Once You Break a Knuckle

ONCE YOU BREAK A KNUCKLE

ONCE YOU BREAK A KNUCKLE

D.W. WILSON

HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2011

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

Copyright © D.W. Wilson, 2011

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Cover Design: Doublenaut

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Wilson, D. W. (Dave W.), 1985–

Once you break a knuckle / D.W. Wilson.

Short stories.

ISBN 978-0-670-06574-5

I. Title.

PS8645.I46615O63 2011   C813'.6   C2011-902355-5

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
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or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

To Al and Kathy Wilson, and my sister, Amanda,

for their unquestioning, unwavering,

and at times unwise encouragement and support

CONTENTS

The Elasticity of Bone

The Persistence

Sediment

The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss

Reception

Big Bitchin' Cow

Don't Touch the Ground

Valley Echo

Accelerant

The Dead Roads

The Millworker

Once You Break a Knuckle

Acknowledgments

THE ELASTICITY OF BONE

On the morning before my old man left for Kosovo, I fumbled along the banister downstairs to the living room, where I found him adjusting his gunbelt so it wouldn't jostle on his hips. He drew the leather through the buckle, notch by notch, and then forced his stomach out; if the belt wobbled, he'd tighten, repeat. He stood a head taller than me and a shoulder wider. His fists were named “Six Months in the Hospital” and “Instant Death,” and he referred to himself as the Kid of Granite, though the last was a bit of humour most people don't quite get. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of two bears in bandanas gnawing human bones. The caption read:
Don't Write Cheques Your Body Can't Cash
.

When he saw me he cleared his throat, unbuckled the belt, and mumbled about making sure it was working. —You're up early.

I nodded. Beside him, a square foam pad leaned against the couch. He sometimes used it during practice at the judo hall. I gestured at it.

He grinned beneath his moustache. Once, years ago, he had come home from two weeks of training with the moustache shaved, and everyone watched his bare lip with a wary eye. Coworkers hesitated in shaking his hand. Men who were his friends forgot what beer he liked. His sister called him from Winnipeg:
I had another bad dream
.

He hefted the pad and flipped it to me. It was larger than my torso and along the back was a strap for my arm. —Hold it like a shield, he said.

—Why?

—Just hold it like a shield.

I brought the pad up. He squeezed his hand to a fist then let the fingers unroll, muscles tense. Eleven years of kung fu had taught him to strike with the heel of his palm – the second-hardest impact point on the lower arm. He jabbed the bag in quick succession: right, left-right, right, his lips whitened to an
O
, his breath pumping with his arms.

—That all you got, old man? I said.

He flicked his wrists so the joints ground and the fingertips whipped in the air. —Brace yourself, boy.

He coiled his right leg toward his left and held it there, perched on one leg, the arch of his foot nestled around his kneecap. Then he kicked out in a way he had taught me would break someone's knee, because you only need fourteen pounds of pressure to break someone's knee.

I bounced against the closet door behind me and knocked it from its track. My old man doubled over and growled his bear laugh. I pushed the pad toward him. I told him I had to fight in the tournament later. I called
him a jackass. He asked me if I had a preference for his right or left fist.

I went into the kitchen and poured myself some coffee. The mug I picked had a picture of one of his friends tending a bonfire with a caption that read,
Burn, Fat Man, Burn
. I put it in the microwave. It was five twenty-seven in the morning and the coffee was already cold.

—Will, he called from the living room, —let's take the trunks to the detachment before the tournament starts.

I told him to wait until I had my goddamn coffee and he told me to get my ass in there or he'd break all the knuckles in my left hand. I told him whenever he's ready he's free to try, so he came into the kitchen and shortly thereafter I was helping him move the trunks. The microwave beeped.

The trunks were police-issue chests fastened with two silver Macedonian locks. The plating peeled around the keyhole and silver flakes speckled the RCMP crests. Letters spelling his name were engraved beneath: JOHN A CREASE. The brass handles left my palms smelling like loose change. We hauled the trunks out, then the boxes from the garage, then the duffle bags from his police room in the basement. He told me to disregard any incriminating evidence I saw about anybody. I asked him what the information was worth to him and he told me pain was a good way to make people agree.

He didn't let me carry the gun. Never has.

