The Devil's Dust

by C. B. Forrest

  He clenched his teeth through a week of withdrawal, hardly venturing outside, and he felt empowered, newly born to the world. But always he had the pills. He lined up his doctor’s appointments with the fastidiousness of a hypochondriac.

  “You’ve had a rough ride the last few years,” the always sympathetic Dr. Shannon assured him. And it was true, after all. His boy Gavin was dead, his wife was gone, he’d been shot, for God’s sake, and what was a man to do but seek some solace? “Take some time off the sauce and see how things go. I wouldn’t worry about you being a drunk though. Being Irish, I’ve seen my share, Charlie. There’s a fine line between heavy drinking and full-blown alcoholism. But watch out for those pills, they can kick you in the arse …”

  Then one evening for no apparent reason he overshot the mark with too many pills, found himself stoned to the point of blunt incomprehension, fingers tripping on numbers as he attempted to dial everyone and anyone in his address book, leaving messages and perhaps on occasion babbling or crying into the mouthpiece. Hattie called back as he sat in a stupor on the couch, CNN cycling eerie night-vision footage of the bombing of Baghdad.

  “What the hell are you doing, Charlie?”

  “Some baking,” he managed, still capable of making her laugh.

  “You’ve got to pull your shit together. You’re a grandfather. Don’t you ever think of that? You’ve got people who depend on you, Charlie, people who care about you.” She sighed. And then, softer, she said, “Listen, I’m not going to call you again. And I don’t want you to call me. Okay? I mean it this time. You know how I feel about you. But I can’t do this anymore. Jesus H., I’m working seventy hours a week these days. We’ve got two kids shot in the head up at Jane and Finch and nobody’s talking. I put in for a transfer, too …”

  This last piece of information was thrown in quickly, like pulling a bandage from the flesh. His addled mind clicked and groaned, attempting to decipher the meaning.

  “Transfer. To where?”

  “Back to Halifax.” It was almost a whisper.

  I love you so much, he thought. But he could only sit there and listen to the dial tone.

  Dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut.

  Seven

  Constable Ed Nolan is back at work three days after being released from the hospital in Timmins. He has suffered a concussion — or MTBI (mild traumatic brain injury), as his file states — and his lacerated scalp is closed with eighteen staple stitches. He lies when the doctor asks if he feels dizzy upon standing, if he experiences double vision, a general feeling of being “out of it.” Of course his head spins when he stands — he was hit with a shovel, for God’s sake — but he holds his ground. He remembers those days he stood for early morning parade back when he was a soldier in basic training. Out all night with the boys in the platoon, having literally crawled back to barracks as the sun was rising, it was a monumental achievement to stand at attention and try not to breathe as the platoon sergeant screamed into your face.

  Nolan wears his toque all day now, even as he sits at his desk in the station, because it hides the bandages wrapped about his skull like a mummy. The Chief has ordered him to a week of administrative duty, which means he can’t attend calls. Administrative duty on a force this small, with so few calls and reports, may as well mean a week of staring at the coffee pot. He tries to read the various magazines to which he subscribes in his attempt to remain connected to the greater world — The Economist, Newsweek, Maclean’s, Atlantic Monthly — but the lines jump and his head begins to pound from behind his eyes.

  His first concern upon his return to the station is obtaining a status update on Travis Lacey. He pulls the report and scans it, squinting, taking long breaks to close his eyes in a vain attempt to clear his vision. The report, filed by both the Chief and Pete Younger, pieces together the moments which are lost to Ed Nolan’s memory.

  At 9:48 a.m. dispatch received a call from Bob Lacey reporting Officer Nolan had been assaulted by Travis Lacey. Constable Younger is dispatched. An ambulance is also dispatched from the small medical clinic in town — there is one ambulance which runs between Saint B and Big Water First Nation. At 10:06, Constable Younger arrives at the scene and reports “Officer Down” to dispatch. The report lays out the facts: “Constable Nolan is lying sideways on the snow, unresponsive but with vital signs, blood pooling at his head.” Younger asks the Laceys to gather blankets to keep Nolan warm until the ambulance arrives. The scene secured, Constable Younger’s attention immediately turns to the search for Travis Lacey.

