Ballistics (37 page)

You’re not in the wrong, I said.

I know, hoss. Neither are you. Come here, I’ll take those things off.

I complied. He sheathed the handcuffs.

Then the Verge’s doors banged open again and all three of us turned our attention to it. Archer wheeled himself out, hunched small and deathly and hairless and with eyes downcast. He had that same blanket draped across his lap, wore his big plaid coat that hung off him in folds. His arms moved with the deliberate care of someone in deep concentration; the skin on his knuckles whitened when he gripped each wheel. It seemed to take him hours to reach the gravel, and that just slowed him more. But he did not relent. He did not give up—which has always been his way—until he had aligned himself with Crib, there in the parking lot.

Whatever emotion we’d triggered in Colton left as soon as Archer came to a halt. His jaw chewed on nothing.

Figured we’d have one more chat before I died, Colton said.

Archer smoothed his hands down his thighs. Believe me, he said. I’d have passed this up.

They deadeyed each other. I touched the gash in my cheek, a chunk of skin shucked off like meat. Heat flushed my face—swell, worry. I wiped blood on my jeans.

So I guess we’re not old enough to move on, Colton said.

Not by a thousand fucking years, Archer said. His voice came out strained, high-pitched. His Adam’s apple quivered and the folds of flesh beneath his chin danced like a set of jowls. He was very afraid or very angry, or both.

He know about you? Colton said. He know what you caused?

Archer didn’t respond.

Colton tilted his head my way. You could be my stepson, if times were better.

You ain’t nobody’s dad, Archer said. He all of a sudden had an accent, a drawl distinctly south-of-the-forty-ninth.

Better not a dad than a shitty dad.

I shoulda kilt you a long time ago.

Colton didn’t rise to it. He turned back to me. His face had that look of supreme indifference cops do so well. I couldn’t read him.

What do you want, Archer? he said.

I want you to have never been born.

Won’t get that. What else?

Archer’s chin came up, but it doddered in place.

You can’t even tell me, can you? Let’s lay it out: you want Linnea. You want her to pack up and bunk in with you. Well you won’t get that either, Archer. She left you once, for good reason.

What’d you know? Archer said.

No, Archer. What do
you
know?

I know about family. I know about caring for people.

Name one family member who hasn’t left you, Colton said, and moved toward the jeep. Halfway there he stooped and plucked the keys from the gravel, where they’d fallen when he hauled me from the driver’s seat. He jingled them in his hand a moment before tossing them my way. They bounced to a halt against my leg and I watched him nod, sagely. I’m not even sure Archer registered any of that exchange.

You got a plan? Colton said.

Drive west. Find Jack. Save the day.

He snorted—an actual show of mirth. You could’ve been my kid, you know.

My cheek had ballooned. With my shirt, I daubed streaks of red from around my mouth. I’m Gramps’ kid, I said.

You look it, he told me. More or less.

Then he turned to Linnea and his face lit with a small smile—just half the mouth. You win, he said. The kid’s just desperate. Christ, aren’t we all?

Archer had a weird look to him, a certain calmness that didn’t make sense. Colton kicked a spray of gravel, and dust coiled where the rocks landed, and I understood, way too late, that he hadn’t taken the shotgun from Gramps’ truck, and why Archer had acted so strange and stiff-legged at the foot of the stairs, and why he was acting so strange now. Colton’s foot barely touched down, and he’d barely regained his footing when Archer cast aside the blanket on his knees and raised from it Gramps’ shotgun, now cut to a sawed-off that he’d concealed across his lap.

The blast lifted Colton off the ground and ragdolled him a few feet from the jeep’s grille. He loosed one disbelieving cry, a sound more gasp than yell, and arched his back and dug in his heels. His elbows thrashed around and his mouth chewed nothing—the bewilderment. With his hands—bloody and roadrashed—he dragged himself to the jeep, until he could grab the bumper and hoist himself to a sit. The shot had torn his shirt and bandages open at the chest, and the flesh beneath lay raw and gaping like a dozen wet mouths. He sucked little breaths; his lips peeled over his gums and went lax. I saw him swallow—one exaggerated bob in his throat.

