The Devil's Dust

by C. B. Forrest

  “You found Jenny,” Travis says in wonderment, and he points.

  “Back up,” Nolan says, but his voice sounds unsure even to himself.

  Travis turns a twisted-lip smile and he is gone up the stairs. Nolan’s body surges with endorphins, fear and excitement, panic and exhilaration. He takes the stairs three at a time, the flashlight heavy in his hand like a sidearm. There is only time to think this focused thought: I am in a police foot chase …

  “Travis!” Bob Lacey yells from the hallway.

  The teen pushes through the front door, Nolan at his heels. The sunshine hits Nolan’s eyes and he squints hard. A world of whiteness, the snow reflects the light and makes his eyes water. Travis is in sock feet but this does not slow his sprint across the front yard, the snow reaching to just below his knees, this wild animal sprung from a trap. Travis careens to the left, disappears around the side of the garage. Nolan’s boots provide better traction and he gains his footing now. He catches a glimpse of the teen’s dark shirt around the side of the garage and he hears the boy’s mother crying from the front step. Nolan negotiates the corner of the building at the same moment the clearest thought enters his mind: never come around the corner of a building unless you know for certain what is waiting for you … approach with caution, approach low and slow …

  In the void of recalled training there is now a looping arc of blurred motion as Travis swings a snow shovel like a home-run hitter. Nolan does the only thing he can do in the short time he has to react, which is to raise a forearm to protect his face. It is the last thing Ed Nolan does just before the concussive connection, sounds of disembodied voices, his seemingly weightless body falling, falling.

  The cold burn of snow on his face.

  And then blackness.

  Two

  That first night off the Greyhound he takes a room at the Station Hotel, the only real hotel in town. The old guy behind the desk is watching a hockey game on one of those black and white TVs that also has a built-in radio. The arrival of a guest seems to catch him by surprise, and he looks up from the little TV with his mouth open. A quick scan of the room keys hanging behind the desk indicates the hotel has full vacancy.

  “Looking for a room, are you?” the old man asks.

  The disembodied sports commentator talks excitedly through the TV’s mono speaker. You can hear the threshing crowd, this rising sea of voices joined in passion. Players are in a corner, fighting for control of the puck. Someone is winning and someone is losing.

  “As long as it’s got a bed,” the visitor says, and sets his heavy duffle bag on the hardwood floor, straightens his back.

  The old man reaches behind for a room key. He places the key on the desk, licks his thumb, and flips a yellow invoice pad to a new page, looks around for a pen.

  “Forty-eight, tax in.”

  The guest pays the night clerk with the last of his American money, having come north in a meandering way through Michigan for no other reason than boredom and the availability of time.

  “You want a coffee or anything? I could brew a pot,” the clerk offers. His eyes tell the guest that he would welcome the company to pass the long hours.

  “It’s been a long day, thanks,” the guest replies, and then hefts his duffle and walks over to the broad staircase with its thick wood banister.

  The clerk nods. “You’re probably tired, don’t feel like talking tonight.”

  A wayfarer’s hotel, the hardwood of the Station is gouged and well worn from the heavy boots and hard lifestyle of its nightly occupants over the long decades, mostly miners coming in or going out, hydro workers following the power lines ever northward, and once in a while a platoon of soft-faced geologists or engineers from the head offices down in Toronto. The four-storey hotel sits across the street from the old train station. The train comes through town just twice a week now, Tuesdays and Saturdays, but at one time, back in the 1970s, it arrived like clockwork each morning.

  The only thing keeping the hotel in business these days is the one-room tavern located off the west wing of its main floor. A pool table sits out front near the big window with the faded neon sign advertising Labatt 50, four round tables and six stools at the bar, a dartboard in a dark corner. The felt on the pool table is bald and torn, and the urinal in the men’s room often clogs and overflows, sending a slow cascade of piss trickling down the hall. The place is only ever a third full at best if there is a good hockey game on, but the business is regular and can be counted on. The draft beer is cheap, and Terry, the owner and bartender and janitor, isn’t averse to letting a regular’s tab grow beyond what might be considered prudent in these tough economic times.

