RATCHET
The boy’s mother insisted her son be named Winston, because it evoked hints of rubbled London and because she remembered her old man, a gunned-down naval aviator who she eventually discovered had raped her mother. She announced her decision with one arm bent like a coat hanger behind her head. Conner liked Winston about as much as getting bitched at, and he couldn’t even shorten it to anything worthwhile: Win, Winny, Winsy. A man called Winsy would shave his armpits and watch foreign movies. Conner’s boy should have a tougher name, like Dick or Tim, or even simpler, and with an r: Ray, or Ern – a name he could wing pinecones at, a name that could torque a crescent wrench.
For ten hours each day Conner shaped steel pipe with a hydraulic choke while his buddies trawled 500-grade tech cable from great nautical spools. They were doing re-haul on the local sawmill. He toiled alongside a metal-worker named Jack who wore a navy jumpsuit and a tinted mask that left his chin bare to sparks. All shift, the steel ionizing beneath his arc welder smelled like baseboard heaters. Some lunch hours, Jack’s twenty-two-year-old wife rolled up in a Rocket 88, cherry red, all that muscle like an athlete. It had chrome accents and leather seats and straps that fastened in an X at a man’s solar plexus. Jack’s wife parked near the retaining wall where Conner ate jelly sandwiches with the guys. A handsome woman, Jack’s wife – blond ringlets teased her collar, lipstick, and this way about her like a reliable set of knockouts. Jack and her would be forty-five minutes, tops. When they returned, he hiked his crotch and Conner eyed his wife and on more than one occasion she eyed him back.
At the end of every week a smudged envelope appeared on top of the pipe threader, Conner’s name scrawled along the seal. No paper trail, of course – this was cash for cash’s sake. He shuffled the bills into a lockbox he hid in plain sight on his bedroom windowsill beside a small cactus and a burned-out Maglite.
Some weekends he left Winston with a nanny so he and the boy’s mother could spend fifty straight hours shitfaced on hash. She dribbled candle wax on her wrist and peeled it off like skin. Conner cruised cooking channels and mimicked master chefs’ chopping motions on his leg with the remote. One time they watched a rerun marathon of The Twilight Zone, pawing each other’s limbs while on the television a mud-soused huntsman Vietnammed his way through the Mississippi wilderness. In those days, before the boy’s mother fucked everything up, they could screw and he wouldn’t be haunted by her handlebar ribs. He liked to hook his thumb in her mouth. She had shapely gums. He had decent stamina. They’d have separate, unremarkable orgasms.
Then, on a clear day in October when leaves piled the streets, Winston’s mother climbed into a two-seater Datsun and took off for Vegas with the lockbox and a pregnant school friend named Eileen. The boy was two. Conner spent one full day so fucked he awoke naked in a hotel room beside Jack’s wife. The room smelled like used sheets and latex. It had musky wallpaper and a titty-lamp mounted on the ceiling above the bed. Residual white grains lingered on the nightstand. Her pale back faced him and in the amber light her blond hair looked ruddy and her skin tanned. She was weeping and she shrunk toward her knees when he trailed his knuckles along her spine.
Conner pulled it together. At dawn he’d drop Winston at his old man’s acreage at the outskirts of Edgewater. His old man wore flannel shirts and his skin was brown and farmered below the elbow. A scar halved his right ocular and a glass eye lolled in that socket like a ball bearing. When Conner came home he pinged spare change into a Folgers tin he and the old man set aside for a new TV, so they could replace the panelboard relic slouched in a corner. The old man barbecued steaks. He mashed potatoes with barbaric, two-handed thrusts. In the evenings they sipped heavy beer and watched news coverage of the war and lounged on the porch passing the toddler between them. At least once, the old man told Conner he’d done him proud.
After a while the boy’s mother showed up penniless and a cokehead. Conner shut the door on her. She threatened to lay abuse charges, showed him finger bruises on the soft flesh beneath her biceps and the bulge of her jugular. He called her a fucking whore. She said it’d be a shame for Winston to see his dad hauled to jail.
A few summers later, while the boy’s friends skewered grasshoppers on willow spears, Conner and him hung a tree fort off a pine so thick around the base they couldn’t ring it, even with their fingertips touching. Winston’s mother had fucked off on another binge with her whore friend Eileen. Conner and the boy fashioned a pulley system around the tree’s branches, and as his son helped him heave on a rope to hoist the base, the nickname came to him: Winch.
EVENTUALLY, CONNER SNAGGED his ring finger in a pipe threader and the machine tugged it off with humbling nonchalance. He pressured his maimed hand in an oil rag and traced the wrecked bone beneath the cloth. At the hospital they stitched him but told him there wasn’t enough left to reattach. The doctor asked if he wished to keep the remains, maybe in a pickle jar, and then he laughed like a man who’d used that joke before.
The finger healed but he didn’t get any money since he worked under the table. His old man knew a few guys in management at a barium mine forty minutes away. Conner and him spent a night awake until the morning light cleared the mountains. Dirty work, the barium mine, and thankless, and likely to put him out of commission with lung defects in two decades. Upstairs, Winch coughed in his sleep.
—Et’ll pay the bills, his dad said, and Conner nodded into his wrist.
Not long after, Conner was braving the rainy highways with one hand knuckled at the twelve-o’clock and one hand on the gearshift. Deer crowded the ditches and one time he swerved to the opposite lane when he rounded a blind curve. His ancient Ford shuddered like a desperate mutt. Cars churned slop onto his windshield. The air blasting through the radiator smelled like woodsmoke and if Conner sucked a deep breath it tickled his nostrils like his dad’s cigarettes used to, when he was a kid riding shotgun through the hoarfrost hours of the morning.
A year through the work, he came home and found his dad at the base of his porch with a busted hip. He was propped on an elbow and he leaned his head against the lowest step.
—Cunt took Winch, his dad said.
Inside, Conner dialed the hospital and told them his old man broke a hip. The Folgers tin was on its side and looted except for loose change. He slammed the receiver.
—Go get yer boy, his dad said when Conner knelt to help him inside.
He did. At his home, he found a ratbag Benz 230 parked on the front lawn. Inside the house, Winch hunched on a lemon-coloured sofa with patches of foam torn out like a bloodied creature. The boy looked alright, was toying with a shoe-sized buggy constructed from a scrapped Meccano set.
—Y’awright? Conner said.
Winch nodded.
The boy’s mother was in the kitchen.
—Ya can’t come in here, she said.
Conner booted a chair out of his way and in two steps had her by the neck. He heaved her at the drywall and it crunched. She clawed his four-finger grip. His old man once told him people change when you’ve got them where you want them. You can see it, his dad said. Their wild, desperate eyes.
Conner pushed his knuckles upward against her nose so her chin tilted.
—Ya hurt muh dad an’ took muh savins, he said.
A throaty sound choked against his palm. He drew his fist back to his ear and watched her track it with her eyes.
—I thought you were gonna hurt muh boy, Conner said.
He dropped her. She landed on her ass in a crumple and made a long, whinnying noise. Conner led Winch to his Dodge Sweptline and they drove to the hospital where his old man was strung up in a cushy bed. In a day’s time the house would burn to cinder and he and the boy would toe through the rubble. He got a handful of insurance paid out but houses in Edgewater had little value. They moved to his old man’s place officially and Conner spent the cash on a colour TV and a set of winter tires, and on the day his old man hobbled home the three of them crashed on the couch and watched The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
WINDLASS
When Winch turned twelve, him and his dad and his dad’s friend Sampson – who his dad called Doc – and Sampson’s son, Dallas, packed into a ’60 Bronco and tear-assed to a cabin out at Brisco. His dad had taken the weekend off. He worked more and more and sometimes Winch wouldn’t see him for days at a time, or he’d shoulder through the front door before bed. Those days, Winch’s grandpa – his gramps – rose from the couch and zigzagged to the kitchen to heat food. Winch’s dad gamed with the cabbage-like smell of pulp, and rust, and he’d have pink-stained hands from the barium, but Winch liked the way he had scratchy whiskers. His dad would sleuth one eye sideways and he’d pretend not to notice, and his dad would start to growl, and if Winch smiled he’d get tackled and they’d wrestle a few minutes, until his gramps brought a plate and a beer in a giant ceramic mug with a picture of two guys tending a bonfire. —Awright you two, his gramps would say. —Don’t make me sepraychya.
