Ballistics (12 page)

No Jack yet, I said.

Don’t call him that. He’s your dad.

Only biologically.

Respect it, Alan, Gramps said.

I ran into Archer.

Gramps made a chewing motion, followed by an expression as if he’d gulped sour milk. How’s he, then.

Dying.

Did he know where Jack is?

No, but he knows where my mom is.

A goddamned family reunion, Gramps said. He mopped a hand through his sewing-thread hair and exhaled a breath that puffed out his cheeks. With his thumbnail he picked at an adhesive disc stuck to his forearm. So where’s your mom?

Owenswood.

Well, damned shame.

What’s that mean?

The highway’s closed, idiot. Rockslide.

I can go around the rockslide.

Probably best I die alone.

You’re
actually
pouting, I said.

Gramps didn’t bat an eyelash. He also didn’t have eyelashes to bat. Can’t wait for this whole goddamned valley to burn.

Will you cheer up, I said. Jesus.

You won’t see me crying over it. Piece of shit valley.

Hey, Gramps: fuck you.

He smacked the side of his bed, cheeks flushing red. I’m dying here.

Is that what you want me to tell Jack?

He’s your
dad
.

When he swallowed, his whole windpipe bobbed like an apple. He put his knuckles against his teeth and the sleeve of his hospital gown slipped down his arm. The skin was the colour of stained paper, the veins shrivelled and blue and bulging, and I noticed for the first time the same on his neck, on the jowly skin beneath his jaw, tendrilling from the temple. He looked like somebody who’d laboured for hours without rest, like he’d been shovelling dirt in the mountain heat and there was nobody at home to pat him on the shoulder. He looked lonely, I suppose. And old.

His eyes pinched shut. Call Archer, he said.

You want to see him?

Not one bit, Gramps said. He drove a logging truck.

Yeah, he told me that.

The logging roads, Gramps said again, sounding annoyed. His eyes had gone filmy, and I thought I might be about to see him cry. But frankly I’m not even convinced he had the capacity. Archer knows them. He can get you around the rockslide.

He’s worse off than you.

Just tell him we’ll call it even, Gramps said, and I pictured myself in his shitty truck, ambling along dirt roads his age or older. Gramps’ mouth went tight-lipped like an army guy. He was frowning, or scowling, or some combination of the two. In hindsight, I should have figured it out way earlier.

And Alan, Gramps said, not looking at me. He’s your grandfather too.

ARCHER AND NORA
arrived after midday, in a burgundy Bonneville missing its rear bumper. When I’d called—they were Gramps’ emergency contact—and explained, Archer fell silent on the line for a long time. It wasn’t hard to imagine Nora nearby, watching him and knowing the weight of what was being asked. Of course he’d do it, he told me.
Of course.

Nora got out of the car first, but Archer didn’t wait for her to loop around to his side. She’d swapped her nondescript dress for a pair of jeans and a beige shirt that hung down to her thighs, but she still wore all her rings. Archer pushed the door wide open and balanced on his feet long enough for Nora to haul the wheelchair from the trunk—she only struggled with the dislodging, the first initial jerk. You could understand a lot from the way she moved: a woman who put value in destinations, maybe, a woman who didn’t have the patience or time to let things happen to her—but I’m probably reading into that. When she brought the wheelchair around, Archer fell into it with a grimace. He’d dressed for the occasion, wore a heavy flannel coat over a blue T-shirt and a trucker cap pulled low on his egg-white head. His jeans were scuffed in great sweeps on the thighs and the knees and riddled with small rips and patches in the denim.

Nora wheeled him to the base of the front steps, and then I went out the door to meet them. Puck followed; Nora eyed him with a smile that faded when she returned her gaze to me. I can’t deny either of them this, she said. But it’s cruel of Cecil, really cruel.

I know, I said.

This will kill him.

I’m right here, Archer barked.

Nora turned toward him and raised her eyebrows and smacked the back of one hand against her palm. Archer grinned. He had everything he wanted, a blind man could see it. They both seemed so bizarrely at peace.

Gramps thinks he’s dying, I said.

If he’s coming to me for help, he just might be, Archer said.

He said you’re my grandfather.

Archer and Nora shared a look, and Archer looped his hands behind his head, but winced when he tried to lean back—his old joints and muscles wouldn’t stretch that far. I guess the cat’s outta the bag, he said.

Why the hell hasn’t anybody told me?

Wasn’t our place, Nora said.

I was in your house.

Cecil, Archer said, and turned his hands outward as if that were answer enough.

You told me where to find my mom—your
daughter
.

Archer leaned forward in his chair, hands on his thighs. I promised that bastard grandad of yours, he said. Then he looked himself over, sized himself up. I don’t have much else going for me.

He settled his hands in his lap with a
thwap
, and Puck took this as his cue to limp down the stairs and sniff him. A dollop of dog drool dropped on Archer’s leg and he smeared it into his jeans, rubbed his old hands over Puck’s ears and smacked his great, muscly flank. Puck leaned into him and the wheelchair tottered, but Archer didn’t so much as flinch.

This guy coming with us?

Looks that way.

We had a mastiff, years back, after we left this town. Called him Dough.

With that, he let go of Puck and wheeled himself toward Gramps’ truck, on his own, because Nora didn’t move from the base of the steps. I went down to her. She crossed her arms. From somewhere out of sight, Puck loosed a playful bark. I’m going to Cecil, she said. I’ll be there when you guys bring Jack.

If he tags along.

