The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  “So what about this favour?” Danny said.

  “It can wait a little. Why don’t you roll us a joint like the old days.”

  Danny Madill didn’t have to be asked twice.

  The marijuana was an analgesic to Duguay’s old wounds, broken bones in various places that had failed, for one reason or another, to set properly. It had been a long time since his last toke, because the dope was never worth the price you had to pay on the inside, and now he coughed against the weed’s sweet refrain. His body exhaled a sigh, and he twittered a bit, but there was no sense that he was “off”, or otherwise dulled. He couldn’t afford it. He’d been good about his drinking lately, too. And the cocaine, it was something he had to push away. It wasn’t out of reach, though, or beyond possibility, that rush of confidence. There was an itch in the core of his brain, the coiled serpent there hissing for a good dose. He had to keep a lid on it.

  “You remember that time when we took off from juvie hall?” Danny said. His feet were up on the desk, and he was splayed in his chair. “We had like ten bucks between us. We made it all the way back downtown, don’t ask me how,” he continued, laughing now as he relived the memory, his own laughter building with the story’s punch line, “and then, instead of putting our money together for a room or some food, we bought a little weed...”

  “A couple of amateurs, we thought we were like Butch and Sundance on the lam,” Duguay said, smiling so hard his cheeks were beginning to ache.

  He looked over at his friend, his oldest friend with the wide face and the brown hair swept back like an eight-year-old boy, and he felt at ease within himself for the first time in weeks.

  “We were back in the joint before dark,” Danny said.

  “We didn’t know anything,” Duguay said, easing through the memory of those times. “We didn’t know you’ve got to have someone waiting in a car, a set of civilian clothes, ID, a safe house where you can lay low for a month, all those details. Juvie hall can teach a kid how to fight and how to break into a car or pull of a quick change stunt, but you don’t have a clue how things really work until you do penitentiary time.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Duguay tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. He said, “You were in, Danny. You did some short time on that vehicle ring years back.”

  Danny’s face changed, and Duguay knew without asking. “Danny?” he said—and it was a question.

  “I tried to tell you a long time ago,” Danny said. “It just never came up.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Danny shrugged, looked down at his boots.

  “I felt like a punk to you, to my brother,” he said quietly. “After you pulled that first set of three years when we were what, eighteen? You came back and you were—I don’t know, man—you were fucking hard. You were a hundred years older than me. I told you they sent me to Collins Bay due to the over-crowding at Archambault. Shit, I only pulled nine months, and I did that in the city hoosegow with a bunch of drunk drivers and quick change artists.”

  “Why would you lie about something so stupid?”

  “I don’t know, maybe I figured you wouldn’t trust me as much.”

  “Trust you? After all we’ve been through? Fuck. You got to be kidding me. I trust you with my life. Without hesitation. Shit, Danny, that’s nuts. It was me, I’d be happy as hell to say I’d never spent a single fucking night in a penitentiary...”

  In the silence that fell between them, Duguay understood something intrinsic about their relationship, something he’d missed along the way, or more likely something he’d seen yet wished not to believe.

  “You never had to do anything to impress me,” Duguay said. “Talk doesn’t impress me, you know that. Those fucks are a dime a dozen on the inside. Tough guys talking about big jobs they pulled or guys they wasted, and it’s ninety per cent bullshit. When the dice hits the mat they always show their true colours, and it’s usually yellow. I’d want you covering my back any day.”

  They sat there together. The room was stale, warm, and there was a scent of rust and hand cleaner. Danny pulled the ashtray to his lap and began absent-mindedly fishing through the jumble of butts with his already-blackened fingers.

  Duguay said, “Danny? If something happens to me. You know. Or if I ever call you and give the word, would you do me a favour?”

  “Name it,” Danny said.

  “I got some money stashed away. If I don’t get it in time. I mean, if they get to me. I want you to find Chantal and give her the money. Okay?”

