Читать книгу Cowboy - Louis Hamelin - Страница 5

HE WAS AN AMERICAN INDIAN KNOWN to his friends as Cowboy. He’d picked up the nickname one night when spotted tramping along the railroad, his lanky body silhouetted by the setting sun, wrapped in a long duster whose folds brushed against his leather boots. His friends were called Karate Kid, Donald Big-Arms, and Judith, who had a pale complexion, a generous pout, and a spry knee. They were the muskeg musketeers and Cowboy was their superman. They were a united clan, though I never fully understood their relationship. They all were at least cousins I think. Those from the encampment, and those from the cabin on the road to the reservoir. They were a progeny in full expansion, already carrying the next revenge of the cradles on its shoulders.

I had been parachuted into the region as a clerk, and was now holed up in my quarters, feet drawn back on the bedspread, stroking the cover of a book oozing wisdom. I was willingly adjusting to their image of me as a young academic who’d come north; a portrait they used to place me conveniently in their gallery of human types.

After a few days, when I said I was going for a stroll, Benoît and the Old Man exchanged knowing looks. This derogation of their iron rule was seen as a snub, a giving of the finger to the venerable buildings vocation as an impregnable fortress. It was an implicit breech of contract which meant I immediately ceased being one of them.

Benoît gravely walked me down the aisle. The Outfitters’ general store was impenetrable, incorruptible, obsessed with security. In a region where fractures and break-ins often replaced polite phrases, a simple lock didn’t cut it. Benoît and the Old Man had explained this early on and seemed proud of their system. Sliding the heavy metal bar across the double flap, Benoît pushed the door open for me. The old trading post closed in on itself with a grating sound as the bar immediately resumed its position. The surrounding night stretched out beneath my feet.

The generator’s rumbling filled the darkness like a sustained groan. Above me, blending its scattered notes with the myriad stars mottling the black velvet, a fugitive constellation of birds, back from its migration, was setting the stage for my meeting with Cowboy.

I was completely still. Head tilted skywards, back arched to the breaking point, shoulders nearly parallel to the ground, I scanned the heavens, focusing only on the fantastic pulsing mass of things. Suddenly, a tired and bitter call, both hoarse and aggressive, pierced the dark sky. I turned towards the lamppost which stood near the gas pumps, holding the chaos beyond its milky halo. Four low-flying geese skirted along the fringe of the vast aureola. They banked, obeying their leader’s shrill entreaties, tracing a perfect circle above me, as I stood immobile, feet planted at the points of a compass. Having completed the figure, their instinct drew them farther away in tight formation, large and powerful in the distance.

I came back to earth. Before me stood the restaurant, already closed at this hour, and the deserted train station, a survivor of the golden age of Canadian railways. It was covered with grey paint, and had gummy white lintels. The scent of tar wafted over the area. I walked down the embankment that had stood between the station and me, and sat on the platform, stirring ballasts with my foot. A sheet-metal warehouse shimmered across the tracks, intercepting and echoing the generators drone. I stood there for a while, looking around as though awaiting someone.

Three of them were walking along the rails, just like in a Leone film. At first, I only managed to see their long shadows gliding towards me on the ground. A lantern stood watch on the stations pediment, splashing my back with its creeping glimmer. They soon spotted me and came to sit nearby, hardly looking at me sideways.

The first one was tall, thin, and nimble, with an expression that was cunning and distressed. He wore a tracksuit, a sort of kimono that made him look like a comical judoka, a poor impersonation of Bruce Lee coming out of a B-movie brawl

The second was strongly built, though a little portly. His features tensed and relaxed at every moment and his massive fists swung before him like pendulums. Donald Big-Arms was naive and rather simple, something those around him acknowledged without too much contempt. He’d sporadically burst out with heartfelt and astonished laughter.

The face of the third was perfectly round. His lofty cheekbones and Buddha eyes stood out amid impeccable features able to change any ill-timed feeling into a harmless wrinkle. I was amazed by his stiffness, but immediately understood the reason when he turned around: a tape-covered handle jutted from his sweatshirt collar, behind his head, like an artificial extension of his spine, or as though a Damoclean sword had split his head.

A smile eclipsed the rest of his face, detaching itself like a quarter moon. His eyes caught mine and, slowly raising his right hand to the back of his neck, he pulled out a gleaming machete and held it up. His contemplation reminded me of those Mexican peasants who wander through coconut plantations on the Pacific coast, and who, with a ritual sense refined by centuries of suffering and subservience, leave their dear machete on the bus’s running board with apparent regret before taking their seat.

Cowboy silently handed me his weapon. Grasping it carefully, I performed a few clumsy manoeuvres under his approving gaze. At times, the three Indians traded short sentences, as unintelligible to my ear as the hoarse honking of the geese. We exchanged succinct thoughts, without words, while the generators angry roar highlighted the piercing silence.

Hovering over the platform of this isolated station, like the whisper of an implicit pact between us, was a secret agreement which the machete would’Ve secured. We heard ominous rumbling in the distance, and I shivered as I caressed the machete.

Mr. Administrator was talking. He was talking and stepping on the accelerator, as though his monologue was fuelling the vans engine. The machinery roared along the deserted road, his words trying to fill the desolate silence between us, between the trees and everywhere. The sandy trail was furrowed and potholed, meandering along the boreal forest, tearing through the endless web of black spruce, its lonely stretches clinging to the lakeheads, spiralling down into valleys, infinitely disappearing into the back country, while an inert storm closed in around us. At times, a dusty flag alerted the driver to a deep crevice in the middle of the road.

“To make a long story short....”

Lakes paraded by, lapping the roadside like frozen gems set in the peat, while the approaching twilight brushed them with amethyst. The forest was a lacy bower all round, its profile growing more pronounced. My new boss chattered away, spraying saliva on the windshield smeared with insects. He went on endlessly, in a high-pitched voice, eyes wavering between me and the road, readjusting the vehicles course before looking at me again, forever concerned about my receptiveness, his head oscillating like a metronome lingering between indefinite collimations. He’d sometimes look for a word, sifting through his brain, poring over his paradigms; he’d catch his breath somewhat, getting lost in a contemplation of the unevenly gravelled network of ruts, then finally collar it, brandishing it triumphantly on the tip of his tongue, ready to spew it. The gleaming four-by-four, poised on its heavy-duty shocks, seemed to glide over this pathetic patchwork of potholes.

“To cut a long story short....”

Side roads ploughed through the dense foliage bordering the main highway. More often than not, the exposed forest appeared as a drapery hung in trompe-l’oeil, a double hedge denying travellers an infinite view of the territory. A few rows of spruce, carefully spared by loggers, camouflaged a huge wasteland of clear-cuts. Fierce winds would soon break the remaining trees like toothpicks. The endless row of conifers undulated like dark lace against the reddening sky. Might as well, I mused, comfort the tourist in his favourable impression of wilderness.

“In short..,.”

The Company had cut as much as it could, then cleared out. It had moved farther west, since operating out of Grande-Ourse was no longer profitable. Boy, had it felled and cut trees and columns of wood fibre, pulverizing countless tons of ligneous material; they laid out a main road, then secondary ones perpendicular to it and, finally, tertiary roads perpendicular to the secondary ones. Then they cut and mowed everything down far and wide. Clearing all this, ladies and gentlemen, is their business.

“Anyhow....”

Mr. Administrator’s words faded into the engines continual rumble and the air whistling against the windshield. Occasionally, between bumps, I’d respond with a vague gesture, eyes lowered on the boastful leaflet I tried to wedge between my rattling knees.

GRANDE-OURSE OUTFITTERS

A HUNTING AND FISHING PARADISE

CITY COMFORT IN THE MIDDLE OF NATURE

Pleasantly impressed by my knowledge of hunting and fishing, which I’d avoided saying was mostly theoretical, Mr. Administrator had hired me following a conversation at Place Bonavcnture, during the Camping, Hunting, and Fishing Trade Show, where the preseason bustle had required his promotional zeal. He belonged to a group of businessmen who’d purchased over half the village of Grande-Ourse when the Company had pulled out a few years earlier, expecting to convert the private town into a tourist facility.

“In any event.... To make a long story short...”

Id once heard about this village, which was unique in Quebec, as it was created by the industry exclusively to house forestry workers. Grande-Ourses economy had peaked in the seventies when high-voltage lines had been run through the region, linking James Bay to the south of the province. Line builders had worked like bees to erect the imposing pylons, which had become an integral part of northern lore.

At night, in accordance with natural laws, something else erected in their pants. The Grande-Ourse Hotel was always full; dancing girls from Mont-Laurier and elsewhere willingly providing additional services. At first, the dancing girls were driven away by protests from the local worthies, though they were a small minority. Then prosperity itself vanished, the blow being given by the holy Company’s departure. Grande-Ourse residents, however, had kept the habit of drinking, eating, screwing, doing their laundry, and living way beyond their means.