Archer had been de-chaired by the recoil. He crawled onto his gut with Gramps’ mangled twenty-gauge levelled to finish what its first barrel had started. He rubbed a shoulder in his eye.

What’ve you done? I said, but Archer didn’t acknowledge it.

My mom shook her head, managed a few tentative steps toward her husband. She didn’t make a sound.

See, Colton said. His voice came out a whisper. He moistened his lips. See, old man?

Archer adjusted his grip.

Everywhere you go. I told you. Remember? I told you.

You told me nothing.

Colton’s hand closed around a clump of pebbles. A smile, those teeth red and slick. He tossed one, but it landed way short of its mark. Look at you, he said. Look at you.

He threw another rock and it bounced along the gravel and Archer didn’t so much as blink. He kept his eyes on Colton, who turned his head to the carnage around us.

You f-f-fucking American, Colton said.

Archer’s hands caressed the sawed-off’s shaft and I imagined the polished steel beneath his fingers—oily, like leather—and the smell of it, that tang of metal. His hairless brow seized tight and on his forehead two landmass blotches drew together, end to end. Colton’s shoulders rose and fell in stutters. His eyes zigzagged in their sockets and to make them focus he blinked with all the muscles in his face.

Do you get off on ruining lives?

That’s funny coming from you.

Colton’s head sagged sideways. His chest heaved and he regarded the collection of pebbles in his hand. Perhaps he saw in them some final irony: his lip rose to approximate a smile, and then he flung them all—his last act—with whatever strength remained in him. They hailed upon Archer, who lowered his forehead to the scatter. A few
tink
ed off the shotgun’s barrel. One caught him above the ear; in its wake it left a smudge of dirt, streaky like a grease stain. He hardly reacted to the impact; I don’t think he once peeled his eyes off the dying man.

Colton’s breath wheezed in his throat, a noise like a congested person’s snore, so irregular you’d give anything to hear it stop. The wounds in his chest gurgled. He raised his hand to where his nipple should have been and flattened it there. It stayed for a brief span of time, then dropped limp into his lap. His eyes glazed over and lolled upward and he died looking at smokescreened sky.

Archer lowered his head to the sights. Wetness dewed the clefts of his eyes.

He’s done, I said.

I want to watch him die.

Fuck, Archer.

I went to him and laid my hand on the shotgun. He tensed up, looked at me with the whole of his face screwed to fury, but I didn’t budge. I hoisted the gun from him. He flopped muscleless on the ground with his head on his own shoulder, looking dead himself. He’d done a number on Gramps’ shotgun: hacked off two feet or more and not bothered to ream the inside. The edges were barbed and uneven; he must’ve laid the weapon across his knees and held on with all his old-man strength and bitterness summoned. I don’t mean this to sound honourable.

I put the gun down. Everyone watched. My mom, unreadable and distant, took hesitant steps toward her husband. She knelt beside him, touched the bloody hand in his lap, his cheek. Her teeth came together, her lips up, and she eased her husband’s eyes closed. Then she knelt without motion, stroked Colton’s knuckles. That much loss, and for no good reason—I had to look away.

Archer lay like a slug before me, half bent to fetal with the gravel drying to mineral against him. He pinched one pebble between his thumb and index and studied the contours.

Archer, I said. Why?

He looked up, blinked tears, so old and sad. I don’t rightly know, he said.

I scooped him up, the whole tiny wiry mass of him, and returned him to the wheelchair. Archer didn’t deserve even that show of compassion, but I just couldn’t leave him lying there and I don’t know, I don’t know why. The wheelchair tottered while I fit him in. His arms clamped around me, and at first I didn’t understand that he wasn’t just holding on to keep himself upright in the chair, but because he needed someone to hold on to.

