Ballistics (42 page)

Aristotle:

All human actions have one of these seven causes:

chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason,

passion, and desire.

For many years, Jack West had lived only a few hundred kilometres from my mom, in a town called Caribou Bridge—not even a town, more a place people drive through on their way to better things. It lay at the base of three mountains in some sort of prismatic valley hailed for its winter skies. The journey’d only last hours, me once again cowboying through the flint-dry forest with its pine needles gone coppery and stinking, unbelievably, of metal.

I set out early on the morning following Colton’s death. We all slept uneasily, and in the bleeding hours with the sun barely luminant I rose and found the boys already awake—two kids who never shut their eyes. They gave me the keys no questions asked, and I dragged myself gaming with fatigue to the kitchen where I shoved two cups of day-old coffee down my throat. My cheek ached, though less than you’d think. I traced the stitches with my fingers. Residual adrenaline, maybe. Self-delusion, more likely. Archer snored on a seventies-yellow couch and I thought about waking him to say
see you later, old man
, but I didn’t have the stomach to look him in the eye—I didn’t have the stomach to hear him justify himself. Then I drove out of the town with the dim sun warming my shoulders.

Dust had collected on the highway as if it were a mantelpiece; behind me, the jeep’s tires left two finger-streaks in their wake. I fought to keep my eyelids up and more than once considered a few winks on the roadside. The air tanged with the static of a thunderstorm, a taste way back in my throat. I passed an abandoned car, the hatch thrown open, plastic bags scattered in a panic and weighted to the earth by contents I would never know. Township billboards rusted, long in disrepair. A wooden sign said
Fresh fruit—200 metres
, but two hundred metres later there was no fruit stand to find. Everywhere: the leftovers of people’s lives. On the seat beside me, Gramps’ maroon box sat uncovered, the unexplained postcards fading to the colour of wheat. I twisted the radio’s dial and through the broken static heard Baritone Radio Man at his post. The jeep had that diminished smell of dog, like a pile of basement coats—a temporary bed, now abandoned.

My whole body ached with fatigue and emotions I couldn’t get my head around; it felt like effort to even let my blood pump. I worked my palms on the steering wheel, counted my knuckles left to right until they became too much like sheep and threatened to make my eyelids droop. Then I pulled over on the blastland roadside and killed the ignition and let the morning’s drought rasp in through the window while the engine ticked cool. The hours on the road had made me thirsty, not prophetic. I’d spent so much time trying to get to Jack that I hadn’t put in a moment to consider what I’d say when I got there. It wasn’t like I had feelings for him—some resentment, maybe—or that I thought he’d dealt me a great wrong. It was Gramps to whom Jack owed an apology, if he’d give it, and if Gramps would receive it; I have few complaints about my upbringing. But I didn’t know what to expect, now that I’d at last zeroed in on the man who could’ve been my father. Drunk? Resistant? In denial? Or worse: would he shuffle from his house with his shoulders slumped, with nondescript features, a defeated-looking man in grey sweatpants and a sports-team windbreaker, ready to admit that, yes, he’d been wrong—so very, very wrong—and that the last three decades had been a terrible waste? That worried me. And I also worried that the whole goddamned search and scour was some masquerade, Gramps’ heavy-handed way of setting things right. It doesn’t take an idiot savant to see Gramps’ logic: he needed someone to look out for me, needed to hand off the burden of parenthood.

Then I restarted the jeep and set off, having figured out not a thing.

Years ago, Gramps drove us through Caribou Bridge, en route to the west coast; back then, the town was summed up by a single motel, after its namesake—the Bridge. Not much had changed; the streets spread out from the motel at its centre where the main haul looped it like a moat. Shops that keep a town alive—the liquor store, the grocery, the post office—dotted that strip, and I cruised around it in lazy laps. By that time in August, the wildfires had mounted the broadside of the not very distant mountains, and smoke sizzled into the air above them like three great, grey-haired legs. Ash and soot coated everything: the jeep’s hood and its windshield smeared as though by oil, the eavestroughs of local houses, the grim-skinned faces of those few remaining kids who dared the outdoors and whose parents had elected to hold the line.

