Once You Break a Knuckle (5 page)

Not that it'd slow him, not that it'd sway him. Ray would persist. It's just what he did.

EVERY VEHICLE IN THE
driveway of Flannerly's shop was a truck. He spotted Paul's Ranger and pulled the Silver Bullet – the only vehicle he had access to – in beside it. A group of guys smoked outside the shop. Ray recognized one as a lippy plumber named Ben, but the others he didn't know. He stepped out and nodded. A black Lab bounded from among the trucks and put its nose in his hand.

The plumber, Ben, waved his cigarette at him.

—Hey, Sparky.

Ray gave a deep nod. —You talking to me or the dog?

—The dog's not a goddamn electrician, is he?

—He'd make a hell of a plumber, though.

Ray winked and went inside. Flannerly's shop was a giant shed, wired with heating and a television upstairs, unfinished walls, material piled in the corners. The walls were dressed with
Playboy
tear-outs and posters of girls in swimsuits. It felt like any other shop Ray had ever been in, except six times as big.

Some thirty guys and a handful of women sat in a giant circle. They had two barrels of iced beer and a table with whiskey. Ray set his bottle of rye on the table and poured himself the first glass. Rye and Coke, cut one-to-one. He found Mud and Paul and joined them. Paul nodded and Ray clapped him on the back. The kid wasn't so bad.

Mud passed him a beer.

—Guess I'm double fisting.

—Ray, Kelly started eyeing you the second you walked in.

—I like Kelly.

—You should. She's a coug. I'd hit that if I wasn't married.

Ray winked.

—How much you had, Mud?

—They call me Doctor Love.

Ray shot the last of his rye and took a beer from the stash Mud had beside his chair. Paul sat smiling and mute; his
stack of empties was only half as big as Mud's, but he was doing his best. Bunch of drunken idiots, the lot of them.

Ray spent most of the evening trying to work up the courage to go talk to Kelly. The night wore on. Mud entertained the group with a story about bull riding in Kelowna under the name Texas Dunlop. Some cabinet guy tried to breakdance but slipped on a crushed beer can and twisted his wrist. At one point Mud leaned toward him, elbow in his ribs, and nodded at Kelly. She had gone to the liquor table and stood apart from everyone else.

—Persistence beats resistance.

—I'm not sure that applies.

Mud nodded, sage-like. —Ray, it always applies.

He joined Kelly at the liquor table. His rye was the least touched of all the booze there, still half-full. He lifted it and filled a plastic cup halfway and offered it to her. She took it. He filled his own and they stood, side by side, but not looking at nor talking to each other.

—How'd it go after I drilled myself?

—We're not going to talk shop, are we?

Ray shrugged, beaten. —Couldn't think of a way to get started.

She tapped the table with one finger and left it resting there. —Can you drive?

He shook his head. —Not legally.

—How'd you get here?

—Illegally.

She left her drink on the table and slunk to the exit. She stopped in the doorway, pressed to the frame, her Usher
shirt visible through the cleft in her vest, and winked. Mud saw the wink – had to see the wink – and put on a
go for it
grin. When Ray looked back she had disappeared except for the tip of her hand. Her fingers waggled on the wood; the nails were chewed down. His ears went red, and not from the booze. He went out the door. Behind him, the guys gave a cheer.

They walked to the beach because Ray couldn't drive, and it was about as romantic as things would get, boozed as they were. It was darkening; the sky over the Purcells had turned a milky red. Red sky at night, sailor's delight. The frozen lake creaked, giant ice plates ground like earthquakes, once so loudly she jumped. They leaned against each other. He felt like a sixteen-year-old anxious to get laid. He stopped noticing things, tripped on tiny rocks and almost ate a mouthful of sand. A tree branch, bent and loose like a drunk's weighty arm, took him straight in the chin. She laughed; he cursed and swatted.

Their meandering took them to the far end of the beach where the sand terminated against a concrete wall. Above them loomed what remained of a wooden fort, weathered to a mottled rib cage lined with insulator's plastic. A long time ago it was a ferry port, when people traded up and down the Sevenhead River. Ray used to party in it as a kid, had his first blowjob there, pressed into the corner with a bottle of rye in one hand and a fistful of denim jacket in the other, jeans drawn down past his ass.

