Washika (19 page)

Just minutes before Dumas signalled that it was time for them to make their lunches, Alphonse stepped into the bunkhouse-and-office.

“Well, my little ducks,” he said. “I have some good news for you this morning.”

“Ah non!
Sacrament
!” Lavigne swore. “Not another fire.”

“Now, now,” Alphonse smiled. “Don't take it so hard. The bus is waiting. Be ready in fifteen minutes.”

“Where is it this time, Alphonse?” Henri asked.

“What do you mean, Henri?”

“The fire. Where's the fire this time?”

“What fire? Who said anything about a fire?” Alphonse looked at the boys standing around him.

“But the bus?” Henri continued.

“Pack your rags, my little ducks,” Alphonse grinned. “There's only one bus leaving for Ste-Émilie today.”

Lavigne rolled off his bed. He danced around the room screaming and holding his clenched fists high above his head. Some sat silently on their bunks with their eyes closed, wearing wide, happy grins. Morrow was already busy throwing clothes into a long, narrow duffle bag. Alphonse left the bunkhouse-and-office. As he walked across the yard to the main sleep camp, Gaston Cyr ran past him and into the main sleep camp yelling, “We're going down! We're going down!”

In the kitchen, Dumas and the cookee and the bus driver were sitting at a small table drinking tea. Dumas had a towel draped over his shoulders and Lise Archambault was cutting his hair.

W
hen the driver came out of the cookhouse, all of the students were seated in the bus. They had combed their hair and put on their cleanest jeans and shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show their tanned arms. Above them in the racks were duffle bags and packsacks stuffed with dirty clothes. The windows were open and the boys smoked and drank soft drinks saved up from before the fire. Everyone was bored waiting for the driver to arrive.

Alphonse stepped into the bus after the driver had started the engine. He stood at the front, holding onto the chromed post by the door.

“Well my little ducks,” he said. “This is it. Don't spend it all in one place now. Be good and have fun and get well rested up for next week, eh.”

The students cheered. Some of the students invited Alphonse to join them for a beer in Ste-Émilie. Alphonse smiled. Someday his sons would be speaking like that. They would be wild like this bunch thinking only of drinking, running after the girls and having a good time. Would he smile then, and also find them amusing? His father had not been amused when he, Alphonse Ouimet, had been young and crazy. Ah yes, he had been wild in his younger days. Not in the same way as these guys from Ste-Émilie. Worse perhaps. But it had been so much fun. Now, he was older and mature, as Father Landry would say, older and wiser perhaps, but what a price to pay. No longer could he do and say all the foolish things of his youth and still be considered a normal, adult human being. But what was normal? These wild, screaming students from Ste-Émilie, that was normal. They were young and their behaviour was acceptable…up to a point. After that, they would have to get serious and make something of their lives. That was it, serious. After a point in time, when a young man has reached a certain age, he has to get serious about his work, his ideas and his life. And then what happens? Alphonse thought of the young men he had known in his youth and how some of them had been very serious and had achieved success in certain disciplines. One day they discovered that they had spent most of their lives being serious about life. Many of the young men and women around them, those less-serious, light-hearted fools, had been busy enjoying their lives to the fullest and would continue to do so with or without the consent of their serious, intellectual counterparts.

Alphonse waved to the students as he stepped down from the bus. “Have a good time, my little ducks!” he shouted.

The driver pulled the arm back, closing the door. All of the students waved to Alphonse through the open windows. They were off, and happy. As the bus drove by the truck scales, Alphonse could hear them singing a familiar drinking song.

I
t was different. It was the same type of gravel road with long uphill climbs and grinding gears and sharp turns and travelling less than five feet from the swampy water in places and plank bridges with the planks rattling as they drove over them and, always, the winding, curving gravel road lined on both sides with jack pine and white birch sticking out through the green pine needles. Nothing had changed for the snowshoe hare that hopped across the road in zigzag fashion, or the raven, wonk-wonking its presence high up on a tall grey
chicot
. But, for the students from the Collège de Ste-Émilie, it was not the same. They were going home, after almost five weeks. Now the jack pine and the birch trees were no longer boring, and the swamps no longer the foul-smelling, sucker-infested cesspools they once were. Now, through the open windows of the bus, going home, they were all of nature's beauty and life.

