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

he’d filled out, lifted weights, ate enough for his parents to joke about making him pitch in on the food budget.
    â€”How’s it going, Will? he said. He didn’t take off his coat or his shoes and he didn’t step out of the entryway.
    â€”You okay? I said.
    He shoved his hands in his pockets, rolled his neck and let his shoulders lower. When he stood like that he looked like the right kid to pick on. But I had seen those shoulders pulled back. I had seen him bare his gums. —Just tired, he said, and moved his arms in a way to flex his chest, his biceps. —Been helping my dad clean the windows. Fucking hicks egged them again.
    We went to the kitchen. I offered to make him coffee and he accepted, even though it was well past dinner. Once, in tenth grade, Mitch bought an espresso machine for his room and shotgunned three solid cups, and I guess the caffeine mainlined to his brain because he charged out the front door. Hours later he returned with a limp and a sprained ankle and mud stamped across his chest like paw prints.
    â€”It’ll be good to see your dad again, Mitch said.
    â€”He left a message a few days ago. He’s in transit.
    â€”How is he?
    â€”Mostly angry, I said, and Mitch grinned like a boy.
    I put only enough water in the pot for two cups. Mitch toyed with the salt shaker – a canister painted to look like a cop’s pepper spray.
    â€”My dad wants to have you guys over, Mitch said. Steam lisped out the coffee maker and I waited for the drip. Mitch set the shaker down. Larry wanted my old man over for dinner to talk about the hicks, and my old man would oblige him, because we’d all been friends so long.
    Mitch exhaled and his breath hung dewy in the air. —It’s really cold in here, he said.
    â€”I don’t have the heat on too high.
    The placemat in front of him was crooked so he straightened it. —You’ll freeze the pipes.
    â€”I won’t freeze the pipes, I said and waved a hand at him.
    He went to the thermostat and cranked it. As the baseboards heated they filled the kitchen with the scent of old metal. —Your dad will sleeper-choke you if those pipes damage.
    â€”He could try.
    â€”And then he’d sleeper-choke me .
    I gave Mitch his coffee in a mug that showed a picture of Darren Berninger poking at a fire with the busted end of a Calgary Flames hockey stick. The caption read: Burn, Fat Man, Burn .
    Then headlights flashed through the living room drapes and Mitch and I went to the window. A patrol carpulled into the driveway. The RCMP drove white Impalas with push-bars on the fronts to buffet deer and motorists who’d decided to run the gauntlet. Fake bullet holes stickered the hood and the driver’s door – it was my old man’s car, fifteen-Charlie-seven, the same one he’d driven for eleven years.
    Mitch’s Rocket plugged the only shovelled entrance to the driveway, so my old man had to plow through the snowbank. The car shuddered quiet and my old man climbed out, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him assembling beside the car. He slung a duffle bag over his shoulder. He shut the car door with his boot. Dark glasses covered his eyes and he wore a blue winter coat, open, and he hadn’t shaved his moustache as a matter of family luck. The RCMP crest was emblazoned on his breast.
    My old man doesn’t walk. My old man doesn’t saunter. He picks a destination and he wills himself to that destination. But, in winter, the front yard had a defence: a lone rosebush with its limbs laden and limp over the icy walkway. My old man was fixed on the front door and I guess he didn’t see the rose stalk that swayed at eye level because he collided with it at a pretty good tilt. His head snapped back and his hand went to his face and the duffle bag hit the ground. Years later, he’d blame the glasses but I’d point out that it was his fault for wearing sunglasses at night. He’d