A fierce wind tore the brochure from my hands, and Mr. Administrator hawkishly watched the document fly away. He parked his car on the edge of the road and excused himself. He had to check a welding joint on the trailer that, so far, had followed us obediently. The road didn’t like motor vehicles, shaking them like a bronco trying to throw his rider into the landscape.

Our sudden immobility wrapped us in the norths palpable silence. We heard faint bird songs, including the evening note of the white-throated sparrow and other muffled and scattered strains. Spring still had to dig in and invent itself. We were right at the interval, at the vulnerable point of any awakening.

My driver, looking appropriately fastidious, leaned his white head under the trailer, while I began looking around, crunching the gravel with my clodhoppers. I spotted an idle grass snake on the roadside, desperately trying to draw a little heat from the last rays of the setting sun. It let me pick it up without resisting.

With childish delight, I showed my catch to the man, whose immaculate hair was now smeared with grease. I waved the creature under his nose, as he lifted his head, frowned, and affected an expression that was disdainful, suspicious, and slightly disgusted, “Alive?”

I nodded. “Only a little numb.... They crawl onto the road to get some sun this time of year. They’re cold blooded, you see...”

As though to punctuate that brief account, the reptile compressed a gland near its tail and squirted my wrist with foul-smelling musk. Mr. Administrator grimaced and turned away. Standing up unsteadily, he shook himself. “Chuck that thing! It reeks like hell!... I checked everything out, we can move on....”

He turned his back to me as I slowly walked away from the road, moving my lips like a praying ophite, handling the snake as it tried to twist around my forearm.

They seem to fear silence, fear that words will lodge like fish bones in their throats. Turning to others with all their energy, their words are entirely centrifugal, their conversation a feat of strength, a high-wire act. Sometimes it begins to waver at the edge of their internal abyss, so they look around for a pole, precariously clinging to hollow-sounding words; it always starts up again, hangs together as best it can, moves on, resonates in a vacuum, and so they invent their little web of fine-sounding truths. It finally creates a background noise as persistent as the generator’s groan. Their language is all they have against the omnipresent threat of dilution into space. Words, propositions, perpetually fractured sentences, hold them together like the road ties them to the world.

Brevity is impossible in a diluted village.

When you keep your mouth shut in their presence, they imagine a kind of internal emptiness exists, and dutifully fill it with sounds, musing that keeping quiet is already a form of listening. They don’t understand that you can make do with hearing, that they can be looked at without being adhered to, without your going so far as showing interest. They imagine that everything, even contempt, can be complacently uttered. I felt like one of those creatures Gulliver meets on the flying island of Laputa. I tilted my head forward, seeing lip movements. My ears had to be boxed before I realized someone was speaking to me.

Mr. Administrator was trumpeting his speech like a politician who, lost on the outer reaches of civilization, decides a handful of votes is better than nothing, after all, and who would harangue fish, firs, and spruce, if need be, just for the pleasure of convincing, and for the principle. When, having to correct himself, he realized he was deviating from the improvised plan he tried to impose on his prolixity, he abruptly stopped and looked around, watching for signs of weariness in his counterparts, leaving his start-up formula dangling in the still air, like a form of apathy. “To cut a long story short...”

The kitchen, like the bedrooms, was designed as a simple outbuilding attached to the general store. From the table, through the bay window, you could keep an eye on the stoic gas pumps, which looked more like worn landmarks, headstones or cairns than the outcrops of an underground reservoir. Beyond the restaurant, you could see the level crossing and the Grande-Ourse highway which, on the other side, continued to wind towards the lake, the hotel and northward. Another window, through the storage room containing the safe and the manager’s office, looked out on the only aisle that was lined with shelves, at the end of which stood the heavily bolted main door. This casement allowed Benoît, the Old Man, and Mr. Administrator to exercise constant vigilance, even during meals. Apparently, no one had thought of organizing alternating shifts behind the stores counter. It seemed evident that meals were to be shared, and normal to allow the convivial unity to be broken repeatedly to trot to the other end of the building and tend to customer whims. Whoever bumped into a closed door only had to plunk his face in the wire-meshed side window to be quickly spotted by one of the diners. The greatly dreaded words would then ring out amid the gurgling of boiling soup or the ardent mastication of a hamburger, “Giiiiiilles! A customer!”

Gilles, that’s yours truly, to help you. Gilles Deschênes. I’d become the humble servant in this village of fools, quickly learning that no feast could compromise the well-being of commercial exchanges. The simple intimacy of a vital function such as nourishment seemed taboo in this place. The grace Mr. Administrator muttered before sinking into his chair went hand in hand with the cash register’s clear ringing.

Benoît, the group s youngest member, was conscientious, self-taught, and good at figures. Promoted as the Outfitters’ manager at twenty-two, he rarely showed signs of being the least bit happy with life. People acknowledged that he had a certain sense of responsibility. That responsibility, and his birth a few parallels north of the national average, had been enough to earn him this thankless job the previous year, following a tavern conversation with nepotistic overtones. Ti-Kid Benoît saw no difference between recreation and work. He did everything diligently, at an intense pace, with carefully cultivated stress.

The Old Man, for his part, had no head for figures, but I swear he had no equal in scrounging a little fast profit. Whenever money was discussed, wherever it was located, even as far as Fort Knox, he’d clearly make it his business. The Outfitters didn’t even have to pay him, couldn’t afford it anyway. He had a pension, and was satisfied with little. He was still hanging around GrandeOurse, working for the establishment locals despised, because he was driven by a competitive spirit where his welfare meant little. He now worked exclusively from devotion to the gods of mercantilism. The simple pleasure of shady deals and the deadly need to toil away always roused him.

For the last two years, however, Mr. Administrator had been doing his best to ease the Old Man towards the exit. But his attempts had been fruitless, and the patience of shareholders had reached its limit, A proper dismissal, therefore, was on the agenda for this visit. Contrary to his two assistants, Mr. Administrator lived in big city suburbs, travelling here only on inspection tours of variable length, during which he liked giving outward signs of sustained activity.

Every night he’d withdraw, greatly preoccupied with the mandate given by his associates, to sleep over in the large white house perched on a nearby hill that had once belonged to the Company’s supervisors. The mere sight of this debonair decisionmaker coming down the steep path, at daybreak, was like a cold shower to the Old Man, who was forever flinching. He smelled of hot soup, and knew he’d become a nuisance by setting the whole village against the business, by coaxing with flattery only to disparage afterwards, and by amusing with anecdotes before hurling retrospective curses. This imperishable little village continued to revolve around him; he always had his nose in everybody’s business. He was on the lookout, constantly well-up on everything, as renowned as Barabbas in the Passion, and unanimously hated. When it was his turn to speak, he’d spring to his feet, his chair having grown too hot. He couldn’t express himself while seated, and had to put all his weight in the balance, wobbling between each word, swinging his arms all round and swaggering like an old rooster with a flaming crest. He spoke like people fart, delivering each term by pushing it out, while Mr. Administrator encouraged him with gestures.

“The national sport around here is tongue-lashing the Outfitters! And its open season all year, besides! Everyone’s been on our back from the start, and now they want to challenge the price of electricity! Heartless wretches! Then there are those who boycott the store, who order supplies from Sans-Terre by railway, in conspiracy with the train guys! What do they want, for Gods sake? All they do is whine, they’re never happy, we always have to run after them to get paid, they quarrel all year, the only way they spend their time around here, neighbour pitted against neighbour, and everyone united against the Outfitters! Rotten, lazy, no-good, profiteering welfare cases!”

He was out of breath and stopped talking, wiping a rough tongue across the soup drenching his chin. For a short time, Mr. Administrator had been trying to interrupt him with a gesture that was both sweeping and composed. He got up and began to pace about the kitchen, highlighting some of his words with an imaginary wand.

“The problem around here,” he said, sententiously, “is the absence of law, which is to say of any representative able to enforce it. In our society, the right to property is the foundation of all law. The only property that matters in this place is the one you can protect with a gun...”

Benoît nodded. The Old Man’s only reaction was to burp haughtily.

“In short, we have to show them we’re tough.... We’re not here to do charity, are we? Let them buy their groceries in Sans-Terre if they want! It’ll mean we won’t have to play the public authorities! And Grande-Ourse will finally become a model outfitting camp. You see, friends, luxury tourism is incompatible with a local population.... But we’re too kind, what can I say!”

“Too kind!” confirmed the Old Man.

The conversation then shifted to the upcoming visit of American fishermen. In fact, the long weekend in the third week of May, which coincided with the beginning of fishing season, ushered in the summer invasion. When mentioning the anticipated event, the Old Man’s voice was but a gentle murmur. He wiped tears from his eyes. They were finally speaking his language.

“Real gentlemen, they are,” he said. “Real gentlemen, yes sir!”

There’d be a real rush on Victoria Day, the Old Man assured me, people would line up at the gas pumps and at the counter.

