behind it, curled the wrist in a half-rotation so the impact crunched the cartilage like an egg. His head whiplashed back and his hand went to his face, and I growled a follow-up to his solar plexus, his winding point, close enough to his scar that I felt the shingly skin on the retract. His breath wheezed against my ear, so gentle as to be intimate, disarming. I talked to Linnea all the time, had always talked to her. Who the fuck did Crib think he was?

  Dad, Linnea hollered, like she was in trouble, and I turned on instinct, and Crib latched his hand on my face, fingers gouging my eyes and cheekbones so my head bent back. His knee dug into my ribs. I flexed my gut against the impact of his knuckles, but he couldn’t get the distance he needed to make it count. We staggered apart, breathing like athletes.

  Stop, Linnea said. She stepped away from the wall, had what looked like a club in her hand. This is stupid.

  You can’t leave with him, I said. After all he’s done?

  What’s he done?

  Alan. What about your son?

  Who’s dad are you? she said.

  Crib sniffled, wiped a sleeve over his bloodied nose. Juice squeezed out his left eye and his face looked like a mastiff’s. His chest rose and fell with enough force to lift his shoulders. He spat, red. His tongue tested the solidity of his teeth. I felt gouges on my cheeks, from his fingernails. A slight burn, as if spending too much time in the sun.

  I went at him. It wasn’t even fair, not anymore. I had the hand-to-hand; he had talk, he had attitude. I scraped my knuckles along his ear. I clipped one downward across his forehead, eyebrow to chin. The nail of my thumb tore his lip and made him drool blood and mucus. Crib’s left eye swelled shut and I’d been trained to exploit that, a blind spot, a free-hit zone. We meshed together, held each other like wounded men. He smelled like bile and limestone, like the dirty diesel engines of logging trucks. My fists clenched. I grit my teeth, felt the bloodlust and the high a man gets when he causes another’s pain. And then the world sucked me backward and down, down, down, legs gone jelly and my head lolled sideways and the night kaleidoscoping, smashed up like fireworks and engine brakes and then: darkness.

  WHEN I CAME TO, I was looking at my own boots in the gravel, at the hem of my jeans darkened with water stains and soaked through, and for a moment I forgot where I was. The Sevenhead hushed in the distance, and at the base of the Ford Fairlane Crib slumped between the headlamps. Linnea helped him up, her backpack discarded and her hair whipping around in the wind. His face was double-eyed and smeared with cartilage and snot, and the corners of his lips were torn into a raw Cheshire grin. My own face ached. The cheek below my ocular throbbed from haymakers and jabs not quite grazed. The back of my skull was warm, heavy. Liquid leaked over my neck and down my back, and I knew without touching it that I’d been struck upside the head. I dabbed my lips together and felt a pulse of blood, couldn’t recall the last time I’d split my lip on my own teeth or someone else’s bone.

  I pushed onto my elbows. Beside me, the upper half of a wine bottle lay in the gravel, the glass as rigid as a shank. Only one person could have wielded that bottle, and the realization hurt me more than the headache behind my eyes or the bruises welting my cheeks or Crib’s headlights like pinpricks. Linnea had actually struck me down. After everything I’d done, the sacrifices I’d made, all those years trying my goddamned best, she’d chosen Crib not only as her mate but also as her protector. Crib, the man who’d haunted my waking hours for the last years. Crib, who’d beaten Jack West bad enough that his confidence had never recovered. Who would soon make a getaway with my daughter.

  And that was not something I could face without resistance.

  I got to my knees, ignored the gravel that jutted into my shins. Crib leaned on his hood, on his coat, and his unsteady movements sent bars of headlight streaming into the darkness. I wrapped my groggy fingers around the neck of the wine bottle, dragged it toward me. I’d already missed one opportunity to deal with Crib. Cecil would never have let it come to this. Cecil would have handled the problem, would have faced it down—but me, I just hid. Wars are not won by hiding.

  I stood up. Force of personality. Old-man strength. Across the road, teenagers had taken note of our fight, had poured out of the party shack to point and sip beers and wonder. There were a whole lot of witnesses now. The glass was slick against my palm, but also sticky—residual wine, dirty groundwater, blood turned muck. I should have thrown Crib off a bridge. Linnea had pulled him to his feet, and he maintained his own balance now, almost as shaky as me. The adrenaline had left me, but I slogged forward, tried to strain my grip on the bottleneck and grit my teeth, to will myself to anger. Crib didn’t even budge. He just waited. He palmed a lighter from inside his coat and struck a brief flame that I watched and wondered at with every single step. It was like he’d let me gore him, spill his guts, save my daughter—that easily.

