October 1970

by Louis Hamelin

I know what I want

  Québécois, we are all québécois …

  That was playing on the jukebox. There was also a piano. And sitting at the piano that night, Marie-France played Clair de lune with Gode sitting beside her on the bench, rain drumming on the roof, their thighs and hips and sides touching but their hands not, their hands keeping their distance, hers making music and his down on his knees, gripping his thighs to prevent them from flying up to rest on her shoulder as she played the sonata. Or to hold her by her waist. And Marie-France pretending to be concentrating on the genius of Beethoven when in fact all she could think about was how much she wanted something to happen, and Gode was beginning to look like a desperate case.

  A woman will forgive a man for rushing an opportunity, but never for missing one. She’d read that somewhere, maybe it was Cocteau, while flipping through a dictionary of quotations. She decided that if nothing had happened by the time she finished the last bars of the sonata, she’d give up on this Godefroid, this cold goad (the audacity of her little play on words brought a smile to her lips).

  She played the final notes of the sonata and looked at Gode, but he wasn’t looking at her, apparently being more interested in what was happening at the front door. She opened her mouth to say something to him, but just at that moment a furious gush of white foam smashed into her chest and took her breath away. Then she was flying across the room on a roaring geyser that smashed everything in its path, and her hand closed around another hand that was closed around hers, holding on with all its strength. Gode, at last.

  If I thought a flock of northern gannets made a deafening racket on the red cliffs of their island, that was before I heard Marie-France having an orgasm in the wheelhouse of the Miloiseau. I was sure the entire village of Percé was following our every move on its municipal seismograph. She came oceanically. It was as if she wanted to shout to the whole world that yes, she was coming and it had only taken seven seconds, and it wasn’t going to stop any time soon. I was sitting with my pants down around my ankles and this magnificent blonde impaled on me with her dress hiked up above her navel.

  Later, we stood on the bridge. There was the smell of fish. The sea rocked us gently. We couldn’t go back to the Hut. They’d destroyed everything.

  *

  The wrecking of the Fisherman’s Hut perpetrated by the police, with the assistance of the volunteer fire department, which had furnished the truck and the fire hoses, and of a dozen or more thugs wielding crowbars, marked the beginning of what became known as the Fisherman’s Hut Affair.

  The day after the showdown, the young people who had dispersed during the night ripped off the padlocks on the door and gathered in the Hut with eight superficial wounds in their ranks. To that total they added the nervous shock suffered by one of the women, the destroyed furniture, water damage, and the wrecked piano.

  For a few days it seemed that life would go back to normal. Gode worked in the café, spent his nights with Marie-France, got up before dawn to go out in the boat with Griffin to furnish the Hut with fresh cod. After a week, he looked wasted.

  On Saturday, Gill Fournier called a special meeting of the municipal council and had them vote in a resolution denouncing the permanent scandal visited upon their village by the presence of professional agitators and drug addicts in the persons of the Percé hippies, and ordering said young people to vacate the premises by Monday at five o’clock. And so they were back to square one.

  Jean-Paul hired a French-from-France chef. He was a magician. You gave him plaice and he turned it into Dover sole. On Monday, when the ultimatum ran out, there were snow crab claws on the menu, which no one on the entire peninsula regarded as human food. During the night, the firefighters’ truck drew up in front of the Hut and the boys from the brigade were back at it. Earlier in the day, Gros Tony Tousignant had enlisted a couple of dozen citizens, transformed them into keepers of the peace, and sensitized them to the hippie problem. Some of them had had a few drinks … And it was this pack of hooligans from the corner tavern, generously armed with baseball bats, Johnson bars, axe handles, and bicycle chains, that the mayor and the chief of police unleashed on the Fisherman’s Hut at the expiration of the ultimatum.

  This time, the deluge lasted a good fifteen minutes, during which time jets of water smashed whatever furniture and chinaware had survived the first onslaught. After that, the auxiliary forces broke into the Hut, shouting and swinging clubs and whips and other improvised weapons.

  “Time for your baths, you pieces of shit!”

  “We’re gonna drown you like the dirty dogs you are!”

  “We’re gonna kill you!”