The general store remained the Outfitters’ milch cow; for the moment, the only relatively profitable part of the economic unit created by the purchase of Grande-Ourse. Mr. Administrator was intensely optimistic. Due to the rather understandable lack of precedent — a private corporation purchasing a village was a first in Quebec’s municipal records — he had ample leisure to delude himself with comfortable predictions, believing the opportunities offered to his administrative mind were infinite. Yet the transition to cushy tourism was turning out to be difficult.

The dead season dragged on, and quiet evenings were typical.

One morning in mid-May, fall made an unexpected visit: a snow-filled sky greeted me when I awoke. A frigid atmosphere permeated the store. For the first time, I was encountering a nomadic group that returned each spring with the break-up of ice on lakes. We were still only dealing with scouts from the dreaded horde: the tough ones, those familiar with the region, returning to open some rudimentary cabin secluded deep in a valley, and appraise the damage caused as much by the rigours of the season as the recklessness of snowmobilers. They were distinguished by their tans, which winter hadn’t changed, and a good-natured savageness in their gaze. Among them were a few greenhorns who could be recognized by their blue colour. They invaded the store in a mad rush, accompanied by an angry wind, twirling around a little, somewhat agitated, rubbing their hands. They asked for warm gloves, pacing on the spot, then purchased the first boots they’d get their hands on. They’d left summer behind, and had just caught up with winter. Large snow flakes, chased between buildings by gusting winds, landed and lingered on the ground like lazy butterflies.

The sky cleared in the afternoon, and a pale sun broke through thick layers of grey. That’s when I saw Cowboy and Karate Kid, the latter still wearing a kimono, apparently oblivious to bad weather. Cowboy was draped in a long maroon coat resembling a pea jacket as much as a bounty hunters greatcoat, and wore a wide-brimmed hat. The two Indians were near the storefront, leaning over a plastic container. Armed with matches and twigs, they were tormenting an unfortunate grass snake imprisoned in a jar. The small reptile was now only a confused knot stirred by limp contortions. Mr. Administrator, standing on the doorstep, hands on his hips, looked down on them with full disapproval. Turning to me, he cleared his voice before hurling out, “Look at them! They seem to think it’s funny!... They treated missionaries basically the same way....”

“With the weather we’re having, it must be completely numbed,” I replied, shrugging. “They re cold-blooded, remember...?”

He looked at me severely, prompting me to add, “Just like fish: I read somewhere they suffer very little when hooked in the mouth. They have a rather primitive nervous system...”

“Primitive...” repeated Mr. Administrator, dreamily.

He stared coldly at the two characters. Shivering, he finally went back in, where Benoît and the Old Man were going around in circles. “Any problems with the Indians lately?” the boss inquired.

Benoît momentarily dropped the pout that made him look like he was chewing his lips and mumbled, shaking his head, “It’s been calm...”

“Calm,” he repeated.

The boy, whose face appeared set with trepidation, also displayed a spectacular tranquillity. As though ashamed of debasing any words, Benoît felt the need to bury each phrase into his downy mustache. He ruminated a few seconds, then added, “Last week, for example, things got a little stirred up...”

That’s all the Old Man needed to wade in with both feet. The brave fellow would gloat at the thought; he liked nothing better than griping about Aboriginals, Siwashes, and their depredations! He ambled towards us, choking and shuddering, eager to regurgitate the bitter fruit of his ruminations, and reiterate his petty apology about the legitimate use of force! He raised his arms, knowing his pantomime by heart.

“We’re all snivellers, god dammit! That’s the truth! We let them push us around like kids!”

The week preceding my arrival, Big Alexandre and his small gang of hoodlums and troublemakers, notorious in the regions reformatories, had turned Grande-Ourse into a wild-west town. The police finally sent a helicopter to clean up the place. Flying over Lac Legaré, which adjoins the village, the aircraft had managed to tip the canoe carrying Big Alexandre and his two cronies. As soon as they’d been fished out, the troublemakers were sent back to the porous halfway house, which had been like a second home during their adolescence. But tempers in Grande-Ourse remained a little overheated.

“You’ll see next time! The police chief himself gave me free hand on the phone! They’re fed up with being bothered by a handful of people who aren’t even able to settle their own problems! You think they’ll send a squad at taxpayer expense each time? For two or three savages who can’t even stand up most of the time they’re so drunk? Let them in, and shoot! Well come in and pick up the pieces. The district police chief said so: BANG!”

He was cradling an imaginary rifle, shooting at everything in sight, no longer holding back.

“Take a guy in Pennsylvania who shoots at a robber, eh? Well, he doesn’t get into any trouble! He’s asked to fill out a form or two, then goes back to his living room! That’s how Americans do things, in Pennsylvania, yes sir!”

He was hopping like a boxer when the bell rings.

“Bang!” he again rumbled. “That’s how they do things over there.... Real gentlemen...

He calmed down somewhat, imploring with every sinew a mad scramble for walleye, bears, and moose: all that Klondike of animal flesh which hailed passing seasons with sacred regularity.

The road map didn’t tell the whole story. Here, the Outfitters and its general store built by the old Company; farther on, the small uniform houses of its employees. Over there, the people, those who’d sponged off the large paper mill and ended up having to be drip-fed by the state after the milch cow had gone. Most now rented from the Outfitters, while others owned land at the edge of the woods. Some squatted discreetly on Crown land, on the fringes of the zone controlled by the new owners. At one time pampered by the Company (which, the Old Man had told me, even mowed the grass of employees, and picked up their garbage), the great majority had taken the change of regime very poorly. The railroad was a genuine boundary.

To the north: the hotel, owned by a certain Jacques Boisvert, and Lac Légaré where the same Boisvert moored his flotilla of hydroplanes, consisting of two Beavers and one Twin Otter. A practical detail: the dispensary stood near the hotel, but the nurse had to cover a large territory and rarely came around.

North of the rails, as well, lived the Indians.

To the south: the restaurant managed by a certain Moreau; the Grande-Ourse train station; and the tiny agglutination that orbited the Outfitters, facing the expanse.

Three times a week, at daybreak, the train smokily plunged into the areas apparent tranquillity, like a whistling blade cutting through a lump of butter. I’d then be awakened with little respect and a jolt. No sooner was I thrust into the bracing air, when we were already parking the pickup on the stations platform. Most of the perishable foods were shipped to Grande-Ourse by rail. Only blueberries grew amid the sand heaps and layers of peat. There was a day for fruits and vegetables, another for meat, milk, etc The train would grind to a stop and we’d transfer merchandise with a semblance of enthusiasm: flaccid, dirt-covered potatoes, onions with shaggy tufts, wilted vegetables and bruised fruit destined to rot, poured into the back of the truck. Northern inhabitants are proud carnivores who harbour a secular suspicion of any vegetation. The more omnivorous ones had been prescient and had already reserved their ration of this weekly heap of pulp, fibre, and scraps, with the assurance of securing the best pieces. The remainder would moulder on shelves, giving off the usual smells.

A little farther on, boastful and cynical Grande-Ourse residents secretly slipped their grocery lists to some shifty attendant. The trains staff, however, were concerned about relations with local authorities. An employee always managed to toss us an issue of the Journal de Montré al, tightly wrapped around a high content: of shock value and sleaze, and no fresher than the alleged scoops it had travelled with. It would lie imposingly on the table several days, before collecting potato peels or shrouding a fish.

The Indians used the train as much as they could to get around, since their socio-political status provided them economical access to it. They’d often be seen looking for an authorization, a permission written by a nurse or bureaucrat which they used as a free pass, They travelled a little everywhere that way, stopping along the line, visiting relatives scattered between Sans-Terre and Tocqueville, where many had modest apartments. They were railway nomads, suddenly disappearing, returning after three days, then leaving straightaway in the opposite direction.

Following the train’s departure, a small crowd inevitably gathered in front of the store. The establishment’s location in the middle of the woods made it the only dispenser of bare essentials, of which speech wasn’t the least. In this backwater the need to communicate created genuine emergencies. People had to show they still existed despite everything; it was particularly meaningful to show it here, right in the face of Grande-Ourses new masters. They had to talk, because to talk was to endure. Moreover, where else could they slake a northerner’s honest thirst for a good price when, having risen early, they’d just thrown up their breakfast?

The Muppet was Grande-Ourse’s most punctual boozer. I’d labelled him as such due to his habit of wriggling about and dusting the air with his pointed tuft of hair planted on a conical head placed directly on his shoulders. He was retired and lived alone in a small house, receiving a generous pension for services rendered to the administration, devoting it exclusively to savouring pints. That pastime had spared him the anguish of dealing with the gaping void which usually follows an active life. Each morning, with the reliability of an old cuckoo, he’d turn up smiling on his motorized tricycle, like a kid on his toy. We’d greet him with resigned sighs and the lethargy which overcame us so easily after breakfast. He came to renew his supply of brown bottles, especially hoping to escape the tyrannical silence of the night and the suffocating cage of his old bones. Benoît and I, dedicated to the higher interests of trade, lent an ear to this pathetic babble reeking of hops.

