Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  There is nothing on TV, so he settles for the late news with Lloyd Robertson. The medicine mixes with the two large beers he drank at Garrity’s, and the flow of ease comes across him as though he is being lowered into a bathtub from an overhead hoist. Warm. And good. Top of the skull, across the shoulders, down through the spine, until finally there is no pain, just the opposite in fact, the absence of pain, a vacancy where once there had been full tenancy. All the old, haunted places were filled with sunshine…

  TWO

  McKelvey sparked his first cigarette of the day on the sidewalk in front of his building. A morning of blue skies, a hint in the air of the autumn to come. This city was at its best, he had always believed, in those in-between seasons of spring and fall. The winter was as grey and as dirty as the slush kicked up from buses and cars, and the dead of summer brought with it a muggy, suffocating heat that made the city stink of garbage and the lake. The owner of a flower shop across the street was busy hosing off the sidewalk, and McKelvey wondered briefly if the Dart & Feather pub located next door had anything to do with it. He smiled as he conjured an image of staggering young men sloping sideways down the other side of last call, holding one another for support as that ninth pint of ale began to percolate with the deep-fried fish and chips.

  He tugged on the smoke then suddenly held the mustard gas in his lungs as a lithe jogger rolled around the corner, catching him by surprise, a woman dressed in expensive exercise shorts and tank top that left no part of her a mystery. She had a life-affirming spring to her stride that made her golden ponytail bounce. You weren’t allowed to smoke anywhere any more, McKelvey thought, because people believed that by taking a few extra measures they could stretch their life to infinity. What is this prize we seek, he wondered. To outlive all contemporaries, to while away those last long empty days withered in a nursing home with a shawl wrapped around bony shoulders, some jaded and underpaid support worker celebrating like it was your birthday every time you took a shit—‘Good for you, Mister McKelvey, that’s a good boy now!’ When the moment came, that very instant that he was no longer of any use to himself or others, he’d much prefer to cross the yellow warning line and stumble onto the electrified tracks of the subway. There was no question. Find the ice floe and hop on board.

  He exhaled the captive smoke once the perky jogger had taken her perfect rear end to the next block. A twinge of guilt reminded him there was a full gym in the basement of his condo, a dark corner he had yet to grace. It was one of the perks of paying exorbitant condo fees. There were stretches of weeks, though, wherein he returned to the regimen of pushups and sit-ups, enjoying the surge of energy and strength that came back to his body like a remembered sense, touch or smell. All in all, and considering the places he’d been and the things he’d twisted and torn in his career as a division street cop, he figured he wasn’t in bad shape. At least not for his age, and that was the slide ruler against which he found himself increasingly judged. Retired, pensioned off, not yet sixty but more salt than pepper in those curls. He was suddenly eligible for a broad new variety of discounts as though he were a member in a secret club—young pimple-faced clerks smacking bubble gum, asking him, ‘You want the seniors’ discount?’ Of course he did.

  He had every intention of taking the subway north on the Yonge line, get off at the urban hip crossroads of Eglinton Avenue and Yonge Street, and catch a streetcar or cab the rest of the way east to Fielding’s new place. He missed his little truck, hadn’t felt his freedom restricted in such a manner since he first arrived in the city as a young man with a duffel bag and the forty bucks his father had given him in lieu of advice. In those days he’d hoofed it everywhere he went, and in that way he got to know every side street and corner of the growing metropolis. The geographical knowledge had come in handy once he found himself behind the wheel of a patrol car seeking out the opportunity to make a good collar, to sweep the streets.

  Public transit made the most economical and environmental sense, to be sure, but the last time he’d taken the subway, he’d come close to assaulting a teenager. This eyeliner-wearing ignoramus sat there with a pound of steel pierced into his head, listening to headphones that may as well have been loudspeakers, this drone of cyclical drums and repetitive bass lines bleeding out like a screwdriver in your ear. McKelvey gritted his teeth, felt his blood pressure thrum, a spider’s web of heat across the back of his neck that was a sort of advance warning system. But he rode out that wave of electricity, urging his thick knuckles to reach out and provide a lesson in civil decorum.

