The Devil's Dust

by C. B. Forrest

  “Uh, Jess …. Yeah, it’s just me. It’s Charlie, okay? I got your messages there and you shouldn’t be worrying about me, kiddo. I’m doing real good. I’m good. I miss you and little Emily there. You tell her that Grandpa said hi, okay? I’m just back up home for a bit but I’ll be back soon. Maybe you guys, you know, maybe you could come down to the city for a visit this summer. Anyway …”

  It is both a cruel and laughable irony that now, on the precipice of his sixth decade, sick as he is, McKelvey feels he finally owns enough wisdom to make this conundrum not only workable, but probably even enjoyable. That is to say that, within those first bleak hours of sitting in the waiting room at the oncology clinic, or the endless hours spent alone in his apartment within the prison of his thoughts, he came to believe with a genuine confidence that he could, if given the chance, finally be the father, the husband, the cop, the man he was meant to be all along. Two minutes left in the hockey game and McKelvey wants the coach to put him in. All of the insecurity which gets disguised as indifference, the impatience that belittles those we love, these rough edges have been weathered down and replaced, through no conscious effort of his own, by a sort of quiet acquiescence. There is, within the acceptance of his predicament, a noble surrender to the innate powerlessness of man against time. McKelvey has simply lived long enough to come all the way back around, this boomerang of cosmic education.

  Like most men his age, McKelvey sometimes wakes in the middle of the night. He is disoriented in the darkness and he hears his ragged breathing, the sound of a stranger in the room. He sits up and he marvels at the cold, hard truth of his situation. Here. Now. The only part of the whole that we all face alone, the ending. He moves to the bathroom and flicks on the light. He stares at himself in the mirror, the curls now grey, the crow’s feet deepening like grooves worked into wood. This is his father’s face …

  Goddamn, he thinks, I’m just a kid.

  The black vehicle follows the tail lights of the snowplough ahead, the driver’s knuckles white on the wheel. The huge steel blade pushes the snow to the side of the highway as though it is weightless. Sheaves rise and catch the wind, blowing back in gauzy curtains that momentarily shroud the world. At times the driver of the black vehicle hears and feels his tires find the deeper snow and ice of the shoulder, and he fights to pull the vehicle back from this seemingly magnetic force that wants only to see him in the ditch. It is twilight and all he can do is follow these brake lights, beacons in the wilderness.

  As he is sure he will, he blindly sails past his destination. It is pitch black out here, everything lost to the smear of treeline, the sky, shadows thrown across the endless snow. He bets a man could drive these roads a million times and still feel like a stranger. Everything about the North is designed to confuse the viewer into believing he is always seeing things for the first time. It is no wonder this man has heard the stories of the local hunters who get lost for days in woods they claim to know “like the back of their hand.”

  He catches a glimpse of a mailbox jutting from the furling blankets of white. He engages the brakes on the large vehicle and watches as the snowplough charges forth, swales of snow blowing back in its wake. The driver suddenly feels more alone than he has ever felt in his life. The wind whistles and he wonders if cold has a sound. He is still not used to being in the centre of vast open space like this. He wonders sometimes if man has evolved to the point where the rural landscape, from whence we were born and reared as a species, now runs counter to biology and physiology, psychiatry and spirit. Man now manoeuvres best in the tangled life of the always-moving, always-on city. Out here in the middle of nowhere on the edge of town there is only a brief and sudden reconciliation of his own insignificance. The driver reaches and pops open the glove compartment. The sight of the handgun in its holster provides him with the confidence and comfort he needs.

  He puts the vehicle in reverse and slowly makes his way back up the black and deserted highway until he reaches the mailbox. He leans over to read the name on the box. It is too dark, there is too much snow, and so he sets the vehicle in park and gets out. He curses loudly as the first bite of the wind chill stabs at his open neck, his uncovered hands. He bends and squints and reads: Garson. Satisfied, he hurries back, jumps inside, and slams the door. He blows warm air into cupped hands. God, he thinks, who would ever try to populate a place like this? He sets the transmission in drive and begins to navigate his way up the laneway, headlights bouncing across the wall of trees.

