The Devil's Dust by C.B. Forrest Read Free Book Online Page B

and everyone in his life. There was a strange sense of relief in knowing that his swirling vortex could no longer harm the ones he loved. He had only himself to drive crazy.
    It was in the midst of this newfound solitude that The Diagnosis arrived. He had expected it, and yet it was still a surprise. A sucker punch you were sort of waiting for as you stepped into a darkened room — it was coming, you just didn’t know when or from where. He read the brochures he was handed, and he sat on the couch in his condo and thought about things he had never hoped to think about. His mind got caught on the notion of religion, and what those people were getting that he wasn’t. Hope or blind stupidity, he couldn’t tell which. And he thought, too, of taking matters into his own hands, to switch the tables here and gain a modicum of control. He understood himself sufficiently to know that he lacked any sort of grace required to surrender, to lie down and wait out the last hours on a regimen of hospital rice pudding and visitors lying to your face about your prospects. He wanted to go quietly, but he was too loud, always had been. Crashing and banging, kicking and fighting. And he realized the fundamental truth of the equation: you walk ten miles into the woods, you’ve got to walk ten miles out .
    McKelvey spent the first two months following the shootings in and out of the police headquarters on College Street, the offices of the Crown attorney, the Special Investigations Unit, answering and not answering questions for hours on end. He grudgingly spent a small fortune on a lawyer who helped him navigate the minefield. He drew rudimentary diagrams of the plant, where they had entered, where they had been ambushed, where the bodies had fallen. It was during this time that McKelvey’s drinking took on a new and darker nature. It was the sort of drinking that had somewhere and somehow edged across a line, something to be reckoned with. It was the sort of drinking that felt more like need than want , and he found himself drinking more and more at home, sitting on his couch or at the desk by the window overlooking the alleyway, trying to write things down in this journal, figure out what had happened to his boy and his own life. Those hours of total solitude wherein the drinking became measured, steady, like medicine dripping from an IV into a patient’s arm. He was rarely drunk, or perhaps he was almost always drunk, at least to some degree, and he finally understood the concept of alcoholic tolerance . He found that he could drink a six-pack of beer and half a mickey of Jameson between eleven and three, and then pull on his sports coat and head downstairs to Garrity’s Pub in time for happy hour. He could slip inside the stream of after-work drinkers buzzing within the glow of their first drink, and he could carry on as though he’d perhaps only had a beer or two on his way over. He rarely changed, in terms of demeanour or mood, and the bartenders and waitresses called him a “good drinker,” as though it were a profession in which one could proudly excel or perhaps receive certification. When the alcohol lost its ability to extract him from himself completely — the way a dentist made your tooth numb before drilling — it was then that he turned back to the pills and their promise of disconnection.
    He was no professional, and in the end it was mixing the two potions that got him into trouble. He quit drinking on a Tuesday night in late December, having found himself earlier that morning sprawled on the bathroom floor, drool gluing his cheek to the tiles, one arm frozen asleep from being tucked at an awkward angle behind his back. Fully dressed, one shoe on and missing a sock, the light burning above the sink. He sat up and felt his face, his teeth, his pockets for his wallet. There was no cash left, but his credit cards and ID were all there. And he pulled out a mess of folded receipts and