The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  “I know, you forgot about tonight. It’s okay,” Tim said.

  “How does pizza sound?”

  McKelvey ordered delivery, and they sat there talking, finishing up the beers. The pizza arrived, and McKelvey brought out plates and a bottle of red wine. He hadn’t had a drink in weeks and hadn’t missed it much. But now the wine was going down just fine, wrapping him in a blanket of ease and congeniality.

  “Tell me, Charlie, how you became a police officer,” Tim said.

  McKelvey shrugged and said, “I suppose I should say something about wanting to save lives and make the world a safer place. But the truth is I got off the train and rented a room in an old boarding house on King Street. The woman who ran the place had a son on the force, and one thing led to another. It was easy back then, if you were a decent size and in good shape. I guess I always figured it was a steady paycheque, until I figured out what it was that I wanted to do with my life.” He shrugged. “The years went by, and we started a family and I just sort of stayed. They promote you if you stick around long enough.”

  “Was it fulfilling?”

  McKelvey bought himself a moment, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Fulfilling? I don’t know, I never really thought about it that way. Maybe some days. You help somebody in trouble, get them out of a jam. The town where I come from, the men were miners or unemployed miners. Neither of those options appealed to me much. And what about you, how did you get to be a school teacher?”

  “It’s a family tradition. Both my mother and father were teachers. They viewed it the same way some families view the practice of law or dentistry, a sort of a calling. My grandfather was one of the first trustees back in the Forties who helped name half of the schools in the city. I think it runs in our blood, to be quite honest.”

  “And is it fulfilling?” McKelvey said with a little smile.

  “Definitely,” Tim said, “I mean, when they’re not throwing stuff at me or putting pencil shavings in my coffee.”

  “Long as they don’t shoot at you.”

  For the rest of the dinner they managed to steer clear of conversation pertaining to grief or loss, focusing instead on sports, joking about the billions spent preparing for turn-of the-century mayhem that never arrived. Eventually though, as is inevitable—like co-workers who meet for dinner and try with all their might not to discuss office politics—the conversation found its way back home, back to the shared experience that bound them and had brought them together in the first place. A thread on crime and punishment created the segue.

  “You know what really burns my ass?” Tim said. “I mean, our justice system is so light on drunk drivers. This guy Leonard Tilman, a repeat offender, kills my wife. And he gets what? He loses his licence for five years and spends six months in jail, another six under house arrest. If he had walked up to her and shot her, he’d spend the rest of his life behind bars.”

  “Don’t be so certain of that,” McKelvey said. “Guys plead down to manslaughter or make other deals, they do all the right things in prison, maybe start carrying a bible around, and they’re back on the street in six, seven years. Early release programs. They’ve got townhouses where they can live together and watch cable TV. It’s just the way it works.”

  He topped their wine glasses again.

  Tim leaned in and said, “I shouldn’t tell you this, you being a police officer, but I found out where the guy lives. And drinks. His favourite bar.”

  McKelvey narrowed his eyes, interested. “First of all, I’m retired. So don’t worry about whether I’m a cop or not. And second of all, you shouldn’t be doing that sort of thing. You could get yourself in a lot of trouble, Tim. This asshole could have you charged with criminal harassment. Some of the repeat offenders know the code better than we do. They revel in the loopholes.”

  But the truth was, McKelvey liked what he saw, some new depth or angle to Tim’s character. Yes, he could see it now, what it would take to get a decent school teacher out tailing the man who killed his wife. Well, wasn’t that something. McKelvey was not alone, that was the message. Not alone in his thinking. It was natural, after all. A man, any man, who faced this variety of personal loss would eventually come to this place. Find himself standing on the precipice of the void. Standing there yelling into the blackness just to hear the comforting sound of his own echo...