  In the ensuing confusion, Wilfrid Griffin was seen standing up to Gros Tony Tousignant. He dropped the chair he’d been using as a shield and grabbed the police chief’s head in his huge, calloused hands, crevassed by years of handling lines, and held him in his unbreakable grip as though he was going to give him a big, wet kiss. Then he smashed his big, Irish forehead between Gros Tony’s eyes and the chief went down like a ton of bricks.

  Shortly after that, Jean-Paul, trying to avoid a massacre, entered the fray waving a white napkin as a flag. Falling in behind him, the young people left the building, fists raised, soaked from head to foot, with the word “Freedom” in their throats.

  They had nowhere to go. From the direction of L’Anse-à-Beaufils came a distant rumbling sound that made everyone’s head turn. A few minutes later, a rolling as of thunder came down from the Surprise Coast Road and spread throughout the village. Everyone, virtuous citizens with a few beers in them, young rebels stoked to the eyeballs, was now looking in the same direction.

  The first motorcycle was followed by a second, then a third, then ten, then twenty, until a whole pack of Harleys suddenly surged out of the night. At their head was the most improbable apparition: the lead biker wore no helmet, had hair flying back like a musketeer’s in a windstorm, but was dressed not in the leather vest painted with the Sun Downers colours, as those behind him were wearing, but in the flowing robes of a lawyer, its long, black cuffs flapping behind him like a vampire’s cape.

  Maître Mario Brien seemed incapable of addressing any young woman without resorting to such endearments as “my sweet,” “my beauty,” “my heart,” “my dear,” and so on. Before a week was up, the first graffiti praising the lawyer and his famous cigar began appearing on the bushes in the area of the Hut. His role in the defence of placers of bombs vaguely associated with the FLQ was well known, but his flamboyant arrival at the head of the Sun Downers was a simple coincidence: two members of the gang had been beaten up during the first assault on the Hut, and the Sun Downers had decided to roll down to the Gaspé to take a look. At Mont-Joli they’d run into Maître Brien: the bizarre lawman was also out on a run down the lower St. Lawrence on his Harley, and his generous distribution of goodies at a pull-off beside the highway (Benzedrine, mescalin, hash, coke, a bit of pot) had been so appreciated by the bikers that they’d allowed him to ride in their company.

  That night there was another great party aboard the Miloiseau. The next day, the hippies once again cut the locks off the Hut’s door and reoccupied the premises, while the municipal authorities deliberated afresh on how to put an end to it.

  When Gode saw Marie-France sit down at the piano to assess the damage, and the lawyer get up, follow her, and sit down facing her astride the piano bench, about as subtle as a dog in heat, he knew he was in trouble. What chance did he have against a silver-tongued devil, a lawyer no less, with a growing reputation?

  “What are you playing, my sweet?”

  “Clair de lune.’”

  “Ha! That’s something else the Americans have stolen from us …”

  Marie-France gave him a quick glance, then played a chord.

  “That’s a stupid thing to say,” she said.

  “What do you mean? Who’s stupid? Me?”

  “Loony,” she said, casting a final look in his direction.

  And t
hat was the end of that conversation.

  Later that summer, the group staged a sit-in at a salmon-fishing club on the Bonaventure River, to denounce the club’s exclusively American membership, which was not uncommon in the area. They forced the gourmet fishermen to fish at night with nets or with spotlights and pitchforks. Operation Bonaventure succeeded in disturbing the halieutic activities of a high-ranking hero of the Vietnam War, a certain General Gore, since he’d been looking forward to flogging the smaragdine waters of the Bonaventure with his favourite Black Bomber: a number-one hook garnished with golden pheasant and black hen feathers and a tuft of black squirrel.

  Maître Mario then had the protesters march from the prison in Chandler, a sleepy little village dominated by the smell of rotten eggs, shouting at the tops of their lungs. He kept them busy. Cheques signed by the members of the collective had an annoying habit of bouncing. A girl belonging to the group was caught emptying the collection box at the church. She said she was simply financing her political activities. The rest of that summer was spent more or less going back and forth from the Hut to the police station to the Percé prison to the courthouse.