  Younger does not need to look far. Younger reports that as he makes his way down the laneway, Travis appears “around the right side of the garage, holding a snow shovel in a threatening manner.” Constable Younger pulls his weapon. Here Nolan stops, conjuring the image in his mind’s eye, knowing it is the first time the young cop has removed his weapon from its holster — not insignificant in a policing career. But the chaotic arrival into the scene of the boy’s mother, her shouts and pleas, must reach through the trance. Travis Lacey sets the shovel aside and starts to laugh as though it all must be some sort of joke.

  Nolan scans through the report, his headache pulsating with each heartbeat. Travis was arrested at the scene, booked into the single Saint B holding cell. The Chief was called down to the station and it was decided to lay a charge of attempted murder. The boy was transferred to Monteith Correctional Centre outside Timmins to await a first appearance on the serious charge.

  “Jesus,” Nolan says as he sits there in the quiet of the station. He tries to imagine how terrified Travis Lacey must be right now, sitting on a jail range with a bunch of reprobates and hardened cons. Or the worry his mother must be experiencing. He needs to help here, to do what he can. Whatever has been started here, this youthful experimentation with drugs, must be made right again.

  He sets the folder of paperwork aside. He sits there for a long time, trying to form clear thoughts against the white noise of his headache. He picks up the phone and calls the Chief, who works from home for the most part these days, at least when he’s not out informally campaigning for mayor.

  “Gallagher.”

  “It’s me, Chief.”

  “Nolan, how’s the noggin’?”

  “Not too bad,” he says, eyes clenched. “Listen, I was just catching up on the report on Travis Lacey. I’m trying to get my head wrapped around an attempt murder charge for this kid. Maybe we should suggest a downgrade to assault. He obviously needs help.”

  “I hear you, Eddie, I do. But listen, we can’t have people swinging shovels at our heads without any consequences. You see what I mean? He hit you in the goddamned head with a shovel, Ed. Could’ve killed you sure as shit. You’re lucky he didn’t. I was scared to hell when I got the call about you. We work up here in the north all alone, takes the OPP an hour to make it up here. If we don’t set an example, the drunks and moonshiners will have their way with us. Anyway, I already talked to the new circuit Assistant Crown, Amanda Jason. She’s a real tough cookie.”

  Nolan eases forward, rests an elbow on the desk and his head on his free hand. He says, “This tough on crime line doesn’t have anything to do with running for mayor, does it?”

  Chief Gallagher laughs. It’s a laugh Ed Nolan has come to interpret as Gallagher offering a polite applause or perhaps an easy way out of a bad joke, the politician in him.

  “Eddie, you need to get some rest. Go lay down, will you? Let Younger hold the fort. You don’t owe this Lacey kid anything. The courts can get him set up with counselling once he’s in the system.”

  They hang up. Nolan sits back in the chair and looks around the small office. Three desks, a coffee pot, a cork board with notices for a potluck at the church and a charity car wash for the high-school hockey team, a few old posters about drunk driving and seatbelt laws. More than big city cops, he and Younger and the Chief are in a position to truly serve and protect this small community. They know the people, they are of the people. He can’t shake the image
of Travis Lacey out of his mind, the teen’s eyes wild and zoned, his hands around his mother’s neck. He wishes someone had spent a little more time with him when he himself was a teen, that corrosive adolescent poison coursing through the veins of his brain. He learned a lot of things, or perhaps most things, the hard way.

  Constable Ed Nolan stands and steadies himself. The floor pitches a little as though he is on the deck of a boat. He grabs his jacket from the back of the chair, zips up, and takes the keys to the second cruiser from the lockbox on the wall. He scrawls a note on the chalkboard by the door, a board which they use without any regularity to track their ins and outs.

  Gone to Monteith — Ed, he writes.

  Dear Journal,

  Fuck you.

  Cold, tired, sore. Almost out of pills.

  Back home. Strange days. Strange feelings.

  Did I really come from here?

  Where have I been … where am I going?

