The Devil's Dust (6 page)

D
arkness is falling. The lights of Main Street burn with a phosphorous glow. This far north, the aurora borealis appear on the coldest nights, these dancing and twisting snakes of coloured vapour — smeared streaks of green and yellow and sometimes blue. Nolan often pulls the cruiser over to the side of the highway just to sit and watch the spectacle. It reminds him of being a boy, how his father would do the same thing in his pickup truck. And Nolan remembers how the cab was always warm, how it smelled of his father — Old Spice and stale sweat — and how perfect life was as they sat there on the side of the dark highway, the world silent and uncomplicated. His father was a miner, and yet Nolan had always sensed there was something untapped within the man, some unnamed sensibility. Life was good back then, simple and easy to understand.

“Front row centre for one of nature's greatest shows,” his father would say.

“What causes them?” Nolan would invariably ask.

“It's magic,” his father would say. And later, when he had started the truck and was pulling back onto the road, he'd always offer a variation on this existential observation. “Those dancing lights,” he'd say, “prove just how small we really are. A man remembers that, and he's got his place figured out just right.”

Nolan is at the wheel of the cruiser, thinking about his father and remembering how the old man had talked about leaving Saint B, moving southwest to Elliot Lake, because his father had seen a brochure about the town. Once a mining centre in its own right, Elliot Lake had reinvented itself as a retirement mecca, offering cheap bungalows and peace and quiet, good hunting and fishing. His father only ever talked about it, and now it was too late. The big man was lying in a bed, withering away to bonelike fruit left on a shelf.

He is on Main now, headed west out of town. As he passes the police station, nestled between the one-room public library and the two-room town hall, he spots a strange vehicle. He slows to a crawl. The vehicle is a black SUV — a loaded Suburban — with Michigan plates. He glances in the rear-view, stops, then puts the vehicle in reverse and eases back to the station. He pulls into a spot beside the Chief's Jimmy. The Chief always drives his own vehicle, and charges mileage to the town, something he says is a holdover from his sheriff days.

Nolan enters the station and the small squad room. Chief Gallagher is leaning back in his swivel chair, boots up on his desk, his guest seated across from him with his back to Nolan. Gallagher is ruddy-faced and his eyes are shining. Nolan spots the tumblers of amber booze. The Chief keeps a bottle of scotch locked in his bottom drawer for special occasions, which are rare in Saint B these days. He keeps his only weapon, a pearl-grip .38 revolver, locked in there, too, and Nolan catches a glimpse of the handle. Gallagher is not a heavy or frequent drinker, and the booze always rushes blood to his face. Nolan has witnessed the rapid transformation of the man's demeanour after just a single drink. He smiles too much and his head lolls as though it is too heavy to hold up, his cheeks and nose flushing red.

“Constable Nolan,” Gallagher says, and swings his boots to the ground.

The visitor turns around. He is an olive-skinned man of about forty, and when he stands to greet Nolan, the constable sees that the man is dressed in designer blue jeans and a navy sports coat with pinstripes, no tie, an expensive black overcoat draped on the chair. Nolan holds out his hand and they shake.

“Tony Celluci,” he says.

“Ed Nolan.”

“Chief Gallagher was telling me about your head,” Celluci says, patting the side of his own head in illustration. “I know how you're feeling. I had two concussions back when I played college football. It's like you've got the worst hangover in the world and you just can't shake it.”

Nolan finally has an analogy that works for his condition. He smiles and nods.

“Want a drink?” the Chief asks as he reaches into the drawer. He stops and looks up, and points to the side of his head. “Are you supposed to drink with your, you know?”

“No, thanks,” Nolan says. “I'm on my way out to talk to Wade Garson.”

The smile falls from the Chief's face. He straightens up, shakes his head slowly.

“Wade Garson? Why would you be going out to see Wade Garson at this hour, with your head all bandaged up, and you supposed to be on office duties anyway?”

Celluci looks at a poster on the wall that has suddenly attracted his attention.

“We should talk in private,” Nolan says.

The Chief nods and closes the drawer, lifts up with a sigh.

“Excuse me just a minute, Tony, but police business calls.”

Out in the hallway, Gallagher puts his hand on Nolan's shoulder and gives a gentle squeeze. This close, Nolan can smell the peaty Scotch.

“Who is this guy?” Nolan asks with a nod toward the office.

“He's from Detroit. Works for the city, Department of Waste Management. He's up here on a tour of northern communities. I told you before they've got their eye on Saint B as a potential landfill site.”

“Great. I've always wondered what Detroit smells like.”

