Slow Recoil (2 page)

“You're my hero,” Detective Mary-Ann Hattie said when she called the next morning. “You just can't stay out of the papers, can you? Are the paparazzi camped outside?”

A little more than a year earlier she had presented him with the laminated front page of the
Sun
featuring news of the shooting at McKelvey's house. ‘Shootout in the Beaches'. The tabloid had jumped at the opportunity to conjure images of the Wild West, gunslingers settling old scores. It made for good copy. At least in this instance it wasn't too far from the truth. McKelvey and Duguay in that darkened hallway, pistols drawn. The smell of gunpowder, the ringing in his ears.

Reputed Quebec-based biker Pierre Duguay was
shot and seriously wounded yesterday morning as
he allegedly broke into the home of a recently retired
Toronto police detective. Sources indicate Detective-
Constable Charles McKelvey was conducting his own
unauthorized investigation into the unsolved murder of
his son, Gavin McKelvey, who was killed almost three
years ago over alleged involvement with the now-defunct
Toronto chapter of the Blades biker gang. Unconfirmed
reports suggest McKelvey had fingered Duguay for the
killing even after the courts dismissed charges against the
Montreal native due to the suicide of star witness and
fellow biker, Marcel Leroux.

The province's Special Investigation Unit has opened
an inquiry along with the force's own Professional
Standards Unit.

“They're going to make a movie out of you one day, Charlie,” she said. “You know, like
The French Connection
. I wonder, who do you think should play you?”

He shrugged, standing there in his boxers in the kitchen of his small apartment condo, early morning light catching the dust in the air. Hearing her voice made him want to see her, for her to come and stay the night. It had been a week or so. He remembered what it felt like to be with her, how they seemed to lock together. But this was the bargain they had struck, and he had to stick to the conditions. “I love you to death, Charlie,” she had said finally, after trying for nearly a year to negotiate a space in the man's life, within his stubbornness and his dual afflictions of guilt and grief, “but I can't live with you… ”

“I don't know,” he said now, “how about Steve McQueen.”

“Cool guy,” Hattie said, “but last time I checked, he was still dead.”

“I know,” he said. “Perfect.”

The truth was, the only thing McKelvey was thinking when he dove into the water of the harbour was the same thing he was thinking when he raised his pistol in that dark hallway to fire at Pierre Duguay:
I am fully prepared to accept the consequences of
my actions.
It was about getting lost in the intent, within those seconds during which time slowed, wherein everything was brought into a sharper focus—life, in all its ragged promise… and yes, in that single instant, Charlie McKelvey had a purpose.

In McKelvey's evaluation, if modern history were a book, things were whittled down to the last few chapters. There was little left for the human race to turn against except itself, and a quick scan of the headlines proved that's precisely where they had come to as a collective multitude; like a bunch of half-drunk tourists, too ignorant to ask for directions or consult a map, they were lost and stumbling in the hills beyond the safety of the resort complex. The morning the twin towers fell to dust in New York City, McKelvey sat and drank beer in his boxer shorts watching the anchors on CNN grapple with the enormity of the moment, the sheer unspeakableness of it, and he knew something had shifted within the entire mechanism of the western world. This was the coda of the modern times, the epilogue of all the great wars fought without final resolution; the simple and unalterable fact remained that mankind was incapable of leaving the scab alone.

It was this vein of morose talk that finally caused Hattie to shake her head and step aside for a breath of fresh air. Cops grew cynical as a matter of course, and given his personal history of loss, she did not expect smiles and giggles from McKelvey twenty-four seven. But it was his inability or refusal to meet somewhere in the middle that finally pushed her to lease an apartment, to regain some of her independence after their year-long experiment of co-habitation. McKelvey had sold his matrimonial home with its memories of his son and his wife and the shooting of Duguay, and he'd taken a nice little apartment condo on the top floor of a converted warehouse in Olde Town on the edge of the so-called “Distillery District” between The Esplanade and Front Street. He settled into the new neighborhood with its little pubs and cozy restaurants, the bustle of the St. Lawrence Market just up the street—those busy stalls with their hanging meats and bags of cheeses, varieties of fish he'd never heard of, these slippery reds and yellows on beds of ice. It was about the old bricks, the way Front Street split at King Street in a “V” that defined the whole bottom of the city with that vista of the Flatiron Building set against the golden, shining bank towers, the CN Tower a spire among the clouds beyond. The unique mix of old and new made him sometimes feel he was on the set of a movie featuring a borough in some other city like Boston or Chicago.