  Love, Charlie

  Eight

  Peggy has begun to put more effort than usual into her appearance. The fact is not lost on McKelvey, who stops by each morning at the same time for a coffee. He makes sure to comment on her hair. She brings a hand to her head and touches the new curls. She smiles. The smile is small but genuine, and McKelvey gets the sense it is a gesture this woman does not offer every customer.

  “Usual?” she asks, already pouring coffee into a take-away cup.

  “I’ll take one of those cherry sticks I’ve heard so much about.”

  “It’s all hype,” she says as she puts one of the doughnuts in a small brown paper bag.

  “You’re cornering in on my market,” he says. He takes a sip of the coffee and winces from the combination of scalding temperature and bitter taste. He does not come for the coffee, for it does not compare to the high-end and over-priced brew he grew accustomed to in Toronto. A Starbucks on every corner. And if not a Starbucks, then a Second Cup or a Timothy’s. Sometimes it seemed to McKelvey that Toronto was not so much a city as it was a series of restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. Every window you passed belonged either to a cafe or some fake British-style pub with a ridiculous-sounding name like The Syphilitic Toad — as though the corner of Yonge and Eglinton in downtown Toronto was supposed to feel like seventeenth-century London for a few hours after work every Thursday.

  “And what market is that, Charlie?”

  “Cynicism,” he says. “You know, courting the general belief that things can and will get worse.”

  “Or maybe it’s realism based on experience.”

  “You win,” he says.

  “Nobody wins.” She flashes her second smile of the day. “That’s the whole point. Listen, not that I’m not enjoying our philosophical debate — because believe me, mental stimulation is on short supply around here — but I wanted to tell you about Eddie Nolan. He’s the town cop. Or the best cop, anyway. Chief Gallagher wants to be mayor, and Pete Younger is just a kid full of high octane piss and vinegar. Eddie was in here yesterday asking about you.”

  “Asking about me?”

  McKelvey shivers, wonders for a moment if the Toronto cops have called up here, sniffing after him. Has the Crown attorney found some new angle on the warehouse shootings? Are they filing charges? This is the life of a man with ghosts trailing him.

  “He said he heard from Carl Levesque that you were up here, and that you were a Toronto cop, a detective. He said he’d want to look you up and get your opinion on some things. He got hurt a couple of weeks ago, hit in the head with a shovel, the poor dear. The kid has had a tough year. His mother died about a year and a half ago and his father has that Alzheimer’s that comes on so fast. Ed looks after him and holds down his job.”

  “I heard about that incident,” McKelvey says. “Some teenager went off on him.”

  “Not the first ‘incident’ around here. They burned down the bleachers at the sports field this fall. Vandalism is something fierce. And the dropout rate. You see kids just hanging around the convenience store, the arcade, Christ, even the laundromat. Drugs are the issue if you ask me.”

  “Show me a town or a city that doesn’t have its share of drugs.”

  “Didn’t used to be like this. Bad combination — drugs and boredom. Life in a northern town. Anyway, Eddie’s uncle was friends with your father. He said they worked together.”

  “Everybody worked with everybody’s father around here.”

  “Touché, Charlie.” She gives him a look, just for an instant, and their eyes lock in a way that does something to McKelvey’s stomach. It’s a feeling he can’t quite describe, but he knows one thing: it hasn’t changed since he was twelve years old.

  Back at the empty house, McKelvey sets out to find something that he is not sure even exists, or if it does, where he will find it. This notion runs through his brain like a mushroom bullet, destroying rational thought. He gets down on his knees and uses a key to unwind the screws on all the heater vents. He snakes his hand around in the empty spaces behind the wall, pulling out cobwebs and dust. He sits there on the floor with his back to the wall, and he closes his eyes. He wants to see himself as a child again, see his father moving around this house, the places he might have considered safe or sacred. What is it he hopes to find? Some clue or remnant from the past, this idea that his father participated in the violence around that infamous strike in the 1950s. The explosion at a storage shed on company property, the death of a scab worker. It is a far stretch, he decides, that his father penned any sort of confession and tucked it behind the wall, a telegraph of truth from the past.