  Fifteen

  At the Station Hotel, seated at a round table beneath a dartboard, Carl Levesque finds the two men he has come to meet. The men, both Native, do not smile when Levesque grins and reaches out to shake their hands. He keeps smiling despite the cold greeting. He stands there for a moment, fishing in his jacket pockets. He finds his cigarettes and finally has something to do with his hands. The municipal ban on smoking indoors is a law on paper only. He lights up and takes a draw, blows a plume like a steam train pumping smoke. Randy Travis’s baritone swoons from the juke on the far side; tortured declarations of regret that seem right at home within these old walls.

  “Sorry for running late, Chief,” Levesque says. “Got tied up with an errand.”

  “I’m not your chief,” says the older of the two men. He is in his late fifties, a broad-shouldered man with long black hair laced with grey. The hair is tied in a ponytail. His eyes are narrow and severe. His hands remain calmly folded in front of him, both sets of knuckles tattooed with faded blue lettering that is difficult to decipher.

  Levesque takes a seat, his salesman’s smile beginning to dim. He taps the cigarette and knocks ash to the scuffed floor.

  “What the hell’s going on down here in Saint B these days?” the younger man asks. He could be the son of the older man, or perhaps more likely a nephew. There are similarities in the set of the eyes, the cut of the jawline, which suggest a shared pool of genetics. Where the older man is thickly built, the younger man is lithe, lean. Skinny, they would have called him in school. His dark hair is cut short, combed back. It shines black as midnight.

  “Little crime wave is all,” Levesque says. “Just some bored teenagers.”

  “Kids getting stabbed over drugs ain’t good for tourists coming in by bus,” the older man says. “My council gets worried. They think maybe this is not the best place for our casino and resort. Kirkland Lake, maybe. Or Elliot Lake. A lot of retired folks there.”

  Levesque pulls a last drag and drops the cigarette to the floor, kills the ash with a twist of his booted foot.

  “Good for property values though,” Levesque says. “People start running scared, they sell at low prices. Eventually the kids will find something else destructive to do, you know, and life will move on. Nothing lasts forever, not even the plague.”

  “Glad you see the upside in all this,” the younger man snaps.

  The older man nods once, stares at Levesque.

  “Say, can I get you a drink, Mr. Whitehorse?” Levesque asks.

  “Don’t drink,” the older man says.

  “Pepsi? A ginger ale?”

  “Levesque, listen to me.” Whitehorse leans close. His eyes are hard and locked. “I don’t like you. I don’t need a new friend. I came to talk about the work you were supposed to do for us about the land leases and killing this Detroit landfill deal. That’s all I’m interested in. I want to get back on the road up to Big Water before another snow squall rides in.”

  Levesque settles back and folds an arm across the back of the chair. He sighs.

  “I’m working on it.”

  In Room 16 of the Station Hotel, almost directly above the table where Carl Levesque sits with his guests in the tavern, Chief Gallagher watches as Tony Celluci stands at the bureau and pours two fingers’ worth of Canadian Club into a Dixie cup. The ice machine in the hotel is broken, has been broken for years, and so Celluci has opted for a can of club soda to cut the drinks. He fixes a second drink and then turns and hands one to Galla
gher, who sits on the edge of the bed because there is nowhere else to sit.

  “Sorry, Chief, no ice.”

  “Enough of it out there.” Gallagher nods toward the window. He then stands and moves to the same window, as though drawn there; he parts the thin lace curtain and looks outside. The lights on Main Street glow yellow, but only every second post is lit. “That’s what you call a symbol of rural decline right there. Town can’t even pay to turn all the lights on these days.”

  The Chief drinks some of his whisky. It runs from his belly to his heart to his head like a natural gas mainline, changes the man’s mood almost instantly. His body feels as though it has sighed, sloughed off the weight of these last few days. With his free hand he spreads thumb and forefinger across the neatly trimmed moustache he has worn since he could grow it, having watched it change from auburn to dark brown to grey to silver.

