And he goes down, down, down, the pavement good and cold on his face.
Ten
Twenty past four in the morning, straddling the shadow that falls between the end of darkness and the beginning of light. The girl with the black hair made sure the other girls who shared the small apartment overlooking a Park ’n Ride lot were asleep before she got down on her hands and knees and used a key to raise a slat of hardwood in the entry closet. She kept picking and picking and finally got purchase with the key and lifted the slat of hardwood to reveal a white deposit envelope. Quickly counted the stash of cash inside—four eighty, five hundred, five twenty—then added eighty to the wad. Six hundred. With the piece of hardwood out, the envelope right there, the apartment silent, she felt as though she were the last person alive. The whole world had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Yeah, and that’d be okay with her. Start it all over again, and maybe this time they could get it right. It was people that wrecked everything. Animals didn’t hurt each other like people did. They didn’t own that sort of nastiness. She wanted a house filled with stray animals, the wounded animals abandoned to shelters. She eyed the envelope, getting thicker all the time. Eyed it and did the fast, automatic calculations of the addict. Six hundred bucks, and she could get rock for ten a piece. She’d rent a room and be high around the clock for three days...
She quickly put the envelope back and replaced the piece of hardwood. Temptations were just bad ideas disguised as good ones. She had a plan, and nobody and nothing was going to pull her from its course. They’ll all find out a little too late, she thought, when I’m already long gone. The Greyhound to Vancouver with a savings account and a new name, a whole new past. She would get set up in an apartment, then she could be a mother, a wife. Imagine. She’d get a library card and a station wagon, and she’d shop for tasteful women’s clothing and nobody would ever know who she had been. It made her smile sometimes to picture herself in a house with a husband, a couple of kids, a dog, roast beef on Sunday nights, growing grey with grandchildren running around asking for her to tell them wild stories of the crazy old days.
Sometimes her mind got stuck, and she saw the boy’s face, the dark hair and the blue eyes, and she felt him near her, a physical presence falling like a shadow across the rest of her life, and she saw all the things they had done, were going to do. But then she hurt so bad, she had to forget him or make him into something else, something she could hate...
She sat there with her back against the wall in the hallway and lit a cigarette. A band of light bled from a crack in the bathroom door down the hallway. She thought about the new past she could create. She could be anybody again. The way she’d been at five, six years old. The future a clean slate, anything you could make of it. The pain couldn’t be undone, no. But she’d get so far away from it that it seemed like a movie she had watched a long, long time ago.
Do you think I’m pretty, mama? Do you think I’d make a good vet?
She drew on the cigarette, and she sat in the silence.
The last person alive in the world. This was the best time of the day.
Charlie McKelvey pulled himself, against his own will and his better judgement, through the murky slumber of unconsciousness. His mouth was dry. His body thrummed. They had him shot up with painkillers, the good stuff. He was weightless, and when he came around the first time, he briefly wondered if this is what death was like, a final freedom from the burden of your own body, of all the things you’d carried with you through a life. It would be good if it were like that…
He blinked at the ceiling tiles, the steel safety guard at the side of the bed, the yellow institutional curtains drawn like a tent. His mind flashed with snapshots, recalled images: the lights in the parking lot glowing like halos above his head as he felt himself sinking, giving in to the promise of lostness, and then the strobe of ambulance lights, disembodied voices, his body being lifted, carried...the scattered sounds of the emergency room, a taste of blood in his mouth like old pennies.
Is there anybody we can call?
His eyes were raw, buzzing. He slipped away for a while then came back, like waking from a hundred-year sleep. The first face that came into focus was Hattie’s. She was smiling, or trying to, and her red hair was pulled back in a bun. A few wayward strands had escaped the confines of the hairpin and were swept across her shoulder, licks of flame. She was dressed in jeans and a green hooded sweat shirt that said “Dalhousie Tigers Hockey”.
“You’re cute after you’ve had a heart attack,” Hattie said.
