Last Days of Montreal

by John Brooke

  I told him I loved baseball, how baseball is a perfect game, how that perfection didn’t fit in Montreal. I told him weather was definitely a factor but I sensed it was more than that — that the laws of nature didn’t hold here — at least not like I was taught them.

  Last Days stared out across the gravel and clutter. The first dribs of sickly sun were leaking through the haze along the river. He said, “Once we were the heart of a beautiful vision. Montreal. World class. We looked like the right kind of future. It could’ve worked… Now we’re a ratty old ball that gets chewed and ripped apart by political dogs. We get punished from both sides for being what we are.”

  I told him, “I walk through these streets and it feels like the end of the world.”

  “Oh man,” said Last Days, “it’s not the end of the world, just the far side of civilization. When the centre can’t hold, the people fall over the edge. They take the streets and scenery with them when they go. People like me, we turn our belief into attitude, we like to party all night, pour stale beer over the bloody sun. It’s how we get our own back.”

  I told him, “We don’t have politics. We have baseball.”

  He said, “I come from both sides, you know…French mom, Anglo daddy. I was their baby. Now it’s me, I’m the man with the sign.”

  I could feel the pride behind his anger. I told him it was like our ball club: Approaching the brass ring…then falling through it, trying to figure out where the hell you are, trying to tell the people who believed in us. I told him, “That’s my job.”

  Last Days said, “Mine too.”

  Saturday, I followed him around. Last Days communicates effectively in both of Canada’s official languages. I was impressed. I watched him battle anyone he suspected of denying reality. He told me, “You have to get right in their faces, Harve, ’cause most of ’em don’t want to know.” And yes, I took him up to the booth that night. I was going to throw him some questions. I thought his answers might put a few things in better perspective for the folks back home. But Security came and kicked him out. They knew him. Last Days had been to a game and caused a scene. He’s banned for life. But the real question is, who will last longer: Last Days or the Montreal franchise?

  Dan: He needs a bath, that’s all I can tell you. So did Harve. He couldn’t sit still — he was scratching away at himself like a third base coach on speed.

  Harve: I was in rough shape. Like the team. I felt I was right there with them now.

  Dan: We had a real bad first inning. Dropped four runs on five straight walks then a error-charged double off the relief. Harve held out and managed to talk us through it. The second too. They scored three more. Harve smelled bad, but he seemed to have his groove back.

  Harve: I’m a professional.

  Dan: Then our reliever takes a liner right in the groin. Ooo! Not a pretty sight. But I told Harve…and our fans, “Maybe he’ll shake it off.”

  Harvey sighs and announces, “Forget it, Danny. We’re witnessing the end.”

  I reminded everyone, “We still have September. There’s lots of time for hope.”

  He says, “These are the last days, Danny. No hope. The very end of the line.”

  “Harvey,” I said — and I believe I was speaking for all our fans, “get a grip on yourself.”

  He was starting to offend me.

  Harve: He talks about offending. “Maybe he’ll shake it off.” Our guys were done for. Now they were literally being knocked to the ground. There was bad magic falling down around our club. How could Dan Wirnooski sit there and still be so blasé with platitudes?

  Dan: Harve leans into the mic and says, kind of soulful, “But, you folks at home, I don’t want you to worry. You may be feeling pain, but here in Montreal they don’t. Our guys are past the pain. Believe me, I know this. It’s too late to get a grip, and truth be told, no one wants to. Isn’t that right, Danny?”

  I looked around for Richard. Richard had his face down, he’s rubbing his head…like you would in the shower. Ralph was beside him. He shrugged. But you can’t have too much dead air when there’s no action on the field; I had to say something, so I said, “Our guys are waiting for a break, Harvey — hanging in and waiting for a break.”

  Harve said, “No more clichés, Danny. It’s time to tell our people where we’re at.”

  Now Richard’s sitting there with his eyes locked. He couldn’t even press the button.

