Once You Break a Knuckle (20 page)

Vic and me shared the mickey of Canadian Club, away from the campfire so we could look over the cliffside at this bizarre piece of land. She took a big chug from the bottle and handed it over. Vic can drink like a tradesman when times come. The moonlight made her cheeks silver and that lazy eye of hers acted out. She spread her sleeping bag across her legs and I inched my way under it and the nylon clung to my shins. Vic smelled like a campfire. Vic smelled like citrus shampoo or something. Vic smelled like Vic.

—This an alright place to sleep, she said and wiggled in the dirt and the dried bloodweed and made a little nest.

—I'm not picky, I said.

—You smell like a dog.

—Sorry, Vic.

She belted me on the shoulder and I leaned into her. Below us a couple semis zoomed north and the Ferris wheel spun and I thought I could hear Walla chopping lumber. Christ, a weirder place. By the fire, Animal sounded out words from his book, finger under each sentence. Then Vic unbuttoned her flannel coat. She always wore it or if not the coat then a flannel shirt. Sexiest thing, swear to God. I remember how she took it off, first time we ever boned,
all awkward and struggling so I had to help her with the sleeves. A different kind of time back then. A different way of going about things, even. Sometimes I wish I was smarter so I could've gone to university with Vic.

Vic put her hand under my chin and jacked my head to eye level. I guess I was looking at her breasts. She leaned in and kissed me and she tasted like dope, and softness, and her smooth chin ground on my middle-of-the-night stubble. But I couldn't kiss her right then. I don't know why. She slicked her tongue over my lips and I couldn't get my head around the whole thing, the Ferris wheel and what Walla said and how I almost got Animal killed, and Vic, you know, and the whole goddamn thing.

—Don't fuck around, she said, but the words were all breath.

—Just thinkin is all.

She bit down on my lip. —Well, stop it.

—I like you a lot, Vic.

For a second she stopped and turned her head and her neon hair grazed my nose and I'd have given anything to know what was going on in her head right then. She had her lips squished shut and her forehead a little scrunched as if figuring something out – same look as the day she left for university. That'd have been in '99, and her and her old man and me stayed at a hotel in Calgary so she could catch her West Coast flight in the wee hours, and while she showered, her old man told me not to let her get away. —It'll happen, Duncan, he said, his face drawn in and lined around his eyes, as if he knew what the hell he was
talking about. —I swear to God you'll lose her if you don't take action soon. And I nodded and tried not to grin, because I understood exactly what he meant.

On the mountaintop, Vic hooked hair behind her ear. —You're my guy, Dunc, she said as though it were true.

—I know, Vic. But sometimes I don't know. You know?

Then she cuffed me, all playful, and pulled me into her.

But that's Vic for you. Afterward, when we were done and Animal's moans were snores and the fire glowed down to embers, Vic sat up and stretched. Her ribs made bumps under her skin and the muscles along her spine tensed and eased and it felt alright right then. That's Vic for you, that's how she can make you feel, that easy. Never liked a girl so much. Nothing else to it. I just cared about her more than the university guy did or Animal did or maybe her old man did. I should've told her so, or how I wished she didn't have to go west, or how I'd had a ring for her for years but lacked the balls to do anything with it. Even then, the mountaintop seemed like a last chance or something.

She sucked the rest of the whiskey and pointed at the sky where a trail of turquoise streaked across the horizon – the northern lights, earlier than I'd ever known them. She just stood there for a second with her back to me and those lights around her. Christ, she was so pretty. Then she whipped the empty bottle off the summit, and I stared at her and thought about her and waited for the sound of the bottle breaking way, way below us.

THE MILLWORKER

Mitch parked his old Ranger in front of the garage door and shifted the clutch to first, killed the ignition. His e-brake had gone slack and this worried him: a couple months ago his son's Taurus rolled down the driveway and butted up to a tree across the road. It could have been a mess but Mitch was awake in the bleeding hours – first guy out of bed on the whole street, on his way to the mill – to wake Luke before anything went south.