“Thanks,” he said weakly, “but it wasn’t a heart attack.”
“I know. The doctor told me,” she said. “Heart attack just sounds—I don’t know.”
“More dramatic?”
“Gastrointestinal hemorrhage just doesn’t have the same ring,” she smiled.
“That’s just your east coast sense of humour,” he said.
“Looks like you got yourself a nasty peptic ulcer there, Detective,” she said.
The young doctor who’d visited when McKelvey had first come around had mentioned something about the combination of the ulcer and stress—or perhaps he had used the word “exhaustion”. His body’s immune system weakened, ravaged.
“How do you feel?” Hattie asked.
“Probably not as bad as I look.”
The room smelled of disinfectant, bandages and industrial floor wax. It was a sickly perfume, and McKelvey remembered it the same way a dog remembers the scent of the vet’s office. This smell was associated with vulnerability, weakness... endings. McKelvey had watched his mother wither away from cancer in a room not unlike this one. Machines and IVs, Hallmark greeting cards and cheap grocery store flowers lining the window sill; his father in the tavern, unable to face the day, an old man hiding from his life. McKelvey sat in that room because it was what he had to do, but every part of him wanted to get up and run down the hall, keep on running until he came to the end of something, the end of himself.
“Is Caroline here?” he asked. “Did anybody call her?”
She nodded then picked up a small plastic container from the table beside his bed, and began to fiddle with it. She replaced the container and looked at McKelvey. His hair was slicked back from sweat, and she saw what he must have looked like as a little boy, staying home sick from school, his mother touching his forehead, stroking his curly hair. A cute boy he must have been.
“The nurses in the emergency department kept trying to reach Caroline, but they couldn’t get through,” she said. Then her expression betrayed her. “So I went over, you know. While they had you out. You were out for a long time. I hope you don’t mind, I got your keys...”
McKelvey waited. Hattie fiddled with something else on the table.
“Charlie…”she said—and that was enough for him, enough and more. “There was a note.”
“Let me see it,” he said and extended a wavering hand. He watched it tremble the way his father’s hand had trembled the last time he’d seen the man alive. He felt weak now, and his stomach began to glow with a strange new sensation. He wondered briefly if this was a sign of things to come. Is this what it meant to grow old, your body folding in like a card chair after the last hand has been played? There was so much left to do. Singleness of purpose.
“I don’t want to upset you. In your condition,” she said. “I could read it to you.”
“Give me the fuckin’ note,” he said and wagged his fingers.
Hattie reached into her back pocket and produced a small square of lavender paper. He recognized it as Caroline’s writing paper, used for sending notes to friends and relatives. Sometimes she sprayed a scent on it, just a trace of fine mist. And sometimes she used a small stamp to cut out various shapes in the corners, an angel or a heart. He saw his wife sitting at the kitchen table to write this note. What it must have taken for her to come to this... Even before he opened the note, he knew it would kill her inside, hearing where he’d been when he read it. He wanted to spare
her this pain; he had never meant to hurt her. Not in a million years...
Then he read the lines so carefully written in Caroline’s beautiful handwriting. And it was strange. Everything seemed somehow so inevitable. The only possible conclusion to The Story of Charlie and Caroline. Of course Caroline had slipped away to visit her sister on the west coast for an indefinite period, “to sort things out”. Of course, she had escaped from their dead home, their mausoleum. He didn’t blame her. Christ, how could he? He loved her, and yet he was happy for her. She had seen a small window of opportunity, perhaps her last shot at a life, and so she dove through it. She had escaped, and how could he hold that against her? Keep running, and don’t look back, he thought.
“I’m sorry, god,” was all Hattie could say.
“Listen,” he said, and he flushed with embarrassment. “I knew I should’ve stayed in bed today. My horoscope said something about all this.”