  The so-called “Megacity” was stumbling in its infancy. A little over three years earlier, the provincial government had amalgamated the six municipalities that comprised Metropolitan Toronto—the original city, East York, North York, York, Etobicoke, Scarborough, everything and everybody—into a monolithic City of Toronto. It was a trend that was popping up all over the country, from Halifax to Ottawa, this notion that somehow things would be easier, more efficient, with one level of municipal government. In McKelvey’s mind the whole thing was a big goddamned boondoggle, a colossal waste of taxpayers’ dollars, and rather than more efficient, everything seemed more obscure, doubled and tripled up. People asking if garbage day would stay the same. Would the fees for public swimming increase? And anyway, the people weren’t in favour of it, hadn’t been from the get-go. A municipal referendum found the vast majority of citizens overwhelmingly opposed to the concept of amalgamation, worried their borough would lose its uniqueness, get swallowed up by the Megacity—the precise reason why they lived “here” and not “there”. Which is of course what had happened, near as McKelvey could gather. It didn’t help matters that the Megacity’s first mayor was a clown who sold bargain sofas and washing machines through these horrible television ads in which he gave you the thumbs up and a conspiratorial wink like he was your long-lost buddy from grade school.

  Now McKelvey hailed a cab easing its way along Front Street. The driver seemed glad for the fare, yanking his wheel to the curb. He was a young man, perhaps thirty-five, and like the vast majority of cab drivers in this and every other North American city, he was dark-skinned and from some faraway place. He spoke with a thick accent, Middle Eastern. McKelvey was never quite able to read, let alone pronounce the names of the drivers posted on their taxi license in that plastic card tacked to the back seat.

  “Please,” the driver said. “Where to?”

  “DVP to Eglinton East,” McKelvey said as he slid in the back. There was a lingering scent of alcohol and sweat back there, the residue of late night fares.

  Tim Fielding had moved to a building overlooking the Wilmot Creek Park. The young man was on his third residence in the two years McKelvey had known him. These geographical adjustments seemed to cure a man of memory and melancholy, at least for a time. And that was worth something. McKelvey saw no shame in a man taking comfort where comfort could be found; he was in no position to judge. He had himself had contemplated many times making an exit from this city with its memories of his wife and son, of the bad ending for all of them. It was a thought, at least for him, that had never moved beyond conception. He loved and hated this place, worshipped and despised it. It was what it was; it was his city.

  “Just starting or have you been on all night?” McKelvey said to pass the time.

  “Since midnight,” the driver said. He eyed McKelvey in the back, and McKelvey thought of those towers coming down like soft ash to the ground, how it had changed everything, and what it must have meant for a man with dark skin and a name like— he squinted at the taxi license photo folded over the back seat—a name like Hassan. McKelvey wasn’t naturally sympathetic to the plight of immigrants, for he believed every man had to make his own way, but this new world had opened his eyes to the obstacles faced by a very specific group. The media called it “racial profiling”, but the police, well, they just called it the law of averages.

  “How’s business?” McKelvey said.

  The driver looked in
the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, weary. “Bad, very bad. Airport travel is down forty per cent. Tourists are not coming, you see. Affects us very bad. This is my cousin’s car. I rent from him. I pay the gas and his fee and have barely enough left to pay for my apartment. In my country I am an engineer, but not here. Here I drive a taxi, deliver pizzas.”

  McKelvey shook his head and looked out the window. He let the conversation die. There was nothing he could do to change anything. Things were what they were. Traffic was lighter than usual on the Friday morning of the long weekend. People calling in sick or booking an extra day of vacation to stretch that last bit of summer. McKelvey knew the highways would build through the afternoon as families scattered northward up the 400 to cottage country, west on the Queen Elizabeth Way to Niagara Falls, or east on the 401 to places like Ottawa and Montreal. You wouldn’t want to be on the Gardiner Expressway or the Don Valley Parkway at four o’clock this afternoon. The sign said the Greater Toronto Area was home to five million souls, but it felt like double that when the commuters flowed into the downtown each weekday morning from the sprawling suburbs.

