October 1970 (23 page)

Ben Desrosiers bred horses, or maybe organic raspberries, somewhere in the Gaspé region. Go figure.

Lancelot taught communications at UQAM, where rumour had it that he bedded one female student after another and hosted a program on garbage-radio in Quebec City. He had children in both cities.

Élise Francœur became a political writer and a feminist. Sam had no idea how she made a living. Her ex-husband, Justin, worked in advertising and had been given the famous “Good Genius” account, where Balzac is shown in rags, Hugo is shown starving in a commune, and Chateaubriand is standing in awe before Niagara Falls, all of them supposedly demonstrating who the creditors were, who owned the greasy spoon, who was the tour guide, who carried the symbolically plasticized Good Company card, and who received low interest rates with extendable margins.

The famous English member of the FLQ, Nick Mansell, made a fortune in electronics and lived in a $500,000 mansion on the side of Mount Royal.

Maurice Corbo, known as Le Corbeau, the Crow, was living out his dream in a hotel in Costa Rica next to Manuel-Antonio National Park.

And François Langlais, according to unconfirmed sources, was working as an attendant in a residential hospital or retirement home on the South Shore. According to others, he owned an extended-care facility near Joliette.

Sam Nihilo had already written to Jean-Paul Lafleur (care of
Bé
lier
) and to Élise Francœur (he'd found her name in the list of members of the Quebec Writers' Union). He hadn't received even a notice that his letters had been received. And the telephone in the offices of Lynx Sightings was never answered.

He then tried to trace Justin Francœur through his advertising agency. Two days later, he had him on the line.

“There's no way I'm going to talk about this on the phone,” Francœur said right off the bat. A natural precaution whichever way you look at it, for someone who's had his telephone tapped. “If you came to Montreal,” he added, “we could go for a beer
 . . .
”

In his dream, a loon was eating his liver while he was chained to the bottom of his canoe, fighting it off and trying to scream but nothing coming out, only silence, was, in the cold light of dawn, Marie-Québec's elbow in his ribs. He opened his eyes. A white-throated bunting sang out its pure, solitary note, a strange nakedness and a living affirmation in the grey morning light.

“Someone came in through the window,” said Marie-Québec.

“What's that?”

“I heard the sound of breaking glass, downstairs.”

“What?”

“Someone's broken in.”

“No, you were just dreaming again.”

“I've been awake for the past hour. Why don't you ever believe me?”

This time the shotgun was in the bottom of the cupboard.

He did a tour of the windows. Nothing unusual. Standing in the panorama of the bay window in the living room, he paused a moment to watch the balsam fir and birch trees slowly separate themselves from the earth's brown shadow and attach themselves to the surface of the lake.

While recrossing the kitchen to get to the stairs, something caught his eye and he stopped. He approached the north-facing window and examined a tiny, downy feather stuck to the window glass by a few splotches of blood. He looked down and saw a still form lying at the base of the wall.

“It was a grouse,” he told her. “It flew into the kitchen window. It couldn't have chosen a better place if it was trying to land in the stew pot.”

It felt good to be getting back into the warm bed.

“What about the window?”

“There's nothing wrong with the window. It took the hit.”

“But I heard glass breaking.”

Another time she maintained that she'd heard a man crying somewhere in the house during the night.

And while Nihilo that night cleaned the suicidal grouse in order to cook its fillets sautéed in butter and olive oil and mix it with penne noodles alla puttanesca, she told him the following story while sipping a glass of Cahors:

“Yesterday, when you went into town to run some errands, I went out to pick blueberries.”

“Where did you go?”

“Just around here, not very far. Along the roadside
 . . .
I had just passed the old greenhouse and was ready to turn into the woods when I felt I was being
 . . .
watched.”

“What did you do?”

“I turned around. And
 . . .
”

“And what? Tell me.”

“Someone was there
 . . .
standing in your office window. I could see him clearly. It was a man. He followed me with his eyes.”

Samuel looked at the carcass he was holding in his hands. He'd been planning to make soup stock with it.

“So, the house is haunted
 . . .
Is that what you believe?”

“Yes. Why are you laughing?”

Samuel thought about their house, cast up like a shipwreck on the shore of several hundred square kilometres of savage forest. And in it, the two of them, trapped in their obligatory prison.

“Because if I didn't, I'd be afraid.”

