raised the skin where his eyebrow should be. He touched the glass to his lip and struggled to swallow. The muscles lining his throat spasmed and his Adam’s apple bobbled and he made a sound like a groaning pipe. When only a dollop remained, he set the glass on its rim and wheezed a long breath.
I don’t know where your dad is, he said, and twined his fingers in his lap. But I can send you to your mother.
He motioned to a plastic lawn chair beside him and I lowered myself into it. It was still early, past noon. I felt that I should know him more than I did. Nora shuffled onto the porch now and then to replace his glass, and though no words passed between them I sensed theirs was not a relationship where such doting was commonplace. The sun peeled through lazy clouds and warmed the porch and the nape of my neck and the foundry-pipe bones of Archer’s face. Nora stood behind the mesh of the stormdoor while we talked, and she watched him like a woman waiting for a man to leave her.
It was Jack who first spotted the car as it inched along the road that looped the highschool sports field—a Ford Fairlane, moving at a cop’s pace, as though on patrol, as though scouring the school grounds and the nearby lawns for signs of who knows what. Jack had been jogging laps on the painted turf, to build his endurance so he could match Cecil when the two of them went hunting. He wore his school track suit that day—navy blue and baggy like one of his dad’s shirts, BTSS stencilled across the shoulders in white—and he stood out against the overcast sky like a fragment of the approaching dark. It was 1969, a day before that fateful Halloween in Invermere, B.C. On any normal afternoon, Jack wouldn’t blow his lunch hour lapping the shitty field, but storm clouds had gathered below the Rockies and he figured it’d be raining like the Flood before classes let out. Cecil said a little rain never killed a guy, but Jack didn’t have to take to all his old man’s lessons. So he spotted the car, and he skidded to a huffing stop, planted his hands on his knees and hawked on the lime-painted grass. The car seemed to notice him, too—it idled to a halt across the ringwire fence. By now, Jack had a good view: chrome drag-racer’s grille, chrome spinners, a yellow smiley face on the antenna that wobbled in the wind. Mostly unremarkable, save the paint job—you couldn’t have a paint job like that in Invermere, not without it becoming gossip the first time some bonehead saw it off its wheels in your garage. Jack just stared. A Ford Fairlane, painted like a goddamned American flag.
FOLLOWING MY GUNSHOT wound in March, Linnea and I spent the nights at Cecil’s cabin or on the couches in his living room when the weather ate shit. We kept our heads low those first weeks, playing endless games of Monopoly—Linnea hated every minute—and sometimes venturing forth for sundown cookouts in Cecil’s backyard. Folk in the Kootenays had no trouble believing a guy was one of them so long as he knew how to work and liked a couple drinks—and I fit that bill. Good to his word, Cecil landed me a job with a painting crew called Jones & Sons, run by a guy ten years my junior, named Harold, who Cecil had some kind of long history with. Not one week through May, Linnea and I moved to a basement suite up the road from the Wests, and on our first night there Cecil packed his barbecue in his truck and hauled it over, and we sat on the grass and ate hotdogs in the shadow of my new home. The next-doors owned a pureblood retriever, and it wagged its golden tail at the cull lumber fence rimming my yard, until I lobbed a leftover wiener. One decade and two owners later, that fence would be torn down and replaced with seven-foot pickets by a man too prissy to see kids romping around his property, and the retriever would be dirt—a lanky, half-mutt pup the beast’s only legacy.
Jack showed Linnea his favourite places around town, and I made her
I don’t know where your dad is, he said, and twined his fingers in his lap. But I can send you to your mother.
He motioned to a plastic lawn chair beside him and I lowered myself into it. It was still early, past noon. I felt that I should know him more than I did. Nora shuffled onto the porch now and then to replace his glass, and though no words passed between them I sensed theirs was not a relationship where such doting was commonplace. The sun peeled through lazy clouds and warmed the porch and the nape of my neck and the foundry-pipe bones of Archer’s face. Nora stood behind the mesh of the stormdoor while we talked, and she watched him like a woman waiting for a man to leave her.
It was Jack who first spotted the car as it inched along the road that looped the highschool sports field—a Ford Fairlane, moving at a cop’s pace, as though on patrol, as though scouring the school grounds and the nearby lawns for signs of who knows what. Jack had been jogging laps on the painted turf, to build his endurance so he could match Cecil when the two of them went hunting. He wore his school track suit that day—navy blue and baggy like one of his dad’s shirts, BTSS stencilled across the shoulders in white—and he stood out against the overcast sky like a fragment of the approaching dark. It was 1969, a day before that fateful Halloween in Invermere, B.C. On any normal afternoon, Jack wouldn’t blow his lunch hour lapping the shitty field, but storm clouds had gathered below the Rockies and he figured it’d be raining like the Flood before classes let out. Cecil said a little rain never killed a guy, but Jack didn’t have to take to all his old man’s lessons. So he spotted the car, and he skidded to a huffing stop, planted his hands on his knees and hawked on the lime-painted grass. The car seemed to notice him, too—it idled to a halt across the ringwire fence. By now, Jack had a good view: chrome drag-racer’s grille, chrome spinners, a yellow smiley face on the antenna that wobbled in the wind. Mostly unremarkable, save the paint job—you couldn’t have a paint job like that in Invermere, not without it becoming gossip the first time some bonehead saw it off its wheels in your garage. Jack just stared. A Ford Fairlane, painted like a goddamned American flag.
FOLLOWING MY GUNSHOT wound in March, Linnea and I spent the nights at Cecil’s cabin or on the couches in his living room when the weather ate shit. We kept our heads low those first weeks, playing endless games of Monopoly—Linnea hated every minute—and sometimes venturing forth for sundown cookouts in Cecil’s backyard. Folk in the Kootenays had no trouble believing a guy was one of them so long as he knew how to work and liked a couple drinks—and I fit that bill. Good to his word, Cecil landed me a job with a painting crew called Jones & Sons, run by a guy ten years my junior, named Harold, who Cecil had some kind of long history with. Not one week through May, Linnea and I moved to a basement suite up the road from the Wests, and on our first night there Cecil packed his barbecue in his truck and hauled it over, and we sat on the grass and ate hotdogs in the shadow of my new home. The next-doors owned a pureblood retriever, and it wagged its golden tail at the cull lumber fence rimming my yard, until I lobbed a leftover wiener. One decade and two owners later, that fence would be torn down and replaced with seven-foot pickets by a man too prissy to see kids romping around his property, and the retriever would be dirt—a lanky, half-mutt pup the beast’s only legacy.
Jack showed Linnea his favourite places around town, and I made her
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