The Devil's Dust (11 page)

“Wouldn't hurt to have them ready. Over and out.”

Nolan is about to respond when the back door of the Station opens. A band of yellow light gets painted across the parking lot, the packed snow made dirty from tires and big-rig highway slush. Nolan watches as Carl Levesque comes down the stairs, pauses at the bottom to fish cigarettes from his jacket pocket. He cups his hands to light a cigarette and then the door opens again. A few bars of the country music bleed into the frozen air, this wailing refrain of lost love that makes the dark night seem darker, lonelier. Two men join Levesque at the bottom of the stairs. Nolan believes he recognizes them from the Big Water First Nation. He is parked at an angle and far enough away so as not to draw attention, but the distance also makes it difficult for him to make a positive ID. The men all shake hands. Nolan must wait now until they are in their vehicles and driving away. Levesque is the last to go. His interior dome light reveals his movements against the blackness. He is leaning over, fiddling with something in the glove compartment. Finally he turns the engine and navigates the big black Cadillac out onto Main, a sleek yacht that appears out of place in the North, in a land of half-tons and SUVs.

“Nolan here,” he says into the mic. “I'm on my way. Over and out.”

He starts the cruiser and pulls out of the parking lot. There is no need for lights or sirens. He will move quickly, but given the report, there is little hope of finding anything more than ashes and bones.

T
here is strange comfort to be found in sharing a woman's company in the absence of anticipation of reward. This fact seems to allow McKelvey to remain focused on the moment, for there is no hyped prize waiting at the end of the game —
this is it
. The smile on Peggy's face, the sound of her laughter, the black humour in her jokes, the way she moves the hair from her forehead. He notices everything, and he fills yet again with a foreign sense of gratitude for life and all of its tiny moments, the real magic that he and most of his kind fail to appreciate in the ignorance of their youth. He believes he could seduce this woman, pry open and climb through the window of her northern loneliness, say whatever it is that she wants or needs to hear, and he could be with her.

He could be with her, or at least he believes the odds are in his favour. And he would. His equipment still functions — despite the dire warnings in the pamphlets of a potential doomsday to come — and he certainly has not yet lost his drive where these matters are concerned. He still dreams of Hattie and her lithe body, the nipples of her small breasts that felt so perfect against his tongue, the softness of her lips and the strength of her muscle, those hours wherein they got tangled and lost together, the sheets twisted, his heart outside his chest. He thinks of Caroline, too, but mostly this is guilt for the worry he has caused her, how he stood and watched her simply slip away — the unalterable fact that he was not there when she needed him, when their boy died and he got lost in anger. Yes, he has the ability and the drive and certainly the desire to lay down with this woman. But he has finally come face to face with the cold, hard truth of his predicament:
he is dying
. If not soon, then sooner than later. If not from the cancer percolating in his prostate, then it will be cancer of something
else
. Or his heart. Or one of those falls you hear that stupid old men take, tripping down a flight of stairs while rambling around to take a piss in the middle of the night. This thing is waiting for him down the line like a car pulled off to the side of the highway, engine running, signal flashing.

It is not male ego on his part that whispers he could become entangled with this woman; rather it is the history of humankind. Men and women, these situations, an ancient and unnameable tension, the spark and the chase, the dance with all feathers preened on jubilant display. This is what the sexes have always done and will always do, but McKelvey lacks the energy to lie or pretend, or to pretend to lie, and so it is that he accepts an invitation to enjoy a home-cooked meal with Peggy from Coffee Time with the complete absence of ulterior motives. So it is that he sits across from her in her small house, hardly touching a glass of red wine. It has been a long time since he has had a drink, or it seems like a lifetime anyway, and the first swallow rushes straight to his head. It comes back to him why he quit, this haunting refrain, jerking flow of images: the disgrace of an elderly gentleman sprawled on the floor of his bathroom, waking from a blackout, sick as a dying dog, addled brain clicking in desperation to piece together those last hours. He pushes the glass farther and farther from his reach.

“So what are you running from, Charlie?” She wears a mischievous smile. “Woman trouble? Taxes?”

“Just like that, eh? Right to the point. I like that.”

He sits back and thinks, at ease in this room, within himself. It seems the older he gets, the less he feels a need to ensure his voice is heard — his point of view, his thoughts on a particular subject. Anyway, a man could make everything up as he went along and it wouldn't make any difference.