I parked in front of a shed-sized brick building cordoned off from the grocery store. Canada Post’s red sign was nailed lopsided to the brickwork; holes and the rusted leftovers of concrete anchors dotted the wall where the sign had previously hung—torn off by thunderstorms, teenagers without proper angst outlets, old Father Time. It was a long shot, both that the office would be open—the town had evac’d—and that they’d know Jack well enough to direct a stranger to him. I unfolded from the jeep and stood in the dregs of daylight and imagined, had that town been populated, that people would have watched me with shifty sideways eyes, would have shuttered their windows and clutched infants to their breasts. Across the street, in a lawn chair on the gravel parking lot of the Bridge motel, a rockstar-haired guy older than me nursed a beer.

They’re not taking mail, he hollered.

I tugged on the hem of my shirt and gathered what remained of my endurance.

I’m actually looking for Jack West, I called, and made my way toward him.

Think these fires are coming? he said. I’m Trevor, by the way. Guess I run this thing behind me here.

You guess? I said. He had the squint of hangover, the early stages of beer gut. His nose curved off-centre and fatigue lines shadowed his cheekbones, dark as grease smears. But he was relaxed-looking there, had the posture of a guy just happy to talk. He’d given up fighting. My name’s Alan.

Trevor patted his thighs—baggy, newly washed jeans—and swept his hands outward, to indicate everything.

Family fucked off, certain the fires would take the place, he said. But these mountains never let us down before. Hell, they could landslide any minute if they wanted to. Worst you get is the occasional mountain cat, and that’s not more than an uninvited guest. I know old Jack, odd case, but he’d give you the shirt off his back. Good guy to drink beers with.

I’m his son.

That’s unexpected, Trevor said. He picked at the label of his beer, but I hadn’t seen him take a sip. Maybe he just liked to set an image.

I’ve been getting that impression.

He never mentioned any kids. I guess I never thought to ask. You look about as smart as him.

Did he evac?

A smile teased its way onto Trevor.

Not Jack, no. He’s at the campground, I suspect. Unless he tried to canoe his way out. Want a beer? I bought a stash, soon as I found out everyone was leaving. Keeps me from being lonely.

No thanks, Trevor.

I’m sensing this is not a happy reunion, eh?

Misery begets, I said.

Trevor let his chin tip toward his chest—not quite a nod.

You gonna cause him trouble? he said, no hint of threat, or warning, or judgment.

I don’t know, I said, honestly.

Well, head north outta town until you hit the turnoff marked by a tractor tire. That’s the campground he owns. Tell him I said hello, unless you’re going to kill him, in that case don’t tell him I said hello.

I hope this place doesn’t burn up, I said.

I still got my van. If it comes to it, I’ll load up whoever’s left and make for high ground.

He finally sipped his beer and pressed it, afterward, to his forehead, eyes closed and his features loose in a way of great relief. I almost reconsidered his offer, but I needed my wits, needed to be able to coerce and threaten and guilt Jack into piling into my commandeered jeep. Gramps had waited long enough.

A PADLOCKED GATE
barred entry to the campground’s parking lot, so I abandoned the jeep on the roadside and cleared the fence with ease. The grounds had a communal roasting-pit with slate slabs laid out in a spiral and chop-logs set in a ring around the pit. A ways off: RV hookups for American campers who liked their satellite TV, a panelboard hut that said
Hot Showers—25¢
. Opposite that, somebody had attached a log cabin to a long, flat building with rusted-out flashing. Within, I saw the dim glow of small-wattage bulbs.
Administration
, it read. It had a wheelchair ramp, greening wood steps, windows gone unwashed, and shingles curling up like anxious, thirsty tongues. In the distance, where tenters would pitch camp, the residue of cookfires trailed away in a line. Overhead, and blotting the sun, columns of smoke drummed skyward, wide and twisted as barbicans, and the daylight barely pierced the cloudscreen. But for once it didn’t smell like burning wood—it smelled like my childhood, like good times with Gramps. This is where I came from, I thought. And then: I could die here—all it’d take was a shift in the wind.

