October 1970 (43 page)

“Do you know a company in Houston called James Engineering?” I asked him.

Jean-Paul remained silent for exactly five seconds.

“No.”

Then he turned his head and saw another raised hand, and nodded encouragingly to the person under it.

I insisted. I interrupted him. He carried on answering the other question without bothering with me. He spoke louder. I spoke louder. The audience got involved.

* * *

After being thrown out of room A-5630, naturally, Nihilo turned up at the White Wolf, where Marie-Québec was on duty, as she liked to say. He found her in conversation with the only client in the place and immediately had the impression that he'd seen the guy before somewhere. It was the dead hour, between five and eight, before the stampede arrived for the rest of the night.

Sam ordered a Marteau and heard the guy beside him say:

“You want a little sickle with that?”

“Samuel,” said his ex, stiffening a little, “this is Friedrich.”

“Right. We've already met.”

“How did it go with Travers?” Rougeau asked politely.

He was a remarkable fellow. At the invitation of the festival, he'd come to Maldo to screen his documentary (the festival was showing only documentaries) entitled
Chicken or No Chicken, We're Off!
It was about the raising of poultry and the factory-farmed chicken industry. Friedrich, like a fat cat, announced that Sam's Marteau was on him, and he bought another round of drinks. Nihilo stared into his glass in silence, then said:

“Your friend Travers never gave me a thing
 . . .
”

“Not true, Sam.”

“What? What do you mean, not true?”

“I spoke to him just last week
 . . .
”

“And?”

“And he told me he remembered your e-mail clearly and that he'd answered all your questions.”

“He said that? Really?”

“Yes. Good old John. He goes for his walk with Molly every day, on the cliffs of Galway where he's enjoying a peaceful and, if you ask me, well-earned retirement.”

“Who's Molly?”

“His sausage hound.”

“Okay, listen: Travers never even answered my e-mail. After a week, I sent it again. Same result
 . . .
”

“Sam, that's not possible.”

“Are you telling me that I live so far out in the boonies that even e-mails get lost on their way to me?”

“I've no doubt that you live a little cut off from the world,” Rougeau said with a fluttering of his eyelashes in Marie-Québec's direction.

“Travers lied to you. He's hiding something.”

“Yes, Sam, you're right. His kinship with the little green man in Roswell, no doubt. Bring him another Marteau, my love
 . . .
”

Sam didn't like Rougeau's tone when addressing Marie-Québec. It was hardly subtle. When the glass landed in front of him, he placed both hands flat on the bar, made of B.C. fir, and looked from one to the other.

“You think I'm getting completely hammered, is that it?”

From the glance he cast at Marie-Québec, Sam could see that even she, totally dedicated irrationalist Marie-Québec, was wondering about him. It wasn't a good feeling.

Shortly after nine, Marie-Québec cashed out and came to sit at the bar, where she allowed Friedrich Rougeau to buy her a double Bloody Mary.
Chicken or No Chicken, We're Off!
was in the running for Best Engagé Documentary, and the word was that a fair wind was blowing its way. Samuel thought the wind in question was more like a country breeze blowing over a well-manured field, and characterized the film, which he hadn't seen, as dribblings from some egg incubator. He'd decided to keep to himself and so moved down to the end of the bar to continue drinking on his own.

One by one, people began to arrive and take over the premises, and he soon found himself adrift in the crowd, pressed up against Michel Chartrand beside the pool table, a Chartrand still in his red-and-black checkered shirt and stinking of the straight gin he was quaffing from a beer glass. Chartrand began haranguing him on the subject of water, saying that the water from the eskers in Abitibi was the best drinking water in the universe and that the esker at Kaganoma was the Napa Valley of potable water, but that a huge transnational company, a giant of the agrifood industry that in truth was a goddamned subsidiary of Pepsi-Cola, had its sights on this formidable natural filter and was planning to build an ultramodern bottling megafactory in the woods around here somewhere. Samuel, unable to get a word in edgewise, watched Chartrand's mouth open and close six inches from his nose, all the words coming out of it smelling of straight gin and echoing in his head, and before long he had reduced them to four:
oh such good water, such good water
, and then to two:
good water, good water, bonne eau, Bono
.