The Muppet had devised a clever scheme to get around the restrictions of the store’s alcohol permit. Since the state strictly forbade him from slaking his thirst within our walls, the old blockhead had got into the habit of leaving an opened bottle in the cold room facing the counter. At any moment, mired in mid-sentence, he’d shake himself and casually head to the tiny refrigerated room, disappearing to have a gulp or two. He seemed to think nobody would notice his ridiculous puppets game, nor realize that he looked more stupefied when he emerged from his glacial alcove. He eventually gave the impression of going in there to can himself in small doses.

Furthermore, everyone in the region was a pothead. When it wasn’t alcohol, it was juice from fruit, vegetables, concentrates, pigments and chemicals, and soft drinks, mineral water, large-size Perrier avidly raised to the lips, Pepsi, which ruled over the area, while Coke conspired in the shadows, and milk, the healthful milk of families. Eyes closed, they’d fervently bring their lips to whatever contained liquid. Pegged to their bodies, the people of GrandeOurse had a collective desire to wrap their lips around a bottleneck; they couldn’t help it.

One morning, when I’d just finished reading for five hours through the fissures of my swollen eyelids, a small native family got off the train. The man was wizened and could’ve been either thirty or sixty years old; he was followed by a short woman who was withered and drunk, trailing her large posterior in a flowery dress, and a ravishing young girl no older than fourteen, throwing fire everywhere she lay eyes. They headed towards the store while, already inside, I was placing milk cartons in the fridge, carefully turning containers so prospective buyers couldn’t see the expiry date: a trick the Old Man had taught me. He was eager to make a real shopkeeper out of me, showing me how to place fresher products out of reach behind the others, to get rid of dubious cases first.

The region’s natives knew and feared the Old Man. He was cut from the same cloth as the trade artists who’d been our first settlers, and who were peerless in their ability to swap a pile of beaver pelts for a little firewater and a handful of trinkets. He was at his best with the Indians, finally able to give the full measure of his business acumen: funny as anything, sly as a coyote, quick to take advantage of the least hesitation, ruthless with gullibility, always ready to shoot you in the back.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the shy young girl Hanked by the strange couple. Meanwhile, the old woman was striving to mumble something in an exotic French moistened with several sputters. Beneath a madder shawl, her face was ravaged by age and pox, and marked by great sincerity. Old coloured rags dangled with some elegance from her twisted bust. Her husband was stoic and seemed to judge her outgoing mood with severity, quietly giving her meaningful looks of reproach. The Old Man turned towards me. Half his face was an amused grimace, “These are good people, Gilles! César Flamand and his charming wife Fernande!”

The Old Man was always able to muster the precise quantity of warmth for necessary effusions. He could appear totally affable when the game was worth it. But when the Indian woman proffered an expectant mouth, gaping and horribly humid, he couldn’t help from jumping back and muttering excuses. He would’ve had the same reaction had someone shot him between the legs.

Cowboy had just slipped through the door and was observing the scene, a sphinx smile sheltering his moods. I saluted him with my fingertips before returning my attention to the young Indian girl. I was taking notes:

perfectly round cheekbones impeccably curved mouth eyelids in the grips of a crisis of sensual awakening a brand new little body filled with so much freshly discovered fragility

The trio soon left the premises, armed, on the Old Mans advice, with an entire selection of dubious acquisitions. In passing, they saluted Cowboy, who was blocking the entrance, stiff as a post. I approached him to observe the teenaged girl disappear.

“Who’s she?”

Cowboy was smiling.

“Gisèle’s daughter. Salomé.”

“Where’d she come from?”

He shrugged.

“Social services. Her mother didn’t take proper care of her.”

The Old Man was already rushing towards us.

“Come with me, Ti-Kid Gilles, I’ve got a contract for you! Did you see old man Flamand? He’s a good Indian, a hard worker!

Not a drop of alcohol in twelve years! We need more like him! His old lady, however.... Misery me.... Did you see the little girl? Shell do a lot of damage!... Hmmm.... Hey, Ti-Kid Cowboy!... Wanna work?”

Totally wound up, he was thrashing about and poking at us, a tangle of nerves and knots. Cowboy and I had our minds on something else.

That morning, I was dispatched to help repair a shingled roof. Unprotected from aerial attacks, I quickly fell prey to a cloud of black flies. Although the insects launched the most vicious and massively heinous attacks, I only noticed the extent of their havoc when the party was over. Seeing me return covered with bites, the Old Man cried out and rushed to the medicine cabinet at full tilt. I was given intensive care.

It happened one Sunday. An itinerant clergyman had detoured through Grande-Ourse, which hadn’t been able to afford a permanent pastor in a long time. Now and again, a priest who was passing through would stay a while. This time, his services were needed to administer first communion to a pair of converts already tangled in a protocol that was supposed to be flexible. Mr. Administrator suggested I accompany him to the service, to sound out the population like in the good old days, when pipe-chewing parishioners stood on the square, reaching into pig-bladder tobacco pouches. But the steps to this chapel weren’t very wide and, with the flies biting, people tended to take them at a clip.

All the right-thinking residents of Grande-Ourse were there. I’d put on a spotless cotton T-shirt with large draping folds, a kind of mini-cassock, which must’ve made me look like a runtish White Father who’d escaped from cannibals. Streaks of ointment on my skin identified the most injured areas. The inquisitive gazes of attendants converged on us while I took a seat in the back, beside my boss. Heads turned towards us like filings drawn to the poles of a magnet. People came here to pry as much as to pray. Mr. Administrator smiled at everyone indiscriminately, as though to say everything’s fine, nothing to complain about.

I got a shock right from the introit. Two cherubs accompanied the celebrant: a chubby voting white boy who seemed carved from soft marble; a young girl, Salome, draped in the vestal robe of choir children. Her brown face contrasted with the garment and was exceedingly beautiful.

She piously lowered her almond-shaped eyes, while I gaped in admiration. Her modesty was the picture of passion. I didn’t take a very active part in the ceremony. People moved their lips, emitting breaths and sounds, while Mr. Administrator mimicked them as best he could. Amid the murmurs, people would lean to their neighbour, inhaling the waxy redolence of their ears. Lukewarm chants alternated with hot gossip. The on-duty preacher, energetic and ruddy, was visibly relying on his instinct to find words able to move this potbellied and unrefined crowd. He spread the word of Christ without affectation, in his own gut-felt language, perverting Christianity’s founding metaphors if needed.

“And so,” he bellowed powerfully to the two converts nestled in the first pew, “what is the Eucharist, eh? What does it mean precisely? Well, my children, I feel like asking who you are exactly. Eh? Answer and you’ll receive communion! Your host, my children, is a nice big stew with a really fat brown sauce dripping between your fingers! And later, when you’re old enough to handle the bottle, the caribou your parents drink will warm your blood during ordeals! That, my lambs, is the nature of your Eucharist in this land of Cain, this land of Canadians!”

He was rampantly bawling the sermon, his exuberance soon managing to elicit reactions in the stomachs of attendants. And the rumblings that typified the end of services soon began rising in the incense-filled air. The priest punctuated his sermon with heavy taps on the curve of his stomach, which jutted towards his audience like a promontory. He sniffed ostentatiously, contracting the capillaries in his large nose, which were visible from that distance. He must’ve been rather familiar with the chapter about caribou.

When we got around to the grand apportionment, the first-time communicants accepted the miserable unleavened chip, just transformed into meatball stew by the magic of the Word. Veterans followed, enticed by all this juicy solemnity. Mr. Administrator decisively got up, turning onto the short aisle, hands joined over his mid-section, brimming with contrition. He had no choice: he had to continue polishing his image and playing the enlightened-leadership card. It was really funny seeing him mix with these characters, to whom he generally had to concede an impressive girth and more than a foot in height and muscle. The communions elbow rubbing swept him along in its muffled swirl and, cupping his hands, leading the procession and leaning before the celebrant, he seemed to be begging for public understanding, indulgence, and approval.

I was overcome with hesitation as I was about to claim my share. I wouldn’t normally have wanted to be in this sad comedy for anything in the world, nor to participate in its supremely facile gregariousness, returning with a host stuck to my palate, thin and bland as the taste of faith itself. As I approached the distribution point, screened from it by the large backs of attendants, Salomé’s white dress dazzled me all the more. Her dark face seemed made of obscurity as she stood in the priest’s shadow.

Head lowered, eager to get it over, I suddenly noticed the bright red stains on the nice T-shirt I’d worn specifically for the occasion. Mr. Administrator had just completed the formality and was returning towards the back, chin resolutely plastered to his chest. My heart beat faster as I made a rapid inventory of the mess. Tiny spatters stretched out like scars across my chest. Beginning to panic, I raised my hand to my neck, pulling it away smeared with blood. I then understood: my morning wounds had reopened, accompanied by new exactions from the bit braces that had found me on the way to the chapel. The result: I was dripping like a tap.

