The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  “I’m fine,” McKelvey said, though the room was beginning to undulate, the hazy lights fading, flickering. “Listen, this is on me.”

  He tossed a few bills on the table then wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “Next time I’ll buy,” Tim said. “If you’re up for it, that is.”

  “Just give me a call,” McKelvey said, and the two men shook hands.

  Outside, the night was clear and cool with an early winter freshness that reminded McKelvey of the childhood nights spent at the outdoor rink just down from his house, old Eaton’s catalogues shoved inside his wool socks as shin guards. He’d wanted to be Jean Beliveau, probably because it incensed his father that he would idolize a Montreal Canadiens player and not a Maple Leaf. As he walked up the sidewalk, he saw himself tearing down the ice on those crisp cold nights, playing the puck with his stick, somebody’s older brother lining him up against the boards so that he saw explosions of stars and had the breath sucked from his lungs, but it was all worth that single moment of imagined glory.

  It was past midnight when McKelvey slipped inside the master bedroom, walking on the balls of his feet across the hardwood. He knew the secret spots that would offer up a sound under his weight. The room was dark, save for a soft glow coming up from the street lamps outside, muted and altered in hue by the window blinds. He got out of his sweaty shirt and jacket, remembering to pull from the breast pocket the tie he had removed at Murph’s. In the bathroom he bent over the sink and splashed water on his face, good and cold, then he paused there to grip the cold porcelain, fighting a wave of nausea. He cupped a mouthful of the cold tap water, to ease the burning in his chest before he brushed his teeth. He had been smoking like it was his new job, so he splashed a dab of cologne on his jaw. A false hope, perhaps, but hope all the same.

  Caroline was sleeping on her side. He traced with his eye the outline of her figure beneath the sheets, the hips that had widened with age, her ample bosom, and he was filled with a sudden desire to make love. It had been a long time. He tried to remember the last time he woke her in the middle of the night, their sleepy bodies moving, the bed creaking in the darkness. But not now, now she would think there was something wrong with him. He lifted the comforter and gently slid between the sheets, doing his best not to jostle the bed. He stretched out on his back and looked up at the dark shadows on the ceiling. His mind swirled with activity, connecting lines and fitting puzzle pieces like blocks of wood. His wife stirred.

  “You’re home,” she said without turning.

  “I met with that guy from the hospital group,” he said.

  “The young man,” she whispered, “who lost his wife.”

  “Tim. He’s a good kid,” he said. “He’s a teacher.”

  McKelvey listened to the sound of his own breathing. It was laboured, raspy, altogether noisier than he imagined it should sound. Was it the cigarettes? Was it the coming of a chest cold? A chest cold that would transform into pneumonia?

  Fill his lungs with fluid until breathing became not an automatic task, something you took completely for granted, but something to be thought about, worked at. Old people died from pneumonia all the time. They died in their sleep, a measure of peace. But he wasn’t old. Not really. He was on the cusp...

  “I said, you’ve been smoking,” Caroline repeated.

  “I had a few with my beer,” he said.

  He waited for it, but it did not come. He understood with a sense of finality they were beyond this now, and perhaps she had resigned herself to this backsliding to old habits. Was it worth arguing about? Was it the least of their concerns? McKelvey turned onto his side and put a hand on his paunch. Whether it was the beer or the cigarettes or the coffee, something was eating at his insides. Like worms: nocturnal miners, tunnelling without rest. Dig it deeper, dig until you come out the other side...

  “They made me an offer today,” he said, his voice drowsy.

  But Caroline had already fallen back to sleep. The room was dark and warm, and McKelvey felt himself teetering on the brink of the beautiful escape. I could die in my sleep. A heart attack, a stroke, an aneurysm. This rattle in my chest, this burning in my stomach.

  Eight

  The dressing room behind the stage was a whirlwind of garments and flailing limbs. Lanky girls wearing lingerie tops searched frantically for the missing bottoms as the bass line from the first song of their three-song set began to pound in their chests. Their scrawny legs were made all the more precarious in four-inch silver heels as they teetered about like strange, twittering giraffes. The cigarette smoke mixed with the blue language, the foul and candid mouths of the itinerant workers rising above the music like voices at a house party, or perhaps a sorority in full swing. The smells of strong perfumes and makeup, body glitters and glues, even the smell of body odour, everything blended together to produce this surreal orchestra of the lonely and the damned.

