by D. W. Wilson
Do you want to toss one around? A football?
The question hung between us and we each took a moment to regard the jagged horizon and the fires on the cusp of their descent. It looked like the mountains had sprouted hairs. I couldn’t even smell smoke anymore, though the scent was stronger than ever. My teeth felt fuzz-coated, same way they do after a night of heavy drinking. I didn’t know how much time we had left: all the might of human ingenuity couldn’t stop those fires, and it had damn well tried. Great and powerful and so far beyond us—that’s what it felt like, standing there. Diminishing. As if we were not really in control of anything, even our own existence. We had to get out of there, but something had to happen to make us go. I think we both sensed that.
Toss a football? I said.
He grinned at me like a dad. Do you throw like a girl?
By now I’ve probably learned to throw like a woman.
Jack rose. He swiped the bottle up in his fist and jerked his chin. Come on.
We moved across the yard toward the tire strung between the trees with bright neon rope. Shards of glass coated the yard, mortared into the dirt like fertilizer: the remnants of bottles blasted to grain. Kernels popped beneath my feet, and I got the sense that not many feet besides Jack’s had walked the length of that yard. He set the moonshine on a severed tree trunk and waddled to the tire, where he bent to scoop the football. His knee hardly moved when he did so. He slapped the football, hard. His muscles went tight and he squeezed it at his chest, then his arm looped over his head and he flicked it to me and it missiled through the air. The catch jarred through my shoulder and a sudden heat waved over me and I tugged my collar.
I ran my fingers over the smooth leather and the stitches stained yellow-grey. Later, he’d tell me how some nights he spent hours in that yard with the dim household glow for light, just blasting throw after throw through that tire, as if it meant something. He was a good aim, he’d say. I threw the pigskin back and it wobbled through the air and Jack cradled it to his hip in a textbook reception. He licked his lips, lasered another one at me, and this time, favouring my arm, I fumbled the catch and it jarred into my finger. I swore, and Jack said nothing while I retrieved it. We carried this on. He wanted to offer advice on how to toss the football and I wanted to ask, but conversation was beyond us. I had so many questions about him and Archer and Gramps, and I somehow knew that if I were to get any true answer it would be from him. All paths led eventually to Jack West, even my own, though I’d managed for twenty-nine years to carve my way without his ever-present spectre. Gramps, I understood, had never let himself move on from the loss of Jack; he was too stubborn, and I worried forward to their eventual meeting. I wondered if they’d both be startled by how much damage time can do, by how men become unassuming as they grow old and how even those, like Gramps, who have held their heads high will stoop their shoulders and come to prefer the look of asphalt. Men and demons, both, can grow soft and fat and normal.
The football lanced through the air like a thing made radiant.
At last I fumbled a big one and it cartwheeled far enough for me to jog after. When I picked it up and straightened, I caught Jack with the bottle pressed to his mouth and the weight of its contents on his pursed lips, suspended and anticipating. He drew a long, burning gulp, and I thought: It has been a long time since he kissed someone. After, he looked from me to the bottle and me again. Then he leaped forward—with as much speed as his gimped leg allowed—and flung the bottle ass-over-teakettle into the brush that walled his yard. It went up in an arc and he himself went down to his knees and I didn’t know which to track. He sagged to the grass, knuckles down, and flopped over in that awkward way that forces your knees into the air. Somewhere, the moonshine landed, never to be recovered. Jack pushed himself up. His shirt slid over his waist and revealed a beer gut and he dragged down at it over and over with one clumsy hand.
THE EVENING TRICKLED inside and made his small room colder than you’d expect from August, and he said it was because the window wouldn’t close and he couldn’t be fucked to fix it. The smoky smell of B.C. moseyed right in. He opened the oven and cranked it on high and I dropped once more onto the couch that seemed out of place. Jack lit the kerosene lamps and stewed up something to eat on the stove while the room grew warm. He spooned it into two ceramic mugs, said he didn’t have bowls, didn’t see the point. He waggled another bottle of liquor at me but I shook my head, and he set it uncorked on the floor. We ate working up the courage.
Went rabbit poaching once, he said. In England, at some abandoned satellite ground. The guy I was with had one nearsighted eye and one farsighted.
Hope you didn’t let him drive.
I did, Jack said, his face upturned at last.
I took another spoonful. So this is rabbit? I said, knowing.
Nah, he said. Cheap beef.
Thanks.
He sat wrong-facing in a chair, hunched with the chairback nearly to his chin.
I feel like I’m supposed to tell you something, he said, and squinted out the window at the sky turning its edges dark.
I didn’t answer him, sucked meat from between my teeth.
