Once You Break a Knuckle (10 page)

—I'm not sure this counts as getting miserable.

My old man's teeth came together. —Just once, Will. Do what I say?

Right then I'd have dug in my heels, except Ash put her fingers on my arm and derailed my stubbornness, and before I could recover it my old man turned away. Then, almost without knowing it or knowing what I was doing, I lowered myself behind Ash on the sled, and she told me
to hang on tight, William Crease, and I looped my arms around her ribs and pressed my chin to her coat. And as wind battered my cheeks and the smell of Ash's wintery hair tickled my nostrils, I imagined my old man behind me, on the slope with arms crossed, dwindling to an outline, a silhouette, a shadow.

AFTERWARD, KAREN BREWED
hot chocolate and Mitch changed into a pair of old sweatpants that hung over his feet and made him look like a kid from one of those family movies. Paul asked for marshmallows and Karen told him no. Ash disappeared upstairs. My old man accepted his mug and held it on one palm, suspended under his face so its steam ricocheted off his jaw. —I think I might call it, he said.

—Let me drive you home, Larry said.

—I'll hike.

—It's no trouble, Larry said.

—I can go on my own.

—Take a tuque, at least.

—You drive a hard bargain, my old man said.

I stayed some time after my old man had pulled a Rough Riders tuque over his ears and ventured into the winter dark. Larry and Karen and Paul and the dog dispersed to the far corners of their house, and Mitch and I moved to the living room. There, he poked at a small fire, gave it a breath of life. A hot chocolate line moustached his lip, but I was a good friend, so I told him about it.

—I'm worried about my dad, I said.

Mitch cupped his hands on the mug, gave a deep, sagacious nod. Tilt a coonskin hat over his nose and he'd be a spitting image of Larry. —Remember when my dad got lost up in the Hoodoos? he said. —The fall broke something in his back. It took two and a half days to find him. He says all he could do was lie there and pray.

—My dad's not the praying type, I said.

—That's not the point.

—It's not like he hasn't been injured before.

—He never got shot.

—There's no difference, I said.

Mitch swirled the grounds of his hot chocolate and swallowed one last gulp. The fire cackled. —It's like it's inevitable, Will. Since he's a cop, you know? And also it's not inevitable, because this is Invermere, so I bet he always pretended it wouldn't happen, because he had to. Same as dying – you never look it in the eye. But now your dad has to look it in the eye.

On the walk home I smelled snow and street salt and I thought of Ash, my cheek against the spine of her winter coat and my arms that circled her, the superficial fact of our descent. And I thought of the speechless climb and the way I stepped only in the footprints she made in the snow, same as I would have if it'd been my old man who I trudged behind.

HOURS LATER, I
woke to the creak of floor joists. A chain rattled. My old man was at the punching bag again, bare fisted, teeth clenched and his glasses off and his attacks
savage. He wore a flimsy muscle shirt, and the skin around his collar showed blue with bruising. His punches had lost their finesse and he swung wildly, hick-style, wide haymakers and jabs that started at his shoulder like a hockey fighter. He had his jaw fixed, his head tilted low so his stubble made a dark line along his cheeks. Around his neck he wore a chain with a misshaped hunk of lead on its end, and it bounced and whipped as his fists thrashed the bag. There was a pink smear on the canvas where he'd torn his knuckles. There was a pink dot on his shirt, inches below his left pectoral. His ribs hurt, I bet. A lesser man wouldn't have strapped on the gloves, he'd say. I could see the rise and fall of his breathing: short, gulping – he would confess, later, that it had taken months to build the courage to try a full inhale. Then he fanned one right hook and the punching bag smacked him in the chest, and he staggered a full three steps.

Sweat formed on his bald temples. A line channelled down his cheek, along his neck and collar, and disappeared beneath the shirt to gather, teasing, at the injury he wouldn't let anyone see. The bag lurched, seesawed. My old man studied it, appraised it, wet his lips. Then he brought his fists up and stepped right back in, and I realized, I think, what it meant to be the son of John Crease.

I watched for a long time from the darkness. You don't often see people as they are when nobody else is around. The bag lurched and my old man dodged left, dipped right, followed with a jab and an uppercut, struck with his elbow like he would while inside an opponent's reach.
He'd regained his technique, as though that hint of opposition was enough to remind him how he won his fights. I crept back to my room and listened to the muted beats of fists on canvas and the shifting of his feet on concrete and the occasional dry breath that scraped from his mouth between swings, until at last my old man had worked himself to fatigue and the punching bag's momentum wore itself spent on the chain.