Sampson and his truck smelled like mothballs. He had a jean jacket with hewn edges, worn open over a Black Sabbath sweatshirt. His cheeks were narrow and tanned and his nose jabbed forward with a hook. He habitually lifted his Coors Light hat straight off his head so he could swipe a hand over his matted hair. Winch’s dad filled the passenger seat in a checkered overcoat and jeans faded in swaths and a beaten blue ballcap. He had the kind of hard cheekbones that could absorb their share of blows, and Winch had seen them bruised and bloodied more than once over the years.
Dallas was a beaver-toothed kid with freckles who talked about rifles all day. Winch had never touched a rifle, but his gramps kept one locked in a fibreglass case above his headboard.
It was September. Rain clouds stirred over the mountaintops and already the peaks had whitened with snow. The morning smelled like winter, the scent of brick and pale sunlight. Winch and his dad flung supplies into the rear of Sampson’s canopied Bronco. His dad fished two granola bars from inside a backpack and flicked one over and they chewed on the bars while Sampson spot-checked. Winch’s dad mentioned the poor state of his treads and Sampson jerked a thumb toward the box, a milk crate full of chains. —I’m from the Prairies, he said.
While they drove, Sampson smoked cigarettes from a carton he kept in the glove compartment. He lowered his window and flicked ash over the glass and flecks of it whirled back into Dallas’s face.
—I saw yer girl, Sampson said.
—She’s not muh girl, Winch’s dad said.
—Even still.
—Don’t care to hear about it.
Sampson crushed his cigarette in a white foam mug taped beneath the radio.
—She’s gone and cleaned.
—Ya know where I stand.
—Maybe ya should give ’er a chance.
—Maybe you should keep yer fingers outta this pie, Winch’s dad said, and belted Sampson on the shoulder.
They veered off the highway. Sampson’s Bronco bobbed over roots and divots and Winch bounced against the restraint. His dad braced one palm against the dashboard and the other clutched the oh-shit handle above the passenger window. Tree branches whipped by, clunked into the windshield and the roof.
—Why we gotta come all the way out here? Winch’s dad said.
Sampson seemed to eye Winch’s dad sideways. —Et’s a big load, Con.
—Seems a long way is all.
—Bein safe. Ya know?
Winch’s dad clicked his teeth. —Just seems a long way out.
—That’s the point, Con. No one sees nothin.
—Don’t like havin muh boy here for it, neither, his dad said, and when he realized Winch was listening he gave a big wink.
They got a few kilometres down the dirt road before a fallen tree blocked the way and Sampson platformed the truck trying to bog over it.
—Fucken truck, he said.
Winch’s dad dropped the seesawing distance to the ground and dusted his hands together with two brisk swipes. —Lock ’er in four-wheel, he said.
—She ent a four-wheel.
—Sonabitch.
His dad circled the truck and Winch twisted in his seat.
—Put ’er in gear, his dad called, and then he slammed his shoulder against the box and heaved. His boots dug in the damp earth, and when Winch glimpsed his dad’s face it was red and bunched together. The truck teetered, its front tires touched down, and then Winch’s dad fell away.
—Winch! Get down here and gimme a hand.
—I’m comin Con, Sampson said.
—I said Winch come help. Doc, you stay in yer sissy truck so it don’t steer into a tree.
Winch scrambled between the seat and ducked out the door. His dad had his lips pulled in a half grin and he gave Winch a little shove. —Let’s get this done, he said, and on a three-count they plowed the tailgate and Winch heaved and his dad’s boots dug gruelling progress and the truck skidded forward over the log so the rear tires bit the tree bark. Sampson hooted. Winch’s dad hawked and spat and wiped his sleeve along his mouth. —Takes one an’ a half men, eh Winch? he said, and winked.
The cabin sagged on one side like a wounded dog. Its exteriors were dark cedar. A tarp and poles jutted off the side and Sampson parked the truck beneath this makeshift carport. He turned the key in the ignition and the truck juddered to sleep. —Here we are, he said, and stretched.
While Sampson took his keys to the door, Winch helped his dad lug four packs from the truck. When he lifted the nearest one, it was heavy and objects swung inside it like bricks. He loosened the strings to peer inside but his dad tore it away from him.
—Don’t be a snoop, his dad said.
His dad superheroed three of the four bags and Winch scurried behind with his own. They hucked the packs in a corner except one, which his dad handed over to Sampson with a nod. The rat-faced man slid it into a cupboard and brushed his hands together and let out a breath that puffed his cheeks.
Winch’s dad handed him a couple sixers of Kokanee and told him to sink them in the lake. Dallas joined him, a BB gun slung against his shoulder like an army cadet and a grocery bag full of empties dangling from the tip. Winch weighted the sixers with a football-sized rock and staked a branch in the sand so his dad could find the beer, then him and Dallas balanced the empties on bleached driftwood. Dallas pinged coloured bullets off the cans and glass bottles and never offered Winch a go. Sampson hoofed it to the lake’s edge and tore two cans free of their yoke and pressed one to his cheek. He gave an affirmative nod, like a man who knew the right temperature for beer, and then climbed to the cabin where Winch’s dad reclined on the porch.
—Met yer mum, Dallas said.
—She’s a bitch.
—Muh dad likes ’er.
Winch rolled onto his back. Dark clouds rolled over the mountaintops. He looked for the haze that meant rain.
—Last I seen ’er she took a bunch of money.
—Yer dad was mean to ’er.
—Well, yeah, Winch said. —She deserves it.
For lunch they ate game meat pressed into burgers. —Not even the haunch of the six-pointer I got, Sampson said. —Got ’em through both lungs. Shoulda seen the sucker keel.
They wheeled a grouchy propane barbecue from inside and Winch’s dad scorched his face when the old thing fireballed. They all laughed. His dad got the barbecue going and it wheezed thin smoke out its sides, and Sampson smacked bloody wads onto the grill with one cupped hand. Winch listened to them sizzle.
—Y’ever seen muh gun? Sampson asked after he’d shut the lid.
Winch’s dad pursed his lips and said, —Nup.
—Gimme a sec, he said, and darted inside. He returned with a rifle held before him like a ceremony, a smile big enough to reveal a missing canine. —Three-oh-eight Winchester. Bolt-action.
He ratcheted the bolting mechanism and sighted through the scope, made a pow noise and faked a recoil strong enough to blast him backward into a deck chair. Dallas laughed in a slow ribbit: huuh-huuh-huuh.
Afterward, they lounged full-bellied in the deck chairs. Sampson and Winch’s dad nursed beer and Dallas and him sucked on Cokes. Sampson faced the three of them, not reclined, elbows fanned to the sides on the arm rests like a man who might rise suddenly. He lifted the Coors Light cap and brushed a palm across his matted hair. A couple times he tapped a finger on his gums. The Winchester leaned against the cabin’s wall, arm’s reach, draw distance.
—Wanna head out on the boat? Sampson said.
—S’a two person, enn’it? Winch’s dad said.
—Dally ken steer it. Let the boys have a go.
Winch’s dad slurped from his beer, tipped his head and jiggled the can.
Sampson was leaning forward on his knees. —What’dya think, Dal?
Dallas mumbled to his chest.
—Didn’t raise ya to be a chickenshit, Sampson said.
—Can go with our boys, Winch’s dad said. —Take a turn. Might not mind a go muhself.
Sampson pitched his empty sideways along the porch. —Pfah, he said, then spat. —Least yer boy ent too chickenshit to go out. He stood and wrapped one greasy palm around the Winchester’s barrel and caught Dallas by the collar. The two of them lurched to the lake’s edge.
