Chapter
ARCHIE EMERGES FROM the Cathedral and shelters underneath the repeating carved-stone arches of its entrance. Leaden clouds grace the sky and pour out their misery on the greyed streets below with their grooves of streetcar tracks. Cars hiss by, throwing up walls of dirty water at pedestrians approaching the intersection of King and Church. Some don’t hop out of the way, blinded by their umbrellas that they’re holding forward to guard them against the wind and sky water. Archie hauls his khaki-coloured Tilley hat out of his jacket’s cavernous bottom right-hand pocket. With both hands, he pulls it down over his head and neatens the brim. Archie pulls up his collar and hunches his shoulders as he leaves the safety of the vaulted entrance and enters the downpour. Rain charges the surrounding air, drumming on his brim, and washes the streets, cleansing them of oil, gasoline, litter, and all the detritus of humans. Un-soldier-like, he stuffs his hands into his jacket’s slit pockets behind its outer pockets and strides south towards Lake Ontario, the mighty body of water that anchors the city along its southern edge and, on hot days, has a slightly seaweed-and-fishy odour.
Water. After the desert and heat of Afghanistan, after the vast distances of sun-dried landscapes of his home state, Toronto with its lake of many moods and dangerous ocean-like behaviour refreshes him. It quenches his thirst for escape, for succour, for renewal. Rain will energize the waves and sluice the odours, Archie hopes as he hastens southward.
Archie strides around pedestrians blinded by umbrellas to oncoming people. He steps out of the way of cyclists pedalling on the sidewalk, weaving between old and young, keeping a safe distance from the drivers speeding and lane changing their way to work. He swerves around strollers covered in plastic domes and doesn’t miss a pace in his mission to get to the water. He turns left at the Esplanade and walks swiftly through intersections where cars wait impatiently for their lights to turn green. Archie keeps walking east through a social housing neighbourhood, the like of which he’d not seen until he’d arrived in Toronto. During Archie’s welcoming tour, Andrew had described the St. Lawrence neighbourhood as ground-breaking for its day; this social housing initiative was clearly a point of pride for Andrew, who felt the obligation to look after battle-scarred men and women extending into the state’s obligation for taking care of its needy. This is who Andrew is, Archie thinks as he raises his head and scans the attractive housing, its greenery now flattened underneath November’s dripping cold.
Archie lowers his head again and watches his black booted feet pound out the one-two rhythm as he heads toward the Distillery District. His hands remove themselves from his pockets almost subconsciously to keep strident time with his feet. His feet angle him automatically toward the path that runs alongside a large fenced green space, currently a landscape of mud and flattened browning grass. The rain eases its onslaught, and Archie lifts his head to feel the diminishing lashing of cold drops against his tanned face. The steady pinging sends up electrical signals throughout his skin, eliciting answering signals deep within him. I’m a soldier, I’ve fought many battles. I’ve been in firefights, driven long distances along tracks that’re merely beaten ribbons in the landscape. I’ve walked and driven for hours and hours with IEDs threatening to explode underneath me at any moment. Imminent mortality; imminent loss of legs or arms.
I fought well, Archie mouths.
I have that medal in my chest to prove it.
I hate it.
Archie’s lips draw back in disgust, for the medal speaks to him of the friends he supposedly saved and what he had to do to survive the US Army’s 5th Combat Brigade Team. Archie commands himself to ignore the rain that suddenly feels like fingers flicking his face and to ignore the answering irritation within himself. He strides forward faster, trying to out-walk, out-soldier the irritation whose purpose seems to be to enrage him. He flies out of the fenced-off path onto the concrete sidewalk and onto the road. Archie cannot halt his momentum. Cars blast horns and brake, skidding on the road’s water film. Archie senses a red car coming at him, stains of rain meandering like blood spatter across its hood; its hood plunges in the driver’s adrenaline-fuelled stomping of his brakes. Wiper blades swoosh across the windshield in their steady back-and-forth, back-and-forth. Archie watches the front wheels as the car skids right up to his legs. His mind and heart blank. The car stops with barely a whisper against his pants.
Tingling crawls across Archie’s cheeks, pulling his gaze up towards the driver, his torso twisting at the hips to follow suit. Anger contorts the driver’s face. Suddenly, the man’s face dissolves into horror. The window whirs down, and the driver sticks his head out. “I’m sorry, man. I almost hit you. You survive over there, and I almost hit you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Archie blinks back into consciousness. He stuffs his hands back into his pockets. Canadians. Archie’s heard sorry so many times in his walks around the city, but this one…Archie shakes his head ruefully. He cannot believe it. He’s at fault in his heedless escape from the irritation within him, and this man is sorry? Archie opens his mouth, but no words come. The man is telling him he’s grateful for what he’s done for his country. Did Archie do it for Canada? For his own country, America? Or did he do it for himself? Archie’s not sure. It’s Remembrance Day, and he doesn’t want to remember that long-ago day on his eighteenth birthday when he’d left his house and his mother’s shouted “happy birthdays” and his father’s “you’re a man now, time to act like one” behind and beelined to the local US Army office to enlist. He’d exchanged an artificially cold house, its kitchen emanating chili spice and vanilla sweetness, for an echoing sterile building redolent of floor cleaner, hoping military regimen would take him farther away. He didn’t care where he trained, where he shipped out. The only family he’d miss was Pawpaw. When Pawpaw had left his birthday party, extra slices of birthday cake in hand for later, Archie had taken it as his cue to leave for the enlistment office. He’d take care of figuring out how he and his grandfather would keep in touch. He had had plans, so many plans, about how he was going to buy Pawpaw a computer, how he was going to teach him how to use email, how he and his father would—
A horn blast. A shout, “He’s a veteran, you moron, don’t you know what day it is?! If he wants to stand in the middle of the road, let him. We can wait!”