His fists beat helpless on my back, two infant pounds. He smelled like that mix of body odour and things gone stale, like something that hadn’t moved around much—old, used up. His sobs growled deep in his throat and grew longer and louder until he no longer cared who saw him cry. But then again, I doubt anyone there cared to see him cry at all. His sobs came crooning out big as howls, and his whole body shook like an engine and his baby-smooth cheek brushed mine, and as his tears cooled lukewarm between us I wanted to cry, too, but I didn’t know whether to do so for Archer or Colton or my mom or myself. My eyes ached, but no tears came. He’d killed a man he didn’t need to, and I’d had a hand in it.

AFTERWARD, THE TWO BOYS
sat knees-knocking on the dirt, looking lost in a way I can’t describe. Archer withdrew to a deep layer of memory; he sagged halfway out his chair with his legs sprawled haphazard in the gravel. My mom cradled the corpse of her husband in the same place he’d fallen, next to the jeep’s grille. It smelled like autumn and rainfall and faintly like the dead. I looked for gaps in the cloudscreen, some sash of colour to tell us that it’d all be alright.

My feet took me past the far side of the Verge, where the terrain sloped lazily down to what I recognized as a gully—a wilderness within a wilderness—and where a trail of tire marks in the gravel pitched off the edge and beyond, though no vehicle lay piled at the bottom. Just one more Owenswood oddity. I hadn’t realized how high the Verge rose above its surroundings: from that vantage, at the apex of that slope, I could sight along the toothpick-bare trees toward the Rockies that cluttered the eastern horizon, no more welcoming than the Purcells. That way lay home, I thought, though I didn’t feel any pull. That way lay the road back, but home? Home is where we go to anticipate change, where we cling to what we have come to know and be comfortable with.

Someone had had the good sense to build a balcony off the Verge’s ass end, and someone else had turned it into a place where the day couldn’t find you; there was a fold-out lawn chair cocked toward the skyline, an ashtray, and a wooden milk crate lined with one or two empties. I imagined the employees who took their smoke breaks there: one guy with crow’s feet and a paunch wedged in the chair; a younger kid with his feet over the balcony, heels bumping wood. Normal people, people with things to talk about and stuff to lose. On weekends kids scoped the balcony for untouched nightcaps left by workers. Sometimes, in the wee hours after a private-cater or New Year’s bash people sat and mused about plans and confessed loves for things you’d never think: jive dancing, handball, the bleachy smell of a newly developed photograph.

Right then, I’d have done anything for a beer or to be anywhere else. The bleeding from my cheeks had stopped, more or less, unless I picked at it. If I listened hard, I thought I could hear my mom weeping over the murdered body of her husband, and though I knew I ought to be out there helping,
somehow
, I also knew I wouldn’t be able to. Regardless how things turned out, I had played a part in that man’s death. The idea of sleep terrified me: every time I blinked, I saw Colton suspended mid-air with that feral energy in his eyes, the bewilderment when he hit the ground. I saw the way he clawed at the wounds and the rocks and the jeep’s grille—pure unbelieving desperation, like an animal. For all our evolutionary advantages, at the end, we simply don’t believe, and we simply don’t understand. So few of us, I think, are ever ready to die.

I sat down. Everything—even thinking—ached.

MY MOM WOKE ME.

Hey, she said, and touched my foot.

She sat on the wood with her legs crossed, her elbows on her thighs, tomboyish. She looked as if she’d been there a while. I pressed a knuckle to my spine. In the natural light her blond-streaked hair was thinner and going on grey, and her face looked taut beyond the elasticity of her skin, as if at any moment it’d shrivel up. She’d been crying, or at least rubbing her eyes. The sun had reached its peak and begun to descend—but I’m no outdoorsman, I don’t know how long I was out.

Hey, I said.

I let you nap.

Are you alright? I said.

She had with her the tin first aid kit, a bottle of iodine, and a plain white shirt bundled under her arm. Your cheek’s bleeding, she told me. It’d stained my collar and wicked down my chest and I thought, callously, that I would’ve looked as if I’d been shot. I peeled it off and tossed it over the side. She touched the damage Colton had caused, her hand cool against the swell. She handed me a damp rag to clean my face and neck with, and I pressed it to my cheek and breathed a short sigh of relief, though I knew I had no place to allow self-pity. A woman had lost her husband.