  And Harvey Doody rambles on, informing everyone within our viewing area, “It’s time to stop praying, time to stop cursing, or wringing your hands and wondering why. It won’t do any good — our guys are too far away from you. They can’t hear you. They don’t want to hear you. Not now. Our guys are just going through the motions. The gods of our game have decided: No more dream season, it’s over and done, so why sweat it? What I mean is, it’s time to tell you folks at home this slide is like a ball girl with blueberry eyes sitting on your face so you don’t have to see what’s happening. Right, Dan?”

  So I smashed him in the mouth. Yes, sir, right on the air. No, I can’t remember what I said.

  Harve: All I wanted was for Dan to tell it like it was. Honesty. We owed it to our fans.

  Dan: Back home they pulled the plug — put a Technical Difficulties card in front of the game.

  Harve: I believe it was effective. The fans had travelled through Dan and me into the soul of our team. They were in disarray, at terrible odds with themselves, yes, but they had coordinates. They were there…feeling it the way our guys were. It’s what any true fan wants.

  Dan: Yeah, and we got yanked. They showed a movie that Sunday afternoon.

  Harve: What matters here is the diffusion of vital baseball information, which is what I’m paid to do. Or was… We lost three in a row in Montreal, and that killer instinct too. We got home and went straight down the toilet, ended up twenty-two games back, totally out of the race. I contend our fans stayed well informed till communication made no more difference. I say, Dan and I — we did our job!

  Dan: And I contend that Harve should stop saying “we!”

  Me? As a matter of fact, I’ll be going back to Montreal. I’ve been talking to a radio station. No, an English one. When my suspension is over they might need a colour man. There’s some good fishing in the lakes up near a place called Jonquière — where Bernie’s folks live. Good people. Sure they get the game up there…in French.

  No sir, I could give a hoot about Quebec politics…Of course I love the game. I love America.

  Harve: Well, I’m going back too. Major League Baseball has said never again to Harvey Doody. When I told my wife about that woman dancing on the Harley, she cut me loose — wouldn’t even try to understand. My kids, my mom, they don’t want to know me. I’m on my own now, and I feel that for me, Montreal is definitely the next thing after baseball.

  Yes, I still believe our game is a thing of beauty. But have we truly considered it all? What is it that happens when the bottom drops out of your most glorious season? You have scouting on everything, your defence is adjusting seamlessly, pitching staff’s throwing precision strikes exactly where you need ’em, offence has that killer power, solid relief warming up in the pen, a closer with a nuclear cannon for an arm. It looks perfect on paper. It’s all working right on the field. More than right.

  But I tell you gentlemen, even a team that’s blessed by God can suddenly be there!

  What is it that gets pencilled into the order that precipitates the fall?

  I could go to any number of major league cities here in America and spread the word, and I will. That will be my job: To tell America. My ex-friends and colleagues are saying I’m disloyal. I say America needs more information on this Montreal thing, this other possibility… My late daddy, who fought in two wars and instilled my love for baseball, he always told me, Harvey, it’s better the devil you know. You know? So I need to go back there first, to bathe myself in it all again just a little more.

  And I’d like to see Last Days. Now
there’s a man who’s got the devil by the balls. Although I won’t be surprised if he isn’t around: with a guy like Last Days each day is iffy, and so, well, we’ll see.

  Chair: That’s fine, Mr. Doody. I believe we’ve heard enough.

  Who Can Fight the Snow?

  Bruce has realized that if his life is to have any meaning, it will be found in the snow. It’s barely December in Montreal. He looks out the kitchen window at forty new-fallen centimetres, lying there, waiting. What is summer when you live in the service of snow? A dream? Not even. Who can fight the snow? He watches the nameless wife of Danny Ng, who is Pacci’s tenant, working around their car, scooping it up with a plastic pail and carrying it to the fence across the lane, where she dumps it into the yard behind the maison de retraite. “A pail,” he groans, turning away, unable to endure any more. “It’s unbelievable!”

  Out front, in rue Godbout, the Haitian woman’s five sons and daughters are shunting and squealing back and forth in their cars, engines roaring, blowing gross oil clouds — then getting out to clear a space and try again. “They have no idea,” declares Bruce, “not a clue. They don’t even wear gloves! There should be a law.”

