Ballistics

Praise for
Ballistics

‘Beautifully observed’

TLS

‘Forest fires are raging, to match the fiery passions of a hard-nosed, hard-boiled, basically hard cast . . . Packs a manly punch’

Daily Mail

‘A lean and powerful book about quiet, emotional people. It animates a world that any smalltown North American could identify in a moment, yet it transcends this environment to evoke something universal’

Guardian

‘
Ballistics
is a profound and haunting novel that won’t let you alone’

Spectator

‘Flinty coming-of-age story . . . Wilson can make a simile and a verb out of pretty much anything . . . Description is the gift he is keenest to cultivate – rightly’

New Statesman

‘A hot shot of a novel . . . Panoramic drama and epic scope’

Tatler

‘Well-written, confident, and often compelling . . . Engaging’

List

‘An unusual and assured novel that dives into the hinterland of human sadness, and the ways masculinity finds or fails to deal with it’

Sydney Morning Herald

‘One of the great pleasures of the novel is the way it surprises at every turn. None of these twists feels forced, however: each is grounded in realistically drawn, vital characters who behave as human emotions and frustrations dictate, rather than conforming to the expectations of the reader . . . It is a harrowing, often brutal read, but it is also emotionally potent and resonant. Simply put, it’s one of the finest novels of the year’

Georgia Straight

For Loon

This is the faith from which we start:

Men shall know commonwealth again

F.R. SCOTT, “A VILLANELLE FOR OUR TIME”

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

Also Available by D. W. Wilson

One

Empedocles:

Having seen a small part of life, swift to die,

a man rises and drifts like smoke,

persuaded only of what he has happened upon

as he is borne away.

On a Friday evening in September, some time ago, a friend of mine spilled a bottle of lager across her lap and slurred her curiosity about how it all began, that summer I spent in a scour across the Kootenays. She doodled her finger through the caramel froth yeasting on the surface of her thighs. I thought about getting her a paper towel, but I thought about a lot of things. We were taking potshots at empty beer cans with my grandfather’s .22 calibre, and I’d lost my aim to nerves and thoughts and the restlessness that endures when adventures come to an uncertain close. I touched a scar on my cheek, about as long as a pocket knife, and wondered a moment after the dead and the gone.

How it all began—that’s a good question. That’s a philosophical question. It’s like asking when a bullet starts toward the beer can. Is it at the moment slug exits muzzle? When I lean on the trigger? Somewhere among those hours spent checking and rechecking the chamber? It could be the munitions line, or the semi-trailer hauling cartridges down Highway 1, or the clerk at the hardware store who retrieves the carton from the glass. It could be strictly mechanical—hammer strikes casing, spark, ignition,
trajectory
—but over seventy parts make up the firing mechanism of a bolt-action rifle, even more if you count the bones of the human hand, the arm, the muscles and nerves and the synapses each themselves firing. And then, getting really philosophical, there’s the Gunsmith’s Paradox: to reach its target, a bullet must first travel halfway, and to travel halfway it must first travel a quarter, an eighth, a sixteenth, smaller and smaller, such that it will never reach its destination, such that it won’t even start to move. This means nobody can ever be shot. This means no journey can ever end.

How it all began? Well, I can trace Gramps’ defects all the way to his childhood: shrapnel he blocked with his sternum when he was seven, the result of a dud artillery round on a beach not slingshot range from home; a welding arc that dashed across his chest while he tempted his body’s conductivity in the rain; smoke inhalation, steam scalds, stress levels, and a consistent blood-alcohol for all those years strapped inside a Nomex jacket with
Volunteer Fire
stencilled across the shoulders. That’s his history, but if I were to pinpoint the moment when everything Began, capital
B
, the summer my family’s past came knocking, I say this: at eighty-two years old, Gramps had his heart attack.

IT WAS A POORLY VENTILATED
evening in May, the kind that encourages a man to splay himself along a loveseat and wear musked-up muscle shirts from his childhood. Gramps’ house offered little in the way of airflow, so we’d wedged the stormdoor with a Gore-Tex boot and unshuttered the windows, and something like a breeze tickled my pits and the skin on my topmost ribs. Earlier, Gramps had salvaged a blastworn industrial fan from his storeroom, but I lacked the technical savvy to revive a guttered servo, and Gramps lacked the sobriety. We’d settled onto the furniture in his den to suffer through UFC exhibition matches as we waited for the approaching dark.

