Ballistics (16 page)

He touched the contents so gently, with so much care, that his hands trembled from the effort. The cap gun caught his attention and he hefted it to nose level, blew across it, thumbed the metal ridges—of course he’d be most interested in the gun. Jack’s, he declared, which was pretty obvious to me from the get-go. Then he pinched the eagle-adorned Zippo, laid it flat in the palm of his hand and stared.

This is like being in someone else’s dream. I never thought Cecil’d be the cherished-childhood type.

The things you learn, I said.

Wish I’d given him the chance, he said, and closed the lid. He set the picture on the dashboard, the revolver on the seat between us. Jack might want this.

I think Gramps gave me the box in case Jack doesn’t want to come. Leverage, or something.

Jack’ll come.

That’s not the point.

Yep, Old Man West always was a crafty bastard, Archer said. Then, almost without pause: You got a girlfriend or anything?

I don’t know, I said.

How’s that the case?

We sort of hate each other.

Sounds like every marriage on the planet, he said, which was a bit cliché. Still, I gave him a one-sided smile; you humour old guys.

She’s a handball player, I said.

Is that a joke?

They are terrifying to behold and overly sensitive to sarcasm.

What happened, then? he said, and sounded—finally—like a grandfather.

I’d rather not discuss it. Brief me on my dad.

He brushed his hands over his jeans, a full-bodied action, like operating a belt sander. I could see stitches along his jaw, near his ear, and a scar under his elbow, white like a patch of freezer ice, and I wondered what kind of cancer plagued him, mostly out of a primal self-cataloguing. On Gramps’ side I had a misfiring heart, bad teeth, a genetic predisposition to say and do stupid things. Blissfulness, I’ve heard it said, is ignorant. Then Archer seemed to notice Puck’s big head gooing drool over the base of the gearshift. You talk like Cecil, he said, looking at Puck. I miss talking to Cecil.

What happened?

Tunnel vision, he said, and gazed out the window at the Purcells, at the ochre, glowing ridge of them. According to Baritone Radio Man, the wildfires had split into two distinct blazes and the current regiment of troops (he called them) was incapable of stopping both. So they’d deployed the Armed Forces—protect the cities, let the country burn, which had the hipsters threatening protest and boycott.
Save our trees
, they chanted, and some sane-sounding fireman explained that the fires were nature’s way of coiling the slack, nature’s Great Recycling Plant. And it’s not like we
want
the trees to burn, he added with a preachy drawl. They’re the economy.

Meanwhile, on the CBC, a broadcaster with a graver-than-funeral-rites voice queried people on what they’d save if they could save only one thing. Photographs, one grandmotherly type said, and in the background a communal
awww
. My baseball cards, said some guy who sounded like he worked in the salt mines, who sounded like the sort of man who lived alone despite his suave charm, his decent soul, the sort of man who would sift through his librarious collection of posterback cards—each in a protective polypropylene sleeve—and sniff their old-booky smell and remember a time when he didn’t expect to die alone. My dad, said a kid.

I pulled us into an Esso station at the top of another hill and loosed Puck. Archer shouldered his door open and swung his legs over the side and looked around for his wheelchair. It was in the truck’s bed, and he eyed the asphalt and the yellow line of the parking stall and the distance to the tailgate: only a few steps. What does a guy like that think? You labour so long and work so hard, and then the very act of mobility—that first of all gifts—is taken away. And not even by something you can test against the strength of your arm, but by wasting. I bet he could still do a lot of chin-ups. I bet he liked to arm-wrestle.

I brought Archer his chair and he mumbled thanks. Sitting down, he was no taller than Puck, and when he wheeled himself around he came face to face with the beast, with Puck’s crazy eyes and those jowls like a pair of waterlogged socks.

I like this guy, he said, and pushed past. Puck lingered a moment and I thought maybe I was reading too much into it. After he’d done his thing on some bushes near a streetlamp, I opened the truck door and he got back in. He chose to sit in driver that time, and Archer shook his head. Puck could do what Puck wanted to do; he saw the world in a different way.

