“We should go out sometime. Tear the place up.”
THEN
Martin had been thinking about a rum when Réjean appeared at the door to the portable on Monday just before quitting time.
“Hey!” Martin said, reaching for the bottle in the desk drawer, “I was just…” But he stopped when Réjean dropped into the grey wool chair, his great hands dangling between his legs.
Martin quietly poured them a drink.
“Mon hobby,” Réjean said at last, to the floor.
A long silence followed.
“Ça ne va pas,” said Réjean.
“Okay,” said Martin cautiously.
Réjean took a deep breath and a slug of rum. He told Martin how he’d been standing at the Lobster Shack counter and had looked down the hill to the parking lot to see the man in the very truck on which he’d written LAVE-MOI pointing and shouting at Agathe. The man had threatened her and she was terrified, and it was all Réjean’s fault. Because he was crazy, the army man was not afraid of Réjean, therefore there was no telling what he might do next. Réjean didn’t want to hurt the man; he only wanted to scare him back, to stop him. He rolled himself up to Martin’s desk and looked him in the eye.
“Martin, j’ai besoin d’un gun.”
Martin let the words play over in his head, reached out again for the bottle, and slowly poured them another drink. If Roy had needed a gun, Jack Bureau would have gotten it for him no matter what. This was what you did for a friend.
Cautious of overpromising (Underpromise, overdeliver—the golden rule of sales) he told Réjean to leave it with him.
The next morning, Martin gave a final squeeze to the tissues in his pocket and walked into the showroom while the guys were having coffee. He didn’t drink coffee because it made him sweat, but right now he needed to fit in. He selected a mug that read Super Dad and poured himself a cup, dumping in four packets of sugar.
A few weeks back, while the sales guys were having coffee, Steve Addison had been telling a story about his neighbour, an old Polish woman, who believed the fence separating their yards was twenty-eight inches shy of the property line on her side. This entitled her, she claimed, to twenty-eight inches of Addison’s yard. She would avail herself of these inches of Addison’s manicured lawn as a repository for her garbage. Now she was having work done on the house and those inches had become the dumping site for all her renovation waste. Addison had tried everything, but there was no reasoning with her. He had never met anyone so tenacious. She was not swayed by threats of legal action, rightly convinced as she was that Steve couldn’t be bothered to take her to court. In desperation, Steve tried threatening her physically, but she had spent two years in a concentration camp during WWII and managed to escape by digging under a fence with her hands. She feared nothing, least of all Steve Addison. She was also in excellent health and looked like she’d be around for a while.
One of the guys had said, “Looks like you’re going to have to pay a visit to Colonel Weed,” and they had all chuckled. Martin hadn’t asked what was funny, because that was how he usually ruined people’s jokes.
Now he sidled over with his Super Dad mug, trying so hard to think of a subtle way to broach the topic that when Ferris, the new guy, said, “Good morning,” Martin replied, “Who’s Colonel Weed?”
The guys looked at each other and there was a long moment while each of them waited for someone else to respond.
“He’s a…he’s a…he’s a bit of a bad guy,” said Steve. “He’s like a guy you call when you need things. Like bad things.”
“I need something,” said Martin, the veins in his forehead pulsing.
The guys liked Martin, but they didn’t understand him. He took the bus to work. It just didn’t make sense. They laughed at him when he was serious and took him literally when he was joking. But something about his strained voice assured them this wasn’t supposed to be funny.
The guys, in fact, knew very little about the Colonel, except that he was extremely dangerous. There was some hushed lore about him, but none of them knew anyone who’d met him face to face. He lived in the woods, they said, outside of town, past the turnoff to the old Presbyterian church with the sign facing the wrong way, and you had to walk through the woods, without a flashlight, until you found him. And you didn’t find him, the guys said—he found you.