She laced her hands together and brought them close—almost like praying. This is all so dramatic and useless. I wish Cecil’d taken that stick out of his ass.

Maybe you can help him out with that, I said.

She stared across her knuckles at me and didn’t speak for a moment. I felt that I was being measured. It’s just such a fucking waste, she said, whispering the curse word.

Then Archer hollered for us to stop wasting his time, since he was dying, and to get over there and help him into the truck. And then I was heading west like a prodigal son, armed with a shoebox of memories and riding toward the horizon with its sunset glow. Archer cracked his window and stuck his elbow out, shifted to let his legs stretch across the seat. In the smoky haze everything seemed to emit an aura. Whether from the light or the escape from Cranbrook—this last grasp at the things of his past, his youth returned for one more romp—Archer had been rejuvenated. With him there, and the truck’s corroded grille and the flames licking the skyline before us, it looked almost exactly how I’ve pictured the world in the 1970s: everything inundated with sulphur and rust like an old Polaroid photo—everything dyed orange, even the air.

Long ago, in some forgotten part of Invermere’s history, the road to the gravel pits was a maintained highway, but in February 1970 it had devolved to a mess of upheaved asphalt riddled with potholes and tree trunks barely cleared aside. Jack told me about drag races there, how the American kid, Crib, bragged about his car’s engine only to chase dust race after race. At the highschool, he’d become legendary not for how badly he lost but for how doggedly he kept losing, as if nothing would deter him. That’s not the nicest thought to have when talking about a man who might be trailing you, but there’s no point in dwelling on eventualities. Crib had also shown up at the school’s parking lot, where he smoked American cigarettes—the package dressed up like the star-spangled banner, because everything we do or make needs to be broadcast as
ours
—and sat on his hood and talked in short, gruff sentences. A pair of teachers ran him off. Jack promised to keep me posted. Cecil suggested we pay Crib’s car a midnight visit, to send a message, but if Crib
was
one of those guys sent to sniff out deserters, the last I wanted was to draw his eye. Better to stay hidden, to stay unobserved. Human attention is drawn first to action and second to contrast.

In winter, the switchback to the gravel pits never got plowed, so driving  it was a job for four-by-fours and men with nothing left to lose. It was dark—seven p.m.—and the distinction between road and ditch was anyone’s guess. I drove with one tire on the shoulder, because you could hear the gravel churn against the wheel wells, so I knew I had at least two tires on the asphalt. A couple times, my headlights caught the glint of marble eyes, but I feared to so much as touch my brakes. Deer carcasses infrequently appeared in front of me, one even fresh enough for steam to rise from the bloody tear in its flank.

You never find roadkill in groups, even if you mow down a family of beasts. I did that once—hit three deer, home after my first tour when the last thing I wanted to do was take another life. Broke all twelve legs at the knees, give or take. My ex wanted to leave them—she couldn’t stand the way they didn’t moan, the way they hid their suffering, their
silence
—but I am disturbed by the sight of something in pain. We didn’t have a rifle with us, so I dodged their rubber-band legs and snapped their necks. It doesn’t make a sound like you hear in the movies—it barely makes a sound at all. But you feel it, a
pop
, like somebody else cracking your knuckles for you. All three had dragged themselves in different directions, so I followed their slug trails in the grass. Like I’ve told Cecil, animals like to die alone.

That February, I had Cecil in passenger and Jack crammed in the middle of us with the stick shift between his knees, and each time I geared down he sucked a sharp breath. They were back-seat drivers, or at least whatever the equivalent is for a truck with no back seat. I’d told the two of them to shut their yaps, and they laughed at me together, like buddies, which was good to see. We were en route to a tradesmen’s party. I’d been asked to be their driver, though not by either of them. In truth, driving them home was the least of my worries and the least of Nora’s, but she’d ask me to go along in case Cecil needed backup. He had a history with one of the bigger contractors nobody liked but everybody tolerated—everybody but Cecil.
My hands are too rough to stroke egos
, he always said, which is a line I admire. Nora didn’t know what she thought might happen, or even if the contractor would be there, but no man could have faced the look on her face and declined to lend his hand. And I owed Cecil so much—I owed him my entire way of living. Debts like that are the hardest to repay.

DAYS EARLIER
, I’d met the two of them at a pond in Idlewild Park, because they’d invited me out for some skating. Idlewild Park does not place among the ten nicest locales in the valley, but it’s not so bad. Mostly, it was huge, and you could go deep enough that the road would slip from view. One time I hugged my way up a branchless pine to rescue a cat. He had a zebra coat and a tail kinked like a power cord, and as I footballed him under my arm I felt his starved muscles and meatless ribs with a glimpse of where my body would one day go.

When thawed, the pond was scummy and full of floating litter that caught in the reeds around the shore, and it smelled vaguely of piss, but winter’s sanitizing cold had rendered it pure. I didn’t have any blades myself, but Cecil assured me he’d be able to dig something up. He and Jack used to spend a lot of time on the ice, when the boy was younger, and Cecil thought—like all Canadian dads think, at one time or another—that perhaps his son would land in the NHL. But Jack lost interest in the ice even if Cecil kept himself sharp, sometimes looping the lake and the pond for exercise and for the feel of that mountain wind blasting on your cheeks. It’d be a good way to clear your head—in the dark with only the ice’s grain moving beneath your feet. It paid off for him in other ways, too, since he figured skating was romantic. That’s a hell of a thing to picture, Old Man West as a romantic, but even the rattiest onions have more than one skin.