Kelly gestured at the fort.

—I slept with a twenty-two-year-old there, last year.

—Wish I could say the same.

From her vest she produced a silver flask, held it flat in her palm with one thumb curled over the spout. She flicked her hair around to the other side of her head, showed off the curve of her neck, a mole perched on the cusp of the jugular.

—It's chocolate vodka.

Ray let her churn the flask in the air beneath his nose, leaned forward as if to follow when at last she retracted it. It smelled like a coffee house, like dark beans or maybe the liqueur they squeeze into brandy chocolates. When she tipped it to her lips he watched her swallow, her neck again.

He wanted to reach for her hand and lead her away.

Her house was a few blocks away – the basement suite of a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot house. Two other girls, half her age, lived there too, but they'd gone home for Christmas. It was almost, she said, like having a place of her own.

The chocolate vodka didn't last long. It was the first step in losing their clothes, there in her well-lit bedroom. Kelly slid her hands around his grey-haired chest, over his gone-soft biceps, and Ray stared at nothing but that bedroom light – how could he turn it off without being obvious? But, perhaps sensing the unease in his stiff, trembling shoulders, she flicked the light so he didn't have to. Then, for the first time in three years, he kissed a woman.

Soon after, naked under the covers, he plucked a bolt of lint from her belly button and she giggled. Kelly's body disappeared beneath the blankets, her muscled legs
only shadows against the curl of his palm. Ray caught a glimpse of himself, his pasty gut, his mangled hands on her stomach – how could she be genuinely interested in him? With this awareness went his boozy haze, and, with that, everything that mattered at a time like this. He focused on Kelly, the sound and sight of her, the way she shifted with his hand and tongue.

He thought of Tracey, followed the memory of curves and moans and the way she would sink her teeth in the soft of his ear. But Tracey was not the woman laid out beneath him; his memories did not match the curves, the sway of breasts. He imagined how Alex would've acted at a time like this, or how he would've acted with her thighs sticky against his jaw, those muscles that must reach like taut ropes toward her knees. Christ, she was a good-looking woman. His old body hovered above Kelly, spread along the length of her, limp. His lips grazed the coarse hairs between her legs but it didn't matter, nothing was going to matter.

Ray rolled off her and sat on the edge of her bed. One of her legs touched his lumbar beneath the sheets. Amber light from a street lamp leaked through the tiny window; it blanketed his feet and lit his discarded pants. She shifted. The blankets rustled. He wouldn't do this well with a woman ever again. His cock dangled against the bed. The sight of it made his cheeks hot, made his fists ball. Kelly fidgeted behind him. If only she would say something.

Then: a hand on his back, between the shoulder blades, warm in the winter cold. He imagined the contours on
those fingers, the nicks and scars and the chewed nails and he felt a tingle, down there, but it lapsed as he noticed. He shivered and leaned away; her fingertips lingered on his spine.

A real man would save face, blame the booze, answer with bravado and nonchalance – but Ray had long moved beyond that. You get less and less invincible, he figured. Or you give up trying. Years ago he would have demanded a blowjob and passed out halfway through. Instead, he hooked his jeans with his big toe, slid them toward him, and tugged them on. Her hand disappeared. The denim balled at his kneecap.

—You can stay, if you want.

He did want. He wanted so bad to stay there in that bed, sexless and warm, snug against the tight muscles in her lumbar. He wanted to wake late with his face buried in her hair and watch her dress in the blaze of daylight, naked and his, even for just this once.

—I'm sorry. About this. It has nothing to do with you. So much depends on this night and I don't know. I don't know why.

He felt her shrug.

—So go to work on Monday and tell them everything they need to hear.

Something like relief passed through him, a great exhalation. Ray lay down with his arms at his sides and clutched the blankets. What was there for him to say? It felt like highschool, the first time he ever had sex, the winces and squinting eyes, cold sweat on the bedsheets. Kelly coiled
around him. Her warmth spilled into his backside; the human body produces as much heat as a one-hundred-watt bulb. Ray let the night happen. She prodded his feet with her toenails and, later, laced her fingers through his. He didn't flinch. He didn't even shiver. All the problems could wait.