  What’re you doing, Archer? Linnea said, and I nearly collapsed all over again. I let the bottle drop, let my shoulders sag. Is there anything more humiliating than having your child chastise you on a first-name basis? Yes: there is the humiliation of becoming something you have taught yourself to hate.

  I don’t want you to leave, I said, and as the words left my lips the world rose up, spun, and I felt gravel on my ass.

  Dad, Linnea said.

  I steadied myself, palm to wet earth. No more cards to play.

  What else have I got?

  Jack. Nora.

  I wish I’d told her that I hoped, more than anything else right then, that she’d be happy wherever she ended up. Instead, I said nothing, sat in a heap on the ground while the Sevenhead rushed and the partygoers trickled back inside and the dampness in my jeans spread to my ass and crotch. Linnea came toward me, toed the broken bottle away, leaned down and pressed her warm lips to my forehead. I felt her inhale the smell of me. And for a brief, absurd moment, I wished that I had showered more recently, I wished that she would remember the smell of me at a better time. I have been told that scent revives memory more vividly than any other sense.

  She left without a word, climbed into the driver’s side of the car. I don’t know who’d ever taught her to drive. Crib balanced himself on his open door, and I forced myself to look at him, to let my nostrils bulge and shrink with the effort of breathing. He’d won, but I would not go gently.

  Don’t get lost in the shuffle now, old man, Crib said, and gave me a salute. Then he ducked into his star-spangled car, and I watched them round the corner out of the Greyhound station, just taillights now, and then I watched them disappear over the crest of the hill that led away from Invermere, away from all the horrible boredom of that small town, away from Jack, and Cecil, and Alan, and away from me.

  I HAD NOWHERE ELSE to go. I went to the Wests’. I went to Nora.

  The walk—couldn’t have drove, and not just because I’d had my bell rung—seemed like it should have been one of those times when a guy gets a chance to clear his head, like it was time to wind things up, take stock, cut losses and move on. In a movie
there’d have been a sad orchestra at work. I crossed the road bridge, where a few of the concrete barrier blocks had been dislodged. Highschool kids had spray-painted a penis on one of them, in yellow. Cars whirred by me and a couple times I trudged off the shoulder for fear of veering headlamps. I’d have liked to skirt the lake, to smell the cadaverous stink of it, to let the air—colder there—ease the burning scratches on my face, the dull throb at the crest of my skull. Whenever the wind changed, I caught a whiff of myself, like breath and body odour and vinegar, though the last had to be my imagination.

  Invermere’s main haul was empty and lit only by the spill from over-shop households, and if I looked directly at them even those dull lights flashed to sparks and lens flare, to beads like a welder’s torch. Cars snailed through town, all their tumbling metal and muscle like an athlete, and as they passed I glimpsed faces and bodies, heard snippets of conversation. The sounds dopplered away, seemed to gather and hang between the buildings like an echo, like being underwater, or in a fishbowl, or not knowing which way was up. Sometimes when I passed under a streetlight it’d flicker and go out, as if I contained a charge or was one of those people who stop watches, as if something was trying to keep me hidden, or keep the path ahead of me hidden—some power beyond science that knew things I did not. Fate, karma having a go, unnamed gods of flame and darkness.

  I knocked on the Wests’ door. A baby cried, and I heard shuffling, worried murmurs about the time of night. Then the latch turned and Nora opened the door, and it was like a blast of warmth hit me, the relief at seeing her. She had men’s pyjamas on. Her red hair sprawled at her shoulders. Her expression said I looked a whole lot worse than she did.

  Jesus, Archer, she said. Behind her, Cecil lurched out of the bedroom, topless. His old, muscular chest was paler than a glass of milk, and I’d have liked to crack a joke but I couldn’t get my tongue moving like I wanted it to. Jack poked his head around the corner. He was holding the baby—Alan—like you would hold a cat.

  Feel a tad lightheaded, I said, and slouched forward. Nora caught me, or mostly, and Cecil got his shoulder under my arm, kick-boxer fast. He gave Nora a nod and she slid away, and by himself he half carried, half hugged me to the blinking white kitchen, and when he saw me squinting at the light he rolled the dimmer low.