The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  “I knew your dad,” Duvalier said. “I bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

  Duguay didn’t say anything. He kept brushing. It was the first new toothbrush he’d gotten in what seemed like forever, a gift from a nurse who had visited his school. He was brushing in circles, the way she had showed his class with the help of an oversized brush and a large set of choppers. He didn’t want cavities. He didn’t want them to stick a drill in his mouth.

  “Sure I did,” Duvalier said. “Yessir, we did time together up at Archambault. Same range, me and your old man.”

  Duguay understood the reference to the penitentiary in the same way a child of privilege might recognize the names of country clubs or dance studios. Names of institutions like Donnacona or Dorchester were simply place names that belonged to the resumes of the fathers and uncles and older brothers, the men who lived along his street, populated his universe.

  “I could tell you stories about your daddy. Would you like that?”

  Duguay wanted to hear stories, yes. He didn’t know his father, owned only a vague memory of a man taking him for an ice cream at a city park when he was what, three or four? A man with sideburns and a cigarette package in the front pocket of his white T-shirt. Large hands with big knuckles. The car was black, and the seats were hot in the sun, wide as a bench. That was all, fragments. He wanted to learn things about his father beyond the lies his mother told. But not from this man. He didn’t want to hear any stories from this man.

  “He was a cool cat. A big guy. You know, before he got himself killed and all that.”

  Duguay didn’t say anything still. But he watched the man from the corner of his eye, his body tensed, expecting.

  “You should be nice to me, kid,” Duvalier said, resting a hand on the sink, running fingers through his limp hair. “I just might be your new daddy, you know, if things work out between your momma and me. Could be.”

  Duguay leaned over the sink and spat. He was aware that the man’s eyes followed him as though he found every movement entirely captivating.

  “You little shit. You was inside,” Duvalier said and made a clucking sound, pulling his tongue against a tooth, “you was inside, kid, I’d have you turned out before you could say ‘papa’.”

  The tiny bathroom got too close, too hot, and the stink from the ex-convict was like a poison gas that made Duguay’s eyes water. He had to breathe through his mouth. How could his mother let this pig into her bed? The man had known his father, or so he said, and this was how he repaid that friendship? Duvalier took a step, almost invisibly, a slick and quick slide. Duguay thought for a second that the man was getting ready to move a hand to him, to touch his body. Saw the events unfolding as though in a movie, and he was ready for it before anything even happened. He tapped his toothbrush against the side of the sink, casual as a Sunday afternoon. The low watt bulb above the faded mirror flickered for an instant. He felt his heart pushing against his rib cage.

  Then Duvalier did it, moved his hand, never taking his red eyes from Duguay. The hand was warm, moist, and it squeezed Duguay’s shoulder. Once, then again. Duvalier made a sound like hauling air through clenched teeth, excited.

  “C’mon buddy, nothing to be afraid of. All the tough guys do it,” he said. “Let me pop that cherry for you...turn you into a real man...”

  Duguay looked him in the eye, staring, his jaw clenched and set. Duvalier stepped in and made his move, both of his skinny arms coming around at once, the limp strands of his greasy hair falling forward now across his twisted face, and Duguay pushed back and made a noise, then there was a hand down the back of his pants, fingers wiggling in his rear end, and he brought his knee up...

  The doorknob rattled, and Duguay’s mother called out in her hoarse morning growl. “Pierre, what are you doing? I’ve gotta get in there. Open the fucking door!”

  Duvalier turned to watch as Duguay slipped out of his grasp, flicked the lock and stepped through the door in one liquid motion, as though he had been in command of the situation all along, determining its beginning and end. Then Duguay was gone, and so too was Duvalier, but not before leaving Duguay’s mother a black eye with which to remember him by. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that Duguay understood with complete comprehension what would have unfolded that day, how his life would have been changed.

