Ballistics (3 page)

I’m Cecil, he said.

Archer, I told him.

You here from the States?

I showed him my gums, had no idea if he was a sympathizer or even where I could find one. Cecil waved a hand. Forget it. Anyone else out here with you?

I sheathed the knife. I’ve never been good at reading expressions, but Cecil seemed genuine, and he had the face of a guy who had seen enough bullshit. Then his son rounded the cabin and I looked upon Jack West for the first time. It’s been a long road. His fingers kneaded the fabric at the hem of a bulky coat and he shuffled to Cecil’s side. If I had it my way, that’s how I’d remember Jack West—just some stupid, awkward kid on a chill evening in spring, when the future and all its shit were still distant, impossible things.

I WAS ON THE RUN
from the US Army. Weeks before, home in Montana, I’d received a letter from Uncle Sam saying they needed me for another tour. It came with a stack of bills and a hardware flyer, and the mailman who handed it over—an old guy with watery eyes—bit down on his lip as if he had advice to give. At the top of the letter, in red block typeface, it said FINAL WARNING—so if I didn’t want the military police on me like a herd of turtles then I had to skip town or re-enlist. One of the toughest calls I’ve ever had to make: I’m a decorated soldier, I’ve got a Purple Heart, a Long Service Medal, a Combat Action Badge—even back then I wasn’t some dreamy college kid crafting posters to save the world.

The day that letter arrived I grabbed a bottle of my homebrewed wine and got in my pickup and drove out to the acreage where I grew up. That property was someone else’s legacy by then, but my family had made the land fertile, had stripped their palms raw tearing up bloodweed, planted and cultivated the trees along the riverbanks to give the soil strength. If any ghosts haunt it, they are ghosts I’d know by name. The new owner—a good enough guy—had flattened our old house, but the landscape was unchanged. Landscapes take longer to move on; they’re ponderous, they remember. Generations of my family went into the sculpting of that land: our sweat flavours the waters that feed the wellspring; acres of poplar trees have heard us fight and bleed and carry on. Us Coles are in the soil, and not just metaphorically.

My part of Montana is all prairie fields, but if you find yourself a vantage point and look west you can see the Bitterroot Mountains across the wheat and birch and horsehead pumps. When I got to the acreage I hiked to a land bridge above a small stream where I first put my hand on a girl’s knee and where we scattered my dad’s ashes in ’59. He was a county deputy who spent the whole of his career without a promotion, and I don’t think I ever saw him as happy as the day I made sergeant first class. I was twenty-seven; first thing he did was salute. So that stream was a good enough place to think things over. Neither me nor my dad had ever been men to shirk responsibility, but fleeing to the Great White North was an exercise in just that. Tough tradition to break.

But I broke it, and then I got shot in the calf, and then I was bleeding and wounded and madder than the Bible. Cecil put his shoulder under my arm and Jack tried to help but he just got in the way, so Cecil waved him to the sidelines. My adrenaline flushed. The cold got me shivering. When Linnea tells this story she says I forgot about her, went hyper-masculine, all big chests and tough words and facial hair. She’s only half right at best. Cecil hobbled me forward and the whole time I was trying to think up a sane way to call my daughter from the bushes. Jack picked at the hem of his coat and Cecil barked for him to open the door, for the love of God.

Wait, I said, and then I whistled for Linnea to come out of the trees. She did so with more than a little reluctance, and then, out in the open, she fixed me with her devil’s glare. It’s a glare that promises retaliation at a later time, a glare of the very-unimpressed. She often looked at Jack West like that, almost by habit. I’ve come to miss its intensity.

Upon seeing my daughter, Cecil’s forehead bunched up like a man in thought. Then he nodded to himself and pushed me through the door and into his cabin. There, he boiled water on a Coleman stove and I hiked my pant leg and cringed at the stupidity of my wound. Jack and Linnea stayed outside. When asked, Linnea says Jack was more terrified of her than of me, that he kept his distance just tugging sprigs from his coat. That’s the one trait he sure as shit inherited from his dad—complete lockdown around the better sex. Things might’ve turned out different if he’d inherited Cecil’s backwater sense of duty, but that’s neither here nor there.

