The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  They would talk about work, but only in a peripheral sort of way. McKelvey seemed to show a lack of interest in staying abreast of the police work that continued despite his absence. But Hattie knew McKelvey followed the Duguay proceedings in the newspaper, saw the articles he clipped and set aside.

  “Leroux’s family authorized it,” she told him one day towards the end of February. “They’re pulling the plug. It’s official.” She searched his face for a sign, anything, but it was blank. “I guess that ends that,” she said. But she didn’t really believe it.

  When Leroux was declared dead, finally and completely dead, the charges were stayed against Duguay, and the man was released to the world. The Sun ran a photo of Duguay on page three. “Blade walks free,” the headline declared. There was Duguay, coming out of the court dressed in a nice suit, one of the city’s notorious defence attorneys at his side. McKelvey cut the photo out, folded it in half, and tucked it inside his wallet.

  She said, “You’ve got it for this guy, don’t you?”

  “These idiots think they’re classy like the old-style mobsters,” McKelvey said. “They don’t see themselves for what they really are, which is a bunch of low-lifes. They’ve got no honour, they’ve got no plan. It’s all about what they can get right here and right now. Duguay thinks he’s Al Capone, waltzing out of court in a thousand dollar suit...”

  Hattie stirred sugar into her coffee and let McKelvey’s harsh tone simmer. She felt the sting and the choke like a lingering vapour. Sometimes it happened, she knew. A cop came to a point where he couldn’t get past something, he couldn’t let go of a perp or a case or a victim. Happened to the best prosecutors, too. Something got stuck and just kept looping. She understood that, for right or for wrong, McKelvey had fingered Duguay and Leroux for Gavin’s death. Now Leroux was dead, and Duguay was a free man. She did not want to listen to the whispers of those who spoke of other motives at work here, a foreshadowing of darker things to come. She wanted to believe in McKelvey and in the way that she saw him.

  When Caroline returned for the second and final time, it was with a moving truck. There was an understanding of conclusion here, a quiet acceptance of the facts. They went to the lawyer together and worked out the details. It was a legal separation; divorce was not mentioned. McKelvey wanted to give her everything, but he knew Caroline wouldn’t take more than her fair share. The retirement savings were figured out, and they came to an agreement on the home they had paid off together; for the time being McKelvey would rent the home, with the funds being deposited in a separate account to be calculated and halved upon the sale of the home at a later date. It was all very business-like, as though the two of them were almost irrelevant in the whole process of valuing savings accounts, RRSPs, mutual funds, capital assets. They were a corporation. Charlie and Caroline Incorporated. McKelvey couldn’t bring himself to make eye contact with his wife as they signed reams of paperwork.

  He could see the change in her. Caroline looked young again, the darkness gone from her eyes, a burden lifted. She was dressed in new clothes. Her hair was done. It was a geographical cure, McKelvey believed, this transfer to the west coast, but who was he to judge? It was a strange and sad irony, though, both of them standing there in the living room looking healthier and altogether more content than they had in years, that their mutual regeneration was made possible only through separation.

  “I have an interview next week,” she told him, “for a job in a women’s shelter. I’ll be doing public outreach again, and helping out with the administration.”

  “That sounds great,” he said. “They’d be lucky to have you.”

  He wanted to reach out and touch her glowing face, touch it perhaps for the last time. They would promise to stay in contact, to call now and then, write letters, but he had no long range plans; he just wanted this done. Like ripping a bandage from the flesh, do it quickly and don’t think twice.

  He said instead, “Listen, I want you to know I don’t hold any of this against you. I mean, you leaving.” He paused, unsatisfied. “No, that’s not what I meant to say.”

  But Caroline reached out and touched his face, and she said, “Shhhh, Charlie.”

  She was crying, and he gave her a hug, rubbing her back. He smelled her perfume, her hair, and he tried to recall the last time they had made love. He wanted to preserve a date, a context, but his mind came up blank. They stepped apart.