  All of the men who passed through their lives were invariably the same, and they came carrying the same weight through a tortured life: forearms speckled with sloppy homemade tattoos, a missing tooth, a grey scar across the bridge of the nose, they usually smoked and they always drank, and it was the rare individual who did not turn mean as the evening crashed headlong toward morning. Raised voices, broken plates, his mother crying, then the slow creaking of her bedsprings as the two wounded souls thrashed away their torment.

  He learned how to steal cigarettes from packages left on the coffee table, learned later how to steal money from pants left coiled on the bedroom floor, and later still he learned how to take a punch and how to give one right back. He had his nose broken at age twelve by an unemployed construction worker named Giroux. Duguay had sassed his mother over something one night, something insignificant, and Giroux levelled the kid with a backhand without so much as getting up from the kitchen table where he was sitting drinking his Labatt 50. Duguay crashed backwards, saw an explosion of stars, tasted blood like rust in the back of his throat. It hurt, it hurt like hell, numbness spreading across his face like a spider’s web, but he was up and ready to roll almost instantly. He had some size to him by that point, too, developing into his father’s body, his father’s temperament. There was a rage spinning inside, a whirlwind rushing him headlong towards the world. Giroux turned just in time to catch a looping haymaker to the mouth. Bloody-lipped, but more embarrassed than wounded, he spun and tried to get a footing, but he was sloppy drunk, and anyway Duguay had already grabbed a full beer bottle from the case on the kitchen counter, and he was swinging it like a Louisville Slugger across the man’s jaw.

  “Pierre! Stop kicking the man, he’s down, he’s down!”

  He could hear his mother’s high-pitched voice, see the man’s face twisted in pain, his jaw broken, teeth stained with blood, his arms wrapped protectively around his head as Duguay stood there working his feet. He couldn’t stop himself.

  At the age of fourteen, Duguay was whisked away to a juvenile detention centre upon being caught for the third time attempting to steal a car. It wasn’t until he was actually inside the detention centre that he discovered what he had been doing wrong all along, and in this way he learned some invaluable lessons in wiring, circuitry. The older boys taught him how “the system” worked, what a kid could expect to draw in terms of sentencing for the various crimes, taught him how to roll a cigarette with three fingers and a thumb, but most of all they taught him how to swagger and act like he didn’t care about anything.

  Upon his release from juvie hall, Duguay stole a brand new Lincoln Town Car from a lot off Ste. Catherine Street. Sat at the wheel like he was some kind of mobster, the window down and his arm cocked out like he drove a frigging Town Car every day. He swung by the fringes of Verdun and picked up two friends he had met in the detention centre. Together, at the age of sixteen, they robbed their first dépanneur with a rusty pocket knife. That was really something. It was the beginning of all that was to follow. The rush of adrenaline, the wail of sirens, the look of respect and fear in the eyes of the other boys as they were returned to the juvie hall. Duguay learned two things from the foray: that he possessed the rare brand of courage required to face down the odds of a life lived on the narrow margins; and that he was a natural leader. He was born for this.

  Eventually, after a couple more years of watching all the Duvaliers and the Girouxs and the Dionnes and the Phenoufs come tumbling through his apartment as though they owned the fucking place, as though they owned his mother and him also by proxy, after just a few more years of that, Duguay himself would be gone for good, too. H
e escaped from the street, he rose above the petty thieves who fenced their own junk in local taverns, the pathetic burglars who ran from suburban homes clutching VCRs and cassette decks to trade at pawn shops for a fraction of their resale value. He rose above it all, finally broke away from the myth of a mother’s unconditional love for her child, and he became a man who was known and feared. He never looked back, and his mother followed his life through the police tabloids.

  On this morning, the parking lot was mostly empty. There were a few vehicles which had been left the night before by those too drunk to drive. He slid behind the wheel of his car and paused before turning the engine. He sat there for a moment. Then he got out of the car, put a knee on the pavement and looked beneath the vehicle for anything that didn’t belong. Wires and things. He reached in and popped the hood, then hefted the lid and scanned the engine components, all the places where it could be done. Satisfied, he let the hood drop, started the car and pulled out of the lot. He lit a new cigarette and steered himself towards the highway and the east end of the city.