At Cecil’s behest, I propped my wounded leg on a chair and he rolled the pants above my knee. The hollowpoint had splintered barely after piercing the fabric, and I doubt any shards cut into muscle—not that it didn’t hurt like a bastard. The skin had gone seven different shades of yellow and I could see the purple blotches where a fragment went in, but I’ve taken worse injuries. The worst—my burned arm—flared up by the mere proximity to heat. Cecil set his saucepan of hot water nearby, dipped a rag into it, and, in a gentle, circular motion like a guy brushes his teeth, cleaned away weeks of dirt and sod and soil.

Jack, he called, and the boy poked his head through the door. Get the whiskey.

Jack shuffled to the cupboards and opened them and I watched him search, hesitate, and search again. He craned his neck around but Cecil had his head bowed near my calf. I caught the boy’s eye though, knew from the way he winced that there wasn’t any whiskey in the cupboard. He said as much, real timid.

What is there? Cecil said.

Jack produced a bottle of sherry and Cecil blinked twice and pulled his lips into a cringe. In a comically gruff voice, he said, What’s that doing in there?

Jack brought two ceramic mugs, filled mine up, avoiding my eyes the whole time, and scuttled outside. Cecil lifted his eyebrows and indicated the needle dangling its trail of gut, and I raised my mug of sherry. Fucking ridiculous, but that’s how it went down, that first evening: Cecil worked with a pool player’s concentration, plucking metal from my hairy leg and closing the wounds that needed closing, and I drank sherry as if it were juice and wondered if I might just be luckier than the blessed. Occasionally, Cecil splashed sherry in his own mug and winced it down. I think we both pretended the sherry was whiskey, because, hell, it should have been. I’ve heard Cecil tell the story a couple times, and he always makes that change. Of course he makes that change.

So, where’s home? Cecil said after a time.

Grew up in Montana, but we crossed the border from Washington.

Cecil’s cheek twitched toward a smile. Woman drag you there?

Shit yes. Been there since Linnea was a girl. What are the kids doing out there, anyway?

Jack doesn’t want to be in here.

Thinks I’ll wring his neck?

Probably thinks
I
will.

I’ll repay you for the stuff we took. I’m good for it.

Jack and Linnea came inside and sat across from each other at the table, Linnea beside me and Jack beside his bastard father. In the dull light of the oil lamp Linnea looked tired enough to die. Her dark hair was stuck to her forehead and heavy on her ears. I offered a dirty hand that could cup her entire cheek. She closed her eyes and put some weight in my palm, and though one day I’d switch seats with Jack West, right then I’m sure he watched that tenderness with more than a little jealousy.

Cecil removed a last piece of metal and pulled the last stitch tight. Then he hazarded a look under his arm, across his ribs where my knife had scraped and been pinned. He eased off his hunting vest. I didn’t have the best angle, but his checkered shirt was lanced open, damp and oil-black in the lamplight.

Jack, he said, and his son perked forward. How bad am I bleeding?

Jack tugged the flaps that wreathed the cut and I saw a gash there, curved like a smile. Not too bad, Jack said.

I pushed my mug aside and leaned in and waved for the needle.

Lord knows I’ve been drunker for more delicate things than a few stitches, I said.

Keep sipping your girly drink, Cecil told me. Then he passed his son a fresh ski needle and a string of gut and for a second Jack just stared at it like it was a thing of great worth. Cecil tugged his shirt over his head, revealed his battered, wiry torso, his pale skin and farmer’s tan. He tilted sideways so Jack could access the cut. It didn’t go very deep and stretched only as long as a thumb, but it ran at an angle along his ribs, and Jack’s forehead bunched as he tried to find a way to work. Cecil’s skin gleamed sweaty and bruised and scratched along his upper arms and collar where my fingernails had grooved his flesh. I could feel myself similarly beaten; in the morning, both of us would be stiffer than a two-pecker goat. Jack worked silently and Cecil adopted what might be the gruffest expression I have ever seen. I slid the sherry across.

I worked in the hangars, in Britain, he said. Never saw any combat.