It made her laugh just a little, but it was something. He tucked the note beneath the covers at his side. He was tired again, drifting. Jesus, what a mess of things I’ve made. McKelvey groaned as he adjusted his weight, a sliver of pain shooting through his torso. The painkillers were waning now. The real world was waiting for him. Run, Caroline…run.
“I’m going to sit here for a little bit,” Hattie said. “If you don’t mind.”
He mumbled something, then he was gone.
Eleven
The prisoner was seated on the hard bunk of his protective custody cell, eyes closed. He slowed his breathing, drawing a bead on a point of light at the centre of the blackness. This was something he had been doing since his first long stretch inside, back when he was eighteen and staring down a sentence of two years less a day. “A deuce less” is what the cons called it. It wasn’t much time, not when stacked against subsequent stints and now this, the threat of a virtual lifetime. But it had seemed like a lifetime to a kid back then. It was an older con named Gervais who had taught him all he’d ever need to know about making life work on the inside. It was all about pacing, not counting the days... Time is meaningless for you in here...time is for the regular citizens, the moms rushing home from work to pick up kids at daycare, the dads coaching little league. Sooner you forget about the clock on the wall, about the calendar on your wall, the pussy sitting at home all alone, the better off you’ll be…
A voice broke his concentration. Visit up. Shackles and leg irons on the slow jangly shuffle to the visitor’s cubicles. It was his lawyer. Slick suit, slick smile. What he got paid to do, to look like. Called Duguay “buddy” until Duguay had told him not to call him that. But that was yesterday, and this was today. A few words, a little bit of Latin, and everything changed. The hemispheres flipped, revealing a bright new day. A smile and a nod of the head as acknowledgment of the continued sweetness of karma. The rat Leroux, it made Duguay smile to picture the motherfucker hanging by a bedsheet, his ugly face turned purple.
Paperwork, appearances, signatures, and now Duguay stood on the street outside the courthouse, the air good on his face, and he looked around, half expecting it to come from out of nowhere as it always did, just something that hit you like the hand of God. Unseen, omnipotent. One of his own or a rival from the Quebec days, it hardly mattered. Get in line, take your pick. But there was nothing. Just the regular citizens in motion, trapped in their mini-vans and hum-drum, moving back and forth across the landscape of their lives.
His buddy Danny there with the car, waiting. Good old Danny. Duguay jumped in and looked around, fully expecting to spot a surveillance vehicle. There was nothing. Not yet, anyway. Danny put a CD on and pulled out, slipping inside the stream of traffic.
He said, “How was stir?”
“Rather do time back home,” Duguay said. “Least the screws speak the language.”
Danny said, “Come on, let me buy you a special dinner. What do you want, a big fucking steak? Spaghetti? And I guess you gotta get laid. But you don’t need my help with that.”
Duguay took the package of cigarettes from the console and lit one. He coughed at first, then sent a nearly perfect smoke ring floating towards the windshield. He watched it hover and glide then finally disappear as it met the glass. Like magic, how you could never be sure the smoke hadn’t just slipped right on through. One of many tricks gleaned in juvie hall. Fourteen years old and thrown to the wolves.
“I want to see my dog,” Duguay said. “And find me a good poutine in this fucking city.”
They settled on Greek, and Danny took them to the Danforth strip, a little taverna that was owned by a hundred-and-sixty-year-old man named Gus, who liked Danny because he had restored the old man’s Cordoba to its original stature, great blue whale of the streets. They took a table at the back, tucked away in a dark corner, and ordered plates of moussaka, grilled octopus and roast lamb, and Duguay told his old friend how he was thinking about distancing himself from the Blades, going back out on his own.
“The Internet, that’s where the next big money is coming from,” Duguay said, washing his food down with a splash of ouzo. “I know a guy down in Virginia, he set up a room with a bunch of computer hard drives and put up websites. He pays strippers and whores to screw on camera, and guys all over the goddamned world pay to watch. I mean these assholes are willing to give their fucking credit card numbers just to see some tits and ass in the privacy of their own home. You can turn around, sell their cards on top of what you’re bringing in from the site. It’s the way of the future, man. Who needs all the heat with dope and guns if you can sit back and run a business from your fucking bedroom?”