Winch’s dad was half on his feet. Sampson planted the rifle in the sand and it fell over instantly. Waves lapped its heel. He had Dallas by the shirt and he swung his gaze from his son to the rifle. Then he smacked the boy with his free hand, just the fingers, but hard enough for Dallas to clench his teeth, squinch his eyes.
—What kinda feet per second this thing get, Doc? Winch’s dad said, coming down the beach.
Sampson swayed sideways and released his son. He lifted the rifle in two hands and held it waist level like a gangster. —Fuck ef I know, he said, and blinked heavily. —Let’s get the boys on the water, let ’em have some fun.
Winch’s dad closed his fist around the Winchester’s barrel. —Might be ya had enough to drink, Doc, he said.
Sampson tugged. —Fuck off.
—I’ll just go put ’er back.
Sampson tugged harder. Winch’s dad stepped forward heavily, didn’t release. —Don’t be an idiot, he said.
—Ricki said you were a dick, ya know.
—Fuck. Her, Winch’s dad said.
—We’re a pair now.
—Doc, let go of the gun.
—Fuck you Conner et’s my gun.
His face was scoured inward but all at once it went lax, his lips drooped, eyes unsquinched. He smiled. —Eh, look at us. Let’s just get the boys on the water an’ forget about all this.
Winch and his dad shared a look. His dad’s jaw went stiff but his eyes sagged and Winch understood he ought to take Dallas out, to get Sampson to shut up, distract him. —Come on Dal, he said.
Sampson kept his tin boat some ways down the shore, anchored to a felled tree with a carved-up trunk. The boat had a plastic bench from port to starboard and a rusted-out motor with a pull-cable so stiff and knotted Winch could barely wiggle it. Behind them, his dad and Sampson stood off, too far for Winch to hear them talk. Occasionally, one would tug and the other would shake his head. Dallas untethered the boat and passed Winch a gnarled paddle and they pushed off and the underside scraped the lake bottom.
They paddled across the water, not out on the water but toward their dads, a shallow arc. The sun lit the lake’s surface like a grease fire. Both men had changed positions: his dad had his back to the water now, shoulders rolled down and head hunched and fists at his side. Sampson had the .308 levelled at his dad’s chest. From that range it’d blow a man’s heart clear out. As Winch and Dallas paddled nearer, their voices skipped across the water, mere murmurs at first.
—Pretty dummuya, Winch’s dad was saying.
—Don’t have a choice. She said ya got a bunch of loose cash.
—Gave that up. She robbed me twice.
The boat rocked suddenly and Winch tore his eyes from the shore to see Dallas terror-gripped on the boat’s edge. He was throwing his weight back and forth and his eyes were pinched shut and he made a humming noise.
—Dal, stop, Winch said.
—I don’t like boats, he said.
Water sloshed over the tin edge and soaked his shoe. Winch tried to throw his weight counter to Dallas but it didn’t seem to matter. The boat seesawed in the water, tottered, and splashed aright. Winch grabbed for the other boy, tried to hold him steady, but Dallas had fear-strength and he was muttering to himself. Water sloshed over the gunwales. The hull rocked.
—Dal! Winch said.
—I don’t like boats, Winch.
—Our boys are goin under, Winch heard his dad say.
—Ya gotta do it, Sampson said. —Ya gotta.
—Nope. Nope Doc.
—Y’owe me, Con man, y’owe me.
—I don’t owe ya. I’m here aren’t I. Wer square.
—Wer not square, Con man.
Winch gulped a mouthful of air as Dallas stood up and the boat flipped. He hit the water cheek first and the shock of the chill nearly drew the breath from his lungs. The boat beat his calves as it overturned and Winch propellered around until he could stop himself. The boat’s base cut the lake’s oil-lamp surface. They weren’t far from the shore but no one had ever taught him to swim. He kicked out. He raked his hands through the water. His shoes weighted his feet and his clothes shucked against his skin. That gulp of air hung in his throat, right at the soft divot above his breastbone, and already he felt pressure building. Sunlight pierced the darkness under the water. Sediment and tackle-like debris lit up like stars.
He found himself in a sphere of light as though in a candlelit room. His gums shrunk inward with the cold. His eyes stung. He swished water in his mouth and tasted seaweed, clamminess, the eel-like texture of his inner cheek. At the cusp of his vision a weatherbeaten truck rusted at the bottom of the lake. Algae eked along its sagging tires and the exposed metal under paint. Corrosion had eaten the hood, and the engine and all its parts sparkled when the water’s surface shifted. The driver door faced him, loose on its hinges, as though the man behind the wheel had bailed in a hurry. Winch knew stories about guys who lost their trucks to the frozen water. The side said: Chevrolet. It was like no Chev he knew anyone to drive. Old. It had to be old. He once saw a burnished-bronze truck trundle into a parking space between two baby pines, on the main street, outside the candy shop, and as the engine wound down it had stuttered, violently, and backfired a clot of exhaust with a loud KA-BLAM, muffled thunder, deep but loud enough for Winch, suspended under the water, to hear and wonder at.
Then he was rushing upward and air whispered on his cheek and then mud sucked at his hair. His dad towered above him, ballcap gone, damp hair combed over the crest of his skull, his jeans and checkered shirt watersopped and heavy. Winch coughed and spewed lake water and pushed onto his elbows. His dad had one arm pressed to his side and his lips peeled over his teeth and his greying hair matted to his head. Blood smeared his open hand and the flannel overcoat where his arm snugged fabric to torso.
—Y’awright? Winch heard himself say.
His dad nodded. —Ya need a minute?
—Throat hurts.
Winch got to his feet and tucked his shoulder under his dad’s armpit and his dad let weight onto him. Sampson was spreadeagled on the shore. Waves licked the soles of his steeltoes. Dallas shivered beside him.
—Get the keys, Winch’s dad said, and Winch eased from beneath the arm and his dad tilted sideways, winced. Dallas kept still as Winch rifled through Sampson’s pockets. A Go Flames dog tag dangled from the key chain. The .308 lay half-submerged, waterlogged, spent.
—Get the gun too, his dad said.
Winch fetched it, felt the weight in his hands like a baseball bat.
—Might need you to drive, his dad said.
—Is he dead? Dallas said, and tapped Sampson on the chest.
—Choked out. He’ll live. Get inside where it’s warm.
Winch drove his dad to the hospital. The doctors phoned his gramps and the old guy showed up without the fake eye. He clutched the hem of his checkered coat. Those big hands were bone-white and the empty socket, rinsed and wet with saline, glistened like a mouth.
THEY STITCHED HIS DAD. That same day, the three of them sat in the backyard and his gramps laid the .308 Winchester across his knees. He cleaned it of water and sand. His dad cradled a mug of coffee in his lap and Winch listened to his gramps’s hands clack the mechanical parts, jimmy the bolt to oil it.
—I useta be a pretty good shot, his gramps said, and rubbed a gummy rag along the barrel. —Y’ever fired one of these? he asked, and when Winch shook his head his gramps came over and looped those old arms around him. —Keep et tight against yerself.
Winch pressed the wooden stock to the crook of his arm, cupped his hand around the trigger and steadied the muzzle with his palm.
—Ef ya don’t keep ’er tight, this’ll happen, his gramps said, and touched a crescent scar on the lower cusp of his ocular, about the size of the eyepiece. —S’not a lot of meat between the scope and yer bone, he said.
It felt good, not the weight of it but the power. Winch narrowed his vision to a span the size of a thumb. Things entered that tiny window and then disappeared. When he swung the rifle the world whirred like a slot machine and Winch counted objects as they skipped by: wood chipper, junky Studebaker, oil drums. His finger curled around the trigger. A group of crows rose to the sky, wheeled, pitched toward the Rocky Mountains. His gramps laid a hand on his shoulder. Winch squeezed and held his breath and waited for the rifle to snarl.
A BIG COP WITH dark glasses and a sagging lip swung by with questions because he heard someone got shot. Winch’s dad blamed his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his son. The cop nodded and departed, and Winch didn’t see Dallas again. According to his dad, Sampson filled the truck with food and supplies and crammed his TV between blankets and a garbage bag of clothes, and with his son beside him he bailed for the East Coast. —Runnin from more ’en just the cops, he heard his dad say.
