Slow Recoil

by C. B. Forrest

  “With this sort of elevation in the numbers,” the doctor said, “although I can’t be certain until there are further tests, of course, and the oncologist can provide…”

  The doctor was a young man in his early thirties, and his words trailed off as McKelvey wondered when this had happened— when exactly he had crossed the threshold and become old. Not just “middle aged” any more, but old. It was official. The future held for him a whole new vocabulary, a foreign landscape over which to stumble—scanning the daily obits for names of friends and former colleagues, storing a cornucopia of multicoloured pills in a seven-day container, pouring over nursing home pamphlets, these places with bullshit names like “Emerald Meadows” and “Serendipity Manor”. Fuck, right. Shoot me now.

  “How many stages are there?” McKelvey asked the doctor.

  “Well, four,” the doctor said, “but again, as I said, we need to…”

  McKelvey tried to picture a glass half full. Or perhaps it was already three quarters empty. A pie with one piece left. The doctor had some brochures and a list of contacts for suggested follow-up appointments and tests, and he left McKelvey to sit there on the gurney. His mind lately had been meandering back home, even before this, the news that most likely explained the stopping and the starting, the trickle and the flow. Just thinking about home. Up there, Ste. Bernadette. It was the river that saved their lives. The green river that was never any good for fishing, too slow and too reedy. When the mercury disappeared and it was so cold that the tip of your nose went numb within a few minutes, still they laced their skates on rough benches made of two-by-fours, and they went together down to carve up that translucent blackness. The white puffs of their breath peppered against the gun metal grey of the winter day, that sound of their skates cutting and slicing. They picked teams and they fought, and someone always got hurt, but it was like a religion. In a small town that offered but one industry, a killer goal or a shutout or a really good fight came with enough glory to make a boy a hero for a weekend.

  They went down there to the tall grass along the shoreline in late October, around Halloween, and they brought beers stolen from their fathers’ cases, and they saw who could walk out the farthest on those first sheets of late autumn ice. They watched and waited as the river’s edge turned grey then a crystalline blue-black. And then one day in late November, the river was frozen shore to shore. From that day on, and everyday until the farthest lip of spring, it was their home and their church and their escape. On a moonlit night they played the greatest game on earth, their young voices loud and carrying across the river. It was everything. And sometimes it was enough …

  He had rested on the gurney in the emergency department through the long night and into the early morning. It was as though once he stopped moving, his body shut down completely. He stared up at the rows of buzzing fluorescent lights, thinking of Leyden and Fielding, thinking of Maxime, and he closed his eyes each time one of the investigators from the SIU or Metro stepped inside the curtain with a notepad at the ready.

  “He’s resting right now,” the young nurse would tell them.

  McKelvey especially didn’t want to see Detective Kennedy. He couldn’t face the man, not just yet. He had drifted into the deepest of sleeps after they first brought him in. He had woken with a start, some imagined threat, and he lifted his head and saw Hattie. He blinked to clear his vision. Her red hair was untied and hung to her shoulder, licks of flame. They didn’t speak for the longest time. They searched each other with their eyes.

  “God, you lied to me, Charlie. Or at least you didn’t tell me everything that was going on, everything that you were doing,” she said. “It’s one and the same. I thought you trusted me. But I don’t think you can trust anyone, not fully. You really scared me this time.”

  “Hattie,” he said. And that was it. What else was there to say?

  She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. It was the innocent kiss of a friend to a friend, a daughter to a father. He deserved even less.

  “Get well,” she said. And he saw that her eyes were red.

  He lay there on the gurney and watched her walk away.

  The young nurse came through the curtain with a plastic bag filled with his personal items. His watch, his wallet, some papers from his pockets.

  “Don’t tell anyone I was snooping,” she said, and she smiled. “I’m a bit of a lottery fanatic. Congratulations.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said. His head was still muddled.

  “The scratch ticket from your shirt pocket,” she said. “You won five grand on the Game of Life. Congratulations. You look like you could use some good news. You know, you’re lucky you didn’t get the wrong paramedics. We hear stories all the time about personal stuff going missing, and then who gets blamed? We do. I think it’s mostly an urban legend.”

  The papers he’d taken from Kadro. He wanted to laugh, but it wouldn’t come. She set the bag on the tray table and slipped out through the curtain.

  McKelvey’s wound had been sutured, and he was given a prescription for strong antibiotics to ward off infection from the blade, and a little something for the pain. He had a series of business cards from both SIU and Metro Toronto investigators, the RCMP. Everybody wanted to talk to him. There were interviews scheduled the following morning. He understood that it would be a grueling process, the questions, the answers, getting things lined up. One of the more sympathetic investigators told him that Goran Mitovik had been picked up at the restaurant he managed and was being questioned by authorities. Interpol had agents on their way from an office in New York.

  He pulled his jacket on carefully, clenching his teeth through the pain. It wasn’t bad, though, nothing compared to the gunshot wound from Duguay’s .45, so close to his balls. The thought still made him shiver. At the nursing station, he asked for Tim Fielding’s room number. Then he went downstairs to the gift shop. The front pages of both the city papers that morning featured block letter headlines about the shootout and aerial photos of the malting plant. He didn’t want to read anything about it. Not today, not ever.