There was a pub called Garrity's right next door to his place, and it was all a man could ask for with its good bartenders and dark wood. Hattie kept her frayed toothbrush and a drawer full of clothes at his place, jeans and sweaters hanging in the closet. They were together, she supposed, no more or no less than any other modern couple. She loved him, and she knew that as much as Charlie McKelvey was capable of it, he loved her right back. She looked into his eyes, those blue eyes, and she saw something that was beautiful and broken all at the same time.

ONE

Toronto

T
hursday evening before Labour Day weekend, the school teacher left a message on McKelvey's answering machine— something about a missing friend. Had McKelvey known this message would ultimately propel him towards a foreign brand of darkness, something beyond the experience of his thirty years on the force—had he known what this one call would bring into his life—well, he certainly would not have checked his messages that night or any night thereafter. He could live without a phone, it was true. In the very least, he would have been more careful in what he wished for; retirement was a killer, to be sure, but it wasn't deadly in any literal sense.

As it was, his friend the school teacher, Tim Fielding, left the message while McKelvey sat in Garrity's drinking a pint of Steam Whistle pilsner, scanning the classifieds for a used vehicle. McKelvey's beloved Mazda pickup, the little red machine, had shuffled to its earthly end. That fateful day, his trusted mechanic had put a hand on McKelvey's shoulder—understanding something of the man's loyal if illogical commitment to the vehicle—and he had simply shaken his head. Like a surgeon standing before an anxious family huddled in a waiting room, the mechanic relayed the long odds at play, the parts and the labour required. There had been a good run in there, oh yes, a few years where McKelvey did little more than perform oil changes, spent a few hundred here and there on brake pads, a muffler. Despite the spread of malignant rust along the wheel wells, and the clouds of pungent dark smoke that belched from its rear-end upon ignition, McKelvey had never really prepared himself for this eventuality. Now it seemed as though the machine's entire organ system was shutting down in succession: transmission, timing belt, radiator, water pump…

McKelvey's rested his elbows on the dark wood of the bar, grooves worn deep. He circled a few promising listings. There was a Honda Civic alleged to have been driven solely by an “elderly female”, as though that explained everything or anything. Another promoted the mind-boggling economical merits of a Suzuki. He said the word aloud—“Suzuki”—and asked the bartender, a former minor league hockey enforcer named Huff Keegan, about the specific model mentioned in the advertisement. The young man was a trunk of solid muscle, thick-chested like a farmer's son, and his face, at just thirty, looked as though it had been put through a grinder both frontwards and backwards. There were incalculable scars, grey and white flecks peppered across his eyebrows and the bridge of his crooked nose. He shook his big head and laughed.

“Does it come with a can opener?” Huff said.

“Is that the model with the lawn mower engine?”

“Good on gas. Great for parking downtown,” the bartender said as he filled a patron's mug with amber Stella Artois. “Probably have to bring your groceries home one bag at a time, though.”

“I suppose I could always get a roof rack,” McKelvey said.

“And maybe a trailer,” Huff added.

“Jesus, I hate this,” McKelvey said. He took his pen, scratched out the circled ads, folded the paper under his arm, and got up from his bar stool. “Maybe I'll just get a goddamned bicycle and a pair of those Spandex shorts.”

He paid up his tab, said goodnight to Huff, and stepped into the night. One block over, streetcars shooked along their tracks, moving across then up the city through old Cabbagetown, where the earliest and poorest immigrants had carved a life, then on past the gay village at Church and Wellesley. It was a beautiful evening of late summer. The air was dry and still. It was the sort of evening that reminded McKelvey there was hay being cut somewhere beyond the suffocating concrete and chrome of this city, large round bales left standing in fields like something constructed and abandoned by an earlier civilization.

This was the long weekend that brought with it the end of summer, if not officially, then at least psychologically. It was the Jerry Lewis telethon during which the hundred-year-old comedian removed parts of his tuxedo in hourly increments, mopping the sweat from his face with a balled-up hankie. It was the harried mothers with their bratty kids at the office supply store, baskets piled high with binders and pencil cases, ruled paper wrapped in plastic. McKelvey remembered how his own boy could never fall asleep on that final Monday night before the start of another school year.