Hell if I know what. Didn’t think it’d be you, though.
I held his gaze. Me and my dad: him with a bowl of stew under his nose, his hand jittering like he needed a drink, and me slouch-shouldered beside him, elbows on my thighs and thinking about nothing, for once. I just wanted to hear him talk. He had stories to tell, a life lived. All the world reduced to that: some few feet of distance, a man en route to tears, the smell of strong liquor.
You wanted to stay, I said.
Of course I did. He’s my dad.
You told him?
Yes, Jack said. I made him cry.
His hands spasmed toward the moonshine. He breathed a deep exhale through lips shrunk to an O.
Nobody saw. He cried.
The wind rattled the window. A retch of smoke pushed past us, strong enough to bring water to our eyes.
Christ, Jack said, all breath.
It’s okay.
I made a lot of mistakes, but fuck.
He took off his ballcap and ran his fingers along the rim.
His voice cracked. I can’t even tell you, he said. I’m sorry … son?
It doesn’t really matter anymore.
Not to you.
No, Jack, not to me, I said, bitterly.
His spoon scraped around his mug’s bottom. Well I’m not sorry.
I put my food down. And what would you possibly have to be sorry for? I said.
Hey, he said, and at last reached for his bottle. I’m sorry I didn’t tell anyone about Archer fucking Nora, and I’m sorry Dad sent her away—
Gramps sent Nora away?
Jack pushed the heel of his palms into each eye. She wanted to stay, same as me. But Dad wouldn’t have it. See, that’s my fault, son. I shoulda let it lie.
He took a tradesman’s swig.
Then this wildfire happens, and I don’t have a licence, and even here at the end I can’t get Linnea to accept my apology. So I figure it’s karma. The world has a sense of justice. Burn something up and get burned up—fucking poetic. So I’m just waiting for it to roll on down the mountain. Been trying to die for thirty years.
And then I show up, I said.
He tossed the bottle down and it rolled along the cabin’s uneven floor, spewing all the way. And then you show up, he said.
I WENT TO COLTON’S jeep to get some air and to let Jack get some composure. The wind was more constant and the smoke almost ringed us like an eye wall. The Purcells had millenniums of experience in the art of holding back fire, but I won’t lie: I worried about how much time we had left. Pillars of smoke coalesced in a haze above us, thick like pillow-clouds or tar or the bubbling pitch from those old cartoons about dinosaurs. It seethed and moiled, and looking at it made me feel like I was being drawn in—like I was approaching a great and impenetrable dark.
At the jeep, I le
aned on the driver window and allowed myself a moment to worry that I would end up like my father. He certainly didn’t have Gramps’ disposition. I don’t know if Gramps had failed to impart it or if Jack had simply been away too long; perhaps, like muscle, even courage can wither if unused. My father, who Gramps so desperately wanted to see again: some over-sentimental man with receding hair and a lack of personal resolve. But I guess it didn’t matter. We don’t choose our family, and, like my mom said, we don’t really choose who we care for.
Jack had set himself up on a chair on the porch, and he barely reacted to my return until I presented him with Gramps’ maroon box. He had another bottle of moonshine open beside him. I didn’t say a word.
What is it? he said, but I just held it out to him. He lifted the lid and held it in the air and just stared, until something jarred him to action and he lowered it to his lap. When he touched the contents his head shook. His knuckles went to his teeth and he toothed on them. I saw his baldness and the way the middle-aged muscles on his back had grown soft despite years of physical work. His shoulders rose with a judder, sagged the same. Why? he said. His eyes were squinty, moist. He made a low, throttling sound, a bubbly groan. Why didn’t he ever get in touch?
You know how he is.
But why is he like that?
That’s the question. That is the question.
Can’t you call me Dad?
Not now, I said. Maybe sometime.
It seemed to satisfy him. He shut the box. The wind scattered dust against his shins and scuffed boots. He kicked at the cloud of dirt rising below him until it too sped away, shucked off toward the grassblades and whatever else awaited. Everything tanged with our sweat and the soot set adrift on the wind and the fires so dangerously close; the empty glasses of moonshine gave off a stink like pure gasoline. He got up and walked off the porch, put his hand to his mouth. Part of facing your own demons is the realization that not everyone will be able to do so.
An object set on a path will remain on that path unless outside forces act upon it—that’s not even philosophy, that’s just physics. Bullets more or less fly straight. People, in general, maintain course toward destiny. And even those vagabonds who journey without destination remain on that journey though the winds may blow them astray. Wandering, it turns out, is just another straight line in hindsight.
