Ballistics by D. W. Wilson

a guy that age pull the trigger? After he read it, Gramps folded it into a little square and knelt with his knuckles against his teeth. He wore his hunting vest, had yet to lose his last strands of hair, but the first of those age-splotches had crept down from the border of forehead. The note dangled from his other hand, its corner touching the ground. I know what he had to be thinking: was it worth letting anyone see the note? Did the kid’s dad—an exterior painter whose own father Gramps had known in the good old days—need to read it? It’s not like it’d give him closure.
    What a fucking waste, Gramps said, and laid the note on the kid’s chest. Then he rose, hands on his knees, and came over. He stopped only a few inches away and looked at me across his shoulder. Did your girlfriend see it?
    She’s not my girlfriend.
    He shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked his shoulders forward.
    You okay? I said.
    I don’t know, he told me.
    Then he reached out as if to give me a hug but jerked to a stop, his whole body seizing against the action. He jutted his chin toward his Ranger. I thought he might have some advice to give; he’d fought in a war, and he was old. The truck wouldn’t start right away but I could hear a thunk each time he torqued the key, which Gramps had taught me meant the solenoid was doing its job. Thank you solenoid, he always said.
     
    I WOKE ON THAT BENCH with an erection and a kink in my neck so severe as to require manual realignment. Dew had slickened the seat and dampened my clothes, and each motion rubbed soggy denim or soggy cotton or soggy vinyl against my skin. I tasted whiskey and hangover at the back of my throat. The sky was cobalt, deeper than the water below it, and across the glass surface of Windermere Lake I could see the first flares of orange: fishermen on houseboats stumbling by light of oil lamp, piss-desperate, to their ships’ edge; white-collar condo-dwellers uncinching the curtains of their waterfront villas; my mind imagining sparks raining down as if by precipitation, as if by embers condensed to dollops—napalm, firewater, Archimedes’ flame.
    I walked home. There, I loosed Puck and climbed out of my soggy clothes and showered with the last of the toiletries Gramps had relinquished to my disposal. I shaved with a throwaway razor and a salt-shaker-sized can of shaving cream and dried myself with the same face towel Gramps had given me when he showed me how to wield a razor. That was in eighth grade, when the girl whose locker was beside mine—she had too many piercings in her ear and they’d started to grow over, like a tumour, like something out of a sci-fi flick—pointed at my upper lip and told me I had a perv ’stache . Gramps thought she was dumber than the nine hells, but I have never let grow my facial hair since. He hooked me up with a throwaway blade and showed me the basics and laughed when I loped from the bathroom bleeding as if I’d taken a beating. He was an excellent stand-in for a father.
    I climbed into Gramps’ truck with my mother’s address folded into the ass pocket of my jeans. Baritone Radio Man recited the latest news about the forest fire: it’d skipped the highway near the Sevenhead and outmanoeuvred the bushworkers’ blockade, and a cadre of those men were digging ditches to save their lives; the eastern highway out of Owenswood had been shut down by rockslide, so if the fire breached the Purcells there’d be no way to evac save airlift. The Armed Forces were on standby and the flippant broadcasters called it Operation Infrequent Wind. I can’t imagine facing that; it’d be like weathering a siege. In the sky, waterbombers rocketed westward, having drunk their glut on Lake Windermere. Valley folk watched those planes with a sense of their potential fate: the quicker those things departed and returned, the closer and the angrier the fires burned. In lineups around town, people told the same story, over and over, about a scuba