Ballistics (7 page)

Sorry, I said, and touched a beaten patch on her elbow.

Believe me now? she said, and pulled the curtain so she could exit the water.

I hung out in the shower until Darby left the bathroom. When I went into the bedroom I found her cocooned under our duvet, its cover embroidered with a fireman’s Dalmatian. She’d sewn it herself, the duvet cover. I slid next to her, still damp. Her hair spilled around the pillows and from the edge of the bed I could touch those strands with my fingertips. Around her collar, where any shirt would normally hide it, the skin was raw and red, not skidburned but scraped as though by coarse hair. As if by stubble?

A breeze slipped through the bedroom window, the scent of cut grass. I looped
one arm around her gut, where she hugged a hot water bottle. She smelled like cinnamon, or something else spicy—cardamom, maybe, who knows. It smelled good. Darby rolled onto her back and for a moment there was only an intimate, breathy space between us. We were close again, felt like lovers again. She flattened her palm on my chest, and I saw the curve of her neck and felt the warmth radiating not from the water bottle but from
her
, and even as I wondered about the state of things, her hand touched down on the hollow of my lower back, searching.

THE ADDRESS FROM
Gramps’ shoebox led me to a subdivision beyond the edge of Cranbrook, near a giant, flat marsh that stretched toward the mountains. I pulled Gramps’ truck to the shoulder and stepped down on an asphalt street that warbled and cracked to the horizon’s edge. The house was three storeys and not quite farmish, had a garage and a room built above it, a steep roof with some shingles loose so the exposed tar glistened like blood. A kiltered mailbox had its flag raised and the name
COLE
stencilled in black. There was a big window that overlooked the front yard, and on the far side of some cinched curtains a television flickered cerulean blue. I twirled my keys in my hand and ducked under a low branch that meandered like a drunken fist. In the distance the wind hushed among tree leaves and a car whirred along a country road. I climbed two steps to the front door and onto a welcome mat that showed a pug-faced dog in slippers, and then I rang the buzzer and thought about the things I would say to my dad.

The doorbell gonged like a grandfather clock and I heard somebody ease from a creaky chair. What was probably a cat thumped down from a high perch. It felt vaguely like the time I met Darby’s father. The door in front of me had glasswork at nose level. Inside, a figure shambled forward.

The woman who opened the door looked Gramps’ age, had spotty skin tight over her cheeks and wrinkles that curled upward as though she’d spent much of her life smiling. Her hair was tucked inside a net and she wore a nondescript grey dress, an overabundance of rings.

Can I help you?

I looked at the address in my hand and then again at the old woman.

I’m looking for Jack West.

I’m sorry, she said, sounding very uncertain. Jack doesn’t live here.

Do you know where I could find him?

I’m afraid not, the old lady said. She fiddled with a ring on her thumb, twirled it round and round the knuckle. Why?

My name’s Alan West. He’s my dad.

Jesus, she said, and shuffled aside as though to let me through. In that case you should come in. My husband, Archer, is out back. I’m Nora.

I met a man named Archer, years ago. Do you know my grandfather?

We’re old friends, she said.

The house smelled of cooking and though only two incandescent desk lamps glowed, I could see photographs lining the nearby walls. Portraits mostly, people I would never know, some in petticoats and others strung up on monkey bars and not even children. A hallway stretched through the house to what I presumed was the rear porch, where it terminated in a blaze of light. Just through there, Nora said, and placed one skinny hand on my bicep.

In the hallway, too, hung picture frames, great two-by-four charcoal drawings encased in glass, all landscapes. I recognized a couple of mountain peaks, a barrelwood cabin near a riverbed I knew instantly as Gramps’ getaway near Dunbar. A picture toward the end of the hall—the only drawing with people in it—showed a man and a boy, each with a rifle upended in the ground, both garbed like outdoorsmen. The sketches were imperfect, but I could identify Gramps by the hunch in his shoulders and the lean that favoured his right leg. The boy had to be my dad, no more than seventeen, curly haired and with the sideways smile of a man who thinks he has the world by the nutsack. The picture of my mother, on that upturned deadwood, home amid my things, would have matched in every regard save the absent dog.

That rotten grandfather of yours put himself in the grave yet? someone barked from the porch. I pushed through a stormdoor into the light and blinked spots from my vision. Archer sat in a wheelchair, bald and meatless and with a glass of what looked like orange juice at hand. I recognized the slope of his cheeks but his moustache was gone, in its place a mottled lip red from years gone unshaved.

One foot, at least, I said, and Archer hazarded a smile.

I got a call, you know. I’m still his emergency contact. I’d have gone, he said, and turned one shaking, deathly hand outward. But, well.

I’ll let him know.

Archer reached for the juice, gripped it with his thumb and his middle finger, swirled it like whiskey. Heard you ask my warden for your old man, he said. Your grandad wants to see his boy, I’m guessing?

Something like that.

Sent you to do the dirty work.

He’s lazy.

Yeah he is, Archer said, and raised the skin where his eyebrow should be. He touched the glass to his lip and struggled to swallow. The muscles lining his throat spasmed and his Adam’s apple bobbled and he made a sound like a groaning pipe. When only a dollop remained, he set the glass on its rim and wheezed a long breath.

I don’t know where your dad is, he said, and twined his fingers in his lap. But I can send you to your mother.

He motioned to a plastic lawn chair beside him and I lowered myself into it. It was still early, past noon. I felt that I should know him more than I did. Nora shuffled onto the porch now and then to replace his glass, and though no words passed between them I sensed theirs was not a relationship where such doting was commonplace. The sun peeled through lazy clouds and warmed the porch and the nape of my neck and the foundry-pipe bones of Archer’s face. Nora stood behind the mesh of the stormdoor while we talked, and she watched him like a woman waiting for a man to leave her.

