October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

  “No, except that the shot was fired from inside the hardware store,” Coco said, nodding his head. “But I guess you already knew that.”

  “What? What makes you say that?”

  Coco met the hardware-store owner’s murderous look. The man was livid. He looked away and lowered his head.

  “Did you find any bits of glass inside the store?”

  “No,” admitted the officers, their curiosity piqued.

  Coco squatted on his heels and pointed to several small pieces of window and a small amount of powdered glass on the sidewalk.

  “See that?” he said. “It ain’t complicated: the debris fell outside, therefore the rifle was fired inside the store.”

  The two police officers turned toward the hardware-store owner, who had turned green. They waited for an explanation.

  But Monsieur Dufour stuck to his story: the rifle shot had come from a passing car. The officers had to choose between the eyewitness account of a respectable citizen, a pillar of the community, and the ravings of a juvenile delinquent.

  Coco was walking down the street when the patrol car pulled up beside him. The officer who was driving rolled down his window.

  “Where are you off to, Coco?”

  “To fuck my girlfriend. You okay with that?”

  “You got something you want to tell us?”

  “Not here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t feel like it.”

  “The street’s all right as far as it goes, Coco, but you can’t stay a fuckin’ bum all your life.”

  “That’s none of your Christly business.”

  “You should come back into the Force.”

  On voting day, the provincial authorities proclaimed the Riot Act. The situation on the South Shore seemed to have got out of control. As well as the usual clashes at the polling stations, this time there were direct attacks on members of the League. Cars overturned, death threats issued. Someone even fired a rifle through the window of a downtown hardware store. The owner of the establishment, a Monsieur Louis-Georges Dufour, publicly vituperated against the young thugs who had dared to vandalize his brand-new Lincoln Continental Mark II. He noted that his position as a League organizer, as well as his irreproachable standing as a citizen and parishioner, had made him a target in the eyes of the bandits. “You’d think we were living in the Wild West,” he concluded.

  It was generally thought that Quebec’s reading of the Riot Act led to the restoration of law and order, and favoured the re-election of Mayor Giguère, the candidate for the League of Social Vigilance.

  Three days later, Coco knocked on Dufour’s door. The hardware-store owner wasn’t happy to see him.

  “Not a good idea, coming here like this …”

  “After paying my guys,” Coco said, “there wasn’t anything left for me. I need more money.”

  “I don’t have any more work for you. The elections are over, Coco …”

  Coco looked over the man’s shoulder, toward the hall. The hardware-store owner’s daughter was walking down it to the brightly lit kitchen. Her father saw Coco looking at her.

  “I don’t have anything for you, my boy.”

  “I don’t want money …”

  Coco looked him in the eye with a tight smile on his wide face. He was a head taller than the master of the house.

  “The Lincoln.”

  “What about the Lincoln?”

  “How much?”

  The hardware-store owner burst out laughing.

  “I don’t think it’s in your price range.”

  “It would be if you gave me more work.”

  “Come see me before the next elections, okay?”

  “No. I’ll be paying a visit to Big Raymond Girard before that.”

  His smile equalled that of the hardware-store owner, who was the first to look away.

  “I just want to try it out,” Coco said quietly.

  “You just … what?”

  “The Lincoln. Just for a spin. Afterward I’ll bring it back. I’ll be careful with it,” he added as the hardware-store owner handed him the keys.

  Dufour didn’t like the smile he saw flash across the face of this good-for-nothing with a bright future ahead of him.

  The second time he took the Lincoln, he also laid claim to the owner’s daughter and a quarter of the owner’s chromosomes. They went to a Western, with John Wayne, at the local drive-in. It was early June and the evening was warm, much warmer in the car after the film was over. They drove south along the road to Chambly and then took the Eastern Townships autoroute to the Acadie River. In Quebec, there are as many places called Îles aux Fesses as there are Green Lakes and Long Lakes. Somewhere between Île aux Lièvres and Île Goyer, they found one where, after crossing a small bridge, they stopped in front of a clutch of cottages.