  The highway was sparse with car traffic this early on a Sunday, but alive with transport trucks of monolithic proportion. Cigarettes dangled from the faces of the truck drivers who appeared like zombies at the wheel, staring straight ahead at the infinite black unfurling beneath their wheels as they hauled their mundane cargo between Detroit and Montreal. Duguay steered the blue Mercury Mystique towards Danny Madill’s auto body garage out in the industrial strips of Scarborough.

  He’d bought the car used, picked it up from the mother of a friend of a friend, a clean car with no history. Despite its name, there was nothing mysterious about the vehicle at all. It was a no-nonsense sedan, something a suburban mother might drive, and for this reason alone it was ideal. Now that he had been released to the world, there was no sense in attracting heat for vanity’s sake. The guys made fun of his ride, but they were idiots. Too many of his contemporaries flaunted their all-cash income by driving around town in souped up new Mustangs, sporty BMWs.

  He drove, and he tried to imagine waltzing back into the life he had been building before the take-down, before a colleague had turned rat. As though it could be that easy. Too many variables had changed. Leroux dying had perhaps spared him a lifetime in prison, but it presented other problems. He was tainted now. His value to the organization was dropping in direct relation to his exposure to both the media and the police. He saw that he was perhaps a liability to them now. Danny’s call, while it shook him from a deep sleep, was not a surprise. That Bouchard, the boss, the national boss, was coming to Toronto—in fact, was in Toronto, and seeking a place to meet— was not a shock in and of itself. Duguay had been expecting the call from the moment he was released. There were issues to discuss, plans to be made. He suspected Bouchard would want him to lie low for a while, or perhaps take a job down south, get out of the city. Everyone knew the task force would keep tabs on him, and it was for that reason he took lefts and rights, zigged and zagged. There was nobody around him now.

  The call that morning had set Duguay’s mind in motion. Danny had said, “Pete. They left a message on the machine. Lookin’ for a place to meet.”

  “Call them back. Tell them I’ll be at the shop in an hour.”

  “I’ll go unlock it for you,” Danny said.

  “Do me another favour, Dan. Stick around the shop for me?”

  “I’ll be there,” Danny said.

  As he drove, all the deaths back in Quebec flooded his mind. A wasteland. The bodies piled up week after week. Guys you sat and laughed with and drank with, blown to vapor the instant they turned the ignition in their car, shot in the face turning a corner, killed in their beds, killed by the other guys or their own guys; in the end it had been too murky to decipher. All the heat that came down on all of them with the formation of the Carcajou—or Wolverine—squadron, these cops who played a new game without rules. The RCMP, the SQ, the Montreal Urban, they were all working in their own way to win the prize, to be the first to wipe an entire gang off the map. In Duguay’s mind, he could not return to the paranoia and violence of those days. He could fight and he could die, but it had to be for something. So many of his friends had died for nothing. All the long years he’d worked as an independent, or associate, carving out his own territory in the neighbourhoods of Montreal, buying bad debts from the various chapters and collecting the payments one way or another. Like a moth to a flame, you could propel the advances and the opportunities for so long, and eventually you got pulled all the way in. And then you burned up.

  He’d been friends with some of the guys in the Laval chapter of the Hells when the Sorel chapter cleaned them out. The “Lennoxville Massacre”, one chapter wiping out another chapter that was drawing heat to the organization. It was then Duguay had seen that there was no real brotherhood, not in the Hells or the Rock Machine either, and while the talk was of making him a full prospect in the Sorel chapter, he made his decision to stand alone. It was a decision, he now realized, that had only delayed the inevitable. He was good at what he did, he was solid, and with the casualties piling up, a dependable soldier was in high demand. The Rockers, the muscle branch of the Hells, finally gave him an ultimatum: sign up or retire. Duguay was his own man, and he favoured neither of the options, choosing instead to take a full patch with the upstart Blades, who had swallowed up the last of the renegade Satan’s Choice, and a few Outlaws chapters.