  “I saw him one day when I was out walking. There he was. Just there. I recognized him, but he didn’t even see me. I ended up following him for four hours,” Tim said. He had a blank expression on his face, as though he were surprised about hearing his actions recounted out loud. “He went into a bar on his way home. I couldn’t fucking believe it. A bar. This guy’s going to drink and drive again, a year after he killed a human being. Like it was nothing. I got his plate and was going to call you guys—he’s not supposed to be driving or drinking, those were the conditions on his sentence—but something stopped me. I just…I don’t know.”

  “You thought maybe you’d handle it on your own,” McKelvey said, finishing the sentence as was his habit from a lifetime of interrogations, leading, always leading. Or as they used to call it, ‘keeping things on track.’

  Tim’s face betrayed him. He was the sort of individual who wouldn’t hold up under questioning, McKelvey knew. Even if he was innocent, given an hour, McKelvey could get him to confess to the Hoffa murder. There was a rhythm to these sort of procedures. A small interview room with no air, a pit bull cop like McKelvey calling you a rapist or a sicko, making a grown man cry, or letting on he understood how things got out of control sometimes.

  “Listen, I get it. I understand. A little retribution,” McKelvey said, emptying the last of the wine into Tim’s glass. His own head was weightless, a bobble atop a spindle; he had had enough of the wine. He cleared his throat, and said, “You want to do something to this guy.”

  “I don’t know. I mean it’s one thing to sit in your car and talk tough...”

  “You saw it with your own eyes, the guy’s breaking his conditions.”

  Tim nodded slowly, the arc of the older man’s thinking becoming clearer now.

  “You know what bar he goes to?” McKelvey asked.

  “Clyde’s over on Eglinton East.”

  “I made some trips there when I was in uniform. That’s a rough little joint on Friday nights, or used to be. What does he drive?”

  “A blue Ford pickup. I got his plate, too.”

  “Jesus. You should have been a cop,” McKelvey joked.

  “It was easy to remember. It’s personalized: Tilman58.”

  “Maybe we’ll wait for him one night and give him a little scare.”

  The utterance of this was like a jolt of electricity through McKelvey’s body. It sat him upright, cleared his thinking, and painted an image of how things would work. He saw the layout of the rear parking lot, with its high fence enclosure offering almost ideal seclusion. Nobody would even see them...

  Tim looked up, disappointment or discomfort on his face, and said, “I appreciate it, but... I don’t think I’m cut out for it. I couldn’t stand in front of my students and look them in the eye if I did something stupid. I’m supposed to be an example to these kids, not some vigilante. You said yourself he could charge me with criminal harassment.”

  “You don’t have to kill the guy. Just fuck with him a little.”

  Tim shook his head slowly, staring into his wine.

  “You want revenge, Tim, sure you do. It’s only human. I don’t blame you. There you are walking down the street minding your own business one day, and who do you see? Curiosity gets the better of you, so you end up following him. You just want to see where this guy lives, what his life is like. You had no idea where he was going, but then you see him pull into a bar. The guy’s actually going to drink again—after how many convictions for drunk driving?”

  “Seven,” Tim said.

  McKelvey shook his head. “Seven. Jesus. They should throw away the key.”

  A sil
ence fell between them, and McKelvey saw his lockbox stuffed with clippings, the little pistol wrapped in a tea towel, let his mind wander through the minefield of fantasy. Finally, just when the evening seemed at risk of falling sideways to gloom, Tim offered McKelvey the chance to participate in what he called a “life affirmation”.

  “I’m getting a tattoo,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “A tattoo?”

  “The counsellor I’ve been seeing said it’s helpful in the healing process to pick a few things you’ve always wanted to do. Like take a trip somewhere or dye your hair or…”

  “Get a tattoo,” McKelvey said.

  “Exactly,” Tim said, nodding. “I always wanted one. I used to talk to my wife about it, but I just never went and actually did it. Now it’s time to follow through.”