  The girl with the coal black hair was seated on a stool in a corner. She rolled the black stockings open so she could slip her painted toes inside, then she uncoiled the roll as far as it would go, to mid thigh. She stood to smooth the short black skirt, then sat again. Suddenly she was a schoolgirl. How ironic, she thought, for a Grade Nine dropout. She had a cigarette going in an overflowing ashtray, and another dancer appeared out of nowhere from stage right, a petite black girl wrapped in a ratty house coat, who grabbed the cigarette and took it with her on her way through the room.

  “Goddamn, Janine, buy your own,” the girl said without much conviction.

  She was olive-skinned, and she had her long black hair tied back while she finished with her makeup. She was just eighteen, but in this dim lighting, she passed easily for twenty-one, twenty-two. When she removed the makeup in the earliest hours of the morning, she looked like a teenager once again, perhaps as young as sixteen. Everything except for the eyes. For these green eyes had seen much. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she saw things that had happened but that didn’t seem real any more. Time was all mixed up. Memories played tricks. The drugs didn’t help matters. There were a couple of years in there, the years of the street, which were tangled together in a knot of memories, dreams. Stepping from the Greyhound downtown, nowhere to go, nobody to turn to. Fifteen years old. A thousand miles, a thousand regrets since then.

  When she closed her eyes, silently willing the strange men labouring above her to reach the end of their lust, the blackness of her clenched eyelids gave up the secrets of her heart. The pictures came into focus then, the faces and places of home and family. It was too much sometimes, and this is what the drug counsellors did not understand, what her aunt did not understand. There were things from which a person could not return. Not whole, anyway. Once you’d seen or done something, you couldn’t undo it. Once something had been done to you. No amount of bathing could ever wash away the physical memory. Sometimes when she got high, she pretended that certain things had never happened at all, that she would be discovered one night while dancing. An agent passing through the city on his way to Hollywood. Or perhaps a wealthy businessman who would marry her and give her a fancy home near a lake, a trip in an airplane. It happened, and it could happen to her. Why not? She was pretty enough.

  “Are you ready yet?” a man called from down the hallway.

  “Relax, Gerry,” the girl said, using her compact mirror to adjust her eyeliner.

  It was almost one in the morning, and the girl was just beginning her work for the night. The dancing was done now, the easiest part of the gig; it was so easy to pry cash from the men that sometimes she wondered why she hadn’t tried this sooner. Much easier than washing windows or bumming pocket change down in the subway and beneath the overpass. When stacked against the alternatives, it was easy to bend and roll, to arch your back like a cat the way the men in the front row always liked, to put your ankles by your ears and drill holes with your eyes until the shy ones burned red and turned away, to put your hands on the brass pole and sway to the beat of th
e music, your tits dripping tequila. You got drunk or you got high, then you hit the stage, and it was dark, then it was over. Once you got past that first time, it was nothing. It was a joke, really. Something most girls, especially girls on the street, ended up doing for free anyway. So why not. Close your eyes and make believe. They’re nobody to you; in these dark rooms everyone is a stranger and your best friend. The payoff came when a client particularly liked one of your assets and ended up dropping twenty dollars for a four-minute lap dance. Once you got them in a corner, it was easy to turn the twenty into eighty, a hundred. Give your share to the club, to the bouncer, and you were still making out. And in this regard at least, Duguay had been true to his word: it was the easiest money she had ever earned. She got paid to tell lies. And she was good at it.

  The dancing was the easy part. What came after was often much less pleasant, the sort of work that required the shutdown of entire lobes. And now that her patron Duguay was in the detention centre awaiting trial, the girl with the black hair found herself unprotected in a sea of sharks. Duguay had chosen her from all the girls, and in this way she was “his”; she didn’t go with anyone unless it was on Duguay’s word. It was usually only once or twice a week, and it was usually an associate of his, someone he wanted to impress. A free ride on Duguay’s private yacht. Something like that. But lately her world had changed, and some of the other girls took great satisfaction in watching her get painted up the same as them. Painted, plastered and parted. But they didn’t know. They didn’t know her. What she had inside.