Following a second of terror, I stretched out my palms, placing the smeared one underneath. My stomach emitted something like a nervous giggle. The priest lowered his dismal eyes, while Salomé gazed straight ahead. I could no longer see anyone and, eyes overturned, was looking for flies on the ceiling. I was growing faint, and their little barter was taking forever. He finally plunked the host in my palm; I fell forward as though it weighed a ton, with Salomé’s image swaying and waltzing in the air with total absurdity. Throwing her arms around my neck, she stirred the shoulder blades lying beneath her wings, and began avidly licking the host in the palm of my hand. My head crashed into the ciborium and snow flew beneath the nave, as I registered the brushing of a robe against my cheek. I think that was all.

Our guard dog was giving a recital as the moon rose. The poor devil of a bastard spent his whole existence chained to a rudimentary kennel near the store. When needed, he could give the alarm with conviction, not much else being required of him. But when the moon was full, he yielded to heredity with breathless vigour, singing the praise of the big orange ball, tilting his litany of barks and whimpers at the firmament; it was enough to freeze blood in your veins and urine in your bladder.

I was sleeping fitfully one night when he began to howl. Yet I could’ve sworn his favourite satellite was in its new phase. I tore myself from a stranglehold as humid as it was purely dreamlike. A train whistled in the distance, while the mutt had started a genuine concert. His chain scraped heavily against the ground, providing backup harmonies while he ran to and fro. Beats worthy of a large drum echoed from the main door, providing percussion. I went down the hall leading to the kitchen, leaning forward in my briefs, staggering as though a cement bag had been loaded onto my back without warning. The Old Man was up, hair on end, wearing shorts and an undershirt, spreading his stench. He’d always turned down the privilege of having his own room, where he could have had some privacy during the brief intervals when sleep came to his proud and decrepit body. Exposed on the front lines, he slept in the living room, always turning in last, curled up on a tired couch whose springs ejected him for the least reason.

Benoît also appeared, eyes puffy with sleep, stifling a yawn as well as a gesture of rebellion.

“Sleeping around here isn’t easy.... “ he said, gritting his teeth.

Blows continued to rattle the door panel, as the rumbling of muffled anger invaded the obscure building. The Old Man made a few steps, repeating to himself, in the neutral tone of a litany, “Pack of dogs! They respect nothing! Pack of dogs! There’s no way.... Pack of dogs!”

Benoît had considered the situation, and taken time to put on his pants. Being well-kept meant everything to this boy.... Well-kept numbers, well-kept premises, well-kept appearance: everything had to be well-kept and, as much as possible, kept quiet.

The Old Man and Benoît, standing abreast, peered down the dusty aisle bordering the shadow-flooded shelves. The blows gathered strength behind the door. Neither a word nor a shout punctuated this patient display of impatience. A fist beating the wood door, the crude rhythm of this pounding. Blows striking the door, that’s all.

Lending a music-lover’s ear to this rolling of kettledrums they knew very well, Benoît and the Old Man exchanged knowing looks. The latter said with all the authority required, “It’s okay, boys, we can go back to bed!... They’ll get fed up!... They must’ve been on the train.... The train always brings Indians.... They’ll get fed up, guaranteed! Bastards.... “

While Benoît returned to his quarters, yawning to the point of breaking his jawbone, the Old Man, finger raised, gave another of those special lectures he really liked to hit me with at the drop of a hat, “Never open!... N-e-v-e-r, d’you hear? Once their foot’s in the door, it’s over! O-v-e-r!... Only thing left is the gun!... Baaaang!... Oh, the bastards will get fed up.... They’ll get fed up, guaranteed!”

As soon as we’d gone back to bed, they knocked with increased obstinacy. The insistent and stubborn rhythm of the pounding, in the midst of my half-awakened delirium, insidiously replaced the throbbing of my blood. It was like the sound of a tom-tom in the night, powerful and primitive, unrelenting and impenetrable. And I clenched my fists in despair, absolutely wanting to sink into sleep but continually caught, awakened by the controlled madness of the drumming. I wanted to hit something as well, anything, just to release pressure and somehow respond to the primary impulse filling the night. But I remained there, proffering death threats muffled by my pillow.

I finally got up and returned into the hallway. The Old Man, expelled by the springs of his berth, passed in front of me in a whirlwind, charging through the store, lifting a genuine dust cloud in the finest tradition of cavalry regiments, bellowing like the devil the whole time. He rushed to the door, tossing the bar like a mere toothpick, then leapt onto the steps, continuously railing against the undesirables, calling them all the names in the Bible, taking stock of and trotting out all the church dishes and other liturgical hardware in an impromptu sermon whose main theme went something like, “Go to bed! You pack of dogs! Go to bed, go to bed! Pack of dogs!”

The vision of the hoary old man floating like a ghost in his underwear must’ve made a strong impression on the Indians, who retreated in disorder without even trying to parley. I glimpsed Donald Big-Arms’ barrel-shaped figure through the doorway; he seemed to be hesitating, wavering on the spot. He split the darkness with a yellow smile and, blind drunk, proudly struggled to stand up before thinking of running off. Behind him, Cowboy was slipping away at a moderate pace, taking his time, calmly looking over his shoulder, as though underlining that such a strategic retreat implied no fundamental concession.

After scattering the riff-raff and addressing the one who’d lingered with elementary rhetoric, the Old Man returned to the back of the building, juggling prize inanities. The half-naked old fool went back to the unstable comfort of his springs, waving his arms as though to brush an entire battalion of demons out of his way. He’d acted in a semi-sleepwalking state, and was now busy realizing how rash his bravery had been. As he was about to pass by me, he snatched a can from a shelf and, waving it as though it were a projectile, turned towards the door, howling furiously,

“Next time, it’ll be with a 30-30!... BAAANG! With a rifle, I tell you!... BAAANG!”

The old scarecrow’s backside had been guarded anyhow. Benoît had surreptitiously worked his way into the manager’s narrow office, which he often had to relinquish during the day to Mr. Administrator’s inquisitive pen. A large unglazed window in the wall of that room allowed you to slip into the hallway. Benoît was seated on the edge of a pivoting chair, eyes opened with great difficulty, rifle on his knees. He was stiff as a rail. The Old Man murmured, with a hint of tenderness in his voice, “It’s over, TiKid.... You can go to back to bed, young fella.... It’s over,”

Outside, the dog was still howling. Benoît returned to his room, leaning the rifle against the wall between stacked boxes of bullets and a dictionary he consulted regularly in the line of duty, since he sometimes needed words to defend himself. And I fell back into the bay-coloured arms of my dreams, as though they were a parenthesis in the long insomnia that was beginning.

A double streak of grease squirted from the hamburger fried the Old Mans way, and Mr. Administrator suddenly announced wearily, “I’m leaving today.... For Montreal.”

He’d said this while massaging his jaw. Through the sharp sputtering of the fat, the Old Mans distinct sigh of relief could be heard as he leaned over a cast-iron pan spitting grease. He could keep his position by default. Once again, Mr. Administrator hadn’t dared give him final notice, and he could see this as another reprieve.

“Another one? Hungry enough for another one?” he bellowed, artistically tossing the beef patty swelling on his spatula. “You’ll never eat better ones, not even at McDonald’s!” he added triumphantly.

Mr. Administrator looked at him furiously. Heartburn was curling his lips.

A little earlier, the previous night’s raid had been discussed, a raid scuttled by our very own Old Man’s courageous stand. Breaking his usual silence, Benoît then launched into an epic description of the Old Man’s outburst, giving a detailed vignette of the terror that had stricken the intruders at the sight of this fury. The zeal of his panegyric plastered a delighted smile on the Old Man’s mug, who probably saw this as an opportunity to boost his image in the eyes of the boss. He cleaved the air with his skillet, elated. “Baaang! Nothing but dogs!”

Mr. Administrator, sullen looking, concealed his face behind the golden back of a large hamburger. He repeated, in a quieter voice, “I’m leaving this afternoon.”

A prolonged stay would’ve inflamed his ulcer. The previous day, he’d wanted to shake hands with parishioners outside the chapel, following the principle that he’d have nothing to gain by setting everyone against him. But his flaccid paw was left dangling in the breeze, bent like a fish hook. All he got were wary looks. Finally, the Muppet himself, tossing like a Cartesian diver, came over to grab his outstretched hand, only too happy to clutch some protrusion. But Mr. Administrator would’ve preferred to speak with some notable specimen of that crowd which, in recent years, had specialized in being indebted to his business. He looked around, diffident, giving me a worried expression mixed with resentment.

Id attracted attention to us, though perhaps not exactly the way he’d have liked. They’d quickly carried me out, while the kneeling priest, with Salomé’s help, busily picked up his supply of hosts, swearing. Slumped on the squares lowest step, Id regained consciousness amid a circus of concerned faces more astonished than moved by genuine charity. Every tragedy has its good side, however, and a decent blonde girl, possessed of more initiative than the local average, had, with quiet assurance and self-confidence, wiped my pale face with a dampened altar cloth. I was conscious enough to hear her explain to the others, who were already anticipating my emergency evacuation, “it’s only an allergic reaction, that’s all.... He’ll recover. There’s venom in those tiny creatures, you know....”