  He fingered through a bunch of trashy magazines, paperback mysteries and thrillers. He hadn’t read a book himself in what seemed like years. He stood there and nodded at himself, at this notion that he might like to do that now, find a good book and see what he had been missing. He wasn’t sure he could get through one of these mysteries, though, if they were anything like the cop shows on TV. These writers who thought they could get it right, sitting there at a typewriter in the safety of their cardigan and slippers. He picked out two books and the latest issue of The Economist, which seemed sufficiently cerebral for the school teacher.

  Fielding was asleep when McKelvey came into the room. He had lost perhaps fifteen pounds, and it was significant on a man who had no weight to spare. His lips were severely swollen, cracked and bloody. His flesh was pallid as candle wax. His eyes fluttered and he blinked.

  “Hey,” Tim said. His voice was hoarse.

  “Looks like it might be a long winter for you,” McKelvey said.

  “Give me time to think about things,” Tim said.

  They were quiet for a long time. McKelvey opened the plastic bag and set the books and magazine on the sliding tray at the bedside. The breakfast was still there, untouched. The first attempt at solids, this grey, moldy-looking oatmeal now congealed to a plastic sheen.

  “I should have asked for help a lot earlier,” McKelvey said.

  Sorry, that’s what he was saying, or trying to say. Sorry for almost getting you killed. My stubbornness and pride, those dual afflictions, McKelvey thought. Caroline had been right about him all along. And now Hattie had reached the point of exhaustion as well. He supposed a person could only take so much.

  “I was the one who dragged you into this,” Tim said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I did a lot of thinking. Funny how being tied up gives a man a lot of time to think about his life. What he’s done or failed to do. The space that he o
ccupies in this life… ”

  Tim got that distant look in his eyes that sometimes made McKelvey uncomfortable when they had few beers together. It was a crapshoot whether that look would lead to a few tears over the death of Fielding’s wife, or a philosophical statement on a level that McKelvey could hardly decipher.

  “And what’s the verdict?” McKelvey said.

  “I think,” the school teacher said, “I have bad luck with women. Generally speaking.”

  McKelvey smiled and said, “Makes two of us.”

  “My face has been everywhere. I mean, even though I’ll be cleared, that will always be out there hanging over me. Hey, isn’t that the night school teacher who murdered his student?”

  “You’re thinking of starting over somewhere else?” McKelvey said. He pictured Fielding squatting in the middle of a circle of school children in some quaint African village.

  “I need to leave everything that I know,” Tim said. “Start somewhere with nothing, just to see if I can do it on my own.”

  McKelvey liked the sound of that coming from the younger man. It was the only thing to do. There was nothing left here for either one of them.

  “I don’t want to have any regrets,” Tim said. And then, after a long moment, he said, “What’s yours, Charlie? What’s your biggest regret?”

  McKelvey didn’t have to reach. It was there, right there.“I let Caroline slip away,” he said.

  The younger man looked at McKelvey then seemed to get lost again. He cleared his throat and said, “So, what about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Any plans?”

  McKelvey thought about it for a minute. Plans. Yes. He had plans. For the first time in what seemed like a hundred years, he knew what he wanted to do, where he wanted to be. Propelled, that was the word.

  “I guess I’m going home for a little while,” McKelvey said.

  “Home home?” Tim said.

  “Yeah, home home,” McKelvey said. “Ste. Bernadette.”

  “You’re heading in the wrong direction,” Tim said. “Should be going south in the winter. You’re supposed to be retired, remember?”

  “Maybe I’ll wait for the spring thaw and the blackflies,” McKelvey said.

  He reached out, and the men shook hands. He held the younger man’s hand and, for just a moment in there, he felt like he was holding the hand of his boy, Gavin. They were all together in that hospital room right then, his boy and Fielding’s wife, all these ghosts with which they had made some sort of quiet peace.

  “I’ll check on you tomorrow,” McKelvey said.

  “Smuggle me in a beer, will you? It’s all I thought about while I was dying of thirst. That sound of a nice cold can opening, pfffft.” Fielding closed his eyes and drifted.

  McKelvey said, “You got it.”

  He went out and walked down the hallway to the bank of elevators. He hit the button and waited. The door chimed and opened, and he stepped aside to let out a few visitors. People with bouquets of flowers, greeting cards, tired looks on their faces. He thought of what the doctor had told him, what lay ahead in the coming months, and cringed at the thought of people showing up to see him lying there dressed in a hospital gown, his old white arse flapping in the breeze.

  When the visitors had cleared, he stepped inside the elevator and pushed the button for the ground level. He lifted his head and looked across the floor to the nursing station. There was an attractive woman dressed in baby-blue scrubs standing there to gather a few files. She looked up. He smiled at her. She smiled back just as the doors closed on him.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Hassan drove McKelvey home from the hospital. It was warm in the taxi, and he opened the back window as far as it would go. The smell of the city came to him like the familiar scent of a lover. Only rather than flowers and vanilla, this was muffler exhaust and a hint of chromium and coal ash.

