The Devil's Dust (4 page)

“Oh, I don't know, friend.” Levesque laughs, and this time it comes across as sincere, a chuckle between friends. “I don't want to be aiding and abetting a recovered addict. But you're a grown man, I suppose. Fire away.”

He hands the pack over. McKelvey lights one. His first in ninety days. The nicotine rushes to his head and he feels nauseous, dizzy. Stoned, perhaps? Yes, that's it. The power of this drug is revealed in its true light when you have spent some time away from it. He enjoys the rush, the buzz. As always, it simply feels good to feel different. And then, like an alarm sounding his guilt, the cellphone he has shoved in his jacket pocket goes off. He fumbles, gets it free, and looks at it while it continues to ring.

“I think you have to flip that thing there and say hello.”

McKelvey gives Levesque a dead-eye glance, flips the phone open, and moves it to his ear and mouth.

“McKelvey,” he says reluctantly.

“Charlie.
My god
. Do you know how many messages I've left?”

“Good morning, Caroline.”

“It's not even morning out here yet. You've had me worried sick. Jessie has been calling me, too. Where
are
you?”

McKelvey looks out the window at the passing bleakness of a small northern town at the apex of winter.

“Back home,” he says.

There is a moment of silence. Levesque is listening but trying to look busy, adjusting the car's temperature controls.

“Is everything okay, Charlie?” she asks. “That's a stupid question, I know. You were supposed to go for counselling after the incident by the waterfront, but I don't think you ever followed through. Why would I expect you to if you couldn't even stick with counselling when Gavin was killed. And you're drinking. You know you called me a few times in the middle of the night. You didn't sound well, the messages you left. Do you remember that?”

McKelvey takes a long drag on the cigarette, blows smoke out the window, then rolls it down farther and flicks the butt outside. His brain warbles now, he is a bobble-head character. The succubus nicotine whispers
again, again, again
.

“I needed a change of scenery,” he says. “And I'm not drinking. Anyway, you don't need to worry about me, Caroline. You don't have that burden anymore.”

“Fuck off, Charlie.” The vulgarity takes him by surprise. He sits back as though he has been slapped across the face by his mother. “You're such an asshole sometimes. You need to pull your head out of that place you keep it and look around. You've got a granddaughter. You've got Jessie. They need you. Grownups don't just run away and hide, Charlie. Is that what you're doing, running away?”

He can no longer sustain the conversation. He is being pulled away and muffled by an invisible hand. The phone must have turned on by accident, perhaps bumped or jostled. He will be more careful in the future. Not knowing about missed calls, not seeing the flashing red light won't bother him nearly as much.

“It wasn't an
incident
, by the way,” he says. “A good cop got killed that day.”

“Oh, Charlie … I wish you could see what I see. What everybody else sees …”

“I'll call you when I have better reception,” he says. “You're breaking up.”

“Sure. Whatever you say —”

McKelvey hangs up and ensures the phone is off. He slips it back inside his coat and turns to Levesque, who he imagines has conjured all sorts of visions.

“My wife,” McKelvey says, and leaves it at that. There is nothing more he needs to say. Levesque nods once and they drive through the town, out from the small and dying business section to the grid pattern of two- and three-bedroom simple bungalows the Carver Company built decades ago to house its employees and their families. The homes are, for the most part, all the same, appearing much like the PMQs on a military base.

“All these company houses, I scooped them up just under two years ago,” Levesque says. “Cheap as hell. I got a consortium of developers from Toronto backing me up on the deal.”

“How many are still occupied?”

“About a third. Carver executives tell me the mine is in its last year and a half, but that's confidential. They've got a skeleton crew mucking the bottom, ready to do the cleanup and shut the lights off on the way out. Of course the mine has been hobbling toward this for a long time, but still. You know, as long as there are even a few jobs down there, people feel we've still got a beating heart.”

“My father told me a long time ago what this day would be like. How it was coming and, more important, how the town should prepare for it.”

“Our mayor, Danny Marko, has this big plan. He calls it his twenty-year vision. There's serious talk about a new transmission line being built up here, bringing power line jobs and construction dollars through town for a five-year period. Then there's our chief of police. He wants to truck Detroit's shitty diapers up here, maybe use the mine as a big hole to fill up. Meantime, the dropout rate in Saint B is into the double digits. Kids are taking off for the oil fields in Fort McMurray or the diamond mine up in Yellowknife. Hard to keep a kid in school when he can go to Alberta and make twenty bucks an hour just sweeping the floors, no experience required. Some days I think maybe I should follow them on out there.”