After they had tired of singing and every story had been told, the boys grew silent. They gazed out through the open windows, thought private thoughts and praised the beauty of nature in their own ways. After an hour, staring at the green jack pine and the white bark of the birch and the waters along the way, they dropped their heads back, some forward, some leaning against the open window frames, and slept as they would have on the deck of the
Madeleine
, or wrapped up in blankets on their bunks at Washika.

It was the sound that woke Henri. He could not remember having dreamed. His neck was sore from leaning his head sideways. He had slept well and now he was awake but the sound persisted, a humming, whining sound that was louder than the engine.

“We're on pavement,” Lavigne said. He had noticed the puzzled look on Henri's face.

“Long?”

“Ten minutes.
Sacrament
, you snore loud, Henri.”

Henri smiled. Lavigne had sat beside him when they left Washika. Shortly after turning right at the forks and along the gravel road that led to the main highway, Lavigne's head had dropped back and he began to snore. Henri looked around him. The students were awakening, stretching, reaching into their shirt pockets for tobacco, and rolling cigarettes.

“How much further?” Henri said.

“Another half hour we should be there.”

“I hope Sylvie's working today.”

“Ah, Sylvie,” Lavigne moaned.

“She goes to Ste-Véronique's.”

“I would take her for a ride in my father's car any day.” Lavigne stretched his legs out and closed his eyes. “Such legs, and those eyes, and…”

“Ask her. Maybe she's going down this weekend. She might go out with you,” Henri laughed.

“Are you crazy? My girlfriend would kill me. Five weeks I haven't seen her. I didn't even answer her letter two weeks ago. I'm in trouble now, for sure.”

Henri thought often about Sylvie after the first time they had stopped at the roadside café. It was the only restaurant along the sixty miles of paved highway and its door was open twenty-four hours a day. Sylvie was a student from Ste-Émilie and her uncle, who was the cook at the restaurant, had gotten her the summer job there. She was a very pretty girl. All of the students had noticed her and voiced their desires. Henri had even thought of asking her out to a movie in Ste-Émilie, but he was never able to be alone with her long enough to speak to her about it. Once, on their way back to Washika, he sat at the counter. He had hoped to speak to her between customers but she was always very busy, filling coffee cups, punching keys on the cash register, carrying orders off to the tables. At one point, there was a lull in business and she stood behind the counter where Henri sat and she wiped it with a damp cloth, then lifted the ashtray and his cup of coffee and wiped it there again. She had smiled at Henri. It was his chance. No one else was sitting at the counter. It was the chance he had been waiting for but he said nothing. It was the button on her uniform that was to blame, the one she had left undone and which let the fold of her blouse fall forward when she rubbed circles on the counter with the cloth. Henri wanted to speak but he could not. He could not utter a sound nor think of anything but the two chalk-white lobes and the thin space between them and, for a fraction of a second when she leaned further over the counter, there was an opening still greater than before, and Henri stared. And then she blushed and Henri felt a hot flash grow across his face. She had seen him looking at her breasts. What did she think of him? Was he just like all the others? How could he ever think of asking her to go out with him? And besides, now there was Lise. Why should he complicate his life like Lavigne and a lot of the others? With Lise he was free to do as he pleased and every Sunday, if it did not rain, he would share pleasures with her that the others experienced only in their wildest dreams. What more could a fellow want? Henri did not dwell on the question. He had thought about it before, about love and relationships that last a long time. He was not ready for that. Probably, he never would be.