  All the big guys,the old guys who acted like generals in a field war, safe from the front lines, were willing to kill their own soldiers on the whisper of a rumour, the thread of a connection. All it took in this world was for someone to think you had a made a deal, and it was more than enough to get you blown apart.

  When he became certain many of his activities were under investigation, just prior to his arrest, Duguay had begun to communicate through Danny. He didn’t trust anyone, not after Leroux. Survival was the only thing on his mind. He could walk into Danny’s garage knowing that he hadn’t been set up. But Duguay knew the landscape was changing, and with it, his place in the order of things. It was this line of thinking that kept bringing him back to his emergency fund—an envelope with ten grand sitting in a deposit box in a little bank up in the small town of Midland. He’d set himself up with the plan during those last days of paranoia, taking half a day to drive at odd angles across the south-western Ontario countryside, just to be sure he wasn’t being followed. The envelope provided a limited sense of security, to be sure. A few grand didn’t go far these days. But it was there if things went sideways. It would be enough to get somewhere, get started again.

  The east end industrial complex was populated with self-serve storage units painted yellow, freight forwarding warehouses with tractor trailers pulled up to loading docks, all-night printing plants, sign shops. He parked just down from Danny’s garage, scanning the lot as he pulled in. It was empty save for two vehicles. The souped up Charger was Danny’s. The black Chevy Blazer would belong to the man he was to meet. Duguay spotted a guy sitting in the passenger seat, there to ensure the vehicle’s continued integrity. The man he was to meet was called ’Ti’Noir, or Little Black, but his given name was Jean Bouchard.

  There was a single garage bay with two windows, and beside it a heavy grey steel door. It was unlocked. Duguay slipped inside. There was movement to his right, at the door leading into the garage bay, and Duguay paused. A man he didn’t recognize stepped in. He was six and a half feet, three hundred pounds. One of Bouchard’s new bodyguards. Duguay nodded as the goliath felt him for weapons. In truth, Duguay knew it was not a gun the man was searching for but a wire. Duguay sensed Bouchard’s increasing paranoia since Leroux had flipped, and now all of their photographs were stacked in files, posted on computers.

  “You should wrestle,” Duguay said to the man.

  “Used to,” the man said.

  “No doubt.”

  “Clean,” the man called down the hall.

  Duguay walked past the garage bay
. He smelled tobacco and a hint of marijuana, and followed the smell to the back office. He stood along the side of the wall, close, listening for a moment before turning his head in. Danny was slumped lazily in his chair, Bouchard across from him.

  “Boys,” Duguay said, stepping inside.

  Danny nodded, and Bouchard stood. He and Duguay were close to the same size, both tall men, broad-shouldered. They looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, and Duguay thought he saw a glimpse of the man’s mood.

  “Just catching up with Dan here. I was just saying I remember his older brother from the west end Irish crew in the old days. Crazy sons of bitches, the Madills, the Murphys. I always got job openings for a crazy Irishman, but Danny here says he likes his cars these days,” Bouchard said. “Anyway, maybe we can work something out. This is a good spot, tucked away. Still, I don’t like driving all the fucking way out here.”

  Duguay shrugged, and said, “I don’t like being frisked like some rat. Anyway, this is the way I do it, Jean. Don’t know who you can trust any more. I’m still not sure I wasn’t set up this last time. Little too much of a fluke getting pulled over like that.”

  “Doesn’t matter now, you got your get-out-of-jail-free card. We settled with the lawyer. You’re welcome for that. Those guys are worse than the Montreal mob, what they charge.”

  “I appreciate it,” Duguay said, despising the notion that he might be in the debt of any man.

  Bouchard held out a hand, and Duguay accepted. Both men offered a formidable handshake, as though presenting the other a preview of the strength to be found within.

  “It’s good to be sprung,” Duguay said and fumbled in his pocket for his cigarettes.

  “That’s why I left you alone for a few days there, get cleaned up and get laid. Luc’s been running the show while you were away. He wants your job, you know. Better be careful.”

  “Good thing I’m not insecure,” Duguay said.