  “We can change that, you and me,” Celluci says. “We can make the Carver Company mines look like amateur hour. Saint B will not only have all the street lamps shining, Main Street will be paved with gold, Chief.”

  Gallagher turns and leans back against the windowsill.

  “Marko doesn’t want Detroit’s garbage up here,” he says. “He’s clear on that. The little prick has no vision. He’s got his hopes set on this goddamned transmission line they’ve been talking about building for twenty years. He’s waiting for those good line jobs and dollars to come while the town rots from the inside out.”

  Celluci is about to respond when a snap of squelch pops. A muffled and disembodied radio voice, or voices, buried within the wood of the bureau. Celluci opens a drawer and fiddles with something.

  “Radio scanner,” he says over his shoulder, and closes the drawer.

  “Police scanner you mean,” says Gallagher. “What the hell do you need that for up here? Are you keeping tabs on us, Tony?”

  Celluci smiles, and his arms and hands come out in a marketer’s soft welcome. He is the vision of a harmless schoolboy caught listening to a transistor radio during the playoffs.

  “I use it on the highways from the Sault on up,” he says. “Cuts down on speeding tickets if I know where the speed traps are set. Listen, Chief. Detroit has a problem, and it looks and smells like four million tons of garbage a day.” Celluci swishes the whisky in his cup but he does not take a drink. “That’s four million tons every day, seven days a week. We’re running out of space to bury it, and we can’t burn it fast enough, and you can only float so much of it around the harbour on a barge. New York tried that and they’re fucked. Look at this place up here, Chief. The first time I came up here I couldn’t believe my eyes. You’ve got the one resource we don’t, and that’s miles and miles of space. You’re in the middle of nowhere, away from the eyes of the hobby environmentalists, the Greenpeace maniacs. We cut some trees and make a road in off the highway, and you’ve got yourself a twenty-year landfill agreement. The train starts running more regular again, hauling loads in nondescript cargo boxes. And a few years in, once all that shit has started to decompose, we pop in some gas turbines to generate electricity from all that trapped gas. Maybe by then your pal Marko has his transmission line built and we can sell our gas-powered electricity back to the grid.”

  Gallagher takes another sip of his drink. He grimaces, his palate unused to the strong flavour of rye, liquid smoke. He has been a small-town sheriff; he knows well how deals are made, whether for horses or hay. Men stand in barns or in back rooms and they share a drink because it somehow puts both buyer and seller on equal footing; it lubricates the negotiation. He saw his own father take this ritual to a different level, however, so that he was selling cars down at the lot with a steady glow, the veins coming out on the top of his nose, always ready for a drink before, during, or after a deal was made. Gallagher supposes this is why he has owned this argument with alcohol his whole life, as though he remains nervous in this woman’s company despite having been near her and with her hundreds of times.

  “You don’t have to convince me, Tony. I’m the one your friends in Detroit put you on to, remember? I worked with your friends on that solid waste deal down in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Talk about learning more about shit than I ever hoped to. Jesus Christ, a lifetime in public service and this is where I end up.”

  Celluci nods. He swishes the Dixie cup and looks down into it. He drains the contents like a shot, winces, and sets the empty cup on the bureau.

  “Marko will come around to your way of thinking because he has no choice. There’s nothing else he can do. The mine is closing. He can’t keep the lights on. And all the kids are turning into meth junkies. There’s a virtual crime wave out there. The timing couldn’t better to put Marko right across a barrel.”

  Gallagher looks over at Celluci. The younger man is all city, dressed in his good suit, with his hair cut not by a barber but by a stylist in a place that smells like shampoo and nail polish. But the clean hands and fancy pants are not to be mistaken for a man incapable of getting business done in whatever manner required. Gallagher knows of the lineage at play here, the front door connection with the City of Detroit Department of Sanitation, the men behind the unions and the back offices. Tony Celluci is a made man.

  “People will almost think we planned this,” Gallagher says. “Detroit comes to Saint B and presto, we’ve got a meth problem. Now we’re even more desperate to make a deal to take your garbage.”