“But you're not going to answer,” she says. “You're evasive.”

“It's supposed to be sexy,” he says, and smiles. “Mysterious.”

She takes a drink and sets her glass on the table.

“It's annoying more than anything. But I'm not pushy.”

“Nothing mysterious about it,” he says. “I'm separated. We've never really gotten around to discussing what comes next. We're probably too old to bother with divorce. She's a few thousand miles away from me, which is almost a safe distance. I decided to come back up here, I guess, to see if it looked any different.”

“And does it look different, Charlie?”

He thinks for a moment about this place where he came from, the place that made him. He knows he has carried parts of Saint B with him every day he lived in the bustle of the country's largest city. Whether it was fear of becoming his father, he doesn't know, but he does know that he did not leave this place, he
escaped
. It comes to him now, the truth he has searched for all these years: he has carried a sense of guilt for leaving, for being one of those who turned away from the work and the life that was offered, as though he wanted or needed more.

“It's changed a lot,” he says, “and it looks exactly the same.”

Peggy smiles and takes a sip of her drink.

“You mentioned something a few days ago, about your father and his old friends. Something you were hoping to find. Have you found it yet?”

McKelvey is still unsure whether he wants to know the truth about that violent year here in Saint B, less so his father's specific involvement. The darkest days of the labour movement. He was a little boy when his father was thrown out of work for months. What he remembers of that time is less food, his mother stretching groceries, more arguments in the house. But mostly a stark image of his father sitting alone at the kitchen table. The police had been by to ask questions. McKelvey watched his father from just inside the living room, a voyeur. His father sitting there at the table staring at the wall and smoking, just smoking, lighting one cigarette off the ember of the last. It was a scene that scared the boy in way that he could never quite describe. He remembers that much, anyway. Seeing your father so lost and idle, it was shattering.

“There was a strike,” McKelvey says. “That's how it goes in a mining town. Years of peace fractured here and there with unrest. Collective bargaining, wildcats, walkouts. You have no idea how a strike affects a town like this until you're in the middle of it. That particular year things got ugly fast. The company brought in scabs, unemployed hicks from the nearby towns, a bunch of guys from the Big Water reserve. A lot of the miners had served in the Second World War, and some of them, like my father, had just come back from a year of combat in Korea. They weren't in the mood to roll over.”

“You have unanswered questions about your dad's role in the strike?”

“A scab worker was killed in an explosion. Nobody was ever charged. It was something people whispered about for years. Back then, the death of a scab — and a scab who happened to be Native — didn't exactly result in a major police investigation. It was a different time.”

A silence falls between them, but rather than awkward, it feels right. A moment of silence for the dearly departed perhaps.

Finally, Peggy breaks the silence. “You've always wondered about your dad, haven't you? If he was capable of committing an act of violence — a murder — and living with it. Do you ever wonder if that's why you became a cop?”

The revelation hits him with the force of a blindside. The doorway to his entire life swings open.
My God
, he thinks.
If that is in fact the truth, this thing I've sought all these years, this notion I have wrestled with daily — good men who commit desperate acts, justice and revenge, right and wrong
.

“I'll leave that one to my psychologist.” He chuckles to lighten the mood, switch the channel. “I have one on retainer back in Toronto.”

He reaches out and touches the stem of the glass, turns it, and settles back.

“You don't like the wine?” she asks, having noticed his reticence.

“I'm not much of a drinker these days.” He finds himself amused with the sound of those words coming from his mouth. He half expects a sudden fluttering of locusts, perhaps the sofa to erupt in flames.

“Why didn't you just say so,” she says with a laugh. “I'm drinking red grape juice myself. I haven't had a drink in nine years. Nine and a half, actually. I keep a bottle of wine on hand for my rare guests. It's probably stale as hell.”

They are sitting in the living room on a love seat. The room is spare, with a leather club chair, a coffee table with a few old magazines on a rack below, three large framed photos of ocean vistas on the walls. McKelvey smiles back at her, both amazed at the subtle hand she has played, and also at their seeming inability to be completely honest even at their age.
Absolute beginners
, he thinks.

“That's funny,” he says. “I thought you'd be disappointed if I didn't take a glass.”

“Societal rituals and peer pressure. Here, I'll switch you over to grape juice. It's full of the same antioxidants as red wine, only it doesn't kill brain cells or result in demoralizing behaviour.”

“Probably too late for me on the brain cells.”

