in the closet right now. But it’s too crowded with my shoes.”
“Ah, I see. Gorley Robinson who lives in the closet. Well, we’ll see...”
McKelvey could reach out and touch the little boy’s face, smell the chocolate milk on his breath—he was there, just there, and for a moment his mind played the cruelest trick. He sat up in the bed. The room was silent save for the quiet tick of a clock on a night table. Soft light from the street lamps outside bled through the Venetian blinds, painting slanted shadows across the wall. McKelvey lifted a wavering hand and reached out, blinking to clear his sight, but then Gavin was gone, faded or retreated. And he was left alone with the tormented thoughts of a guilty man, all of the rhetorical questions gathered across a lifetime hanging there in an empty room. Why had he not even considered getting bunk beds?
If I could go back, he thought, I would build the thing myself. The best bunk bed in the neighbourhood, all the kids would want to sleep over at Gavin McKelvey’s...
He could see the lengths of pine, how the ladder would fit against the side with a set of brackets, and a runner so that you could slide it back and forth. He settled back onto the bed and closed his eyes tight. He felt the sting of a tear roll from the corner of his eye and slide down his cheek to the pillow. He tucked his hands between his knees to rock himself, and in this way he negotiated sleep.
The alarm sounds, and McKelvey slaps the top of the little black box, giving himself the gift of another eight minutes of lostness. When the second buzzer sounds, he finally opens his eyes and stares at the stucco on the ceiling with its familiar shadows. He collects his bearings; is it Tuesday or Wednesday? Time shifts, and days melt into weeks. Mondays are born and suddenly bloom into Friday afternoons. There is comfort to be found in the mundane routines.
He pulls himself from the cocoon of covers, steps numbly into the shower, slides a razor down his face, pats his cheeks with whatever cologne Caroline bought him for Christmas last year. He stands in front of the fogged mirror dabbing a piece of tissue on a nick. Stands back to adjust the sports coat that is too tight in the armpits. He feels hot, stuffy. He practices nodding, smiling a few times, until he feels like a meteorologist on a local cable channel, searching for a middle ground between contrived and genuine. And so he meets the day...
McKelvey stood there in front of the mirror the same as he did every morning, adjusting and re-adjusting his tie. And still it was too short, three inches above his belt line. He undid the tangle and worked at it again. His thick fingers—ode to a few generations of McKelvey manual laborers, miners mostly—were not designed for this sort of fine work. He had never slipped a tie around his neck and made it the correct length in one attempt; it was always an event, a flail of silk. How many years had he been doing this, for godsake? Caroline used to laugh at him and, when he was old enough, Gavin, too. The kid said his fingers were like fat sausages...
“Sausages,” McKelvey said aloud, and was startled by the sound of his own voice.
Finally satisfied with the result, he brushed a few flakes of dandruff from the shoulders of his navy sports coat and regarded himself for a moment. He thought he looked old and heavy, and he was heavy, over two-fifteen now. There were pouches beneath his blue eyes, dark circles, bloodshot eyes. His face was evolving, morphing into his father’s face. The same width, the same creases at the jowls, the same wrinkles across the forehead from a lifetime of scowling. He leaned in to check his teeth, and they looked the way old people’s teeth begin to look: narrowing, dying. He hadn’t slept well, his mind working through the coming events of the day. It was to be a day of reckoning. At last, a beacon at the end of the long dark road. All of the work, all of the tears, all of the silent angst bottled under pressure. Two years of bulldog determination, countless hours of unpaid overtime logged pouring over files, drawing the connections. He had pushed it as far as he could push it, working angles from the sidelines, and the doggedness had brought him to the point of being written up for accessing files without authorization. The files concerned the murder investigation of his son, so Aoki had let the infraction begin and end at her desk. It was one cop doing another cop a favour. Any father would be interested in his son’s murder investigation, more so if the father happened to be the police. But even so, McKelvey believed there was some word out there about his level of interest in the whole thing, the way he came at things. He was aware that some people spoke of him in a certain light.
He passed through the kitchen and downed the last of his cold black coffee. He set the mug in the sink and grabbed his long coat from its hook in the hall. He was warming up his old red Mazda pickup when he was startled by a knock on the window. He turned and looked into the face of his neighbour, Carl Seeburger, who was standing there with his wispy silver hair glowing like a baby’s down in the back light of the rising dawn. The old German had been their neighbour for just eighteen months now, having replaced a longtime and affable family by the name of Dewar. For eighteen months, he and McKelvey and some of the others on the street had battled sporadically, and sometimes loudly, over the trio of dogs that Seeburger kept, without much apparent attention, in his backyard. McKelvey rolled the window down without smiling.
“Did I forget my lunch bag again?” McKelvey said.
Seeburger’s lips began to work and, as always, a tiny white froth appeared at the corners of his mouth. He crossed his long arms across his chest and said, although it sounded more like a direct accusation, “Did you call the city about my dogs?”
“Jesus Christ. It’s seven o’clock, Carl, you should be in bed,” McKelvey said, and immediately began to roll the window back up, move his foot to the clutch.
Seeburger, dressed in faded grey work pants that were a little too short, and a worn red and blue flannel shirt and suspenders, stepped closer to the truck. He was a tall man, and he had to bend down to level his face with the window. McKelvey caught a whiff of strong cheese and wool. Even though he had apparently been living in the country for forty years now, Seeburger’s accent was still thick and harsh. Is sounded to McKelvey like a machine cutting and splicing. McKelvey believed it spoke to the man’s stubborn refusal to go with the flow.
“Just because you work for the city, you think that gives you the right to use your connections to hassle tax-paying citizens? This is a free country, Mr. McKelvey, and I will not be treated like a criminal. If I choose to own dogs, that is my right. Protected by the Constitution. And if you have any more problems with my dogs, I would wish that you would be man enough to address me directly rather than use your connections to have me harassed by the city by-law office.”
It was the right morning, or it was the alignment of the stars. Or it was just the way McKelvey felt lately. As though he were functioning in a sort of suspended animation. Everything was as in a dream, and he couldn’t think anything through with clarity. Anything could happen. McKelvey moved his right hand to ensure the stick shift was in park, then popped his seatbelt and was out of the vehicle standing toe to toe with his neighbour. Seeburger stepped back, his eyes blinking with anticipation.
“Listen, let’s get something straight here,” McKelvey said and pointed an index finger. “I hate your fucking dogs, Carl. I really do. I wish death upon their ugly howling heads every night when I close my eyes and try to fall asleep in a neighbourhood that until eighteen months ago was a goddamned piece of heaven. Secondly, I don’t have any connections with the bylaw office, and even if I did, I wouldn’t require the use of said connections, because I would take care of things myself. I’m not beyond getting my hands dirty. In fact, I enjoy it from time to time.”
“Oh,
