The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  McKelvey said, “I’ll call you. I promise.”

  He hung up, rolled the window down and tossed the cellphone out like an apple core. A little bit of calculus and voodoo, and they would have his last known position traced to the mile. It was something the bikers and gangs were starting to get smart with. Hitmen were removing the batteries on their pagers and cellphones while criss-crossing the country on their dubious business. His thigh was throbbing, the pain in tune with the beat of his heart. His pants were stained with dried blood. He would need to pull over to check the wound before long.

  Jessie rubbed her eyes and stretched. She turned to him, and he felt her watching him. He had so many questions to ask her, about his son, about their time together, about her life and her family, but he focused on the road ahead, the task at hand. It was this sort of behaviour that had driven Caroline crazy; she was always asking for a metre reading on his feelings, his thoughts. In his line of work, keeping the silence was not only a legal right, it was a means of self- preservation. He would take things slow with this one. He knew it wouldn’t take much to make her bolt. He could see it in her eyes, waiting him out.

  “We should call your aunt before we show up, shouldn’t we?” he said.

  “This was your idea, remember. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “You know her better than I do, Jessie.”

  “I’m kind of glad, to be honest. I mean to see her again, to go home for a while. I haven’t been back up in about three months. She sends me money to take the bus back every month, but shit happens, right.”

  She was quiet for a little while, then she cleared her throat. He thought she might be crying softly, but he didn’t want to turn. He felt the balls of his jaw clench and release, waves of pain rushing over his body. He gripped the wheel and held on as the road rushed past them, all around them.

  “Are you going to tell my aunt...you know, everything?”

  He gave her a quick sideways glance, caught the expectant look on her face. No matter what she had done, where she had been, the rooms and the men and the street and the drugs, she was a child at heart, whether she knew it or not. Hell, none of them knew it. That was the point. The big fucking irony of the whole crazy experiment called life—you didn’t know jack shit until you were too old to do anything about it.

  “I mean, you don’t have to tell her what I’ve been doing and all that, do you?”

  McKelvey said, “Listen, I’m not interested in fucking up your life.”

  She was visibly relieved, and she said, “It’s just that Peg has been so good to me. She thinks I started going to school to become a hairdresser.”

  “Have you ever thought of that?”

  “Hairdressing school?”

  “School, period. College, university. It’s how most people get good jobs these days.”

  She shrugged and said, “I never really gave myself a chance.”

  “You’re a smart kid,” he said. “I bet you could be anything.”

  She turned and looked at him hard. “You don’t even know me,” she said.

  “Well, you survived the biggest city we’ve got,” he said. “That’s good enough for me.”

  The scenery of southern Ontario changed shape, the box houses of Barrie dissolving into the rugged woods and jagged grey rock cuts of Muskoka cottage country. Highway 400 became Highway 69, then they were a world removed from the unforgiving city. Here even the most widely used roads seemed forever unexplored, the air was colder and fresher, and busted up pickup trucks took the place of expensive SUVs parked in the laneways of modular homes and trailers. It had been years since he’d moved beyond the ever-expanding perimeter of the metropolis, and as the countryside engulfed them, he was reminded of his boyhood home. The northern country where woods could swallow a man who did not treat them with the respect they deserved and demanded. McKelvey remembered how every few years, a crew of businessmen would go missing in the sprawling woods of Gogama, city slickers up for a long weekend of drunken amateur moose hunting, and it was men like his father who were called in by the fire department to assist in the search. The hunters were invariably found, wet and cold and embarrassed, huddled in their expensive designer khakis beneath a tree. But sometimes they were not so lucky. As with the sea, the woods of the north swallowed up their share of souls. His father had told him as a boy never to set foot in the woods without a compass, a pack of matches, and a jackknife, even if he was only going on a short hike. “A man can get turned around real easy,” his father used to say.

  “What are you thinking about?” she said.

  “I haven’t been up this way in a long time,” he said.

  “You used to live up here?”

