D. D. West—Writing Sample
From Army Brat, Chapter 2, "Invincible"
Every birthday and Christmas, Russel and his older brother Mark receive models—mostly
fighter planes and tanks and racing cars. They arrive as uniformly coloured plastic pieces,
cleverly molded into a single frame. Russel has watched Mark in his bedroom, sanding off the
edges of each piece, paying special attention to the spot where it has been snapped away from
the mould. He has watched Mark run glue along the edges, butt them together, wipe off excess.
Hold paint brushes steady, avoid drips, keep colours separate. Apply decals level. The whole
process from start to finish and Russel can't imagine doing it himself.
Russel is eight and a half and no less fascinated by war and speed than Mark, who is thirteen.
But the models sit on his shelf unbuilt, provoking first guilt and then self-righteous indignation.
The thought of removing the plastic wrap from the box, sliding out the pieces, unfolding the
instructions, fills Russel with a kind of anticipation of boredom that stops him before he starts.
The models come to Russel from his grandparents and aunts and uncles, never his parents (at
least not after a while). His parents see that he never makes them, while the rest of his extended
family lives 'out west', thousands of miles from his house in Longeuil, on the south shore of
Montreal. Russel has never met these people, never seen where they live, but he comes to resent
them.
The models only ever get made when they work their way into Mark's room. There, planes take
their place hanging from strings (dive bombing, strafing, pulling into a climb). Tanks guard the
corners of book shelves. Cars grandstand along the desk top and window sill. It doesn't seem to
matter to Mark that Russel's models are too young for him; he makes them anyway.
The models continue to gather in Mark's room until shortly after Mark's thirteenth birthday.
School has just let out and Mark brings home his final term project from woodshop, a gun rack
that he mounts in his room. Onto the middle tier of this he places this birthday's main gift, a
twenty-two rifle with a cross-hair scope, given to him by his parents. Below this he adds two air
guns—one larger, one smaller, the larger on top—that he and Russel received last Christmas
from Santa Clause. In the top two tiers, in no particular order, he places his father's double
-barreled shot gun and high-powered rifle. Before displaying the guns, he lays them all out on a
moving blanket, then breaks them down and cleans them with gun oil and a shammy and a barrel
brush.
Now when the boys go into Mark's room they can't help but notice that the room is over-full
with models, and that the older ones look rough, amateurish. It occurs to them—like a reflex
triggered by the presence of guns—that these older models are ready to be culled. And the
thought of destroying models—unlike the thought of building them—fills Russel with energy
and intent.
Russel and Mark move stacks of Montreal Gazettes from the garage to the basement, where
they build a kind of altar, into the centre of which, one by one, they will place each model. Their
father inspects this arrangement and deems it satisfactory. He drills them on gun etiquette: never
point a gun towards yourself or another; keep the safety on until you're ready to shoot; walk with
the barrel cracked; store it unloaded. None of this is new to them. They've been hearing this
speech since they were given the air guns last December.
When their father has left, Russel and Mark lay out on a table top a slide-open cardboard box of
lead slugs, shaped like tiny badminton birdies, and a red plastic box of small copper and lead
cartridges. Beside this they place a packet of wooden matches and a string of fifty lady fingers—
little, red fire crackers that they have been given by friends who've come back from Florida.
And now, model by model, salvo by salvo, they undo Mark's labour. They re-enact explosions
with excited sounds and elaborate gestures. They use pen knives (also gifts from their father—
the blades get longer and the options more elaborate every year) to dig ruined slugs out of the
paper and study their mutations. They imagine improbable scenarios like using a bullet to light a
match to set off a fire cracker wedged into a cock pit or a tank tread or a wheel well.
Mark's friend Pierre happens by the house. He sometimes comes around to ask if Mark wants
to help him work on his tree fort in the woods. Now he finds them in the basement and they
allow him to take a few shots. Pierre is incautious with the guns, handling them as if showing
off, but he has to be shown how to load the chamber, and how to remove the safety.
Russel is struck by how strange it feels to be included in something with one of his brother's
friends. Usually, when Pierre and Mark take their bikes to the tree fort, Russel is not invited.
Russel has sometimes tried, unsuccessfully, to chase them as they ride away. He finds the whole
idea of this far away tree fort mysterious, and he can't imagine what the older boys could do
there for so long.
For days after shooting the models, Russel keeps imagining looking down the sights, hearing
the report next to his ear, feeling the kick into his shoulder. Then he and his brother and father
take the guns and drive a few miles along the south shore, to where their father works on the
army base and there is a shooting range. Now Russel is given his father's guns to hold and shoot,
and he finds it very difficult to lift them up and hold them steady. When he pulls the trigger, the
recoil against his shoulder is ferocious.
The targets in the basement seemed small and close and insubstantial, but the targets at the
range are life-sized and football fields away. They show German-looking soldiers (you can tell
by their helmets), eyes wild and teeth bared like a dog's, running towards you with a bulls-eye
on their chests. Russel and Mark spend much of their time looking for complete versions of
these, behind the target mounts. They also inflate yard-long, hour-glass shaped balloons, that
their father has brought for them to shoot. When Russel asks why these are used as targets,
his father explains that they are not so different from a human form, viewed from four hundred
yards. At the end of the day, Mark takes a soldier-target with him, to hang on his closet door.
Russel keeps some left-over balloons and stuffs them in his jean-jacket pocket.
Back home in his bedroom, Russel finds that he can spend hours lying on his back on his bed
keeping these balloons aloft.