Slow Recoil (36 page)

“Me?”

“Any plans?”

McKelvey thought about it for a minute. Plans. Yes. He had plans. For the first time in what seemed like a hundred years, he knew what he wanted to do, where he wanted to be. Propelled, that was the word.

“I guess I'm going home for a little while,” McKelvey said.

“Home home?” Tim said.

“Yeah, home home,” McKelvey said. “Ste. Bernadette.”

“You're heading in the wrong direction,” Tim said. “Should be going south in the winter. You're supposed to be retired, remember?”

“Maybe I'll wait for the spring thaw and the blackflies,” McKelvey said.

He reached out, and the men shook hands. He held the younger man's hand and, for just a moment in there, he felt like he was holding the hand of his boy, Gavin. They were all together in that hospital room right then, his boy and Fielding's wife, all these ghosts with which they had made some sort of quiet peace.

“I'll check on you tomorrow,” McKelvey said.

“Smuggle me in a beer, will you? It's all I thought about while I was dying of thirst. That sound of a nice cold can opening, pfffft.” Fielding closed his eyes and drifted.

McKelvey said, “You got it.”

He went out and walked down the hallway to the bank of elevators. He hit the button and waited. The door chimed and opened, and he stepped aside to let out a few visitors. People with bouquets of flowers, greeting cards, tired looks on their faces. He thought of what the doctor had told him, what lay ahead in the coming months, and cringed at the thought of people showing up to see him lying there dressed in a hospital gown, his old white arse flapping in the breeze.

When the visitors had cleared, he stepped inside the elevator and pushed the button for the ground level. He lifted his head and looked across the floor to the nursing station. There was an attractive woman dressed in baby-blue scrubs standing there to gather a few files. She looked up. He smiled at her. She smiled back just as the doors closed on him.

THIRTY-THREE

H
assan drove McKelvey home from the hospital. It was warm in the taxi, and he opened the back window as far as it would go. The smell of the city came to him like the familiar scent of a lover. Only rather than flowers and vanilla, this was muffler exhaust and a hint of chromium and coal ash.

“Traffic seems heavy,” McKelvey said.

“Rush hour. Summer is over now, my friend, everyone has been back to school and back to work for two days now,” Hassan said. “It is like the world has woken up
from a slumber. Do you know this city has more than three hundred and fifty school buses? Some days I feel like they are all lined up in front of me.”

McKelvey had lost track of the days. Of course it was back to school. The end of Labour Day. He wondered how much Jerry Lewis had raised this year for muscular dystrophy. He had always watched the telethon with his boy, Gavin. He remembered how Gavin used to mimic the comedian, unbuttoning his pajamas and mopping his brow with a hankie. The memory made McKelvey smile. It was a small smile, but it was foreign, and it felt good the way anything new feels.

“Did you happen to catch any of the Jerry Lewis telethon?” McKelvey asked.

“I'm afraid not,” Hassan said. “We do not have the cable television.”

They inched their way the last few blocks to Front Street. McKelvey slid out and handed the driver two twenties for the twenty-five dollar fare, along with a piece of silver paper stock.

“Keep the change,” McKelvey said.

Hassan had his hands in the leather fanny pack which contained his float, but McKelvey was already limping up the street. Hassan watched him for a minute, but he had to squint against the strong September sun, then he lost sight of his fare altogether.

He held the piece of silver paper up and saw that it was a lottery scratch ticket.

The apartment was still and quiet, and he stood there just inside the door for a moment. He thought it looked more like a hotel room than a home. It was true, Hattie had tried in her way to push him in that direction, to really start his life over again, to fill his space with new things. Build something, unpack the suitcase of grief. Perhaps she was still too young to realize that changing your address or changing your hairstyle didn't really change anything about who you were or where you'd been. Or perhaps he was simply unwilling to fully let go of the past.

He crossed the floor to the telephone by the window. He picked up the receiver and dialed from memory. She answered on the third ring.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello,” he said.

There was a beat, a moment of silence wherein he lived and died.

“Charlie,” Caroline said. “How are you?”

He stood there at the little desk by the window. He looked outside. It was a beautiful day of early September. A good question posed by the person who knew him better than anyone, better than himself—how are you?

“I'm okay,” he said.

There was no sense burdening her with information about which he himself was unclear. The truth was, he was scared. Of how close he had come to losing his friend, the days of questions that were to come, of what lay ahead for him with the news from the doctor. More tests required. He reached into his coat pocket and found the small white paper bag with the prescriptions. He cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder, set the antibiotics aside and opened the pain medication. He shook two tablets into his palm.

“It's good to hear your voice,” Caroline said. “It's been a while. I was getting worried about you.”

“You've got better things to do than worry about me,” he said.

“Jessie called the other day,” she said. “She's worried about you, too, Charlie. She said you looked like you had gone a few rounds with somebody. You have a black eye?”

McKelvey laughed it off. “Just getting clumsy,” he said. He popped the tabs in his mouth, snapped his head back and swallowed them dry. “Otherwise. I'm right as rain.”

“Speaking of rain,” Carline said, “we're on day six out here. I don't miss the snow, but the rain can get a little monotonous. I've been thinking of coming out for a visit. See Jessie and Emily. And you, of course, if you want. I always liked the fall in Ontario. We used to go on those long drives up through Georgian Bay just to see the colours. Do you remember?”

He felt what was perhaps the first faint glow of the pills, or it was his mind wishing for it. He looked out the window at the day. Everything was moving. Nothing went unchanged. The world existed in your memories. Things as they were.

He closed his eyes. “I remember everything,” he said.

With very special thanks to Sylvia, Allister and Emma at Napoleon.

I would like to thank the following for their support of my writing today and over the years: Tracy Forrest; Graham and Susan Forrest; the New Brunswick Forrests; Ariane Sabourin; John Churchill; Stephanie Smith; Ulrike Kucera; Katherine Hobbs; Brenda Chapman; Sue Pike; Pauline Braithwaite and Greg Poulin; Mary Jane Maffini; Barbara Fradkin; RJ Harlick; Rick Blechta; Lou Allen; JD Carpenter for his correspondence and Bushmills wisdom; Allan Neal and CBC‘s
All in a Day
; Steve and Andrea Clifford; Bob and Leslie Grace; Patty Brundritt and the Marsh clan (don't forget little Dougie); Capital Crime Writers and Canadian Crime Writers; and lastly, those reviewers and their publications who still believe that Canadian writing is worth talking about.

This is entirely a work of fiction; as such, the author has taken liberties with historical timelines and the facts in general. Several sources of information provided inspiration during the writing of this book, including:
Seasons in Hell:
Understanding Bosnia's War
by Ed Vulliamy;
My War Gone
By, I Miss It So
by Anothony William Vivian Loyd;
Love Thy
Neighbor: A Story of War
by Peter Maas;
Slobodan Milosevic
and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
by Louis Sell; and
Ghosts of
the Medak Pocket
by Caroline Orr.

photo by Stephanie Smith

C. B. Forrest was born and raised in Richmond, just outside of Ottawa, Ontario. After studying journalism, he worked as a reporter for the
Sudbury
Star
and
Northern Life
.

His fiction includes the award-winning short story “The Lost Father”. His poetry has appeared in
Contemporary Verse 2, Bloodlotus Journal, Bywords
Quarterly Journal
and
Ascent Aspirations
.

Forrest lives in Ottawa with his wife and daughter.
Slow Recoil
is the follow-up to his debut novel with RendezVous Crime, the acclaimed
The Weight of
Stones
(2009), which was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel.

More info can be found at
www.cbforrest.com