  “Coincidence or luck.” Celluci shrugs. “Either way, I’ll take it.”

  Gallagher takes another sip of the whisky. He looks into the Dixie cup as though he is reading tea leaves, looking for a sign. Then he remembers something and smiles. Setting the cup on the windowsill, he says, “My dad used to say luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

  The snow has ceased. The sky is black and peppered with stars like the targets they used to shoot at back when Ed Nolan was in the army. He shivers with the notion of wasted time, those years he searched to find the core of himself, some sort of motivation or even a keen interest to propel him toward schooling or a trade. The army in those days seemed to gather the lowest common denominator as though this was precisely the intent of their recruiting. These sharply dressed soldiers sent to stand in the shopping malls and gymnasiums of high schools in small towns in Newfoundland, Quebec, Northern Ontario. The recruiter looked upon the faces before him and nodded, hands on his hips. His eyes seemed to convey all that the young men and sometimes women were themselves coming to accept with a sense of both failure and relief: we are your last best chance; we are your new family. This was in the mid-1990s, and the forces were floundering under budget cuts, stretched across too many peacekeeping missions without adequate resources. The same few thousand had cycled through multiple tours in Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia, and they exited in droves once the futility of their work was made evident. There were no parades, no ceremonies to welcome them home.

  Constable Ed Nolan has just pulled into the rear parking lot of the Station Hotel. Whether this is a stakeout, he is not sure. But he is watching Carl Levesque’s movements and recording them in his notepad — Carl’s Cadillac is right now parked beside a dumpster and beneath the single lamp that hangs loosely from a hydro pole. Nolan supposes this is what it means to “tail” someone. He smiles to himself at the notion of conducting real police work up here in the middle of nowhere. Or perhaps, more accurately, not even the middle of nowhere, but the far edge of it.

  Nolan has come to see that places like Saint B truly do not exist for the people of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, except as oddities. Urbanites insert these places as adjectives into conversations as they sit in trendy coffee shops and bistros. They use these places as the punchlines for jokes. Or as mock threats for some sort of corporate transfer — we’re sending you to Amos, Quebec, or Pickle Lake, Ontario, ha ha ha. Who would freely choose to live in these places, they wonder. What do people do for fun, culture, sushi, international films? Places like Saint B don’t make the news until a mine or a
paper mill or a shoe factory closes and the flow of a resource to the city is threatened. Even the federal and provincial politicians don’t care about a place like Saint B, because the votes of its constituents just don’t matter on election day. It is for these and many other reasons that Ed Nolan believes he made the right decision to come home again, and to stay. To stay despite the loneliness, the state of his father. But there are things which need fixing here, and he wants to make a difference.

  Nolan is anxious to share with McKelvey news of his skip tracing efforts. He has made inquiries, turned over a few rocks, run some checks against a series of names. Carl Levesque, he has discovered, carries with him an old conviction for drug trafficking, busted in the mid-1980s in Winnipeg with twenty grams of hashish and half an ounce of marijuana. The man also has a series of arrests on file from his younger days, minors for sailing bad cheques at grocery stores, a drunk driving incident. A shark in a cheap suit, this is how Nolan has always viewed him. He knows Levesque is an opportunist, it is in his marrow, but this revelation of a criminal past has added to Nolan’s understanding of the man.

  The snap of static makes Nolan jump as Shirley Murdoch’s voice comes over the radio.

  “Reports of an explosion and a fire just outside of town,” she says. “Sounds like it could be the Garson place. The caller is a long-haul trucker. He’s pulled over to the shoulder.”

  Nolan closes his eyes for a moment and tries to conjure an image of the scene. The flames, a curling ball of choking black smoke. Wade Garson’s trailer, exploding like a grenade, the air sucking in on itself. A propane leak, perhaps, or more likely some sort of illicit activity. Nolan has read about this, these small towns in the U.S., amateurs cooking batches of meth until the smallest misstep leads to Armageddon. This is, he believes, the fault line which is threatening to split wide open and swallow his town.