BIG BITCHIN' COW

Biff liked the smell of a truck, the gas and muddy dashboard and the steering wheel smeared with sweat and dirt – manure gone dry, and rust, rust, rust, from bled animals and oxidizing steel and that time he and the boy took one helluva shit-stomping in front of Invermere's only bar. That was because some bonehead in a John Deere trucker cap pawed the boy's girlfriend – woman troubles, always woman trouble with the boy – and until that night Biff had never actually been clubbed with a barstool. Afterward, he and the boy sat in his ratbag Ranger, just bleeding in each other's company, just one ugly pair, cheeks blueing like cabbage head and nicks and burrs up and down their chins. Their eyebrows: split. Their teeth: slick with blood and snot and not all of it their own. —Thanks, Dad, the boy said, and Biff dragged a flannel sleeve over his gums and reached across to pat his son on the knee.

Now, twenty-five years later, that pat was as close to a plan as Biff had, as he drove over the frozen lake in the
thunder-cracking hours of the morning. Far off on the horizon the rising sun made the Rocky Mountains glow red and orange like a kerosene lamp. His granddaughter had explained the situation over the phone: the boy discovered a truth about his wife Biff had suspected for years, and then he'd gone hauling-ass to his truck, and then tear-assing down the driveway and around the bend and to the lake. Forty-four years old, the boy, but age doesn't guard against everything – that one Biff knew by heart.

Biff's plan: track the boy across the frozen lake, across all B.C., across the whole of the Great White North if that's what it took, and pat him on the knee. He owed the boy that much and a lot more; nobody else had ever stepped up to save Biff's life. That was on a Prairie farm, the boy no more than thirteen. Not that Biff hadn't almost been killed other than that once – nearly drowned in the Kicking Horse, got real bad pneumonia when he was eleven – but nobody but the boy had ever gone and thrown themselves in front of the raging bull, or however the saying went.

Biff checked the speedometer: one-thirty-eight, on sheer ice. At that speed he'd blast through anything – bullet-through-concrete theory, the boy called it. In the past, he'd mowed down his share of deer and elk and, once, a moose calf at Sicamous near the pulp mill that stunk up the world like propane. He always stopped to double-check he'd killed the animal – didn't like to see things in pain, even bugs – and kept a 30-30 locked in the toolbox behind the cab, in case he hadn't. The only time he didn't slow was
when he clipped a black bear, since it was a goddamned bear – a beast designed to crush men's skulls.

As a teenager, the boy, too, had wrecked a few trucks, though not once by hitting an animal. When the boy trashed something it was the good old-fashioned nose-to-ditch style, or passenger-door-to-tree style, or track-jump-followed-by-fishtail-into-city-bench style. Biff had about zero tolerance for idiot driving if it resulted in steeper auto insurance, but the boy got better. He went on to win a couple drag races at the gravel pits, to blitz from the cops one night after a licence suspension, and now, now, how-many-years-later, to cowboy onto the frozen lake and leave Biff chasing tail lights. The boy had a head start and if he reached the far side before Biff caught up then he could disappear into the wilds for good. That scared Biff more than physical violence. That scared Biff more than lizards, and not much did. Without the boy Biff would be one more ass-hapless guy bleating around construction zones – no money, no family, nowhere to go except the cold sucking earth. Biff Crane: a man with nothing to lose. Biff Crane: a man with something to get back, maybe.

Driving on the lake, in the dark, was like driving underwater. He had a globe of light from his highbeams and he could only track his motion by the ice grain slithering beneath his wheels. It felt like floating. It felt like not moving at all. The last time he'd driven on the lake had been with the boy and the boy's wife, them two riding a pair of GTs hitched to his trailer tow. The game: go like a
maniac and bank a sharp turn, skid into yaw and slingshot the lovey-dovey brats in an arc. That marked the first time Biff ever locked antlers with the boy's wife, since the boy skidded too near a warm spot and sunk waist-deep in the water. Biff hauled him out – the GT was lost – and packed him into the truck. The boy peeled off his snowpants and sweatpants and, yes, his underpants, and they sat in the Ranger, heat blazing, with the boy's wife between them and everybody's knees brushing everybody's knees. Biff grinned like a stupid man and he could tell the boy was doing his damnedest not to.