Levesque rolls the window down all the way to flick his cigarette butt. A blast of cold air rolls in and wakes McKelvey from his nicotine stupor. The air, at least, is fresh and clean and smells of a coming snowfall. It is strange not to smell Lake Ontario, the stale subway air wafting from sidewalk grates, the chromium and coal ash.

“And that's it for today's depressing small-town news,” Levesque says, and laughs like a dog barking. His chest wheezes. He catches his breath and adds, “Welcome home, Charlie. Welcome home.”

T
he boy who always has some marijuana now has something else. He stands in the centre of the boredom of this dying place and it offers the promise of amusement, an antidote to the tedium. At the same time, he offers himself the gift of small-town popularity. He will never want for friends as long as he always has a few grams of weed in his backpack. And now this, the magic powder.

At first he thought the yellow-white substance in the foil was cocaine. He got it at the arcade, the same place where he got his pot, but had no idea what he was looking for, what cocaine or any other hard drug smelled or looked like. He rubbed some of the powder on his gums, as he had seen narcos do in the movies, and it gave him the edge of a tiny buzz. He sprinkled it on a pinch of tobacco and rolled a joint. In this way he discovered the pathway to the waterfall. And now, standing here in his parents' garage, he shows the others how to smoke it using a ballpoint pen with the ink cylinder removed. Heat the foil with a lighter, inhale the chemical reaction. Instant payback. No waiting required. Flick the switch and you are perfect.

“Hey, Scott,” one of the girls says, “I heard you gave Travis Lacey some shit that made him go crazy. Is that true? He's at a mental hospital in Sudbury 'cause he tried to take that cop Nolan's head off with an axe.”

Two of the six teens have smoked. They have instantly found and occupied their own private wavelength. They are standing in this cold garage with their breath visible, boxes of empty beer bottles stacked in a corner, four summer tires awaiting the retreat of snow, tools hanging on a pegboard, and everywhere the smell of two-stroke oil and gasoline. The square of foil is passed to the girl and she holds it, her face stricken in this moment of choice. Her hand shakes, fluttering the foil like a leaf on an autumn tree.

“You think weed is amazing, Casey, this stuff is insane,” Scott says.

He smiles. His eyes are lit up like LED lights. They are vacuums that suck her into his private world. He owns a confidence she can't quite understand.

“What about Travis?” Casey says. “He tried to kill his mom, I heard.”

“Travis did too much,” Scott says. “You got to be smart. Hold the lighter there just for a minute and you'll see. You don't have to sit in your basement for two days and smoke it all to yourself.”

“Anyway, Travis was always a little crazy,” someone says, and they all laugh.

The teens who have smoked start giggling, lost in a shared joke. The girl hesitates, but she looks over at Scott, this boy with the killer smile, and she doesn't want to disappoint him. She holds the hollow Bic pen between her teeth and sparks the lighter with a flick of her thumb. The little yellow flame heats the foil. Grey-white smoke lifts and curls in a wispy tendril, and she draws it away with the makeshift pipe.

She stands there in the dim garage. The roof pulls back like the screen on a convertible sports car, and sunshine pours in like golden summer-day warmth, and she feels so good, so light and happy, like Christmas morning and your birthday, too, and the boy with the killer smile is right there with her.

A brassy light streams through the window and fills the small kitchen of the bungalow where Constable Ed Nolan stands fixing a cup of tea. The hand stirring sugar in the steaming cup freezes there while he gets lost in memory, tripped or snagged. He seems to be doing this a lot lately, simply getting stuck in mid-thought or mid-stride, sitting there with a forkful of potatoes or a coffee cup hovering three inches from his lips. How long he stands here with the spoon in the cup, he has no idea — thirty seconds or six minutes, it is all the same. And then, as though released from the binds of a magical spell, his hand begins to work again. This condition is not the result of the recent concussion, he knows, for it dates back more than a year, to those long days when he straddled his job and tended to a mother dying in a hospital a hundred kilometres down the highway, all while watching his father slide into the void of dementia. The concussion, in addition to this newfound worry for the fate of his town, has likely only piled onto the tail end of a bad year. Ed Nolan knows that he needs a vacation, a break away from this place. If he is honest, he knows he must leave altogether one day, or face a life of loneliness and slow suffocation. The truth is, he can't leave. Not while the kids in town are in danger from this new, dark stranger called methamphetamine.

