Ballistics Read Online Free PDF Page B

outdoors, like axe heads and chopped wood and chimney smoke and big changes not so far around the bend.

Two

     
     
    Anaxagoras:
    Men would lead quiet lives if these two words,
    mine and thine , were taken away.
     
     
     
    With Gramps’ shoebox never more than arm’s reach away, I phoned my girlfriend. Men, I think, typically white-flag it to their girlfriends or wives—or mothers, if all other women be in absentia— when the emotional shit strikes the Great Oscillator. It’s a primal thing, no different than the human discomfort around snakes and arachnids or our general dislike of other people’s feet. Men who confide, and trust primarily, in other men have learned to do so as a skill; just as instinct would have us pry a nail from our foot, so would it have us bewail our sorrows to the females in our lives.
    That night, my girlfriend didn’t answer, and I lay in bed and counted all the jocks I knew, like the guy with the triangular brainpan who directed the university’s intramurals, or the gymnastics instructor who could stand for a whole hour with his arms bent right-angle to his hips, chest inflated like a ghostbuster. I figured I would one day find her in their arms. The window in my bedroom was busted like a spiderweb where my buddies once blasted it with a propane-powered potato cannon. Through the glass, a streetlamp’s fossily light fell across the far wall where hung my modest collection of awards—medals for outstanding marksman, mostly, though also a certificate for first prize in a grade eight drafting contest (I snap a mean tangent), a trophy clock shaped like the state of Montana, and a brass-dipped Labatt beer can I won as part of a Barrel-Fill crew Gramps had slung together for Sam Steele Days. The Impressionable Lads, I think the team was called.
    The cordless rang against my ear and my girlfriend’s voicemail picked up. You’ve reached Darby, it chimed, way too cheery. I listened to my own breath and clacked my jaw in circles. For the first time in years I felt my small-town roots, that I could stay there, in Invermere, take welding lessons from Gramps, spend my days seven-to-three banging things together and then ten-to-one at the bar grazing elbows and buying drinks for girls I knew from highschool but had never dared proposition.
    Invermere is a town where sons take after their dads and teenagers in lift-kit trucks catch air off train tracks. Winters are cold and punctuated with sudden warmth that melts all snow, and grotesque snowmen vanguard front yards, half-thawed and horror-jawed like hellions from the seventh ring of Dante’s Inferno. Power lines slouch under snowfall and sully people’s mountain views. Rednecks redline their Ski-Doos across the frozen lake. In summer, teenagers burn shipping flats at the gravel pits and slurp homebrew that swims with wood ether, and at least one novice drinker goes blind swallowing the pulp. Vehicles courtesy-honk at kids meandering the roads, and those kids nudge each other toward alleyways and paths beaten through strangers’ yards. Houses sit back on lots. Properties are for sale by owner. Trees lay long shadows during dusk and dogs leap at fences to test the resilience of their chains.
    I had only a handful of friends growing up, most of whom are either dead or married now—Will Crease and Mike Twigg; Brad Benson who vanished one summer after a devastating fallout with his old man; Joe Brooks; others who joined our group for lengths of time. In those days a kid was judged by how fast he could run and how quickly he could scale a neighbour’s fence. A palisade rimmed our backyard, six feet high, and I could vault the slats and windstorm my legs overtop and disappear into a sprint upon touchdown. Parents watched me and their fences with a wary eye. One neighbour, a widow with skin that wrinkled horizontally, owned a bean-shaped pool, so she duct-taped a red warning line along the portion of fence that dropped into water. A crotchety