Free Once You Break a Knuckle by W. D. Wilson

before his folks let him live that one down. Then my old man took a bullet to the chest in Kosovo. Twenty-three years in the Force and he’d only twice gone without his Kevlar. His lung collapsed. The doctors at the base reinflated it, pried the bullet out, and sent him home. He was on a plane back, or on a train to get on a plane back, or in a car, onthe road, in a country, driving fast, to get on a train, to get on a plane back. The RCMP wasn’t one-hundred percent. But they’d let me know.
    It was three weeks between when my old man got shot and when he returned. In that short time, relics of him appeared around the house: I found an instrument for testing grip strength wedged under a couch cushion; the cat knocked a silver RCMP tie pin off the fridge; downstairs, a canvas punching bag, worn and sweat-stained at the midsection, ripped from its ceiling hook. I fired up the uninsured Bonneville in the garage to see if the damned thing still worked, and the inside smelled of shaving cream and Old Spice deodorant and a trace of spilled beer – it smelled like my old man.
    Months earlier, I’d driven him and that Bonneville to the airport in Cranbrook, a shithole city best described as a place even the hicks think a bit too small-town. My old man squashed into passenger with only a duffle bag for luggage. It held three items: his electric razor, his judo gi , and a balled-up gold chain the Force wouldn’t let him hang around his neck. He wore his dark glasses and a black T-shirt that read: You Can Run, but You Can Also Scream .
    The Bonneville’s dashboard looked like the heads-up display from a space fighter, complete with a wire-frame model of the car that changed from green to yellow to red as parts broke down or took damage. My old man watched the speedometer the whole way and if I notched it above one hundred he’d threaten to commandeer the vehicle. I warned that if he didn’t stop heckling me I’d drive overa cliff. He said all it would take is one good punch to the neck and I’d be out cold. I asked if he meant the head and he just slapped his fist against his palm. Then he made a call on his cellphone, to his friend Darren Berninger, and told Berninger to be without mercy in busting me for speeding. In fact, my old man said, one eye levelled at me through dark glass, be a little unfair.
    We talked about upcoming movies and he asked me to send him a DVD of The Bourne Supremacy . I offered to mail him the cat. He respectfully declined. At the airport, a young security guard with nervous hands detained my old man for a key chain fashioned like little handcuffs. They could be used as thumb traps, the guard said. To cut off a person’s thumbs. My old man deadpanned the poor bastard and said if anyone actually got caught like that, they didn’t deserve thumbs.
    On the night he finally returned, my buddy Mitch came over.
    It was late by then, dusk. From the couch I could see the yard and the road through the front window, and Mitch pulled up in his oxblood Rocket 88. He didn’t drive that car in the winter if he had a choice since the street salt could threaten the undercarriage. It was a 1953 vintage beast, a car more attitude than metal. Mitch’s old man, Larry, purchased it from some hick twenty years earlier. Larry was a birdwatcher by trade, the kind of guy who could wear a coonskin hat and not as a joke. With fifteen thousand dollars and the patience of a birdwatcher, he teased that car from ratbag to beauty.
    I met Mitch at the door. He wore a leather jacket and some leather gloves and a grey scarf. I’d known Mitch since I was eight years old. He was all long arms and bony knees, had a terrier’s bouncy eyes. A scar dented his cheek where a pebble got embedded when, at the age of ten, he crashed his bike into a yard umbrella. He stood six-five, shorter than he’d end up, but I barely topped his collar. When we were kids I made him look spindly, but