  McKelvey’s mind flashed with stark images, black and white, of Gavin’s pale arms emblazoned with cryptic designs, incomprehensible pagan symbols. The work he’d magically had done in the time away from home. His thin arms tucked against his body on the table…

  “What kind of tattoo are you thinking of getting?” McKelvey said.

  “Well,” Tim said, and reached for his wallet, “I just happen to have a picture with me.”

  He found a slip of paper in his wallet, a cutout from a colour copy, and handed it to McKelvey. The design featured black and grey lines, intersecting weaves combining in a triangular knot pattern. It was, McKelvey knew well from his ancestral roots, a Celtic trinity.

  “The endless knot,” McKelvey said. No beginning, no end, he thought, just two lines, two lives intertwined to infinity. If only it were like that, if only it were the truth about life.

  “So,” Tim said, “how about it? Are you up for it?”

  “A tattoo?” McKelvey said. He thought about it for a minute, then said, “I’ll be there for moral support, maybe hold your hand. But I’m not getting a tattoo.”

  “You’re not afraid, are you?”

  “God no,” he said, “I just don’t shed my blood unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  Tim laughed. “I’ll set up the appointment. Who knows, maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  “You can always hope for a miracle,” McKelvey said.

  With the school teacher stretched out on McKelvey’s bed, snoring with a jagged back draft, McKelvey poured himself a cup of tea to clear the boozy fog then crept into the bedroom and pulled down the box he’d moved from the garage to the closet. At the kitchen table, with a single light throwing a soft candle glow, he scribbled the particulars: the make and personalized plate for Leonard Tilman, the name of the bar. Perhaps. Yes, perhaps it was something to be considered.

  It was just past two in the morning. McKelvey felt like he was the last person alive in the world. And it struck him that he was in fact an orphan. A man without a family. The clock on the stove ticked. The dogs next door began to bark on cue, and their howls rose in near perfect unison as McKelvey absentmindedly fingered the new .25 cartridges he’d picked up.

  Fifteen

  There were memories of touch. Smells. Of breath. Fire and a taste of ashes. A dream, just a dream. Or else she had imagined the memory after hearing the story repeated so many times... Some days she felt there wasn’t much difference between a real memory and an imagined one.

  The girl with the black hair stepped from the shower and towelled herself, pausing to reflect upon the image of her body in the long mirror against the opposite wall. She had been blessed with good genes. Cursed, more like it. Men back home had been looking at her in that way since she was ten years old. And in her little girl naïveté, she had at first embraced the attention. Her father was dead, and the stories everybody told about him made her feel sorry for him, even though she didn’t remember him. How he did what he did and almost ruined them all. A loser, that was the insinuation. She didn’t remember him, not really. Just because you never knew someone didn’t mean you couldn’t miss them.

  In another life, in a time that now seemed so distant it was perhaps a lie, the girl had dreamed of becoming a dancer. A real dancer. It was true. Putting her aunt’s ABBA tapes on the little stereo in the living room and twirling and twirling, her little girl mind filled with the sounds of applause. Happy moments of sunshine memories broken by the sound of the door opening in the middle of the night. The man with the stutter who said words two or three times in a row.

  Sometimes she could smell the breath of the man with the strong hands, a memory manifesting itself through the senses, yes, smell the cigarette smoke and the funk of his body, then she felt feathers of his hot breath on her back, and she heard the noises he made, and she closed her eyes and wondered why nobody knew what was happening to her insides...

  Now she danced beneath the lights for the hungry eyes of strangers. They called them “exotic entertainers”, the whole business regulated through permits and laughable entertainment visas handed out to Russian and Serbian women brought over to fill a skills void. It was a strange business, and the lines were blurred between everything: criminality and drugs and businessmen, and nothing was free and everything came hard.

  But it was filling the hole in the floor with the money she would need to leave it all behind.