  “Are you hungry?” he said, suddenly aware of the time of day.

  “I’m fucking starving,” she said. “I need some cigarettes, too. And I need to pee.”

  The gauge was hovering at the orange safety marker, and McKelvey had no choice but to cease the momentum. He pulled into a ramshackle gas station and convenience store on the other side of Parry Sound, for the summer town was far too busy with Greyhound traffic and a detachment of the provincial police. The odds were high that his plate number was already making the rounds. The notion that he might be considered an outlaw was strangely exhilarating.

  “I’ll gas up then see if I can look at this,” he said, indicating his leg. He stepped out of the truck, reached for the knapsack and slung it over his shoulder. “You can wait in the store for me, see if you can find something for us to eat.”

  “Dressed like some fucking backwoods hick?” she said, lip curled in disgust.

  He shrugged and looked at her sitting there in his old clothes. It made him smile.

  “Fuck you,” she said, and slid low on the seat, arms folded across her chest.

  A boy of eighteen or nineteen came across the gravel lot dressed in work boots and old jeans, a John Deere cap pulled down over a thick head of hair. McKelvey handed the kid a few bills. He saw the kid looking at the bloody stain across the crotch and thigh of his pants. McKelvey gave him his cop’s stare in return—the “it’s none of your business, keep moving on” look—and the boy busied himself with the fuel.

  “Washroom open?” McKelvey said.

  “Just follow your nose,” the kid said, wagging a thumb over his shoulder.

  McKelvey limped across the lot and found the washroom door ajar. He pushed it open with the toe of his shoe, his face wrinkling at the stench of shit and closed, fetid air. Beneath the single forty watt bulb, he steadied himself with a hand to the brick wall and managed to get his ruined pants off. He felt for Duguay’s ammunition clip and slipped it into the backpack, then balled the jeans up and tossed them in the garbage can. The wound was scabbed with dried blood, and he had to dab at it with some of the wet gauze before he could get a glimpse of its severity. The bullet had sliced through several layers of flesh, and when he parted the wedge with his fingers, fresh blood came to the surface, along with an ooze of yellowish fat. He winced and let out a groan. It was deep, but not as bad as he had imagined. Lucky, considering its proximity to the femoral artery—not to mention his balls. However lightly used of late, the latter were something he aimed to keep in their original condition. He clenched his teeth and pressed the two flaps of his flesh together long enough to apply a rectangle of gauze and tape. With his wound dressed and his new pants on, he washed his face in the brackish water then stepped back outside, hauling the fresh air into his lungs.

  The gas attendant was back inside the store now, sitting on a stool behind the counter. McKelvey went in and looked around. No sign of the girl. He looked out the dirty window to the truck. It was empty. Of course.

  “You see where she went?” he said.

  The clerk pointed up the highway.

  “Women,” McKelvey said, and the clerk gave him an understanding nod. McKelvey took a hobbled step then remembered the list: food, smokes. Something to drink. He shuffled to a wall of coolers and grabbed a
litre bottle of water, a dozen packaged cake donuts from a stand in front of the cash, and ordered two packages of cigarettes. With his sack of supplies stowed in his knapsack, he cut a line to the truck as quickly as he could, wincing with each step. He tossed the knapsack inside and tore out of the station in a cloud of dry dust.

  He scanned the shoulder of the road on both sides, squinting to decipher human forms from the rows of rural mail boxes. There were ways of bringing this to a conclusion, with or without her. He had taken her—kidnapped her, perhaps—so she was entirely his responsibility. His mind flashed with images of her on the side of the road, sprawled in a ditch, or picked up by some maniac. Fuck, he thought. Give me a goddamned break today, please. Just one day, that’s all I’m asking.