  Danny shook his head slowly and smiled. “Chantal LeClair. Haven’t heard that name in a while,” he said.

  “I been thinking too much lately,” Duguay said.

  “That’s never a good thing.”

  “You ever miss the old days, the old neighborhood?”

  Danny said, “Sometimes, sure. I miss the smoked meat. I miss the quarts of beer in the dépanneurs. But everything looks better from a distance, man. I moved here to get away from that place. The people who tie you to your family name, to the things your father did or your older brother. I would have died if I had stayed, Pete. I know that’s the truth. I’d be dead right now. Or pulling a life sentence like my brother.”

  “I just can’t get used to it here,” Duguay said. “Everything’s different. The women are stuck up, and all the cons are working on ten-year plans. I’ve been thinking a lot lately, you know. Maybe I should make a move. I can’t sit here like a lame duck, you know?”

  “Where would you go?”

  “I don’t know,” Duguay said. “Home, I guess.”

  “You could expect a nice homecoming from the Hells,” Danny said. “From what I hear, things are only getting worse again between them and the Rock Machine. Heat was coming down on everyone for whacking those prison guards. It’s a goddamned butcher shop back home these days.”

  “It’s the only place for me.”

  “They’d kill you, Pete,” Danny said. “You have to know that. You can’t just walk back into the old neighbourhood and start up again like nothing happened. Like you didn’t turn away from them and side with the enemy.”

  “I have nothing to hide,” Duguay said. “Nobody ever owned me. I never ratted anybody out in my life.”

  “You’re old-fashioned, that’s your problem. You believe in the old-school days, honour among thieves and all that bullshit. But these guys today, they’re fucking animals. Blowing kids up, taking hits out on those prison guards like that—and a chick, to boot. They all turn over to the cops as soon as they get picked up. Anyway, honour ain’t much use if you’re dead.”

  “If it’s coming, I’d rather face it in my own way, with my own people. Not here, not in this city. It’s all strangers. My English is good, Dan, but I miss speaking my native tongue. I miss driving around the city, you know, the old streets.”

  “I don’t know, maybe you could go back. If you talked to some of them,” Danny said. He fiddled with his lighter and said, “If anybody could beat the odds, it’d be you.”

  Duguay held his hand out and said, “Light another, will you, Danny? I’ve got something to ask you. A little backup plan for these motherfuckers. I need some place to draw them in if everything goes to hell. A last stand.”

  It was a dark sky night of no stars when Duguay pulled out of the parking lot. He bought a coffee at a corner store to shake off the last of the head buzz and sipped it while scanning the magazine rack, pornos and bike mags. He bought a magazine featuring a new limited edition Harley Davidson on the cover. All sleek chrome and badass muscle, all shine and gleam, and Duguay stood there feeling like a kid staring at his first nude centrefold. It was something he’d wanted back in his life; he’d been almost a year without a hog of his own. There were many things he wanted back in his life. And some things gone from it. Is this what happened to a man as he edged up to his fortieth year?

  When he pulled out onto the boulevard, he noticed the white van turn in behind him from a side road.
He fixed the rear view, checked the side mirrors, ran through the options. He could make out two of them, a driver and a passenger. He wasn’t carrying, not this soon after being released. He had a baseball bat in the trunk, but it would mean pulling over, popping the trunk, and making it to the back before they opened up on him. A baseball bat against a gun; the odds weren’t worth the calculations.

  He took a few quick turns, circling a block, and the van stayed on him. His heart was beating fast now, his mind playing through the possibilities. He pulled over on a dark stretch of road. The van eased up a few yards behind him and kept the headlights on, then flicked the high beams. The blast flooded Duguay’s car so that his every move was visible. He squinted, trying to remember the license plate from the quick glances he’d managed in the rear view, but it was gone. Back in Quebec during the war, he’d become adept at memorizing plates and car makes of the rival dealers and associates, cataloguing them away for later recall, slips of paper kept in the glove compartment.