  The Acadie is a flat river the colour of mud because of all the farms it runs through. Clumps of trees and shrubs extend down to the gentle riverbank. Just after midnight, Coco drove into a narrow meadow and pushed the nose of the car into the tall grass between two ruts until it was barely visible from anywhere.

  Ginette guided his hand. Her breasts were like two loaves of bread fresh from the oven, bursting with life, and he told her so. Not long after that, the white Mark II began rocking between the cattails and the stars.

  Afterward, they smoked a cigarette.

  “I saw you the other morning,” Ginette said. “You with were those guys who turned Dad’s car upside-down. What I don’t get is how he could lend you the car after that.”

  “It’s just politics,” Coco replied. “Don’t ask too many questions.”

  He rolled down the window and threw his cigarette butt into the wet grass, then opened the door and got out. She saw him tuck his shirt-tail back into his pants, then walk back to the trunk. She heard him open it. When she got out on her side, she felt swallowed up by the sky and the night. The sound of frogs. A few feet ahead of her, Coco was holding a rifle, a .303 Lee Enfield, army issue, fitted with a scope. He raised it to his shoulder and peered through the cross-hairs into the dark.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking,” said Coco, aiming the rifle at something on the far side of the river.

  He cocked it. A sharp, almost joyful sound came from the mechanism, metallic clicks slightly muffled by the heavy wooden stock. It pleased him.

  “It’s his deer-hunting rifle,” Ginette said. “He goes every year.”

  “He uses it for other things besides deer hunting,” Coco said in a mocking tone, the rifle still raised to his shoulder.

  He told her about the incident with the window.

  “I still don’t understand why he lent you his car,” Ginette remarked.

  Next to her, Coco could see invisible frogs in the tumultuous riverbed. He lowered the rifle and smiled to himself.

  “Because I’ve got him,” he said, then said it again, for emphasis: “I’ve got him by the balls.”

  Ginette would never admit it, but she was impressed.

  There were many Saturday-night drives to the Île aux Fesses. They played with each other, made love in the back seat, being careful, as much as they could, not to start a family, and then, sitting up in the big Detroit boat of a car, smoking cigarettes, they watched the river flow by them through the darkness.

  “One day,” Coco said, “I’m going to have a boat and I’ll take you out on it. I’m not talking about a little rowboat either, I’m talking about a two-master, a real sailboat, Ginette, my own, sweet Ginny. I’m talking about a boat we can sail around the world …”

  Three months later, when the hardware-store owner showed up at the pool hall, it wasn’t to give Jacques Cardinal another cushy job, it was to tell him that he had to take responsibility for his actions. The ceremony took place on a day of wet snow, slush, and ice. After a night of drinking, Coco had to swallow half a dozen bennies just to stand up. He forgot to bring the marriage licence. As it turned out, he’d just mispl
aced it: he found it stuck between the cushions in the back seat of the Lincoln. They drove off in the car after the wedding, through freezing rain and a hail of confetti, accompanied by the traditional concert of horns, their faces split by Pepsi smiles.

  Honeymoon in the Laurentians, at Colford Lodge, near Lachute. Ginette went into the bathroom to take off her wedding paraphernalia. She had a brief moment of panic when she saw how young she looked in the mirror above the sink. She decided against the negligée that her mother had given her and returned bravely naked to the bedroom. Coco lay stretched out across the bed, snoring like a chainsaw.

  The father-in-law had connections in the Montreal police. That was one thing being in La Patente was good for. Coco joined the force.

  There was the sound of something smashing and a string of curses coming from the kitchen. As she lay awake, waiting for the next crash, he came into the bedroom and fell onto the bed. And stayed there without moving, fully clothed. She could smell his rough, heavy breath filling the room. She shoved him with both hands.

  “Wake up.”

  Eventually, he opened one eye.

  “What …”

  “I’m having contractions … Take me to the hospital.”

