A Very Bold Leap (15 page)

All went well until about three in the morning. Charles had been stopping the car at various street corners, rolling down the window, and barking loudly. When a dog responded to his bark, Charles would write down the address, then move the car down the block and give his bark once more. Dopey, meanwhile, would grin and let out little yips of satisfaction, rubbing his hands together happily.

By three o’clock, Charles had noted four dogs he suspected of not having tags. At Laprotte’s request, he had stopped the car in front of a Canadian Tire store, above which there were two apartments. After taking a drink of mineral water to wet his throat, he gave out a long series of barks. Three dogs replied to it at once! Laprotte was ecstatic.

“They’re in number 204, do you see it? Up there, with the two windows covered by pink curtains, just above the sign! I knew they had dogs in there! Ha! This is going to cost them big-time, my boy! I’ll come with you in person when you pay your little visit to those Dansereau sisters, three spidery old spinsters who’ve been spreading their venom around the area for thirty years. Faces sweet as apple pie, oh yes, little sugary smiles on them, go to six-o’clock mass every day looking like three little porcelain dolls, and all the time they drive us crazy with their constant complaints about their neighbours, over
nothing at all. Oh yes, on Friday we’re going to pay them a little visit and then we’ll see what we shall see! Well done, my lad. This deserves a break.”

He pointed to the greasy window of an all-night doughnut shop a few doors down from the store. “Let me buy you a coffee and all the doughnuts you can eat.”

Charles accepted the offer happily, since barking like a dog — no, better than a dog — all night had made him ravenously hungry.

They went into the shop. It smelled of cheap coffee, deep-fryer fat, and cigarette smoke. Charles took out his pack, but Laprotte placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“Not during work hours. It’s very bad for your voice. Dogs don’t smoke, never forget that!”

And he looked at Charles, clearly disappointed.

The inspector went up to the counter, ordered the doughnuts and coffee, and led them to a table. Then, for some inexplicable reason, his mood seemed to take a nosedive. While eating doughnuts, Charles tried to involve him in conversation, but without success. From time to time he shot a surreptitious glance at the inspector, growing more and more anxious; each time the man’s face seemed to have sunk a bit more.

Then, suddenly,
it
happened. Laprotte gave out a kind of deep groan and shrivelled into himself. His hands went up to hide his face, his shoulders drooped, and his body shrank as though he were trying to disappear under the table. Dopey had shown up.

“Damn, damn, damn,” he sighed through his fingers.

“Is something wrong?” Charles asked, worried.

“Damn, damn, damn,” the inspector repeated in a voice choked with unbearable suffering. “What a useless, goddamned, filthy life this is… Always the same stinking mess… Nothing but petty little idiots who spend all their time trying to cheat each other out of… killing time until they die … And to think it’s my job to chase after them… Makes me sick to my stomach … If I could I’d put an end to it once and for all…”

These decidedly gloomy remarks went on for several minutes. Charles tried to comfort the man, but Dopey seemed not to be aware of his presence. Suddenly he fell silent, and then his shoulders began to shake. He was sobbing. Three customers sitting at the counter turned on their stools and stared curiously at him.

“Need some help?” one of them asked Charles.

Charles made a gesture of helplessness, and timidly placed a hand on Dopey’s shoulder. The shaking subsided slightly, and the shoulder felt almost jellylike; was the man dissolving from unhappiness right there in the restaurant?

A small man with a filthy baseball cap on his head and a three-day growth of grey stubble on his craggy face left his booth and headed towards their table. Charles motioned him to leave them alone.

Suddenly, Dopey removed his hands from his face and shouted in a hoarse, crazed voice, “Go away! Get back to work! I’ll take a taxi home. Go on, I tell you. Beat it!”

Charles quickly left the restaurant and continued making his rounds. But his heart was no longer in his work. His bark sounded false and elicited few replies. By six in the morning he had identified only two more dogs. Sunk in gloom, he returned to his apartment to sleep. What strange illness was the poor man suffering from? Had he, Charles, somehow brought it on without knowing?