  Duguay hit the gas and the engine whined. The van pulled out and was almost touching bumpers when the passenger rolled the window down and fired once, twice, with a handgun equipped with a silencer. One of the bullets hit the driver’s side of the car, exploding the side mirror in a spray of plastic and glass, and Duguay tried to drive with his head below the console level. He managed to break away from the van by taking a sudden turn down a narrow side street, scraping the side of a parked car in the process, sparks shooting into the dark night like fireworks. He got himself out of the maze and back onto a main street, joining the flow of normal citizens.

  “Come on!” he screamed, hitting the steering wheel with his palm, the adrenaline running through his body like an electric current. “Here I am! Come and get me!”

  He pulled into a laneway, backed the vehicle up behind a parked trailer and sat there for almost an hour, smoking cigarettes with a shaking hand. It was then that he understood the decision had been made for him. He had no choice but to make the drive out to the small town bank, make his final withdrawal, and leave the failed experiment of this city behind him. He wondered, as he sat there in his car with the broken side mirror, if Chantal LeClair would run away with him if he showed up on her step in the middle of the night. He thought she’d probably say something like, “It’s been ten years, Pierre...”

  Twenty

  True to his reputation, the loyal dog stayed up with him through that long night, the first night of his newfound faith. Hattie came by just past midnight with the file folder on the girl. There was a vibration of hope and desperation all at once, and always, this faint hope that all of the searching and the dogged harassment would come to fruition with this, the startling news of the existence of a child. McKelvey was unable to eat or sleep, and Hattie said he looked like a college kid strung out on speed during exam week.

  The girl, she told him, was named Jessie Rainbird.

  “She’s in CPIC. She was picked up in that sweep on the strip clubs last fall. She was charged and got rehab in lieu of jail time. I got a friend to pull the court reports. She’s a runaway from Manitoulin Island. Grew up in Sudbury. Same old story, small town girl blinded by the big lights of the city. No education, no job, no fucking chance. She has a history with the Children’s Aid. Looks like an aunt is her legal guardian. There was no mention of dependents, Charlie.”

  “Maybe she lied. Maybe she gave it up,” he said. “Could be any reason.”

  “For all we know, she could have made the whole thing up for Gavin’s sake. To keep him. A knocked up girl out on the street, that’s got to be absolutely terrifying.”

  “Why are you saying all this?” he said. “I haven’t had a goddamned ray of hope in two years, Hattie. And now I find out I might have a piece of my son out there somewhere, and you want to bring me down?”

  “Charlie, nobody wants to see you happier than I do. I just don’t want to see you get hurt in this. Maybe take some time to think things through, that’s all. These people, they’re from the street. They tell lies they way you and I say good morning.”

  “I wondered why I called Tim Fielding that first night, you know. I could never figure out what made me do it. It’s not like me to reach out like that. But something made me pull over and make the call that night, Hattie. And now I know it was Gavin. There are no coincidences in life. If I hadn’t called Tim that night, I would never have been at the tattoo shop today...”

  She watched him, and she nodded, but he could tell that she didn’t believe him. Or she didn’t believe that he believed what he was saying. They both knew how far the families of victims can carry things when they hang onto hope just a little too long.

  “Let me see the file,” he said and held out his hand.

  Hattie sighed and handed it over, and said, “It’s official. We’re both breaking the rules now. Only you don’t have a job to lose.”

  “I hear the work’s overrated anyway,” he said and gave her a little smile.

  McKelvey flipped through the printed reports. “She was picked up at the Dove,” he said.

  “Blades’ unofficial clubhouse,” she said. “Must be working for one of their agencies.”

  He glanced at his watch. It was twenty past twelve. The strip joint would be stumbling headlong into its final hours. There was no tomorrow, no day after that. It was right now, right here. This was everything.

  “I’m going to ask you to go home,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” she said.

  “Go home and stay by your phone. I’ll call you to check in.”

  “Charlie, no,” she said. “Let me stay here at least. I’ll be worried sick.”