“Easy now, Eddie. It's early days yet. But listen, what are you doing here? Go home to bed, for Christ's sake. You don't need to be going up to Wade Garson's and surprising him in the dark. That paranoid son of a bitch could have guns for all we know, and we know he's got a goddamned dog that's crazier than he is. You know how much he hates the cops, Eddie, especially since we sent his brother away on that weapons charge. Those people aren't right in the head, never have been. Their old man, Dewey Garson, you know he about killed a man with a pool cue one night in the Station Hotel twenty years ago. Over a spilled beer.”

“Travis Lacey told me he was on methamphetamine, Chief.
Meth
, right here in Saint B. He wouldn't tell me where he got it, but he said there's a lot of it going around the last couple of months. I talked to this former Toronto detective, Charlie McKelvey, today, and he—”

“Whoa, whoa there, Ed. What are you talking about? You mean that McKelvey who's renting his old house from Carl Levesque? You need to stay away from that character, let me tell you. I made a few calls when I found out he was in town, see. That's my job, to know who we're dealing with in this little fishbowl. Well, let me tell you, son, McKelvey has quite a history. You best just leave him to his walk down memory lane.”

Nolan's head begins to pound with such clarity that he swears he can feel and trace the line of each pulsing artery back to its root. It is after seven. The winter night is pure blackness, even blacker out near the trailer where Wade Garson lives and peddles junk car parts and sells dope by the gram. Nolan forms an image of himself once again sprawled in the snow, his head or chest bleeding, Wade Garson standing over him, a dog barking and howling across the empty night. The Chief is right about one thing. It's not the time or the place to come at Wade Garson. He needs to slow down and use his head. And regardless of what Gallagher says, Nolan wants this veteran cop McKelvey at his side. He will need to convince the man to ride along. Or trick him. Either way, the cause is righteous.

“Maybe you're right, Chief. I should get some rest.”

Gallagher's hand squeezes Nolan's shoulder and the Chief smiles.

“Now you're talking sense, my boy. We don't need any fireworks in Saint B these days. We've got a chance here to turn things around. It's our job to keep things nice and tidy, okay?”

Nolan nods. The Chief pats him on the back.

“Watch that black ice,” Gallagher calls as Nolan opens the door and enters the cold, dark night.

The Saint B coin laundromat is located at the south end of Main Street in one of the first collection of low-rise buildings on the approach into town. There is a butchery located on one side of the laundromat, long since closed, and a Kwick Kash on the other side, which is closed at this late hour but otherwise still in operation. This is the place where locals cash their unemployment and welfare cheques when they don't want to follow the seemingly inconsistent hours kept by the Royal Bank branch located beside the library. In exchange for cash-in-hand, they are willing to lose up to twenty-eight percent of the cheque's face value. It's a racket Carl Levesque wishes he had thought of years ago; legalized loansharking.

The full glass-front window declares
MODERN COIN WASH
, but the paint is faded and someone has used the opportunity to substitute an
L
for the
C
in the word
Coin
. Levesque still smirks every time he sees that, slogging in now with his green garbage bag full of dirty clothes. Actually, he thinks, that's not such a bad business idea either. Why nobody ever thought of setting up a massage parlour in this craphole is a crime. Back in its heyday, the place, like most mining towns, had about a four-to-one ratio of men to women. He knows that Saint B has had its share of “known bawdy houses,” these nondescript bungalows, the addresses passed around on payday. He sees the unrealized potential in cornering that market. And it's too late now. The town is caught in that in-between place: too many old people, too many kids. It's the middle group that is missing, the consumers with regular paycheques, and they are disappearing from Saint B in droves.

He's shoving his twisted ball of pants and shirts and socks and underwear into an industrial front-load washer. The bells on the door jingle. Three teenagers shuffle in — two boys and a girl, sixteen or seventeen — and a rush of freezing air rolls in after them like a delayed wave. Levesque eyes them, but continues with his task. Four quarters, a shot of powdered soap, and he slams the door and turns and puts his back against the wall of washers, folds his arms across his chest. The teens congregate near the washroom at the back, where the girl has retreated. There is a corkboard on the wall beside the washroom door. It is pasted with months-old notices for bake sales, campers for sale, winter tires for trade, someone's lost dog. One of the teens rips a flyer from the board, crumples it into a ball, aims at a garbage pail in a corner near the emergency exit at the rear. He misses the shot. The crumpled ball of paper hits the rim and bounces off.