At ten o’clock that same night, Charles once again showed up for work. The inspector was waiting for him in his office as though nothing had happened, and made no reference to what had taken place in the restaurant. He must have been ashamed of his behaviour.

The night went without incident, and Charles surpassed his performance of the night before: eleven dogs caught. At the end of his shift, Laprotte invited him out for breakfast at a small restaurant near the office, where he entertained him with a long list of the joys and sorrows of being an inspector. It was after eight o’clock by the time Charles handed in his report. Seeing him, one of the secretaries gave him a radiant smile; another employee, whom Charles did not know, rose from his desk to shake Charles’s hand and ask him how the evening had gone. Laprotte had evidently sung Charles’s praises to the rest of the staff.

Friday, the day he had to deliver his notices of fines to those who had unlicensed dogs, was the last day he was to be accompanied by Laprotte. The work went well, both men maintaining their good moods, and towards the middle of the afternoon, they even made a startling and unexpected
discovery concerning the feline species: in a fit of nervousness that often afflicts those who know they are breaking the law, a man on rue Moffat committed a slip of the tongue by mentioning his cat, Louis-Philippe, which made Laprotte realize that the man had fraudulently registered the animal with Social Services as a dependent in order to receive welfare benefits for it. The next working day, the government would take strenuous measures to demote Louis-Philippe to the status of domestic cat.

But it was closing in on five o’clock when Laprotte achieved his greatest joy. They had left off visiting the three Dansereau sisters until the end of the day, and had even requested the presence of a veterinarian. The surprise visit revealed that each of the sisters was in possession of an unregistered poodle; the vet determined the ages of the animals, which were five, nine, and twelve years old, respectively; the sisters foolishly admitted that they had acquired the pets as young pups; and the accumulated taxes and fines amounted to a total of eight hundred and twenty-two dollars.

The oldest sister, Emilie, flew into a towering rage; Berthe choked on a piece of her biscuit; and Léontine, the most prosaic of the three, sobbed uncontrollably into her handkerchief. Laprotte regarded them for a moment in silence, his arms crossed on his chest, then left the premises with an air of dignified triumph that amused Charles immensely.

“I can retire happy now,” Laprotte sighed, as though he had achieved the pinnacle of his career. “Those three buzzards will leave us in peace for a bloody long time after this! The director will be tickled pink…”

He shook his colleague’s hand and walked off down the street with the lightness of tread an angel might display as it traversed a cloud in Paradise.

After that, because of his normally late working hours, Charles rarely ran into Laprotte. The inspector had helped him enormously through his apprenticeship, and had inspired in him as much admiration as distaste. The curious mixture of perceptiveness, vigilance, and concern for the public good, along with a kind of perverted sadism, impressed Charles no end; at the same time, it caused him a certain amount of anxiety. Would he end up as an inspector? Anything but that! This job was nothing more than an experiment, a way of learning a little about life.

Several weeks went by, during which he learned a lot about life. His new job was like a key that unlocked the door to every level of the social edifice, from the dentist’s mansion and the university professor’s residence to the apartment of the young, drug-addicted prostitute who never paid her rent; he was given access to them all, and was permitted to ask any questions he wanted, or almost. He saw the full range of facial expressions — slyness, fear, hatred, violence, naïveté. Honesty had but one face, and he rarely came across it.

Despite everything, the solitude in which he carried out his nightly tasks began to weigh on him. One night he brought Boff along on his rounds, but soon realized that was a mistake: excited by all the barking, his master’s as well as those of other dogs, Boff made a distracting nuisance of himself in the car, and Charles had to take him back to his apartment in the middle of the night. Blonblon and Steve went with him a few times. Charles’s skill as a canine impressionist made them howl in derision, but they soon gave up keeping him company because they were too exhausted the next day from lack of sleep. Lucie and Fernand absolutely refused to allow Céline to go with him, fearful for her safety as well as for her grades: two or three times she snuck out of the house anyway and stayed with him until midnight, returning to her parents’; house on the last subway, but not before the couple had made love in the back seat of the Honda, much to their mutual delight. In the end, though, Charles had to learn to make his rounds on his own, away from his girlfriend.