  Late in the afternoon, with the sun high and glowing behind a hazy film of cloud, a black police SUV ambles up the laneway. McKelvey watches from the kitchen window. He is dressed in faded jeans and a black T-shirt with a white logo for Garrity’s Pub, dark denizen where he spent long hours and small millions, merciful flow of cold beer on tap, sacred amber Irish whiskey on crackling ice. He has not had a drink in forty days as of today. He can’t remember the last time he went forty consecutive days without a drink, but it is likely going back to his teenage years. Forty days. It is biblical, epic in proportions. Strange how the thought crosses his mind just now with a fleeting message of promised relief, satisfaction, contentment, and ease: go ahead, Charlie, it couldn’t hurt …

  McKelvey watches as the tall and broad-shouldered constable steps from the vehicle. This would be Ed Nolan, as Peggy forewarned. The man appears to be in his late twenties, square-faced, strong-jawed. He reaches back into the cruiser and pulls out a tray with two coffees. He tucks a file folder under his arm and comes to the door. McKelvey doesn’t wait for the knock. He holds the door open wide, cold air rushing in, his breath coming back out in a cloud.

  “Constable Nolan, I presume?”

  Nolan smiles, nods once.

  “Can I bother you for a minute, Detective McKelvey?”

  “You got a warrant?” McKelvey stares with a straight face. It stops Nolan in his tracks. Then McKelvey smiles and says, “Come on in. And it’s just Charlie, please.”

  Nolan sets the coffees down on the kitchen table and pulls off his gloves, unzips his coat.

  “I’m Ed Nolan,” he says, and they shake hands. “Small force in the middle of nowhere, we do a lot of things without waiting for a warrant from the circuit justice.”

  “I can imagine. It’s all just paperwork anyway.” McKelvey motions for Nolan to take a seat. “I made my way into more than a few rooms just by bluffing, holding up a folded piece of paper. I never implicitly said it was a warrant, and they never asked to see the paper, so it was a bit of a grey zone.”

  “Things are a little more black and white up here,” Nolan says, and lets out a long breath. He reaches up and gently removes the black wool toque, revealing a wrap of bandages around his short blond hair that sprouts from the top of the coil.

  “I heard about that kid who hurt you,” McKelvey says. He reaches out and takes one of the Coffee Time coffees, knowing full well it
will taste like shit and kill his stomach, but still he will drink it. It was, he imagines, poured by Peggy.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I heard you were in town. Big-city cop and everything, I could sure use some of your experience right now. This Lacey kid, Travis Lacey, is a solid A student. Or he was. Up until two months ago, anyway. It’s as if he changed overnight into this psychopath. Parents say he stays up around the clock playing video games in the basement or he’s out with this group of friends, staying out all night.”

  “Sounds like a teenager,” McKelvey says, remembering his own boy, Gavin. But he also remembers how his boy, somewhere and somehow, slipped across an obscure line. Stumbling from normal teenage angst to a world of hardcore drugs and, eventually, street gangs. Bullets, blades, and bullshit.

  “For sure. We all goof around a little, blow off the testosterone.” Nolan takes the lid off the other coffee and blows across the top. “I know all about that. I left Saint B when I was seventeen, felt like I was suffocating. I found my share of troubles before I got my head on straight.”

  “I did the same, Ed,” McKelvey says. “Train used to run more regular in my day. It was easier to escape.”

  “I visited Travis down at Monteith. Poor kid is scared out of his mind. And he’s coming off this shit, coming off hard. Said he’s been smoking meth. I couldn’t believe it. Meth in Saint B. How could we not know? I know who deals pot, hash, who has pain pills from time to time, who can get blow in for the shift workers when they want to celebrate something. But meth?”

  McKelvey takes a sip of the coffee, then pushes it away.

  “Would you help with this?” Nolan asks. “I mean, I don’t even know what your plans are. If you’re here for a visit or …”

  “I don’t have a plan,” McKelvey says. “I got this idea in my head and ended up on a bus. I can tell you, it’s strange as hell being back here. This is the house I grew up in. You have no idea how fucked up that is.”