The Devil's Dust

by C. B. Forrest

  “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.

  Six

  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 Nat
ive 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 abili
ty 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.