Chapter
IRRITATION CREEPS UP Archie’s chest. Awareness flickers at the edges of his mind. Archie’s eyes swivel side to side as he checks out his surroundings with his ears and the fine hairs erupting from his skin. Like little shards of glass, the irritation pricks the space inside his heart, urging him to get out. Get out where? Archie doesn’t know. He’s by himself, in a snug room—he darts his eyes to the right to sense the level of light on the door-side of his room while keeping his eyes closed—is his door open? No. It’s pitch-black behind his eyelids. A vacuum of darkness that no light can penetrate. Archie tells himself to calm down. Relax, he thinks to the glass shards pricking, pricking, pricking him.
Get out.
Archie snaps open his eyes.
His ceiling glows amorphously above. Panic roils his digestive juices into his esophagus. Archie swallows hard, trying to suck saliva out of the dry-bed of his mouth. He sucks in his cheeks, urging his saliva glands to produce spit for him. He whispers to himself: “Relax, relax, relax.” Drops of saliva douse his cheeks and moisten his palate above his teeth, easing the stale gumminess. Again, he vacuums in his cheeks, but his glands won’t give up any more precious liquid.
Archie swallows dryly, and panic rises into his heart.
He tears off the top bedsheet and vaults out of bed. Archie’s sleeping bag flies off the bed and slides across the floor to land up against the multi-locked door in a crumpled heap. Tension rises his shoulders and drives his fingers into his hands. His short-clipped nails cut red lines into his palms. Archie had forgotten to clip them shorter last night, his nightly ritual to keep himself safe. But impending Remembrance Day ceremonies had consumed his thoughts so that he forgot even his routine functions.
“You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe,” Archie says loudly, over and over, hoping the repetition will make it so. “You’re not,” snarls a small voice that has more power than all the waterfalls in the world combined. Archie hears its threat; the potent voice squelches his soothing self-talk.
Archie’s chin rears against his neck in his effort to swallow.
He flickers his tongue out, trying to wet his lips. He pulls his lips in and out, in and out, hoping that somewhere, somehow, his spit will gush into his desperate mouth and provide relief. It doesn’t.
The VA counsellor’s voice speaks to him from the distance of his memory banks: “When you feel that panic, Archie, tell yourself where you are, who you’re with, that you’re safe, what year it is.” Archie blinks against that memory, wanting to hunch in on himself more than he wants to follow the advice of a man who’d left him.
No, his logical mind tries to tell him, listen to his advice. Your counsellor didn’t leave you. The VA made him leave you. He had no choice. A soldier must follow orders, even in hospitals. “But why?” Archie moans to himself. Moisture beads his eyes and dots his thick, black lashes. He doesn’t heed them. He crouches to the window. He splits the blinds open at the bent slat and peers out onto the night-blanketed street.
The street lays quiet.
Silver-metal streetlights light up the loneliness below his window. Windows in the dilapidated houses across from him are obsidian rectangles. The devil’s light, he thinks. The devil doesn’t like light that illuminates. The devil sucks suns into his belly and chews them up with the thousand mouths of the demons who reside in it.
Click.
Something clicked somewhere in his house. Suddenly, Archie drops onto his haunches, his back to the window, his head facing the door, his buttocks tensed, ready to spring him forward off his toes. His door stands in its place, unmoving. For long minutes Archie waits, watching. He sends his eyes around the perimeter of the door to check for changing light levels, for shadows moving stealthily in the concealing silence.
Nothing.
Archie sends his eyes around the perimeter of his room, over the walls blank of any artwork, over his bed, its top sheet half off it, over his nightstand—
The gun stops his scrutiny.
The Outdoorsman lies there, glinting in the artificial light slanting through the gap between the crooked blind slat and the one below it.
Archie’s breath vibrates his vocal cords. The wheezing hum reverberates in the room. His eyes widen as he takes in the comforting sight. Archie straightens up gradually and glides over to his nightstand to stand over his gun with its long, blue-black barrel. The Outdoorsman lies there innocently on its left side. Carefully, he reaches his left hand down to pick up the gun. Archie holds it with his trigger finger along the length of the barrel, not slipping it into its natural place. He scans Pawpaw’s hefty gun, the weight of it balanced and reassuring in his grip.
Archie relaxes.
The gun is his friend.
It was Pawpaw’s friend.
“My Outdoorsman never leaves me,” Pawpaw had told him one summer day, when the cicadas were quiet in the dry heat and the coyotes had found shade in the wadis to lie panting on their sides. The wildfire haze had obscured the far mountains as Pawpaw and he had sat on the front porch of his grandfather’s home. That afternoon was one of the last times Archie had seen Pawpaw. Archie’s father had had to help Pawpaw sell his home after his grandmother had died the previous year from congestive heart failure, a phrase his parents and grandparents had bandied about but meant nothing to him except that she always breathed heavily like a stuffy, old engine that belched stale smoke.
