Ballistics (5 page)

Two

Anaxagoras:

Men would lead quiet lives if these two words,

mine
and
thine
, were taken away.

With Gramps’ shoebox never more than arm’s reach away, I phoned my girlfriend. Men, I think, typically white-flag it to their girlfriends or wives—or mothers, if all other women be
in absentia—
when the emotional shit strikes the Great Oscillator. It’s a primal thing, no different than the human discomfort around snakes and arachnids or our general dislike of other people’s feet. Men who confide, and trust primarily, in other men have learned to do so as a skill; just as instinct would have us pry a nail from our foot, so would it have us bewail our sorrows to the females in our lives.

That night, my girlfriend didn’t answer, and I lay in bed and counted all the jocks I knew, like the guy with the triangular brainpan who directed the university’s intramurals, or the gymnastics instructor who could stand for a whole hour with his arms bent right-angle to his hips, chest inflated like a ghostbuster. I figured I would one day find her in their arms. The window in my bedroom was busted like a spiderweb where my buddies once blasted it with a propane-powered potato cannon. Through the glass, a streetlamp’s fossily light fell across the far wall where hung my modest collection of awards—medals for outstanding marksman, mostly, though also a certificate for first prize in a grade eight drafting contest (I snap a mean tangent), a trophy clock shaped like the state of Montana, and a brass-dipped Labatt beer can I won as part of a Barrel-Fill crew Gramps had slung together for Sam Steele Days. The Impressionable Lads, I think the team was called.

The cordless rang against my ear and my girlfriend’s voicemail picked up. You’ve reached Darby, it chimed, way too cheery. I listened to my own breath and clacked my jaw in circles. For the first time in years I felt my small-town roots, that I could stay there, in Invermere, take welding lessons from Gramps, spend my days seven-to-three banging things together and then ten-to-one at the bar grazing elbows and buying drinks for girls I knew from highschool but had never dared proposition.

Invermere is a town where sons take after their dads and teenagers in lift-kit trucks catch air off train tracks. Winters are cold and punctuated with sudden warmth that melts all snow, and grotesque snowmen vanguard front yards, half-thawed and horror-jawed like hellions from the seventh ring of Dante’s Inferno. Power lines slouch under snowfall and sully people’s mountain views. Rednecks redline their Ski-Doos across the frozen lake. In summer, teenagers burn shipping flats at the gravel pits and slurp homebrew that swims with wood ether, and at least one novice drinker goes blind swallowing the pulp. Vehicles courtesy-honk at kids meandering the roads, and those kids nudge each other toward alleyways and paths beaten through strangers’ yards. Houses sit back on lots. Properties are for sale by owner. Trees lay long shadows during dusk and dogs leap at fences to test the resilience of their chains.

I had only a handful of friends growing up, most of whom are either dead or married now—Will Crease and Mike Twigg; Brad Benson who vanished one summer after a devastating fallout with his old man; Joe Brooks; others who joined our group for lengths of time. In those days a kid was judged by how fast he could run and how quickly he could scale a neighbour’s fence. A palisade rimmed our backyard, six feet high, and I could vault the slats and windstorm my legs overtop and disappear into a sprint upon touchdown. Parents watched me and their fences with a wary eye. One neighbour, a widow with skin that wrinkled horizontally, owned a bean-shaped pool, so she duct-taped a red warning line along the portion of fence that dropped into water. A crotchety Calgarian, whose liver eventually failed him during a Loop-the-Lake marathon, tire-ironed me off his property after I boarded his carport via a whip-like tree and a stunt out of
Indiana Jones
. Not infrequently through my boyhood, neighbours came knocking on our front door and Gramps would invite them in and sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking in murmurs unintended for my ears.

I never thought untoward about any of this, but with the content of Gramps’ shoebox so close and my absent dad weighing on me like a thesis, I wondered whether the neighbourhood vigil upon my boyhood was conventional prudence or something more personal, the result of a lineage I never really sought after. History, in a place like Invermere, is not easily entombed.

Our house had two storeys and jaundiced siding. In the backyard eight or so pines strained skyward, sturdy-trunked—trees from which a man could rescue his cat. Long ago, Gramps dug his own firepit, and in the evenings he lounged in a deck chair on the moist soil and just stared at the trees and the mountain peaks he could glimpse amid branches and other people’s homes. The awe of a prairie boy, I guess. A previous owner had buried a vertical PVC pipe, thick as my forearm, to its mouth in the middle of the yard, and Gramps guessed the pipe was an abandoned geothermal project, a relic of the groundwater heating fad that’d swept the valley around 1970. One summer, my dad rescued a shotglass-sized bird from the deeps of that pipe by intermittently heaping sand on the creature’s head. I have few memories of my father—glimpses of a moustached face, a man who flung footballs through a strung-up tire rubber, a certain scent of carbide and steel, maybe, though Gramps always smelled like an engine and it is through his stories that I know Jack West.

My dad disappeared when I was a year old. My last memory of him—if it is indeed
my
memory—is the two of us watching a house fire across the street. He had one hand tight on my small shoulder. We’d have been watching Gramps do the fireman thing, the way the old guy wrestled with a water hose, the people he might have dragged kicking from the flames. It wouldn’t be the only fire that has taxed Gramps to his limits, but sometimes he talks about it when he drinks. He hated how close it came to home;
If the wind had been unlucky
, he’d always say, and shake his head. The whole time, as I watched it, my dad kept that smoky hand on my shoulder, not tight enough to hurt, but enough that I couldn’t shimmy away. Likely, he pointed things out:
fire truck
,
Grandpa
,
hydrant
. If Gramps is to be believed, Jack was an alright dad for the year he stuck around. He’d have been twenty-something in that memory.