Marine Corps. Never been shot before. Hit with napalm, but never shot.

Don’t worry about paying me back.

I’ll find a way.

After Jack finished and Cecil had eased his shirt on, he said he had wireframe cots in the loft, but needed to know if I’d be able to pull myself up the ladder. I told him it’d take more than a pellet in the leg to keep me down, and he grunted like I expected him to. He glanced under his shirt, to inspect Jack’s work.

It’s passable, he said, and ruffled the boy’s hair. Then he climbed to the loft to set things up, and I spun the sherry between my fingers and looked over at Jack.

Sorry, he said.

It’s alright.

I don’t even remember firing.

When the adrenaline’s in you, I said.

You ever shot a person?

Then Cecil came down the ladder and jerked a thumb toward the loft. Two beds up there, he said.

You’re hit too. Make the kids sleep on the wood.

Jack and me can sleep in the truck, he said. I’ll visit the doctor in the morning, in case you need antibiotics. Then we’ll think of something.

You a sympathizer?

Cecil put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. He ran his tongue along his teeth, tested the point of a canine. I’m not a war supporter, if that’s what you mean.

I’m AWOL, I said, sounding suddenly sober, even to myself. It’s more serious.

You’re too grey to be a draft dodger.

They’ll court-martial me.

Like I said, we’ll think of something.

I owe you, I told him, and Cecil made a motion with his shoulders I have come to understand as the only way he knows to acknowledge that he’s been thanked.

LINNEA AND I SPENT
the remaining hours on one of the fold-out cots in Cecil’s loft. He’d given us one of his only two sleeping bags—good to minus ten, he promised—and we’d unzipped it to share like a blanket. Cecil and Jack suffered through the night in the rear of his pickup, where he kept two foamies. Even with Linnea’s body heat, the chill dried my nose and breathing prickled my throat. Cold, for a March night. Linnea went right to sleep but I’ve never been able to just shut down, so I listened to the rhythm of her heart and watched her shoulders rise and fall. I like to think I made a pretty good dad. You won’t hear me say that about my other talents, and Lord knows there aren’t a lot of them, but I gave it my all. A guy has to do that, far as I figure. That’s how we’re judged, in the end.

Despite my best efforts, my daughter has borne the weight of my missteps. I didn’t expect another war and by the time I got shipped out her mother had other things going on, so Linnea had to board with my sister and her preacher-thin husband. They put her to work at their raspberry farm, demanded she sort the fruit to earn her keep, even though I was paying them. By the end of each day Linnea’s fingers were stained pink and freezing from the unheated water they spritzed over the berries—full-time on the weekends, a few hours every day. If I ever get back there, I’ve got a couple things to say. Linnea, bless her, never complained about it, and I’m not sure I deserve to be spared carrying that blame. The world can be so kind and so cruel all at once, and I tend to land on the receiving end of its kindness—or I’m a closet optimist—but the same cannot be said of the people close to me. Cecil’s a good example, for more than a few reasons: even that first night, too much of a man to sleep under the same sleeping bag as his son. While Jack tugged the vinyl to his chin, Cecil crossed his arms and tilted his ballcap over his eyes and shivered in the dark.

That’d become something like a custom for Jack and Cecil—the two of them camping in the bed of his truck, Cecil freezing his ass so Jack might have a second blanket, a second sleeping bag, and God forbid Jack decline that offer. Those trips would culminate in a cougar-hunting trip in July 1972, right before the start of Jack’s grade twelve year. They’d piled a two-man tent and a food cooler under the canopy, stocked their hiking for one helluva trek. Their destination was somewhere southeast of town, because word spread about high cougar concentration in the woods there, and there was an open call on the beasts. Cecil’s buddies had downed one earlier in the summer, skinned it and lynched it in a garage above a drainage pipe so the dripping blood wouldn’t make more than an oil-spill splatter on the floor. Guys in the valley built their houses with those kind of specifications in mind. As long as I’ve known him, Cecil has never been a great hunter, but after his buddies showed him that massive swaying carcass, he’d gotten it in his head that he needed to measure up.