Nolan stands now with his back against the counter and surveys the room — his mother's needlepoint designs of deer and flowers in country fields, the framed religious verses, the dozens of spice and herb jars organized in alphabetical order. He brings the cup of tea and walks through the living room. Once cluttered with bric-a-brac of all varieties, clunky furniture picked up by his bargain-hunting father at yard sales and church fundraisers, awful oil paintings created by the wife of a mining friend, the room is now as sparse as a monastery. He is slowly, tediously working his way through the house one room at a time, a machine that cleans and clears. The walls are blank, the shag carpet has been rolled away. His father has no memory of these rooms, or this house even, except the odd and seemingly random blurting out of a snapshot, something shared here or there one Christmas, a Sunday in June of 1983. Nolan wonders now if the fog that has settled on his brain like a rag dosed in chloroform is similar to what happened to his father in those early months. The days when he sat across from this once seemingly omnipotent man with the tight biceps, the neck muscles taut and corded, and had to remind him what a knife and fork were for.

He taps softly three times at the bedroom, a habit and societal ritual that overrides the reality that his father likely can't comprehend the notion of privacy. He slips inside the room and the stale air mugs him like a hand over his mouth and nose. The floor is planted with clumps of dirty clothes, old bedding, and he feels guilty and ashamed. The day is quickly approaching when he will need to make the call and have his father taken to a nursing home in Timmins or Sudbury, perhaps somewhere even farther away.

“I have your tea, Dad,” he says, and steps over some clothes to the night table.

Nolan can hardly breath, the air is so ripe. He moves to the window and opens it a few inches. He will take the risk of letting sub-zero air into the room, despite the fact his father now lies in bed and is at constant risk of developing pneumonia. A slice of cold winter air does in fact immediately change the temperature. He closes the window and turns back to his father.

“I have to go to work, Dad,” Nolan says. “We have problems … new problems here in Ste. Bernadette. If I told you, you wouldn't believe me. The whole world has changed.”

His father doesn't respond, and makes no move for the tea. Nolan listens for a moment, believing he may have heard his father make a sound, but there is nothing. The son can't recall the last time the father spoke his name, or any word for that matter. Nolan nods, as though he is once again accepting that it is simply the right thing for a son to do, to make that call. Breaking the promise his father made him make when Nolan's mother was sick — that he would never, under any circumstances, surrender him to a nursing home, that he would be afforded the simple luxury of passing away in his own bed — this is something Nolan will have to live with.

S
>te. Bernadette — or
Saint B
as she is known by the locals — is nestled in the thickest of the wild country of the Cambrian Shield, due north of Timmins and just west of the Quebec border. Unpolished, with the ragged and torn-open beauty that only the North can produce — a beauty born of adversity and stubbornness, this place where trees jut impossibly from grey sheer rock walls, wildflowers surviving in barely a dusting of soil. Ste. Bernadette for two generations has straddled a vein of gold — her luck and her curse. The community centre that thirty years ago rocked with Saturday night dances now rots in its place, leaning to one side, the whitewash faded, cracked, and peeling. The once-prosperous shops along Main Street now own boarded windows, except for those few whose owners refuse to let go.

A little more than twelve hundred people live there now, but at the height of the Carver Company mining operations located just outside the town, Ste. Bernadette was home to more than double that number. Ste. Bernadette never really figured in the mining news, not when stacked against the big players — Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Timmins, Red Lake, even Cobalt in its gravy days. Ste. Bernadette was that rare secret; a small operation, yes, but it was prosperous and stable. Most of the locals didn't mind that outsiders never mentioned the place when they thought of mining; it was just as well to keep their ambitions away. Many worried aloud that a small boom would both invigorate and eventually destroy the town. Paranoia of the south and the cities down there was simply a part of the embedded culture in a remote northern town where sharing gossip and passing judgment were a part of daily life.

