at all. Except that you happened to borrow an iPod that was stolen. Let me ask you this — does this Ephraim sell stolen goods?”
Ked shot his father an angry look. The rebelliousness returned to his face. “No! He just bought it from some guy!”
“Would you calm down, please?”
“Why should I calm down? You’re accusing my friends, Dad. I know Eph, and Eph would never purposely handle stolen goods.”
“Then why did he have it?” The argument was turning circular.
“Who would turn down an iPod for thirty five dollars?” Ked screamed.
“Didn’t it occur to him that a thirty-five-dollar iPod might be stolen property?” Dan’s voice sounded angrier than he’d intended.
“Apparently not,” Ked said, his eyes misting over. “You don’t believe me either. You don’t trust me!” The hurt in his face was apparent. “I always tell you the truth and you don’t trust me!”
He took the stairs three at a time. Dan heard his bedroom door slam.
Kendra was inclined to reserve judgment on the question of whether Ked had known the iPod was stolen property.
“I mean, think about it, Dan. He’s always told us the truth, hasn’t he?”
“Of course.”
“Well, sometimes at that age you don’t think about the consequences of things.”
“That age, nothing! He can’t afford not to think,” Dan snapped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is really rattling me.”
“It’s all right. I’m sure there are things here for both of us to learn.”
That was Kendra — all about learning things when the world was falling apart. Still, Dan admitted, it was better than falling apart with it. “It’s just that kids sometimes do stupid things. I’m not saying he was stealing, but maybe he simply turned a blind eye to what his friends do.”
“Then this will be a lesson he won’t soon forget,” Kendra said softly. “Come on, it’s not the end of the world.”
“This could be on his record for a very long time — guilty or not, it doesn’t matter.”
“I know.” Kendra sighed. “But we’ve gone this far without these troublesome parent-teenager issues, so I think we’ve done a pretty good job, all round.” She paused. “No — you’ve done a good job. I’ve mostly been sitting on the sidelines reaping the rewards. So try to remember that before you beat yourself up over this.”
The issue lingered like a dark cloud, with Ked suspended from school. His friend had quickly cleared him of all suspicion regarding ownership of the iPod, but the issue of stolen property remained. Then suddenly, the day turned bright again. The school principal called to apologize to Ked and his family, dismissing the terms of suspension and asking Ked to return to school. That same day Ephraim’s mother produced a receipt from a pawnshop showing she’d bought the item legally, and all charges were dropped against the boys.
Dan was glad to have the issue resolved, but in that time his son remained edgy with him, tense and barely communicative, as though in Ked’s mind Dan had gone beyond some sort of acceptable parent-son boundaries.
Twenty
Sid and Nancy
Known locally as “the 69,” the highway to Sudbury does little to prepare you for the city itself. True, the farther north you go the more barren the terrain becomes as the Canadian Shield rises from the earth like a giantess spreading her apron to shelter a multitude of stunted children, the towns and cities marginalized and tethered on the periphery of the land. Offering boreal forests in the south and tundra to the north, the Shield is better known for its abundant mineral deposits and the mining communities that have exploited them for more than a century.
The landscape had changed greatly since Dan’s time. Much of the change was positive in ecological terms, undoing years of bad. The International Nickel Company’s much-vaunted Superstack, a 1,247-foot, concrete chimney, had been built not long after Dan was born, as if to commemorate his arrival. The poisons and pollutants that once blanketed the town were now sent spinning into the atmosphere at an altitude high enough to cut Sudbury’s pollution by more than ninety percent. His aunt recalled days when she’d had a raw throat all summer long from the sulphur emissions, conjuring images of ash films that blackened the snow outside her basement apartment in winter.
For miles around, forests had strangled on the noxious by-products of mining, the conifers turning rust-red as their needles dropped and the plants slowly died. The region’s pink-grey granite turned black with soot and the vegetation crawled farther and farther into the bush while lakes filled with acid and the fish population shrank and died. With the coming of the Superstack that suddenly stopped, as urban centres to the south began to report mysterious lines of yellow haze scrawling across the sky. Even Inco’s reinvented Tower of Babel couldn’t whitewash the filthy scud away forever. It had to come down somewhere.
To a child, Sudbury had seemed an intricate playground of things gone wonderfully awry: houses jutting from mountainsides, car-sized boulders in basements with washing machines and furnaces tucked around these incongruences. Buildings pitched and tilted to the sway of winding streets, as though the Crooked Man who’d built a Crooked House had returned with a vengeance to construct an entire derelict, lopsided town crowned by the searing gold spill of slag dumps, a magisterial ring of fire poured down nightly on the Earth.
Local legend saw the town nested in the crater of an extinct volcano, just waiting for the return of the fiery forces to extinguish it again. Geologists speculated it was the site of a giant meteor crash that gave the area its vast iron and nickel ore deposits. Years of annual spring floods led some to conjecture that the downtown was in actuality a giant swamp, as water rose over the streets with their smattering of English and French names that mingled New and Old World history: LaSalle, Elgin, Wellington, and the generic but obligatory catch-alls of King and Queen. Who the hell Frood was, no one seemed to know or care. At times the floods were so severe they seemed to be mocking the city planners until they put their heads together in the mid-sixties and devised a drainage system that dealt with the problem once and for all.
Despite its problems, Sudbury affected a sense of homegrown achievement. Schoolchildren recited proudly how prior to the first Apollo moon launch the flight crew trained in the terrain around the city because it resembled the lunar landscape closely enough to launch an astronaut’s career in earnest.
But if Sudbury was the moon by proxy, then the Flourmill District was the dark side of that moon, an industrial, monochromatic soot-on-soot neighbourhood of the type that sprawled throughout England in Victorian times, finally slouching across the ocean to end up reborn as a living museum exiled in northern Ontario ever after. It made the gritty black-and-white misery of other industrial centres seem like a dove’s cry.
Dan pictured the cold-water flat without a bathtub where for years he’d washed in a sink with a tap that never entirely turned off, and whose drips left a turquoise stain on the ceramic basin, just a few streets over from the colossal concrete towers that sat like a giant six-pack of dynamite behind his home. The nearest of the six bore an irregular hole the size of a small child just a few feet above the ground. Lore had it the flourmill had once been set for destruction. The hole, it was said, offered testimony to the fact that even explosives