  He knew she couldn’t have made it far in the time it took for him to dress the wound, so when he spotted a bungalow-style truck stop diner up the road, he pulled in. The lot was filled with a half dozen family sedans and four tractor trailers. Sure enough, he saw her standing in a phone booth at the far end of the lot. He hit the gas and pulled up in a choking billow of dust, the front of the truck a foot or two from the doors of the phone booth. Jessie was not on the phone. She was standing there with her arms crossed, her eyes shooting arrows of hatred into his chest. He honked the horn and motioned for her to come. She shook her head and turned away. He revved the engine and honked the horn again, then resorted to lazy parent tricks by pulling the cigarettes from the knapsack. He rolled the window down and lit a smoke. He had almost forgotten how much he missed that simple ceremony, that rush of nicotine to the brain. He set his arm on the window and took a long, leisurely drag on the cigarette. She watched him, and her eyes were full of a base, uncomplicated hatred. It was a stalemate. He watched a big rig roll by, and in that moment envied the life of the driver. Long hauls. A radio and some good coffee. Just the road.

  “Want one?” he said, waving the cigarette like a smoking baton.

  She gave him the finger and mouthed something he couldn’t make out.

  “Get in the truck, Jessie,” he said in his cop’s voice. “You could’ve run away last night, and you didn’t. So unless you want to be left here in the middle of fucking nowhere, I suggest you get your mopey little ass in here. Right now.”

  She didn’t like it, and she took her sweet time making the move, but she finally flung the folding door open, got in the truck and without even looking at him grabbed the door and slammed it shut.

  “Give me one of those,” she said and held out two fingers.

  McKelvey obliged and lit her cigarette, then they were off again, rolling northward. The sky was changing its mood from grey to a dull yellow, then it was full sunshine and the cab of the truck was warm. They smoked their cigarettes and ate their packaged donuts in silence.

  They sailed through Sudbury, with its giant nickel statue paying homage to the mineral which made life possible for the city. It was an odd sight, a goliath coin set against the backdrop of golden black slag heaps and rock cuts.

  “Ever been to the Big Nickel? I went there when I was a kid,” Jessie said. “You can take a tour of the mine. They grow food and stuff down there, you know. It’s pretty cool. My aunt Peg took me and my friend Katie there one summer.”

  “To be honest, I’ve never been one for small spaces like that,” he said.

  “You’re claustrophobic?”

  “I wouldn’t say that exactly,” he said. “I just don’t like being underground. Figure I’ll do enough of that when I’m dead.”

  She laughed, and McKelvey gladly accepted the point as a small victory. He stuck his foot in the door of opportunity and held it open a while longer.

  “Were you raised by your aunt?” he asked.

  “After my dad went away, my mom had trouble looking after me and my brothers. Her sister Peggy had a decent job working for the town of Little Current, so she tried to help out the best she could. When my oldest brother Tom was eighteen, he joined the army and moved out west. My other brother George got sent away to a foster home because he was breaking into houses all the time. He had a learning disability, but nobody took that into account.”

  He didn’t trip her up with her changing story about her father, the way he would have tripped up a suspect. Had the man died or left them? It was a mystery.

  “And what about you, Jessie?”

  She shrugged and flicked ashes out the window. “My mom is so needy. Pathetic, really. She always needed a man in her life. It was good for her, I guess. It wasn’t so good for everybody else. Some of them would get into fights with George after Tommy was already gone. They picked on George because he was a little slow. And some of them, well, some of them wanted more than what my mom was giving them, I guess.”

  “You were abused,” he said.

  “Call it what you want.”

  McKelvey saw his son, Gavin, and the change that had taken place between fourteen and sixteen, two years of utterly confounding transformation. The cowlicked boy spreading hockey cards across his bed suddenly emerged one day as a moody, sullen impostor. It was a question he had asked himself a thousand times, playing through any and all possibilities for the opportunity of abuse, and he always came up empty. Gavin had played pee wee hockey, but the kids were never alone with the coaches, not like that. Beavers and Cubs, it was the same thing. So what then? What had been the catalyst for the startling transformation? Could it have been manic depression all along, or some other condition to which they were oblivious? What if a simple prescription could have spared them all of this pain? Why hadn’t he bothered to dig beneath the surface of things, search for medical records? Instead he’d become fixated on a single man, a single crime. But it wasn’t so clearly defined; Hattie was right, he had become blinded. It was the investigator’s most unforgiveable sin.