  Room 27 is small, spare and simple. A twin bed with a handmade afghan folded over the bottom half, a desk in front of the window looking out on Main. The street at this hour is bathed in the false yellow of street lamps, still and empty. Nothing to do in Ste. Bernadette on a Friday, let alone a Sunday night. Dead of January. Dead, period. The guest sets the duffle by the foot of the bed and closes the faded curtains to mute the street lamps and the silver glow from a nearly full moon.

  There is an old calendar from a tool company tacked to the wall near the bathroom, stale-dated by four months. Someone has circled October 15 and scrawled the words Out of Ste. Bernadette! It is underlined not once but twice. He figures he knows how the author must have felt in this town, in this little room: the walls closing in, the town itself shifting inward, smothering, growing smaller by the hour. It plays tricks with a man’s head.

  He unties and kicks off his boots then goes and takes a long piss. The flow is uneven, and at one point he clenches his eyes to the effort. The low-watt bulb makes the stained porcelain sink, toilet, and tub appear older than they are, chipped and badly used, like his reflection in the square of mirror. Fifty-nine or a hundred and six, it’s a coin toss. He splashes water on his face and sees that he needs a shave and a haircut. Nothing that can’t wait another day, another week. There is no one to impress.

  He pulls off his clothes and showers in the lukewarm water to wash away the sweat and smells from the Greyhound. Long hours of highway from Toronto, then pushing back up across the border to the Sault, the whole time sitting next to a great-grandmother who smelled of sharp cheese and eye-watering lavender. And she had wanted to talk to him about everything that was going on with her and her children, the demise of the modern family, the shame of the country as a whole, his lost generation. Pretending to sleep, eyes closed to keep the old woman at bay, his mind had fluttered with dark thoughts, the tangled briar patch of fear or anxiety that seemed to be part of coming home after a long time gone. Or it was the illness, his being sick, and the game of pretending it was not the truth.

  In boxer shorts and sports socks he stands at the sink and rummages through his shaving kit for the pain pills. What are they for again? A gunshot wound or a strained oblique muscle, a broken heart, a hang nail — it hardly matters anymore. He has long since passed the destination where pain is possible to pin down with any accuracy or honesty; it is now as much a part of his biological chemistry as carbon, oxygen. He gobbles three capsules and washes them down with a mouthful of tap water. The water tastes of sulphur and smells of moist, fecund earth. The taste of Ste. Bernadette; the taste of home.

  And so Charlie McKelvey crawls beneath the sheets, pulls the quilt up to his chest, and waits there in the darkness for sleep to show him a little mercy.

  Three

  The oblong capsules wrap the occupant of Room 27 in a cocoon of gauzy, tongue-thick sleep until just after ten the next morning. Eventually and inevitably, the aches and pains located indecipherably throughout McKelvey’s body begin to stir, shaking off chemical slumber. First the hip, then the knees, the back, the shoulders. The wind chill and the dampness in their air up here give a cruel twist to the first signs of arthritis that sit like rust in the cracks of old broken bones, abused joints. He swings his feet to the floor, teeth already clenched to start the day. Groggy from th
e pills, head stuffed with cotton, he licks his lips and rubs his puffy eyes with the heels of his palms. Yawns and stretches and looks around the room, wondering yet again what in the hell he thought he was doing by coming back here, what sort of loop he was looking to close. Maybe there was no loop after all. Life, in all of its purported mystery, wasn’t so mysterious after all. Things as they are and always will be.

  He moves to the duffle bag that sits on the floor and digs through the jumble of clothes for a clean pair of underwear and socks. His hand finds the cellular phone he so loathes and he sets this on the bed. It is not the implement or even the strange cordless technology he despises — though there must be witchcraft involved in a telephone that has no cord leading anywhere — it is the fact they are making them so small, his thick fingers struggle to enter correct numbers. There is also the matter of how tiny the digital display is, and he has not and will never admit to needing glasses.

