Ballistics (43 page)

Aren’t you going to tell me I picked a helluva time to show up? I said, to pre-empt. Jack went to the sink and filled a kettle, set it on an element.

He shrugged, a flash of goofy dad. Are you hungry? he said.

I don’t really eat breakfast.

How about some eggs. With the coffee I’m making.

He brandished a pan at me, reached for the cupboard door.

I’ll have some eggs, I said.

Free-range, he said, then he set about cooking, and I flopped onto the shiny leather sofa that seemed like it didn’t belong.

I took it in, that cabin with its manhandled walls of pine, the kerosene lamps and the candlewax that dotted the surface of a coffee table, the sooty dust that gilded all the places beyond easy reach. What I wanted to see was a clue about his life—pictures or trinkets or the kind of baubles you can stuff inside a maroon shoebox and tuck beneath your bed. A bookshelf stood against the far wall, stocked with titles like
Firewater
and
Home
-
Brewing
for
Dummies
and
European
Spirits
. On the top shelf: a bottle of plum-coloured liquid with a bloated wood cross somehow crammed inside. There was an otherworldly scent to the house. I smelled dog, but more than that: I smelled a place I knew from my childhood, like déjà vu, or like coming all of a sudden into possession of a memory—like when you wake from a dream so real you can’t be sure it wasn’t.

I watched Jack’s shoulders, the stiffness of those neck muscles so determined not to turn his head. He smeared oil in the pan and cracked two eggs, scrambled them with swift, gladiatorial thrusts. Dishes columned up at the sink’s side; flattened pizza boxes were wedged between the fridge and the counter. Thirty years separated us, and I couldn’t place him. Awkward, humble, reticent in that way of shy people and dads who can’t talk to their sons.

Do you have a dog? I said.

Sent him away with a buddy, he said, and scraped the eggs onto a plate. He set it down in front of me on the coffee table, pressed a thumb to the edge to kill its wobble.

Why not just take him yourself?

No licence, he said. Then he dragged a chair from the table, sat in it reverse, arms draped over the backrest like a teenager. I made the trip to Owenswood to try and get Linnea out of there, but I can’t drive legally.

He paused, linked his fingers together, elbows thrown wide. His eyes moved over his knuckles, as if counting each one.

There are worse things, I said.

Let me get you some cutlery.

I ate, and he gravitated from that chair to the window, watched me or watched whatever was outside. The fires maybe, so close now you could feel the heat on your cheek like breath. We needed to get in Colton’s jeep and head east, we both knew that. But I finished eating and he took the plate and rinsed it without soap and set it on a drying rack of braided tree branches. For a second, he lingered like he might attack the rest of the dishes, too, but instead he ran cold water and lowered his mouth to the stream, came up wiping his chin with his sleeve, like I’d seen Gramps do a thousand times before.

Jack lit one of the kerosene lamps, lifted it from its hook.

Tell me straight: is Dad okay?

He thinks he’s dying.

The skin around Jack’s eyes constricted, the muscle in one cheek tensed.

But is he?

He had a heart attack, but they defibbed him.

Can’t you just tell me?

I don’t know if he’s actually dying, Jack. I’m not a doctor.

Well, he said, and shrugged a defeated-person’s shrug. I didn’t know that.

He went to the cabin door carrying the kerosene lamp. Then he seemed to notice it, made a grimace at it, a confused shake of his head.

Let’s have a drink, he said, and pushed on through.

I followed him out. His yard—his space—had its own firepit with handcrafted wooden chairs and another slate spiral, this one far more carefully done, more evenly spaced and angled as if measured. There, he limped toward a padlocked shed twenty or thirty metres away. Trees broke up the mountain view; the grass had been recently mowed. Strung between a couple of trunks was a tire rubber. At its base: a pigskin, worn to a snub nose at both tips. The occasional beer can lay in the grass, some of them doublebent and hole-punched by bullets. There was a swing set; I don’t know why. Jack’s limp became more pronounced the closer he got to the shed, or maybe he just picked up speed. With each step, he threw the leg forward at the hip, hardly bent the knee at all. That’s the kind of injury that will one day cause a leg to buckle, and I thought about asking him what had happened, and I thought about telling him, then and there, the fate that had befallen Colton and that even now he wouldn’t be able to get my mom back.

It’s far away to reduce vibrations, he said upon reaching the door. A fist-sized padlock barred entry, and Jack drew the key from a leather cord around his neck. Inside was a distillery, barrels with their bent-up tubes and that warm smell of fermentation like a small-town pub. He kicked off his boots, tossed me a wink, and tiptoed across the floor—concrete, and probably immaculately level—and snagged a bottle from a stand. It sloshed with translucent liquid. He offered it to me, two-handed, like a thing of great worth.

I was trying for something European, he said, but pronounced it
Euro
-
peen
. Really, not much more than firewater. Can’t make it right.

Have you got old tin cans we can swig this from? I said from the doorway.

He squinted, lifted the corners of his mouth.

I could empty out some beans.

I’m kidding, Jack.

His eyes darted instantly to the bottle. He swirled it.

I don’t mind. I could empty some beans. If you’d like that?

Let’s just have a drink, I said.

We crossed the yard. Jack kicked an empty beer can and something inside it
tink-a-link
ed. He paused to stare up at the smoke, to inhale through his nose and shake his head, let his chest deflate much slower than it’d inflated. He motioned to two lawn chairs in the shade cast by the small cabin, and I dropped into one while he rummaged inside for two clean glasses. Through the open window I heard water run, the squeak of him scrubbing with a bare hand. He came out flicking water from the insides of two jam jars.

I never really saw the point of buying cups, he said, and handed one to me, threads and all.

How long you been here?

I lost count. More than a decade. But I was away.

Away where?

Europe, he said, with a certain severity.

Doing what?

As he sloshed the liquor into the jars his hands shook. The liquor tasted like liquor, and not much else. Like drinking a Christmas tree, Gramps once said of a buddy’s homebrew. Jack scratched his temple incessantly; the skin was raw and waxy there and when he finished he checked his nails for blood and the bedrock of dead flesh. A breeze blew by from the east, but it didn’t cool me so much as just move the heat around. If I stuck my tongue out, I tasted charcoal.

Jack refilled his glass, a finger’s worth.

I didn’t think Dad would send you, he said after a time.

Neither did I.

How’d you find me?

Archer, then my mom. Had a run-in with her husband.

I’m not surprised, Jack said. Then he shot the liquor in his glass and wheezed against the burn.

It’s a story for the drive, I told him, and he eyed me quizzically between the whoops of his cough.

When he had cleared himself, he sat just looking at the alcohol in his glass like some kind of diviner. Then he emptied the jar onto his yard in a wide spray, and corked the bottle. The chair sagged when he dropped his weight into it. I wondered what to say to him, what kinds of stories he’d like to hear, if any.

You like football? he said.

Hockey.

I don’t mind the CFL. Hope the Yanks don’t buy it up?

No opinion.

How about Iraq? You’re young.

They say it’ll be like Vietnam again.

Is that what they say?

He looked at the bottle. I considered asking for another, but the day was still young.

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.