Nobody had left any lights on for him but he'd grown used to this kind of inconsideration. He eased himself from the Ranger, imagined his muscles unfolding like big ropes. Everything was the colour of ink. The sun teased behind the Rockies, gave tungsten outlines to their silhouettes. Invermere's streets were quiet save a herd of deer plucking crabapples from a neighbour's tree. Mitch knew guys who'd rather blare a hollowpoint into a deer than let it eat their fruit, and why those guys lived in the Kootenay Valley he couldn't say. They might as well head east, leave B.C. There was plenty of room in the tar sands.

Inside, Mitch tugged off his heavy, grease-grimed boots, and they left his fingers gummy when he knelt to unknot the laces. About the only thing he wanted was a beer and a nap, but not a dozen steps out of the entryway the kitchen fixture wouldn't turn on, and it was probably something Andie already told him about, something he should've fixed days or weeks ago, so he grabbed a chair and wiggled the curly fluorescent bulb and it flared to bright, and he blinked turquoise spots from his eyes. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and his wife. Overhead, wallpaper banded the ceiling, patterned with chickens and leopards and zebras and giraffes. The guys at the mill would give him hell for that, but it kept Andie happy.

Mitch bent backward at the hip until his spine popped and the tension lessened. It'd been an extra eight hours shoving lumber and he was gamy with the smell of sawdust and that metallic thing tools do to your hands. Everything ached. Invermere's was about the only mill in all B.C. that hadn't gone fully auto – valley stubbornness, valley fascination with relics. He shrugged his coat over the back of a kitchen chair. It used to be his dad's, that coat, and over the years Mitch had sewn its holes and fixed its tears and patched it with reflectors so the late-shifters wouldn't knock him blindly into a presser. Whenever he caught flak from the young bucks who strutted around invincible, Mitch reminded them of the kid whose legs got crushed so bad that bone fragments ravaged his blood-stream like grains of mortared glass.

He dug his gloves from the coat's gut pocket and tossed them in the laundry sink. Splinters jutted from the palms, not deep enough to gouge his skin. He'd thank God for that, if it mattered – little in the world disgusted him more than slivers. Once, during a dry summer in his childhood when he romped through the wilderness like a kid ought to, a buddy of his snagged a wood shard in his palm, fat as a pencil, and the hand swelled up like a boxing glove. It had something to do with wood pulp, something to do with allergies, but that ballooning hand stayed radiant in Mitch's memory.

He collapsed on the couch in his dirty overalls knowing Andie would give him hell, and, as if sensing him through the ether, upstairs a light flicked on. Andie descended, hand trailing on the banister. She wore a forest-green bathrobe that, when pulled closed, would display a logo of a windmill with a great, proud
S
in its centre. Mitch bought it for her three years ago to celebrate the rebranding of the Calgary Flames into the Saskatchewan Windfarmers – her homeland's first NHL team since its failed bid for the Saskatoon Blues almost five decades earlier, in the eighties.

Andie's brown hair hung to her shoulders and Mitch stared at her like always. He'd never known anyone who could be so beautiful first thing in the morning. Her nose bent a little sideways – she broke it, years and years ago, with her own knee – but she had the creamy skin of a movie star. She put her shoulder against the wall. Her bathrobe swayed open but she cinched it shut. The small
lines around her eyes and at the corners of her lips made her look older than she was. He probably had something to do with that.

—It's cold, she said.

Mitch leaned forward on his thighs. —I can turn up the heat, he said.

—You alright?

—Tired.

—Come to bed.

He shrugged as best he could. Her shoulders slumped as she looked at him, dirty, on her couch. Maybe she was thinking of those nights he didn't come home, if he sat, filthy, on another woman's furniture. Maybe she remembered the way he smelled afterward, as though some of the mill had rubbed off on those foreign sheets, or those sheets onto him. He could wash and wash but there was always a residue Andie could detect and he'd see it in her eyes.

—I gotta work in a few hours anyway, he said.

—It's stupid. You working like this.

She picked her way to the kitchen. Her bathrobe caught a kernel of stray cat food and it rolled on the laminate, over and over, ticking like a moth. She brewed coffee – organic, shade-grown, fair-trade roast that cost him three dollars more per pound than it would've ten years earlier. You couldn't even get non-organic coffee anymore, unless you went instant, and Andie refused to drink instant. So Mitch forked out, to keep her happy, even though the guys at the mill gave him hell for it same as they had been for
however many years. The world changed, Mitch figured, but people more or less stayed the same.

—There's oil on the gloves in the sink, he said.