  He fishes a hand in the bag again and this time pulls out a stack of pamphlets. An array of informational pieces graphically designed in soothing colours, featuring photographs of salt-and-pepper-haired men smiling and playing touch football with ruddy-cheeked, smiling grandchildren, with reassuring titles like Prostate Cancer: A Survivor’s Guide. He tosses them on the bed. His gaze alternates between the pamphlets and the phone. The red light that indicates a missed call flashes on the phone like a poke in the eye. The calls — for he knows they are in the multiple — are from any number of people who have taken umbrage with his sudden pulling of stakes. As though it is somehow shocking that a man who finds himself poked, prodded, goaded, cajoled, and generally fucked with should one day decide he has reached the limit of his tolerance. It happened just like that: one morning he simply woke, threw clothes in the duffle, and walked up to the bus terminal on Bay Street at Dundas. Scanned the list of destinations on the board, paid for the ticket in cash like some deadbeat on the lam, and was off.

  Now he steps into the bathroom. He turns on the shower and waits for the initial explosion of rusty water to subside, these barks of brackish brown-red, and then he is in and under the flow, hands to the tile, head bowed. This may be as close as he comes to absolution this day, and he’ll take it.

  They are waiting for him down at the front desk as he knew they would be. It is the night manager and two other old-timers. They are all in their late seventies or early eighties, with white hair and yellowed, rheumy eyes. They are drinking coffee from white Styrofoam cups. They stop talking when McKelvey comes down the stairs. There is just no getting around it. This is life in a small town so far removed from the cities that any visitor is considered an aberration until all facts are investigated, sorted, and filed. He could just as well be Tom Selleck in town to film a Sunday night movie.

  “Sleep okay there, buddy?” the manager asks, trying to show his friends in some way that he has already formed a relationship with the guest.

  “Not bad. You wouldn’t have an extra cup of that coffee.”

  “Endless cup,” the manager says, and goes to the pot sitting on a stand by the reception desk. “Comes with the room. Just one of the many perks of the Station.”

  The men chuckle and the manager hands McKelvey a cup. The steam rises in tendrils and McKelvey can already taste the stale brew, feel his guts cramping. It smells like burnt leaves and mud. One of the men is eyeing McKelvey as though he knows him, or thinks he does, trying to place the facial features against the family names of the town roster. McKelvey thinks he might recognize the old man right back, one of the old Finnish miners. The old guy is wearing a navy wool toque rolled tightly on top of his head.

  “You wouldn’t be Grey McKelvey’s boy, would you?” the man finally asks.

  And here it is. Forty years gone, save for a few short visits during his father’s final illness, and still they know the face and the surname, the history attached to it like a set of roots planted in this stubborn soil.

  “Yes, sir. Charlie McKelvey.”

  “Nick Jalonen,” the man says, and then nods to the man at his side. “And this here is George Fergus. ’Course you already met Duncan last night, Dunc Stewart. Hope you had a good trip in. What brings you back this way?”

  McKelvey can see in the men’s eyes that they are sewing together memories, perhaps of his father in certain situations, or all of them together as young men, hard-bodied and full of life. How time slips away.

  “Grey McKelvey, Jesus Murphy,” George Fergus says. “We had some times, didn’t we? Your dad was the toughest SOB ever ran the union.”

  This stops McKelvey’s mind, for he recalls the late-night arguments in the kitchen below his bedroom as his mother and father debated the merits of union leadership and an impending strike. In the end, McKelvey believes his father turned down the nomination. He seems to recall that his father was somehow philosophically opposed to the notion of co-operatives and unions, believing each man was responsible for his own representation in this life.

  “I always thought my dad shied away from the political stuff.”

  This makes the trio of old-timers laugh. They eye one another in conspiracy.

  “I never said he was president, or even on the executive,” Fergus says, “but make no mistake, your dad was the go-to guy. He was the balls behind the whole operation, that wildcat strike in ’54.”