Archie nods at the driver who almost hit him, who’s now shouting at the driver behind him mashing his car horn in one long angry blast, to let him know he’s thankful for his patience, and bolts, shaking off the memories.
Archie doesn’t want to remember.
Archie’s booted feet hit the Distillery District’s cobblestones, and he barely notices the change from flat concrete to the uneven ground of rain-marooned bricks. He’s not sure where he’s headed; he’s letting his boots lead him on. There isn’t anyone here. The District’s lanes and streets are empty as people have found shelter inside its many stores and coffee shops. Walking on the cobblestoned streets is like entering the past; Archie slows down, letting the unhurried pace of this empty place bind him into its timelessness.
Archie emerges from the long wide lane fenced in by the old distillery buildings into the cobblestoned street that cuts the district in half along the north-south axis. Archie hesitates as the sky lightens, and the rain peters into drizzle. He slides his hands out of his pockets and stands at ease, scanning the area, scrutinizing the odd person hurrying from one building to another or out to Mill Street, arms bent at right angles, coffee cups in their hands. He shakes his head at the superficiality of busyness. Archie feels like an alien, a person who can never be that coffee-cup holder, who can’t afford the daily $6 latte or the normalcy of carrying a cup of coffee without fear of it being smacked out of his hand because he wasn’t paying attention.
Archie draws his brows together and strides forward in hidden rage. He whips his legs one-two, one-two north along this pedestrian-only street then east along the cobblestoned lane toward Cherry Street. He hits its concrete sidewalk at almost a run, swerves right, and arrives at Lakeshore Boulevard in under five minutes. He jogs through the multi-laned traffic zipping underneath the concrete underside of the Gardiner Expressway and enters a ragged, neglected area west of Cherry filled with weeds and screed that he’d discovered a few months earlier. Archie hastens towards its water’s industrial edge. Finally, he’s there.
Archie’s right hand strays underneath his jacket towards his Sig’s grip.
I can’t shoot here.
Archie remembers another spot, far away from anyone or any place where he practices on targets of old, fallen trunks of trees. But not here where there are lake freighters at docks and tug boats could appear—and the port with its police and customs officers who could recognize the sound of his pistol.
Archie aches to shoot.
But he cannot.
Archie had promised Andrew. And a man keeps his word. What kind of man would he be if he broke his promise? Resentment soaks Archie’s heart in bile at Andrew once again extracting from him a promise to meet him, and worst of all, today, to meet him at the Cenotaph where he must remember, where people will spot his dress uniform pants, his military jacket, his poppy—
Archie searches inside his upper left-hand jacket pocket for the poppy Andrew had insisted that he must pin on and adjured him not to lose. Yes, the poppy’s still there, he reassures himself. Its pin pricks him sharply; Archie retrieves his injured finger hastily. He doesn’t suck on it, for the pain has left his mind.
Archie stands at attention. The familiar stance brings comfort into his soul. His eyes rove the industrial area with its wind-roughened water slapping against the rust-red hull of the docked lake freighter; the Toronto Islands with its far-off trees being stripped of their leaves; and, across the harbour from the Islands, the soaring glass and gold buildings of Toronto’s financial district, impervious to wind and rain, punctuated by the sky-thrusting spire of the CN Tower. Archie empties his mind, but memories sneak in. Words and sounds, sensations of heat from oil and metal on fire and of the cold of a desert night, of his mother’s wail when she’d called him on his flip phone and he’d inadvertently blurted out to her: “He’s dead.”
Archie shifts his feet. His vision fills with blood and brains, a blasted-off leg lying across vehicle debris, powdered with Afghanistan dust. The flashback suffocates his chest. He hyperventilates, struggling against his brain cycling air in and out rapidly, gasping for rescue, to replace the remembered sweet-sourness of blood and death with the freshness of wind-stormed water. A lake freighter’s baritone horn resounds off his chest, blasting away the waves of memory. Archie blinks rapidly and refocuses on the reality before him of grey clouds upon grey clouds, of iron-grey water huffing up and down near his feet, of the grey concrete that lines the channel he’s standing near…
Relief.
Archie feels nothing. And that’s how Archie prefers living his story, hidden from even himself.