“Who? Him?” an astonished voice cried out.

“The flies, stupid!” she answered him, smiling at me. “I saw a guy rushed to hospital after being bitten like that...,”

I couldn’t stop looking at her.

“A city guy, obviously!” decreed someone else, whom I couldn’t see.

I’d managed to sit halfway up, “You’re the nurse, I guess?”

She burst out laughing.

“The nurse, here, went to school with Armand Frappier. I hope I look a little younger.... No, I work at the hotel,...

With those words, my boss dragged me off while, in our wake, the Muppet pedalled in the dust,

He left the following afternoon, other business requiring his attention farther south. He was made for managing from a distance, not for waging battle on the front. He needed a safety margin, a few hundred kilometres between himself and the source of his problems. Deep down, Mr, Administrator was a dreamer. Unlike the two others, he wasn’t continually tormented by an energy that was pitifully down to earth. He needed that distance to maintain his illusions. From the top of an office tower in downtown Montreal, or from a patio lined with uniform flagstones and equipped with a volcanic barbecue, Grande-Ourse could still seem like the reflection of that resuscitated village, that playground for the rich he’d dreamt about one night, covered in his eiderdown.

CITY COMFORT IN THE MIDDLE OF NATURE

In fact, Mr. Administrator asked only to be reassured, and was never happier than when his alleviated concerns finally joined the other certainties in his personal collection. When his van disappeared over a nearby hill, the Old Man was beaming, feet firmly rooted to the ground.

“Sooooo... long! Sooooo... long!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, making useless wide gestures.

As soon as the vehicle disappeared around the first bend, he breathed more easily, becoming more effusive, settling in more firmly. When his opinion wasn’t asked, he’d crop up behind you, turning the screws in your back. He was everywhere at once, had five hands, bustled about like four monkeys! You’d feel like scratching whenever he wandered nearby. A capuchin, a marmoset, a ringtail monkey, a squirrel monkey! He smelled of suint. Often, while continuously talking to the walls behind which he’d grown proficient at finding us, he’d move slowly, imperceptibly, gently drifting towards the shower stall, his own stench having finally got to him. He took two or three steps backwards, turned around, procrastinated. The idea of leaving the conversation in our pathetic care offended him in the highest degree. He’d cling to his verbosity, it was his wall of protection against the insignificance of the inanimate world, against the outside night.

“Don’t tell me he’s gonna take a shower?”

“Course not...” replied Benoît.

And he came back towards us, went off again, dithered about, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, then jumped on the spot, then backward and forward, following the steps of a complex choreography understood by him alone, moving from the passacaglia to the paso doble without transition and, in the end, as though to yield to a carefully prepared effect, slapping his forehead, totally excited, “Oooh! I forgot to tell you!...”

The following second, he again gesticulated, throat trembling like a bell, chattering abrasively, spring fully wound, a ridiculous hybrid produced by a deaconess and a leprechaun. He’d stand before us, spewing threats in all directions, choking on his moans, vilifying the thoughtlessness of some, pillorying others. The flow of his words greatly exceeded that of the shower head. He, at least, had no problems with flies, being so well coated with his own sebaceous layer.

I listened very carefully. In their eyes, I was a kind of likeable lost cause, a young thinker out of his element who spent most of his time daydreaming, opening his mouth, like a fish, only to breathe. I didn’t miss any of the Old Man’s words, that prolific gossip where each sentence, like a roof tile, partially covered another. I took advantage of the peace and quiet they allowed me to spy with impunity. I secretly scribbled notes, feeling the rest of the story would throw me into a role for which I had to prepare immediately. I soaked up all those ceaselessly repeated words, discharged with heavy throat clearings. I’d become a sensory sieve, a selective strainer. When the lump 1 imagined to be necessary would crop up amid all this mash, my prospector’s ear would go off like a valve. I’d then be able to grasp that dark nugget hidden in the passage of time, and extricate it from the sand, exposing it to the light, making it the jewel which, one day, would redeem all.

Folks in Grande-Ourse always returned to the same story, the famous one nobody said much about, but which was deeply repressed in everyone’s psyche. The Affair ate at Grande-Ourse’s social fabric, and Salome somehow sprang from the tragedy which tormented the village like a burning thorn in its paw. The hotels threshold had been the cradle of the curse which poisoned exchanges. It was a delicate topic, a build-up of explosive forces that had been swallowed by the darkness. The embers still glowed, watching over like a scar; even the Old Man, when broaching the subject, displayed a temperance that contrasted surprisingly with his customary frenzy.

An Indian man and woman drive up to the front of the hotel in an old pickup. It’s night and they re drunk. The man heads to the door, unsuccessfully trying to open it. He knocks. No one answers. He insists with heavy blows. His companion stayed behind. He wants one more beer, despite the late hour Behind the door, a voice urges them to leave. The discussion is animated. The Indian man finally heads back to the pickup, shouting imprecations. He threatens with his fist. He’s lost sight of his girlfriend. He fiddles around the vehicle for a moment, and heads back towards the hotel wielding a heavy axe whose sharp head shines in the darkness. Swinging the tool, he deals a terrible blow to the door. The crash of broken wood echoes in the night. And he repeats the manoeuvre, enraged. Blows thunder in cadence, slow and heavy. Soon, he opens a breach. Then the door topples over, torn off its hinges. The only sound from the interior is an oppressed silence. The Indian now utters incoherent words. Someone hands him a beer through the demolished entrance. He grabs it and drinks without asking questions, still belching a string of hazy words. He turns back, walking unsteadily, beer in one hand, axe in the other. He walks with difficulty, shouting his head off, bellowing wild chants. As he’s about to reach the door of his vehicle, the first shot rings out. The Indian doesn’t fall right away, only staggers a little more. Several gunshots will be needed to bring him down and stretch him out properly. The salvo then rattles the night, shaking his back with heavy shivers. He finally tumbles forward, spreading out full length, trying to hang on to the opened door.

Grande-Ourse hasn’t finished hearing those gunshots. The door is summarily put back into place. Not a trace is left of him. Nothing. His silhouette can be seen lying on the ground, legs stretched out as though making a final broad stride and trying to enter the earth itself

The Old Man was informed and came over. He picks up the body. A dead man is heavy, he thinks, slipping his hands into the armpits. Destination: the cold room, beneath the Outfitters storehouse.

That’s what happened.

That’s what would’ve happened, if a long story could be cut short....

They could be seen approaching at a snails pace across the railway, the entire band piled into an old verdigris pickup specked with rust. The scrap heap’s contrasting candy-pink hood was touching to behold. The head of the clan, César Flamand, was holding the steering wheel. He was fascinating to observe up close: totally wizened, ugly as three sins, taciturn as a grave. His features were always twisted by elaborate twitches and scowls, as though he’d wanted to keep flies away from his face without using his hands. His shoulders had portaged numerous summers and he was easily twice as old as the age anyone might’ve given him. Romeo, the young man who’d fallen under the bullets twelve years earlier, was his son. Salomé was the daughter of this Romeo, and, therefore, César’s granddaughter. He’d stopped drinking in the wake of the famous incident, and now dragged his sadness everywhere, as though it were tethered to his forehead. Fernande was his second wife, with the exception of a few casual cohabitations. Mature and deeply wrinkled, yet just recovering from childbirth, she snuggled up to him on the seat, beer squeezed between her thighs in the mild evening. They looked like a pair of teenagers heading to the drive –in. A raft of colourful children dangled over the side in the back as the tires rolled over the gravel. Many of the kids belonged to César, who still wasn’t thinking of abstaining from the pleasures of procreation. The others, snatched from bad mothers whose breasts spurted more alcohol than milk, had been placed in the couple’s good care. Flamand’s reputation for abstinence, and paternal kindness taken to the point of self-denial, reassured social workers.

Salomé appeared calm and introverted amid the noisy fray. Dressed all in red, she was shy and anxious, averting her eyes. Her sisters, half-sisters, brothers, and half-brothers, a howling swarm, swept through the entire store. The smallest ones, unsure and incredibly cute, jolted along the aisle in short, hasty, and conquering strides. Flamand and his wife wandered amid this brood with indulgent smiles. All they wanted was to linger tenderly. They had all the time in the world while the Old Man taunted them amicably, “Hail! Hail César! Hail Fernande!”

They were the only Indians that Benoît and the Old Man saw as not covered in war paint. This laudable effort at tolerance was mainly due to the austere Aboriginal’s tacit vow of sobriety. As well, Flamand was fond of Benoît, perhaps because of his morbid dolorism, and respected the Old Man, since that pale morning when, suspenders dangling, the latter had gone to pick up his son, back riddled with .303 bullets, in front of the hotel. Without ever recognizing it openly, Flamand was deeply grateful to the Old Man for having spontaneously performed the gruesome task.