  As the cab passed beneath the Bloor Street Viaduct, McKelvey was reminded of the great leaps taken from that high arch. Over the years, this connecting span had served as the exit point for many an overwhelmed soul. He had responded to a jumper call there in his patrol days, this thirty-year-old salesman who had argued with his unfaithful girlfriend and decided to teach her a lesson by taking a nosedive from the rail. McKelvey saw in his mind’s eye the man’s limbs twisted at awkward angles, the internal structure completely re-organized, dark blood sprayed like graffiti across the rocks onto which he had landed. You noticed the smallest details, and they got burned into your memory. How the man’s blue necktie was folded back across his shoulder, eyes grey and dead and milky, flies already buzzing at the nostrils. McKelvey wondered now how this had affected the unfaithful girlfriend, what sort of weight she had carried through the days of her life, where she was now, and what she was doing—and how often she stopped to think of that day the way McKelvey did.

  The deep and rugged ravine of the Don River had until 1919 served as a natural obstacle to movement and growth. Construction of the Prince Edward Viaduct—or the Bloor Street Viaduct as it came to be known—linked two major thoroughfares: Bloor Street on the west side of the ravine, Danforth Avenue on the east. The span had played a crucial role in Toronto’s history as a young city in terms of bringing together boroughs previously divided. McKelvey wondered now if the designer, Edmund Burke, would accept as part of that progress the fact his viaduct had eventually become North America’s second most-used suicide bridge after the Golden Gate in San Francisco. It was, McKelvey figured, the give and take of modern life.

  The driver exited the DVP onto Eglinton Avenue East and slowed as he searched for the address McKelvey had provided.

  “Right up there,” McKelvey said, and the cab pulled up to the front of a fourteen-storey building. The fare was twenty three dollars and change. McKelvey gave the driver a twenty and a ten and told him to keep the change.

  “Thank you sir,” the driver said. Then, as McKelvey walked toward the entranceway, he called out. “Please, if you need a driver, sir, give me a call. I give you my card…”

  The man had scrawled his name and cellphone number across a taxi receipt in the shape of a business card. The entrepreneurial spirit impressed McKelvey, and he stuck the card in his shirt pocket, giving the top of the car a tap before he walked away.

  The elevator in Fielding’s building was mirrored floor to ceiling. If the designer had been after some element of class or chic, he’d missed the mark. The effect was disorienting, slightly creepy. The glass was smudged with hand prints and the smeared smacked lips of toddlers. McKelvey punched the button for the ninth floor then stood back and checked his reflection in the yellowish light. He was dressed in jeans with a white dress shirt and navy sports jacket, still unable to leave the house without looking something like a plainclothes cop. Which is what he was, in his heart of hearts, and what he always would be. It was his skin, it was his DNA—the Alpha and the Omega of Charlie McKelvey. Which was somewhat ironic, considering he had stumbled by chance into the job as a fresh-faced kid off the bus from the cloistered northern mining town of Ste. Bernadette. It was a steady paycheck at first, and he’d never expected it to become a lifetime, to define everything about who he was and what he believed. One day you simply wake up and The Police is your marrow.

  He buttoned and unbuttoned the jacket, turned to the side, sucked in his modest paunch. Those draft beers at Garrity’s, the always-at-hand bar peanuts. He thought he didn’t look as bad as he felt. He was holding his weight steady at one ninety, better than the two fifteen he’d carried around his last few years on the Hold-up Squad, eating fast food and guzzling too much coffee. The soft lighting in the elevator was flattering too, and his curly hair seemed to have more pepper than salt. But as the floor chimed and the doors whooshed open, he saw that it was all an illusion: every mile was etched there, and he had been both city and highway driven.