  Duguay was not a nice man. But everything in this world required perspective, and when stacked against the other assholes, he was okay. He never beat the women in his “entertainment agency”. That was something, at least. And it was strange, because while she had never seen him so much as raise his hand to a man or a woman, everyone seemed to fear him. He demanded respect and owned a room when he entered it. He looked you in the eye, his cold eyes focused, intense. He was big and tall and thick-chested. He had brought her into this life before the bust on the strip joint and the mandatory drug treatment, in those blurry days after the boy was taken from her, and there were no alternatives for a girl of her position on the street. He said dancing at first, easy money, then he asked for a favour. Just a favour. And then the favours kept coming. He shared the money, though; he was always fair about that. He bought her clothes, and he brought them out for meals at restaurants, Duguay in the centre of the booth with his girls on either side.

  “Anybody fucks with you, they fuck with me,” he had told her. And she believed it.

  But everything had changed so quickly. She’d seen the writing on the wall, how quickly things in this world could change. Like flipping a coin. The man named Leroux had turned rat—and she trusted her instinct, because she had met the man once or twice through the boy and had been left with an uneasy feeling. Leroux’s turn to the other side had caused a whirlwind within the club and the men who worked around Duguay. The vibe was electric, dangerous, and she thought someone might end up dead. Then it happened: Duguay was pinched leaving the club early one morning, and that asshole Luc started running things. They said that Luc had come from northern New Brunswick and had killed men to earn a patch with the Outlaws before crossing over to the Blades. These days Duguay was locked up in the apartment, hiding out. Sometimes he’d come down to the club and talk to the doorman, talk to some of the guys—heavies she recognized as regulars.

  When they partied after closing time, and Duguay was a little drunk and his edge was softened, he spoke of his father and the life he had led in the small bike gangs of Montreal in the Sixties. The Popeyes, he said, and the name made her laugh. It was a place of mutual understanding, for her own father had met a violent end.

  “Those guys were animals back then, and my dad fit right in,” he said. “A real tough son of a bitch. They say when he hit someone with his fist, it was like getting hit with a brick. He was raised in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, the same neighbourhood where Mom Boucher grew up. You know, the head of the Nomads over there. I wonder what he’d think of me now, my old man. All these years in and still spinning my wheels. I should have patched with the Hells when I had the chance.”

  “My dad was a bank robber,” the girl said. “He robbed banks all over the no
rth. Timmins, Kapuskasing. Places like that, right. He got killed in a shootout.”

  “Was he Indian? You look a little Indian to me,” Duguay said.

  Her black hair, her olive skin, the shape of her pretty face.

  “Métis,” she said. “More like half Métis.”

  “My mother had a little Indian blood in her,” he said. “She got crazy when she drank.”

  “Not all Indians are like that, you know,” the girl said. “Not where I come from, anyway. The Indians aren’t nearly as bad as the white trash.”

  “Only Indians I ever really knew,” he said, “were in prison. Lots of them in there.”

  She took a cigarette from him, and he leaned in close when he lit it for her. She drew on the cigarette and sat back, letting her robe slip open a little bit to reveal the tight flesh of her belly. She watched him looking at her body. She was used to it. It’s what men did. She wanted to ask him questions about Marcel Leroux. She had so many questions, and yet there was never the right time or the place. And anyway, a man like Duguay didn’t answer the questions of a girl like her. One thing she had learned on the street, it was best to stay close to the people you least trusted.

  It was just like the old days working a stakeout, only this time instead of bad coffee and cigarettes, McKelvey had a bottle of mineral water tucked between his legs as he sat parked across the street, with a perfect view of the rear parking lot of the dive bar. Waiting, watching. He had arrived at the decision a few days after his dinner with the school teacher. It was something he came to with clenched teeth and an existential shrug. When he looked at his friend, when he viewed the facts spread out across the continuum of the young man’s life, the scattered debris and the residue, and all the long days of soul-searching yet to come, he was overcome with a desire to do something. That was the thing. The frustration of his own life and experience, of watching his wife slip away like a boat drifting from the very bay where once it had sought refuge, it left him with an insatiable desire to act.