“Pawpaw can’t live by himself.” Sir’s voice slices into Archie’s hearing. “He’s having trouble with his eyesight and feet. Diabetes.” With his implacable tone, Sir concludes: “A nursing home is what he needs.” Archie’s father leaves to secure a spot.
Archie sits with Pawpaw. “They won’t let me take this,” Pawpaw says, patting his gun in its worn leather holster on his hip. “My trusty companion. It’s with me always.” Pawpaw’s voice fades into another place, another time. Archie feels like Pawpaw has already left him. His heart staccatos nervously. He shuts his lips against words that want to spill out in case Pawpaw leaves him right then and there. He cannot conceive of a life without Pawpaw in it. Mortality was an abstract, not a reality.
“I want you to have it,” Pawpaw says abruptly to Archie as he turns his head to stare right into Archie’s soul with those eyes of his now faded from disease and the toll of aging but still glacial with hardness born from too much experience.
“Me?” Archie squeaks, intensely embarrassed at the high-pitched tone at odds with his normally smooth, deep voice.
“Yes, you. You’re not a squeal like your twin. You’re a man’s man, like me. You’re in the army, boy.”
Archie has signed up and was on his way to basic training when he stopped in at his grandfather’s for one last conversation. He talked to his grandfather nightly, just before suppertime. It was their ritual. He drove over in his beat-up Ford 150, its tan colour faded from its layers and layers of dust. Pawpaw shouted only minutes earlier, as he always had, as he watched Archie drive up: “The army will teach you to clean that up. Have some pride in yourself, boy!” Archie knows Pawpaw didn’t want him to join the army. Gratitude lifts his lips, gratitude that Pawpaw accepts his decision and himself despite his inclination.
A faint bang, somewhere outside, jolts Archie. His consciousness shifts from the present of that long-ago New Mexican night into the present night of a chilly Toronto November. Archie is staring at his gun.
Archie thinks: Pawpaw’s companion, I’m holding it, as Pawpaw had held it that day. The Outdoorsman’s weight seems to lighten in his hand; Archie switches it into his right hand. Pawpaw was left-handed, but he’s right-handed. Yet the gun doesn’t seem to want to be held in his right hand; it demands to be switched back into his left.
Archie obeys.
The gun seems to come to life. The Smith & Wesson Outdoorsman—Pawpaw’s gun—seems to be talking to him like Pawpaw is guiding him, urging him to do what he must do to escape. The shards of glass irritating his heart sharpen in their insistence that he must move, leave, get out, just go. Now!
Archie lifts the gun higher until it’s hovering right before his eyes. His left forefinger slides into its accustomed place on the trigger. He feels the impending effort of pulling that trigger. He extends his left arm out while keeping the gun’s profile at his eye level.
Archie stands there for long minutes. The glowing numerals on his clock change upward from 04:33 to 04:34 to 04:35. The numerals crawl into his attention. His eyes focus on the last numeral as it changes from 5 to 6. He refocuses on his gun. Archie bends his wrist towards his face, and the barrel of the gun rotates toward his eyes, towards the space between his eyes. His hand freezes. The gun is pointing to the side right of his right eye. He tenses his trigger finger. If he shoots now, he’ll graze his temple, the tender point of his head. But he won’t die.
And he really wants to leave.
To escape.
To not be here with its moments of sudden prickling deep inside him, of sounds that throw him down into vigilance, into the unabated loneliness of his family that had loved him so much that they’d told him—
Archie judders his head free of that memory. He wants to hurl up the horrors, to purge their evil. But he cannot. Pawpaw’s gun can take him away from it all. His faithful companion, Pawpaw had said, the evening before his companion had not let him down. The night it had let him escape. Archie angles his wrist ninety degrees, the flexion straining his muscles and tendons, and draws his arm backwards. The .38/44 moves its sight toward his left temple.
“You’re going to be there, right, Archie?” Andrew’s voice booms out of nowhere.
Memory becomes reality.
“Promise me, Archie. You’ll be there?”
Archie had nodded.
“Not a nod, Specialist,” Andrew had commanded. “I want an affirmative, Specialist.”
“Affirmative, sir.”
“Good,” Andrew had slapped him on the back. “We’ll be in the parade. You don’t have to be, but I want to see you near that cenotaph.”
Archie had nodded.
Andrew had stared right into his skull. “I want to hear you say it, Specialist.”
Archie had said: “I will be there, sir, right next to the cenotaph, saluting you as you march by.”
“Good man,” Andrew had replied warmly, gripping his shoulder with his large warm hand for an instant.
Archie’s view of the gun blurs as he lowers it down and places it back onto the nightstand soundlessly.
He had promised.
Weariness covers Archie like a sodden blanket as his wrist throbs from its unwilling bend under a tortured mind’s will.
Archie drops onto his bed, his head into his hands, and sobs silently, not wanting to wake up his rooming-house neighbour, not wanting to hear any more pounding of shells and fists, not wanting to live in abandonment’s stink any more.