  Tim Fielding was the sort of man who could not easily conceal the internal workings of his life, something McKelvey had learned from their time together in the men’s grief group up at St. Michael’s Hospital. The young widower wore his guts on his sleeve, the type of man who would never hold up under police questioning. That morning, when he opened the door, McKelvey thought Fielding looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week. His usually clear eyes were red and glassy, and his face had taken on a new paunchiness.

  “Thanks for coming, Charlie,” he said. “You must think I’m crazy.”

  “To be honest,” McKelvey said, “you’re the most rational person I know.”

  Fielding went to the kitchen and poured two coffees from a drip machine. He handed a mug to McKelvey, and McKelvey read the swirling blue letters that proclaimed “World’s Best Teacher’.”

  “You take sugar and cream, right?” the younger man said.

  “Just cream,” McKelvey said. “I’m supposed to go for skim, but what the hell. It’s a holiday almost.”

  Fielding stood with the fridge door open, staring. After a moment he turned and held his palm up.

  “Sorry,” he said. “No cream. And the milk’s expired.”

  McKelvey nodded, accustomed to his own lack of fresh groceries. He sat in the living room on the sofa and set his coffee on the table. It was one thing for his own fridge to carry little more than a block of crunchy orange cheese, but Fielding was better organized and took better care of himself than that. These were the variety of observations that allowed a cop to form his appraisal of a situation. Everything meant something. It was the part of his job had that always driven his wife crazy. On the way home from a house party, Caroline might say, “Charlie, for god’s sake, those are our friends. Do you always have to watch people like that, like you’re on duty?” And for the most part he was unaware he was even doing it. The insinuation seemed to be that he wanted to find the dark spot in every soul.

  “Donia,” Fielding said, coming around the kitchen island to join McKelvey, “she’s a student in my night school course I was telling you about. She’s Bosnian, a survivor from the war. Her family was destroyed. She came over less than a year ago to work in a factory as a seamstress, working these industrial sewing machines. She wanted to get ahead, but her English isn’t strong enough. She’s from a small village. Her people were simple people, farmers and tradesmen. She always said that: simple people, but good.”

  McKelvey took another mouthful of the black coffee. It was caustic, like Liquid-Plumr running down the back of his throat. His doctor had warned against this sort of carelessness, for the peptic ulcer which had hemorrhaged and escalated his retirement meant a lifetime of vigilance against those four horsemen of the apocalypse: booze, cigarettes, stress and coffee. He had grown sick of the bitter and bland low-fat yogurt, of a life lived on the narrow margin of the health food aisle. A m
an could only eat so much plain rice and couscous before he snapped, walked into a steakhouse off the street and bought a twenty-two ounce prime rib with all the trimmings.

  “You met her through the night school,” he said, getting his facts down.

  “I just…we hit it off. It sounds stupid, Charlie, I know. She’s a beautiful woman, and there was something there. She’s wounded, I suppose, and I’m obviously not a poster boy for the well-adjusted. We just seemed to fit.” Fielding threaded the fingers of his hands as he might do in demonstrating a point to his students. “We went for coffee and then it was lunch and then it was dinner. And then, you know…”

  “You slept with her,” McKelvey said. Going easy here, for if he had been making inquiries on the job, he would have used guttural language in an attempt to draw some emotion, indignation— yeah, that’s what you did with her, isn’t it, you dirty dog?

  Fielding nodded and said, “I hope you know me well enough to know there was nothing untoward about the situation.”

  Untoward, McKelvey thought. Was that a fancier way of describing the act of a teacher putting his prick in one of his students?

  McKelvey said, “Go on.”

  “We’re adults here, Charlie,” Fielding continued. “She’s not one of my Grade Six students with braces and a training bra.”

  McKelvey pushed the mug away a little so he wouldn’t keep reaching for it out of habit. He regarded his friend, saw the truth written across the man’s face, and in fact had never suspected otherwise. Tim Fielding was one of those people walking the streets, bless his heart, who happened to lack the gene necessary for telling bold-faced lies.