When Winch entered highschool he began half-hearted attempts at his homework. He passed his classes, if barely. He excelled at tech, woodworking and metal art, and the teacher for both was a dust-haired blonde named Miss Hawk who had enough wrinkles to make her mom-like. She wore scuffed jeans and weathered-down shirts and she had a habit of curling her lower lip over her teeth. Winch wasted hours in her shop while other boys lobbed shot puts, joined basketball teams. Miss Hawk taught him how to bore a stripped screw and the best way to countersink bolts through a steel sheet. Winch earned the right to the school’s only chop saw and used it to shave a dowel rod into hexagonal posts for a bird feeder. During metal art he fashioned a wire-frame buggy with workable pistons that pumped when it rolled down a ramp. For machine tech he embarked on a project to rehaul a 1953 Rocket 88 Miss Hawk had rusting in her garage. She told him it belonged to her ex, a welder who took off with a girl half his age. It was the nicest car Winch had ever seen. Miss Hawk and him worked into the bleeding hours nightly. They sandblasted and rewired faults. They polished joints, and Winch recounted his experience of that ancient Chev on the lake bottom at Brisco, how it sort of lingered in his head. Miss Hawk listened with her thumbnail pinched in the corner of her mouth and one knee bent and resting atop a sawhorse. She tossed her hair over her shoulder as he lay on a skid, half tucked under the car. Her overalls swelled at the chest and his eyes could trace her figure despite the baggy clothes. He noticed for the first time the curve of pink skin at her neck so unlike her soot-stained hands. His ears heated and he was thankful to be buried to his ribs under the Rocket 88. For a long time, hers was the body he’d fall back upon in his loneliest nights.
Winch’s gramps took to teaching him how to best fire the Winchester. When he came home he’d wing his homework on the kitchen table and head for the backyard. In the distance the Purcells reared ancient and corroded like riverbanks. His gramps set targets on all the junk accumulated on the lawn: oil drums, half a fridge, a trailer nobody ever used. Winch would check and recheck the Winchester, cock the bolting mechanism, and painstakingly blaze those empties to grain. With each shot he’d eject the spent shell and whiff the chamber and its breathy scent of scorched bronze.
At sixteen years old his friends wrangled him to a party at the gravel pits, where he shot straight vodka and finished in a sleeping bag with a pig-tailed girl named Mandy. Her hair smelled like tea leaves and her lips had that cabbage taste of marijuana. Winch had no idea what to do. She wasn’t much encouragement. Amid the haze of alcohol and embarrassment and the low, bleating hum of love songs, the only way he could chance an erection was to imagine Miss Hawk with her lips at his cock. Afterward, Mandy jerked onto her side. Figures moved inside trucks and boys stole glances at girls who hadn’t covered themselves. Winch listened to canvas and bodies rustle. One last shipping flat was hurled onto the fire. Country ballads rambled from a truck, the bass so thick his heart quivered, and the whole place smelled like alcohol and anticipation.
FOR CHRISTMAS, MISS HAWK presented him with a book called Layman’s Machinist that contained the schematics for home-built contraptions: a self-making bed; a diesel-fuelled toaster that toasted bread in four and a half seconds; a two-person biplane with an aerofoil constructed from the scraps of a weathervane.
They were late in the shop as usual. Miss Hawk examined a stack of student-built toolboxes at a dinted wood desk, lit with a construction lamp. Winch lay on the concrete, elbow-deep in mechanics. He’d discovered a problem with intake, but with a barbecue lighter and a can of aerosol lubricant he got the engine chortling. Occasionally Miss Hawk snorted at a stupid flaw. She’d cut her hair short – ear length – and dyed it a deep maroon. She wore a yellow dress that hung to her knees. —I don’t need to get dirty with you around, she’d remarked when she caught him noticing.
—Winch, she said, and he wheeled himself from beneath the car. —Let’s take it for a spin.
Snow covered the ground, inches deep, and more fell from the sky in flakes the size of his big toe.
—The street salt, he said.
—One spin won’t corrode it.
He scraped his thumb along a patch of grease on his overalls. They were perpetually damp at the thighs where he wiped his hands and he couldn’t drink Coke because the smell reminded him of all that oil.
—Well, Miss Hawk said, and stretched her arms so Winch had to look aside. She dangled two copper-coloured keys from her fingertips. —Come here.
Then he was out of his overalls, in jeans and a sweatshirt with the school’s name – BTSS – printed across the chest. He folded into the Rocket’s driver seat and Miss Hawk swung in beside him like a girlfriend. Winch strapped himself into the seatbelts that fastened in an X at his sternum. He fit the key in the ignition and leaned on the clutch and the Rocket murmured. Miss Hawk fiddled with the radio for a moment and Steve Miller’s “The Joker” hummed from the speaker. He rubbed the stick shift on his palm and then clocked it to reverse, out Miss Hawk’s shop and onto Invermere’s streets.
He wound around the road by the lake. Snow crunched beneath the tires and air hushed through the trees. Miss Hawk opened her window a finger’s width and Winch realized his hands were sweating enough to slicken the wheel. At the beach a huddle of kids passed a spark around. Miss Hawk tsked and then snaked him a sideways smile. A lone street lamp lit the beach because the frozen lake counted as an actual highway, even if the cops couldn’t patrol it.
—Use the lake, Miss Hawk said.
—There’s ridges.
—Get you home faster.
Two shallow trenches led over the frozen sand onto the ice. Winch flicked on his highbeams and Miss Hawk reached over and with her thick fingers unclipped his X-buckle. His cock went instantly hard. —Just in case, she said.
The town lights fell away until his whole world was the space ten feet in front of the car. Miss Hawk’s face was lit by reflection off the ice. He pressed his foot onto the gas and the car drew forward, snugged him against the seat. Miss Hawk sucked air through her teeth and braced one hand on the dashboard.
—Faster.
He shifted to fourth in a quick, jerky motion he’d seen men do on television. The car hummed and bucked and the wind from the open windows huffed across his cheek. Miss Hawk flattened her palm against the ceiling and her breasts rose with a held breath and Winch dropped the car to the final gear and laid on the gas and his eyes flickered along the juts and rivets marring the ice’s surface.
Lights blinked into view and Winch let off. Sweat pooled in the bowl of his collar. His shirt clung to his back like a tongue. He geared down. Miss Hawk hooked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. They’d drifted from the beaten highway, but the shore in the distance was marked.
—Goes good, Winch said, and Miss Hawk eyed him.
He pulled the Rocket into his gramps’s driveway and killed the ignition, and they lingered in the darkness listening to the engine hiss. It was ten o’clock, no later. In the living room blue light danced on a wall, and then a shape rose from the couch and stood at the window – his dad, awake and watching anything so he could see Winch to bed.
She shook her head. —It was all you, Winch.
He climbed from the car as the front door lurched open. His dad stepped out. He wore a pair of jeans and a grey Nike T-shirt. His dad never wore jeans after work, unless he was expecting someone, because he preferred a ratty pair of sweatpants he could lie around in. Miss Hawk’s door clunked and she stepped out into the cool air.
—Millie? his dad said.
—Conner? Miss Hawk said.
Winch’s dad patted his own head. He scrunched his eyebrows. —What’re you doin here?
Miss Hawk circled halfway around the Rocket’s grille. She laid one wrist on the hood as if balancing herself.
—Why ya got muh boy with ya? Why’re ya – why’re ya here?
—Your boy? she said, and then she eyed Winch, lower lip curled over her teeth. She shook her head and puffed air out her lips. —It was a school project.
—Fer what?
—Tech, Winch said.
His dad came down the steps. He tripped and Winch wondered how much he’d had to drink, or worse. —So yer not, his dad said, and reached a hand toward Miss Hawk. —So yer not comin by?
Miss Hawk drummed her heels on the Rocket’s bumper. She was sitting on the hood by now. —Fifteen years later, Conner. A change of heart?
