Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  Hassan relayed the facts as he had processed them, his cab driver’s eyes always recording—which is what made drivers such a great source for the dicks of the various crews working in Hold-Up, Homicide, Sexual Assault. McKelvey put his head back on the headrest in the back seat and took a haul of air between clenched teeth. His face could come off if he pulled hard enough. He could pull it off and hand it to Hassan and walk away and find another face somewhere. He was cotton-headed, tongue-thick. He had the four numbers from the plate, the general description of the asshole wielding the sledgehammer in his right hand. He closed his eyes and centred himself, willing forth the last of the reservoir, the needle well past “E”. His mind flashed to the image of the stark white refrigerator and that single square magnet stuck to the door.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, opening the door, and stepping out on legs no longer connected to his hips. “I forgot something.”

  “Please sir, let me take you to the hospital,” Hassan said.

  “That’s our next stop,” McKelvey said.

  FOUR

  Three days earlier…

  Kadro stands on the balcony of the cheap airport-strip motel smoking a Canadian cigarette. Du Maurier. The cigarette is smooth. Fine. Back in the war, he liked those mornings best when the sun had not yet burned away the fog completely, and he could stand alone with the gun slung over his shoulder and enjoy a cigarette all to himself. The fields seemed peaceful then and not at all associated with the gruesome acts of war. The bullets, the bombs. The effect of shrapnel on the human body. The sweet, sick stink of the dead, the sounds they made in their own moment of dying. None of it seemed possible inside the stillness and clear sunshine of those fields. He would smoke his cigarette and watch the morning glow within itself, and it made a man feel grateful to stand with his legs wholly intact, heart still beating, still pushing blood. He understood in those moments what it meant to be entirely alive, because he was already dead—his generation expendable as a matter of birth and name and timing. The great lottery of life. His number was accounted for; it had been waiting for him just up ahead all the days of his life. The next field, the next town.

  “Always daydreaming,” that’s what Krupps used to say. The weary squad leader with the perpetual smirk, the crooked grin. The dimpled cheeks of a farm boy contrasted against the dead eyes of a killer, their best shooter. Removed the head from an enemy soldier at six hundred yards. At dusk. With a hard wind blowing at them. Krupps had collected on the bet from every man in the squad, including Kadro. It was supernatural.

  But it was Krupps who was dead and not him. Dead going on seven years now. And only just yesterday. Life was funny that way, how time shifted, played tricks so that even now Kad could close his eyes and actually smell the cordite, the blue-grey smoke from their guns—and then the other smells that came on, the stomach-curdling stink of death, the foul funk of bodies left to bloat and swell in the hot summer sun, a smell that settled in your mouth like a taste, something that stayed on your tongue for days.

  “This,” Krupps said, handing him a pint of plum brandy, “is the only thing that gets rid of the stink. Drink it. And then smear some under your nose… ”

  Yes, life was funny. Kad’s brother Tomas had studied at a school in Chicago, because he was the smarter of the two, always reading these thick books, preferring conversation and debates to sports or roughhousing. And it was Kad who’d stayed home with the rifle and the grenades, the bayonet that he could mount on his rifle when the fighting got that close, that dirty. Kad was not jealous of his brother. He was proud of Tomas and happy that he had been spared these years of war. To see the world come to an end, to stand each day in the midst of the apocalypse. To have killed men, to have witnessed the cause and effect of the bullets stored in the belt slung across his back. Kad had seen the brochures for his brother’s school in Illinois. Ill-in-noise—how many times had he said that word as he tried to imagine this unknown world his smart brother had flown to with scholarship dollars. The fields that looked like a golf course, the thin white girls with blonde hair, always blonde. What perfect timing Tomas always had. He graduated and earned his scholarship—his ticket out—in the very months before the war came to their villages, to their homeland. At first it was the whisperings of independence that reverberated around the world.

  “I will come home to fight,” Tomas had told his brother in their last phone call.

  “Father will not allow it. You are the only hope we have… stay where you are.”

  Everything happened so fast. But not really. No, this was two thousand years in the coming. It was always there, as Kadro’s grandfather had said, this wound without stitches. When Bosnia voted for independence from Yugoslavia on February 29, 1992, the dominoes teetered. In the days following the vote, the Yugoslav Amy disbanded, looting the Bosnian reserve units of their weapons and ammunition, equipment and uniforms. There remained the fledgling and poorly trained Armija—the government army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or perhaps the 7th Muslim Brigade of the Armija for the truly devout. Neither option appealed to Kadro, for he was neither devout nor interested in guaranteed annihilation as part of an ill-trained and ill-equipped army fighting for a country so new, it had barely had time to ink a national emblem.

  The storm clouds gathered and the fates conspired. Yugoslav Army soldiers fresh from the killing fields of Croatia paused to catch their breath in Bosnia, there along the Drina Valley at the Bosnian border with Serbia. A pileup of tanks, artillery, personnel carriers, soldiers smoking and stewing and drinking in the local pubs—drinking and talking and fermenting their hatred, this notion of revenge for the homeland.

