Once You Break a Knuckle (11 page)

Two years later they were divorced. That same summer, Biff and the boy drove eighteen hours to the Prairies and stayed with his brother, Bill, on a cattle farm outside Regina, where Biff drank more home-brewed wine than a man should and where the boy spent whole days in Bill's yard with Bill's dogs – two big Rottweilers named Moose I and Moose II. Biff's clothes were a wreck of torn work tops and khaki pants, and he'd quit shaving. The way his brother stared at him – it felt like coming home beaten. It felt like not coming home at all.

—You still got Princess? Biff said at dinner one day.

His brother nodded – one deep, deliberate dip of his chin. —She had a calf.

—No way.

—After all these years, his brother said.

—She a cow of yours? the boy said through a mouthful of steak.

Biff sucked on his teeth, saw his brother watching. He shrug-a-lugged. —Not only that, he told the boy. —She's my first cow ever. Might not mind seeing her, actually.

—She had a calf, got all mean.

—It's Princess.

—Yeah. But like I say, she's mean now.

Biff barely heard him, took the boy and hopped in the Ranger and made his way to the barn. Then he was facing Princess, his darling cow, who, as a young man, Biff had saved from certain death – the only living creature he could say that for. That time, Princess was pregnant, and Biff woke in the night with this sudden feeling – the same feeling he'd later have about him and his wife, how doomed they were – as if she needed his help. He bolted out the door, ignored his hollering old man, and found Princess in labour. They lost the calf – and every other one, every other time – but Princess persisted.

And now her little sucker of a calf was sucking milk, legs as wobbly as a TV stand. Princess had a bottle-shaped blotch along her bottom ribs. One eye was grey and the other green, and both of them a tad too close together. Her head was big for the rest of her, which itself was pretty damned big.

The boy stayed outside the stall, but Biff went in. Princess's tail whipped against her sides. The bleary-eyed calf slunk toward Princess's hind legs but Biff lowered his palm at it and it seemed to calm. He laid his hand on
Princess's flank – he loved that cow, would've nicknamed his daughter the same had he had one, and never told her its origins.

—Hey, gal, he said.

Princess made a deep, mewling sound in her throat, like a drill stuck in low gear. He patted her, like you might a dog. —Remember me? he said, and she raised her head as if acknowledging that she did, in fact, remember him.

—See? Biff said, turning to the boy.

In hindsight, his warning might have been the scuffing of the calf's hooves on the floor, or the sound of straw kicked into, and then drifting from, the air – like a person flicking dirt off their fingertips. But it happened too fast – too fast, even as he registered something like horror on the boy's face, but not quite horror, because what kind of man gets scared of a cow?

The beast knocked him over with one great bullheaded blow to his blind side. It was like getting blasted through concrete. It was like being pushed underwater – that disorienting. Biff hit the ground mouth first and the muscle above his shoulder – the big one, tough as trailer-hitch, that holds the arm in place and can tow a flatbed – tore nearly in two, and then Princess was on top him, front legs bent to pin him beneath her weight and her big head clubbing him like a madman with a barstool.

Even with two functioning arms he wouldn't have fended her off. His left hung useless, four inches lower than it ought, numb with ache through to his fingertips. He barely knew where he was. He barely knew which way
was up. Princess reared her head around, bludgeoning him, but Biff managed on each swing to get his good arm between her head and his. He cracked her in the gums with his elbow. He pushed his thumb into her eye. In his mouth: dirt and cow shit and bits of chewed straw. In his mouth: the rusty, loose-change flavour of his own blood.

Then the boy came. Not thirteen years old, meatless head to toe and in a pair of gumboots and baggy Carhartts belonging to Biff and a stained T-shirt that said:
4U2NV
. He hit the cow like you'd hit a cow to tip one. He put his whole body in the act, shoulder first, toes in the mud, and a face screwed upward and inward with the effort of his heave. He made a sound like a kid would make to help his dad push a truck from the ditch. And Princess barely moved. Sixteen hundred, maybe eighteen hundred pounds, that Princess – one big bitchin' cow. She rocked. Maybe she got distracted. It gave Biff his chance. He stretched his good hand behind his head, to the underside of the wooden stalls, and in a feat of strength he would never repeat, dragged himself from beneath the cow, beneath the stall, and to safety.