“Tool,” his friend says. This boy is the taller of the two, about six feet. He is dressed in jeans and untied Kodiak boots, a wool navy pea coat. His hair is long and dyed jet black.

“Hurry up, Casey,” the thrower says. He knocks on the door loudly. “You're not taking a dump are you?” and this makes the two boys laugh.

“Dump,” the bigger teen repeats as though it is the funniest thing he's heard.

Levesque looks out the window onto Main. There is no traffic. He does not expect to see any. Only half the street lamps are on, a cost-saving measure, and this creates an eerie false dawn. The town is in dire straits thanks to a dwindling tax base. Garbage collection is now every two weeks. It will be monthly before long, and then the rat population will bloom. One of the town's two snowploughs sits idle at the town garage. Cause and effect. He looks back to the kids, who also keep eyeing him while pretending not to notice him. Goddamned Saint B, how has he ended up in this place? Doing laundry at quarter to ten on a Friday night? That he is owed, that some good luck is due his way, goes without saying. Goddamned right. And if the luck won't come, then he'll just do what he's always done, he'll make things happen. He hears the voice of the man from the tapes in his car —
take control of your destiny. Decide what you want from this life, make a plan, and go for it …

The door of the washroom opens. The girl steps out and gives the tallest boy a shove. She wears a black toque over long blond hair. Levesque sees that her nose is pierced and her eyebrows, too, and her eyes are ringed in black makeup. She has an edge to her, something he likes. He figures in a mere three years this girl will be someone's pregnant wife. Unless she makes a break for it, heads to a city. And even then the odds aren't good, he knows. And it's a shame is all, how these two young studs are too stupid to see what's right in front of them. She is at the apex of her beauty.

“Hey,” Levesque says, and the teens look over.

They stare, as though he is doing his laundry in the nude. He remembers well this age, how the very existence or presence of adults seems an insult to the meaning of life. They simply can't accept the fact they, too, will eventually start their day by gathering what remains of their hair into a swirl on top of their balding skulls, they will wear their shirts untucked in a vain attempt to reduce the visual impact of their burgeoning girth, and they will reach out and snatch from life whatever she offers, and they will be grateful for it.

“Fuckin' cold out there, eh?” he says, as he slides a hand into the breast pocket of his jacket. He pulls out a twisted cigarette and a lighter. He licks the end of the joint and pops it in his mouth. He lights it, inhales long and deep, holds the smoke in his lungs a half-minute. He tilts his head toward the ceiling and exhales a funnel like an industrial chimney up at the Carver Company mines. He sighs and smiles.

“Toke?” he says, and holds the joint out to the group — an offering.

His eyes, though, are on the girl.

T
here are few places to which a man in a small town can escape once the walls begin to close in and the memories start. There is the tavern at the Station Hotel with its mouldy reek of floorboards made wet from spilled beer, the spattering of garden-variety losers nursing their drinks, playing dollar-a-game pool. So McKelvey sits at the counter of the Coffee Time, sipping a fecund coffee and picking at a stale cherry stick. The place is empty at this hour, half past ten, except for a lone pensioner seated by the windows with a bowl of chili and a dated copy of
The Mining News
. In one of life's sour ironies, gold is on the upswing, and nickel, too, thanks to the requirement of both resources in the manufacture of today's modern accoutrements. Too bad the reserves of both minerals are on the decline, at least in these parts. In Africa they seem to find new veins and deposits with the digging of every new hole in the ground.

It has been strange walking around town, for he has often recognized the traces of youth in a passing face. An old schoolmate, perhaps. How odd to stand on a sidewalk and look into the eyes of someone you have not seen in decades, to squint and morph away the crow's feet and the silver hair, to erase the forty pounds, to understand the fact of your own aging set against this living measuring stick — and within it all, to also understand the shortness of time, the single breath that leaves your lips between the starting point and the finish line. There was Gerry Bines, who used to try and build stink bombs with McKelvey back in Grade 4, retired now from the accounting department at the Carver Company. And there was Clifford Martin, as skinny as ever but now bald as a polished bearing, still stuttering his Ts. And all McKelvey could think about as they stood and tried to catch up on forty years was the time they were playing hockey on the river and Clifford pissed his pants because he got hit so hard in the kidneys.

Now McKelvey watches Peggy moving behind the counter. She owns something he can't quite put his finger on, but he believes it falls between confidence and indifference, a quiet grace here in the midst of decline.

“You weren't born here. So tell me,” McKelvey says, “how did you end up in a place like Saint B? There must be a story there.”