  “We gotta go,” the man called again, this time from the doorway.

  The girl snapped the compact shut and put it in her small purse. She stood and brushed past the man, walking down the hallway towards the back door of the Dove Gentleman’s Club, the effects of the vodka and O.J. and Oxycodone painkiller carrying her on the wings of something that could make life bearable.

  The driver was a nice guy named Gerry. He was stocky, and there were thick grey scars along the ridges of his eyebrows that someone said were a commutative result of boxing, and his ears looked a little funny, too, lumps of twisted flesh, but he was soft-spoken, and she had never heard him so much as raise his voice. It’s all he did, drive the girls to the dates which were arranged by the management. It was no secret that the club out by the airport hotels and convention centres was owned and operated by the Blades. The girl with the black hair liked Gerry because, unlike the doormen and bartenders at the club, he never tried to get one from her for free. She figured he was like all the guys who hung around the place, hoping one day the management would ask an errand of him, and in this way he would be initiated. Men were all the same in their desire for sex and power.

  “You look nice,” he said as he drove them up the Airport Road. Traffic was light at this hour. “You know the drill, eh. Call me when you get in and see that everything’s okay. Call me again when you’re ready for a pickup.”

  “Yeah, Gerry,” she said, but she was looking out the windshield at a huge 747 gliding in for a landing. It seemed like magic that something so huge and heavy could be so graceful. She had never been on an airplane. She wondered what it would be like to sit in an airport all dressed up, or to tell people when they asked, “Oh, I’m leaving for Paris.” To be in between destinations, to be nowhere really, and completely anonymous. She often wondered about the fancy hotels, too, and what it would be like to stay there as a guest. To call down for poached eggs and have them call you Miss So-and-So. She had slept in the nice beds with the big pillows, yes, but she hadn’t seen very much. She had never been up the CN Tower, either. She wanted to go to a hockey game.

  They moved away from the high-rise hotels, the Marriotts and the Deltas, past the industrial strips and storage units and all-night gas stations glowing like space stations, until finally the driver pulled into a two-level complex called Grand Motel. A big sign on the road promised cable TV and free local calls. It was a dive. She could already envision the polyester floral print comforter, the hideous artwork hanging crooked above the bed with the abused mattress, glasses with water stains turned upside down on the bathroom counter, the cheap rectangle of soap loosely wrapped in paper. The driver eased the car around the lot, reading the numbers on the doors. She watched him the whole time, waiting for him to let her in on the joke. This wasn’t the kind of place she was used to. He stopped in front of Room 14.

  “What is this?” she said.

  “This is the place. Luc set it up.”

  “Perfect.”

  She wondered what Duguay would think of them sending her here to this place. Would he care? It didn’t matter anyway, because Duguay wasn’t here now, as Luc and the others had made clear. It was funny with these men, with their blue tattoos and thick arms, their big talk and swagger. All the talk of loyalty, brotherhood, death before dishonour. How quickly they forgot. Duguay wasn’t inside a day before Luc and the others were already jostling for control.

  “Are you okay?” Gerry said.

  She didn’t say anything. She had a bad feeling, which was unusual. Perhaps she wasn’t drunk or high enough. That could be it. Three months—ninety-six days to be exact—off the rock, and nobody had a clue as to the true depth of that single achievement. Fucken Jezus. Like winning every award in the world all at once. At least she was proud of it, proud of herself. Everyone underestimated her. They didn’t know that she was going with the flow until she could save enough money to get out. It wasn’t her life, wasn’t her future. Just a means to an end. She was resilient and had more guts than anyone could ever know. Fuck them all. They’ll find out one day when I’m long gone...