His dad’s hand swung sideways onto Winch’s shoulder. Those barium-pink fingers dug muscle. —Just when I seen ya here, thought ya were comin by.
—Sorry, Miss Hawk said.
His dad kicked clods of snow free from the driveway.
—Muh boy got what it takes?
—Dad, Winch said.
—Shut it. You’re a young buck. More kick ’en yer old man, his dad said, and then spat. —Give ’er a good ride, Winch?
—Conner, Miss Hawk said.
—She tell ya the truth of it? Old Jack, he was gettin nicer tail.
His dad’s fingers worked at Winch’s shoulder but his eyes were keen on Miss Hawk. She pinned her chin to her chest, clutched a set of keys. She yanked the car door and slipped inside. Winch’s dad stepped past him and railed a closed fist on the hood.
—No-good whore, he said, and Winch felt a lump in his throat he couldn’t swallow, and he watched his own fist smack his dad in the jaw, an earthy sound, like someone tapping a piece of chalk to slate.
For a moment his dad didn’t react. He touched his chin. He glanced from car to woman to boy and then back at the house, his head tilted to the ground and his left eye squinting as though puzzled. Then he shot forward and those two massive pink hands hoisted Winch from the ground.
He landed hip-first, sideways. The impact spiked down his leg. His dad fell upon him, limbs methodical. Winch batted an arm aside, absorbed a half blow with his ribs, snugged his elbow over it. He smelled beer and deodorant and cigarettes, and Winch had never known his dad to smoke.
Then he was rushing upward and the ground left his feet and then he was pinned to a tree. His dad stood below him, nostrils raging. Miss Hawk hollered from the Rocket. His gramps appeared at the front porch, barked: put him down. Winch stared at his dad whose fist gyrated in the air and whose forearm pinned him against the tree.
—Nup, his dad said, and lowered him. The fist relaxed, unfurled. He brushed Winch’s shoulder, as if to remove dirt. —I won’t be that guy.
He faced Miss Hawk. She’d started the Rocket and pulled around to leave. Winch leaned on the tree, a wide trunk, but not the one they built the tree fort on – too old, unsure roots, too much risk. His dad, facing the Rocket, turned his hands out as if to say, who could’ve known?
IN THE MORNING, Winch found his dad hunched at the kitchen table and his gramps pressed into the wedge where counters intersected, arms across his chest. It smelled like charred toast and burned eggs left to soak in the pan. Outside, what little snow they’d had was melted to a great bowel of mud and salt. Condensation pooled on the windowsills and the weak sun beat his dad’s shoulders. His gramps plucked the glass eye from its socket and set it on the countertop. It lolled on its side.
—Winch, I didn’t mean to scare ya, didn’t mean to hurt ya, his dad said. He stared straight ahead and set both his hands on their ridge, fingers stacked upright. —Got some things comin back to me is all.
—Happens, Winch said.
—Might be I need a break, ya know?
His gramps cleared his throat and the phlegm caught like a stalled engine. The glass eye tinked against a ceramic mug. He drew his thumbnail down the scar bisecting his socket.
—Sure, Winch said.
—Didn’t know Millie was yer teacher, is all.
—You had a thing?
—Were bad times.
His dad looked anywhere but at him.
—Where ya gonna go? Winch said.
—Won’t be away a long time.
—How we gonna get money?
His dad clicked his teeth and his hands rose level with his nose. He pressed them together. —Left yer gramps a stack of cash, sompthen I been savin, just in case.
Winch noticed the hiking pack on an adjacent chair and the puffy balloons of skin hanging over his dad’s cheekbones. His hair was greasy and it matted his ears, greyer than Winch could remember, but also thinner, like he’d been tugging at it. His beard had grown and the whiskery hair stained his face like soot.
—I didn’t mean to hurchya, Winch.
—Boy knows that Conner, his gramps said.
—He does.
—I’m not leavin fer good, his dad said. He twisted in his chair to face the older man.
His gramps reached for the glass eye, rinsed it under the tap, and popped it in. His eyelid fluttered for a moment and the orb spun. —Winch dodn’t know that.
—I just told ’im I’m not.
—Awright.
—I just told ’im! his dad said, and slammed his palm on the table.
Winch put his shoulder in the door frame. —Where’re ya goin? he said.
His dad slung the pack over his shoulder. It jingled and tinked with items that didn’t sound like food and clothes. —Might be I just need a break, his dad said.
After he was gone, Winch stayed in the dark kitchen with his gramps cross-armed at the counter. The old guy watched the floor, chin to chest. Then he plopped the glass eye into his palm and reached for a wallet-sized bottle by the sink and squirted a line of saline solution in the socket. His gramps blinked and wiped a channel of liquid at the corner and said, —Fucken shit always makes my eyes water.
At school Miss Hawk wouldn’t look at him. She was in her jeans and roughing shirts, but as he worked wood under a lathe or fit elbows and scored razor edges, Winch pictured her in that yellow dress, the way her face glowed from the ice reflection. —Millie, he mouthed to his metal. —Millie. He tried staying late, but she told him he had a key now, he could lock, and he spent four hours alone in the garage.
He took up shooting again. Him and his gramps played Donkey, like the basketball game but with rifles. They took turns propping empty Kokanee cans in obscure places on the shooting range: peeking over the lip of the Studebaker’s box; half-visible among the branches of a willow tree; suspended on chicken wire so it swayed in the wind like an arm. Winch figured the lone eye gave his gramps an advantage, because the old bastard iron-sighted shots Winch couldn’t gamble with a scope. They stocked ammo in a tin cigar case and after their games his gramps rattled the dwindling contents and looked up the road.
Each day he checked the entryway for his dad’s steeltoes.
At school, Winch kept with tweak-work on the Rocket, but the spring semester meant new electives he hated but needed to graduate, like art, and biology, and a course called Communication for kids too dumb for real English. The art teacher was a stout woman named Miss Mary Mason who wore a cooking apron and gave the best marks to clever pieces. A deathly skinny kid made a door out of jars and called it The Door is Ajar. The preacher’s son dismembered plastic dolls and fashioned himself an Armchair. Winch couldn’t draw and he couldn’t paint and he wasted the hour flipping through Layman’s Machinist, desperate for an idea. He read the article on the home-built biplane. It included a sketch of the product, so he hit Miss Hawk’s shop and tried his luck with a miniature. He bolted it together with nail guards, drywall anchors, and an EMT union so it could swivel at the base. Mason graded it a B, said it wasn’t art, but good craft. He pawned it to his gramps, who set it on his windowsill beside a banana-sized cactus and a set of dog tags.
His gramps started telling him to make sure the lights were off, his heat dialed down. He started coughing too, at night and in the morning – low, sledge-like sounds while he mulled his coffee.
A girl named Chris with hair the colour of motor oil asked Winch if he’d like to go to a movie. She had compact lips and a dimple more prominent on one side than the other. She said she liked the way he handled things. She said she liked his little biplane. Winch mumbled an acceptance and paid their way to the Toby Theatre on money his gramps thrust into his palm with a wink. The Toby’s seatbacks were padded with maroon shag carpet, and overhead, models of World War Two fighters swung from long threads. They pressed hip to hip in a two-person seat and Winch supplied the popcorn and halfway through Blazing Saddles they were tongue deep. She tasted like butter and she grabbed incessantly for his hands, and he didn’t know why.
IN EARLY SPRING, Chris suggested they sneak to the natural hot springs at the Fairmont resort. One of her brother’s friends, a kid they called Squints, tagged along. Squints had curly, pubic-like hair and glasses as thick as a finger. Winch had ideas about the guy, but didn’t voice them, swiped his gramps’s only bush-lamp, a million-candle beast. When his gramps saw it tucked under his arm, he leaned forward on the couch, where he spent more and more time.
—Ya gonna do sompthen stupid?
—Prolly.
His gramps coughed phlegm and with an apologetic look hawked into a ceramic mug with a picture of two old guys tending a bonfire. He was chalk-white. —I don’t wanna waste gas pickin y’up from jail.
—I can hiket.
—Worried about bears?
—Nup.