  The police harassment intensified. Penniless youths caught panhandling were rounded up and escorted to the outskirts of town.

  Passing through Percé, René Lévesque held a spontaneous press conference on the dock. Around him, men up to their chests in cod were forking piles of fish out of their boats with manure forks. A trawler was unloading mullet. A political attachée held the umbrella under which the thin little man in the wrinkled raincoat spread his hands, cigarette dangling from his mouth. It was raining cats and dogs.

  “If you ask my opinion of the Fisherman’s Hut,” he said in a voice that sounded like a sour lime grated on pewter, “and the so-called [apologetic smile] hippies, and this business that is so much in question here at the moment, and not just here but elsewhere as well, I would say that I, when I see what’s going on, as does the whole world, I ask myself questions. Because when we see the young who are engaged in these things, it’s natural that we ask ourselves who’s behind all this goddamned stuff. A handful of professional agitators, who come down here to be fair-weather friends [pout], okay, well, if they want fair weather they’ll have to come another day [apologetic smile], but to me, in response to your question, it seems obvious that these so-called Percé hippies are being supported, either locally or from afar, by someone who has the means to finance their let’s call it bloody …”

  A hand reached out of a boat like an oar and Chrome-Dome grabbed it and went over to the Miloiseau.

  “How’s the fishing?”

  “Not bad. We’ve got problems with the goddamn draggers …”

  “The what?”

  “Draggers. When they come here for scallops, they turn over the seabed. They cause a lot of devastation …”

  “Okay, thanks, that’s good,” said Chrome-Dome.

  Gode and Griffin watched him move away.

  “What the hell?” asked Gode.

  This time, Griffin didn’t spit into the sea.

  While looking for sand dollars, Gode and Marie-France found a seabird carcass cast up by the tide. It was already beginning to stink. Gode kicked at it with his foot. It looked something like a puffin, about a foot and a half long, with a heavy, compressed bill grooved laterally by a white stripe.

  “Alca torda,” a passing tourist told them, binoculars slung around his neck. “Razorbilled auk. Around the Gulf of St. Lawrence they’re called godes …”

  Gode found Jean-Paul talking to a girl, an English girl, on the dock in front of the Hut. Jean-Paul had just gotten out of jail for trying to bounce a rubber cheque in one of the local shops. While in the clink, he’d met France’s future public enemy number one, a fellow named Jacques Mesrine, who was suspected of having strangled a motel guest earlier that summer. Mesrine was at the start of a career that would claim thirty assassinations and, before ten years were up, would end with him receiving eighteen slugs shot from a canvas-covered truck in central Paris. The two hit it off immediately. Mesrine took Lafleur under his wing and, to teach him a trick or two, beat the shit out of another detainee before his eyes, without giving him a chance. Lesson number one: no pity.

  By the end of the summer, Jean-Paul had changed. They’d all changed, but Jean-Paul had changed more. His brilliant eyes now shone with a harder light.

  “It’s beginning to get pretty hot around here,” he confided to Gode.

  “You mean the girl?”

  From the Hut’s porch, they looked at the young woman lying on the beach.

  Jean-Paul shook his head, smiling wanly.

  “No. This place. We’re getting to be too well known, too much under surveillance. Too many people passing through …”

  “Yeah, well, there’s too much bickering going on in the Hut for me. I could use a break.”

  Jean-Paul’s gaze settled on him.

  “Where to?”

  “Camping on the island with Marie-France.”

  “Yeah, don’t go getting fed up with us, eh, buddy …”

  He gave him a friendly shove.

  “Who’s the chick?” Gode asked.

  “What chick?”

  “The English chick.”

  “Oh, her. A real aristocrat,” said Jean-Paul with a shrug. ”Janet Travers. Her father’s some kind of British diplomat, I think …”

  Those Were the Days rode the waves with Gode crouched in the hull, terrified by the force of the wind and the height of the whitecaps, the steep slope of the rudder as Marie-France, hanging over the edge grinning like a cartoon whale, steered the boat toward Île Bonaventure.