We loaded the last of his stuff into the back of the truck – a 1989 Ranger with a rusted door and missing tailpipe. I
fiddled with the radio while he fought with the ignition. It was a good truck as soon as you could make everything work. It finally chortled to life and I got some Ozzy playing. The extra weight in the back strained the shocks as we scaled the small lip of our driveway onto the shitty streets of Invermere. The tires dropped into potholes and the trunks rattled in the back.

The detachment was a red brick building that used to be the public library. One of the RCMP cars had a series of stickers on the side that looked like bullet holes; this was fifteen-Charlie-seven, my old man's car. He fingered one of the stickers and peeled it off, stuck it to the trunk, and I threatened to tell the police. He shook his fist at me.

He had joined the RCMP twenty-three years ago and spent all of those posted in small towns on the fringes of B.C. He served seven years in Cranbrook, four in Kingsgate, four in Fort Nelson, and eight in Invermere. This turned him into what he dubbed a
CFL
– a constable for life – since promotion opportunities meant he'd drag his family (me) through shit and broken glass: corporal status, if he'd live in the Yukon; pay increases and living expenses if he'd police a backwater dump he'd have to get to by seaplane, where his son would turn into a user or a gang member and he'd probably end up dead. Promotions, he told me, are a lot like blowjobs: easy to get if you're willing to go somewhere dirty.

Inside the detachment, a stuffed buffalo head hung over the entrance. It was as large as the door of our truck but not quite as ugly. We unloaded his stuff so it could
be picked up and flown to the base in Kosovo. The whole peacekeeping thing started when he applied online one night during a Christmas party and proudly proclaimed that he would be going to smite evil. When they called, he couldn't give a definitive answer because he hadn't actually considered it; he was almost fifty, and peacekeeping was a young man's job. But, in short, they'd pay him a lot of money for not a lot of dangerous work: law-drafting and applied police science, no guns.

—You want to get some food before the tournament? he said.

It was by now past seven, which meant the A&W would be open. We ate scrambled eggs and toast and one of their hot apple pie things each, because this was the ultimate breakfast of champions when I was seventeen.

—I've got to be there for opening ceremonies, I said. —I'm coaching the little bastards.

My old man swirled the coffee in his mug, then set it down without drinking. —I'm coaching the not-so-little bastards.

—You calling me a bastard?

—Yeah, he said, and placed his hands on the table, his uneven knuckles enmeshed. Once you break a knuckle, he has told me, you will break it again.

At eight-thirty we went back to the house to get our judo
gis
. He was a black belt, a
shodan
, in judo, kung fu, and kick-boxing, and he had police combat training. I was a brown belt in judo and more sarcastic than him. He wore a Toraki Gold
gi
with a lapel of refolded cotton as stiff
as pressure-treated lumber. I wore a Toraki Silver because they were lighter and I relied on speed. He stood six-foot-three and weighed just over two-twenty. I did not.

I slipped into the cotton pants of the
gi
while upstairs my old man got his stuff together. It's important to wear your
gi
before the actual fighting starts, so you're accustomed to its weight and the way the fabric shifts when you move. My old man came down the stairs with his duffle bag in his right hand. He'd changed into a shirt that said,
Pain Is Only Weakness Leaving the Body
, and he'd donned a pair of sunglasses despite the cloud cover, because he liked to pretend to be Agent Smith. I called him that as we entered the truck. He pinned me against the door and used his index finger to roll my upper lip against my nose. For the record, that hurts.

To the untrained eye a judo tournament is distinguishable from a toga party only by the presence of referees. It is a gathering of people screaming at combatants in white pyjamas, a place where redneck wives cough and turn their heads when their husbands grind their hips and paw each other's chests. It is a place of broken arms and vanquished hopes, concussions, overpriced hotdogs, and eastern Europeans.

Our tournament took place in the gymnasium of the local highschool. We'd laid out two fighting areas on the floor, fashioned into twenty-foot squares with red and grey mats linked like Lego blocks. Masking-tape numbers designated them as I and II. Small factions had already formed in the bleachers – groups of eight or ten people
rallying under homemade banners that declared
FERNIE ROCKS
or
RAYMOND JUDO
. No fewer than two banners read
CRANBROOK SUCKS
.

Our sensei, Herman, greeted us as we entered. He was an old stonemason from Austria who was once injured by a bomb he'd found in a field outside his home. He'd lain on the ground, his eyes seared blind, a four-inch piece of shrapnel through his chest, for seven hours before help arrived. He was eleven.