  “I have to do this on my own,” he said. “You can understand that. Please.”

  “I can’t just let you leave here to go after Duguay. Printing a few files is one thing, Charlie, but I’m not going to be an accessory…”

  “Shhh,” he said, and leaned over to take her face in his hands. “I don’t give a shit about Pierre Duguay, Hattie. I want the girl, that’s all. I want to find my grandchild.”

  “She might not even work there any more,” she said. “Christ, she could be anywhere.”

  “She’s there,” he said. “I can feel it. She’s still there.”

  Duguay parked the car in the lot of a motel a block down from the Dove. The passenger side was trashed, streaked with black scratches and peppered with paint flecks from the car he had side-swiped, something in burgundy, and the driver’s side mirror hung there like a popped eyeball. He walked back to the club, came in the front door and slipped past the doorman. He spotted a few of the hangarounds standing at the bar, guys who did the gang’s dirty work while awaiting their promotion to “prospect” status. He would have them get rid of the car before it drew any more heat to him. Duguay slipped the keys in the jacket pocket of a hangaround named BB.

  “Car got shot up. Get Davey to follow you and drive it out of the city,” Duguay said. “Take it up to Orillia or some place. Strip the plates and light it up.”

  “What’s Davey supposed to do?” BB asked. His mouth was open, and he had big teeth.

  “Drive you back, asshole,” Duguay said and brushed past them on his way through the club to the apartment, using his shoulders to clear a path through the patrons. These were the soldiers Bouchard had sent to open a franchise, to raise a flag. Morons and crackheads. The thing was doomed from the start. And now his ass was on the line.

  The sweat was drenching his T-shirt as he began to throw his clothes into a duffel, cursing his own stupidity for throwing in with this crew. He’d felt like he was in a no-win situation after the bad business in Lennoxville. He should have taken the hand extended by the Sorel Hell’s Angels, moved past the fact they had killed a few of his good friends. Yet here he was. Pride or hatred, or perhaps both had prevented him from shaking hands with those people. He’d been sitting in a bar near the Montreal airport waiting for a flight attendant from Air Canada who imported cocaine for him on
her body. That’s when the friend of a friend had seen him there and made the introduction to Jean Bouchard. The old man had liked him right from the start. And that’s when everything had changed for Duguay.

  He went around the rooms of the apartment, and it was always this way in the end, it always came down to this: trying to decide what to carry with him, what to leave behind. He was in the living room zipping the bag shut when Luc, the acting boss, came through the door. He stood there regarding Duguay for a moment, and Duguay did not like the trace of a smile on the man’s mouth.

  “What’s the joke?” he said, and straightened up.

  “BB told me you came in, said your car got shot up,” Luc said. “What happened?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” Duguay said.

  “What are you talking about? Why would I want to hurt you?”

  “Don’t fuck around with me,” Duguay said. “I’m not playing games here.”

  Luc took a few steps, careful not to move too fast, and sat down on a love seat. He was a tall man, but lanky, and his stringy black hair had always bothered Duguay, always hanging in the man’s eyes. And he wore too much jewellery—like most of the bikers did—which Duguay saw as unnecessary and boastful. All show and sizzle.

  “I swear on my life, I would never put a hit out on you, Pierre. It’s the Para-Dice Riders, I bet. We’re starting to get heat from them, too. The Hells on one side, the Riders on the other, both of them starting to squeeze our nuts. Loners are the only ones who will even sit and talk to us about an alliance. Have a drink with me, Pierre. Relax. Sit down and have a drink,” Luc said.

  “It’s all a mess,” Duguay said. “Nothing’s organized. They sent us here to fail. The Hells own this place. It’s a death wish trying to carve out a territory in this city with a bunch of fuckheads.”

  “Listen,” Luc said, glancing at his watch, “I’ve got to run across the city to see a few of my guys. I’d like to have a beer when I get back so we can talk. But tell me what you need, Pierre, tell me what I can do right now to help.”