On paper, it was perfect: back-to-the-land, life of the pioneer, simple, self-sufficient, neo-hippie philosophy. Composting. Free-range chickens. Catch a fish for supper. His lady kneeling in her peasant skirt in the middle of the sandlot-sized herb garden. But eventually you discover that the only thing Nature is able to grow here are carrots two centimetres long and a few lettuces surrounded by more fencewire than a Jewish colony on the West Bank, which in any case proves useless because there is always a newly weaned baby rabbit that can slip through the wire and eat everything in the garden down to ground level. And to the idyllic image of your lady in straw hat and peasant skirt you have to add netting hiding her face about as sexy as a hijab, to prevent the hordes of blackflies, mosquitoes, deerflies, horseflies, and any other kind of flies from picking her up and carrying her off.

As far as the neighbours were concerned — that mixture of villagers, retirees who'd converted their summer cottages into year-round residences, and suburbanites shunted out to the extremes of Maldoror by the centrifugal force of urban sprawl — Sam and Marie-Québec were artists, and people didn't generally ask what they did for a living for fear of upsetting them: a freelance writer doing contractual piecework and working on “a serious book,” and his actor partner. Marie-Québec had decided to stage a production of Chekhov in the Loblaw's Happy Times Theatre, and to direct it herself. She also took on other projects: picked up an old Westfalia camper van from somewhere, for example, and founded Four-Wheel Theatre, an itinerant troupe of actors whose mission was to bring Camus, Shakespeare, Lise Vaillancourt, and Daniel Danis to villages surrounded by forest and ugly, mono-industrial agglomerations on the fringes of the 49th parallel, to show the idle youth of the North that there were other things to do in the summer than making suicide pacts.

One day, going in to Maldoror to buy supplies, Sam saw a seagull sitting squat in the middle of the road. The roadway had been cut into the red sandstone between two lines of Jack pines studded with patches of white birch. Although the lake was only a few hundred metres below, a gull was still an unusual sight in such a spot, where the usual congregants were pine grosbeaks and spruce grouse. The gull was trailing one of its wings, which had been torn half off. Sam took his foot off the gas to assess the damage, but he knew from experience that there was nothing to be done for the creature except to deliver the
coup de grâce
, which the bird in any case seemed to be asking for, to judge from the way it offered Sam its bravest profile. And so he pressed on the gas pedal and drove over it. A loud POOF! from under the vehicle and, in his rear-view mirror, a pile of crumpled and more or less flattened white feathers was the only evidence of death that Nihilo needed.

Upon his return two hours later, the carcass was gone. He attributed the cleanup to some wild animal intent on giving the lie to the old adage there was no such thing as a free meal. Marie-Québec had taken a part-time job at the White Wolf, a bar in Maldoror, to help pay expenses, and her shift that night ended at nine o'clock. At ten, Samuel was banging away at the tiny black-and-white television set that had come up through La Vérendrye park with the rest of his junk, when he suddenly heard someone kicking frantically at the front door. Since they never locked the place, he wondered who it could be as he hurried across the room.

In the porch lamp's weak light, the scene that leapt into view was that of Marie-Québec, looking like Mother Teresa of the Forest, holding the gull in her arms like a suckling child. The bird was staring at Samuel with a baleful, accusing eye. The sight of the revenant brought a cry to his lips.

“Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh.”

The bird had sprung into Marie-Québec's headlights as she'd been driving home, apparently still looking for someone to put it out of its misery. As Marie-Québec held it to her body, Sam bent over and looked at its wounded wing. Under the feathers, which were dirty and smeared with blood and road dust, the wing was held on by nothing more than a thin filament of shredded tendon. The bird nodded its head threateningly.

“What do you intend to do with it?” he asked.

“Take care of it
 . . .
Save it,” she added after a moment's reflection, in case she hadn't been clear.

“But look, its wing is completely broken off. No autumn migration. And it can't spend the winter up here in Abitibi. Believe me, it's pretty well fucked.”

“Not if we take it to the Pageau Refuge
 . . .
”

“The Pageau Refuge? They take wolves and moose there. This thing is a dump rat with wings.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, speaking like that.”

Nihilo received a fierce peck from the topic of their conversation, which made him think of scenes from the Hitchcock film.

“All right, what do you propose we do with it?” she said.

“Put it in with the chickens for tonight.”

“And tomorrow?”

“A painless treatment. Number 4 lead shot.”

That night was the first time they slept in separate rooms.

That's how it started. The next day, Jonathan Livingston Seagull disappeared from the yard, where we'd put him before going to beds (plural intended). The wire fence was in shreds and the bird took advantage of the fact: by the time we discovered it was gone, it was probably already in some fox's or lynx's belly, a happy ending for a bird that had probably lived on Big Macs all its life.

