Ballistics (24 page)

I nodded again, hated myself for it—for just doing my impression of a bobble-head. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I didn’t know where to look or stand or if I should show her the sketch that I was playing with like a highschool love letter.

You want something to eat? I can get one of my boys to make you something.

Boys?

Employees, she said. No long-lost half-brothers for you.

You don’t have to apologize, I said, which is pretty much the stupidest thing.

Jack and I never married.

I know so little, I said.

My dad send you here?

Archer—

Yeah, my dad.

Archer’s outside with my dog. He’s hurt.

My dad’s hurt?

No, my dog is.

Her face twisted up—an expression that meant
stupid boy
.

There’s no vet, she said, and her face softened, became motherly, maybe. Left town with most of them when the evac was called. But my husband might be able to help, if he’s not busy getting ready.

Ready for what?

She leaned sideways on a maroon booth, hip against plastic backing, and jerked her chin out the window, at the glow. You pick a helluva time to show up, she said.

Gramps had a heart attack.

Ah, shit.

He’s okay.

I always had a soft spot for Cecil.

I’ll let him know.

Too bad he’s not here. Where’s
my
dad, anyway?

Scared.

She smiled toward her feet, and I saw that her left canine tooth—the one she didn’t pinch her tongue against—was chipped and flat. She looked like a woman who smiled often. There’s hope in that, in knowing your mother is not too burdened by life, but I can’t possibly explain it. Maybe it speaks toward your own future, your own prospects. It’s nice to know you’re not biologically destined to unhappiness.

Go bring him inside, she said. And when Colton gets back—my husband—I’ll tell him that you’re here, and to see if he can help your dog.

She turned to the kitchen, a set of double-hinged doors like you’d find at the front of a saloon. I couldn’t summon the nerve to call out
Mom
.

Do you know where Jack is? I said, and she stopped cold.

Cecil finally calling him back, eh?

He thinks he’s dying.

She wandered to the window that granted a view of the kitchen, crossed her arms. I imagined she was the kind of woman who could get people to follow orders. A second later, she poured herself a coffee from a stained carafe. It banged around on its rim, that sound like a hollow clock. It’s pleasing to know that places like the Verge exist, that, somewhere, life simply goes on.

I have a soft spot for your grandad, she said to the window. I’m just not sure he deserves to see Jack again.

Shouldn’t that be Jack’s choice?

All Jack ever wanted was to be called home, she said, and lifted the coffee to her lips and swallowed a loud mouthful. Did Cecil tell you what he was gonna say?

No.

Ever seen Cecil apologize?

I thought about that. Gramps knows how to make amends, I said.

She watched me over the edge of her mug. Maybe he’s changed, she said.

Gramps told me, about Archer coming along—he said it’d make them even. What’s that mean?

I don’t know.

Do you really not know, or do you just not want to tell me?

I’m sorry, I don’t know.

Maybe we all skirt secrets, but right then I could feel the biggest one pressing on me like a dumbbell: that problem of Gramps and Archer, and Nora, and whoever the hell else. Jack, my mom—Archer had only begun filling me in, and there were things he wouldn’t tell. There had to be. Everybody dangled secrets over my head as if expecting me to leap at them, or to get tired of leaping at them, to just sit and pant and idly wonder. Even Darby, goalkeeping for her handball team—another secret, another loose thread. At the end, she tricked me into believing that by some magic of pheromones and good luck we’d rekindled what was lost from our old, warm days. And what if Gramps just wanted to dish out one last blindsider? I wasn’t supposed to be skulking across the Kootenays in a breakneck search and rescue. I had a thesis to complete. I had a woman to forget.

You think I’ll be bringing Jack to Gramps just to have him bitched at? I said.

She
clunk
ed the mug down on the counter. Behind her, one of the kitchen boys flew by the window brandishing what looked like an inflatable lizard. I don’t know, kid, she said. But it’s probably something you should be prepared for.

ARCHER HAD MOVED
to the driver seat. He was scratching Puck under the jowls. I leaned on the Ranger’s hood.

I’m ready, he said.

Do you think this is gonna end happy?

Things look grim, I take it.

The whole thing. Will Gramps forgive Jack?

You mean, did you drive me out here for nothing?

Puck smacked his gums, flung his tongue around trying to catch Archer’s hand.
I’ve killed my own dog, Archer
, I wanted to say. Instead: That, yes.

It ain’t nothing, kid, Archer said, and flicked gobs of dog spit off his fingers. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.

That’s a stupid cliché, and I don’t believe it.

It is what it is.

Another stupid cliché—maybe he’d earned the right to them. I fetched his wheelchair and he lowered himself in without my help. Fierce independence, as far as possible without surrender. He was such a classic old guy, such an army vet, so much like Gramps that for a moment I saw the whole trajectory of my mad search and rescue like a ricochet between those two men: like Gramps, Archer needed me to reconcile him with his daughter, except he didn’t know how to ask; like Archer, Gramps was saddled with a guilt I couldn’t comprehend, and I feared that by the end of it, through all the smokescreen and posturing, it’d leave him wheelchair-bound and terminally ill and more alone than he’d ever known—a man with nothing left to do but die. The saddest truth of all is that we either lose the ones we love, or they lose us.

Archer stretched his arms over his head and winced like before, like he’d forgotten that his gears hadn’t been oiled.

Good luck in there, I said.

You’re not coming?

This is your thing.

He tapped his wrists on the arms of the chair.

Two against one, right? Strength in numbers?

I think you’re better off mano-a-mano.

I’m scared shitless.

That’s the point.

What the hell do you mean by that?

You need to do the talking yourself, I said.

Don’t give me a fucking lecture.