And then he was gone, like my mom before him, and Gramps never filled me in. Years ago, I found a pencil sketch of my mom in the garage, stashed in a steel-bound chest amid an unexplained hoard of charcoal landscapes. Gramps said he was holding them for a friend. The sketch—I kept it—shows my mom balanced on an uprooted log in a knee-length skirt, sleeves cut at the elbow. Beside her: a dog that resembles Puck before the trap accident. She must be seventeen in that sketch, less—hair draped on her shoulders
,
an exaggerated freckle the artist had dotted below her left eye in a softer, deeper carbon. The caption read
Linnea—72
, and the initials
A.C.
were scribbled in the corner.

I’ve inquired after my parents a couple of times: in grade two when, for a Father’s Day project, I needed to know if he was more like a hunter, a golfer, or a fisherman; while Gramps and I crossed the blastland Yukon one winter when I was ten, en route to visit an ailing comrade; at the start of my teenage years, hating everything, when Gramps just told me to shut my yap and go collect dogshit.
There’s not a lot to tell
, he’d grunt, or he’d thumb his canines—a nervous tic, I think—and say it didn’t matter, that they’d ditched and he’d done his best, and wasn’t that enough?

The other fire, the one that nearly killed Gramps, happened at the cusp of my grade eleven year. He was the only firefighter on shift, and he’d gone solo to investigate claims of smoke billowing from the upper windows of an unfinished timberframe home. The house had a deck overlooking the vast lake and firebrick heaters suspended above, but those heaters weren’t the culprit: they found traces of varnish—accelerant—and blamed the painters for ditching oily rags in a garbage bin. Gramps, while doing a quick one-two for people on the second floor, noticed angel fingers licking the ceiling and a pitch-coloured smoke that thickened around furniture like muck—signs, I guess, that firefighters notice when something really bad is about to happen. He took the nearest exit—the master bedroom’s window—and the landing hospitalized him for a broken scapula and a leg that went garden-hose at the hip. He described a fire that stunk of sulphur, that lit nearby houses the colour of beryl, so intense and loud that as he clawed through soot and calcite he sensed the flames like breathing at his ear.

I didn’t hear about his injury until the next day, and when I arrived at the hospital there was another man at his bedside, a heavy-shouldered guy with jagged cheeks and grey, pushbroom hair. He had morning stubble, his forehead set into the nook of his hand, a brownish moustache with its bristles freshly cut like straw. His clothes were nondescript greens, army-coloured pants, a wool coat and Gore-Tex boots. He straightened as I entered, nudged Gramps’ good leg—a single, sharp motion that made the old man gurgle but not wake.

Got him on some heavy painkillers, the man said to me, unfolding from the chair. He kept his gaze on Gramps and brushed his thighs as though he’d just recovered from a fall. Then he offered a handshake with a half twist, flourish-like, so I could stare down into a tundra-scarred palm. I’m Archer, he said.

I clasped the hand, felt the pressure of his grip, the tough skin inside the thumb, like my own. I told him who I was, and we stood in each other’s presence and waited for Gramps to wake from the injuries he should never have sustained. Gramps was too old, even twelve years ago, for that kind of feat and that line of work, but back then he lacked the ineffable quality that would let me label him a bluehair. It’s something like stubbornness, but not merely so—an understanding of limitation and a deliberate testing thereof, maybe.

Archer bit down on his lip and lowered into the chair. I’m his emergency contact, he said after a time.

You
are?

His cheek twitched at the edge of his mouth, enough to expose teeth. It might have been a smile.

Yeah. Decades of silence and then you get a call. You ever notice how people have a way of saying your name right before they tell you something bad?

Mr. West
, I said, baritone, gravelly.

Archer
did
smile. Just like that, he said.

We fell into the silence that comes when you’ve run out of easy things to talk about, and back then I was not so adept at small talk. A pretty nurse with hair that curled below her ears popped in and did whatever it is pretty nurses do. When she left, Archer and I made eye contact and he lifted his eyebrows as if to say,
Well?

How do you know Gramps? I said.

He helped me get settled in the valley.

When was that?

Archer scratched a thumbnail along his jaw. I’m not sure, he said. Thirty some years.

You’d have known my dad.

He grunted, or snorted, a sharp flex in his gut. Yup, he said, and emphasized the
p
.

And my mom.

He nodded.

I don’t know much about them, I said.

It’s not some huge mystery, if that’s what you’re wondering.

I’m
just
wondering.

He glanced sideways at Gramps.

Your dad made some bad calls.

And my mom?

Must’ve seen it coming. It’s really not my place to talk about this.

Archer sucked a deep breath that filled his gut. I thought either he and I were about to have at it or he was going to tell me more, but instead he deflated, resuming the languid, hunched-in-chair posture as his wind trilled out his nose. Eventually Gramps came to. He squinched his eyes at the light and did a survey of the room. He wriggled upward so he could sit straight and then he noticed Archer in the chair beside his bed.

It’s official, Gramps said, not incredulous. I’m in Hell.

Next best thing, Archer said.

What’re you doing here?

You nearly killed yourself so I showed up to your rescue.

That’s unlike you, Gramps said, and he didn’t smile.

Archer bulged his tongue into the gap between his teeth and lip.