  “It’s nobody’s fault,” she said, which he accepted as a small kindness. “I just…I couldn’t breathe, Charlie. I was suffocating...”

  “I didn’t come through for you, and I am sorry for that,”

  he said.

  “You need to look after yourself, Charlie. You’re so angry, so filled with hatred. Treat yourself with love and kindness. You need to get some help with all of this. It’s too much to carry around. There’s no shame in admitting that. But even as I say that, I know it doesn’t come easy for you. I know that, charlie.”

  She went to pack the last of her things. The two young movers busied themselves removing furniture and boxes.

  McKelvey made them take more than his wife wanted, until there remained little more than the kitchen table and chairs.

  The master bedroom was stripped except for the bed itself.

  McKelvey stood in the middle of the living room once the movers were locking up the gate on the truck, and he nodded his acceptance of this new world order, this cosmic ripple.

  “So what now, Charlie?” Caroline said.

  She startled him, coming up from behind. He turned and saw her standing there, a final box at her feet. It was marked “Books”. He smiled and felt something catch in his throat. He almost cried, but he didn’t. It was over before it began.

  “I used up all of my sick time and vacation days. So I guess I’ll retire,” he said with a shrug.

  “Oh, I’ll believe that when I see it,” she said. “Promise me you’ll take your medication and stay on the diet. You know how you drift away from things after a while.”

  She went to touch his face again but stopped herself. Old habits.

  “I’ll take a trip out that way next summer, stop in and visit,” he said. “If that’s okay.”

  “That would be nice,” she said. “That would be just fine.”

  They looked at each other. They both smiled sadly, understanding they were too old to pretend. He stood at the living room window and watched as her cab pulled away. She did not turn back as he thought she might, a last little wave. Then the moving truck revved, shifting into gear with a guttural moan, and disappeared down the street, taking a good portion of his life with it. McKelvey experienced no pangs of regret or longing for the items in the back of that truck; it was just stuff. What was gone was his wife. His wife and son. His family. Everything he had worked for all these years, all those midnight shifts in the cold patrol cars, all the arguments over bills, the vacations and the Christmas mornings, all of it gone with the flicker of the brake lights on the moving truck.

  Like a snake shedding its skin, he moved through the house to the garage, and pulled an old chair up to the high shelves along the wall. He reached with his hand, adjusting the rags and the oil cans and the garden fertilizer, until his hand found a small grey lockbox and pulled it down from its hiding place. In the kitchen he set the box on the table and opened it with a tiny key on a string that he kept in the bottom of his underwear drawer. The box was filled with newspaper clippings in which he was quoted in court, a few old photos, and at the bottom, wrapped in an old tea towel, there was a small .25 pistol. Black, what they used to call a lady’s gun. Something he’d kept hidden from Caroline for years and years. The black metal pistol had belonged to a friend. He had kept it while the license was sorted out for the guy, but somewhere along the line it had become his property. It rested in a leather holster that you slipped onto your belt, the little bundle wrapped in the old stained towel. He unwrapped the gun, weighed it with his palm, this tiny weapon, then set it aside. Wit
h his green tea steaming, he sat alone leafing through the old clippings about armed robberies, arrests, acquittals. The story of his life set out in fading newsprint.

  Thirteen

  The air tasted in the back of Pierre Duguay’s throat like crack cocaine. Its chemical residue clung to his tongue like baking soda and burnt plastic, and he hadn’t even partaken. It was just after six o’clock in the morning, and Duguay was staring at the bedroom ceiling in the apartment unit located above the Dove Gentleman’s Club. The sun was breaking open, spreading across the eastern horizon the colour of burnt marmalade. But in here it was still midnight. In this place it was perpetual midnight. The windows were covered in tinting, and the blinds were drawn. There had been a party, a series of never-ending celebrations following his release. His townhouse had been leased out during his confinement, so he was here like a kid starting all over again. Something he’d been doing his whole life, starting over again once the cuffs came off and the gates opened up. His throat burned from too many cigarettes, and his lungs ached from the abuse. On mornings like this, he felt the full weight of his age, the consequences of a lifetime lived on the fringe, the unpaid bills from his youth now stacked and awaiting payment. This year he would turn thirty-eight, a milestone in terms of morbidity rates in his profession. His father had made it to thirty-four. In this way he was already something of a generational success story.