Jack squinted at the light, hand to forehead in an evening salute. He scratched his chin, that polished line of stubble. He looked noble all of a sudden, like a man from the Dirty Thirties: a coal-shoveller, maybe. Or an air force cadet, unremarkable and unassuming, a man of paramount mediocrity—exactly the kind of man who should be an unlikely hero. He stood there on the dry grass with the light spread thin across him, just being Jack West, and for that moment it seemed the world moved around us, and not us around it. I’d never felt that way before, and not again since—like lying on your back and watching the stars rotate, but with everything, with your very existence. Jack West: my father, but more than that. Mystery, enigma, trope. Son, lover, coward. Beginning, middle, and end.
Acknowledgments
This book was four years in the making, and I am humbled by all the people who’ve lent a hand during its creation. I’ve heard it said that writing is a solitary art, and writers solitary people, but I’m not sure I believe that.
As ever, my mom, dad, and sister have been pillars of support throughout this and all projects, as have my surrogates on the older side of the Atlantic: Annabel, Greville, Corty, Thomas, and Charlie. It’s impossible to quantify how much it means to know that someone’s in your corner.
For reasons I can’t fathom, and after almost four years, Andrew Cowan continues to offer his immaculate editorial eye, his expert wit, and his invaluable constructive cynicism. Lorna Jackson taught me to write a sentence and believed in me enough that I too believed. No small feat, either of these things.
Great swaths of this book were workshopped at the University of Victoria, during my undergrad, and the University of East Anglia, during my MA. Thanks to Giles Foden, and to my fellow students at both, especially Joshua Piercey, Armando Celayo, Ben Lyle, Anna Smith, Bernardo “Bro-1” Bueno, Hal “Soulbrother” Walling, and Trevor “Chest” Wales.
Elaine and Andrea, of Massaro’s Coffee, gave me the shelter I needed to get through the last two drafts; in the darkest hours, down those darkest roads, their coffee kept me going and their abuse kept me humble.
My agent, the electric Karolina Sutton, continues to tolerate my shenanigans and to convince publishers to publish my work; she is irreplaceable as an agent and a friend. As with my previous book, I am grateful to my editors—Nick Garrison at Penguin Canada, Helen Garnons-Williams at Bloomsbury UK, and Anton Mueller at Bloomsbury US—for all their work to make this book as polished as it can be. Emma Daley is one hell of a publicist, and Steve Myers, though a drunken lunatic, is not a bad one himself. I am grateful, of course, to the rest of the staff at Bloomsbury and Penguin for their ceaseless enthusiasm.
Lastly, for being forced to read the very first draft of this book, and for not telling me to give up right there and then, a shout-out to Thrasher Gaston—man of myth, legend, and unchangeable glory.
A Note on the Author
D. W. WILSON was born and raised in the small towns of the Kootenay Valley, British Columbia. He is the recipient of the University of East Anglia’s inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship – the most prestigious award available to students in the MA programme. His stories have appeared in literary magazines across Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, and ‘The Dead Roads’ won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2011. Once You Break a Knuckle, his debut short story collection, was published by Bloomsbury in 2012. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Ballistics was a finalist for the 2013 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and has been longlisted for both the 2013 Dylan Thomas Pize and The Desmond Elliot Prize. D. W. Wilson lives in Cambridge.
By the Same Author
Once You Break a Knuckle
Also Available by D. W. Wilson
Once You Break a Knuckle
Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2011
In the remote Kootenay Valley in western Canada, good people sometimes do bad things. Two adolescents sabotage a rope swing; a heartbroken young man chooses not to warn his best friend about an approaching car; sons challenge their fathers.
Crackling with tension and propelled by jagged, cutting dialogue, D.W. Wilson’s stories reveal to us how our best intentions can be doomed to fail or injure, how our loves can fall short or mislead us. An intoxicating cocktail of adrenaline and vulnerability, doggedness and dignity, Once You Break a Knuckle explores the courage it takes to make it through another day.
‘D.W. Wilson’s stories have a wonderfully raw, vernacular energy which carries the reader through some dark and spitefully funny moments. This is a cracking read.’ Jon McGregor
‘A massive achievement’ Guardian
‘Wilson’s world is dangerous and unpredictable, and his writing has a terrific, understated force’ The Times
‘Wilson’s voice is distinctive, confident and completely enthralling’ Geoff Dyer
First published in Great Britain 2013
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © D. W. Wilson 2013
The right of D. W. Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The excerpt from F. R. Scott’s “A Villanelle for Our Time”, which opens this book, is used (gratefully) with the permission of William Toye, literary executor for the estate of F. R. Scott
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eISBN: 978-1-4088-3377-3
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