Unlike the Hollinger Gold Mine of Timmins, which was at one time the richest gold producer in the western hemisphere — or even the mines of Rouyn, which operate still — the vein deep beneath Ste. Bernadette was seemingly
not
infinite. Like many remote towns in northern Ontario — or northern Quebec or Manitoba or Saskatchewan — there was a Native reserve nearby, in this case half an hour northeast of Ste. Bernadette. A short trip up the two-lane highway, followed by a ten-minute drive down a gravel road would deliver you to a new universe: the Big Water First Nation.

It is surreal
: McKelvey stands in the kitchen of the home where he was raised. It is silent. Sun streams through the window and warms the side of his face. He remembers standing just like this on cold winter mornings, eyes closed to the warmth, feet cold on the linoleum floor. Later, as he unpacks, the medical brochures once again poke him in the eye. He stands at the dresser and regards them like a fan of cards, the worst royal flush he's ever drawn, and then he opens a drawer and tosses them in. He adds to the drawer the journal he has been keeping with no sense of regular dedication. Some of the entries simply record the date and a line or two about having nothing to say, dispatches from the front lines of mortality:
Rain today. Fuck it
.

Now McKelvey stands at the bathroom sink, the porcelain cold against his stomach, and he swallows the tablets with a backward snap of his head. He closes his eyes and imagines the chemical molecules dissolving, entering his bloodstream on their mission of salvation. This bathroom, this small place. Remembered smells, voices from down the hall. He forms a grainy vision of his father standing at this very sink, shaving cream slathered on his big handsome face, a cigarette propped between thin lips. In the vignette his father turns, notices him standing in the hallway with a foot stuck between the banister posts; and Grey McKelvey smiles and winks. It's a good memory of a man who rarely let you know where you stood within his silence.

The warmth of the sun through the window feels good now, in the dead of winter, but at the height of summer the top floor of the old house will be stifling. McKelvey wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and puts the pill bottle in the medicine chest above the sink. His razor is in there, too, untouched for the third day now. The stubble is beginning to itch, especially at night with his face pressed against the pillow, but laziness wins out over discomfort. Seems to be a theme in his life these days. But it wasn't always this way; for once he had a purpose, and drive. He can't help but admit the waning of his energy, the slowing of that internal propeller. Is this getting old, he wonders, or is it giving up?

It is as though a parallel universe opened up the day he left the force, stumbling inside an upside-down place where time no longer had meaning. He had given himself a period of holiday from total responsibility after so many years of increasing stress on the streets of the city. The murder of his son at the hands of bikers and a crooked Drug Squad cop, Raj Balani. The shootout with the Montreal biker, Pierre Duguay. The kidnapping of his friend Tim Fielding. And within it all, through those darkest of days, his wife gave up on them and moved to the west coast. He discovered he was a grandfather. And he also discovered he had cancer. Some people clawed their way through a tough year; McKelvey felt as though he had eaten the shit of an entire decade. It was just getting too hard to swallow.

He often wakes in the early morning from a dream of the shootings in the old Canada Malting Company factory on the shore of Lake Ontario. The echo of the gunshots, the sounds of wounded and dying men. He shivers in the darkness, alone and confused. This weight, this guilt he carries. McKelvey came through the investigations without drawing any formal charges. There was talk of obstruction of justice, but he kept his mouth shut and there was little to go on. He knew the truth, and those who knew it with him were dead. While McKelvey accepted his role in the conclusion of events, he did not feel responsible for Detective Leyden's death per se. That trigger had been pulled by someone else, a madman, and McKelvey had done his best to keep everyone — Hattie included — out of the line of fire. In the end, Tim Fielding had been found, he had been saved. Whether it was worth the cost was a question beyond McKelvey's salary grade. What was done was done.

