Pierre was the student guide. And this was his first-ever class trip. He had put a lot of thought and effort into his presentation.
He waited until the bus hit the highway and he stood up and reached for the mic. He took a deep breath.
“We are going to Nouvelle France. And we are going to be there for four days. I want you to be adventurers. I want you to give me your five senses for four days.”
Instead of the rapt audience he had imagined, Pierre was greeted with the sounds of candy wrappers ripping, pop cans popping, Game Boys buzzing, iPods leaking, and snoring, from one of the parent volunteers.
Murphy turned to Sam and said, “Last year they went to the IMAX. Do you think we will go to the IMAX?”
The only people listening to Pierre were two girls sitting way up front who said, “Oui monsieur, oui monsieur,” right from the start, and who were now poring over Will Ferguson’s Canadian History for Dummies, apparently checking Pierre’s facts.
It was not the reception Pierre had imagined. But Pierre didn’t give up. Pierre kept going.
“The food we are going to eat is not the same as your parents’ food. I want you to taste the food. The houses are not your parents’ houses. They are made of stone. I want you to touch the stone walls. The French and the British built them two to three hundred years ago. I want you to smell the horses and buggies, and the smells coming out of the horses.”
Someone at the back of the bus made a fart noise and everyone laughed. Then Mark Portnoy put up his hand. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said loudly. And finally, everyone was listening.
“There is a toilet at the back,” said Pierre.
“It’s gross,” said Mark. “Can’t we stop at a Tim Hortons?”
The bus broke into applause.
In a few months’ time, after a few more trips, Pierre will recognize this kind of interruption as the perfect way to get the kids to listen. “Where,” he will ask, in a few more months, “do you think you would go to the bathroom, if you were in Quebec City three hundred years ago?”
That will get their attention. And once he gets it, he will continue.
“You’d go in the same place as the horses—in the street. I want you to smell the horses because that’s what it smelled like three hundred years ago. Smell the horses, taste the food, touch the stones and listen to the language that you will hear all around you.”
But this was Pierre’s first trip. And he didn’t say any of that. Pierre just sighed, and said, “We aren’t stopping for another two hours,” and he sat down and turned off the PA.
He had lost them. He wasn’t getting them back. And he knew it.
By mid-morning they were rolling through the rich and green valley of the Fleuve St-Laurent.
“One of the great rivers of the world,” said Pierre. He had been planning on telling all of the students about the river. Instead he was talking to the two girls sitting in the first row.
“Everything else on the continent goes north–south. This river flowing this way,” he pointed east along the highway, “made the idea of Canada possible.”
“Oh,” said one of the girls. She was looking toward the back of the bus. They were watching DVDs back there. Her history text had slipped to the floor.
At Gananoque they left the hustle of Highway 401 for the pastoral beauty of the Thousand Islands Parkway. Pierre pointed at a clump of green islands in the river.
“That’s Canada’s smallest national park,” he said. But the two girls had moved to the back of the bus. He was talking to the bus driver.
They passed Mallorytown, and Butternut Bay, and Cardinal, and they stopped by the Iroquois Lock to eat the picnic lunches their parents had packed them.
“Part of the St. Lawrence Seaway,” said Pierre, to no one in particular.
The sky was blue and the clouds were white and the world was perfect—made more so when an impossibly large laker glided through the lock, moving as smoothly as if it were on tracks. The boat was almost close enough to touch.
It was late afternoon before they closed in on Quebec City— North America’s only walled city. The breathtaking stone turrets and towers of the Château Frontenac guard the cliffs and cobblestones of old Quebec like an ancient castle. The Gibraltar of America.
Everyone was pressed to a window as the bus rolled onto the Quebec Bridge. Pierre reached for the microphone.
“Longest cantilevered bridge in the world,” said Pierre.
He waited until they were high above the river, about halfway across, and added, as if it was just an afterthought, “It has collapsed twice.”
That produced the first reaction Pierre got all afternoon.
