The Weight of Stones (17 page)

“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

T
here 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 north. 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.

The Leonard Tilmans, the Pierre Duguays.

Who the fuck did these people think they were, anyway?

In the end, when perspective and context were put into a sharper focus, it didn't really matter, did it? Not when stacked against what he was planning for Duguay, with the truth that was in his heart. In many ways, he viewed this as an exercise, a training manoeuvre, something to steel his nerves, move it forward. He had finally stopped meandering on the precipice, had crossed the threshold and stepped into the void. It was, he knew, the onset of a free fall.
Let it come…

There was no point in getting Tim involved, for he was a teacher, and besides, he would not be able to live with himself. That was a fact. McKelvey knew that much about the young man. The kid wouldn't hold up. As for McKelvey, well, he now believed that life was all about figuring out the difference between the things a man could live with and the things he couldn't. Between the two poles there rested a place that promised a version of peace.

So it was that he dressed in jeans and an old flannel work shirt, and pulled his old Blue Jays cap down from the closet. When he saw the broom standing at the back, he got his idea. With an old handsaw from the basement, and working across the kitchen table, he cut a length of the stick. Six inches. Held the stub in his palm, curled his fingers around the shaft.

He stood in front of the bathroom mirror and looked into his own eyes. Searching there for something. A way out of this? No. Confirmation perhaps that he was in the right here. It was a grey area, but not really. Not so grey. He could see that now. He put the length of broom handle in his back pocket and went to the truck.