“Charlie. My god. Do you know how many messages I’ve left?”
“Good morning, Caroline.”
“It’s not even morning out here yet. You’ve had me worried sick. Jessie has been calling me, too. Where are you?”
McKelvey looks out the window at the passing bleakness of a small northern town at the apex of winter.
“Back home,” he says.
There is a moment of silence. Levesque is listening but trying to look busy, adjusting the car’s temperature controls.
“Is everything okay, Charlie?” she asks. “That’s a stupid question, I know. You were supposed to go for counselling after the incident by the waterfront, but I don’t think you ever followed through. Why would I expect you to if you couldn’t even stick with counselling when Gavin was killed. And you’re drinking. You know you called me a few times in the middle of the night. You didn’t sound well, the messages you left. Do you remember that?”
McKelvey takes a long drag on the cigarette, blows smoke out the window, then rolls it down farther and flicks the butt outside. His brain warbles now, he is a bobble-head character. The succubus nicotine whispers again, again, again.
“I needed a change of scenery,” he says. “And I’m not drinking. Anyway, you don’t need to worry about me, Caroline. You don’t have that burden anymore.”
“Fuck off, Charlie.” The vulgarity takes him by surprise. He sits back as though he has been slapped across the face by his mother. “You’re such an asshole sometimes. You need to pull your head out of that place you keep it and look around. You’ve got a granddaughter. You’ve got Jessie. They need you. Grownups don’t just run away and hide, Charlie. Is that what you’re doing, running away?”
He can no longer sustain the conversation. He is being pulled away and muffled by an invisible hand. The phone must have turned on by accident, perhaps bumped or jostled. He will be more careful in the future. Not knowing about missed calls, not seeing the flashing red light won’t bother him nearly as much.
“It wasn’t an incident, by the way,” he says. “A good cop got killed that day.”
“Oh, Charlie … I wish you could see what I see. What everybody else sees …”
“I’ll call you when I have better reception,” he says. “You’re breaking up.”
“Sure. Whatever you say —”
McKelvey hangs up and ensures the phone is off. He slips it back inside his coat and turns to Levesque, who he imagines has conjured all sorts of visions.
“My wife,” McKelvey says, and leaves it at that. There is nothing more he needs to say. Levesque nods once and they drive through the town, out from the small and dying business section to the grid pattern of two- and three-bedroom simple bungalows the Carver Company built decades ago to house its employees and their families. The homes are, for the most part, all the same, appearing much like the PMQs on a military base.
“All these company houses, I scooped them up just under two years ago,” Levesque says. “Cheap as hell. I got a consortium of developers from Toronto backing me up on the deal.”
“How many are still occupied?”
“About a third. Carver executives tell me the mine is in its last year and a half, but that’s confidential. They’ve got a skeleton crew mucking the bottom, ready to do the cleanup and shut the lights off on the way out. Of course the mine has been hobbling toward this for a long time, but still. You know, as long as there are even a few jobs down there, people feel we’ve still got a beating heart.”
“My father told me a long time ago what this day would be like. How it was coming and, more important, how the town should prepare for it.”
“Our mayor, Danny Marko, has this big plan. He calls it his twenty-year vision. There’s serious talk about a new transmission line being built up here, bringing power line jobs and construction dollars through town for a five-year period. Then there’s our chief of police. He wants to truck Detroit’s shitty diapers up here, maybe use the mine as a big hole to fill up. Meantime, the dropout rate in Saint B is into the double digits. Kids are taking off for the oil fields in Fort McMurray or the diamond mine up in Yellowknife. Hard to keep a kid in school when he can go to Alberta and make twenty bucks an hour just sweeping the floors, no experience required. Some days I think maybe I should follow them on out there.”
Levesque rolls the window down all the way to flick his cigarette butt. A blast of cold air rolls in and wakes McKelvey from his nicotine stupor. The air, at least, is fresh and clean and smells of a coming snowfall. It is strange not to smell Lake Ontario, the stale subway air wafting from sidewalk grates, the chromium and coal ash.
“And that’s it for today’s depressing small-town news,” Levesque says, and laughs like a dog barking. His chest wheezes. He catches his breath and adds, “Welcome home, Charlie. Welcome home.”
Five
The boy who always has some marijuana now has something else. He stands in the centre of the boredom of this dying place and it offers the promise of amusement, an antidote to the tedium. At the same time, he offers himself the gift of small-town popularity. He will never want for friends as long as he always has a few grams of weed in his backpack. And now this, the magic powder.
At first he thought the yellow-white substance in the foil was cocaine. He got it at the arcade, the same place where he got his pot, but had no idea what he was looking for, what cocaine or any other hard drug smelled or looked like. He rubbed some of the powder on his gums, as he had seen narcos do in the movies, and it gave him the edge of a tiny buzz. He sprinkled it on a pinch of tobacco and rolled a joint. In this way he discovered the pathway to the waterfall. And now, standing here in his parents’ garage, he shows the others how to smoke it using a ballpoint pen with the ink cylinder removed. Heat the foil with a lighter, inhale the chemical reaction. Instant payback. No waiting required. Flick the switch and you are perfect.
“Hey, Scott,” one of the girls says, “I heard you gave Travis Lacey some shit that made him go crazy. Is that true? He’s at a mental hospital in Sudbury ’cause he tried to take that cop Nolan’s head off with an axe.”
Two of the six teens have smoked. They have instantly found and occupied their own private wavelength. They are standing in this cold garage with their breath visible, boxes of empty beer bottles stacked in a corner, four summer tires awaiting the retreat of snow, tools hanging on a pegboard, and everywhere the smell of two-stroke oil and gasoline. The square of foil is passed to the girl and she holds it, her face stricken in this moment of choice. Her hand shakes, fluttering the foil like a leaf on an autumn tree.
“You think weed is amazing, Casey, this stuff is insane,” Scott says.
He smiles. His eyes are lit up like LED lights. They are vacuums that suck her into his private world. He owns a confidence she can’t quite understand.
“What about Travis?” Casey says. “He tried to kill his mom, I heard.”
“Travis did too much,” Scott says. “You got to be smart. Hold the lighter there just for a minute and you’ll see. You don’t have to sit in your basement for two days and smoke it all to yourself.”
“Anyway, Travis was always a little crazy,” someone says, and they all laugh.
The teens who have smoked start giggling, lost in a shared joke. The girl hesitates, but she looks over at Scott, this boy with the killer smile, and she doesn’t want to disappoint him. She holds the hollow Bic pen between her teeth and sparks the lighter with a flick of her thumb. The little yellow flame heats the foil. Grey-white smoke lifts and curls in a wispy tendril, and she draws it away with the makeshift pipe.
She stands there in the dim garage. The roof pulls back like the screen on a convertible