The hotel that had been booked for the trip was a pension inside the walls of the old city. The floors were uneven, the stairways narrow. There was an elevator with a frayed green carpet decorated with gold fleurs-de-lys. The elevator looked as old as the city, and the fleurs-de-lys were like little worn moths. No more than two people with suitcases could ride in the elevator at the same time, and everyone except the two girls from the front of the bus banged their suitcases up the stairs.
The kids were billeted four to a room, two to a bed. They had half an hour to settle in to their rooms and argue about who was going to sleep with whom. Then they were to meet in the lobby.
There were signs on their beds that said Phone the front desk if you need more pillows. The kids felt like royalty. It took about five minutes before the woman at the front desk stopped answering the phone.
When they went downstairs, Pierre circled them up in the lobby. “We have an hour before dinner,” he said. “Go explore. No one go alone. And not beyond the Porte Saint-Jean or Rue Ste-Anne.”
They couldn’t believe it. Sure, most of them had been away from their parents before. A lot of them had even been to camp. But at camp there was always someone watching. At camp they never dropped you in some town and let you wander around unsupervised. It was beyond the realm of their imaginations. They stood in the lobby for a moment in shock. And then off they went. The shy ones stuck to the teachers. But most of them headed off in groups of two and three.
Peter Moore was like a cat let off a leash.
“Come on,” he said.
Murphy and Sam followed him out the front door of the hotel and down the street. Murphy led them into the first depanneur they saw.
“I want to get some Red Bull for tonight,” said Murphy.
“Look at this,” said Peter. Peter was holding the biggest plastic troll doll they had ever seen. It was almost two feet high and had bright-orange hair that stuck out in all directions. Its troll hands were perched on its hips.
Peter said, “Watch this.”
The troll’s eyes lit up and began to flash.
“There’s a button on the back of its head,” said Peter. “It’s only twenty-one dollars.”
At five o’clock they gathered in the hotel lobby and marched off like just another army set on conquering Quebec—up the Côte de la Fabrique, along Rue du Trésor. They stopped at Champlain’s statue in the Place d’Armes and then headed along the Rue St-Louis. Pierre pulled up in front of a little stone house with a steep red roof.
“Built in 1677,” he said as they marched into a restaurant that was much too good for them. Prix fixe: boeuf bourguignon, salad and dessert.
“This meat looks like dog food,” called a voice from the back.
Less than half of them ate their stew. But they all devoured their dessert—sugar pie.
At ten o’clock that night, Mr. Reynolds went from room to room checking that everyone was present and accounted for. He had a roll of masking tape in his pocket. As he left each room, he tossed the masking tape in the air and caught it.
“I’m putting a strip of tape across your door,” he said. Then he told them about the all-night security guard. If the guard saw the tape on their door was broken, he would know they had left their room. They didn’t want to know how much trouble they’d be in if th
at happened.
“Is the guard armed?” asked Peter Moore.
“He has a Kalashnikov,” said Mr. Reynolds. “He’s Israeli.”
Then he said, “Lights off at 10:30. Right?”
“Yes, Mr. Reynolds. Yes, sir. We’re pretty tired, sir.”
“Good night, boys.”
“Good night, Mr. Reynolds.”
Ten-thirty? There wasn’t a light out by two-thirty. There was much too much do. In Eleanor Michelin’s room, four little girls had set up a spa and were attempting to turn the bathroom into a steam room by running the shower at full hot.
Two floors above, in Room 421, Mark Portnoy, the only kid with a bed to himself, was about to show his three goggle-eyed roommates, who were sleeping in the other bed, how to make a blowtorch using a can of hairspray and a cigarette lighter in the shape of a cannon that he had bought on Rue St-Jean.
There was a marathon Xbox tournament getting under way in the room below them.
And on the top floor, in Sam and Murphy’s room, there was a two-foot troll being lowered out the window on the curtain sash. At any moment it was going to come even with the window of the girls’ room one floor below, its red eyes flashing menacingly.