In those days and weeks following the kidnapping and all that it brought to his life, McKelvey came to understand and appreciate the depth of his losses. His wife, Caroline, was still living in Vancouver, and her plans to return to Ontario seemed now to be on hold in light of the violent events of that day at the Toronto harbourfront. She admitted in one of their long and rambling telephone conversations that his actions seemed
desperate
, though she stopped short of deeming them either homicidal or suicidal. And perhaps, McKelvey believed, she was only now accepting the truth of this man she had loved and the things of which he was capable — the violence that rested there just beneath the stillness. Jessie, his son's former girlfriend and the mother of his grandchild, had taken the little girl back to Manitoulin Island, where Jessie was right now opening a hair and beauty salon in the quaint harbour town of Little Current. Detective Mary-Ann Hattie was entirely through with him, having passed her exams to make Homicide on the country's largest and busiest municipal police force. Tim Fielding was sleeping on the floor of a hut in some remote northern Chinese village, teaching English to farm kids and sending irregular emails that said little in their brevity, though he claimed to be at peace, finally at peace. Exactly as expected, perhaps even precisely as planned, McKelvey was finally and completely alone. He had lost everything and everyone in his life. There was a strange sense of relief in knowing that his swirling vortex could no longer harm the ones he loved. He had only himself to drive crazy.

It was in the midst of this newfound solitude that The Diagnosis arrived. He had expected it, and yet it was still a surprise. A sucker punch you were sort of waiting for as you stepped into a darkened room — it was coming, you just didn't know when or from where. He read the brochures he was handed, and he sat on the couch in his condo and thought about things he had never hoped to think about. His mind got caught on the notion of religion, and what those people were getting that he wasn't. Hope or blind stupidity, he couldn't tell which. And he thought, too, of taking matters into his own hands, to switch the tables here and gain a modicum of control. He understood himself sufficiently to know that he lacked any sort of grace required to surrender, to lie down and wait out the last hours on a regimen of hospital rice pudding and visitors lying to your face about your prospects. He wanted to go quietly, but he was too loud, always had been. Crashing and banging, kicking and fighting. And he realized the fundamental truth of the equation:
you walk ten miles into the woods, you've got to walk ten miles out
.

McKelvey spent the first two months following the shootings in and out of the police headquarters on College Street, the offices of the Crown attorney, the Special Investigations Unit, answering and not answering questions for hours on end. He grudgingly spent a small fortune on a lawyer who helped him navigate the minefield. He drew rudimentary diagrams of the plant, where they had entered, where they had been ambushed, where the bodies had fallen. It was during this time that McKelvey's drinking took on a new and darker nature. It was the sort of drinking that had somewhere and somehow edged across a line, something to be reckoned with. It was the sort of drinking that felt more like
need
than
want
, and he found himself drinking more and more at home, sitting on his couch or at the desk by the window overlooking the alleyway, trying to write things down in this journal, figure out what had happened to his boy and his own life. Those hours of total solitude wherein the drinking became measured, steady, like medicine dripping from an IV into a patient's arm. He was rarely drunk, or perhaps he was almost always drunk, at least to some degree, and he finally understood the concept of
alcoholic tolerance
. He found that he could drink a six-pack of beer and half a mickey of Jameson between eleven and three, and then pull on his sports coat and head downstairs to Garrity's Pub in time for happy hour. He could slip inside the stream of after-work drinkers buzzing within the glow of their first drink, and he could carry on as though he'd perhaps only had a beer or two on his way over. He rarely changed, in terms of demeanour or mood, and the bartenders and waitresses called him a “good drinker,” as though it were a profession in which one could proudly excel or perhaps receive certification. When the alcohol lost its ability to extract him from himself completely — the way a dentist made your tooth numb before drilling — it was then that he turned back to the pills and their promise of disconnection.

He was no professional, and in the end it was mixing the two potions that got him into trouble. He quit drinking on a Tuesday night in late December, having found himself earlier that morning sprawled on the bathroom floor, drool gluing his cheek to the tiles, one arm frozen asleep from being tucked at an awkward angle behind his back. Fully dressed, one shoe on and missing a sock, the light burning above the sink. He sat up and felt his face, his teeth, his pockets for his wallet. There was no cash left, but his credit cards and ID were all there. And he pulled out a mess of folded receipts and attempted to comprehend how it was that he ended up spending over a hundred dollars at Filmores on Dundas Street East at quarter after one. The strip joint was a twenty-minute walk from Garrity's. It reminded him of the days of his police work, piecing together the movements of a suspect or a victim through their purchases and the corresponding time stamps. In terms of memory there was nothing to go on, simply blackness. It was terrifying to think he had been walking about like some automaton. It was a recipe for disaster.

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.