I kept stride with Archer as we approached the station. He made an alright clip, but his chest wheezed in and out, and I worried that he’d give himself a heart attack before asking for my help—a bluehair too stubborn to accept that he had limits.

Look, just let me push you, I said. You can carry the supplies.

Fuck you kid.

I got better things to do than deal with you dying.

Get used to it. I’m definitely dying.

We can strap you to Puck, I said.

Dogsled? A gimpo dogsled?

It’d be more of a chariot, I told him.

He didn’t even let me get the door for him. At least, he attempted to get the door open without my help, and in a more vindictive state of mind I’d have stood by and let him struggle. Inside, he moved around like somebody his age and condition should. It occurred to me that I didn’t know how old he was, but as his aluminum wheels
eek
ed along the station’s dirty laminate floor—leaving, in their wake, a line of displaced grime, like contrails—I ballparked him at seventy-seven.
A good age to die
, Gramps would say, but he’d been saying that since I turned eighteen.

Baritone Radio Man had followed me inside, but he spoke of nothing interesting, droned statistics about square kilometres burned and grizzlies driven north to mate with polar bears and the shifting velocity of the wind. He mentioned something about the Rogers Pass but I only caught the tail end, hoped we wouldn’t find it closed or backed up with traffic or something else, else it’d be north to the Yukon for us. I recalled Darby talking about the Rogers too, wished I’d been paying attention. Kamloops was entering evacuation standby, Radio Man said, which meant people were ready to ditch home at a moment’s notice. The RCMP had begun drills for looter duty—a job that could very well be the loneliest on the planet. Imagine driving those empty streets knowing any movement meant malcontents. Even their dispatch would be a skeleton crew—the brave and the stupid and the mortally unlucky. Imagine the tinny radio silence. Imagine the taste of the air.

Gramps knew landscapers in Invermere who had signed up to combat the blazes, backhoes and all, normal working-class guys stepping up to the plate, stepping up to save B.C.’s economy (the pay was very good). Other maniacs parachuted into forward camps, armed only with a camelback full of retardant, maybe the most basic tools. Gramps himself had never done bushwork—too old, and he’d be the first to admit it—but he knew all the theory, knew enough to understand that the might of human ingenuity couldn’t stop such destruction. Luck, he’d said. It’ll come down to luck, or nature will sort itself out.

In the gas station bathroom, above the urinal, someone had scrawled:
I fucked your mom last night
. Below that, in answer:
Go home Dad, you
’
re drunk
. At the front counter, Archer bought two Cokes.

The glass kind, he said when I came up beside him. He spun the bottle in his hand, and I figured he probably wasn’t allowed to drink Coke. Far as I can tell, that’s what relationships come to—a giant game of
what can I get away with
.

They’re the best, I said, and he offered the second bottle, and I took it. A touching gesture of grandfatherliness, or I’m being cynical. Anything else you want? After this, it’s Owenswood or bust. All or nothing.

Better get some water, be safe.

Survival kit’s in the truck.

Right, he said.

Gramps is never unprepared.

Archer scowled into his hands at that. His wedding band
tink
ed on the Coke bottle and he struggled to twist the cap off, but I knew better than to do it for him, and in a moment it came off with a sizzle.

THE ROGERS PASS
is as close to the mountains and as near to feeling wholly insignificant as you can get, short of climbing a mountain or, I don’t know, flying into space. The rock faces loom so close that the less iron-willed feel claustrophobic; it seems wilder than other places in the valley, less tamed, but that could be because I am unfamiliar with the geography. Traditionally, Gramps and I headed south for camping, east for roadtrips.