  Geneviève looks up from her Paris-Match. “What kind of law?”

  “I don’t know…put something in the immigration test.”

  “That’s racist.”

  Bruce bridles. “Oh nonsense! I didn’t say I don’t like them. It’s just they don’t have the foggiest notion what to do with the snow. I mean, it’s hard enough for someone like me.”

  “Toi, l’expert?”

  “Damn right.”

  “Then go and show them.” Gen goes back to Johnny Hallyday water-skiing in Tahiti with his latest wife.

  “Maybe I will.”

  But not till he takes care of his own: forty centimetres times forty square metres of patio; times fifty-five square metres of garage roof; times a one-by-twelve metre track from the patio to the gate at the end of the garden, along which he moves the load from the roof and patio; times the lane, which serves his garage from rue St. Gédéon — thirty-two metres long by eight metres wide; times another seventy-square for the spot where Pacci’s truck sits beside Danny’s car. Forty centimetres times all that. He begins with his small shovel, clearing around the kitchen door and the door to the garage, the barbecue, the top of the barbecue, careful, precise. It can be an art — like sculpting space, the soul’s own territory. Next, he takes his big shovel and does the patio. Then, hauling out the stepladder, he squirms, seal-like, onto the garage roof. Gen feels he’s a foolish martyr for doing the garage roof every time and that he’s wasting valuable sexual energy slaving to maintain the track through the garden. But Bruce’s system is logical, Gen’s feelings are not. If the snow from the patio is left in the garden, by mid-March there will be a pile at least two metres high. That means a flood a half-metre deep covering the total area of the garage in April, even factoring in a February thaw and partial drain-off. You could add another quarter metre to this deluge from the melt-through on the garage roof…Two hours later, art and logic having evaporated with the sweat streaming from under his toque, Bruce steps into the lane, pumped as a hound.

  Pacci comes out his basement door within seconds. Not to help — Pacci has had too many bypasses to help — but to direct, to guide Bruce along the edges and make sure he does not forget to do his parking space or clear the porch steps and basement stairwell for Marisa, his wife. As Bruce digs, Pacci tugs at the peak of his baseball cap and chuckles, “I am professeur de neige.”

  Bruce can’t laugh. He resents Pacci’s presumption. But, as with the snow itself, Bruce no longer has a choice in the face of it. You offer once and it’s forever. Pacci is the reason Bruce will never say a word to the Haitian woman’s clueless children or Danny Ng’s poor wife. He gets back at Pacci by working too fast to stop and talk… Won’t stop. Can’t stop. By the time he goes back to the garage and wheels out his machine, he is one seething flow of adrenaline stoked by equal parts anger, pride and fatalistic desolation

  In the beginning Bruce had one of those toys from the hardware store, but it was worse than useless. A big waste of time in any sort of major snowfall — anything over ten centimetres, really. Maybe someone in Toronto, or Victoria perhaps, could find a use for such a thing. In Montreal it was a parody, an insult to a serious man with a job to do. He cashed an RRSP and bought a four-stroke, eight-HP, five-speed-forward, two-in-reverse souffleuse with snow tires.

  Unwise? Bruce usually responds, “What’s the point of saving money for retirement if you’re going to be sitting there buried in snow? Existentially, literally, it’s the same thing.”

  People usually change the subject.

  Now Pacci, taking advantage of a pause in the action, points a finger and demands, “Why you so crazy with neige?”

  Bruce cranks the motor. “What would you know about it?”

  “I know,” says the old Italian, “I spend fifty-three year to watch my wife to work into my kitchen. Never stop. This is crazy.”

  “You know nothing!” shouts Bruce, catching a spark, opening the throttle, engaging the gear. Its spinning teeth eat the snow. The snow shoots into the air. He moves away from his hovering neighbour.