His gramps lurched upright, hands gripped on his thighs. —Winchester won’t stop a bear, anyway, he said, and fingered an empty .308 cartridge centred in a placemat on the table. He tapped his forehead where hair met skull. —Skulls so thick they ricochet bullets an’ whatever else.
—Gotta catch ’em in the neck, Winch said.
His gramps shook his head, opened his mouth. —Gums.
Chris drove her dad’s Suburban. The journey would take forty minutes, another ten to zigzag to a point where they could hike for the springs. Winch inspected Chris’s tires before they hit the road. He remarked that they looked bald as all hell and she flashed him her dad’s BCAA card and told him to get in the fucken truck.
They reached a toll booth where a man in a blue blazer wore circular glasses perched too far down his nose. He peered crow-like at them, slid his window open and dangled one tattooed hand menacingly out the booth.
—Nope, he told them. —Springs are closed for tonight.
—We’ve got friends at the resort, Chris said.
—Don’t think you do.
They retreated. Winch notched his seat forward. Chris hunched over the wheel like a rodent and Squints stayed silent in the backseat and Winch wondered if he planned to contribute anything to the entire trip.
—Could get some booze, Chris said. She pulled onto the shoulder and flicked the cabins on. —I might not get ID’d.
—No, Squints said. In the mirror Winch saw him stretch an arm along the seat. He nodded toward the box and his tongue passed along his teeth and his lip bulged with it. —We can get to the springs guerrilla style. Old guy won’t see us. I know some guys doin a party there. Pretend like we’re in Vietnam.
—How long? Winch said.
—Hour up, same down.
They left the Suburban in the lot of an A.G. Foods grocery, under a sodium street lamp that lit the silver vehicle like a pumpkin. Squints declared his right to lead. Winch waved him by. As they embarked, Chris told him she’d watched an episode of Twilight Zone where a wild-eyed hunter prowled through the forest only to find himself prey to a terrible beast. He tugged her hip against his. When Winch flicked his gramps’s massive bush-lamp, Squints ducked as though under fire. —Keep it off, he hissed.
—Awright Sergeant Squints Sir, Winch said, and saluted.
Near the toll the old guy peered through his lenses as if he’d spotted movement. Squints swathed through the brush. Winch held his arm in front of his eyes to catch whipping branches. They appeared on a mountainous road and the resort’s lights brimmed in the night sky like fog. Squints passed rubbery water bottles around. Chris circulated a joint. Whenever headlights appeared they barrelled for the ditch, and Winch gashed his elbow in one of the dives.
Chris prodded the skin. —You have thin blood.
—And a thick skull, Winch said.
—Best place to get hit with a beer bottle, Squints said, and rapped his forehead.
Winch’s dad had a scar curled over the crest of his forehead, same spot Squints was tapping with his knuckles. After the house burned his mum disappeared, except for one night when she snuck in the rear door of his gramps’s place. Winch’s dad shovelled stew from his bowl and watched an episode of Dr. Who, and though his dad saw her coming, no man alive could have dodged that bottle. Winch looked on from the bedroom where he tucked into the corner with a stray cat named Kalamazoo. Biggest scrap his parents ever dug into, first time he saw real desperation, the way a man gets wild-eyed when he’s on the defensive. His dad spent a day laid out with a concussion and two bust knuckles. If he flattened his hand on a hard surface and lifted his middle finger, the bone would rear like a serpent.
They crossed a bridge. Winch grabbed for the fibrous rail and it slickened his palm. A river howled beneath him and the trees on the water’s edge shuddered like a drying dog. He hadn’t trekked through wilderness for a while. The air hung with dew and the scent of snowfall and the bridge swayed and the moon scythed amid clouds. Halfway across he latched on to the rope rails and braced his legs on the net siding and hoped for a gust to whip the bridge like a sling.
Squints led them down an embankment and Winch went first so he could catch Chris if she took a dive. The air smelled like gunpowder. Chris’s shoulder brushed his and he swung his hip into her playfully. Squints soldiered forward with renewed purpose, a bounce to his step like a man planning to get laid. When the springs finally swept into view Squints chortled and pumped his fist in the air. A waterfall splashed to a rocky pool and above it smaller, hotter pools bubbled and steam lilted off them and guys Winch’s age and older filled those pools, beer cans clutched talon-like, and empty bottles and cardboard littered around the springs like leaves. He recognized some as jocks, others as the welfare hicks who crowded outside Miss Hawk’s shop to catcall her when she walked between classes.
—Squinnnssseeeeyyy, someone bellowed.
In the moonlight a trio of men rose from the hot springs and shambled across the shale that lined the pools. Squints stepped toward them and they clasped hands and Winch realized he did not know Squints’s past, what he used to do, which groups he used to hang with. Chris was silent as all hell and she kept one shoulder behind him, her chin to her chest.
—Who’s this? the centre man said, and lifted his bottle to indicate Winch. He was the oldest of the three of them, pushing twenty-five, and facial hair horseshoed along his jaw. All three were sleek with the hot water. Steam haloed them. The middle man had a tattoo inked along his neck and down his collar, looping his abs at the ribs, like a belt.
—I’m Winch.
The three men laughed. —Hoi Winch, I’m Lever, one of them said, and they laughed again.
—An’ I’m Gearbox.
—An’ I’m Stick Shift.
—Good one, Butter, Squints said.
The man in the middle – Butter – rubbed his nose and sniffled loudly. —Who’s the cute one in the back? Least ya brought some tail.
—She’s a friend of mine, Squints said.
—Open season, Butter said.
A gruff voice in the background yelled and Butter twisted halfway, and his exposed cock swung and Winch saw the three men had been skinny-dipping. They all were. —Wanna come fer a swim, baby?
Butter reached across as if for Chris’s wrist and Winch knocked his hand away. —Back off, he said.
Butter fingered his beard. Squints sidled away and the two men on either side backed up. Chatter halted in the springs. These were guys who never showed their faces at school but would swarm like maggots at the first whiff of a fight. Winch listened to the waterfall splatter in the largest pool. His dad had told him to pick his fights, because there was no reason to take a shitkicking. A man can tell when things are out of control. In desperation there are no Queensberry Rules.
—Huh, Butter said, as if considering.
Guys climbed from the water and beads trickled down their legs to the pools. The air smelled like a bedroom with no open windows, like ten-ounce boxing gloves with cracked canvas palms. Winch pulled his gramps’s bush-lamp to his chest, as if to use it as a shield. Butter fingered his beard again and as he did he eyed Chris. In a few moments Winch would have a dozen other guys atop him.
—Huh, Butter said again.
—Wer leavin, Winch said.
Butter’s tongue frogged along his teeth.
—I said wer leavin.
—Yeah? Butter said.
—Didn’t know you guys were here is all.
—Think yer takin yer lady friend with ya?
—Thought it was empty up here.
—An’ what if I’m gonna give ya a shitkicken fer comin up here? Butter said.
Winch’s heart thrummed in his chest and he tightened his grip on the bush-lamp, considered its weight. He linked his fingers around the stiff handle and thumbed the rigid shank, the rubbery slats that provided him grip. It had metal edges, thin barn doors used to funnel light. Butter hunched like a zombie and stroked his fingers along his beard, tongue pinched in the gap between his teeth and his lip.
—I’m just kinda hopin ya don’t, Winch said.
—Hopin I don’t.
—Yup.
—Hopin I don’t take yer lady friend from ya too I bet.
—Yup.
Butter laughed, the other guys with him.
—Yer a funny kid, Stick Shift. A funny kid. Where’d Squints find ya, anyway. Funny kid. Butter nodded toward him. —He’s a funny kid eh? The others laughed again and something like a bloodclot balled in Winch’s throat, at the divot where his breastbone became his neck, a hard, lumpy knot he had to swallow down.
—Get the hell outta here, Butter said, swiping his hand under his nose. —Get out before I break all yer hopes an’ dreams. Y’owe me big, little man, y’owe me big.