Though he’d forsaken the bottle, you could see at first glance that César Flamand had drunk a great deal, to the point of saturating his yellowish flesh, and that before stopping completely, he’d had to go to the bottom of things, to where truth and horror lie. Whenever Flamand spoke, you always took a few seconds, at first, unsure whether that chain of imperceptible chin movements corresponded to a living tongue.

As soon as the mercury climbed a few degrees, the sale of Mister Freezes increased by leaps and bounds. It’s crazy how much I’d sell of this frozen pasteurized water(as specified on the product label). I expected the parent company to send me a bonus at any moment. The craving for something cold spread among the young people, each wanting a small column of ice wrapped in cellophane. And Flamand, following the customary protests, would take grumpy pleasure in organizing the distribution. Salomé deliberately leaned on the fridge, where she remained still, literally seated on the supply of Mister Freezes. With a glimmer of defiance in her eyes, she waited for me to feign pushing her to tumble down gracefully. My fingers became several stems running aground. She again hoisted herself to the same spot, staring at me unexpectedly, pensively sucking her colour crystals, oblivious to the awful insolence of the purple stick liquefying in her mouth. Flamand coughed up the cash.

Rounds of Mister Freezes wouldn’t have been complete without Admiral Nelson. He’d burst into the premises, inquisitive, as though he’d been able to sniff the chemical colourings from a distance. Little girls made fun of him, but he paid no attention and made do with claiming his share. Dealing with other humans was painful to him.

Admiral Nelson was a solitary boy, already accustomed to the minimal compassion the world offered him. He was a young Indian, about 10 years old, cheerful as the devil but able to be serious. Afflicted with a harelip, he chattered like a magpie and looked like a squirrel: he was prescient and nervous. Since he was called Nelson, his surname had followed quite naturally. His infirmity made speaking difficult, and you had to go up to him and lean over somewhat to make sure you got everything. Contrary to a majority of brothers, sisters, and cousins, Nelson had plans for the future and, each winter, on hills covered in grey pine, he trapped martens to be able to afford his dreams. He wanted to become an engineer, get his pilots licence, and buy a hydroplane. Sometimes the Old Man would vaguely encourage his aspirations. This kind of acceptance of the rules pleased him.

Young girls from the band got into the habit of surrounding the store each night, a venue more respectable than the hotel after all. The Old Man, filled with impartial clairvoyance, suggested that they came to check out some new guy, evaluate the merchandise, as it were. They’d set out from Flamand’s cabin beside the lake after supper, moving as a group along the railway, leaving it near the overpass, landing on the Outfitters like a volley of birds. Their arrival terrified Benoît, who wasn’t the most sociable individual in such circumstances. His policy dictated that he conceal the pleasure he felt at this feminine invasion. No guilty inclination could get in the way of his business vocation. As soon as the first skirt was spotted in the area, he quickly took refuge behind the counter, stuck to the cash register, as though he feared the lasses would make off with the day’s proceeds.

This impervious reserve undermined his popularity. Girls would finally get fed up with his grim expression and impassiveness, and I became the new focal point without trying too hard. When, from the confines of my room, I heard the shouts, laughter, and other warbling signalling their visit, I’d spring out of my lair, approaching with studied casualness, calmly going over to lean on a shelf. Their banter, interrupted by brief chases and democratically distributed blows, was quite simply dizzying. Nothing embittered the Old Man so much as this habit of cluttering the premises without the slightest intention of buying anything, of filling all useful space with the wind of frivolous prattle, often chanted in a foreign language, taking out their coin purses only when threatened with expulsion, something never really enforced since the general store couldn’t disregard its status as a public place.

Salomé’s shyness set her apart from the group. Her integration into the rest of the band, besides, was very relative: remaining stubbornly aloof from the teeming swarm, she looked at the ground, radiating a kind of heavenliness that was the antithesis of the surrounding merriment. She realized I was observing her and took refuge atop the refrigerator whose mass provided soothing warmth.

The provocative ingenuousness of the gaze the graceful shape of the cheeks the eternal anticipation on the mouth with curled lips the ebony hair the bronzed skin the indecent perfection of the face.

A precocious tendency for procreating, and the likely influence of genetic programming, determine that most Indian women mature early. Salomé was already approaching the crumbly ridge where she’d stand around the age of sixteen, and the burgeoning was breathtaking. During the peaceful nights that preceded fishing season, she opened the first breech in my vow to practice a little abstinence that summer. She gave me a taste for simply being there, after the meal, when the small troop that scattered through the store was trying to taunt Benoît. Simply being there to look at her, and forgetting she’d someday be twenty, thirty, forty, likely fat and wrinkled, perhaps a boozer, doomed to suffer the fleeting desire of empty-handed fishermen getting loaded at the hotel.

These young girls, barely emancipated from parental attention, were quickly promoted as baby-sitters, dragging along the most recent offspring of those prolific lineages. And then, carelessly displayed by their elders, the most beautiful tots in the world made their inaugural walks into the world, at my feet. They frolicked like ducklings on the old planks, rolling on the ground, wretched bundles of innocence that the social services had taken from decrepit mothers, relocating them to more stable homes. Their beauty seemed to reach all the way back to the origin, to the hardness of the egg, and I felt that if I’d been able to contemplate an Indian zygote for only a moment, I’d have experienced ecstasy, discovered the crux of everything and swallowed the core of the world.

Benoît was trying to raise a brimming spoon to his mouth.

“They’ll burn him, they’ll burn him!” the Old Man repeated, walking back and forth.

We were seated at the table before bowls of steaming soup. Spoons swirled in the broth and the kitchen echoed with the sounds of our palates. The Old Man, with no request besides silence from warmed throats, was telling his stories. Sometimes it seemed as though only his voice held us in the present. Its music and false notes, distinct tempos, scores, signs and keys, its outbursts, sudden changes from low to high notes (when he’d strive to imitate Mr. Administrator’s tirades) and the intangible structure of his rhythm affected Benoît like an irresistible lullaby. This was the hour when lack of sleep tried to catch up with the manager. The young fellow had the odd habit of drinking five or six instant coffees before turning in. Strange how he didn’t realize the practice caused his insomnia; after all, it’s only a temporary concession to unproductiveness. The Old Man never slept more than four hours a night, and took pompous delight in his ability to bounce to his feet each morning at dawn. At 4:00 a.m. sharp, all the pots and pans rattled at the same time, and the shrillness of the radio took on a chorus of crows getting agitated outside: the Old Man went into action, it was his hour of glory, he reigned on a sleeping world, he made himself useful. His favourite pastime during those moments was to wash the previous day’s dishes and, since he was growing more hard of hearing, the transistor would bellow its stream of crackling at full volume, while the clanging of porcelain rose from the sink.

This infernal racket cruelly cut short our nights. I’d see Benoît nodding in front of me at the table, the amplitude growing more pronounced with the grating of the elderly human trumpet. He raised his utensil painfully, like the wand of a conductor lacking the strength to reach his crescendo. And then, oops, the spoon deviated from its course, missed its target and Benoît burned his cheek, drenching his lap with wonderful smelling hot soup; he suddenly awoke, cried out, and came to.

The Old Man would then agree to interrupt the meandering course of his reminiscence.

“Go to bed, Ti-Kid! Go to bed! You’ll burn yourself!”

But in the shelter of his pride, Benoît stood firm. And, as though to highlight the danger of any quietude, we immediately heard urgent knocking at the door. Prompted by that signal, he stood up like a robot, turning his head slightly to look at the individual who’d disturbed his lunch. Then, eager to fulfil the requirement of his vocation, he’d hurry to the entrance. Forgetting his own problems, the Old Man would then take pains to go over the flaws and misfortunes of this blasted hamlet, this unredeemable pandemonium whose case could only be settled with a good lock! Everyone got their due; whites and their cowardice, shareholders and their smug ignorance, Indians and their laziness. Indians, those parasites, flea-bitten dogs, thirsty-horned animals only interested in ruining the business of honest citizens and sullying all that Grande-Ourse still had of industriousness!

To lighten his burden, Benoît was determined to teach me, if not how to count, then at least how to use the machine designed for that purpose. I was a very bad student right from the beginning. It must be said that, amid all the uninhabited space around Grande-Ourse, numbers enjoyed a special status. Appropriate names are a luxury found only with civilization. Over there, people didn’t say at Lake Such and Such, but rather at the ThreeMile Point They didn’t refer to the bridge over a given river, but to the Twenty-Mile Point The land had not been cleared, and therefore had to be explained. The pickup’s odometer took care of place names and, obsessed with distances, people exorcised their seclusion by tossing numbers onto the map. They felt remoteness to be less frightening with those particulars nailed into it. Emptiness faded into the reassuring linearity of a collective consciousness marked with imaginary milestones.

Patiently and imperturbably, Benoît showed me the cash register’s secrets. He initiated me to the keyboards coded language, acquainted me with the joyful rolling of the till that jingled as it slid on its hinges, taught me the best way to handle crisp banknotes forming wads in different compartments, encouraged me to carefully examine the tape rolling out like a streamer from the top of the machine and, finally, inducted me into the secrets of the safe by entrusting me with its three-number combination.