The boy vaulted out the moment Biff cleared, and then they limped from the barn and the boy drove the Ranger, since Biff couldn't operate a gearshift. His arm hurt like nothing in the world – worse than the time he got blood poisoning from a wood splinter in the palm, after being flung from the sidecar of his ex-wife's Harley – but he couldn't keep a straight face. The boy gave him this look – a frown damned near comical it was so serious. He
held it, sternly, at least for a second. Then the two of them laughed great whooping laughs that shot rings of pain through Biff's shoulder.

—You owe me one, the boy said.

—I sure do, Biff told him.

—You see that – saved your life, the boy said, and he flashed Biff a ridiculous thumbs-up, like you'd give to a guy about to go get laid.

Now, on the frozen lake, Biff would pay the boy back, because he had to, because the boy had saved him from certain death, because nobody gave him the time of day like the boy did, and because there was nothing else in the world Biff cared about more. Everything depended on it – at least, everything that mattered. And as his speedometer cusped one-fifty-seven, the absolute fastest he'd ever got the Ranger moving, he had this sudden gut feeling that he and the boy were in the same driver's seat of the same truck, just two decades separate.

Thirty years ago, thirty years backward in time, while Biff cradled his maimed shoulder and they bounced along his brother's farm road, the boy had grinned a boy's grin that showed all the crooked teeth he wouldn't suffer braces to straighten, and then he reached across the seat and patted Biff on the knee. —It'll all be okay, Dad, the boy said, and Biff, Biff – well, Biff believed him.

DON'T TOUCH THE GROUND

In seventh grade my buddy Mitch Cooper climbed a tree with a handsaw slung over his shoulder on a piece of twine. Later, a kid died. We were only thirteen years old and Mitch needed both hands free so he could shimmy up the trunk. Each time he moved the saw slapped his lumbar. In the hazy light I could see the cotton of his T-shirt translucent from sweat. A red line stained his back from hip to shoulder, but that had nothing to do with the saw. He only looked down at me once, and his left eye was swollen shut and his lip split and he had his teeth bared like an animal enraged.

Earlier that day, I'd met Mitch at the swings outside our classrooms. He had his knapsack one-strapped over his shoulder and both hands in his pockets, was wearing his roughing-it jeans – his oldest pair, patched on the knees and the ass and faded shin to thigh from all the time he spent sliding around in dirt. His arms dangled low and scrawny looking until you grappled them. He liked running, climbing, and building things; by the time he turned nine he had scaled every tree in the neighbourhood
except one – a giant pine with no low branches and a trunk so wide even my old man couldn't reach halfway around. Mitch called it the Chevy. I don't know why.

He greeted me with a nod and rubbed his palms together. He smelled like campfires and wood lacquer. It was late May, so his old man would have taken to hotdogs over the firepit and Mitch probably wore the same T-shirt into the smoke the night before. We started our trek home, along the side of the school where Mitch dragged his hand against its stucco.

—I got out early, he said.

—How?

—Mr. Simmons went to the office for something and never came back.

He smiled because he really hated Simmons. I never understood Mitch's hatred, the things he selected.

—I heard his son went blind, I said.

—He just lost an eye.

We passed the tetherball pole and Mitch gave it a running punch. Big signs posted nearby said:
Do not punch the tether-balls
. This was one of the few rebellions Mitch ever dared. The ball swung around and Mitch cocked his arm back for a second hit, but he lacked the coordination. His knuckles grazed the side and the arc bent up like a coat hanger. —Everyone else is still waiting, he said. —I hate sitting.

—My dad would give me hell, I told him.

His eyebrows tilted like he was mad but they weren't thick enough to be convincing. He came from a religious family, old-fashioned Bible folk, but not the kind that
hang pictures of the crucifixion over their toilets. Mitch's old man was a world-famous naturalist named Larry Cooper, which sounds more like a plumber than a bird scholar but there you go. Larry liked looking at photos, talking about birds, and making jokes about boyhood that parents found hilarious. He'd wear big glasses and a coonskin hat, clothes all greys and greens. But he didn't tower like other dads I knew, didn't make you stop and think,
Hey, I'm going to listen to you
. My old man, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him, cold stare and dark glasses, towered. Larry sort of dawdled. He had a retired-cowboy look, would curl one thumb under his belt and give his pants a slow hike. My old man could tell stories about choking out drunks or eating a five-second taser blast or smashing a crook's teeth on the cell bars, and Larry would talk about the time he watched a grizzly bear toboggan down a snowy hill on its ass.