  He tore three buttons from her pyjama top getting it open, exposing her heavy, swollen, expectant breasts. She gasped as, his breathing cutting through the silence broken only by the clicking of his metal buckle, he knelt above her on the bed and undid his pants. He roughly grabbed the two sides of the pyjama top, tearing them apart, the bottom button flying off into the air in an arc, at the apex of which it seemed to hover for a fraction of a second, like a woodcock over a thicket.

  “Jacques, no …”

  Cardinal grabbed the elastic waistband of the pyjama bottoms and with a grunt exposed the incredible moon that rose in the room, as solemn as marble beneath his fingers. The strong biochemical smell rising from her did not deter him. Just the opposite: the intense mucousy emanations seemed to excite him.

  Afterward, he slept where he fell, on the floor, alone, like a dog.

  Before daylight she tried to wake him. At the word “hospital,” he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  Her contractions were coming in constant waves when Coco, still drunk, climbed behind the wheel of the Mark II and drove them into the night.

  He was promoted to the morality squad. He eventually gave his wife three more children, alternating girls and boys. Work was a universe of illegal houses, gambling, and debauchery, long nights in Montreal. The mayor was a reformed sinner, incorruptible, who had built his reputation on an immoderate passion for decency and upright behaviour. While a young lawyer, he had attacked the Augean stables and accomplished the notable achievement of padlocking the red-light district, then had himself elected mayor and extended his heavy-handed crusade to city hall, where someone was put in charge of explaining the realities of life to him.

  The essential services rendered to Director-in-Chief Salaberry by a certain madame whose establishment in the quarter had reopened, its façade spruced up and its suggestive sign made more discreet, was an open secret in the force. Tenants in cat houses were warned in advance of police raids by telephone calls from a high-ranking officer, as was only right. The men brought in a few hookers to show that they were not turning a blind eye to the corruption that was gaining ground, spreading like gangrene into the legs of the city’s politicians, while the turgidity of the mayor’s speeches increased in direct proportion to his secret and shameful lubricity. So they would bring in a few girls and lock them up for the night.

  Bouncing like a pinball between alcohol and pills, Coco soared up mountains of euphoria and plunged into pits of despondency as he wove from party to party. He’d bring friends home, couples. One night, Ginette went to sleep hoping that the shouting and the breaking glass wouldn’t wake up the children. When she opened her eyes, a young colleague of her husband’s had slipped into bed with her and was grinning like an idiot, wearing only his boxer shorts and socks. She went after him like a mother dog protecting her pups.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “Well … Coco told me it would be all right.”

  The speedometer registered 110 miles per hour. On the seat between Ginette and Coco was a case of Molson’s Ex. He was driving with his foot to the floor, a bottle between his legs, charging up behind cars until their fenders were nearly touching, then swerving out to pass, racing toward trucks coming in the opposite direction before cutting back into his own lane at the last second. Laughing at his wife’s terror, ignoring her pleas to stop.

  Somewhere near Berthier he turned a corner too sharply, and the case of beer flew off the seat and crashed onto the brake pedal. The Lincoln flew across the road, crashed through a fence, and carried on for a hundred metres before coming to a stop in the middle of a field. Eventually, Ginette stopped screaming. Coco sat staring in front of him, eyes bulging out of his head, fists clamped on the steering wheel, jaws squeezed so tight Ginette could hear his teeth grating.

  Another time, they were driving through some woods not far from Morin-Heights when Ginette, gripping the dashboard, had a nervous breakdown. Unable to make her shut up, Coco threatened to put her out of the car and leave her by the side of the road. Thirty miles farther on, he’d had enough. She was still crying her eyes out. He stopped the car, calmed himself, then got out, walked around the front of the car to the passenger side, opened the door, grabbed his wife by her wrist, and yanked her out of the car.

  She watched as the car burned rubber on the pavement and vanished around a curve. Then she sat down and waited for him to come back for her. But he never did.

  The exact reasons for Coco’s ejection from the Montreal Police Force are not known. At the time, there was talk of fraud, of irregularities with union funds. The fact remains that in the mid-sixties, Good-Time Coco left the force. What he said to his wife was that he’d quit of his own accord. All there was to it. Case closed.