It was Jack who first spotted the car as it inched along the road that looped the highschool sports field—a Ford Fairlane, moving at a cop’s pace, as though on patrol, as though scouring the school grounds and the nearby lawns for signs of who knows what. Jack had been jogging laps on the painted turf, to build his endurance so he could match Cecil when the two of them went hunting. He wore his school track suit that day—navy blue and baggy like one of his dad’s shirts,
BTSS
stencilled across the shoulders in white—and he stood out against the overcast sky like a fragment of the approaching dark. It was 1969, a day before that fateful Halloween in Invermere, B.C. On any normal afternoon, Jack wouldn’t blow his lunch hour lapping the shitty field, but storm clouds had gathered below the Rockies and he figured it’d be raining like the Flood before classes let out. Cecil said a little rain never killed a guy, but Jack didn’t have to take to all his old man’s lessons. So he spotted the car, and he skidded to a huffing stop, planted his hands on his knees and hawked on the lime-painted grass. The car seemed to notice him, too—it idled to a halt across the ringwire fence. By now, Jack had a good view: chrome drag-racer’s grille, chrome spinners, a yellow smiley face on the antenna that wobbled in the wind. Mostly unremarkable, save the paint job—you couldn’t have a paint job like that in Invermere, not without it becoming gossip the first time some bonehead saw it off its wheels in your garage. Jack just stared. A Ford Fairlane, painted like a goddamned American flag.

FOLLOWING MY GUNSHOT
wound in March, Linnea and I spent the nights at Cecil’s cabin or on the couches in his living room when the weather ate shit. We kept our heads low those first weeks, playing endless games of Monopoly—Linnea hated every minute—and sometimes venturing forth for sundown cookouts in Cecil’s backyard. Folk in the Kootenays had no trouble believing a guy was one of them so long as he knew how to work and liked a couple drinks—and I fit that bill. Good to his word, Cecil landed me a job with a painting crew called Jones & Sons, run by a guy ten years my junior, named Harold, who Cecil had some kind of long history with. Not one week through May, Linnea and I moved to a basement suite up the road from the Wests, and on our first night there Cecil packed his barbecue in his truck and hauled it over, and we sat on the grass and ate hotdogs in the shadow of my new home. The next-doors owned a pureblood retriever, and it wagged its golden tail at the cull lumber fence rimming my yard, until I lobbed a leftover wiener. One decade and two owners later, that fence would be torn down and replaced with seven-foot pickets by a man too prissy to see kids romping around his property, and the retriever would be dirt—a lanky, half-mutt pup the beast’s only legacy.

Jack showed Linnea his favourite places around town, and I made her show me. She whined about it but I exercised my military what’s-what. I followed her to Jack’s haunts: a road bridge above the train tracks where half the town once gathered to watch a man push his brother in front of a coal train and where Jack liked to drop plastic bags full of tomato soup; a derelict fort overlooking Invermere’s lake, with exposed cedar studs and polyurethane sheets hanging off the walls like skin; a jungle gym in an abandoned playground, where the old primary school used to be, with little remaining save a rope swing and a red spiral slide that reeked of ammonia and dope. Cecil figured Jack had other hideouts he didn’t show Linnea. If he wanted to, Cecil said, that boy could keep out of sight for days.

With Nora’s help I got Linnea set and ready to resume her education in the fall, at a tungsten-coloured highschool called Bill Thompson Secondary. Nora told me to keep my head low as far as possible without surrender, in case Uncle Sam went on the prowl, which seemed like a bit of excessive paranoia even by my standards. But she is a hard woman to deny. Deserters, she said, could be rounded up and shipped back to the States; the Canadian Forces demanded it. She folded her arms across her chest when she said so, as if daring me to raise a fuss. One night Cecil called me up because of some documentary on the CBC, about American army guys in Canada ferreting out deserters and draft dodgers and dragging their asses over the border—like bounty hunters, but without contract.
Brailers
, the show called them, which is a pretty fitting name when everything’s done and said. So I took my pay in cash and paid rent with bills and did my damnedest to obscure my paper trail. Cecil joked about me changing my name—becoming Archer West, his long-lost brother—but no force on the living earth could make me do that.

Summer shot on by. Rainstorms pelted the valley with water gobs as big as beetles and lightning lit a few small forest fires that were themselves extinguished. My scarred arm throbbed for those fires, even at a distance—like finding true north, my own biological compass. A big logging company out of Alberta proposed to build a sawmill forty miles south of town, toward Cranbrook, and Cecil won the welding bid with a dirty lowball. It was the biggest job he’d ever done, and me and him made two material runs each evening for a week before the work started, driving his old Dodge with its bent fender and no exhaust pipe so he couldn’t idle at a red for risk of carbon monoxide. Nora was on the nag for him to start planning their wedding, but Cecil played the sad-man card, or the busier-than-the-dickens card, or the still-need-to-talk-to-Jack card. She could’ve trumped him—there was no resisting her smile or that cackle of a laugh—but she chose not to. Whenever he bumbled through another excuse she hooked her arm around his neck and gave him a strong shake, like a headlock. Any woman like Nora is worth marrying on the spot, but there you go. That one act of physicality—it let him get on with his day. It made him think everything was aces and spades.

AT THE END OF OCTOBER
, a few days before Jack saw the car, I asked the boss—Harold—for a week off, because my artist’s eye favours the autumn light. The odds of me getting the time were alright, because as the days shortened and the winds picked up, business at Jones & Sons slowed and, like he did every winter, Harold eyed guys to cut loose. That was his strategy, and call it dirty if you want: hire a squad of assheads who could blast through an exterior job and then dump them elbows-first when the jobs moved indoors and the call for sobriety sounded.