“I've got a tummy ache,” Gavin would say.

Or it was a headache. Or German measles. The sudden affliction of polio.

It was an area in which McKelvey felt a kinship with the child, for he had also detested that final sleep before entering the battlefield of another school year. Wondering which burned-out teacher you'd get stuck with, rating their defects on a scale—I'll trade halitosis for dandruff, body odour for the stench of half-digested vodka. He would stare at the shadows on the ceiling, willing some natural disaster of biblical proportions. But his hometown in the north knew no floods or tempests. The deep freeze of winter was broken up by a couple of months of moderate summer. The closest they came in Ste. Bernadette to an act of God were the infinite blankets of blackflies that hatched in early May like the spawn of hell itself. McKelvey had swallowed them by the dozen while riding his bike, choking on them, digging them from his ears and the corners of his eyes.

The sidewalk in front of his condo apartment off Front Street East was undulating with human traffic now, couples and groups of young people on their way to eat wings and sushi, or simply to sit and look good on the patio bars. All of these young people, McKelvey thought, with their bodies at the apex of health and strength, carefree as though life would always be just like this, filled with free time and spending money. He figured there was no sense in telling them the truth about what lay ahead. They would find out, just as he had, by navigating through one shitstorm at a time. Every year that he lived, he grew fonder of his late father and the example the man had tried to impart. That is to say, he let the man off the hook for all the things he had or hadn't done as a father. The way things had worked out between McKelvey and his own son, well, it put a man's view of himself in a clearer context. There was no end to the second-guessing, playing with the pain and regret like a tongue poking a canker.

The sidewalk gave off a warmth still, as though it were the collective embers of all those golden days of July and August, when the tourists shuffled along on their way to a Blue Jays game or to visit the Hockey Hall of Fame. McKelvey lit a cigarette and enjoyed the rush of dope to his head, the effect of which always seemed compounded after a couple of pints of beer, as though the cigarettes knew his defenses were already weakened, so they took the opportunity to carry him across the threshold. He coughed a little and cleared his throat. It was the third and final allotted ration in what was his latest scheme to maneuver within this habit, for breaking it all together seemed utterly futile. Old dogs and all of that business. He had become, in his advanced years, a proponent of compromise.

He walked the three or four paces to the door of his condo building. An attractive woman in her early forties walked by in a group of mixed company, and she caught McKelvey's eye. A nice red dress that fit her well, fit her very well, a white sweater tied across her shoulders to guard against the evening chill. They gave each other this shy little smile, kids flirting in a schoolyard, and McKelvey shrugged as she walked on past, shifting her eyes to the sidewalk when she could no longer hold his gaze. He pinched the glow from the half-finished cigarette, dropping the ash to the sidewalk, twisted the end and put the remainder of the smoke in his shirt pocket. There was a measure of consolation in knowing he would start the next day up half a cigarette in the debit column. It was all just games that grownups played, this mental masturbation. One had to be grateful for the small mercies won or awarded in a day.

McKelvey climbed the stairs. Each unit had its own landing and a small velvet-topped bench against the wall in case someone was waiting for you and for some strange reason you didn't want them in your house. It was a new building and they were collectively the first tenants. There was the old Italian, Giuseppe, on the main floor, a former member of the resistance in Italy during the Second World War, the
Resiztenza
. McKelvey had tried to tell the old man to stop using a stone to prop open the inner door of the building, saying it defeated the purpose of a so-called secure entrance. The old man shrugged and said he could never remember to bring his keys with him when he limped up to the St. Lawrence Market to buy his coils of sausage. On the second floor was a young gay couple, Chad and Russell, both of whom appeared to be lawyers or perhaps financial traders, always dressed in these expensive suits and ties. On the third floor, just below McKelvey, there was a divorced woman in her late thirties or early forties who made Hattie a little jealous because she was cute with her short hair, and she sometimes smiled at McKelvey. It had been an adjustment to leave The Beach, the old neighbourhood off Queen East and Gerrard with its converted cottages and the boardwalks, the first home he had made for his wife and his son; he accepted the fact it was a geographical cure of sorts, the shaking of ghosts. It had been an adjustment, but he was getting used to it. The people in his building were as good a collection of wayfarers as he could imagine.