  They walked along the island’s deserted shore, drank muscatel from the bottle and had sex on a woollen blanket that made a bright red splash on the pebbled beach. The gannets that earlier in the summer had covered the top of the cliff like a living duvet had all but disappeared, dispersed along the coast and up the estuary and out to sea. Gode’s penis was still buried in the warmth beneath Marie-France’s blonde pubic bush when he fell as sound asleep as a rock.

  When he awoke, Marie-France was looking through the binoculars at an excursion boat full of tourists that was just rounding the point, en route for the cliffs on the opposite shore. It was called The Island Gannet, according to the name she read on its side.

  Fat Gill’s company. Business was booming. Percé was on everyone’s itinerary, it seemed. All the motels and campgrounds were full. Vacationers were having to sleep in their cars. In the early mornings they could be found walking on the beach near the extinguished bonfires, in the hopes of surprising a nude sleeper. The mayor himself had had to admit that hippies had become a tourist attraction.

  NINA

  IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF autumn, 1999. After Labour Day and the departure of the cottagers, tranquility had returned to the shores ringed by the forests of Kaganoma. A concert of shrill voices filled the yard where the chickens roamed at will. The yard, about a hectare in area, formed a vague parallelogram, one side of which was the lake. It had been only partially cleared by the previous owner, and fallen black pines had been left to rot among their own saplings, ferns, yews, blueberry bushes, and Labrador tea.

  Nihilo wandered to the edge of the clearing, passed under some chickens that were roosting in tree branches, as passive as old biddies. A bit farther on, he came face to face with a feral cat that must have weighed forty pounds, reddish feathers sprouting from its mouth as it sat contemplating him, unperturbed. The feline moved off unhurriedly through the striations of sunlight that slanted through the understory.

  It came back later that day, the same or possibly a different cat. Nihilo went out, aimed his shotgun at its huge round head framed by sideburns, raised his line of sight a good metre, and fired. The beast disappeared in a few bounds.

  The next time he saw it, Sam fired two shots at it, again aiming over its head through branches of spruce, three metres from the chicken coop. Stretched out like a sphinx
on the carpet of spruce needles, his visitor continued to look back at him with the same air of suicidal indifference and fathomless consciousness. This time it didn’t even bother to move off.

  At the municipal library in Maldoror, across from the hockey arena, Sam cruised the bookshelves for anything he could find about lynxes. He sat at one of the tables near a window and went through the pile. He read about the Spanish lynx reintroduction program, and about another in Colorado, releasing individuals captured in the Yukon and near Abitibi.

  The Canadian lynx consumed an average of two hundred hares a year. The kits, usually two in number, spent the first winter with their mother.

  Old French trappers had called it the pichou, a word derived from the Algonquin pesheen. At one time the term was also used to refer to snowshoes made from deer or caribou hide.

  In a book on animal symbolism in Amerindian cultures, he read that the lynx was considered a kind of “holder of secrets.” Another work, entitled Discover Your Animal Totem, confirmed that to penetrate the deepest secrets you needed to resort to the medicine of the lynx. According to writs of this medicine, the Egyptian sphinx was obviously not a lion, as had always been assumed, but rather a lynx. “If the lynx knocks on your door, pay attention!” concluded the authors, who then went on to issue this advice: “Become a lynx and smile like Mona Lisa!”

  Sam met Phil Baron at the White Wolf, where Marie-Québec had four or five shifts a week waiting on tables, usually from three o’clock to nine. Phil was one of their neighbours on Lake Kaganoma, a balding man in his fifties with a long, uniformly silvered ponytail who had dropped everything and blown six thousand bucks on his dream: a hunt camp, rough as they come but with a lease from the Ministry of Natural Resources tacked beside the door. Phil lived with Joey, a young groundhog that accompanied him wherever he went, nestled under the hood of his ancient Dodge Chrysler, curled up on the chassis. Phil liked lifting the truck’s hood to show you the brownish red lump huddled up against the engine block. Joey had come into Phil’s life during a spring fishing trip when, after drinking half a case of beer, he’d parked his truck above the animal’s burrow to take a piss. It took him a while to figure out why, when he was leaving, the fat groundhog had taken refuge in his truck; the engine, well known by his friends for its musical talents, made a noise like a groundhog: a shrill whistle followed by a tremolo.