  The line of dominoes toppled and fell with the Siege of Sarajevo, the guns in the hills opening with salvos of artillery and incendiary tank shells. And so Kadro’s new Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina—recognized as sovereign by the U.S. and most of Europe—was truly a nation born into war. The days were merciless. It was mayhem. Kad’s father would meet a group of men at the tavern in their small village and return with updates, fragments of news. To his wife and daughter he would say only that the war would be over before it reached their town, and anyway, what did anybody want with a bunch of poor farmers this far from the city? They were but a dot on a map, of no strategic value. But to his son he spoke the truth. This village had fallen, such and such official had been hung from a telephone pole. He told Kadro of the reports from the front, what the men were doing in the villages to the women, the girls.

  “I am too old to fight,” his father had said, “but I will. To my last breath those bastards won’t touch your mother or your sister. I will burn my own home to the ground before I give them the satisfaction. There is no choice now, my son, you must fight. Either with our small army or with one of the units forming up… ”

  And so it was that Kadro joined a handful of his classmates in a paramilitary unit that was rumoured to be funded by a wealthy landowner with business connections in Russia and the Balkans—this never-seen entity referred to simply as “The Colonel”. They were a rag-tag jumble of farm kids and country kids who could shoot well but lacked any formal military training, no understanding of comportment. The commander of their unit, whom they referred to as “Captain”, explained to them their predicament.

  “This is not the fucking regulation army, boys. You are not protected by any international laws or conventions,” the Captain told them, standing on the tailgate of a black half-ton truck. He was the only one among them dressed in full camouflage, new trousers bloused over new black boots, his grey and black beard neatly trimmed. “But that hardly matters now. This is not a conventional war. We have only one mandate, and that is the mandate as declared by The Colonel. We are to take back as many of our villages and to kill as many of the enemy as we can before we ourselves are terminated. Any questions?”

  Kad looked out now across the parking lot of the fifty-dollar motel. The sun was rising, giving birth to his purpose in this life. The b
urden of his brothers and sisters squarely on his shoulders. The load was heavy, but he didn’t mind. He had no family now, no past, no future. He was invisible; in fact, he had never been born. He turned and slipped inside the glass patio door and surveyed the room: the ugly artwork on the wall, the red shag carpeting worn from a million footsteps, the brown water stains painted like a map of Africa on the stucco ceiling, the cheap plastic cups wrapped in more plastic, the bed with its sloping mattress, the floral-print comforter.

  This was Canada. The word made him think of the UN and the blue helmets and the white troop carriers shipped to a war that was none of their business, these fresh-faced boys sent halfway around the world to stand at roadblocks and witness murder. Canada. Smooth cigarettes that did not burn your throat, soft beer, soft women. The place where people apologized even when it was you who bumped into them. That was the word that came to mind: soft.

  Out on Airport Road, a car backfired, and Kad ducked low, hunching at the shoulders. The automatic reaction even after all these years. His mind worked to decipher the sound, incoming or outgoing, mortar or something worse, something larger—an American five-hundred pounder sent to level a street, a block.

  “We have to move,” Krupps says, kicking at Kad’s boots, waking him.

  “What about Ahmet? He’s too fucked up to move. He needs blood,” Kad said.

  Standing in the motel room and the fields of war all at once. Standing and seeing Krupps, seeing everything as it was, as it always will be. Outside the traffic of Toronto ebbed and flowed.

  “Leave him for the UN. Give them something to do for the morning, those bleeding heart blue helmets. Thirteen minutes, Kadro. Let’s move.”

  He took a final long haul of his cigarette, tossed the butt to the ground. He exhaled the tobacco and looked out across those fields. The places he had played as a boy, the small wonders of a boy’s imagination at work in those deep woods. The trees and hedgerows were forming now, coming to life, the fog burning away to reveal the true nature of the torn landscape.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Kadro opened his eyes and blinked. Here in the room. Here in Canada.

  The man with the guns had finally come for him.

  Now Kadro was at the wheel, and the man with the guns was in the passenger seat. Riding shotgun is what the Americans called it. From the days of the Wild West, the stagecoaches carrying payrolls across the bleak prairies. The driver had to keep his hands on the reins, so this required a second man with free hands and free eyes to shoot at Indians and bandits. Kadro had watched dozens of black and white westerns when he was a boy. John Wayne and Gary Cooper with their six-guns. Sitting around the TV at his uncle’s place, five or six cousins sprawled on the floor, their fathers getting drunk on plum brandy and filling the old farmhouse with choking cigarette smoke. How he and his cousins had fashioned sticks and branches for guns, playing in the woods and the barns, shooting each other out of trees, trying to squint like the American cowboys. If only they had known what their life was to hold, of the killing that was to come for their generation.