  “Traffic seems heavy,” McKelvey said.

  “Rush hour. Summer is over now, my friend, everyone has been back to school and back to work for two days now,” Hassan said. “It is like the world has woken up from a slumber. Do you know this city has more than three hundred and fifty school buses? Some days I feel like they are all lined up in front of me.”

  McKelvey had lost track of the days. Of course it was back to school. The end of Labour Day. He wondered how much Jerry Lewis had raised this year for muscular dystrophy. He had always watched the telethon with his boy, Gavin. He remembered how Gavin used to mimic the comedian, unbuttoning his pajamas and mopping his brow with a hankie. The memory made McKelvey smile. It was a small smile, but it was foreign, and it felt good the way anything new feels.

  “Did you happen to catch any of the Jerry Lewis telethon?” McKelvey asked.

  “I’m afraid not,” Hassan said. “We do not have the cable television.”

  They inched their way the last few blocks to Front Street. McKelvey slid out and handed the driver two twenties for the twenty-five dollar fare, along with a piece of silver paper stock.

  “Keep the change,” McKelvey said.

  Hassan had his hands in the leather fanny pack which contained his float, but McKelvey was already limping up the street. Hassan watched him for a minute, but he had to squint against the strong September sun, then he lost sight of his fare altogether.

  He held the piece of silver paper up and saw that it was a lottery scratch ticket.

  The apartment was still and quiet, and he stood there just inside the door for a moment. He thought it looked more like a hotel room than a home. It was true, Hattie had tried in her way to push him in that direction, to really start his life over again, to fill his space with new things. Build something, unpack the suitcase of grief. Perhaps she was still too young to realize that changing your address or changing your hairstyle didn’t really change anything about who you were or where you’d been. Or perhaps he was simply unwilling to fully let go of the past.

  He crossed the floor to the telephone by the window. He picked up the receiver and dialed from memory. She answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hello,” he said.

  There was a beat, a moment of silence wherein he lived and died.

  “Charlie,” Caroline said. “How are you?”

  He stood there at the little desk by the window. He looked outside. It was a beautiful day of early September. A good question posed by the person who knew him better than anyone, better than himself—how are you?

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  There was no sense burdening her with information about which he himself was unclear. The truth was, he was scared. Of how close he had come to losing his friend, the days of questions that were to come, of what lay ahead for him with the news from the doctor. More tests required. He reached into his coat pocket and found the small white paper bag with the prescriptions. He cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder, set the antibiotics aside and opened the pain medication. He shook two tablets into his palm.

  “It’s good to hear your voice,” Caroline said. “It’s been a while. I was getting worried about you.”

  “You’ve got better things to do than worry about me,” he said.

  “Jessie called the other day,” she said. “She’s worried about you, too, Charlie. She said you looked like you had gone a few rounds with somebody. You have a black eye?”

  McKelvey laughed it off. “Just getting clumsy,” he said. He popped the tabs in his mouth, snapped his head back and swallowed them dry. “Otherwise. I’m right as rain.”

  “Speaking of rain,” Carline said, “we’re on day six out here. I don’t miss the snow, but the rain can get a little monotonous. I’ve been thinking of coming out for a visit. See Jessie and Emily. And you, of course, if you want. I always liked the fall in Ontario. We used to go on those long drives up through Georgian Bay just to see the colours. Do you remember?”

  He felt what was perhaps the first faint glow of the pills, or it was his mind wishing for
it. He looked out the window at the day. Everything was moving. Nothing went unchanged. The world existed in your memories. Things as they were.

  He closed his eyes. “I remember everything,” he said.

  With very special thanks to Sylvia, Allister and Emma at Napoleon.

  I would like to thank the following for their support of my writing today and over the years: Tracy Forrest; Graham and Susan Forrest; the New Brunswick Forrests; Ariane Sabourin; John Churchill; Stephanie Smith; Ulrike Kucera; Katherine Hobbs; Brenda Chapman; Sue Pike; Pauline Braithwaite and Greg Poulin; Mary Jane Maffini; Barbara Fradkin; RJ Harlick; Rick Blechta; Lou Allen; JD Carpenter for his correspondence and Bushmills wisdom; Allan Neal and CBC‘s All in a Day; Steve and Andrea Clifford; Bob and Leslie Grace; Patty Brundritt and the Marsh clan (don’t forget little Dougie); Capital Crime Writers and Canadian Crime Writers; and lastly, those reviewers and their publications who still believe that Canadian writing is worth talking about.

  This is entirely a work of fiction; as such, the author has taken liberties with historical timelines and the facts in general. Several sources of information provided inspiration during the writing of this book, including: Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War by Ed Vulliamy; My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anothony William Vivian Loyd; Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maas; Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia by Louis Sell; and Ghosts of the Medak Pocket by Caroline Orr.

  photo by Stephanie Smith

  C. B. Forrest was born and raised in Richmond, just outside of Ottawa, Ontario. After studying journalism, he worked as a reporter for the Sudbury Star and Northern Life.