—You're an irresponsible bastard, the boy's wife said as they drove to shore.

—That's a good distance from the truth, Biff said, and the boy, naked below the waist but otherwise dressed like a logger, snorted at the window.

The boy's wife was a Calgary cowgirl he met during his first year of electrical school, with dishwater-blond hair and a black cowboy hat she'd only wear when driving her car. She had soft cheekbones and a boyish jawline and a chickenpox scar under her nose. She wore skirts too short to make Biff comfortable. She had a math degree, of all things, and about nobody Biff ever met was as smart as her, and she made a point of it. They were a good match, her and the boy, Biff used to think – even if she voted for the Liberals.

—He could've died, the boy's wife said.

—Well, princess, Biff told her, —you coulda pulled him out yourself.

Biff figured the boy would've snorted again, but his wife jabbed him with her elbow. She wasn't a bad woman, but she could drive Biff into a frenzy with all her left-wing opinions. He held his tongue for the boy's sake: you didn't need to be very smart to call a spayed horse spayed.

That incident would've been a decade ago, and here he was still thinking of it. Mostly, he feared he'd done something wrong, that he should've given the boy some kind of father-son talk. Biff knew about all kinds of fighting, ask anyone, but when it came to matters between a guy and his wife, well, he had only a slate of losses to show. If he could do it again he'd probably do things different, try a bit harder not to get divorced. He never expected he'd die old and lonely. But he bet nobody ever expected that.

The sky was turning turquoise. Biff thought he could see tail lights, but it could have been a reflection, or nothing. He cracked his window a finger to let the morning air enter the cab. He liked the smell of the bleeding hours, the frost or dew and, at home, the scent of a cold house and the cheap, cheap, stovetop coffee he'd strain into a cheap steel thermos and drink in the shower, and while pissing, and while shuffling outside in his Carhartts and steeltoes to let the Ranger's engine wind up in the dry B.C. cold. He didn't envy those poor bastards on the Prairies, like his old man and his two brothers and the stew of fuckers from his ex's side. Romanians – and hillbilly, even by his standards.

Not that he held anything against the ex, really. They got on well enough. She invited him over for holiday
dinners, and if he saw her at the bar he'd buy her a drink. One time he helped her chop a cord of firewood and haul it to her backyard in wheelbarrows. He got a peck on the cheek for that, an affectionate rub on the chest. They'd met on the Prairies, went to the same highschool even if they lived in different villages, but that's how it went with all those ghost towns around Regina: get to highschool, partner up, and bunker down. Biff and the ex, at least, made it to B.C. because the province needed electricians, and Biff was, if nothing else, a good electrician.

As he sped along the ice, the edges of his highbeams caught a fishing hut – squat and made of grey lumber, so weatherbeaten it was almost cured – and he almost tapped the brakes, as if that'd do any good. Every year, at least one of those things got taken out by an idiot in a truck, but nobody'd ever been killed, far as Biff knew. His ex used to like fishing in those huts, and he tagged along even though he never saw the charm. You gotta do things like that, Biff figured. You just gotta.

A tough woman, his ex – a denim wearer, coat and all, and the kind of girl who looked good in a ballcap, who could run her fingers through her hair and make you watch. She always had a smudge of dirt or sawdust or oil on her cheek, sure as makeup. She was damn near as strong as him, and if he'd ever had to fight her he wouldn't have wagered either way. One time, when the boy couldn't have been more than ten, Biff and the ex hauled a cargo of teenagers around town so they could hawk Ice-Melt tickets to raise money for their football team. Biff bought
a dozen himself, bet on March twenty-second, and when the twenty-second rolled around he and the ex woke in the smoky hours when the Rocky Mountains cast long shadows over town. She smelled like wax paper and bronze, as though she'd been counting change all day, and as he watched her sitting wide-legged in passenger he had a feeling in his gut that the two of them were too similar to last. The ice on the lake had melted, so they were two hundred bucks richer, but rather than celebrate they sat in the Ranger just looking at the view – the glass-work lake lit by the morning sun, as if on fire, as if made of miles and miles of fire. Between them: his cheap steel thermos, her cigarettes. Between them: the gearshift, the empty seat.