SEDIMENT

In the last weeks of the school year the hallways empty out and summer gets so close you can taste it like iron in your throat. Invermere, the whole town – maybe all of B.C. – is suddenly the eye of a desert storm. The wind kicks dust down the main haul but there's not a soul, not a tumbleweed, only this feeling in your gut that you're shooting on through. My days blur into report cards and administration and the occasional phone call to a student's mom. Ceremonies, grad pranks, a party in some teacher's backyard with a bonfire as big as a motorhome. It's euphoria, it's like a thing earned, and the hours swelter by without worry over recompense.

But you never quite move on from what you've left behind. At night, on my porch, I eat grapefruit wedges and think about who got me here. The air smells like the mountain wind and the citrus juice pooling on my plate. Life is a series of events between shitstorms, or so my dad used to say. On the porch, I'll imagine Bellows, the only guy who ever bared his teeth for me, his bob-and-weave
walk, his messy hair and that grin more bucktooth than lip. Then I'll remember the hick, Ham, huffing on the asphalt, his breath sticky with hops and his mouth full of blood and sand, how bad he looked after Bellows beat him pulpy. And for a moment I lose track of myself: there's only the grapefruit and the valley wind and the questions that will trouble me to the end of days.

WE MET AT THE
end of our grade eleven year when Ham, this highschool dropout with a pigskin face, caught me late for class. He pinned me to the school's stuccoed wall and waved a bony fist under my nose. —This is what you get, he said, and pushed the knuckles against my nostrils. I was a hundred and five pounds and Ham had one fat arm across my chest. He stunk of chewing tobacco, wore an nWo ballcap turned one-eighty, a button-up denim coat. I was a teacher's boy, the kind of kid rednecks take a fancy to, and I generally spent my free time hiding behind the tungsten-coloured portables, in a cubby someone had hollowed in the earth.

I smelled that jagged fist and imagined how bad Ham would smash my face with it, but then Bellows, a Jehovah's Witness with biceps bigger than my neck, came out of nowhere. He threw himself at Ham, this tornado of arms and grunts and spit. Afterward, he brushed dirt off my shoulder and asked if I was alright. —Yeah, I told him. —And thanks.

Bellows was new to town, said being a JW often caused him trouble in Christian settlements like the Kootenay
Valley.
Settlements
– he used that word, I remember. He had dog-brown hair and freckles and a mole beside his nose. Having him around felt like having a police escort. His family had moved to the valley from Manitoba, where his dad worked as a mechanic for a JW community outside Winnipeg. Bellows claimed to not touch alcohol and he was forbidden from eating ketchup or having sex out of wedlock, but rumours said he and a girl named Charlie tried it in the backdoor. He had one green eye but the other was colourless grey. His dad could refute the theory of evolution. I once saw him curl a one-hundred-pound dumbbell in each arm, and that made him the stuff of legend, like a figure out of the WWF.

We killed time together at lunch hour in a walled-off courtyard accessible by a door marked
Staff Only
. The stucco was algae-green with a shin-level strip of sandstone brickwork. Bellows only ate peanut butter sandwiches and a grapefruit, quartered, and he always offered me one of those wedges and I always accepted. For the first time in four highschool years the hicks hesitated to pick on me and for the first time since he could remember Bellows had a friend who didn't care that he was a JW. I showed him the dirty hollow I used to hide in and he collapsed it with two great guillotine-stomps. He read me a couple verses from his Bible. We hiked Invermere's main haul and he bristled whenever we passed anyone who might cause trouble. A couple times he thought somebody was making a move and he went stiff, pupils dilating and his heart a-thump like a kid in love.

At the end of May, Bellows found an ad in the newspaper selling a '67 Camaro, so we drove to a town called Edgewater to have a look. When we got there, the car was on cinderblocks outside a mobile home – cobalt blue, darker than the desert sky, rust-peppered tinwork. Bellows lowered a palm to the frame like worship. He lifted the hood to stare at the V-8. When he blew across the engine, dust coiled into the air, thick with the smell of carbide. We tried the doorbell but all we got was a Rottweiler's blood-howl, so deep and throaty it left you scratching your chest for an itch, and we hightailed it out of there. A few days later Bellows took me to his garage, and perched amid the clutter and the freezers full of elk meat was that beautiful Camaro. —My project, he told me.