  But he has to stop as the Junior Bombardier rolls by, effortlessly clearing the walk along St. Gédéon. (Bruce, who should know better by now, says “bom-ba-deer.”) He waves shyly as it passes, acknowledging the perfect snow-fighting machine: sphinx-shaped, compact, tough and implacable on its steel treads. The City guy inside the cab nods but remains focused on his controls. Then it’s gone.

  Bruce’s endorphins settle. Energy stalled. Anger momentarily muted. Humbled.

  Why are you so crazy with snow? Even without Pacci’s prodding, it’s always something to ponder while he works; and while he waits for more to fall.

  It started with his divorce. Bruce can trace it to the night he watched Denise lying there like a corpse, staring at the ceiling, refusing to say another word, giving up. Finally, looking away, he watched it fall outside their window. And it never seemed to stop. His two children were hating him for failing at love. His parents were growing increasingly depressed by language laws and an “attitude” they could neither accept nor cope with. They wanted to move to Florida but couldn’t sell their house on the West Island. They still can’t. As for work: McNulty, McNulty, MacNaught is a Golden Square Mile original, but that no longer meant anything. Meaning resided in the fact that friends and former clients and colleagues were finding happiness, not to say prosperity, in Toronto and Vancouver, even Calgary of all places. Meaning was in all those nights wrestling with a malignant certainty that he should have gone with them. The moment he and Denise split, he should have too. Meaning was in the view from his office window on a February morning, two years later. It was his forty-fifth birthday. He sat there, empty, looking at Montreal and the never-ending snow.

  Opportunity, and the passing thereof… Bruce works along the lane, watching snow fly from the guts of his machine. He remembers looking out his window on his birthday and knowing he’d missed it. In the aftermath of Denise, his mother had said something about one door closing and another opening. Bruce had not been inclined to believe her.

  Then, enter Geneviève.

  He had prepared a small brochure outlining the range of financial services provided by his firm; but it was in English, and the people for whom it was intended — the newly affluent out in Laval and along the South Shore — spoke French. They wanted their money handled in French. Bruce understood this. It’s a personal thing, like going to the dentist or getting buried. Reception rang and sent her through, this translator who would prepare the French version. The first thing she did was pronounce the weather “dégueulasse!” Disgusting. It was by way of making sure he understood she was not from here.

  Bruce could not figure out why anyone in their right mind would move from the south of France to a place like Montreal. She argued with him over the phras
ing of certain items, threatened to walk away if he insisted on going with the cochonnerie — the junk? he heard around him every day and was sure would be the friendlier way of approaching his target market. Was this le snobisme? It was as if she were on a mission for L’Académie Française. Still, he liked the fact that she had standards and it blossomed from there.

  A renewed sense of love only goes so far.

  Take his brochure (in perfect French, no less): Nothing happened. With so many of his contacts moving their money and/or themselves out-of-province, that meant cold calls. Back to square one, a virtual junior again. Since they’ve been together, Bruce’s French has improved immensely — even Geneviève concedes that; but back then, at that crunch point, he knew he wasn’t fooling anyone. As the political climate grew more and more strained, he sat in front of the telephone alone with the creeping feeling that each of those would-be investors in Repentigny could hear past the numbers and straight to his Anglo heart. While McNulty, McNulty, MacNaught continued to hire bright-eyed, smooth-voiced, perfectly bilingue juniors — Laurette, Marie-Eve, Julie, all of whom were soon making more money than he was.

  Cold calls still leave Bruce as cold as the snow that blows out of his machine and straight into his face whenever there’s a wind in the lane. They’ve since taken away his windowed office and given it to another rising star. He has been questioning his deeper convictions. Would he be openly hard-line if he could only afford to be? Now, with the Referendum a year behind them, the next one a constant threat, he has joined a group — Tuesdays after work and the occasional Sunday — at which partition is an option that must be considered. But where will that lead? To war? Add to that the perpetual formlessness of the new forces playing on his judgment and advice, trying each day to believe in the myth of gold mines, the potential of pesos, the mentality of Hong Kong floor traders, the vision of Bill Gates…