The Weight of Stones (27 page)

Footsteps, voices, then a door slamming shut. Duguay opened his eyes. Blinked. He stared at the blurry ceiling, at the walls, then he moved a hand to his face, and he saw the blood, his blood on his fingers like grease. His face swollen, his throat closed. It was there now, like the fragments of a dream recalled in the confusion of morning. He touched his face, and his jaw was numb. His tongue. Thick. He could not open his mouth properly.

Not like this,
he thought.
Not like this. On my back. I want
to be standing up...

The prison psychologist had wanted Duguay to talk, always to talk, asking him about his childhood and his crimes and his victims and how the scores on his IQ tests suggested he was too smart for the life he had chosen.

“Maybe I should be a doctor or a lawyer,” he said. “Or a shrink like you.”

“With your intelligence, I imagine you could be anything you want,” the doctor said. “But as with everything in life, it takes hard work. You have to apply yourself.”

Duguay laughed. He looked at the psychologist, a man of forty dressed in a cable knit sweater and khakis, his hands as soft as butter, his face as smooth as a baby's ass cheek.

“Have you ever been in a fight? I mean, a fist fight?” Duguay said.

The psychologist's face screwed itself into a knot, unaccustomed and uncomfortable with the roles being switched here. The interviewer becomes the subject.

“I got in my first fight when I was about seven. I mean, my first real fist fight with bloody noses and black eyes. It was an older kid named Lameroux. They were a tough family. Real tough kids. I was scared, you know. This Lameroux kid was going to kill me. But it wasn't the pain that scared me. It was the idea of getting beaten in front of my friends. That's all it was ever about for me. Maybe it was pride, I don't know. I just had to win, no matter what. And I did. I beat the crap out of this Lameroux kid. I mean, I messed him up pretty good. It was awful for him going home with a broken nose and a missing tooth. Some seven-year-old down the street kicked his ass. I heard his old man busted his collar bone, he was so pissed at him for losing the fight... I was too busy trying to make it out of the street, man. I didn't have time to look through those fucking glossy catalogues they got for the colleges. But I think I did pretty good. I did pretty good for myself.”

“You're in prison, Pierre. I don't see that as success.”

“I'm alive, right? I made some good money.”

“But you're not a free man.”

“Neither are you. Not really.”

This frustrated the doctor, and he scrawled a long note in his pad. Duguay didn't tell the doctor the truth about his life, about the time his mother slit her wrists and he found her in the washroom, drunk and dying and still crazy and crying. He didn't tell the doctor about the man he had killed behind a bar in St. Luc, the way the man's eyes went when he turned and saw the gun, the sound of his death. There was so much to tell, but there was no point. There were no textbooks, no videos, no courses that could properly educate on the life he knew, the birth lottery.

“Nobody's going to look after you,” Duguay said. “We all stand alone...”

He was staring up at the barrel of a big gun, a red-headed woman behind it.

“Don't even think about it,” the woman said. Only a cop would say something like that.

Think about what
, he wanted to say. The cop saw the Browning further up the hallway and stepped over the bloody footprints, the wads of dog hair, and examined the weapon. The clip was missing. McKelvey.

Duguay went to speak. To ask about his injuries.
How
long?
he wanted to know.

He thought about his father, how the man had died in a stairwell at the prison. What was it like to be stabbed that many times? Did it feel the same as this? Pain and the absence of pain all at once...did his father think of him then, lying there with the life leaving his body? Did he think of his boy?

He thought of his mother and what she was doing, and what would she say when she got the news—would she be sober enough to care? Thought of how all the anger and the love withheld seemed so worthless in the end, how he wanted to see her one more time...his mother. Tell her that she'd done what she could, and it was better than what she'd had.

He wondered about his dog.

He heard the woman calling in on her cellphone, calling for “a bus”.

“An ambulance is on the way,” she told him.

She was pretty. A girl cop. Soft in the face like an angel. Sent just for him.

His luck. It sort of made him smile.

If Danny could see him now, he'd say something about Duguay always ending up with the girl. Danny and his crooked smile, the juvenile detention centre, the days of the old Camaros and those first little bikes, the Hondas and the Kawasakis.

Duguay. That's me. I'm supposed to live forever.

It's okay...

Twenty-Six

M
cKelvey and the girl headed up Highway 400, passing a growing stream of commuters moving like drones toward the steel grey metropolis at the first burning of the dawn. It was a choreographed show, wave after wave of rolling yellow headlights rising and falling across the lay of the land. Jessie drifted off for a while, and McKelvey called Hattie on his cellphone. She answered on the first ring.

“Where the hell are you?” she said. “Your house is on City TV.”

“Balani,” he said. “He was mixed up with Leroux.”

“What are you talking about, Charlie?”

“He's dirty,” he said. “The girl identified him. He's in with Leroux. Or he was. Maybe Gavin recognized him that night. He would've seen the son of a bitch at police picnics, for Christ's sake.”

He heard her speaking to someone else in the room, and there were muffled voices, then she came back on.

“This doesn't make any sense,” she said.

“I don't have time to explain everything. Is Duguay gone?” McKelvey said.

“No, he's not dead.”

“He looked dead.”

“You clipped his neck, and he lost some blood, but other than that... He must have been knocked unconscious when he fell back. He had a large gash on the back of his head. You messed his face up pretty good. He's up at the hospital now under guard. Tell me where you are, and I can send some help.”

“I can't do that, not yet.”

“You're going with the girl,” she said. “To find the baby.”

