“He never talked about it,” McKelvey says. “I remember that year. A supply shed got blown up. A scab was killed.”
The men seem to lose themselves in private and collective memories. They look down at the floor and nod their heads. There are no smiles now, no laughter.
“Was a hard time in those days,” Duncan says. “They was goin’ to put us out of work, the way the management was running things, talk of that merger with INCO. We had families to think about. Your old man had been over in Korea, and let me tell you, his training came in handy. That scab was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
McKelvey doesn’t want to hear or learn anymore, not now, not standing here in the lobby of a one-star hotel less than twelve hours after arriving back in his home town. He drains the cup against his better judgment, tosses it in a wastebasket.
“I need a place to stay for a while,” he says. “Is there anybody in town that rents apartments or houses?”
The men shoot one another quick looks, and then Duncan smiles and moves to the desk. He opens a black address book and writes a number down on a piece of paper.
“How about your old homestead?” he says with a grin. “Carl Levesque bought up most of the Carver Company houses, including yours. He’s got some plan to tear them down and build a goddamned casino, if you can believe that. But I bet he’d take a few dollars in rent while you’re up here.”
George Fergus laughs. “The guy’d charge rent to his grandmother.”
“Welcome home,” Duncan says, and hands McKelvey the slip of paper.
Four
Carl Levesque answers on the third ring with some rehearsed tagline about business coming back to Ste. Bernadette, blowing in on a northern tailwind. He appears eager to meet McKelvey and discuss rental opportunities. He asks McKelvey to meet him at the Coffee Time on Main Street, three blocks down from the Station Hotel. McKelvey walks with the collar turned high on his too-thin trench coat, for the day is bone-chilling and he has forgotten how the cold works so quickly, how your back hurts from the strain of your body’s attempt to fold into itself. More than half of the storefronts are boarded up, and McKelvey finds himself slowing down, trying to remember the various incarnations of these places so long ago.
Murray’s Five and Dime, where he bought comic books and jawbreakers, the place always smelling of sawdust and those bricks of bright yellow soap that Murray kept stacked in pyramids on tables — so that McKelvey as a boy imagined they were gold bricks, probably dug from the mine where his father worked. And there had been Poulson Mercantile and Sundry, where you could buy rough underwear that had been manufactured by people whose primary goal was to punish small children, or sit at the small lunch counter in back and order a creamy malted milkshake if your mother was in a generous mood. McKelvey smiles now at the memory of asking his mother repeatedly what exactly “sundry” was supposed to mean. And how she tried unsuccessfully to explain the strange notion of dry goods and paper products and envelopes and, well, everything in the place that didn’t happen to be something you could wear.
He bought a package of Club chewing tobacco in there when he was sixteen. Kept a wad in his mouth for exactly fourteen seconds before spitting out the glistening tar-black gob behind his house. He had been aiming for toughness, these miners he saw with their cheeks full of the stuff like chipmunks storing food for winter.
He stops in front of a boarded-up unit with a sign that says VIDEO AND GAME SHACK, and steps into the alcove to read the paper posted to the inside of the glass door: a foreclosure for failure to pay rent. Almost eighteen months ago now. He catches the name Carl Levesque within the legal mumbo-jumbo. This place was, at one time, perhaps fifty years ago now, a barbershop called Bud’s. He closes his eyes and he can actually smell the inside of the barbershop …
He can see the multi-coloured bottles of aftershave and hair tonic, the neon blue disinfectant for the black combs, the lather creams, the strong, manly scent of sandalwood and alcohol, tobacco smoke, and sweat. How old Bud would set a board across the chair, heft him up, wrap a red apron around his neck, push his head forward, and begin to work with the scissors. The sound of stainless steel parts working in concert. McKelvey keeps his eyes closed, pretending not to follow the conversation between his father and Bud and the other men assembled in the barbershop, this sanctuary of all things male. They speak in loose code about local women, about their physical attributes, then on to hunting, drinking. When the haircut is done, Bud takes a hard-bristled brush and whisks away the hair trimmings from the back of his neck, and the brush hurts, but he doesn’t say anything, not ever. Bud with his big boxer’s face that reminds McKelvey of an old bulldog with sad, bloodshot eyes. Bud always gives him a lollipop from an old coffee tin he keeps under the cash.
McKelvey opens his eyes, stamps his feet against the cold, and moves on down the sidewalk, filled with a sense of loss for something that is gone both for himself and the rest of the world, all of the generations to come. And he thinks it might be something called innocence or perhaps the unspoiled pleasures of simplicity and gratitude for the small gestures in life.
Carl Levesque is leaning over the counter chatting with the middle-aged clerk, a woman who looks as though she believes despite overwhelming odds in the promise of meagre satisfaction from this life. She is attractive despite a world-weary weight to her eyes and her face, though McKelvey can tell she was likely a knockout in her youth, black hair tied back. There are two old men seated at individual tables near the window, each of them quietly sipping coffee and reading newspapers, likely enjoying the time away from their wives. The swivel stools that run along the counter are empty.
“Well, that must be Mr. McKelvey,” Levesque says as he turns upon hearing the jingle of bells tied to the door.
McKelvey nods and holds out his hand as he approaches the real-estate-agent-cum-small-town-entrepreneur.
“What’ll you have, Charlie? Do you mind if I call you Charlie?”
“It’s my name,” McKelvey says. And he smiles at the woman now as he squints to read the nametag pinned to her ugly beige uniform blouse: Peggy.
“Anything you want,” Levesque says with a sweep of his hand across the vista of stale doughnuts, a half-empty fountain well of lemonade, and two pots of coffee. Levesque smiles, pleased with himself at this generous offering. McKelvey sees instantly that this man is a salesman, has likely sold a little of everything in his life — toilet brushes and cars with bad radiators — and he would get on your nerves if you spent too much time with him.
“I’ll take a small coffee, black,” McKelvey says. He no longer cares about the regimen imposed in the aftermath of his gastrointestinal hemorrhage, which was partly, though only partly, responsible for his early exit from the force. No more plain Balkan-style yogourt, no more celery snagged in his teeth for him, no sir, not since Dr. Shannon delivered The News. So, fuck it. Black coffee, please. And suddenly his entire body thrums with desire for a cigarette, even though it’s been a miraculous three months since he gave up on trying to ration himself or otherwise control the uncontrollable, which is to say he quit cold turkey.
“No cherry stick?” Levesque asks, and pokes McKelvey in the belly. It’s a move that instantly provokes a reptilian response within McKelvey — he clenches his teeth and swallows the urge to snap the man’s finger. Don’t touch me, he could say. Not ever. “I gotta tell you, they’re goddamned dynamite,” Levesque continues. “I eat, what, two or three a week?”
He says this to Peggy, who has already poured McKelvey’s coffee.
“A day, more like it,” Peggy says.
Levesque laughs, and it sounds like gravel pouring through a tin culvert, forced and over-loud. At the tail end of the laugh there is a wheeze in the man’s lungs, this constricted exhalation. McKelvey imagines the man chain-smoking two packs a day. Sitting behind a cheap metal desk in some trailer on a used car lot, watching the door, willing it to open, asking everyone about the weather, how about that rain,