Ballistics (29 page)

Archer drew a deep breath, and on exhale his whole body shrivelled and seemed to recall his age: his shoulders drew down until he was hunchbacked; his head bobbed forward and the deep caverns of his eyes went dark, mole-like, and the skin of his face slackened so the pink beneath his eyelids glinted in the low light. Maybe he himself didn’t know what he wanted or why he’d come, had no idea what would happen, hadn’t played events over and over in his mind. Maybe, when we set out, he really did just want to repay a debt to Gramps. But I doubt that.

He looked out the window. The turquoise sky, that last glimpse of stars.

I guess I got in his way, Archer said, barely audible.

In the distance, the mountains burned an eerie jade. We’d had our brief respite, our few hours of sleep. I got the sense that Archer had business here, a past as thick as mashed potato, and that he would come no farther in my company. Of course I’d end up alone in my search for Jack—how else?

I’m old, he said. I’m old and by now I’m alone.

You’re not alone yet.

Listen to me, Alan: don’t leave your girl.

You’ve still got Nora, and Linnea.

That’s not a proverb, Archer said. Don’t leave your girlfriend. Cecil’d tell you the same.

I gave him a once-over: a man who’d lost it all, or nearly.

Wise men, I said, bitterly.

You’ll regret it.

I’m not sure you’re in a position to talk about regret.

Archer’s teeth clicked shut. He cleared his throat. But you love her, right?

Darby, then, would be alone in Toronto in her dumb robot pyjamas with her laptop on the bed, late-nighting some crap television series, episode after episode after episode. That’s what we used to do, even when one or both of us had to be awake for a dawn start. She’d have a mug of green tea going tepid between her palms, and she’d hold the ceramic at her lip until a moment of suspense, then slurp and gulp down her excitement. We’d fall asleep with an episode still playing, the laptop warm atop us. On the screen, some tough-guy cop dodged bullets to save the world. It’s sad going to sleep, Darby mumbled to me once. I wish we could be together when we sleep.

Archer tapped his thigh again. I let him. I used to, I said.

That’s something.

Enough?

Enough to keep trying, Archer told me. And who knows.

OUTSIDE, THE AIR PRICKLED
with that morning damp and when I pulled a deep breath the moisture tasted like coal. My mom was perched on an upturned log, faced toward town. I had a few puzzles I thought she might help me put together, and I needed to bury my dog. The wind flung dust our way as I approached, and she put her cheek to it so the motes danced like ricochets off her skin. She wore a sheepskin coat unbuttoned, and its separate sides fanned outward at her hips. Hands in its gut pocket, elbows wide, dishwater-blond hair jostling at her shoulders. She slouched, and when she squinted I saw the wrinkles at their corners, her age more obvious in the morning light. She had boyish cheeks, a mole near her jugular that puckered at the edges where she’d scratched and scratched at it. My mother, nonetheless.

Sleep well? she said, but didn’t look my way. In the distance, the sun teased the lip of the Rockies, highlighter orange. Four, maybe five in the morning.

Archer snores.

I got to watch over Colton all night. He’ll probably want breakfast, too.

Fringe benefit of being shot, I guess.

Her lip pinched a half-smile, humouring me, and her hands wormed so deep in her pockets that the sheepskin reached her forearms. It didn’t feel all that cold: somewhere under six degrees, since my breath churned warm fog. The light looked pale as a winter day. I smelled trees, that earthy scent of places where few people drive.

I pulled up a log. How’s Colton? I said.

He won’t complain.

Sounds like everyone else in the family.

My mom rocked on her log, one elongated
thu-thump
. Why’d you have to bring my dad here? she said.

I thought you’d be happier to see him, I said.

It’s more mouths to feed, she said. And he’s a cripple now.

He helped. The highway’s fucked, and he knew the way through the logging roads.

Good for something after all, she said.

Her hand slipped from her pocket, pinched a clump of dirt that had collected on the log. Downslope in the town, a blockade of crushed cars formed a wall as high as the buildings that pinioned them. They were all ancient vehicles from the days of steel and eight cylinders, when cars still equalled sex. Prized in their day. Shadows now—of their former selves and physically in the world. My own vehicle was parked nearby, and, looking at it, I felt a clot tighten in my throat that I had to force down.

I need a shovel, I said.

My mom followed my gaze. Ah, shit, she said.

It’s okay.

I forgot. Colton—

It’s
okay
, I said.

She stood up and pressed her knuckles to her spine in a bid to ease some tension, and lurched out of sight around the restaurant, limbering up as she went. Her body moved like an old hiker, like someone with a set of injuries that’d only get worse, all shuffles and hollow joints and tendons stretched like O-rings. She swore. She muttered something about the time of day. I heard her foot acquaint with metal. Probably, I should’ve fetched the tool myself, but by the time this thought dawned she’d already returned with the shovel brandished hip-height like a musket.

She appraised me, like she had before—like a mother, maybe. You’d benefit from a shower. A shave, too.

I felt my cheek and its steel-wool stubble. Been a stressful few days, I told her.

A joke, kid. Lighten up.

I’m just trying to make Archer jealous, I said.

That’s his thing. Wears his jealousy like a bib.

She crossed her arms, stared at the town. I got the impression she spent a long time staring at the town. Do you want to bring the dog now, or after?

After.

I followed her into the forest that circled the Verge. Branches draped low in our path and my mom trudged through them undeterred, and rarely did she pause to hold them for me. Pine needles cloaked the floor like playground mulch, not one among them green. The whole place smelled like the bonfires you light to burn piles of yardwork. I remember Gramps doing that: a stooped figure who shovelled chokecherries and grass into the back of an old truck, and, afterward, sat in the bonfire’s glow with a rifle dismantled across his knees, his hands
clack
ing around the parts.