Peggy leans in and sets her elbows on the counter. Her dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail and she is wearing makeup around her green eyes. McKelvey has never noticed the tiny dark birthmark on the left side of her upper lip. Like the Queen of France. He can't remember the name.

“There's always a story,” she says. “Usually boring or cliché.”

“Jesus,” he says, and laughs. “Let me piece it together then. Let's see.” He leans back now on the stool and surveys her as though she is a piece of abstract art that he is trying to understand. “You were born and raised in Maidstone, Saskatchewan. Your parents were missionaries for an Episcopalian church. No, wait. Baptist. And you lived in a series of small and boring prairie towns. Until you met a guy when you were seventeen at a fall fair. Guy worked a ride, probably that strawberry that turns around in circles. And then you —”

Peggy is smiling now, and McKelvey is smiling and pleased that he has made her smile — for the smile changes her whole face, as though a mask has fallen to the floor and the real Peggy is here for just a moment, a glimpse of what she looked like as a child.

“This is painful,” she says. “And you call yourself a detective?”

He shrugs, and says, “I didn't say I was a good one.”

“You're right about one thing. I did meet a guy when I was seventeen. He wasn't a carnie, but it was close. He was a miner. I was born and raised in Winnipeg. My dad was a lit prof at the university and my mom was a nurse. Normal childhood, no skeletons, no trauma. I met Davey at a summer barbecue. He was nineteen and working in Sudbury. He was home to visit some friends, and he had a brand new motorcycle. This black Harley-Davidson. God, it sounded like the end of the world when he started that thing up. He always had a roll of cash. He was fun. And dangerous.”

“What is it with girls and bad boys? Do you really think you're going to change them? And if you did, if you succeeded, they wouldn't be dangerous anymore. It would defeat the purpose.”

“Go ask a psychiatrist that one, Charlie. All I know is that he was handsome and he was independent. We drank together, too. That was our connection, really. We partied a lot in those days. I mean
a lot
.”

Peggy straightens up and folds her arms across her chest. She gets lost there in memory. McKelvey knows all about that, and so he sips the coffee in silence and then pushes the mug aside. He isn't about to ask her to finish the story. He has a pretty good idea how and where it ends. It is one of the unfortunate side effects of a lifetime of police work; his curiosity is close to non-existent, for human nature is predictable.

“And you?” she asks. “What's your story?”

McKelvey shrugs. His story.
History
. Everything is now in the past tense. He was a father, a husband, a cop. Now he is simply closer to the end than the middle, perhaps even closer than he himself can appreciate. There are forces at work within his bloodstream, forces whose primary objective is to decode, dismantle, destroy.

“Born and raised here,” McKelvey says. “Left at seventeen and joined the force in Toronto when I turned eighteen. Met a girl, got married. We had a boy.”

“Where are they now, your wife and son?”

“They're not with me. Or I'm not with them. I can never remember which.”

“Sounds like the abbreviated version.”

She smiles at him with eyes of compassion or shared understanding. It reminds him of the way the schoolteacher, Tim Fielding, used to look at him all the time, after they met at the men's grief group at the hospital. This look that said,
I know how you're feeling, I really do, even if there are no words that we can use to spell this out.

“Top-up?” She reaches for a pot of coffee.

He shakes his head. “I have a confession to make.”

“I know,” she says, and smiles. “The coffee tastes like crap.”

The wail of a siren makes Peggy jump, and she almost spills some coffee. McKelvey swivels and looks out the window. A police cruiser races past, lights flashing, strobing bands of blue and white bounce across the walls inside the Coffee Time.

“Must be an accident out on the highway,” she says.

Peggy bites her bottom lip, staring out the window as though the darkness out there holds some answer. “I wonder,” she says. “I should call Shirley.”

“Who's Shirley?”

“Shirley Murdoch. She does dispatch for the cops and the ambulance. Fire, too.”

McKelvey shakes his head, marvelling at the simplicity of life in a small town. There is something both refreshing and dangerous about having everything out in the open, about knowing who everybody is, what they do, and how they do it. He listens as Peggy says a few words into the telephone, nods. She hangs up and turns to McKelvey, shaking her head.

“Saint B is going to hell. Some kid just got stabbed in the washroom at the arcade. Pete Younger just called for backup. Drugs, I bet you any money.”

Sure enough, in a moment another cruiser drives past the coffee shop, lights flashing, snow flying in its wake.

“That'll be Ed Nolan rushing over even though he should be in bed,” Peggy says. “At this rate they're going to need to hire another cop around here.”

“I miss the peace and quiet of Toronto,” McKelvey says.