We crossed the playground. Every couple steps Mitch turned to see if anyone was coming. We headed to the gully, a forested area separating the subdivision where we lived from the grade school. A ringwire fence rimmed the playground, and Mitch ran and tried to vault it but didn't quite make the height, and as he descended he took a nasty gash down his back.

He balled up his T-shirt for me to see. —How bad is it? he said.

The scratch spanned from his kidney to his shoulder blades. It was deepest and reddest at the hip. —It's welting, I said.

—Is it gonna get blood on my shirt?

—Maybe.

—Is it?

The scratch looked like someone had drawn a red line across his back with a felt pen. —I don't know, I said.

—If you see it getting stained let me know, alright?

—It's just a T-shirt, I said.

—Yeah, but let me know.

Then a green Ford Ranger screamed by us with teenagers piled in the bed. One of them pointed at Mitch and even though I couldn't hear him over the muffler I knew exactly what he'd said –
fag
, or
jew
, which made no sense but which the hicks used to describe things they hated. The truck braked and U-turned and cars honked at it to no avail.

—Let's go, I said.

The truck eased up beside us and kept our pace as we walked along the street. Rat-faced hicks in the cab snickered and smoked and one of them raised his arm to throw something. The guy in the passenger's side was a kid named Jordan who wore a blue hockey jersey and a ballcap on backward. He could recite any of the speeches from his favourite WWF wrestlers, had a half-finished cigarette tucked behind his ear and a loose grin on his face, as though his cheeks had come unyoked from the jaw.

—Hey, piglet, Jordan said.

My old man had told me to ignore people like him because they'd always be there, because there were guys who truly hated cops and would tell their kids to pick on me, and because if I didn't ignore them then I'd have to
live every day by the bone in my knuckles. I'd have kept going without even looking at them, but Mitch – Mitch stopped dead in his tracks. The hicks in the truck hooted; this is what they wanted. I gave Mitch a sharp order to keep going, but he didn't. One of the truck's doors clicked open.

—Leave us alone, Mitch said.

Jordan looked at his buddies in the cab and smiled as if Mitch had made a joke. —Why? he said, and moved his jaw in a chewing motion.

Mitch had nothing to say to that. He eyed me and I motioned with my head that we should go. A car behind the truck laid on its horn and Jordan gave them the finger, turned away for just a moment, and Mitch and I burst into a sprint.

We cut along the road against traffic. Mitch was a good runner but I wasn't. The hicks had pulled over and guys spilled out the doors. They ran at us with wobbly legs. I thought the only hope we had was the gully and Mitch must have thought the same. Jordan and his friends hadn't even covered half the distance when we veered through the ditch and down a path we'd taken home for the last four years.

Behind us, Jordan yelled threats. He'd find us. The gully wasn't that big.

But, well, it was – the gully served as a gateway into the vast, undeveloped wilderness of the Kootenay Valley. Mysteries happened there: hunters claimed to watch animals withstand deer-slugs through the jugular; some teenagers erected a fort where the forest relinquished to
beach, and a month later that fort was gone and three girls with it; fires glowed in the distance, always out of sight, and people whispered about the feral things that can never be tamed. Hooligans built rope swings and smashed beer bottles on pine trees but nobody ever found the glass. Boys were broken, body and spirit – claimed by the gully – and people would remember them and cluck their tongues and think,
They could've gone far.

In the gully truckloads of teenagers didn't threaten to beat us with their bike helmets. In the gully Mitch knew the quickest way anywhere. He pretended to be a great hunter, would kneel before a footprint and run his index along the shape, push his tongue into the corner of his mouth. He'd pick a name he hated, like Ford Helmer, and when I asked him how he knew he'd note the depth of the impression. —Helmer's a big guy, he'd say. —He has heavy feet.