The news spread about the room like a trained flea:
Bono? Bono was coming? His bodyguards were securing the place?

Nihilo, using his elbows to good effect, managed to get to the door in time to see Marie-Québec leaving just ahead of him with Rougeau. He ran up the street after them. An icy wind swept the snow that was now falling across the sky, ululating gusts unfurling from the north through the infernal circumlocutions of the foundry and reducing the halo of the street lamps to fading fireflies.

And it was like in the dream that Sam had had: Marie-Québec moving away from him, not turning, never a glance in his direction, except that there was no white sand in the immediate vicinity, and instead of Branlequeue as the wading bird, it was Rougeau Nihilo ran up against, the marabou, who said to him:

“Fuck off, you little conspiracy-theorist shit!”

I woke up in my own bed. I vaguely remembered an evanescent avalanche blowing against my windshield, stop signs that sprung up out of nowhere in my headlights like haggard, muffled ghosts. Then I became aware of another presence in the room and opened my eyes.

The ghost was sitting at the foot of my bed.

“The house is burning,” he said.

And just as he finished speaking, the smoke detector in the stairwell went off.

Sitting up in bed, I tried to think. It felt as though someone was squeezing my head in a vise.

“The old Anishnabe Indians that I meet around here,” Lavoie said, “you know what they tell me? That in their language ‘Kaganoma' means ‘place of words.' Don't you think that's funny? No, well, in your place, I probably wouldn't either
 . . .
”

“What are you doing?”

The spectre pulled the pillow out from under my back. He showed me his right palm and his wounded and heavily bandaged left wrist.

“I can't take your hand. I hope you understand
 . . .
”

He turned, raised the pillow, and held it against his chest and face, then threw himself head-first at the window, passing soundlessly through it and disappearing on the other side into the blinding whiteness of fresh snow that covered the countryside. Then I smelled smoke, and heard, finally, the crackling and snapping of flames in the stairway. The smoke detector started drilling into my cranium.

“No
 . . .
”

I charged into my office and began hauling out bankers' boxes and chucking them out the window, like ballast thrown overboard so that my house would go up in flames. Folders flew out one after another, the whole history in separate pieces, the puzzle of all these words and all these names that corresponded to lives, some of which had been lived in the vast unknown of the real: General Bédard, Uncle Bob, Madame Corps, Zadig and Madwar, Chevreuil, Gode, Lancelot, la Bellechasse,
Maître
Brien, Corbeau, Machinegun Martinek, the chicken delivery guy, the Fat Cop
 . . .

Even Chevalier Branlequeue. Goodbye and good sailing!

Finally I grabbed my laptop and threw it into the snow, five metres down.

When I left the office, the stairwell was already breathing red flames and pumping them up to the second floor, and the heat was cooking my right shoulder. I went back into the bedroom, threw a housecoat over my shoulders and, seeing the terrified cat, chased it under the bed and went after it into a nest of dust bunnies. I threw it out the window, following after it through the broken glass, to land in a stand of young saplings that settled me gently to the ground on boughs cushioned with fresh snow.

On my road above the house, I met firemen wearing gas masks and fireproof suits that made them look as though they were going off to wage chemical warfare against Saddam Hussein. Three huge, fluorescent-yellow trucks were coming up the road with difficulty between the rows of spruce. Someone tossed a blanket over my shoulders and it slid down onto the ground without my lifting a finger to stop it. A female police officer spoke to me and couldn't seem to make head or tail of my explanations. It wasn't complicated, in any case. I looked for the cat, it was there, somewhere in the snowy whiteness. And Paul Lavoie, have you seen him? The cabinet minister assassinated in 1970? If you did, you weren't even born yet.

