Читать книгу The Devil's Dust - C.B. Forrest - Страница 11

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 sports car, and sunshine pours in like golden summer-day warmth, and she feels so good, so light and happy, like Christmas morning and your birthday, too, and the boy with the killer smile is right there with her.

A brassy light streams through the window and fills the small kitchen of the bungalow where Constable Ed Nolan stands fixing a cup of tea. The hand stirring sugar in the steaming cup freezes there while he gets lost in memory, tripped or snagged. He seems to be doing this a lot lately, simply getting stuck in mid-thought or mid-stride, sitting there with a forkful of potatoes or a coffee cup hovering three inches from his lips. How long he stands here with the spoon in the cup, he has no idea — thirty seconds or six minutes, it is all the same. And then, as though released from the binds of a magical spell, his hand begins to work again. This condition is not the result of the recent concussion, he knows, for it dates back more than a year, to those long days when he straddled his job and tended to a mother dying in a hospital a hundred kilometres down the highway, all while watching his father slide into the void of dementia. The concussion, in addition to this newfound worry for the fate of his town, has likely only piled onto the tail end of a bad year. Ed Nolan knows that he needs a vacation, a break away from this place. If he is honest, he knows he must leave altogether one day, or face a life of loneliness and slow suffocation. The truth is, he can’t leave. Not while the kids in town are in danger from this new, dark stranger called methamphetamine.

Nolan stands now with his back against the counter and surveys the room — his mother’s needlepoint designs of deer and flowers in country fields, the framed religious verses, the dozens of spice and herb jars organized in alphabetical order. He brings the cup of tea and walks through the living room. Once cluttered with bric-a-brac of all varieties, clunky furniture picked up by his bargain-hunting father at yard sales and church fundraisers, awful oil paintings created by the wife of a mining friend, the room is now as sparse as a monastery. He is slowly, tediously working his way through the house one room at a time, a machine that cleans and clears. The walls are blank, the shag carpet has been rolled away. His father has no memory of these rooms, or this house even, except the odd and seemingly random blurting out of a snapshot, something shared here or there one Christmas, a Sunday in June of 1983. Nolan wonders now if the fog that has settled on his brain like a rag dosed in chloroform is similar to what happened to his father in those early months. The days when he sat across from this once seemingly omnipotent man with the tight biceps, the neck muscles taut and corded, and had to remind him what a knife and fork were for.

He taps softly three times at the bedroom, a habit and societal ritual that overrides the reality that his father likely can’t comprehend the notion of privacy. He slips inside the room and the stale air mugs him like a hand over his mouth and nose. The floor is planted with clumps of dirty clothes, old bedding, and he feels guilty and ashamed. The day is quickly approaching when he will need to make the call and have his father taken to a nursing home in Timmins or Sudbury, perhaps somewhere even farther away.

“I have your tea, Dad,” he says, and steps over some clothes to the night table.

Nolan can hardly breath, the air is so ripe. He moves to the window and opens it a few inches. He will take the risk of letting sub-zero air into the room, despite the fact his father now lies in bed and is at constant risk of developing pneumonia. A slice of cold winter air does in fact immediately change the temperature. He closes the window and turns back to his father.

“I have to go to work, Dad,” Nolan says. “We have problems … new problems here in Ste. Bernadette. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. The whole world has changed.”

His father doesn’t respond, and makes no move for the tea. Nolan listens for a moment, believing he may have heard his father make a sound, but there is nothing. The son can’t recall the last time the father spoke his name, or any word for that matter. Nolan nods, as though he is once again accepting that it is simply the right thing for a son to do, to make that call. Breaking the promise his father made him make when Nolan’s mother was sick — that he would never, under any circumstances, surrender him to a nursing home, that he would be afforded the simple luxury of passing away in his own bed — this is something Nolan will have to live with.