All of this, of course was happening behind the taped doors. So at eleven o’clock, when Pierre reported to Mr. Reynolds that all was quiet, Mr. Reynolds nodded and said, “You can go then.”
Mr. Reynolds took a look down the hotel corridor. He wasn’t naive enough to believe everyone was asleep. But as long as the kids were in their rooms, Mr. Reynolds was going to try his best not to think too hard about what might be happening in them.
If he had stepped outside for a moment and looked at the hotel from the street, he would have seen that the Pension du Vieux Québec was lit up like a party ship. There was steam billowing from a bathroom. What looked like a flame-thrower was belching occasionally from the fourth floor, and a troll with flashing eyes was dancing around in the night sky.
Mr. Reynolds missed all this, however, and was sound asleep by midnight, which was when Charlotte Groves got bored of her pedicure and picked up the remote control and discovered Canal Deux—the Blue Channel.
It was Eleanor Michelin who worked out how you could phone from room to room without going through the switchboard, and word spread like wildfire. Pretty soon every television in every room was switched to Canal Deux, and the educational component of the trip to Quebec began in earnest.
“That’s not real, is it?” said Peter Moore, moving closer to the television.
The next morning, Peter snuck back to the depanneur during breakfast and spent every last cent of his lunch money on troll dolls. When Sam and Murphy came back upstairs to clean up, Peter had his trolls, all sizes and shapes, lined up on the windowsill like soldiers. There were seventeen of them.
“Peter,” said Murphy. “I can’t believe you have done this. What are you going to do for food?”
Peter didn’t care. It was hours until lunch. Peter was lost on Planet Troll. “Look at this one,” said Peter. “Isn’t it cool?”
“Come on,” said Sam. They were supposed to be in the lobby.
They followed Pierre through Place d’Armes, and past the château, and onto the wide wooden boardwalk suspended high above the river. To the east, in the lee of the Île d’Orléans, you could see that the great colonies of snow geese had begun to gather. Pierre was about to stop and point them out—from this distance they looked like slashes of snow on the shore—but then decided to let it pass, thinking, as he kept walking, that winter was closer than he had realized.
It was in the Jardin des Gouverneurs that he had his brainstorm.
“Come on,” he said. He was taking them to the Plains of Abraham.
“Venez. Venez. Dépêchez-vous,” said Pierre.
He divided them into two armies and assigned them roles. Murphy was Governor General Vaudreuil. Peter, the Intendant Bigot. Sam was General Wolfe.
“What are we doing?” said Murphy.
“We are going to recreate the battle,” said Pierre. “You,” he said, pointing at Mark Portnoy. “You can be the Marquis de Montcalm.”
“I don’t want to be Montcalm,” said Mark. “He lost. We …”
“We what?” said Pierre. “Who do you mean … we?”
Mark Portnoy shrugged. “Canada,” he said.
“Canada?” said Pierre. “There was no Canada then.”
They were standing on the green Plains of Abraham, just outside the walls of the citadel. For the first time Pierre had everyone’s attention.
“This wasn’t,” said Pierre sweeping his arm around him, “this wasn’t a battle between English Canada and French Canada. There was no English Canada. There were British ships, and British troops. Were they the Canadian army? They weren’t the Canadian army. There was no Canadian army.
“This was a European war that was fought here. Canada came later. Canada hadn’t been invented. Not yet.”
They re-fought the battle three times. Everyone jumping and shooting and whooping around. Twice the British won. And once, to make it fair, the French carried the day, Mark Portnoy stomping back and forth, with his fist in the air.
After the battle Murphy, all grass stained and sweaty, ran up to Pierre.
“That was pretty cool,” said Murphy. “But are we going to go to the IMAX … like last year?”
“Tomorrow,” said Pierre, defeated. “We are going to the IMAX tomorrow.”
Murphy pumped his fist in the air.
“Yes,” said Murphy.
News spread like wildfire. This was going to be great. The highlight of the trip. NASCAR 3-D! In French.