In the following days, Marie-Québec's insomnia continued as usual, except that now she experienced her dazed, nocturnal meanderings in a separate bed. I slept in my office, on a mattress on the floor. I buried myself in the October business and worked even harder.

One day, apropos of nothing, I asked Marie-Québec what Chekhov play she was doing.

“
The Seagull
. Why?”

“Nothing,” I replied, “except that some strange things are happening in this house.”

Two days later at first light, I stuck my nose outside the door. The night before, I'd left a garbage pail by the corner of the house intending to take it to one of the Dumpsters along the road into Kaganoma. And who do you think I caught going through my garbage? Him. His wing was in an even sorrier state; he was dragging it behind him on the ground at the end of a knot of nerves as he scurried out of my way, flapping on his webbed feet like a tragicomic clown. I went back inside to get the shotgun. Quietly, on tiptoes. I came back downstairs putting a pair of shells into the double barrel. I went through the door and advanced, barefoot across the dawn's wet grass, shotgun at the ready.

PERCÉ, SUMMER 1969

THE WATER AROUND THE MILOISEAU
was churning. Birds swam over from the base of the cliff and fought each other for the capelin that were rising from the blue depths of the sea. Gannets cut through the air like swords, necks straightened, wings tight to their bodies. Waves exploded on the brick-red rocks below the cliff, where a puffin stood with three smelts in its colourful beak. Higher up, razor-billed auks were lined up along a ledge. On the boat they had to yell to be heard above the roar of crashing waves, piercing bird cries, squawking and shrieking, as though the red cliff face was being bombarded by explosions of feathers and webbed feet. Griffin's face was the colour and consistency of the rock. Godefroid and the captain didn't need words to understand each other. It was enough that their gazes met from time to time. The way they tried to match their movements to the violent but regular rhythm of the sea was a kind of intimacy. The net flying through the air, then falling, then flying again, the long-line quickly hauled aboard with both hands, and shaken, the fish unhooked
 . . .
In the middle of the boat was a pile of glistening guts and thick, moustachioed heads. The day's take must be around three-quarters of a tonne, according to the captain. Since they'd found the school of cod that had been going after the same capelin the gannets were spearing in their frenzied chase to the surface, they had caught fish after fish without a break.

Wilfrid Griffin's eyes, with their hint of Ireland set deeply in the crazed network of grooves in the burnt leather of his face, fixed on a point somewhere behind Gode. The latter followed the captain's glance. Griffin was the sole master of the
Miloiseau
, one of those solidly made Gaspé fishing boats, decked and graced with an elegant line and a forward cabin; this one was twelve metres long, with deck planks of hemlock spruce and a hull of Nova Scotian white oak. Squinting into the sun, Gode saw a sail, an immaculate white triangle, rounding the island's tip, leaning into the whitecaps that broke and lapped appealingly against its hull.

He followed the apparition for a moment, then turned back to the captain. By way of response, the captain threw out the net again, drew in another twelve kilos of cod with smooth, alternating movements of his arms. With a simple flick of his wrist, he detached the three-pronged hooks from the fishes' gullets and finished the motion by throwing the fish onto the heaving pile behind him. Then, after again throwing in his jigger line and wedging it, the coastal fisherman spat into the sea.

The lobster boat was pulled up alongside the
Miloiseau
, a line of empty beer bottles trailing in its wake almost all the way to the horizon. The newcomers had a propane stove on board on which they'd set a pot of seawater to boil, and the boarding consisted of a typical exchange of freshly caught and cooked lobster for a few sun-warmed Labatt 50s. Gode grabbed the dripping, bright orange-red lobster that was tossed to him, cracked the shell of a large claw against the boat's side and chewed the aromatic flesh. When he was finished, Captain Will passed him another beer. He applied the neck to the boat rail, polished by the incessant rubbing of lines, and hit the cap with his fist, letting the foam spurt out. While he went back to working on his lobster, a shout made him look up. The lobster boat was about twenty metres off, heading into the wind. The excited fishermen scrutinized the distance between the island and the shore. Gode followed their gaze. A tiny sailboat was coming straight toward them, giving the impression that it had taken off from the red cliff face to dive like a gannet on the two boats.

It was a Sunfish, about four metres long. About thirty metres separated the
Miloiseau
and the lobster boat. They were running parallel to each other, and the Sunfish, without even changing course, passed directly between them. A tall blonde was at the helm, navigating by herself, her body leaning completely over the side so that her long, curly hair blew in the wind and touched the water, the air ecstatic in her white sailing pants and sailor's T-shirt with navy-blue stripes. The men watched her go by, mouths hanging open. It didn't matter where this rig ended up, they knew they had their conversational topic in the tavern for the next month.