In his portable after work that night, he steeled himself with a rum, then another rum, waiting for daylight to fade. He was not cut out for dangerous things. He had never in his life been in a situation like this and had no idea how he would respond to danger. He wished there were a way to turn off his nervousness just for a little while. He thought about the way dogs attacked when they sensed fear. Surely the Colonel wouldn’t interpret his nervousness as a threat.
He mentally recited the directions in French to calm himself.
“Suivez la route 11 jusqu’au parking lot du traversier. Tournez à droite. Continuez sur le 11 jusqu’à l’ensigne pour l’église presbytérienne.”
He would have to walk through the woods, which meant getting his shoes dirty. The sweat factory was running on all pistons as he sat at his desk. He would be soaked by the time he got there, and tissues would not cover this level of nervousness. It was four blocks to the lot where he parked the Ranger, then the drive to the church would take approximately forty-five minutes, time enough, he hoped, to dry off in the truck with the fan.
The sky over the lot went yellow, then pink, then purple.
“L’heure est arrivée,” he told himself.
When Martin was a boy and a towing call would come in, Jack Bureau would throw on his quilted vest before he had even hung up the phone, grab his keys, kiss Mrs. Bureau, and start the truck all before his other arm had slid into its armhole. Martin tried to do the same now by downing the rest of his rum and throwing on his jacket, tearing the lining. He wanted nothing more than to stay here in the office and drink rum, but there was no way he couldn’t try to help his friend. He cast a last look down at Réjean’s chair as he closed the door.
In the Ranger, the fan on full bore, he reminded himself not to talk too much. Soyez normal, he thought. Soyez normal. He would come and go as unremarkably as he could.
He held his palms up to the fan one at a time, then assured himself that if he did make it in to see Colonel Weed, handshaking was unlikely.
“Il fait noir,” he said. “Il y a beaucoup d’arbres.”
“Voici une église,” he was just starting to say when he noticed with dread the sign pointing the wrong way. His heart drummed as he hit the turn signal and pulled over under a cluster of trees where the truck couldn’t be seen from the road.
Stepping down from the safety of the Ranger into the leaves, Martin whispered, “Je ne veux pas mourir,” before shuffling into the woods.
The nights were cooling off with the end of summer, but the breeze was still warm, and floating on it, Martin could make out an aroma more human and not strictly of woods. As he moved further through the leaves, the smell began to take shape, seemingly changing the temperature of the forest, and grew still warmer and more pungent, rich and oily and slightly sour, as Martin walked on, holding his hands out before him to fend off stray twigs.
“Cette odeur est atroce,” he murmured to himself, unable to contain it. Just as he did, the unmistakable smell of cigarette smoke overtook the sweetness of the air and the click of metal split the darkness.
“Ne me tuez pas,” Martin pleaded.
He stood frozen and an impatient voice from behind the gun said, “What?”
“Please don’t kill me,” he said.
“You’re French.”
Martin scrambled for the right answer.
“You speak French?” the voice said louder; it would not ask again.
Martin knew that admitting to speaking French was never a good idea, but lying seemed a bigger mistake, so he said, “Oui.”
“What do you need?” the voice asked after a smoky pause.
Martin forced out, “Un gun.”
There was another long pause.
“Colonel doesn’t usually like visitors during table tennis, but…”
The man led Martin deeper into the woods, where the smell covered him like a hot blanket. His eyes watered, blurring the little he could see in the solid darkness, but the path beneath his feet felt well-worn. He clenched his fists and resolved not to mention the smell, though it was impossible to imagine how the man with the gun was enduring it.
When they reached a clearing in the woods, Martin rubbed his eyes and tried to get a look around.
A series of shacks were laid out before them like a small industrial town. The man led Martin up to one of the bigger buildings and stuck his head in the door, nodding to someone inside. He held the door open for Martin to walk through.
“Wait here,” he grumbled as he passed through another door, leaving Martin in the chipboard vestibule.
