October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “How are you getting on?”

  “All right, I guess. Keeping my head above water,” he said, indicating the office. “A bit of this, a bit of that. As a matter of fact, I’m considering a salary of seventy-five thousand for fantasizing over eighteen-year-old girls while explaining Madame Bovary to them. I can see myself doing that.”

  “Why aren’t you teaching in a CEGEP somewhere?”

  “Whenever I have to send in my CV, I go blank. I don’t know why.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “Translations. Or working in the white slave trade, writing for newspapers. Writer of all trades.”

  They talked about the dearly departed. His rages, his passions, his infatuations. His mania for psychocriticism, picked up in the early eighties while sharing pills of all colours with Gérard Bessette, the author of Semester.

  Eventually they came back to the funeral service. Laughed about the premier’s return to single life. The surrealistic tint of the culture minister’s forehead.

  “He died alone,” Emma declared. “It’s a scandal, what happened there at la Pérade.”

  “Maybe. It’s always dangerous to attack the heroic versions of a people’s history. But with Elucubrations, they really didn’t have any choice, they had to celebrate it. They couldn’t just shove it aside. Thanks to Chevalier, Quebec has its national anthem.”

  “No, you’re wrong there. What made him untouchable was that he was imprisoned during the October Crisis. He didn’t actually bear arms, but being arrested is like being issued a passport to seventh patriotic heaven, in certain people’s eyes.”

  “Yes, that’s as may be, but these nationalist questions aren’t always easy to follow … Good old Chevalier. At least he managed to get the premier out of his bunker!”

  “Stop. He died in deep intellectual solitude … All these young people he liked to surround himself with, his Socratic side, where did they all go when he lost his health?”

  Sam made no reply. It had been Emma who came up with the name for the group that used to get together at the White Horse after classes, and then later at Lavigueur’s, farther east. One fine afternoon at the beginning of the fall term, she’d run into Branlequeue and his little band on Saint-Denis, coming from a course on Hubert Aquin and the Revolution. “Hey, what’s this, Oktoberfest?”

  “But it’s not even October,” Chevalier called back.

  “Ah, but with you people it’s always October,” Miss Magy had shot back cryptically.

  And so they’d been baptized the Octobrists, a play on Tolstoy’s Russian Decembrists. Then, on account of the rivers and rivers of beer that flowed in their drinking establishments of choice on rue Ontario, the word “Octobeerists” eventually insinuated itself on the group.

  “What became of all those people?” Emma asked.

  “CEGEP profs. Proofreaders. One’s a stand-up comic. Another’s picking wild mushrooms in the Yukon.”

  “Well, not one of them came to the funeral.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you working on anything at the moment?”

  “A novel on the go,” he lied. “A kind of thing …”

  He kept his eyes down as he spoke, drawing squares and oblongs replicating themselves to infinity on a blank page on the desk.

  “He had faith in you, Samuel. I feel it’s my duty to tell you that, now that he’s not here any more. He saw you going far …”

  “I write little squibs. I send reviews to newspapers. I run around after freelance assignments.”

  “What I’m saying is that he counted on you a great deal. He told me so. Chevalier … saw something in you.”

  “Chevalier was always seeing something, Emma. Maybe he was a visionary. But maybe not. Maybe he was just mistaken. All those years … There was never any plot. And the second part of Elucubrations is lost, and that’s a damned shame.”

  “Too many keys and not enough locks, was how he summed up the Lavoie Affair. He was sitting right where you’re sitting now. I can still see his big gleaming eyes, his sad old face, and the amused and sorry look on it when he said to me: ‘You know, Emma, in all this I find myself confronted by people who are a lot stronger than I am.’”

  “He said that?”

  “He was never able to follow the path to the end. It was his biggest regret, and he took it with him to the grave. I wanted you to know that …”

  Embarrassed, Sam turned to look out the window. With a sudden, diminishing clatter, a pigeon detached itself from the sill.