Gode took time to read the name painted in red letters on the tailboard:
Those Were the Days
.

The captain spit into the water.

“I'd haul that one below.”

They called us outsiders, bums, crud, fleabags, hippies, beatniks, filth, students. According to the chief of police, Big Tony Tousignant, we were always having orgies at our place, between “persons of both sexes aged thirteen to thirty,” which delighted the journalists when things got hot and the press started showing up. The mayor (Gill Fournier, who also sported a huge beer belly) was quick to say that our presence in his little fishing port encouraged the consumption of drugs, the corruption of minors, theft, and murder. The whole village was on edge ever since the owner of a motel had been villainously assassinated at the beginning of the summer. Percé was a colony of artists, motels, campgrounds, and a few souvenir shops: shell ashtrays, agate necklaces,
Made in Japan
junk. A fishing village for whom the principal catch was tourists, and the season lasted two weeks. Local businessmen filled their pockets as long as the manna kept coming and the hole in the famous rock stayed where it belonged. Millions of Kodak moments had turned it into one of the most famous nature postcards on the continent.

After spending nearly a year getting ourselves organized, the Lafleur brothers and I simply wanted to take a vacation. The Fisherman's Hut was a dilapidated shack filled with old fishing nets, but it was a few feet from the dock, and we rented it and turned it into a café. A few tables, the fishing nets now hanging on the wall with a few crab shells and half-rotten starfish stuck in them. Someone showed up with an old jukebox, and the party was underway.

* * *

Mayor Gill Fournier's Pontiac hurtled down the Three Sisters, the triplet of low mountains that blocked the horizon to the north. Seen from this angle, the famous rock didn't look so remarkable, with its hole demurely hidden by several million tonnes of limestone. As if the local cash cow was protecting herself from the prying eyes of anyone who'd come from the direction of Gaspé, which is what Fat Gill was doing. He had just bought himself a hunting rifle at the sports shop in the regional capital and was dying to try it out. The beautiful, brand-new 12-gauge pump-action was sitting on the back seat, still in its case.

Crossing through the village, he noticed the cluster of tents around the new Fisherman's Hut at the end of the quay. The owners of the motels, campgrounds, and restaurants were already complaining to the municipal council. Not to mention the grumbling from the local population, him included, that could be heard over beers in the hotel. Not hard to figure out why: the hippies were charging nothing, zero, free, gratis, to pitch a tent in the field full of crabgrass, dandelions, and thistles adjacent to their café. They sold food for what it cost to make it. He could even name one or two fishermen who were providing them with fresh cod for no better reason than that it gave them an excuse to hang around with the hippy chicks with eyes as blue as those of a northern gannet. And if that wasn't a case of high treason, you had to wonder what was.

From Highway 132, which when it went through the village became the main street, you could see a few of them hanging out, barefoot, their hair down around their shoulders, lounging in the sun with nothing to do but lean back against the old rail fence or sit on their asses on the steps of the Hut, or on the ground, like savages. No ambition at all.

Just before the road headed off up Surprise Coast, Gill parked his car, took the shotgun out of its case, and started walking along the beach. Bird Island rose up across from him. The shore at Percé, with its swaths of beached kelp rotting under the July sun and swarming with sand fleas, gave off, in the mayor's opinion, a rotten stench. His vocabulary was somewhat limited, and for him “briny,” “salty,” “humid,” and “rotten” all pretty much described the same smell.

He reached into his pocket and took out a shell filled with a number 4 buckshot and slid it into the chamber of his new shotgun. He figured there was plenty of space around here for trying out the gun. A movement caught his attention, and he looked up and saw a gull coming toward him, its wings flapping confidently and regularly in the light sea breeze. The palmiped was flying in a straight line parallel to the edge of the seashore, about twenty metres up. Gill released the safety, shouldered his shotgun, quickly took aim at the moving bird, and fired a fusillade of pellets. The gull spiralled down like a struck fighter plane. It hadn't even reached the silvered surface of the wavelets before Gill turned and walked away.

Marie-France was tall and sinuous, her plump ass leaving harmonious waves in the wake of her undulating walk. The way she filled her bell-bottomed Wrangler jeans was the very height of eroticism. She had a devastating smile, a few spots of rouge, a voice that ranged from simpering to guttural, and an easy laugh, a sort of throaty bray that added a destabilizing touch of vulgarity to her personality, which was far from disagreeable.

