show me. She whined about it but I exercised my military what’s-what. I followed her to Jack’s haunts: a road bridge above the train tracks where half the town once gathered to watch a man push his brother in front of a coal train and where Jack liked to drop plastic bags full of tomato soup; a derelict fort overlooking Invermere’s lake, with exposed cedar studs and polyurethane sheets hanging off the walls like skin; a jungle gym in an abandoned playground, where the old primary school used to be, with little remaining save a rope swing and a red spiral slide that reeked of ammonia and dope. Cecil figured Jack had other hideouts he didn’t show Linnea. If he wanted to, Cecil said, that boy could keep out of sight for days.
With Nora’s help I got Linnea set and ready to resume her education in the fall, at a tungsten-coloured highschool called Bill Thompson Secondary. Nora told me to keep my head low as far as possible without surrender, in case Uncle Sam went on the prowl, which seemed like a bit of excessive paranoia even by my standards. But she is a hard woman to deny. Deserters, she said, could be rounded up and shipped back to the States; the Canadian Forces demanded it. She folded her arms across her chest when she said so, as if daring me to raise a fuss. One night Cecil called me up because of some documentary on the CBC, about American army guys in Canada ferreting out deserters and draft dodgers and dragging their asses over the border—like bounty hunters, but without contract. Brailers , the show called them, which is a pretty fitting name when everything’s done and said. So I took my pay in cash and paid rent with bills and did my damnedest to obscure my paper trail. Cecil joked about me changing my name—becoming Archer West, his long-lost brother—but no force on the living earth could make me do that.
Summer shot on by. Rainstorms pelted the valley with water gobs as big as beetles and lightning lit a few small forest fires that were themselves extinguished. My scarred arm throbbed for those fires, even at a distance—like finding true north, my own biological compass. A big logging company out of Alberta proposed to build a sawmill forty miles south of town, toward Cranbrook, and Cecil won the welding bid with a dirty lowball. It was the biggest job he’d ever done, and me and him made two material runs each evening for a week before the work started, driving his old Dodge with its bent fender and no exhaust pipe so he couldn’t idle at a red for risk of carbon monoxide. Nora was on the nag for him to start planning their wedding, but Cecil played the sad-man card, or the busier-than-the-dickens card, or the still-need-to-talk-to-Jack card. She could’ve trumped him—there was no resisting her smile or that cackle of a laugh—but she chose not to. Whenever he bumbled through another excuse she hooked her arm around his neck and gave him a strong shake, like a headlock. Any woman like Nora is worth marrying on the spot, but there you go. That one act of physicality—it let him get on with his day. It made him think everything was aces and spades.
AT THE END OF OCTOBER , a few days before Jack saw the car, I asked the boss—Harold—for a week off, because my artist’s eye favours the autumn light. The odds of me getting the time were alright, because as the days shortened and the winds picked up, business at Jones & Sons slowed and, like he did every winter, Harold eyed guys to cut loose. That was his strategy, and call it dirty if you want: hire a squad of assheads who could blast through an exterior job and then dump them elbows-first when the jobs moved indoors and the call for sobriety sounded.
Me and Harold were outside a duplex in this subdivision near the highschool. The sun had all but sunk behind the Purcells and the northern lights flickered on the mountain peaks. We needed to disassemble the scaffolding piece by piece and toss it into the gear van, just me and him,
With Nora’s help I got Linnea set and ready to resume her education in the fall, at a tungsten-coloured highschool called Bill Thompson Secondary. Nora told me to keep my head low as far as possible without surrender, in case Uncle Sam went on the prowl, which seemed like a bit of excessive paranoia even by my standards. But she is a hard woman to deny. Deserters, she said, could be rounded up and shipped back to the States; the Canadian Forces demanded it. She folded her arms across her chest when she said so, as if daring me to raise a fuss. One night Cecil called me up because of some documentary on the CBC, about American army guys in Canada ferreting out deserters and draft dodgers and dragging their asses over the border—like bounty hunters, but without contract. Brailers , the show called them, which is a pretty fitting name when everything’s done and said. So I took my pay in cash and paid rent with bills and did my damnedest to obscure my paper trail. Cecil joked about me changing my name—becoming Archer West, his long-lost brother—but no force on the living earth could make me do that.
Summer shot on by. Rainstorms pelted the valley with water gobs as big as beetles and lightning lit a few small forest fires that were themselves extinguished. My scarred arm throbbed for those fires, even at a distance—like finding true north, my own biological compass. A big logging company out of Alberta proposed to build a sawmill forty miles south of town, toward Cranbrook, and Cecil won the welding bid with a dirty lowball. It was the biggest job he’d ever done, and me and him made two material runs each evening for a week before the work started, driving his old Dodge with its bent fender and no exhaust pipe so he couldn’t idle at a red for risk of carbon monoxide. Nora was on the nag for him to start planning their wedding, but Cecil played the sad-man card, or the busier-than-the-dickens card, or the still-need-to-talk-to-Jack card. She could’ve trumped him—there was no resisting her smile or that cackle of a laugh—but she chose not to. Whenever he bumbled through another excuse she hooked her arm around his neck and gave him a strong shake, like a headlock. Any woman like Nora is worth marrying on the spot, but there you go. That one act of physicality—it let him get on with his day. It made him think everything was aces and spades.
AT THE END OF OCTOBER , a few days before Jack saw the car, I asked the boss—Harold—for a week off, because my artist’s eye favours the autumn light. The odds of me getting the time were alright, because as the days shortened and the winds picked up, business at Jones & Sons slowed and, like he did every winter, Harold eyed guys to cut loose. That was his strategy, and call it dirty if you want: hire a squad of assheads who could blast through an exterior job and then dump them elbows-first when the jobs moved indoors and the call for sobriety sounded.
Me and Harold were outside a duplex in this subdivision near the highschool. The sun had all but sunk behind the Purcells and the northern lights flickered on the mountain peaks. We needed to disassemble the scaffolding piece by piece and toss it into the gear van, just me and him,
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