  THE BOAT

  HE WAS BORN IN COTEAU-ROUGE, in a tarpaper shack. The doctor had had to tramp through an acre of snow up to his knees to bring him into the world. His mother cursed like a trucker. The only other witnesses to the event were two goats, huddled in a corner, their faces masks of fundamental and archaic vindictiveness.

  In Jacques-Cartier, the working-class district that had spread across to the South Shore around a simple crossroads in the region known as Coteau-Rouge, career opportunities were divided neatly into two categories (unless you counted providing flesh for the good Brothers of Christian Instruction to fiddle with): crime and the police. Before even reaching the age of majority, Jacques Cardinal understood that between those two spheres of activity there existed intermediary zones that weren’t always as watertight as everyone pretended. One of them was politics.

  He was one of those schoolyard jackals who hunted in silence. Later, he would be seen hanging around with a small gang at the billiard hall. Waiting for something to happen.

  The inhabitants of this semi-rural slum were unacquainted with the benefits of running water. Those who had wells shared them with neighbours, others emptied their chemical toilets where they could, for example, in the washrooms of service stations. Coco’s brother, industrious and resourceful, put a fifty-gallon drum on a wagon and dragged it with a friend into one of the better-equipped neighbourhoods, like Longueuil-la-Bourgeosie, where they filled it from a fire hydrant, dragged it back along unpaved streets to Jacques-Cartier, and sold it for ten cents a bucket. One afternoon they came back in tears, their drum empty, boot marks on their asses. Big kids, they explained.

  Coco Cardinal was fourteen.

  “Stop your snivelling and come with me,” he said. “We’re going back.”

  There was a stop sign in a stretch of the road, but no intersection. The sign was Longueuil’s way of saying: “Stop, stranger. If you’re Black, Chinese, Indian, or even just poor, go somewhere else.”

  They passed it, leaving the poor district, and stopped at a fire hydrant on the other side of rue Chambly. Without looking around, Cardinal signalled to his brother, who took a monkey wrench he’d stolen from a construction shed, went up to the hydrant, and stood there while four young toughs casually walked out of a nearby yard. The one in front had good shoulders and a pack of cigarettes tucked under the sleeve of his T-shirt. He also had a length of steel wire in his hands, which he played with like a Greek fingering his worry beads. Coco surveyed them from the corner of his eye.

  The kid with the wire loosened his jaw, found a bit of saliva at the back of his dry mouth, and spat.

  Cardinal stood his ground in front of the hydrant, and the kid came up and squared off. He stretched the wire to its maximum extent between his fists.

  “Hey. You got no business being here …”

  “We just came to get some water.”

  “Didn’t you get what I just said, Fatso?”

  “Water belongs to everyone.”

  The tough stopped playing with the wire and put it in his pocket.

  “Not this water. This here’s good, clean water. It’s not for pigs.”

  Coco never saw the punch coming. He took it full on the mouth and felt a cottonlike thickness spread through his jaw, taking the full weight of the punch on the lower half of his face. Staggering backward, he felt for the pipe wrench but couldn’t reach it. The tough fell on him, and they rolled around on the ground.

  Managing to bre
ak free from his adversary, Coco stood up. Someone had snatched the pipe wrench from his brother, and now Coco took it full in the stomach and slowly fell to his knees. For a moment that seemed much longer, he did nothing but stare at the pavement and try to get his breath back. The wagon was kicked upside down, and he heard the heavy, metallic roll of the drum until it hit the curb somewhere far off. The same kid who’d sawn his insides in half with the wrench now used it to unscrew the cap on the fire hydrant. A large powerful jet of water flooded the street and turned the gutter into a dirty torrent. He could hear his brother bawling somewhere. He was grabbed from behind. He looked up and saw the grimacing face of the little tough above him, outlined against the blue sky.

  “You want water? Help yourself …”

  A few years later, when he was old enough to drink, by chance Coco came across the guy in a tavern in Longueuil. The tough was completely pissed, sitting at the bar staring at a large jar filled with a greenish liquid and a few hard-boiled eggs floating in vinegar. He was drinking a large Dow, his shoulders slumped forward. Cardinal took a seat a few stools down from him and watched him for a long time. No doubt about it, it was the same guy.