The man returned a moment later and, without looking Martin in the eye, asked him to conjugate the subjunctive of the verb to love in French. Martin couldn’t believe it. The subjunctive had been one of the hardest tenses to learn and though he still never knew when to use it, he employed the trick he had learned for remembering it by mentally inserting it is imperative that before the verb. It is imperative that I love. It is imperative that you love…And so, mechanically, he rhymed it off. Then the man showed him a picture of a hat, hastily rendered on a sheet of notebook paper, and asked him what it was. He knew, perhaps better than anything, that the picture was not of a hat, but of a snake digesting an elephant, and shouted that out like a game-show contestant. The man held the drawing straight out and looked at it, then disappeared again behind the door.
Martin hadn’t expected this kind of test. These were questions he not only knew the answers to, but was dying to be asked.
The door opened again from the inside, and the impatient voice said, “Mon.”
The room was made of the same particle board as the entranceway, but with huge swaths of purple velvet haphazardly tacked on the walls. Two men sat on a worn gold sofa, each with a long beard cut off at a blunt angle and a pit-bull terrier at his feet. In one corner of the room stood a bar covered in brown Naugahyde, with several open bottles of wine and a few half-full glasses atop it. A Ping-Pong game was underway on a table in the middle of the room. Another bearded man had just served to a man in an ivory cable-knit sweater. As the latter followed through on the missed serve, he turned his face toward Martin, who stifled a gasp.
“Aie! Bonjour,” the man said, placing his paddle down on the table. The man approached him, hand extended, and said, “Je suis le Colonel Ouide.”
There was something strange about the Colonel’s French, but it was hard for Martin to put his finger on it with all that was going on with the Colonel’s face. Martin wiped his hand on his pant leg before returning the unexpected handshake, trying to think of his own name.
“Je m’appelle Martin Bureau,” he found the presence of mind to say. He had to concentrate to figure out how the parts of the Colonel’s face worked together: the oily brown curls, the thick bottom lip, the bulbous nose. Without question, his face was unusual, but it was only as Martin’s eyes travelled outward that he got the full impact of the ears. From behind each of the Colonel’s cowlicky sideburns protruded an ear the size of an English muffin. He couldn’t look away.
“Où avez-vous appris votre français?” the Colonel asked.
France! The Colonel was from France. He didn’t know how he knew, but Martin knew. He felt giddy.
“Je lis des livres et j’écoute des cassettes et j’aime beaucoup le français,” said Martin.
“Le Petit Prince est le meilleur histoire au monde,” said the Colonel.
“C’est mon livre favori,” said Martin eagerly, committing an unpardonable anglicism.
The Colonel languorously lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and let his head roll back as he exhaled.
“Dis-moi, what is your favourite part of these buke?”
Martin wished he didn’t speak French so badly that the Colonel felt he needed to speak English badly.
Books were hard to come by in Pinto, even at the bookstore, but when he’d started learning French, Martin had found a copy of Le Petit Prince in a bin outside Readies’ Books and had read it easily a hundred times. He knew the answer to this question, too, though it no longer felt like a test. The fox. The fox was the reason he would turn the book over and start reading again from the beginning. Each time the story ended, he missed the fox.
Martin stared and stared at the Colonel’s ears and said, “Le renard,” in case there was a chance they could speak French again.
Colonel Weed exhaled toward the ceiling and said softly, “Le renard…”
He nodded approvingly, his thoughts visibly elsewhere. Martin shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He could feel a moustache of perspiration.
“Le renard, he’s very important. To learn to make a friend.”
Tentatively, Martin said, “Quel est votre favourite part?”
The Colonel turned his strange face upward and said, “La rose, bien sûr.”
Martin nodded enthusiastically, though he had never understood why the prince was so keen on it. The rose was vain and dishonest, while the fox was calm and profound and genuinely cared about the prince. Nevertheless, the Colonel clearly had a stake in the rose and Martin wasn’t about to mention his misgivings.
“Jean-Claude,” said the Colonel, directing his voice behind him. “Du fromage.”