I’d only been in the valley a few days, having fled from an impending thesis and some girlfriend drama that for many months has been only a few bubbles shy of boil-over. It was to be the last visit before my indoctrination: a PhD in philosophy. Back east, my
significant other
, Darby—who I’d dated and not married for the better part of a decade—had taken to long nights at the university’s gym, training for handball, of all things; each night, calling her, I listened to the unanswered telephone and marvelled at the gap between us. There are a number of things a handball player can do late into the night, but only one of them involves the sport so named.

Gramps went to the kitchen and banged open his fridge and I heard him grab a pair of bottled beer. Outside, the dusk light glanced off neighbouring roofs. Years ago, Gramps strung a mosquito net abreast the exterior window because brown birds tended to get drunk on the gemstone berries that grow on a nearby tree, and they’d kamikaze into the glass. One day he found a family of those birds piled at the house’s foundation, and when he lifted them in his palm their necks lolled like tongues.

Pillow clouds swirled above the Rockies, and I smelled the pinprick sensation of lightning on the horizon. The sky had turned the colour of clay. Woodsmoke loitered in the air like breath—it clung to clothes and furniture, a scent like chimney filth, or hiking trips along riverbeds, or the charcoal that remains on a campground after the campers have moved on. The province was in flames. Folks in the Interior had fled their homes and each morning I woke expecting to see the town ablaze. Earlier in the month, the Parks had declared Fire Warning Red and everybody—locals and tourists, bluecollars and rednecks, cops’ sons, preachers’ boys, parlour philosophers, even the old, haggard men who huddle under the pinstripe tarp that sags off the bakery—doused their camping pits and boiled their hotdogs and darted amid traffic to stamp out cigarettes left to smoulder in the heat.

Gramps set the two open beer on the coffee table and his maimed dog, Puck—an eleven-year-old butter-coloured English mastiff—lumbered from behind a pony wall. On the television, two long-limbed Muay Thai fighters lilted in half moons around each other, gloved hands at temples, knees drawing like longbows. Then one of those stick-men split-kicked forward, sailfish-fast, and Gramps made this noise like
ununghf
and when I looked over the old bastard had gone scarecrow. He lurched sideways and one hand clawed for the end table but fanned it, hauled a circa 1970 lamp down atop him, shade like a hot-air balloon. I knew a thing or two about emergency first aid, so I launched into CPR and dialed 911 and, from the driveway, watched the paramedics green-light him for de-fib in the ambulance.

The ambulance veered behind a panelboard house and out of sight. Neighbours from yards abroad lurked in my peripherals: a pear-shaped man hiked his crotch on his verandah; two kids, young enough to be my sons (I was twenty-eight), leaned on their bikes. Through the living-room window, beyond the mosquito net, Puck stood a vigil, his big head swooping as he looked from me to the empty road and back again as if to say,
What are you waiting for?

I rushed inside, grabbed Gramps’ keys from his hunting vest, and commandeered his Ranger. It was a three-minute drive to the hospital, up a hill with a sixteen percent gradient and past a rundown hostel ripe with the stink of dope and gamey thrill-seekers. As I crested that hill, driving straight west, I was struck by a clear view of the Purcell Mountains. For a moment, under the sunset, they looked to be on fire, the treetops glowing red and orange, and it seemed I could see past them, through that shield of rock and carbon, to the very flames that ravaged the province’s interior. I felt a gust of warmth in my eyes, like the dry heat from a wood stove, like a welding torch, as if from the blazes burning on the mountains’ far side.

When I arrived at the hospital, a receptionist with curly hair sat behind a desk built into the wall.

My grandfather had a heart attack, I said.

Cecil West?

That’s him.

She directed me to a lobby with a window overlooking the courtyard of an old folks’ home. There, a double-bent man, out for an evening stroll, passed half a sandwich to a Dalmatian at his side. In the room with me, a toddler drooled on a Tonka dump truck he’d filled with alphabetized blocks. He wore a spaghetti-stained sweatshirt, and he mimicked an engine’s hum as the Tonka trundled left to right, where he dumped its cache in a heap against his knee. On those frequent trips to the hospital when I was a kid, Gramps never let me handle the scarce toys laid out in waiting rooms—germ laden and smeared by hands too long unwashed, I suppose.

Then a tall woman my age, with blond hair tied in a bun and a square jaw like a boy’s, stomped into the waiting room and glared down at the toddler. She wore blue jeans faded in scruffs at the thighs and a grey T-shirt cut above her triceps. I recognized her as a fling from my highschool years. Missy, she used to be called.