To continue along the road as though I had somewhere important to get to but hard to make sense of was probably a mistake. I didn't turn around when she called out something that sounded like:
Freeze
!, which was funny, given the temperature and what I was wearing. I started to tell her that maybe she'd seen too many cop shows on television, and then I just gave up.

That was how I left Kaganoma Lake, strapped to a stretcher, with 50,000 volts in my chest.

* * *

Sam plunged the blackened camping kettle into the deep snow, tamped it down with his bare hand, thinking that they'd probably never get used to this strange thing, snow. And with another sweeping gesture, as though scooping a fish into a hand-held net, he returned to the cabin and placed the kettle on the woodstove.

Around the head of the lake, where the spruce and Jack pines had never known a saw, the countryside resembled what the first trappers must have seen as they hacked a portage route with their axes after ascending the Ottawa River, and the Kinojévis met them as they broke out of the woods on their snowshoes: an infinite expanse of intense white, fringed by a dark circle of evergreens weighed down by piles of sculptured snow under a sickly sun. Caw, caw, a coal-black crow passed by in a deep blue sky.

While waiting for the snow to melt, he sat at the old pink Formica table and flipped through the cabin's guest book: a simple notebook with a stiff cover left for the use of visitors on the trail:

It's beautiful, but the trees aren't very big. And no trace of the great moose in these swamps. Frankly, if you're looking for big game, it's much better in the Ngorongoro crater, where at least there were some gnus (www.ngorongoro.com), or even in the Canadian Rockies, with all their wapitis that seem to be posing for photographs.

The bugs were a real pain (we mean the insect kind, obviously, ha ha ha) . . .

They were probably from France.

When he was being held for observation in the hospital after being tasered (according to the local police report, Officer Kathy Drolet had zapped him with all those volts and secured him to the stretcher to protect him from himself when he put himself at risk of serious exposure) and they asked him if he wanted someone to be notified, Marie-Québec's name was the only one that came to the tip of his tongue. She dropped everything. And instead of bringing flowers, she showed up with
Three Yellow Roses
, the collection of stories by Raymond Carver. It was the kind of thing one doesn't forget.

After his night of observation, Sam went to live with her, in her three-and-a-half beside the foundry, where they spent three days in bed, making love, eating pizza, and watching the ten o'clock news and uncut movies on the Télé-Québec channel.

Remembering all this, he began to feel himself getting hard again. He took off his T-shirt and shorts and got back into bed.

“Mmmmh.” She opened her eyes. “Why don't we just stay here?”

“You mean
 . . .
”

“Tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow, or the day after that.”

“And what would we live on?”

“Porcupines. And beaver stew, essentially. When I was small, I went with my father on his trapline and it was me who had to finish off the ones who were wounded. Say yes, Sam
 . . .
”

“But it isn't our cabin
 . . .
”

“No, but no one uses it except for two weeks a year, during the hunting season. It's ours for the rest of the time. Fifty weeks a year. And for the two other weeks
 . . .
”

“We could go to Mexico.”

Marie-Québec looked at him. Wide awake, now.

“Are you serious? About Mexico, I mean?”

“More serious than that. We could spend the winter down there.”

“Using what for money?”

“Big Dumont owes me a cheque.”

The water in the kettle began whistling gently.

“No automatic coffee maker,” Sam declared.

“No. No desk lamp, vacuum cleaner, Jehovah's Witnesses at the door, laser printers, or toasters.”

“No neighbours playing music in their kitchen. No telemarketers. No problems with the shower head.”

The air in the cabin was redolent of warmth, steam, wet wool, wood smoke, sex, and the Nicaraguan coffee they'd ground the night before.

Marie-Québec was sitting cross-legged on the bed, her eye on Sam's erection, the nipples on her small breasts jutting up into the smoky air like rifle targets.

He took her in his arms, picked her up, and she guided him inside her, they fused their two bodies together, he held her thighs in his hands and she, thus impaled, wrapped her arms around his neck, and he turned around and headed to the door.