The bus slowed down and turned in to the right by the sign saying “Café d'Or” in large letters made of bent ash wood. Alphonse had told them about the letters being made of ash wood but he didn't know where they got the wood as there were no signs of ash trees anywhere nearby. Alphonse had also mentioned that the native people who lived in the area used this same ash wood for making their snowshoes. Several cars were parked in front of the restaurant and most had trailers with canvas-covered boats with only the outboard motors showing. All of the cars had orange and blue license plates. These were the American tourists from New York State, the only Americans the students had ever seen.

The students stepped out of the bus and walked in a group towards the Café D'or. They looked in through the windows past the curtains, smiled at the customers inside, and scanned the tables, looking for the
petites Américaines
. Henri was a bit shy with girls, and so were Lavigne and André Guy. Most of the guys were that way. But, as a group, and with the jukebox jammed with quarters, they were beyond shyness; there was no girl too beautiful or parents too reserved or protective to prevent them from openly expressing admiration for their female progeny.

Henri sat at the counter, near the cash register. The swinging doors opened and
Madame
Laviolette, the proprietress, backed into view carrying four plates of steaming hot stew. She nodded towards Henri and went over to the tables by the window. Henri was able to look past the doorway into the kitchen when
Madame
Laviolette had come out. Sylvie was not there.

When the elderly woman had finished with the customers by the window, she returned behind the counter and, after turning several pages back in the receipt pad, stood in front of Henri.

“Yes
Monsieur
?” she said.

“Just a coffee,” Henri replied.

“One coffee,” she repeated.

“Sylvie's working nights?”

The woman placed the coffee before Henri and added a small plastic container of cream onto the saucer.

“One coffee. There you are.”

“Thank you,” Henri said. Perhaps she had not heard him. Henri cleared his throat. “The girl who works here, Sylvie, she is working nights this week?”

“Yes, yes, I know her,” the woman replied. She wrote numbers on the receipt pad. “Your name is Henri Morin?”

“Yes.”

“Sylvie has gone down for the weekend. She asked me to tell you that if you happened to stop in here.”

Henri was certain that he had blushed. He could feel the heat on his face. The woman looked at him without smiling. She tore the receipt from the pad and placed it on the counter by his cup.

“
Merci Monsieur
,” she said. She placed the pad in the pocket of her skirt and returned to the kitchen.

Henri put two spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee and emptied the plastic container of cream into the cup. So, now it was Sylvie. And what about Lise? That was how it was, all or none at all. Still, Sylvie was more his age. They could go out together, to the movies or to the restaurant. With Lise, it could only be on the sand behind the row of trees. How long would it be before it could be like that with Sylvie? And with Lise, how long would that last? Until the end of summer? What did they do at Washika in the winter? He did not know the answer to that one, or the others. And Sylvie was really more than pretty. She was very beautiful. All of the fellows spoke about her at the
collège
. She was beautiful and she was waiting for him in Ste-Émilie. Henri was excited, wondering what he should do. Should he call her? No, it would be better to play it by ear, to meet her on one of the main streets in town or at the hotel perhaps. She might be there if there was a good band. By nine or ten, if she was not there he would call her from a pay phone. And Lise? Well, he would see. Lavigne had it all right: the fire's the fire and the sweep's the sweep. He would see later about Lise. And besides, it was different with Lise and him. It was not one of those affairs, like Lavigne and the others who had steady girlfriends. With Lise, it was different. They were not tied to each other, only on Sundays on the sand behind the trees.

Henri finished his coffee and stood up from the counter. He handed the receipt and a dollar bill to the woman behind the counter and turned to leave.

“Your change,
Monsieur,”
the woman called to him.

Henri waved his hand without looking back and left the restaurant. The woman shrugged her shoulders and dropped the change into a glass under the counter. The students began to line up at the counter. Each student handed the woman his receipt and, each time, she held it at arm's length and stared down at it through the lower half of her glasses. She punched the keys and looked up at the numbers in the display window of the cash register to see if she had punched the right ones. Each time she handed out change the student would raise his hands and she would say, “
Merci Monsieur
,” and, more often than not, the student would say, “We just come off the drive, us.”