Céline, in her turn, had to learn to accept the new phase of life her boyfriend had entered with this job. One night, feeling particularly depressed, she called Isabel and poured out her heart’s sorrow; Isabel, normally a warm and maternal shoulder on which to cry, rebuked her sternly, telling her that trying to hold back a young man when he was gripped by a sense of adventure was not only a waste of time, but was also wrong.

“No, girl, that’s the quickest way to lose him, or to push him into being unfaithful to you, believe me! You don’t own the guy, you know. He’s not some kind of trinket you can put on when you need him and shove away in a drawer when you don’t. Is that what he is to you, a trinket? Have some patience, Céline. You might as well, anyway, since you don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. One of these days he’ll get fed up with barking for a living and that’ll be it as far as dogs are concerned. He’ll get another job with normal hours and you’ll have him all to yourself again.”

It was all right for Isabel to be generous and full of good sense. Her conception of life was completely traditional, hardly differing from that of her mother and her grandmother: the man was seen as both the master and the infant, someone they had to obey without question while at the same time manipulate without his being aware of it.

Her little sermon had its effect, though, since Céline gave up complaining, and Charles, much relieved to feel free from her pressure, was more inclined to find his little darling even more adorable than ever. None of which prevented him, however, from having an entirely unforeseen adventure.

I
t happened on a Friday, the day he delivered his notices of offence. Early in the afternoon, he rang the bell of an apartment on boulevard Desmarchais, from which, the night before, he had heard a series of small but quite sharp and distinct barks. The sounds had come from the left window of the top floor of a two-storey building faced with imitation stone, ordinary enough but well kept, and obviously containing several spacious and comfortable apartments.

He had just rung for the fourth time and was on the point of coming back later when the door opened and a woman’s head appeared. She was wearing small, round eyeglasses; her brown, wavy hair was cut to the middle of her ears; and she looked at him with a sleepy, almost bored expression on her face.

“Yes?”

He introduced himself and explained the purpose of his visit. Her head jerked awake suddenly, and her eyes, now come to life, regarded him more closely. Charles showed her his identity card; the woman studied it carefully Then she gave him a confused look and asked him to come in, at which point a series of sharp barks emanated from a back room and began to come closer, accompanied by the dry clicking of a small, cantankerous animal running on a hardwood floor.

“Quiet, Moppet!” the woman cried to a white fluffball that looked more like an overstuffed powder puff than a dog. It even smelled like a powder puff.

“Ah,” said Charles, trying to keep the whole thing on a lighter plane, “the
corpus delicti
, in the flesh.”

“Yes,” sighed the woman, bending down to pick up the powder puff, which continued its high-pitched yapping and snarling in Charles’s general direction. “Would you come with me, please?”

She led him into a large kitchen, which was as brightly lit as an operating theatre, and, sitting at a table under a huge knitted wall hanging that appeared to be unfinished, motioned him to sit across from her. With the dog held tight against her chest, she listened carefully to his explanations. The dog growled and yipped and strained murderously towards Charles, who was both surprised and vexed: not once in his whole life had he met a dog who hadn’t liked him. This dog obviously hated his guts, and he was beginning to feel the same way towards it.

“You are Madame Aglaé Mayrand?” he asked the woman, opening his large black notebook.

Looking more and more uncomfortable, the woman nodded.

“According to our records, madame, you have neglected to register your dog and pay the annual tax levied by the city.”

“I know,” she replied, in a soft, somewhat guarded voice. “I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

Charles smiled at her indulgently. He saw her as a good mother and housewife, always making healthy muffins for her four mischievous kids as the washing machine hummed in the background. She was a tiny bit overweight, pretty but not remarkably so, with a soft but sensible manner, the kind of woman one passes a hundred times a day on the street without really noticing.