Gode was twenty-two, and his crippling awkwardness had allowed him to get through Expo 67 and May '68 practically without a hitch. He'd come out of those two great laboratories of free love more or less intact but more confused than ever. He was still incapable of seeing opportunities with the girls who moved around him, the silent signals woven into the coded thickness of the nights. And then along came Marie-France. No separatist had ever held a bomb like her in his hands.

She was touring the Gaspésie with her friend Nicole. The car belonged to Nicole, the sailboat on the trailer behind it was Marie-France's. Nicole, a petite brunette, was a nurse in Rivière-des-Prairies and no sailor. She was much too busy to cruise around on a boat. Marie-France was different. Among all these good little women in bell-bottoms who seemed happy to have exchanged a seduction code involving patience and ritual for another that centred on simple sexual availability, she had a character in which inclination and a moral sense seemed to be able to exist at the same time. She was studying to become a legal secretary, but hastened to add that that was only until she could afford to study law at a university.

René cast his net for Nicole first. The youngest of the Lafleur brothers broke the ice, and Gode threw himself into the water after him. They were a dozen or so sitting around a bonfire on the beach, driftwood crackling like the poles of a tipi on which someone had thrown some old tires. A thick, oily smoke filled the hot night, or rather the early morning, in the small fishing port cum tourist trap. A guy named Latraverse, a tall, bony type, was scraping on a guitar in the light from the flames and sang like he was chewing on sandpaper.

Gode stood up, a small O'Keefe in his left hand, and walked around the fire to sit beside Nicole, Marie-France, and René, who already had the two women laughing uproariously. I'll jump through the flames if I have to, but there's no way I'm going to stay sitting down. He hummed Dalida's
Those Were the Days
.

After opening on the twenty-sixth of June, the Hut became a café, the café a restaurant, the restaurant an inn, and the inn a colony. On any given weekend, there could be a hundred people packed into the place. On the evening of July 20, a Sunday, René had disappeared into the guts of an old black-and-white television he'd found somewhere, emerging in time for them to catch the dark, shadowy figure of Neil Armstrong's boot setting down on the surface of the moon. Some among them were awed by the magnitude of the historical event and suspended their critical faculties and political opinions. Others saw in it an extreme example of Manifest Destiny, and it fed their fierce resistance: Vietnam, salmon rivers, and the Sea of Tranquility, just different aspects of the same fight.

The next day started out as a true summer day
à la Gaspésie
: wall-to-wall wind and cold rain with no relief in sight. About thirty of them were hanging around, minding their own business, when a police officer presented himself at the door at about nine o'clock in the evening. The following is the official version of the order of the events that followed:

• Officer states that the establishment named The Fisherman's Hut was operating without a permit and was, moreover, situated inside a residential zone;
  
• Jean-Paul Lafleur points out to the officer that the establishment named The Fisherman's Hut was in the same zone as an art gallery, a restaurant, and a craft boutique, and if that wasn't commercial then he didn't know what was;
  
• The officer states that no operating permit, then no operating, and that was that;
  
• Jean-Paul Lafleur replies that the Village of Percé only issues permits to exploit the people and fishermen of the Gaspésie, and the members of the Hut collective want nothing to do with all of that;
  
• The officer states that he will take the matter up with a higher authority;
  
• Jean-Paul says the officer can take the matter up with whoever he damned well pleased, there is no higher authority, and so good riddance to him;
  
• 9:30 p.m.: the officer's chief, Tony Tousignant, presents himself at the door to the premises, accompanied by two unidentified individuals;
  
• Gros Tony Tousignant senses they're at the bottom of the barrel;
  
• Gros Tony Tousignant repeats, though not in the same words, the message delivered by the officer a half-hour previously;
  
• Jean-Paul opens his mouth and
   . . .
  
• Jean-Paul closes his mouth, or at least his mouth is closed for him, because Gros Tony Tousignant has just smashed his fist into Jean-Paul's face;
  
• Jean-Paul falls backward and lands in the arms of his friends, girlfriends, etc., and remains in this position while consulting with them;
  
• Rubbing his jaw, Jean-Paul returns to Gros Tony Tousignant and says, in more or less these words: “We're not leaving
   . . .
  ”
  
• Gros Tony Tousignant leaves, swearing loudly, followed by his two acolytes, in the direction of the hotel, promising that this is not the end of the matter by any means.
  

  How I love you
  

  Allelujah, in pajamas
  

  Eyes wide open
  

  My sweet summer love
  

  I know what I want
  

  Qué-bécois, we are all qué-bécois
   . . .