The highway up the Rogers winds under a series of tunnels bored through rock croppings, overhangs, impassable walls of carbon. On all sides, the vertebrae of the world rise as high as the late-morning sun. The cliffs are steeper than death; the steel and concrete barricades reek of insufficiency—you’d be surprised how easily metal bends against the impact of a yawing car. I have a friend who once complained about the Canadian tendency to erect highways that climbed around nature’s palisades, but there is no better option. You can’t just go through them; humans are not dwellers of the underground and the dark.

We passed cars that’d pulled onto the shoulder, and drivers scowled as I trundled by. Archer, predictably, had dozed off, but not before he justified his sleepiness by insisting that westward travel affected him in a special way—that it had to do with magnets and poles and, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear, the refracting angle of solar wind. Baritone Radio Man had gone silent, so I fiddled with the tuning knob and hoped to snag CJ92, Calgary’s Best Rock—Cowtown: Heart of the New West (not bad)—but, as far from the border as we were, my options were CBC’s classics or Puck’s musical pant.

We drove into a tunnel. When I was a kid, I held my breath through each of the underpasses, and wished. The Rogers is a goldmine of wish-granting tunnels, but I always thought that one spoiled wish—one breath not quite held—would thwart all previous and future wishes for that object of desire. If you couldn’t hold your breath it would never come true. That’s a grave game to play as a child, or even a teenager wishing, of course, for romantic success. I can remember blue-facing myself as Gramps cursed slug-moving semis; I can remember pounding my wrist on the dashboard and feeling that rush of expelled air, that rush of complete and inconsolable loss. What I can’t remember are the wishes themselves: what preoccupies the mind of an eight-year-old? Right then, as I held my breath while Archer gargled beside me, I wished for things between Darby and me to have gone differently than they did. Someday, I won’t remember even this. Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here: that it isn’t
what
we desire that endures, but
that
we desire, that we are constantly reaching, hoping, pining, praying for the things beyond our grasp. Our desire is as perennial as the mountains.

Ahead, the highway—the very
asphalt
, the
fact
of the road—was heaved skyward, as if some beast had burst from its prison of soil and tar. It looked like a skateboard ramp, as steep as the snow-and-gravel toboggan jumps kids erect at the base of hills. This was what I’d missed Radio Man talking about in Golden, what had been meant by the mutters and glares from those shoulder-parked cars. The road had split in two. It was tectonic—one side of the highway shoved the other away with all the finality of rock.

I geared down, crawled the Ranger to the ridge’s lip and killed the ignition. Archer woke up, jerked from sleep by the kicking of the truck’s transmission. The crack cut through the highway and the dirt beneath it—wood-chop-esque, like it’d been hewn with an axe, like Paul Bunyan had had special occasion to come out of retirement. Why wasn’t the highway closed off? What if it’d been night?

I got down from the truck. Puck scrambled after me.

You want a closer look? I said to Archer, and he gave a single nod, so I pushed him and the chair to the edge. Ridiculous—if I stomped on the asphalt the vibrations loosed tufts of dirt. There was only a short fall to the other side, a few feet, but also a chasm into the maw of the Earth, dark like the kind of place a demon would dwell.

That adds a few hours to the trek, I said. It meant doubling back to Golden, continuing north and cutting west along one highway or another, and frankly I’m not even sure you could get to Owenswood any of those ways. Gramps would have known, but Gramps always knows. That’s his mutant power—to always have an answer. He doesn’t deal with problems, he once told me. He deals with solutions. I wondered what he and Nora were doing right then—fighting, if history had taught me anything.
Old friends
, Nora had said, but it doesn’t take a philosopher to spot a misdirection.

Archer scuffed his feet over the broken rock. This from the fire?

The drought, I said. Has to do with moisture transferring through the soil. Like a shrivelling apple, how the skin’ll just slide off.

He sucked a loud breath through his nose. The sun had descended toward the Purcells and the air looked dusty, like someone had peeled out with bald tires, like the residue kicked by a drag-racer on a tinder-dry course. The sky was the shade of wood chips, the mountains red-rimmed like a watercolour. Was it actually getting hotter as we headed west, or is that my imagination?