I winked. Trust me on this one.

He cupped his hands over his face, pulled the droopy skin low under his eyes.

You can’t just send me in blind, he said, and I tilted my head, cat-like, with pleasure. Come on, kid, forewarned is forearmed.

Fuck you, Archer.

He craned back in his chair—an act of bewilderment. I watched him mesh his fingers together at his solar plexus, elbows loose at his sides like wings. He wasn’t a stupid man—I’m sure the irony wasn’t wasted on him.

Then Archer nodded and pressed his lips to a pucker to mask a stupid grin. Typical army guy. Maybe I had him pegged, after all. He vanished inside the Verge and I stood beside the open driver door and kneaded my fingers in the doughy skin at the base of Puck’s neck. He drooled. He gurgled, nearly purred. As a pup, he used to kick nightly, gripped by dream chase, great hunts, moonlight pursuits of beasts far grander than he. But he’d grown out of that. For years he’d lain still on his dog bed—an old chair Gramps relinquished after Puck tore off one of the arms.

Puck lapsed into a slumber fuelled by Gramps’ beer—all I could hope for given the circumstances, sleep being some intermediary between pain and death. I hoped the trade-off was worth it: dog for son. They had a history, Gramps and the mutt, but I only knew snippets of it. Some old painter named Sal had gifted Gramps with a mastiff puppy, decades before I was born, in payment for Gramps helping him build a house. That dog wasn’t Puck, but it’d ignited Gramps’ love for mastiffs. What’s the point of having a small dog, he always said. He liked a beast with a certain weight to it, that could achieve a certain momentum. You can’t wrestle a dachshund.

I could see Archer and my mom squirm through those first moments of reunion. His lips moved like a chastened man’s and in his lap his hands picked themselves raw. She towered above him. She cut an imposing figure. Around her swirled her father’s fate and she crossed her arms in a way that said she knew it. The neon
Open
sign above the Verge’s front doors went dim but its contours stayed momentarily radiant in my vision. Archer rubbed his palms together in front of him. My mom nodded, once. Perhaps the corner of her mouth twitched to a lopsided smile. I couldn’t fathom the courage that’d take from both of them: Archer to go prostrate and her to forgive—it is so much easier to stay angry and indignant. My mom discarded her apron. Archer laid his hands on his knees, knuckles down. They turned toward one of the booths and as they did Archer caught me watching, and even through the window I could see the wateriness of his eyes, the whites awash with the heady shades of plum.

A boy appeared before them, ferrying coffees. Archer touched the mug’s handle, looked at his daughter, and in that span of seconds his posture grew straighter and his shoulders drew upright, as if all his tension-wound muscles had, after so many beleaguered years, released—as if a great burden had passed to someone else. I saw him smile. Coffee had long been banned to him too, I bet, so his grin was at least part mischief. Nora would’ve
tsk
ed at me for letting it happen. I bet Nora would’ve liked to see him as I saw him then.

Against my better judgment I left Puck and wandered a short distance down the road. Owenswood was only a few hauntings short of ghost town, and as I sloped away from the Verge I peered into the gaps between buildings and expected to see tumbleweeds barrel-roll alley to alley. It felt like the set of a spaghetti western, that resinous curl of splintered wood and self-smelted shot. Even the night seemed permeated by it. Uphill, the Verge squatted like a bunker, encased in its own orange glow. Figures darted here and there past windows, and I imagined the exchange between Archer and my mom—all that emotion. Christ, how do you overcome three decades of missing someone? How do you even get past
hello
? Archer would eventually try to extract himself to a booth and fail, and she’d see right through him—old, waxing alpha male. Their first contact, maybe: her hand on his bannister of a forearm, his shoulder against the swish of her hips. Who knows.

I put my weight on the shaft of a nearby lamppost and felt my entire body shudder. Fatigue, overspent muscles, Gramps’ salvation in my white knuckles on that blasted Ranger’s steering wheel—perhaps it all caught up with me. The ochre streetlight lit an orb around me and I studied my own shadow on the sidewalk. Up the street, the Verge could’ve been a church, the only object in sight not washed to some shade of brown. Haloed, almost. It felt good to have distance from it all: from Archer, my mom, even from Puck, bless him. It felt good to just slump there and wallow and let the tiredness wash on over me.

I CAME TO
on the warm ground with my back to the lamppost. Someone stood above me, downlit so I couldn’t see the face, and this person had tapped me awake: short, with hair at the shoulders. A woman, with her elbows loose and sideways and her hands in the gut pocket of her coat, the lower hem of an apron at her thighs. My mom, of course. Something metal in her ear caught a band of light, glinted like a ring.

You caused me a small ruckus, she cooed. Set Archer all a-tither.

I scrubbed my knuckles in my eyes, tried to blink away that gooey feeling of sleep. My lips had gone parched and my hands felt papery, as if the moisture had been sponged out of me.

How long was I asleep?

Her head tilted sideways and she didn’t remove her hands from the coat. It was by now dark enough for the streets to be colourless and washed out. My mom turned at the hip and squinted along the road downhill; she stayed like that for a good few seconds. An hour, maybe? she said. Long enough for me to take notice. Back in my life not an hour and you already cause me shit.

My bad, I said.

Yeah, I’m not pissed off. Archer’d have left you out here for the wolves, though.

A gentleman, your old man.

He likes to think so.

She smiled down at me then—a twitch of the cheek, her lips drawing up. Her hair shone dark as lamp oil and the orange streetlight hid all traces of grey. I searched for a similarity between us, one biological clue or another: mannerisms, maybe, or a way of looking at the world.

You don’t worry about me, she said. You just keep sitting there. Take your time.