  There had been another party, and now the mood was sombre, the hollow come-down mood of a strip joint at daybreak. The vampires were asleep, spread around the apartment, passed out on the long leather couch in the living room or curled up on reclining chairs. This one at his side had come to rest there as much by chance as any design. There were young girls new to the club, and his memory was unclear concerning this one. Nothing brought home the fact of his aging more clearly than the requirement of a few lines, once he had too many beers into him, to get hard and stay hard. The white was something he had tried to stay away from; once tasted, it was a talon in his shoulder blade. It came and went from his life in short, sharp bursts. He did what he did, and things were what they were. He never smoked it or shot it, a compromise of sorts.

  He looked at the girl’s back now, her tanned flesh smooth and dotted with tiny freckles across the shoulder blades. A tattoo at the base of her neck, some sort of Asian symbol. He figured it was her birth sign or perhaps a meaningful phrase in some mystical language: “courage” or “faith”, something like that. All the young girls were getting the same tattoos in all the same places. They all wanted to look the same, dress the same. She stirred slightly, rolled over so he could see her face. She was not unattractive, but the evening had taken its toll. Her long copper hair was tangled, and her face was puffy from sleep. Her breath was sour and strong. He slid from beneath the sheets and walked naked across the floor, stooping for his jeans and t-shirt on his way to the bathroom.

  Duguay lifted the toilet lid, tilted his head back and pissed a long golden stream. He shivered and ran fingers across the blue-black lines inked to his chest and belly, evil incantations, swords and skulls. He dropped the lid with his foot and hit the flush. He coughed and drew a mouthful of phlegm, spat in the sink and washed it away. He splashed cold water on his face then ran his wet fingers through his brown hair that fell to just above collar length, a little shaggy but a generation removed from the waist-length hair he had sported in the early Eighties. Tied back or let loose, for better or for worse, it had been something of a wild trademark, back when he’d tucked his jeans into his goddamned cowboy boots and taken himself so seriously. Driving around Montreal and Sherbrooke and way up in Val D’Or in a yellow Camaro. Jesus, he thought. The days we had, the days.

  In the bedroom he found his watch on the night table and slipped it over his wrist. The girl was awake now and sitting up with her back against the headboard, a few white crumbs in her palm. He watched as she put the tiny glass pipe to her lips, a one-hitter, the glass blackened and stained from the burning chemicals. She held a lighter to the end, and in this way she was delivered from the collapse of her spirit. It was what she needed, what she wanted, what she had become. The first hit was a jolt, a dog bark in her ear, and she woke up. The ease crawled across her internal organs, system to system, cell to cell, then out through her limbs, some kind of a cure. It was the only game in town.

  “Tabernac. Hitting the pipe before her eyes are open. You better watch that shit, sister. You’re no good to me, you’re no good to nobody. Fucking junkies...”

  Her head was back now, lolling side to side. Duguay shook his head and reached for his cigarettes. He freed one from the package and tapped it a few times against his Zippo lighter, popped it in his mouth and fired it up. He drew a long haul, then exhaled the smoke through his nostrils in two long funnels.

  “Cops probably sitting outside right now, watching this place,” Duguay said. “Looking for any excuse they can get just to come in here.”

  He walked towards the door, and the girl opened her eyes, groggy. “Where you going?” she said.

  “You should know better than to ask questions like that,” he said.

  “Can’t it wait till morning?”

  “It is morning, bijou,” he said. “You girls better be showered and have this fucking place cleaned up by the time I get back.”