He didn't say anything. He looked over at Jessie. She was asleep with her head against the window. Her face was puffy from lack of sleep.

“This is crazy, Charlie. You're scaring me. You need to stop while you're ahead here.”

He didn't say anything. He drove, the leg wound pulsing.

“What if there is no baby?” Hattie said, softer now. “What then? Everything to this point can be explained or at least dealt with. Duguay came into your home, we can work with that. But stop and think this through, Charlie. How it looks, you taking off like this.”

McKelvey said, “It can't be any worse than it is already. I'll take my chances.”

“You're wanted for questioning. A girl at the club reported the girl missing. Or kidnapped. They said a gun was involved. A man was assaulted…”

Jessie sighed and adjusted herself, folding her arms across her chest. She looked to McKelvey like someone who was not entirely unused to sleeping in strange places, strange positions.

“You're on the way to Manitoulin,” Hattie said. “Thinking the aunt has the baby. That's what I'd be thinking, too.”

“Give me a couple of hours. I'm not asking you to lie, Hattie. I'm just asking you not to volunteer that information just yet.”

Hattie was quiet, background noises filling the dead air.

McKelvey said, “I'll call you. I promise.”

He hung up, rolled the window down and tossed the cellphone out like an apple core. A little bit of calculus and voodoo, and they would have his last known position traced to the mile. It was something the bikers and gangs were starting to get smart with. Hitmen were removing the batteries on their pagers and cellphones while criss-crossing the country on their dubious business. His thigh was throbbing, the pain in tune with the beat of his heart. His pants were stained with dried blood. He would need to pull over to check the wound before long.

Jessie rubbed her eyes and stretched. She turned to him, and he felt her watching him. He had so many questions to ask her, about his son, about their time together, about her life and her family, but he focused on the road ahead, the task at hand. It was this sort of behaviour that had driven Caroline crazy; she was always asking for a metre reading on his feelings, his thoughts. In his line of work, keeping the silence was not only a legal right, it was a means of self- preservation. He would take things slow with this one. He knew it wouldn't take much to make her bolt. He could see it in her eyes, waiting him out.

“We should call your aunt before we show up, shouldn't we?” he said.

“This was your idea, remember. I'm just along for the ride.”

“You know her better than I do, Jessie.”

“I'm kind of glad, to be honest. I mean to see her again, to go home for a while. I haven't been back up in about three months. She sends me money to take the bus back every month, but shit happens, right.”

She was quiet for a little while, then she cleared her throat. He thought she might be crying softly, but he didn't want to turn. He felt the balls of his jaw clench and release, waves of pain rushing over his body. He gripped the wheel and held on as the road rushed past them, all around them.

“Are you going to tell my aunt...you know, everything?”

He gave her a quick sideways glance, caught the expectant look on her face. No matter what she had done, where she had been, the rooms and the men and the street and the drugs, she was a child at heart, whether she knew it or not. Hell, none of them knew it. That was the point. The big fucking irony of the whole crazy experiment called life—you didn't know jack shit until you were too old to do anything about it.

“I mean, you don't have to tell her what I've been doing and all that, do you?”

McKelvey said, “Listen, I'm not interested in fucking up your life.”

She was visibly relieved, and she said, “It's just that Peg has been so good to me. She thinks I started going to school to become a hairdresser.”

“Have you ever thought of that?”

“Hairdressing school?”

“School, period. College, university. It's how most people get good jobs these days.”

She shrugged and said, “I never really gave myself a chance.”

“You're a smart kid,” he said. “I bet you could be anything.”

She turned and looked at him hard. “You don't even know me,” she said.

“Well, you survived the biggest city we've got,” he said. “That's good enough for me.”

The scenery of southern Ontario changed shape, the box houses of Barrie dissolving into the rugged woods and jagged grey rock cuts of Muskoka cottage country. Highway 400 became Highway 69, then they were a world removed from the unforgiving city. Here even the most widely used roads seemed forever unexplored, the air was colder and fresher, and busted up pickup trucks took the place of expensive SUVs parked in the laneways of modular homes and trailers. It had been years since he'd moved beyond the ever-expanding perimeter of the metropolis, and as the countryside engulfed them, he was reminded of his boyhood home. The northern country where woods could swallow a man who did not treat them with the respect they deserved and demanded. McKelvey remembered how every few years, a crew of businessmen would go missing in the sprawling woods of Gogama, city slickers up for a long weekend of drunken amateur moose hunting, and it was men like his father who were called in by the fire department to assist in the search. The hunters were invariably found, wet and cold and embarrassed, huddled in their expensive designer khakis beneath a tree. But sometimes they were not so lucky. As with the sea, the woods of the north swallowed up their share of souls. His father had told him as a boy never to set foot in the woods without a compass, a pack of matches, and a jackknife, even if he was only going on a short hike. “A man can get turned around real easy,” his father used to say.

“What are you thinking about?” she said.

“I haven't been up this way in a long time,” he said.

“You used to live up here?”

“Are you hungry?” he said, suddenly aware of the time of day.

“I'm fucking starving,” she said. “I need some cigarettes, too. And I need to pee.”

The gauge was hovering at the orange safety marker, and McKelvey had no choice but to cease the momentum. He pulled into a ramshackle gas station and convenience store on the other side of Parry Sound, for the summer town was far too busy with Greyhound traffic and a detachment of the provincial police. The odds were high that his plate number was already making the rounds. The notion that he might be considered an outlaw was strangely exhilarating.