  The information hits McKelvey like a punch to the stomach, and for a moment he thinks he should sit down. He hasn’t eaten in eighteen hours, save for half a wilted ham sandwich bought at a gas station outside Sudbury, and this coffee has gone straight to his head. The inference that his father may have been involved, or more to the point, a leader in the strike and the ensuing violence of that historic year, it is akin to discovering the man had a second family holed up somewhere. McKelvey knows a scab was killed at the height of the strike. He knows, too, that no one was ever charged in the killing. The scab was a Native from the nearby reserve, just some guy looking to support his family. It was the 1950s and it was the North and times were different.

  “He never talked about it,” McKelvey says. “I remember that year. A supply shed got blown up. A scab was killed.”

  The men seem to lose themselves in private and collective memories. They look down at the floor and nod their heads. There are no smiles now, no laughter.

  “Was a hard time in those days,” Duncan says. “They was goin’ to put us out of work, the way the management was running things, talk of that merger with INCO. We had families to think about. Your old man had been over in Korea, and let me tell you, his training came in handy. That scab was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  McKelvey doesn’t want to hear or learn anymore, not now, not standing here in the lobby of a one-star hotel less than twelve hours after arriving back in his home town. He drains the cup against his better judgment, tosses it in a wastebasket.

  “I need a place to stay for a while,” he says. “Is there anybody in town that rents apartments or houses?”

  The men shoot one another quick looks, and then Duncan smiles and moves to the desk. He opens a black address book and writes a number down on a piece of paper.

  “How about your old homestead?” he says with a grin. “Carl Levesque bought up most of the Carver Company houses, including yours. He’s got some plan to tear them down and build a goddamned casino, if you can believe that. But I bet he’d take a few dollars in rent while you’re up here.”

  George Fergus laughs. “The guy’d charge rent to his grandmother.”

  “Welcome home,” Duncan says, and hands McKelvey the slip of paper.

  Four

  Carl Levesque answers on the third ring with some rehearsed tagline about business coming back to Ste. Bernadette, blowing in on a northern tailwind. He appears eager to meet McKelvey and discuss rental opportunities. He asks McKelvey to meet him at the Coffee Time on Main Street, three blocks down from the Station Hotel. McKelvey walks with the collar turned high on his too-thin trench coat, for the day is bone-chilling
and he has forgotten how the cold works so quickly, how your back hurts from the strain of your body’s attempt to fold into itself. More than half of the storefronts are boarded up, and McKelvey finds himself slowing down, trying to remember the various incarnations of these places so long ago.

  Murray’s Five and Dime, where he bought comic books and jawbreakers, the place always smelling of sawdust and those bricks of bright yellow soap that Murray kept stacked in pyramids on tables — so that McKelvey as a boy imagined they were gold bricks, probably dug from the mine where his father worked. And there had been Poulson Mercantile and Sundry, where you could buy rough underwear that had been manufactured by people whose primary goal was to punish small children, or sit at the small lunch counter in back and order a creamy malted milkshake if your mother was in a generous mood. McKelvey smiles now at the memory of asking his mother repeatedly what exactly “sundry” was supposed to mean. And how she tried unsuccessfully to explain the strange notion of dry goods and paper products and envelopes and, well, everything in the place that didn’t happen to be something you could wear.

  He bought a package of Club chewing tobacco in there when he was sixteen. Kept a wad in his mouth for exactly fourteen seconds before spitting out the glistening tar-black gob behind his house. He had been aiming for toughness, these miners he saw with their cheeks full of the stuff like chipmunks storing food for winter.

  He stops in front of a boarded-up unit with a sign that says VIDEO AND GAME SHACK, and steps into the alcove to read the paper posted to the inside of the glass door: a foreclosure for failure to pay rent. Almost eighteen months ago now. He catches the name Carl Levesque within the legal mumbo-jumbo. This place was, at one time, perhaps fifty years ago now, a barbershop called Bud’s. He closes his eyes and he can actually smell the inside of the barbershop …