The impatient man from outside ducked behind the curtain and the Colonel beckoned Martin to follow him to the Naugahyde bar. He poured two short glasses of wine and passed one to Martin.
“Le Prince,” said the Colonel, lifting his glass.
“Le Prince,” said Martin.
The Colonel took a contemplative swig, dramatically permitting the wine to rest on his tongue for a moment before swallowing. Martin reproduced the Colonel’s exact motions and satisfied reaction. The taste was complex and fruity, dark and mysterious. He had never understood the swishing and all the ceremony of wine, but this tasted different than any other wine he’d had. He had never wanted so badly to keep something resting on his tongue. It seemed a shame to swallow it.
“C’est mon Gamay Noir,” said the Colonel.
Martin nodded, though the words meant nothing.
Jean Claude returned from the backroom with a plate of cheese, which he placed in front of Martin. Here, beyond any doubt, was the source of the smell that permeated the forest.
“Je le fabrique myself,” the Colonel said.
Martin took a gulp of air, then timidly picked up a lump and put it in his mouth, unsure what to do once it got there. He brought his palate down to crush it and found that the smell had no bearing on the taste. In fact, its foul smell was exactly matched by its deliciousness. He had never tasted such cheese. No one else ate, and the Colonel’s eyes remained on Martin’s face as he devoured every crumb.
The moment the plate was clean, Jean-Claude swept in to remove it. He returned a moment later with a big leather case, which he gently set down on the bar before the Colonel.
The Colonel adjusted the high neck of his sweater and opened the case. “Et bien, mon ami?”
Martin had forgotten why he was there, and when he cast his eyes over the row of firearms, he nearly screamed.
The Colonel said softly, “And for what, you? What will you do with this gun?” He looked Martin straight in the eye as he spoke.
“It isn’t for me,” Martin said. “It’s for a friend.”
“You are here, very afraid, buying a gun for a friend,” the Colonel said, more testing out the words than requesting confirmation.
“I want to do him a favour,” said Martin.
The Colonel looked at him for a long time. “You have such a friend, that for him you would do such a favour?”
Martin contemplated telling him Réje
an’s situation, but instead said, “He’s my best friend. I’d do anything for him.”
The Colonel searched Martin’s face curiously, his eyes flickering back and forth, then reached behind him into the waistband of his pants and pulled out a gun. Martin jumped back.
“It is correct,” said the Colonel, turning the handle of the gun to face Martin and laying it flat in his palm. “Voici.”
“God, that really scared me,” Martin said.
The Colonel laughed. So did the bearded men on the couch.
Martin slowly reached for the gun. It was compact and beautiful and terrifying.
“These one is mine,” the Colonel said. “Un Glock G9. Comme la police.”
Martin wrapped his damp hand around the gun in the only way he could imagine holding one. It was incredibly light. He placed his finger on the trigger and felt an uncanny shift in the atmosphere of the room. He pointed it at the floor. Holding it in his hand made him think differently about the word handgun.
“How much?” he asked.
“Take-le,” said the Colonel quietly with a nod. “Your friend, he’s lucky to know a man like you.”
Martin shook his head.
“Garde,” said the Colonel. “Men who come to see me, they are all the same. They are closed. They are closed up. In their face you can see there is no way in. All around me are these men.” He turned and gestured toward the men on the couch. “These ones, they work for me, but do we understand each other? Do they make a joke to me? I know them now many years, and do they ever make a joke on my ears? Non. Look at them, my ears!”
“They’re huge,” said Martin, at last.
The Colonel smiled, nodding his head with satisfaction. “Oui. Ils sont énormes.” He spent a moment in quiet appreciation of Martin, sizing him up. “Take this and give it to your friend. He must know how he is lucky.”
Martin managed to nod solemnly and put the gun in his pocket. They sipped their wine and Martin thanked Réjean in his heart for having taught him to drink in silence.
I Am a Truck Page 6