She laughs and gets up and takes his glass into the kitchen. He listens to her movements. The fridge opening, closing. A glass bottle set on a counter. A top being unscrewed. It seems as though suddenly everything matters, every detail, the painting in of all the lines that he was always so happy to leave blank for so many years. And then his mind breaks free of this unnatural sense of peace and he thinks of the pills.
The pain pills
. Oblong capsules of bliss, tiny torpedoes of transcendence. He has wondered, increasingly, about the validity of the pain which necessitates the ongoing prescription. The twinge of shame he feels when he visits old Dr. Shannon, how he can't meet the eyes of the pharmacist when he is asked whether he understands the significance of the medication.
Yes, yes,
he assures them, already shoving the bag in his pocket, shuffling toward the checkout,
I know all about it …

I am not addicted
, he thinks. No. Reliant, perhaps. A crutch. But addicted?

McKelvey has been a frontline worker in the field of addictions. As a detective on the Hold-Up Squad, he came face to face each day with the ceaselessly shocking things a human will do in order to ensure an uninterrupted flow of dope. Junkies holding a jagged piece of glass to the throat of a taxi driver for the sake of twenty or thirty dollars, shooting a convenience store clerk in the face for a garbage bag of lottery tickets and cartons of cigarettes to be sold for one-tenth their face value on the street. The whores who roll their johns, the strippers who slip wallets from pant pockets with the liquid fingers of a magician. And the worst, always the worst and the most unpredictable, the crackheads and the tweakers.

Heroin is a drug of sloth, the ancient domain of jazz musicians and cerebral poets, mats scattered on the floor of funky and dimly lit Chinese dens. The men who trade in heroin are for the most part highly organized in terms of business structure, highly intelligent, and thereby highly dangerous criminals who view their import-export trade as simple economics, the supply and demand of replacing life's misery with instalments of joy. Marijuana is the culprit in many street-level gang deaths, to be sure, but use of the drug itself is in many ways actually an aid to the police, in that its users are most often rendered slow-witted, dumb and lazy. It is the street nature of coke and speed — blow and crank — the easy access and affordability of a five-minute high, that combine to make the vortex of its peddlers and users such an insane and volatile labyrinth.

Are you using these pills because you can't cope with life on life's terms?

Within the otherworldly hierarchy of drug addicts, speed users are the bottom feeders and also the most dangerous. A crack cocaine high lasts about twenty minutes; speed lasts ten or twelve times longer. Tweakers run for days on end, smoking foils of meth and angel dust in filthy rooms, soaring and jabbering through the long-lasting high, then riding the rough shoulder of the come-down. It is in this final phase of the use and abuse that junkies appear as aliens who have just landed here. To refer to them as
otherworldly
is not inappropriate.

Peggy comes back in the room and sets his drink on the coffee table.

“You quit drinking,” McKelvey says. “Like cold turkey?”

“I used to go to meetings,” Peggy says. “Twelve Step meetings. There's only one in Saint B, on Tuesday nights, and I haven't been in a while. It goes from three people to a dozen on any given night. When things got bad between Davey and me, I knew what I had to do. Stop drinking and drugging. Wake up to my life. Be here,
really
be here.”

“Takes a lot of balls,” McKelvey says, and it comes too quickly. He wishes he could change his choice of words. But he watches Peggy. She smiles at him. He adds, “Most people aren't capable of being that honest with themselves, is what I meant.”

And he is about to talk about his boy. His Gavin, and the fall to drugs. How it seemed he was one day just a kid with a skateboard and cowlick and the next he was lying on that steel bed in the morgue. But he doesn't have the strength to rip those stitches and begin again. The story from start to finish. He will not wake that dog.

“You get older and you look back through your family,” Peggy says, “and you realize all those uncles and aunts and grandparents you thought were these real free spirits were just drunks. A bunch of alcoholics gathered for a family celebration is like putting a stick of dynamite on the kitchen table and setting a candle beside it. You just stand back and wait.”

They are quiet for a little while. McKelvey welcomes silence, the warmth of the small house, this sense of connection that he can't quite name. He understands this is perhaps what it means to be still. His mind is not turning, obsessing on a problem real or imagined. He closes his eyes. The blood hammers in his ears.
This is his heart pumping blood through his body. And his body is well worn and abused, but sitting here now with his eyes closed, he could just as easily be a kid again … fully alive and young, just starting.