“Sounds like easy money,” Danny said.
“The best kind,” Duguay said, and smiled. He raised his glass, and Danny raised his, and they clinked. “To new horizons, man.”
Twelve
It was a strange period, a time of significant adjustments, during which McKelvey came to certain resolutions. These were the variety of conclusions a man arrived at when he stood still long enough to face the truth of his mortality. Beyond the scope of a mid-life crisis, this was constitutional, akin to a government reopening laws and charters, setting a course for a new era. It swept a man along on its own energy, the stark realization that he might leave this place before his work was done. It reminded him of a poem the teachers had his class memorize back in grade school, about a man walking in the snow, miles to go, miles to go. He couldn’t remember much of it, just those lines. He felt he could relate to that sort of propulsion.
On the morning he was discharged, McKelvey stood in the washroom of his hospital room looking at the sudden transformation of his face. Much of the weight gone from it, a new cut of sharper angles, lines now visible around the eyes, and he understood he had been re-born, he had been delivered another chance to make peace with himself, settle the score with his son’s killer. He needed to get in shape and stay in shape. He needed to close his eyes to all else, put blinders on to block the periphery. One foot in front of the other. Follow the fading line to its end point. It was, in the end, all there was to do.
In the time between his discharge and full recovery, his wife returned twice to their home. The purpose of the first visit was to check in on him following his release from hospital, but Caroline stayed longer than she had planned. They fell into a quiet and comfortable routine. She prepared food for him, moved about the house doing this or cleaning that. They rarely spoke, but it was okay. He slept, and she read in bed at his side. There was something indestructible about Charlie and Caroline. And he thought, it doesn’t matter that she won’t stay, because we remain forever. He understood with a sense of sufferance that he would not take another wife. These days spent together as old friends were to be among the final memories McKelvey would carry with him.
There was a month between visits. During this time he adhered to the strict nutritional guidelines as set out for him by a platoon of doctors. He stood at the kitchen counter to slice and dice fresh carrots, turnips, onions, the mysterious eggplant, i
tems he had barely considered in his previous incarnation, items he passed by in the grocery store because he felt they were the tools of the trade for those earthy “hippies” who seemed always to be vehement recyclers and drove bicycles to work even in the snow. He became acquainted with a broad selection of herbs— oregano, rosemary, dill, garlic. He gave up coffee and cigarettes entirely; a recorded miracle. There was a desire here to see how far he could run with this new life, take it to the limit. When the doctor allowed it, he began a careful regimen of sit-ups, pushups, small hand weights of fifteen pounds, twenty pounds. He embarrassed himself on the first attempt, lifting his body from the floor a mere six, seven times. But he could feel the strength returning, flowing back into his body. He lost four inches around his waist and had to buy new pants. There was a notion of early man morphing, evolving, crawling from the primordial ooze to stand upright and beat his fists against his chest.
The longest days of winter came to pass, and with it the arrival of a new century. There were no computer meltdowns as the doomsayers had predicted; the world simply sighed and shuffled forward. Now and then Hattie would stop by for a visit, and she would laugh when he poured himself a tea, taking great satisfaction in watching McKelvey perform the brewing ritual as though it were a religious ceremony. He seemed so centred, so calm. There had been a shift in polarities.
“Chamomile,” she said. “My god, it’s the seventh sign. What’s next—locusts?”
She always made him laugh with her unpretentious ways, the ways of a Maritime girl.
“You have such a nice smile, Charlie,” she said. “You should use it more.”
He shrugged, held the cup to his lips and sipped.
“And you’ve lost weight. God, you must be down to what, one ninety?”
“One eighty-eight, actually,” he said. “I was pushing two-fifteen.” She smiled. “I know you were. You look good.”
The Weight of Stones Page 8