  She longed for a joint now and hoped whoever was inside Room 14 was a partaker. It would mellow her out, soften the rough edges of the night. Or another drink at least. Something. She fumbled in her purse for her cigarettes and lit one. She blew a line of smoke from the corner of her painted mouth directly at Gerry, who sat at the wheel with a pained look on his face.

  “Sorry, eh,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” she said to him. How, typical girl, soothe the asshole who drove you here to get laid by a stranger. “It’ll be fine,” she said. “That’s me. F.I.N.E. Fucked up, insecure, neurotic and emotional.”

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Oh, just a stupid saying they had in the detox,” she said.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  She got out, put her mask on and went right up to the door. She knocked three times as Gerry moved around the corner. She knocked again and heard some noises from inside the room, something being knocked over, someone swearing at themselves, and she closed her eyes for a second and hoped with all her heart that the customer was drunk, too drunk.

  Afterwards, the girl with the black hair stares at herself in the fogged mirror of the motel bathroom. Her face distorted by the steamy glass, she appears as a ghost to herself. And she is a ghost. It’s how she feels inside most of the time. Just the trace of a girl, a charcoal sketch. She is an outline. I’ve been waiting, she thinks, for someone to come and colour me in…

  Nine

  The ringing of the phone on the night table tore McKelvey from the ether of a restless sleep. It was dark yet, and his fumbling hand set the clock radio blaring, a disembodied voice on the AM talk news station ranting about the Maple Leafs’ final games to be played that year at the historic Gardens. He flicked the light on and hit the radio with the flat of his palm enough times to make it stop. It was only then that he realized Caroline was already up and out of bed. A return, perhaps, to those darkest days when McKelvey had woken to an empty bed and found her sitting in the living room staring out the bay window at nothing at all as the sun spread like honey across the darkened street. Now she came in from the kitchen, dressed in her robe, her hair tied back. She watched him and waited.

  He grasped the receiver and made a noise. It was Aoki. That simple fact promised bad news. He made a motion with his hand to indicate it was about his work, and Carolin
e receded. He felt as though he were watching everything unfold in a Sunday night movie, looking down at his bloated body sitting on the side of the bed, hair tousled, face wrinkled by sleep.

  “I wanted to tell you before you heard it on the news,” she said. “The star witness Marcel Leroux was found hanging in his segregation cell late last night.”

  He cleared his throat. “I see.”

  “I’m sorry, Charlie.”

  How many times had he heard this same phrase? He couldn’t stand to hear it any more.

  “So,” he said, “what happens with the Duguay trial? Everything was on Leroux.”

  “I’m not sure what their plans are at this point,” she said.

  He made a noise with his throat again, holding it in, and said, “Well…”

  “But no, it doesn’t look good. Without Leroux, there isn’t much of a case. His lawyers will have a motion for dismissal drawn up before court’s open today.”

  “I appreciate you calling like this, Tina,” he said, nodding. Nodding, for he saw things laid out clearly now. How he had been a fool to place his trust in the system, when he knew what he knew. For the system was broken. He was part of the system, he was the system, and yet he knew in the deepest parts of his heart that it was a ruined machine. He had lost faith. It was not an easy conclusion to reach. But it was what it was.

  “You’re off today, so take some time, Charlie. Do something with Caroline to get your mind off all of this stuff,” Aoki said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I hear from the Crown. Okay?”

  “That’s right,” he said, but his mind was already gone, already thinking ahead.

  He hung up, fell back on the bed and closed his eyes in an effort to regain his focus. Breathe, Charlie. Inhale, exhale. The line of fire was stoked in his belly once again, rising like liquid flame. Jesus Christ almighty. He sat up and looked around the room, searching for something, anything. It was a necessity. Bottled up, a gas threatening to erupt. His hand grasped the clock radio, and he hurled it against the far wall, hurled it hard. It exploded in a spray of plastic shrapnel and electronic bits, coloured wires hanging, and the sharp sound sent Caroline running back into the room. Her eyes moved between the dead appliance and the dent in the drywall, and finally settled on McKelvey, sitting there on the edge of the bed. He just looked back at her. The room was silent. She turned away, and he dropped back to the mattress, exhaling the poisoned breath of his life.