  Not that she thought of complaining. The squad had been a bad influence on him, but its effect receded with time. The new Jacques was free to spend some quality time at home. He looked after the youngest child, told stories to the older one. He cooked, an apron stretched around his ample girth. She became pregnant with their third child. They had no television, and so he spent his evenings after dinner reading books he’d borrowed from the library. The big Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World reawakened his dreams of travelling. He memorized the names of all the seas and sailed them in his imagination: Azov, Marmara, Barents, Aral, Aegean, Oman, Kara.

  They were living beyond the business section of town, where well-nourished rats scuttled through the breeze-blocks. The end of their street opened onto a field. The only thing Ginette had brought to the marriage was the Lincoln Continental Mark II, and it was now worth a small fortune, but Coco would rather be run over by a Volkswagen until he was dead before he would sell that car. When creditors outnumbered the mouths he had to feed, Coco began looking around for a connection or two.

  He could usually be found in the Vegas Sports Palace on boulevard Taschereau, on the South Shore. The establishment belonged to Luigi Temperio, right-hand to the Montreal Mafia boss Giuseppe Scarpino, who was related to the Bonanno family in New York. Coco’s police contacts gave him access to some new friends. He started coming home late again, went back to drinking and chewing amphetamines like they were those candies threaded onto necklaces they sold at Labelle’s in Coteau-Rouge when he was a kid. When deliveries from Labelle’s Self Service Store had been made in a horse and wagon. The milk truck had also been drawn by a horse. And the chip truck …

  And for running water, for running water, there had been that little wagon.

  But today he drove around in a Lincoln Continental, while princes of darkness paid for his cognac.

  Coco felt he had the soul of a patriot. He joined the separatist group Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale. Impatient for action, factions wit
hin this movement tinkered with bombs that rattled the symbols of power as well as the walls of barracks. Radical separatist groups formed, expanded, and disappeared faster than it took to name them, and history was made. Coco participated in meetings of the Comité indépendance-socialisme started by Francis Braffort, where he also met members of the Intellectuels et ouvriers patriotes de Québec, a workers’ party founded by two former police officers. It was bizarre, two cops putting together a Marxist group, but in those days anything could happen.

  One evening, Richard Kimball showed up at the apartment.

  Kimball was a twenty-one-year-old from northern Michigan, Marquette, or somewhere around there. He had left the States out of idealism, so that he wouldn’t have to do what was expected of him, which would have meant letting himself be eaten alive by insects and, if possible, killing a few Vietnamese. A draft dodger. He was a strange case. Kimball told Coco that in 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson opened the United States pavilion at Expo 67, he’d hidden in a tree on Île Sainte-Hélène and taken a potshot, not at the president but at the young fellow whose job it had been to raise the American flag during the ceremony. He later told Coco that the protocol office and the secret service had had the bright idea of having the flag raised by a Boy Scout, because they were convinced that no potential assassin would shoot at a child. Kimball added that the kid wore a bulletproof vest when he raised the goddamned Star-Spangled Banner. Those were the kinds of stories Kimball told.

  Sometimes Coco believed him, sometimes he didn’t. There were some things he could do without knowing.

  Kimball was blond, gifted with a winning smile, and had a dangerous sense of humour. He apparently considered his rural accent from the Upper Peninsula to be a superior form of speech, and everyone around him had to bow down to it in the interest of maintaining good relations between civilized peoples. Ginette took an immediate dislike to him. He brought girls over. He lived on avenue Mont-Royal, in a huge five-and-a-half-room apartment. When he showed up, Coco and Ginette’s place filled with smoke and a mental fog that lasted until the next morning. The first time Kimball brought Lucie, she climbed up on the table and took her clothes off. Someone took photos. Then Richard carried her into the bedroom, laid her down on the bed, and went to work on her. The other guests talked among themselves, while Coco, who had a ringside seat next to the bedroom, didn’t dare stand up.