Slow Recoil

SLOW
RECOIL

SLOW
RECOIL

C.B. Forrest

Text © 2010 C.B. Forrest

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

Cover design by Emma Dolan
Author photo by Stephanie Smith

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

      

RendezVous Crime
an imprint of Napoleon & Company
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
www.napoleonandcompany.com

Printed in Canada

14 13 12 11 10      5 4 3 2 1

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

For Abby

–
Who never ceases to amaze me.

CONTENTS

July, 1995

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

JULY, 1995

A farm field outside
Kravica, Bosnia-Herzegovina

T
he men—although to say “men” is inaccurate, for many of them are just boys—stand in rows, stripped to the waist. Their flesh is stark white except on their faces and arms where the sun has touched. They are terrified of the unknown—or worse, the expected—their chests working like bellows as they try to sort out what comes next, how this works. As though the logistics matter. The bus ride offered time to think, too much time, and it seemed it was true after all, how your life really did flash before your eyes. Or at least these bits and pieces. Moments of happiness, tears, first sex and first cigarettes, the simple pleasure of a smile induced at a moment when needed most, a bottle raised in celebration. Sons, daughters, wives. Fathers, mothers, holidays, and smells of cooking, of home. All of the small gestures we take for granted across a lifetime.

Even as they are coming off the bus, they hear the gunshots. The crack that breaks across the skyline. Pungent cordite hanging in the air. The stink of death is unmistakable, sweet sickness wafting in the light summer breeze. For they all know what death smells like after these years of war, neighbour to neighbour, street to street, house to house.
My god, the things we
have done to one another…

This one thinks briefly of trying to make a run for it—perhaps there is something nobler in being shot while attempting to flee. But there is no time. Their captors are efficient, mechanical, managing this as though it were a line in a factory. Drill here, move the thing down the line. Drill. Next. Drill. Next…

The shots report, and the men jump, expectant. Tense. Blindfolded. They wait. Hear the jagged breathing of the men in front and behind, the whimpering of these big men you schooled with and lived with and drank with, and the shots make you jump, and there is no dignity to be salvaged in this place, not here, not now.

Hear the bodies folding to the ground like dropped bags of chicken seed.

You're crying, too, and you don't want to give them this final piece of your possession.

To face this chin up, shoulders back, is all you want to do. But it is hard, the hardest thing you have ever done in a life that has never been what you would call easy—though right now you would trade the worst day of your past for one more tomorrow.

Even to will your legs to move ahead takes energy, focus.

Crack!

And it will be your turn now to anticipate the slow recoil of the final shot.

I should be dead by now, but there is work to do.

- Czeslaw Milosz

PROLOGUE

H
e was sitting on a bench at Queen's Quay watching the late-summer tourists stroll along the Toronto harbourfront with their cameras and their holiday smiles, just sitting there with a soft-serve ice cream cone melting down the side of his hand, when he heard the screams for help. A girl's voice, shrill. He sat bolt upright, turning his head to decipher the location of the distress. A flash of movement, a commotion within a gaggle of people gathered on the dock beside one of those tourist charter boats that charged a fortune for a two-hour putter around the harbour. McKelvey dropped the cone, closing the distance in a dozen fast strides.

He came to the dock area just short of the Amsterdam foot bridge. Couples sat reading magazines on the decks of moored sailboats or were busy tidying ropes to set sail for a sunset cruise out past the quaintness of Toronto Island. Some of them stopped what they were doing and looked around, unaware of what exactly was taking place. McKelvey spotted a woman in her early thirties pointing frantically at the green-blue water.

“My daughter fell in!” she screamed. “I can't swim!
Please!
”

McKelvey saw it, the flail of arms, tangled dark hair like a mess of seaweed out there in the water a few metres off the bow of a yacht painted blue and white. He beat a young man who was taking too long to kick off his sneakers and jumped feet first into the space between the boats. The water was colder than he would have guessed. When he broke the surface, he saw the girl had slipped under, likely having panicked and swallowed a mouthful. He took three or four strong strokes and reached beneath the water with both hands, raking the darkness. His own breath was coming short now. He took a long haul and let himself drop beneath the water line. He opened his eyes to the murk, the silt too thick to see more than a foot in front of his face. It stung his eyes like vinegar. The world shimmered above in the dull silver of muted daylight. His fingers made contact with a patch of hair, and he pulled the girl to himself, using his legs to propel them this last distance to the surface. He came up, vacuumed air into his lungs like life itself and coughed a little. He pulled them towards the dock with a one-armed breast stroke, his other arm locked in a V around her head to keep it above the water.

The girl was limp in his grasp. She was light, maybe forty-five pounds, and McKelvey guessed about six or seven years old. A mop of thick black hair that for an instant, just a flicker, reminded him of his own boy's head of hair. The young man who had taken off his shoes was already in the water, halfway down a wrought iron ladder. He accepted the girl as McKelvey held her up, the frantic mother already there. He pulled himself up the ladder just as the girl turned her head to expel a mouthful of Lake Ontario, then immediately started crying in a loud, shivering wail, teeth chattering, the mother threatening to crush the girl with her hugs. He heard the girl let out a belly-empty belch and knew that she'd be all right.

When it was done, he crouched on the hot pavement at the end of the dock to catch his breath, drenched clothes chilling his skin despite the strong sun. He could smell the stink of the lake on him, motor oil and algae, poison and piss. People were gathering in a large crowd now, tourists and passersby drawn by the current of human tragedy and excitement. The EMS workers came through with a folding stretcher and black medical kit that looked more like a large fishing tackle box. A middle-aged man from one of the sailboats came over and handed McKelvey a bath towel. He dried his hair and cleaned out his ears and wrapped the towel around his shoulders.

“That was a quick response,” the boater said, looking over at the mother and the daughter. He was dressed in pressed khaki shorts and navy golf shirt, the tanned face of a Bay Street trader who had retired at fifty to a life of sailing and country club golf. “Let me guess, you were a lifeguard when you were younger.”

“Something like that,” McKelvey said.

It was the six hundred and twenty-third day of his official retirement. And thirteen hours. Not that he was counting; not exactly. But still, he missed it. Getting wrapped up in the details of the work, the drive. That was it mostly, the sense of purpose the work had provided in his otherwise meandering life. Once again his mind's eye conjured an image of himself dressed in a blue smock, pushing shopping carts toward idiotic shoppers at the crack of dawn, a sickening smile plastered on his face. Have a nice day, asshole!

The
Sun
the following day carried on Page 5 McKelvey's reluctant picture and a brief article with the headline:
‘Shootout
Copper Pulls Girl from Harbour'.
A young reporter intent on bringing McKelvey's history into the story asked how it felt to save the life of a child, considering his own son's life had been taken by the hand of another almost four years ago. It was a good question. But McKelvey didn't have an answer. He could have told the fresh-faced scribe there were no scales at work in this conundrum. We trust in the laws of karma because we need to believe that what goes around does indeed come back around. In McKelvey's experience, it was a line of thinking that had delivered disappointment more often than not. Not that he was keeping score; not really. Sometimes it came easy, sometimes it came hard. Life was just what it was; no exchanges, no refunds. Down here, your good luck charms hold no sway…