“It can happen to anyone,” he said, trying to minimize the fault. “Unfortunately, on top of the forty dollars I’ve got to charge you for the permit, I have to add a twenty-seven-dollar fine. I’m really sorry, but the rules leave me no choice.”

She nodded her agreement and gave him a gentle smile. She blushed and seemed to become increasingly confused, gazing at Charles so steadily that he began to feel uncomfortable.

“I know I should have dealt with this a long time ago,” she said. “But I’m a replacement pharmacist, and my job takes me all over the province. I’m not at home very often. I always take Moppet with me. I guess I think of him more as a friend than a pet.”

“I see,” said Charles, showing polite interest. But he began filling out a form with the vague feeling that something was about to happen.

For a minute or two, nothing did. Then, after noisily clearing her throat, the pharmacist spoke in a trembling, troubled voice.

“I think you have a small rash on your neck, on the left side. Would you mind if I took a look at it?”

Charles looked up, speechless with surprise. Unable to think of any way to refuse her, he nodded his assent.

“I’ll just put this little monster in the bedroom first,” she said, getting up quickly.

She came back almost immediately and stood beside Charles, who had pushed his chair back to hide his astonishment. He could hear her breathing — or, more accurately, panting — as she traced her index finger gently around the small red mark on his neck.

“It’s just a skin irritation, probably,” she murmured after a moment. She seemed to hesitate before adding, “Are there any others like it?”

“Yes, a bit farther down…. I get them from time to time. They’re not serious, are they? I always —”

“Can I just loosen your shirt a bit?”

Before he could respond, her hands were undoing his buttons, pulling his shirt down over his shoulders, and exposing his upper chest. She gave a sort of hoarse sigh and threw herself on him, covering his skin with kisses. For a moment, taken aback, he tried to disengage himself, but then he relaxed and began to find the experience enjoyable. He put his arms around her.

“You are so handsome,” she breathed between kisses. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself. This has never happened to me before. I feel like I’ve lost my mind.”

The next thing he knew they were in the bedroom and she was stripping off the rest of his clothes, covering him with kisses so lascivious and passionate they made him feel drunk and plunged him into a kind of amazed ecstasy, as though he were sliding out of control into an unknown and marvellously frightening world. She gobbled at him as though he were a cream cake, awakening in him a raging hunger for her devilish caresses, her tiny love bites, which soon became more vicious and made him sing out with pleasure. They made love with joyous abandon, with a brutal, tireless, careless ardour, and from their feverish bodies arose the sharp scent of frantic lovers. Mingled with laughter and groans she gave him a series of crude but precise instructions, changed her position, directed his head, guided his hand, turned him this way and that with loving authority, while Moppet, enclosed in the
next room, kept up his frenetic barking until it sounded weak and far away. They continued their romping play — he was the sea, she the rolling ship — then reversed their roles amid waves of sensual joy. Doors opened within Charles: was this not also a kind of love? An equal kind? It couldn’t possibly be, and yet… he was a child in these matters, a baby, naïve and a bit stupid, with still so much to learn about life.

The dog must have collapsed from exhaustion. Charles and the pharmacist lay motionless on the bed, their legs entwined, their minds foggy with the sleepy well-being of sated lovers.

Suddenly he lifted himself on one elbow.

“You know,” he said, “when I first saw you, you seemed so shy and reserved, I never would have guessed that… I suppose that goes to show how much I know about women!”

She laughed gently. “I don’t understand it myself. No, really! It’s just that you looked so handsome, and you seemed so nice … I couldn’t stop myself. I just lost it. It’s the first time that’s ever happened to me.”

“Sure?” he said, smiling skeptically. I swear!

Her face suddenly tensed, as though she had just had an unpleasant thought.

“You don’t think I —”

She stopped, not daring to continue.

“I don’t think you what? Go on, finish your sentence.”

He pressed himself to her and kissed her throat.

“… that I brought you into my bed to get out of paying that fine. I hope you don’t…”

It was his turn to laugh. Quite foolishly, he said, “Even if I didn’t want to, I’d have to make you pay up.”

“Well,” she said with a small frown, “I should hope so.”