  He walked out through the living room, past the empty beer bottles and stuffed ashtrays, an open pizza box with four or five cold slices that turned his empty stomach, past a girl curled and crashed on the couch. In a small refrigerator in the kitchen he dug his hand into a large package of deli end cuts, old heels of mock chicken and pork roast and spiced salami, then he unlocked the door to the spare bedroom. The room was empty save for a large comforter coiled into a bed, a bowl of water and a food dish. Too many luxuries spoiled a dog. Diablo, a Red Nose American Pit Bull, was waiting on his haunches, his thick body packed with muscle, translucent grey eyes glimmering, liquid.

  “Daddy’ll be back,” he said, and tossed the handful of meat into the bowl.

  He wiped his hand down his jeans and closed and locked the door to the spare room. He was closing the main door behind him just as a toilet flushed in the washroom down the hall, and the girl with the coal black hair stepped into the hallway, the hangover headache coming on like timpani as she gathered her clothes.

  The sunshine was like arrows in his eyes as Duguay walked across the parking lot. It was a perfect early spring morning. It was still cold enough to see his breath, but the sun was warm on his face even at this early hour. It made him think about being a kid, a specific memory of walking to the corner store—the dépanneur—to buy milk for his cereal. A Sunday morning. The sun shining and making him squint like the cowboys in those Saturday afternoon movies. The streets were always dead on a Sunday morning, everybody sleeping off their Saturday night. It was a memory that came with a good feeling, like he was a man of independent means, a buck fifty in his front pocket, money filched from the asshole sleeping on his mom’s couch. The little boy Duguay squared his shoulders and walked straight down the middle of the sidewalk.

  The past wasn’t something Duguay had much use for. To him, life was right here, right now. It had always made sense that way to him, as far back as he could remember. Now was all that mattered—getting through the next hour, having enough money in your pocket, a bed to sleep in, a woman to lie with. The counsellors in the prisons were always offering up diagnoses as a means to explain his chosen life, this path which alternated between periods of wickedness and penitence. Some said he had a personality disorder, or borderline personality, although he read the brochures and figured he owned only about half of the necessary characteristics. Was it true that he had no conscience? No, it wasn’t true. Not the way they made it sound. When he was righteous, when he was wronged, then he could and would take care of business without hesitation. He had hurt people in different ways, it was true. He would probably hurt many more before his time was through. One time he’d tried to explain it to a co
unsellor by saying it this way: “If it comes down to me or another guy, it’s going to be the other guy who falls every time. I’m gonna be the one who makes it out. See, you sit in an office, and you don’t understand. You can’t understand. You don’t come from the same place as me.”

  There were things they tried to get him to talk about, and he gave them just enough to get his papers signed and make parole. Sometimes he made up stories, telling the counsellors things he thought they wanted to hear. It wasn’t until the range was mostly silent and he was on the bunk in his cell that his mind drifted back to the fragments of childhood, the worst secrets of those crazy days. The faces of the men his mother brought home, the sickness from booze and drugs hanging over the whole place like a weather pattern, the endless disappointments of birthdays and holidays. And always the memories started and stopped with the man named Duvalier, who stayed with him and his mother for a few weeks when Duguay was nine or ten. Duguay hated him more than the other dregs his mother brought home. These men were for the most part harmless fools, drunks and petty ex-cons, a parade of losers, men who had let life slip through their fingers and now sat in rented rooms with quart bottles of beer, their fingers stained yellow from tobacco, teeth rotting out of their head. But he particularly hated Duvalier because the man gave off a vibration of meanness, as though with him anything was possible. Duguay hated his little round beer belly, hated his thin brown hair slicked back across his high round forehead, hated the way he looked at Duguay. There was something not right about the man, about the way his eyes held the boy.

  It happened one day while Duguay was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. A Saturday morning, his mother passed out and cartoons buzzing on the little TV in the living room. Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd teaching him American English. Duvalier came in, closed and locked the door behind him. Duguay smelled the day-old booze on the man, seeping through his flesh in a greasy film. The man’s breath was sour, as though he had been sick to his stomach.