Slow Recoil Read Free

malignant rust along the wheel wells, and the clouds of pungent dark smoke that belched from its rear-end upon ignition, McKelvey had never really prepared himself for this eventuality. Now it seemed as though the machine’s entire organ system was shutting down in succession: transmission, timing belt, radiator, water pump…
    McKelvey’s rested his elbows on the dark wood of the bar, grooves worn deep. He circled a few promising listings. There was a Honda Civic alleged to have been driven solely by an “elderly female”, as though that explained everything or anything. Another promoted the mind-boggling economical merits of a Suzuki. He said the word aloud—“Suzuki”—and asked the bartender, a former minor league hockey enforcer named Huff Keegan, about the specific model mentioned in the advertisement. The young man was a trunk of solid muscle, thick-chested like a farmer’s son, and his face, at just thirty, looked as though it had been put through a grinder both frontwards and backwards. There were incalculable scars, grey and white flecks peppered across his eyebrows and the bridge of his crooked nose. He shook his big head and laughed.
    â€œDoes it come with a can opener?” Huff said.
    â€œIs that the model with the lawn mower engine?”
    â€œGood on gas. Great for parking downtown,” the bartender said as he filled a patron’s mug with amber Stella Artois. “Probably have to bring your groceries home one bag at a time, though.”
    â€œI suppose I could always get a roof rack,” McKelvey said.
    â€œAnd maybe a trailer,” Huff added.
    â€œJesus, I hate this,” McKelvey said. He took his pen, scratched out the circled ads, folded the paper under his arm, and got up from his bar stool. “Maybe I’ll just get a goddamned bicycle and a pair of those Spandex shorts.”
    He paid up his tab, said goodnight to Huff, and stepped into the night. One block over, streetcars shooked along their tracks, moving across then up the city through old Cabbagetown, where the earliest and poorest immigrants had carved a life, then on past the gay village at Church and Wellesley. It was a beautiful evening of late summer. The air was dry and still. It was the sort of evening that reminded McKelvey there was hay being cut somewhere beyond the suffocating concrete and chrome of this city, large round bales left standing in fields like something constructed and abandoned by an earlier civilization.
    This was the long weekend that brought with it the end of summer, if not officially, then at least psychologically. It was the Jerry Lewis telethon during which the hundred-year-old comedian removed parts of his tuxedo in hourly increments, mopping the sweat from his face with a balled-up hankie. It was the harried mothers with their bratty kids at the office supply store, baskets piled high with binders and pencil cases, ruled paper wrapped in plastic. McKelvey remembered how his own boy could never fall asleep on that final Monday night before the start of another school year.
    â€œI’ve got a tummy ache,” Gavin would say.
    Or it was a headache. Or German measles. The sudden affliction of polio.
    It was an area in which McKelvey felt a kinship with the child, for he had also detested that final sleep before entering the battlefield of another school year. Wondering which burned-out teacher you’d get stuck with, rating their defects on a scale—I’ll trade halitosis for dandruff, body odour for the stench of half-digested vodka. He would stare at the shadows on the ceiling, willing some natural disaster of biblical proportions. But his hometown in the north knew no floods or tempests. The deep freeze of winter was broken up by a couple of months of moderate summer. The closest they came in Ste. Bernadette to an act of God were the infinite blankets of blackflies that hatched in early May like the spawn of hell itself. McKelvey