  The passenger was a Canadian, but he was a blood brother in this. He was fully vetted. His name, or at least his operational name, was Turner. He was to be Kadro’s primary contact after landing at Pearson International Airport, to get him the tools he would need for the job. Turner looked like an accountant or a government auditor, slim with brown hair parted on the left, a nondescript face save for one feature: a patch on his left eye. Like a damned pirate, Kad thought when he opened the door to see the man standing there. For two days he had sat in the motel listening to the flights take off and land, listening to couples on either side make love in hourly appointments, nothing to do but pace and smoke Canadian cigarettes, watch idiots on game shows, and scratch those lottery tickets he found at the Shell station down the road. That first night he had ventured from the room in search of air and perhaps a bag of potato chips. Beneath a plastic display at the cash register he had discovered the opportunity to win one million Canadian dollars. Two dollars a chance. Why not?

  “The vehicle is registered to a numbered company,” Turner said. “Try not to get into any accidents. Don’t speed. And whatever you do, don’t drive drunk. That’s generally frowned upon over here.”

  “I know how to drive,” Kadro said. “Since I was ten. Tractors, trucks.”

  “This isn’t a fucking tractor, and this isn’t a cow lane in Bosnia,” Turner said.

  Kad stopped himself, as he was trained to do—to swallow instinct, smother emotion, follow orders. In any other situation he would have addressed the profane insult with a hard flat-palmed chop to Turner’s throat, grabbed the back of his neck and driven his accountant’s face into the dash of the car. The man would be sucking for air through a broken windpipe before he had time to wet his pants.

  “Your ID is good enough to throw a beat cop off your scent,” Turner continued, “maybe buy a little time, but don’t screw around. Since nine-eleven, you can’t go to the bathroom without a note from your teacher. Follow the plan. Don’t deviate or you’ll bring us all down. You have the cellphone, you have my number. After today, it’s the only way you’ll reach me. The number will be de-activated in seven days. By that time you should be on your way out or…well, it won’t matter anyway.”

  Kadro found everything—the streets, the shops, the women on the sidewalk, the signs in the stores, the grass and the glass and the chrome and the sheer number of brand new vehicles on these city streets—it was more than he had imagined. This city was so new, so young, it looked as though it had been built a month ago, not at all like the cities of Sarajevo or Banja Luka, Visoko, Srebrenica, with their ghosts on every corner, their architecture from the earliest centuries. This place was a movie set, it was a shopping mall, it was a picture you saw in a magazine. The year he’d spent locked away on the farm waiting for the last trace of his identity to be erased, existing for this and only this, it had been the life of a monk. Five a.m. wake up, cold water wash and meal parade, exercise and studies—both the English language and overviews of maps and cultural explanations, the security rehearsals, sitting in a chair and reciting his new name and the details of his invented life until they became real. The handler had warned him of the dangers of over-elation, of too much excitement, of meandering in the great North American arcade. No drinking, no drugs, no sex, no chance to get in trouble. Get in, get out.

  “Take the next exit,” Turner said, “and merge to the right lane. Easy, easy.”

  Kad saw the sign for Highway 7. They were north of the downtown core now, the CN Tower reduced to a souvenir a few inches tall in the rear-view mirror. Turner gave him directions one at a time, feeding him only the necessary information, until finally they pulled up to a self-serve storage complex. It was a sprawl of low-rise warehouses with tin roofs and yellow garage doors separating each unit, the whole place circled with eight feet of chain link and topped with razor wire.

  Kad said, “Like the prison camps.”

  “This is where Canadians store all the shit that won’t fit in their houses,” Turner said. “Pull right up to that little stand there and swipe this across the transponder.”

  It was hard to believe, Kad thought, how people could need more space for their belongings. The things they owned. So much. He had lived the past seven years out of a duffel bag, washing his clothes in sinks, eating only enough to stave off starvation. And this is why his body was as hard as stone while the people around him were soft and slow. Turner handed him a blank white card with the words “Secure-Store” on it, and Kad waved it until the machine beeped and the chain link gate slid open.

  “Number sixty-two,” Turner said.

  Kad threw the car in gear and took them slowly up and down the rows until they found the unit. He put the car in park and killed the engine. The motor ticked as it cooled down. Turner dug in his coat pocket for a key then looked over at Kad quickly, perhaps one last check of this stranger he was about to arm. Kad st
ared back at him. He didn’t like this Turner with his orders and his “this isn’t a cow lane in Bosnia”, as though he thought Kad was some dumb farm kid from the hills. He had been that at one time, yes, as a boy. But he did not remember that boy, could not place himself in those shoes.

  Turner unlocked the door and lifted it just high enough to get a boot under it. He gave the door a good heft with his foot, and it rolled all the way up to reveal a storage unit twelve feet deep by eight feet wide. There was nothing inside the unit except for a large green trunk. Kad recognized the box as a military foot locker.

  “Close the goddamned door,” Turner said, standing there at the box. Kad turned and rolled the door down, enclosing them in darkness. Then a light came on, a glow of bright blue-white from an LED lantern. Turner’s face was rendered pale and eerie in the light, and the eye patch suddenly gave him a new and sinister impression. Kad saw then the potential that existed within the man for violence; it was there, yes, he could see it now. And this was so true of life, how sometimes the things a man needed to see only became clear to him in the darkness. How a man like Turner navigated through life by appearing just as he presented himself: harmless, insignificant. It was a tactic, of course it was, because everything they did had a tactical purpose.