  “When did you start drinking and drugging?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Eleven, I guess. A friend stole a bottle of cooking sherry.”

  “Jesus,” McKelvey said, making a face. “I’m surprised it didn’t turn you off for good.”

  She shrugged. “Tasted like shit, yeah, but the buzz was good. I felt like...I felt like was out of myself, away from myself. You know?”

  “I think I do, sure.”

  McKelvey could piece the rest of the story together for himself. “When did you run away?” he said.

  “I was living with my aunt Peggy because George was gone and Tommy was gone, and my mom couldn’t take care of me any more. That’s what she said, that I was too much to handle. Can you fucking believe that? Her boyfriend’s coming into my room at night to get his rocks off, and I’m the problem?”

  Jessie reached for the pack of cigarettes and lit one with a shaking hand. The talk had upset her, dredging up memories from the past. And right now, right here, she was defenceless. No booze, no drugs, no place to run.

  “Peggy’s the only one ever gave a shit about me, if you want to know the truth,” she said, curling up, drawing on the cigarette. “I took off the year I turned fifteen. I mean, you can only take so much bullshit, right? Peg wasn’t so bad, it wasn’t her. She tried everything to get me back. She got the cops involved, and when that didn’t work, she even hired a private detective to come down and find me and bring me home.”

  “Sounds like she really loves you,” he said.

  Jessie didn’t say anything. She smoked her cigarette, her head turned to the window, the trees blurring to a single wall of green. The sun was strong through the windshield, and the cab of the truck was beginning to smell of smoke and dust and body odour. McKelvey rolled the window down a little to let in a rush of cool highway air.

  “She’s a good person, she just doesn’t understand what it’s like. To go from there to here. To live on the street and do...things. She doesn’t understand that you can’t just flick a switch and go back to being a little girl playing with Barbie dolls. You know?” she said, and turned to him. Her eyes were glossy, and McKelvey saw that she was close to crying, in se
arch of assurances.

  He said, “There’s always a way out. It’s never too late to turn things around. Look at you. You’re young. You may not feel like it, but when you’re my age, you’ll look back and realize just how young you were now. The past is the past, Jessie. You can’t change it, but you can learn from it. It’s all any of us can do.”

  “Where did you read that bullshit?” she said with a snigger.

  McKelvey laughed and said, “I don’t know. Some pamphlet probably.”

  “All the counsellors at the detox say the same fucking slogans over and over again, like you can just walk out the door and become a completely different person. But people can’t really change that much. You still have to live with who you are and what you’ve done. What’s been done to you.”

  “You said you saved up some money,” he said. “What’s that for?”

  “After Gavin died, everything went crazy. I had nowhere to go, no money. And Duguay was there, and he offered me work in the club. I didn’t want to do that, you know,” she said, and turned to him, and he knew she was looking for something.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” he said. “We all have to survive.”

  “I was pregnant and alone and broke. I lived in the women’s shelter until they got me into this program for teenage mothers. They were trying to get me to give my baby up,” she said, and her voice began to break, “but there was just no way. You know? I mean, she’s all I had left.”

  It was the first genuine admission about a child, and McKelvey took a deep breath.

  “I went back home for the last two months. After she was born, I left her with my aunt until I could save up enough to make a new life. It was supposed to be a couple of months, but they make it hard to save enough money. You always owe them for something. Duguay said I owed him for the time off I took with the baby, for the last few months when I couldn’t work for him any more. Anyway, I started tucking a little away, and I have almost a grand under the floorboards of the apartment they keep for us, for the girls who come through on the circuit. I was going to head out to Vancouver maybe and start all over again where nobody knows me. Gavin and I used to talk about Vancouver all the time, because it doesn’t get too cold. I figured when I had enough money to support me and...”