My palms had gone sweaty, so I wiped them on the hem of my shirt. The campground was in decent shape; I had expected rust and disrepair, the stink of garbage and of meat burned to charcoal, a dirt-and-gravel slaptogether where drunks would stagger rather than home to their wives. But Jack’s campground was clean, landscaped, the trees thick with greenery and life. Quaint, I guess. Like a home. Around the administration building, he’d planted bushes; I heard the
tick-a-tick-a
of a sprinkler, some ways off, probably in disregard of water regulation—and ridiculous, either way. The whole moment, all the time it took me to take it in, was like stepping into someone else’s dream: a striped canvas lawn chair had been angled at the setting sun—it looked well-sat-in; at the foot of the green-wood stairs, a football tottered in the wind; inside the house, a low orange light flared up, and then went dark. I felt like I was on the verge of a memory, or on the outside of one, looking in. A dog ought to have barked, or a bird of prey should have wheeled skyward and away. But instead I got the silence of a place devoid of woodlife, a place abandoned. Caribou Bridge was a ghost town to more than the people who’d forsaken her homes.

He came out of the cabin in a ballcap and a khaki shirt, in blue jeans faded at the thighs and scuffed boots that could’ve been military. Average height, my height, with a bare lip—I expected a moustache?—and sideburns peppered grey. Forty-seven, he must’ve been, or forty-eight. His cheekbones were visible beneath his eyes and shadowy with sleepless bags and as he approached I saw or imagined the pupils constricted to beads, the whites veiny as Christmas mints—drinking alone, here beyond the end of the world.

His right leg limped and his foot tended not to lift high above the gravel and instead churned pebbles beneath the sole. A spitting image of Gramps, if Gramps were forty years younger. He moved like a man uncertain, slipped one hand in his back pocket, the other to the nape of his neck, rubbed it in the slow-motion way of someone coming to realization. Jack West, my father—a middle-aged, tired-looking guy in boots that needed a polish.

He stopped—ridiculously—at gunfight range, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a holster on his hip, a Peacemaker unlatched and its hammer cocked, his thick, fatherly fingers two twitches shy of a draw. We stood there, breathing at one another. I think, there in that parking lot, that I understood why he couldn’t have gone before Gramps without invitation.

Is it Dad? he said, and flicked his hand, as if to dry it. Then he rubbed its knuckles.

He had a heart attack, I said after a pause. But he pulled through.

Jack’s hand went to his cheek, his finger scratched the skin beside his ear.

Is he okay, though?

He thinks he’s dying.

Is he though? Dying?

I shoved my hands in my pockets. He sent me to find you, to bring you back. I’ve got a bunch of your things.

Memory box?

Something like that.

I’d like to see it, he said. He had a gravelly voice, like someone who’d spent a few good hours crying. I could see his throat bob when he swallowed. A breeze flicked his short hair, one or two strands dancing up and down.

You gonna come see him?

Been waiting almost thirty years, of course I’ll go see him. Might need a drink first, but of course I’ll go see him. Want to come inside?

I gave in, and he held his ground as I approached across the gravel, until I had neared enough that he could have reached out and belted me a friendly punch on the shoulder. He turned on his heel, and almost side by side we walked the last stretch to the administration building. At the entrance, he knocked his boots against the stairs; I followed suit. The door hung loose on its hinges, but once inside I saw another, stronger, wood one that barred entry to his cabin, his small reclaimed personal space. We pushed through that, too.

The cabin was the size of a studio. Its kitchen spanned one wall opposite his bed; at night, he’d hear the fridge’s growly rumble. The oven door yawned open—the cabin was probably not the best-insulated structure this side of the Rockies, and heat is heat. On the windowsill sat a knot of parched vine, some kind of herb. His tap had a filter. Outside, there’d be a compost pile.