He and Chris left Squints with the guys and retraced their steps. Chris fished the remnants of her joint from an inside pocket and offered it, but Winch shook his head and she bagged it. They followed the road. It took longer, and when they passed the toll booth the old guy slammed his palm against the glass. Chris’s Suburban still glowed like a pumpkin. They had barely said a word all the way down, the occasional warning at an exposed root or an overhanging branch. Winch slumped in his seat and Chris waited for two full breaths before she started the ignition.
—Thanks, she squeaked, and he patted her on the thigh, an inch or two higher than they’d established as appropriate.
At home, Chris let him out and rolled down the driveway in neutral, headlamps off. Winch pushed through the front door and kicked his boots into the closet. The living room was dark, but light spilled from the kitchen. He replaced the bush-lamp in the boot closet beside a long-unused fishing pole and a toolbox his dad used to haul down from the shelf before work. His gramps was asleep at the table, forehead to placemat, the .308 disassembled in front of him. Winch capped a tin of polish and a tube of oil and tugged a gummy cloth from his gramps’s fingers. He’d never watched the old guy clean the weapon to that extent, never seen the components separated. He recognized the bolt, the tension coil for the trigger, the chamber, and the slick cylinder that locked into the barrel. In his gramps’s open palm: a set of dog tags and a .50-calibre shell as long as Winch’s thumb – relics whose origins Winch did not know. The firing assembly lay apart, the screws that fastened it scattered, pin disengaged from hinge. Winch fingered the sulphur-scorched hammer and it rattled in its joint, limp, lacking the force he’d known to spark gunpowder.
—Gramps? Winch said, way too loud, and couldn’t bring himself to take the old man’s pulse.
Winch didn’t go to school the next day, or the next, or the next. He sat on the couch with the blinds pulled and the Winchester scattered around him. Reassembly of the rifle was beyond him. His hands combed over those scraps of foreign steel. He prodded oiled joints, traced notches, and his palms smudged with the smell of loose change. In tech class Miss Hawk had taught him to troubleshoot mechanics. Work from isolation. Work from causation. Why won’t the hammer rise, what’s catching the swivel, if he left it to last, would the recoil block still guard against impact? He pulled his gramps’s hunting rifle off the wall to deconstruct and analyze, but it was a lever-action, and he couldn’t reverse-engineer it. Chris left him messages every hour on the hour. She came by on the second night and he ducked upstairs, to his gramps’s room, and she only dared a few steps into the empty house. He wanted to call out to her, to be hugged and comforted by her, but nobody had ever taught him how to ask. It struck him that he was entirely alone.
On the third evening Winch watched headlights flash through a slat in the curtain. Tires churned gravel and a car door whooshed shut and a man cursed. Winch went to the curtains and the light slashed across his face as he peeked through. His dad steadied himself with a hand on the hood of his Sweptline. He reached through the open window and killed the ignition and the lights died.
—Winchy, et’s yer dad, he slurred. The front door was locked – to prevent Chris entry – and his dad rattled the rickety thing in its frame. —I dunno where I put muh fucken keys.
—Why ya comin back now? Winch hollered through the wood.
—Muh dad’s dead ya dumb cunt. Came back to pay muh dues.
—Ya never called me Winchy before.
—Aww come on.
Winch opened the door and his dad came two steps through and stopped dead as rock. He sucked on breath, and those maimed hands tugged on the hem of his shirt, like a boy. They stayed like that, with the door flown wide. Then his dad eased it shut and pressed his forehead to the wood. —Goddammit, he said.
—I can’t rebuild the rifle, Winch said.
—What?
—Gramps’s rifle, Winch said. —I can’t.
His dad pushed off from the wall. He smelled like a locker room. Winch saw ruddy stains on the sleeves of his dad’s T-shirt, frays at the edges, smudges on the collar like oil smears, or unwashed fingers.
Winch went to the kitchen table where he had the rifle parts piled and ordered. His dad followed, the sound of his boots clunking on the lino like a loose timing belt. The two of them sagged into wooden chairs. Winch surveyed the disassembled Winchester, sought similarities among the pieces, hooks and eyes, threads and mouths and notches that could click together like molars. It should’ve been easy for him. It’s what he did – it’s all he knew how to do. His dad pinched a chunk of metal between thumb and index, gave it a twirl. It was jagged, big as a Christmas orange. —Ken ya make some coffee?
Winch put on a pot. His dad massaged his temples, one thumb on each side.
—I done muh best, Winchy.
—Why ya callin me Winchy?
His dad squeezed and unsqueezed that metal part – a component of the stock, if Winch hazarded a guess. —I always call ya Winchy, ya dumb cunt.
—Ya don’t never.
—The hell cares about that now, his dad said, and flicked the part aside. —Why ya got this mess here?
—Told ya, Winch said. —I can’t rebuild it.
—Can’t rebuild what?
—I just told ya. Gramps’s rifle. I just said.
—S’just a gun, Winch.
—It’s Gramps’s.
—Awright, his dad said. The coffee blurbled, and Winch lasted a few good seconds of his dad’s distant stare before he got up and poured two cups. His dad didn’t drink his – only held it in his palm and gritted his teeth.
—Yer a good kid Winch, his dad said. —An’ I’m a shitty dad.
—Shut yer mouth, Winch said.
—What’re ya goin on about?
Winch sipped the coffee. It burned the roof of his mouth. —Ya don’t know me. Ya never even knew me.
—Awright?
—Whatcha want me to say? Winch said.
—I’m a shitty dad, awright?
—Yeah, awright.
—Yeah? his dad said.
—You ain’t even said yer sorry.
—Fer what?
—For leavin us, Winch said. He took another sip. —Chrissakes.
His dad put an elbow on the table. He made a fist, and the knuckles cracked like a ratchet.
—This ent how I thought it’d go.
—How’d ya think, then? Winch said.
His dad just shook his head. —I dunno, Winchy. Like when I got back ya’d be happy to see me or sompthen. That’s how et’s spose to go. Yer my son, fer fucker’s sake. I done muh best.
Winch felt a whole lot bigger all of a sudden. —I dunno, dad, he said.
His dad’s face scrunched up, went old, worn out. —I’mma sell this house.
—And where’re we goin then? Winch said, but he knew the answer, had known the answer for a long time by now.
—Dunno where yer goin, Winch, his dad said.
—That’s why ya came back, then.
—Need to get out.
—Yer my dad.
—Nah Winchy, his dad said, down toward the coffee and the four-fingered hand that gripped it. —Muh dad was yer dad, I didn’t do good as him. He got it right or sompthen.
In one of Winch’s better memories, he and his dad crouched before a bonfire and tried in vain to make s’mores. They’d just hung the tree fort, and his dad smelled as if he’d been tending a blaze all day. He had a moustache, dark hair that only barely receded past his forehead. Winch was six and his dad seemed noble then, like a man from the nineteen-thirties. They slurped tap water from a steel canteen. They wrestled on the grass, wrapped roasted hotdogs in white bread. And that night they bunked in the tree fort until darkness had settled around them and Winch had drifted asleep with his dad’s arm draped over him like a blanket.
His dad pressed a knuckle to his forehead. Please dad, Winch wanted to say.
—I’m real sorry, his dad said, and rubbed both eyes with the heels of his palms, and Winch wondered if the good memories would remain, or if they’d all rust down to this dim kitchen, that broken rifle, his weeping dad. The coffee cooled and thickened but when Winch raised it to his lips he still blew across it – an act of denial, because if it was hot, and if it stayed hot, he had reason not to leave the table, and he and his dad could persist as father and son at least a few breaths longer.
WINCH SPENT A GOOD long time with the rifle parts, this time in the dark, while upstairs his dad ruffled through sock drawers and medicine cabinets and the dusty underside of beds in search of who knows what. Winch couldn’t fix the rifle – probably never would – but he still liked the weight of the pieces, still liked the way their metal smell chafed onto his calluses and the outside of his hands. So he rolled them around his fingertips, let miscellaneous chunks clack and tick together, let them knock the wood with their hollow baritone sounds. Sometimes he smelled sulphur, or guncotton. Sometimes he heard his dad intake a breath, creak on a floor joist, shut bedroom doors more forcefully than they needed to be shut. The house stayed dark, and Winch stayed still. The fridge hummed, cars trundled by on Invermere’s broken streets. Hours later, getting hungry, he rose and moved blindly upstairs to his gramps’s bedroom where he found his dad on the bed with a razor and a rail of cocaine laid out on a baking pan.