  He got up and went for a piss. There was no way the mug had recognized him. The stalls were filthy, the smell of urine suffocating. The blue ceramic urinal down the centre of the room looked like a watering trough for animals. Coco turned on a faucet and watched a stream of rusty brown water run into the sink, then turn yellow. The towel was a grey rag that had been tossed into a corner. There was no soap. He took a small bottle from his pocket and shook two capsules of Benzedrine into the palm of his hand, tossed them into his mouth, and washed them down with a few sips of tap water cupped in his palm. Then he patted his face with his wet hands, dried them on his pants, turned on his heel, and went back into the tavern.

  He sat two bar stools down from the only other customer in the place and ordered a draft. He took a dime out of his pocket and, before sliding it over to the barman, held it up between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

  “See that?” he said.

  The barman, in his fifties, white shirt, top button undone, sleeves rolled up, dark patches of sweat under his arms, looked at Coco’s hand.

  “What I see,” he said, “is a tencent piece, and in the thirty years I’ve been working here, my boy, this isn’t the first one I’ve seen come my way.”

  “Take a closer look.”

  The barman furrowed his brow.

  “All I see is an old cow, why?”

  “The other side,” Coco said, noticing his mistake. He flipped the coin over in his fingers. He picked up his draft with his other hand and took a big swallow. The bennies were beginning to work their magic.

  “A boat …” said the barman.

  “A schooner,” Coco corrected him. “A two-master. Built in Nova Scotia for fishing cod. But then they started racing it, and it won every race. You never heard of the Bluenose?”

  “The only sailboat I know is the one on the Molson’s label …”

  Coco rolled the coin between his thumb and index finger. In the yellowish light it flashed like gold above the bar.

  “Yeah, well, when I get my boat … a two-master, just like this one, you won’t be seeing my face in here again. You know why?”

  Look at me closely, Coco’s smile said.

  “Because I’m gonna have a bar on it.”

  The barman shrugged and took the coin, looking annoyed. Two stools down, the other customer broke into a shrill, almost demented laugh. Slowly, Coco turned on his bar stool and looked at him without laughing. From somewhere in the depths of his drunkenness, the other man rolled his eyes and shook his head with a knowing look and smiled up at the ceiling.

  As though reluctantly, Coco turned away from his neighbour and back to the barman.

  “Believe me, it’s gonna be one helluva fine boat …”

  In the corner of his eye, he saw the steel-wire man weaving his way to the men’s washroom.

  With a dreamy smile on his lips, Coco drained his glass, got up, and went into the toilet. When he pushed open the saloon-style swinging door, he saw the other man urinating with some difficulty. Coco grabbed him by the back of his neck and smashed his nose against the wall, then cracked his skull a few more times until the tiles were covered with red spray, like a slowly descending burst of fireworks. He threw the man on his back in the urinal, his cock in the air, his bladder continuing to spurt itself empty, let him look around for a second to get his bearings, then bent under the ancient, rickety, rusted sink, closed his fist around the drain pipe and, yanking it free, brandished it like a club. Water began shooting out from under the sink, wetting his pants and running down his legs, flooding the filthy floor around him. Coco went back to the urinal, raised the pipe above his head, and brought it down hard on the body slumped in the blue ceramic basin. Blood flowed and mingled with the piss and the mothballs scattered in the urinal as a disinfectant. Bubbles formed, and he pounded away and kept pounding until his arm was tired. Then he threw down the pipe and grabbed the man’s gurgling head by the hair to make sure his nose and mouth were well down in the mixture of blood and piss at the bottom of the urinal. Then he left the washroom.

  “Water damage,” he said in response to the barman’s questioning look.

