The Weight of Stones (16 page)

That evening Tim came over for dinner to celebrate. The invitation had slipped McKelvey's mind as he brought his papers to his lawyer to ensure Caroline would be permanently listed as the beneficiary of his police pension should anything happen to him. He wanted all of his papers in order. And then he saw him...

It was him. It had to be…

McKelvey was coming out of the lawyer's office when he caught the side profile of his son. Yes. Gavin! It took his breath away, stopped him cold. He squinted against the brightness of the day, and while his intellect looped the impossibility of it all, his heart raced with the potential. What if? What if there had been a cover-up? Stranger things had happened…

He walked briskly, deftly navigating his way through the people on the sidewalk, never taking his eyes from the back of the head. His boy's head. The pace quickened, and he almost knocked a woman sideways as he drew closer. At last, like running after a bus pulling away from a stop, he was close enough to reach out and touch. Which is what he did, he put his hand on the boy's shoulder, and the boy turned sharply and stared back with a snarly look of confusion on a face that was decorated with metal, but altogether not his son's.

“Sorry,” McKelvey mumbled, and the kid shook his head and walked away, left him standing on the sidewalk like a lover spurned.

Fuck.

Right now McKelvey pretended not to be surprised when Tim Fielding came to the door at ten to five, a six-pack in hand.

“You forgot, didn't you?” the younger man said.

It came back.
“You bring the beer, I'll do the rest.”
McKelvey remembered his invitation now. Some friend he was.

“Of course not,” he smiled and waved Tim in.

They popped their beers and sat at the kitchen table, an old Gordon Lightfoot song coming through a small radio on the counter. Some guy threatening to deal with anybody caught lurking around his back stairs…

“That stuff reminds me of driving around in the back of my mom and dad's station wagon,” Tim said. “They were so proud of their eight-track stereo, they went out and bought every Gordon Lightfoot and Joan Baez album they could find. Don't even get me started on Nana Mouskouri. I think they call it Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.”

McKelvey fiddled with the tuner and brought in a station playing new pop. Tim kept looking around the place until McKelvey told him that no, he had no plans to buy more furniture or otherwise re-decorate. He had everything he needed.

“Probably list the house in the summer, maybe buy a little condo,” he said.

“I was going to say maybe I should move in. Save some money if we split the expenses.”

“I've tried that,” McKelvey said. “I'm not very good at living with other people.”

McKelvey felt a rare sense of ease in the teacher's company. Tim Fielding was a good man, plain and simple. And not a cop, which was good and new. Tim had stopped by the hospital the day after McKelvey's episode, bringing with him a copy of
The Hockey News
and a pair of flannel pyjamas, and that simple act had altered McKelvey's comprehension of the younger man. There were good people still.

“I went on a date,” Tim said. “Last Tuesday.” He looked down at his beer, turning the can with a thumb and forefinger.

“And?” McKelvey said. “Details, man. A full debriefing.”

“She's a teacher at my school. We went out more as friends than anything else. But I got out at least. We went and saw
Cast Away
.”

“The one about the guy who gets stranded on an island or something?”

“He washes up on an island and has to learn how to do everything from scratch. Build a shelter. Make tools. Tom Hanks did a pretty good job. It was believable, you know. And I just kept thinking as I was sitting there, how if I were shipwrecked for twenty years, I would want my wife to go on and have a life, to not waste it sitting around waiting for me. And I started thinking about it in terms of my life today. Shipwrecked and alone. And I sort of thought my wife probably would want me to go on…that's right about the time I started to cry, and I had to apologize to my date.”

McKelvey looked over at his friend, and the two of them smiled then began to laugh. Tim had a few tears in his eyes, but he wiped them with his thumb and finished his beer. McKelvey opened them each a second can, and he closed his eyes as the cold beer burned down his throat.

“Well,” McKelvey said, wiping his mouth, “I have a confession to make.”

“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 silence 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.