They left for the theatre the next morning at ten. As everyone staggered onto the bus, Sam wheeled around and looked at Murphy. “I forgot my wallet,” he said patting his back pocket. “I’ll be right back.”
He peeled out of the bus and into the hotel.
Murphy was never able to explain what happened next. But what happened was clear.
Mr. Reynolds did attendance. And when he called Sam’s name and Sam wasn’t there to answer, Murphy answered for him. If he had thought about it for a moment, he wouldn’t have done it. It was a gut reaction. He didn’t want Sam to get in trouble. And then before he could think of anything, he heard Mr. Reynolds say, “All present. Let’s roll.” And Murphy panicked. He should have run to the front and stopped the bus. But he hesitated.
Meanwhile Sam, who had bounded through the hotel lobby as fast as he could, had hit the sidewalk. But it was four floors up and four floors down. And when he got there, he stopped dead in his tracks. He couldn’t believe his eyes. The bus had left without him.
Murphy had tried to keep him out of trouble and there he was all alone, on Rue St-Jean. In trouble.
Sam stood in front of the hotel for about five seconds. He felt a surge of panic, and then he did the only thing he could think of doing. He started running in the direction the bus had been pointing.
There was a red light, and he spotted it a block away, but the light changed and the bus was accelerating, and even though he did too, even though, fuelled by fear and his desire not to miss the movie, Sam ran harder than he had ever run in his life, running even when he couldn’t see the bus anymore, he lost it, and eventually pulled up, standing in the middle of a block, bent over, his hands on his thighs. A spent little NASCAR clean out of fuel.
When Sam straightened up he saw a policeman on the other side of the street and he almost asked him the way to the theatre, but it occurred to him the cop wouldn’t just give him directions. He would make calls that would certainly get him in trouble.
So he didn’t ask the cop. Instead, he asked the boy carrying the skateboard. It was only after he’d asked that he realized the boy was a girl. And by then, she was as confused as he was. Because as far as this girl understood, this odd-looking boy she had never seen before had just asked her on a date to the IMAX.
Sam had used his best French, but it had come
out fast and garbled.
“Quoi?” said the girl he thought was a boy.
Sam wanted to start running again, but it was too late to start running again, and anyway where was he going to run? So he tried again.
The girl was leaning forward, looking at him really hard, and then she said, “Ahh.” She started talking in French, and she was going so fast that he didn’t understand a word. Not one word.
And she must have seen that because she stopped talking and said, “C’est trop difficile. It is too far from here. You can’t do it. It is much too difficile.”
“I have to,” said Sam. “Everyone is there. I can’t miss it. Everyone is there.” His voice cracked. “It’s the best thing of the trip.” He was still out of breath. He was thinking, I am not going to cry. I can’t cry.
The girl shrugged.
“C’est difficile,” she said again. “Mais, I could show you there.”
And he wasn’t sure, but maybe she reached out and wiped a tear off his cheek, or maybe he just wanted her to.
She was wearing black boots, brown army pants way too big for her and a baggy jacket. They were walking beside each other now and she was saying, “Where are you to?” Sam said, “The movie theatre.” The girl looked at him funny, and he understood that she meant from, where was he from. And he said, “Toronto. I am from Toronto.”
“Oh,” she said. “I am so sorry.”
And then she was climbing up on the wall. On the wall that went around the city. Sam was standing there below her. He didn’t know what to say next. So he said, “I am on school trip.” And she, “Je sais. Je sais.” Sam and the girl stared at each other without moving. Then she waved her arms in exasperation and said, “Viens, viens. It’s okay.”
And before Sam knew it, they were walking along the old stone wall of the city, thirty feet in the air, the street on their left, the river on their right, as if they were walking along railway tracks. Sam said, “We drove past this yesterday.”
And then he told her about the Plains of Abraham, and the museum, and Peter’s trolls. He was talking to her back because she was ahead of him by a couple of steps; he was telling her how he had left his wallet in his room.
Extreme Vinyl Café Page 12