Ahead of me, my mom picked her way over roots and divots and I envied her footwear and her balance and her practised grace. I grew up rampaging through a gully just like that forest, lost in the freedom of it alongside a neighbourhood’s worth of kids. Manhunt, tag, capture the flag: we played all those games in the gully. A few times, Gramps joined us for cops and robbers, and he outclassed us by tiers: once, he stepped wraithlike from behind a tree when all us kids had our backs turned; another time, he scaled a wide poplar and pegged us off from its branches until the forest floor was littered with foam bullets. Later, it was paintball, but the same story. Gramps: untouchable. Now, trudging behind my mom, I realized just how much I didn’t belong.

We arrived in a small clearing with a circle of rocks that ringed some leftover charcoal.

Here? she said. People use it. Less likely to get dug up. And if spirits are real he’ll have some company.

Thank you, I said, and she waved her hand.

It didn’t take long to dig; the dry dirt came apart without resistance. Each scoop, a swell of dust scattered toward us, weightless in the breeze. I pushed the shovel’s blade through clumps of brittle chaff and twigs and dead roots long buried. My mom hung nearby, and I wished she would say more, say anything, because it seemed like she was supposed to do that—she was my mother.

Jack was here, she said at last, and I stopped digging. Circles bagged her eyes, and her face had the sallowness of a person who’s been up late, worrying. She chewed at a hangnail on her thumb. I assessed her, and the hole before me. I planted the shovel in the ground.

You’re gonna have trouble getting to him, she said.

Do I have to ask when he was here?

Days ago.

And you didn’t think to tell me. Like, maybe
when
I
asked about him
.

She leaned on a nearby tree, arms over her chest like some tomboy from the cornbelt. I waited for her to go on, but she just touched the crown of her skull to the bark. Her eyes ran up and down over me: that same appraisal of worth, like some continent-crossing pilgrim weighing the burden of a wounded companion.

He’s gone west.

You say that like I can’t go after him.

We might need you here. Owenswood’s not a good place.

You keep saying that.

It’s Colt’s call, she said. This is an evac zone. You have any idea what that means? Criminals, kid.
Bad guys
. They shot my husband.

Jesus, are you a cop too?

Fuck off.

I stepped on the shovel, drove it deeper in the ground. Its haft wobbled.

We’re having some trouble, she said, not toward me, and I didn’t need to look up to know that she’d begun, again, to scan the tree line. Around us, I realized, the forest made no noise at all—not even the whistling of bugs. Humans are the only beasts who do not instinctively flee from fire.

Why do you keep looking around like that?

Why do you think?

But
why
did he get shot? Come on, Mom.

I’m not your mom.

I bit my tongue. Pettiness: Archer’s daughter. What’s keeping you guys here? I said.

You need to talk to Colton.

And Archer? What’s his deal with Colton?

She spit the hangnail off her tongue—a single, quick
pip
. That’s an old wound, she told me. Overhead, the sun inched above mountains’ edge, though we couldn’t see it through the trees—just a warmth that tasselled the cloudscreen. Anyway, you’re about to finish up, she said. Can you find your way back here on your own?

Yes.

Can you carry him on your own?

Yes.

Okay, she said. Bury him, then talk to Colt.

I don’t like the way this sounds.

She shrugged, shoved her hands in her coat pockets. Then she jerked her head, toward the Verge, toward Colton—
we’ll see
, maybe, or
you don’t have to
. I couldn’t tell.

PUCK HADN’T BEEN DEAD
long enough for rigor mortis to pass in full, but I ferried his stiff body to the hole I’d made and laid him down within. I slid my hand over his flank, touched one fuzz-soft ear, and thought about the wonderful mess I’d made. Not just Puck, but the whole batshit thing: Darby, and this foolish search, and now with Archer, who no doubt wouldn’t abandon his long-lost daughter to whatever grim fate awaited. I should never have left Toronto. Darby’d labelled me a coward, and who was I to refute her: I’d fled home precisely because it was easier than facing the reality of
us
.

Puck’s grave was shallower than I’d have liked, but he would not be soon dug up, though that’s the circle of life, anyway, and I don’t know if he’d have minded much. I figured Archer didn’t need to find out that I’d buried him, and I didn’t know what to say to Gramps, if I even got the opportunity to say anything. He’d call me a dumbass, and fair enough. I’d killed his dog.

The dirt rose in a lump above the campground floor. No amount of hardpacking had made it less obvious, so I toed through the remnant fire and the logs around it in a search for something that’d make the grave less obvious: a moss-specked log, or a couple cinderblocks shunted some few feet out of place. But in the end I settled for a bundle of arm-length blackened kindling that I dumped over Puck’s final rest. If the fires blazed on through Owenswood, at least they’d pave his grave with fertile charcoal, and he could himself grow to become a tree, or a bastardly bush—stinging nettle, maybe.

I made my way to the Verge to collect Archer and carry on. We had, I figured, wasted enough time, and Colton’s fight was not our fight. Through its front windows, I saw Colton and my mom bent over the Verge’s front counter, side by side with mugs of coffee airing cool. Their lips moved and their eyebrows drew in and on more than one occasion they tapped the countertop as if it were a map and they two tent-dwelling generals. Four crossed arms, two hushed voices, the smell of old Folgers gone sour as bile. Colton wore no shirt, but cotton gauze bandoliered his chest, and even indoors, in his maimed state, he’d donned a set of aviator sunglasses. When he spotted me he lifted his lips upward and outward, something like a snarl though not quite—more like trying to loose stray gristle from his gums.

The front door bumped me on the ass as I went in, as if to say,
Go on
.