They dozed for a while, then she talked to him about her work, which obliged her to travel constantly. She spoke of long evenings spent in hotel rooms and bed-and-breakfasts. She lived a very quiet life, detested bars full of fat pickup artists whose hands were on your thigh after two minutes of conversation. Her locums often took her back to the same areas, and over the years she had made a few friends and acquaintances here and there, which provided her with some distraction, but too often boredom reared its ugly head; she fought it off as best she could with books and television. But
despite all the inconveniences, she liked her peripatetic life. It gave her a sense of freedom.

“Now tell me about you,” she said, pressing her lips against his.

Charles was less forthcoming about his past, but he did tell her a bit about his childhood, about the circumstances under which he’d been adopted, about Lucie and Fernand and the job they’d given him at the hardware store. And he told her that he’d dabbled in writing, and eight months ago had even published a novel.

“Really?” she said, impressed. “A real novel? I’d love to read it. What’s it called?”

“It was a very bad novel,” was all he replied. “I burned all the copies. I might write another some day.”

“All the copies?” she repeated in astonishment. “But that’s terrible!”

“Even the manuscript.”

“You’ll live to regret that.”

They made love again.

“When can we see each other again?” he asked her as he was leaving.

“Tomorrow morning, if you can come early. I have to go up to Malartic for two weeks. Can you be here?”

“If both my legs were broken I would drag myself here,” he said with a wide smile.

Charles had been barking for sixty-three days. He had become so good at it, he could have given elocution lessons to dogs. The job, however, was beginning to get him down. The magic of those solitary nights was wearing thin, as was the thrill of catching canine-owning miscreants. He felt that the day was not far off when he would tire of this bizarre life in which he slept while the rest of the world worked, and worked when everyone else was asleep. He missed his friends, and in the past few weeks his friends seemed to have drifted away from him. And Céline, whom he was seeing much less often than usual, missed him more and more, and he could foresee the day when she, too, would let him go.

He saw his stunning pharmacist twice more after that unforgettable day when he’d knocked on her door to deliver her notice of offence. She came back
from Malartic and left almost immediately for Moncton, New Brunswick. She called him a few times when she was depressed, a mood that came over her more often, she confessed during one call, since she had met him. One night she tried to persuade him to call in sick and join her for a weekend, and for a moment he was tempted. But he declined when he thought of Céline, and Aglaé, wisely, didn’t push it. Charles had made it clear to her since their first encounter that he had a girlfriend.

“I’d be surprised if you didn’t,” she’d said to him, with a somewhat sad smile. “I’ll bet you’re madly in love with her, too. Oh, well, I’ll just have to take what I can get, and count myself lucky to have you at all.”

“No luckier than I am,” Charles had replied, smothering her with kisses.

To his amazement, his infidelity caused him no great, stinging remorse, and that, oddly enough, bothered him. Did he not still love Céline? He was fairly certain that he did. Why, then, did the thought of how he was behaving towards her not cause him some degree of shame? His misconduct hardly bothered him at all, evoked little more in him than a desire to laugh out loud. Worst of all, he had absolutely no desire to stop; no woman had ever given him so much pleasure before. Did all men, as they got older, become such egotistical and unscrupulous womanizers, liars living double lives, hopeless swordsmen ever in search of a piece of skirt with which to comfort themselves? Can a man ever really love a woman, truly and deeply?

One afternoon in March, he posed these questions to Parfait Michaud. The notary had asked him to help remove some storm windows whose frames had rotted, and replace them with new ones. They worked for about an hour, buffeted by a damp, icy wind, with the tips of their fingers tingling painfully, their eyes tearing up, their cheeks stinging with cold, and both of them bitterly cursing the winter and its attendant discomforts. When Charles, frozen stiff, carried the last of the old windows to the garbage, Amélie came out into the yard to see how the work was progressing. She was wrapped in a thick purple coat and had a cap stuck on her head. To her husband’s great surprise, she seemed satisfied with their work. She turned to Charles, who was shivering beside her, and gave him a warm embrace.