  At election time, Jacques-Cartier was always taken over by the mob, from petty crooks to big leaguers. Any elections — school board, municipal board, provincial, or federal. Organizers wanting a little extra muscle found all they needed at the local pool halls. On polling days, groups of these little bantam roosters could be seen driving around, five or six to a car, going from polling station to polling station, as in a Western movie. For a few dollars, the streets belonged to them. Windows were broken, cars were sunk to the ground, all four tires slashed. Fires broke out in garages and garden sheds. Filthy messages in DayGlo red were painted on the sides of houses.

  The small gang that gravitated around Coco had their unofficial headquarters in the pool hall in the new shopping centre, next to the five-and-dime. The hardware-store owner Dufour had made a bundle from the land the shopping centre was built on, and he knew Coco from having seen him sniffing around his daughter, a pale, dreamy-eyed blonde a bit on the thin side. The gang watched Dufour drive up in a white Lincoln Continental Mark II, a real boat of a car. They went out and had a good look at it, smoking and spitting, then went back into the pool hall to finish a game, the hardware-store owner at their heels.

  “Seems you taught that Duchesnay kid a lesson or two.”

  Dufour acted as chief organizer for the candidate for the League of Social Vigilance.

  “I guess I did,” Coco replied.

  Then he turned away and became absorbed in contemplating the complicated network of potential trajectories on the pool table.

  The hardware-store owner lit a cigarette. Ordered a round of Kik Colas. Indicating the Lincoln in the parking lot, one of the most expensive models in the history of the automobile industry, he said he needed a hand getting people to change their minds on the day of the elections.

  “But careful, like,” he said. “I don’t want to see a scratch on it.”

  “Why not?” Coco wanted to know, sincerely intrigued as he chalked the end of his pool cue.

  “Because I might want to resell it.”

  Coco looked at him without saying anything. More and more interesting.

  “It’s politics,” said the hardware-store owner. “Don’t ask too many questions.”

  Coco leaned over the table and sent the eight ball hard into the corner pocket.

  The municipal elections in 1957 pitted the “mob candidate,” Big Raymond Girard, a jovial and skilled man whose methods apparently didn’t meet with unanimous approval, against Gilbert Giguère, who was running for the League of Social Vigilance. Giguère had vowed to put an end to the “reign of terror” that he said had been imposed on municipal democracy by organized crime. It is now known that the Le
ague was a front for the Order of Jacques-Cartier, better known as “La Patente,” a secret society that was an enemy of the Orange Lodge and worked in the background for the advancement of the French-Canadian race. In Montreal, the editors of the daily newspaper Le Devoir, infiltrated by La Patente and under the pen of its municipal affairs columnist Paul Lavoie, the future member of the legislature and Liberal minister, led a vigorous campaign against Girard, his Mafia ethics, and his dubious team of cohorts.

  A Lincoln Continental was found with its four wheels in the air in the driveway of a bungalow in the suburbs in the small hours of the morning. It took a dozen men to do it: five to lift it up by its chassis and flip it over, the rest to catch it and let it down gently on its roof. They looked like a bunch of ants clustered around a piece of immaculate, white flesh. They deposited the beauty almost delicately on the driveway’s asphalt.

  Coco gave the rear fender an affectionate kick to ease his conscience. He looked up at the house and thought he saw the curtain move. The hardware-store owner was right. It would have been a shame to damage the car.

  The others had already taken off, but Coco held back, took his time walking away, his hands in his pockets, and after a few paces stopped and turned around. For a moment he stood in the middle of the road, legs spread defiantly. The living-room curtain opened a little farther. A single blonde braid.

  Later that day, Coco saw a patrol car parked at the sidewalk in front of the hardware store. Inside, Dufour and two police officers were examining the store’s plate-glass window, which had a small, round hole with striations radiating from it, like a star. Coco stopped on the sidewalk and also looked at the hole in the glass from his side. When the hardware-store owner saw him, he gestured for Coco to move on. But instead of leaving, Coco motioned to the police officers to come outside. The two policemen knew him. After a moment, they came out, followed by Monsieur Dufour.

  “Looks like a .303,” Coco told them.

  “Yeah, it does. Why, do you know something?”