—I'll wash them.

—You don't have to.

—I don't mind, Mitch.

He joined her in the kitchen and she brought him a ceramic coffee cup and the heat stung his fingers as he took it. The mug had a picture of an old friend, Will Crease, being punched in the gut by his dad. Its caption read:
You're not in Mayberry anymore!
Mitch had snapped the photo for that mug, at a family dinner after Will's dad came back from Kosovo. Those were better times, maybe. Andie folded into the chair nearest him and nudged her bathrobe closed around the lapel, but not before Mitch glimpsed skin.

—Luke's still not here, she said.

And that, his son, was just one more thing.

—When'd he leave?

Andie gave a half-hearted shrug.

—I guess I'll go look for him.

—It's almost morning. He'll be home or at work in a couple hours.

—You'd think he'd have the courtesy to call, Mitch said.

Andie dragged a hair behind her ear and he immediately regretted saying even that. She had her eyes fixed right on him, and after a second she reached across to touch his face – he'd bruised it slightly, caught a chunk of stray pine to his cheekbone. He knew what she must have
been thinking: who was he to judge Luke for not coming home at night? Did
he
ever call? There was something so humiliating about being judged on par with a teenager, let alone your son.

—Want me to make breakfast? she said.

—I'll grab something from Tim's on the way.

She spun her mug between thumb and index. Mitch knew a joke about women who did that at a bar, but didn't mention it. She was never a touchy woman. He ran his finger along a gouge in the table and counted the knots in the grain. —If Luke comes home, he said, but couldn't bring himself to ask anything of her.

She glided to him and he felt her palm land on the back of his chair. Her nails
therrapp
ed the wood. Mitch curled his fingers around the mug and squeezed as hard as he could, until the heat needled his palm. Then Andie dragged her fingernails over his scalp and he closed his eyes and felt something like relaxation, if for just an instant.

—I'll let you know, she said, and kissed his forehead.

—I need to set things right.

She rubbed his cheek. Her smooth knuckles ground against his stubble and the warmth from that hand spilled into his cheek, the warmth from the mug into his palm.

AN HOUR LATER
, Mitch's watch alarm woke him from a frail sleep. His head was in Andie's lap, her fingers dragging pleasant lines on his scalp. She told him he didn't have to go to work, that he had nothing to prove, and he hovered with his chin against his chest and his palms flat on the
edge of the couch. He could get a lot done with even one day off work. But Mitch pulled his arms back and wiped a knuckle in his eye and cashed in on some last energy reserve. —That's not how it is, he told her.

Once beyond town limits he stopped at the Tim Hortons and got them to fill his thermos. The drive to the sawmill took him along a mountain ridge with Invermere and much of the valley beneath him in a well of darkness. The goats were out in force, more than he'd ever seen. They loitered at the roadside or straddled the yellow line, mouths grinding circles, and Mitch wove among them. Years back, in the days when Luke was still breastfeeding and they were so broke they sometimes ate dinner with his mom of necessity, he struck one of those goats with his Ranger. The creature barrel-rolled over his hood and landed on its knees in the box, all anger and not injured. After much baying and coaxing, Mitch phoned in sick because he couldn't chase the creature from his truck.

The road brought him through a hotel town called Radium, with major construction under way on a strip mall along its main drag. As he drove through, Mitch spotted his brother's truck, a forty-five-thousand-dollar enviro-friendly bio-dieseled no-footprint half-ton with
Cooper Contracting
decaled on the side. Nowadays Paul bid whole subdivisions, didn't work piecemeal jobs in satellite towns where his name wouldn't carry weight. And he no longer strapped on tools – just marched job sites with suits in tow, marked comments on blueprints, pupils like dollar signs.

Mitch pulled in next to the truck and scanned for Paul and spotted him in the doorway of the reno'd Liquor Depot, propping it open so two goons could haul drywall through. Mitch had a year and a half on Paul but his brother looked a decade younger, had good colour in his short hair. His features didn't sag and he kept a trimmed goatee that split his jaw in two. From profile, that scruff jutted from his chin like a hangnail. Paul wore the trade-mark coonskin hat tilted over his forehead – a relic from their boyhood years. Their dad donned that thing every time he trekked into the great outdoors, and, wearing it, Paul could have been Larry Cooper incarnate.