—So this is it, he said.
—I done muh best, his dad said.
Winch flipped his keys, tried to look anywhere. —I’m goin for a drive.
His dad wiped a sleeve under his nose, sniffled. The room smelled like musk, and semen.
—That’s muh truck, Winchy.
—I’m takin a drive.
His dad set the baking pan down, touched his toes to the floor. —I said et’s muh truck.
Winch had his wallet and his own set of keys, one of which could operate his dad’s truck. He just needed to get there first. —Awright, he said.
—Yer lyin to me, his dad said.
—Am not.
—Winchy, that’s my truck.
Winch bolted, dragged the door closed behind him and skipped down the stairs in threes. His dad gave chase, clambered out the door and craned heavily into the banister. Winch hit the front door in all-out sprint. —I fucken swear to God, his dad called, but he tripped somewhere in the house and Winch heard the clatter of things knocked askew.
He hauled ass down the driveway. The truck’s passenger door was unlocked and he jumped inside and dropped it in reverse. His dad flew out the entryway and lurched a couple steps before he heaved his hands to his thighs and huffed like a man exhausted, and Winch peeled out and felt his dad’s eyes trace him all the way around the curve.
He ended up at Miss Hawk’s house. His headlights beamed through her front window and movement skipped past the slatted curtains. When she came onto the porch she wore an unflattering dress that hung straight from her shoulders down, men’s white socks. Her hair had grown out to its dusty blond, and at a distance, in the low light, she looked like she had the skin of a teenager. Winch dropped from the driver’s seat to the ground, her paved driveway. He only knew where she lived because she’d taken her whole tech class, years ago, for a field trip.
—Have you been eating? she said.
—I need to shower or somethin.
—I’m dirty as all hell.
—Winch, Miss Hawk said, and combed a hand through her hair.
—Muh gramps passed.
—I heard.
—Muh dad just showed up, he’s selling the house.
—Why don’t you come inside, she said, and pushed the door open a sliver.
Miss Hawk’s house was more cluttered than his but it smelled sweeter. A fire burned in her living room. The boot closet brimmed with steeltoes and hikers and a bunched-up pair of Carhartts. Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” hummed from a radio in the living room by a butter-coloured couch.
—Bathroom’s down the hall, she said. —I was making a grilled cheese. I’ll make you one.
He realized he had no toiletries, but it’d been days and he wanted, if nothing else, to feel clean in Miss Hawk’s house. The bathroom was a tight, storage-sized room with a standing shower and iron decorations. He torqued the hot water crank until steam filled the stall like fog, and fit himself under the tap and let the streams rivet down his chest. The water pounded his skull and he thought about things like money and Chris and if his dad had reported the truck as stolen. Then he heard a thud and the walls shook, and a woman’s voice shrilled through the house. He shut the water off. His dad’s Sweptline in the driveway, like a trail of goddamned bread crumbs.
—Where is he! Whore, the truck’s out front, where is he!
—Get out, Miss Hawk said.
—Millie, his dad growled. —I don’t wanna hurchya.
He pictured his dad’s lined face, the grey hair and the eyes bloodshot and high. All those years at the barium mine, the hard work, the good example – and now a cokehead like his mother. He wanted to grab his dad’s hair and smash that face into a tabletop, until the wood was dented with his dad’s front teeth and all that remained in his fist was a bloody husk of hair and sinew.
Winch didn’t bother to put on clothes. The adrenalin was in him like an awakening. He stormed out the bathroom and his dad wheeled and said, —There’s the pussy.
Winch couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to. A great pressure moved him forward. His dad wore a thin grey T-shirt ripped at the collar, blue jeans stained like a drunk’s. His eyes were red and wild and open. Winch took long strides, booted a stack of books aside, and with all the upward momentum he could muster he lunged and hooked his dad by the neck, heaved him against drywall. His naked, beaded arm tensed, the muscle strained. His dad latched his fingers, clawed at the grip. It was like the day he watched his dad and mom fight, how his pupils narrowed and his actions went frantic.
Winch backhanded him, hard enough to split his knuckles on his dad’s gums.
—Take yer truck an’ get out, Winch said through his teeth.
His dad grunted and cold air breezed over Winch’s legs, his abs, up his exposed ribs. Miss Hawk stood in the doorway to her kitchen, lit, angel-like, and moved her head once sideways, no.
—Get out, Winch said, and let his dad drop to his knees.
—Don’t want no boy anyway, his dad coughed, upward.
When he’d gone and Winch had reclaimed his clothes, Miss Hawk dabbed his knuckles with a lukewarm cloth. He’d never had her skin this close to him. Sometimes she moved her hands aside to see him, but he pretended to examine the decor. Her cabinets were deep maroon and she said she painted them herself. A Coke bottle, wrapped in masking tape, centred on the tabletop, plugged with a thin, unused candle. Winch’s gramps kept a syrup container covered in glued-on beans as the centrepiece of his table – an art project from his dad’s youth.
He didn’t realize he was crying until Miss Hawk set the cloth aside and laid her delicate, callused palms on his cheeks.
She locked the door behind them. His cheeks burned as she cinched his shirt in her fist and drew him close. She smelled like she’d been in the shop all day. He clasped her at the waist, unpinned her buttons. She pried his shirt, notched his jeans, and he tightened against the denim. She was square, almost boyish beneath her clothes, stronger than him, and when she clapped her palms on his deltoids his whole body startled at the impact. He trolleyed his lips along her stomach, across her belly button, to the rigid hairs at the fulcrum of her pelvis. She rocked and shuddered like a truck. When he wedged himself into place a breath trilled through her teeth. Their thighs skidded together. She shifted him, adjusted angles, linked her fingers through his hair. Her nails raked over his ribs. He tended to lower his chin to his chest, stare at her breasts, but she leveraged his head upward with two fingers under his jaw.
Afterward, Winch tucked the sheet under his chin. A horseshoe moon slipped behind clouds. Cars zoomed the Friday streets and their headlamps swivelled through the window like searchlights and Winch pressed his face in the pillow that smelled like Miss Hawk. A tow truck approached from the distance with the distinctive gurgle of diesel and power. Winch waited for it to Doppler. Miss Hawk’s pale back faced him and as the tow truck ambled past the window its amber hazards lit her skin like honey. She sniffled, and Winch realized she was weeping. A mole perched on the cusp of one of her vertebrae, another behind her ear. She made a noise, almost like a horse’s whinny, and he reached out with tenderness and brushed his knuckles along her spine, but she shimmied forward against her knees and left his hand, cold, in the space between them.
IN A WEEK HE’D have no money, but Miss Hawk would forward his name to a goateed mechanic everyone called Shank, and Winch would receive a phone call, drop from highschool two months before graduation, and start his apprenticeship. While finishing his first year at a community college in Nelson, he’d find out Emily Hawk was knocked up, and he’d count the months backward on his fingers with dread.
But that night he lay awake, naked and spent, and waited, hoping she would circle her tough arms around him. He wanted to feel the taut muscles in her stomach, the swell of her breasts, her nose. As he drifted to sleep he dreamed a future where Miss Hawk birthed a daughter he nicknamed Caboose, where his dad became her gramps, where he built a hangar in his backyard with a concrete floor and a tar-sealed dome in which he undertook a lifelong project to construct a yellow biplane. He would tailor it with two sets of wings and a propeller bolted to the nose, a rudder Miss Hawk would swear he salvaged from weathervane parts. And in that dream he sparked the engine and the plane sputtered and he snugged a pair of aviators over his eyes, and while his daughter and Miss Hawk watched and his dad manned the gunner’s seat, those ever-pink fingers strong and patient as a father’s, Winch took off in a contraption he’d hand-built to carry him from the earth.