“The important thing is to balance!” he liked to repeat gravely, with a somewhat sinister complacency.

Our finances, as I understood them, were based on the same principle as the black box: it was enough to know what went in, what came out, and to always establish an equivalency between the two amounts.

But the machines keys refused to line up in the right sequence beneath my fingers. I added up gaffs faster than the price of goods multiplied by their number. Each new blunder stared my supervisor in the face, breaking his heart, as he leaned over the distressing white ribbon which was an insult to all mathematical rigour. When Benoît was out of sight, Id settle on noting any calculation that didn’t add up on a piece of paper which I then concealed under the cash, without losing my cool, whispering to myself, like an incantation: Benoît will manage. Benoît will balance.

It was important to show unflappable confidence before the shrewd and paunchy humanity that regularly filed through our establishment. I couldn’t afford to hint at the least blunder in the eyes of those large woodsmen on welfare, bearded poachers with piercing eyes, brawny and griping lumberjacks on unemployment, and other friendly barbarians inclined to stinginess whenever it wasn’t a question of eating or drinking. They would’ve pulverized me for less. Id sometimes see their eyes bulge after they’d glanced the price of an item. They’d cry robbery just to test my resolve. I tried to remain calm, taking their money, recording transactions. I was gradually learning to figure them out.

They all seemed more or less cut from a pattern that took up space and was draped in abundant flesh. Midriffs were rather rotund. Local custom flaunted a joyful disregard for public health standards regarding consumption, and no restraint mechanism could’ve prevented those flabby paunches from spreading out and dangling around waistlines. Around here, stomachs were the last refuge of wealth.

Mornings when the heat wasn’t too intense. Big Ben, a Metis, would show up on the horizon above the tracks, his four limbs making short and comical rotations around his pudgy body, like a locomotive’s connecting rods in slow motion. Not much of him had been seen during Mr. Administrator’s stay: Big Ben belonged to that race of honest idlers, unable to feign efficiency only to dazzle. Though not among the heaviest of his counterparts, he did carry about an imposing and impeccably circular mass.

When the Old Man introduced me to him, the enormous factotum stretched out his hand uselessly, in an uncertain gesture halfway between a handshake and a simple vague sign, a result of his arm’s limited reach and his obvious reluctance to move his feet without a compelling motive. Quiet and modest, he gazed at the ground, its immediate view being forever denied him due to his corpulence. This fat boy, who was the perfect audience for any compulsive chatterbox, had mastered the art of tolerating the flapping of lips in others. He seemed intoxicated by the infinite variations in voice tones.

“What’s happening with you, Big Ben?”

“Um Well UhWell.”

Perhaps to confront the contradiction inherent to his being Métis, Big Ben had created his own dialect which rested on purely iterative rhetoric. It always drew on the same monosyllabic repertoire reduced to a minimum, and borrowed from a level of evolution barely beyond the grunt. This lexical impoverishment seemed perfectly deliberate. Big Ben had everything of the friendly gorilla who’d accidentally discovered the principle of mantras.

“What’s new, Big Ben, old buddy?”

“Well Um Well Uh.”

He liked to examine shelf contents, walking along the aisle, hands on his stomach, getting excited over nothing, over the tiny breeze which, filtered by the half-open door, stroked his pathetic sweat-drenched carcass, or over a bag of potatoes delivered by the train that very morning and destined for the corner restaurant’s foul-smelling fryer. Leaning with all his weight on the potato bag, he repeated, amazed, “Oh the nice potatoes! Oh Oh! Oh the nice potatoes!”

With his mouth in the shape of a heart, he’d catch his breath, lift his head, sponge his brow, “Oh the nice breeze! Oh! The nice little breeze...”

He’d come back down to earth, then, “Oh! The nice potatoes! Oh the nice potatoes....”

Big Ben nodded at everything the Old Man said, chanting his lone syllable, lovingly rocking it on his tongue. He was a fan of all-out approval, and could say yes sixteen times without changing pitch.

“Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes.”

Big Ben was also the volunteer fire chief. One day, wonder of wonders, he showed me Grande-Ourses fire truck. The antiquated vehicle, stored in a garage and forgotten by everyone, hadn’t seen action in three or four centuries. Big Ben pampered it.

Raoul Legris was another notable character whose actions I’d carefully study. He was small, hard-hearted, sinuous, ageless. His greying mop, ruffled by an eternal night of partying, had two very stiff locks that gave him a pair of horns. Something bad and consciously crooked emanated from the grimace that was always on his lips. Legris was a rogue and didn’t pretend to be anything else, which gave him an advantage over many of the people around him. He played his role as a villain with a fervour that could only make him sympathetic in the long run. He wasn’t a Grande-Ourse native. His migration was the reverse of the tendency generally observed in rural regions: one day, he’d left his mediocre suburb in the Lower Laurentians, ending up in Grande-Ourse, at the end of the road and that of his resources. He worked for the Forestry Company at first, then for whatever required his dubious services here below. He had a good deal of pride for a bootlicker. This region had pleased him, having no law but the jungles. He’d removed the licence plates from the vehicle he’d stolen in Saint– Thérèse-de-Blainville, disappearing into the landscape on the double. He quickly specialized, among other expedients, in establishing questionable friendships, especially with American tourists, who always wanted to buy lessons in local behaviour. Legris used his smile like others use a beggar’s cup. Another pool of shady relations had been provided by the Indians. He went from one group to the next, acting as a contact point. I here were Metis with brawn and Metis with brains. The mixed blood Legris had was in his brain. He was crafty as anything.

The first morning I saw him, he was in a rather sorry state and suffered from a crying need: a pair of ears, no matter whose, to be filled with the sound of his complaint. Posing as a victim with obvious satisfaction, he railed against a legion of nocturnal aggressors and, filled with meticulous self-pity, caressed the purple bruise adorning his forehead. Having merely got what he deserved, he rejoiced in having touched the Old Man with the moving tale of all his misfortunes. The latter was beside himself as he ran up to him.

“You, Legris! You! I knew it was you! You were behind the ruckus last night! I should’ve known! Legris is back!”

His counterpart awaited the rest, quiet and sarcastic.

“Same old story!” lamented the Old Man, calling on me as a witness. “The typical scenario: Legris gets the Indians to drink, buys beer all night, gets beat up in the morning and afterwards, has the gall to show up and complain!”

So much for the proceedings. The affair was understood.

“And now,” the Old Man went on, “you’ll ask me to call the Tocqueville police again? As if they weren’t already on to your little number?”

Legris, who’d seemed distracted, straightened up completely, like an actor who’s just been prompted.

“You think I’ll let the shirt be taken off my back? They broke into my trailer and made off with a hundred pounds of meat! My freezer’s totally demolished!”

The Old Man, secretly gratified by his role, was heading to the phone on the wall near the counter, fulminating. A determined Legris was on his heels, shouting, “Come on! Dial the number! I want the whole bunch locked up! Bastards!”

The Old Man dialled, affecting a solemn attitude. Receiver in hand, Legris interrupted the account of his misfortunes to collect himself for a moment. Something then clicked in his mind, and he abruptly hung up, burning with rage, “Don’t need the pigs for that! I’ll personally take care of the Siwashes! Without us, they’d still cover their asses with animal hides!”

Sharing his burden had been enough to wash away the offence. The Old Man wouldn’t budge, but you could feel he’d calmed down considerably. The familiarity of this masquerade and the predictability of its outcome rewarded him each time. All Legris required was a little attention. Besides, seeking intimate conversations with the police really wasn’t to his advantage. The Indians acted as foils to him; in fact, they allowed him to think he was superior, a kind of heretical Christ offering to suffer for their salvation.

But, to ensure everyone was happy, the Old Man still had to trot out his bugbear, infused with biblical wrath. “You son of a bitch! You wasted my time again! I’ve always told you: don’t make them drink, don’t make them drink! Never, do you hear?”

Fingers in his ears, Legris walked away sniggering, regaling in the commotion he discovered he was still able to cause. His bruises already began hurting less and he mused about other happenings.

“Never make them drink!” barked the Old Man, plunking himself before me, though I hadn’t caused him any problems.

Passing near me, Legris repeated, fire deep in his eyes, “Without us, they’d still wear animal hides over their asses.”

The Old Man often looked outside worriedly, vigorously scratching his groin.

“Still, fat Lili will have to show up, one of these days...”

When asked who Lili was, he shrugged compliantly. “You’ll get to know her, don’t worry....”

I believe I caught a knowing smile across Benoît’s lips.

My progress with the cash register was hopelessly slow. My calculating knowledge was practically non-existent, and my preferred customers were Indians. With them, commercial relations were surrounded by a pleasant simplicity. Thrift had no hold on their imagination and they were completely oblivious to the most widely accepted notions of economy. One day, Cowboy came in to buy instant coffee along with Karate Kid. He went down the aisle, then returned with a tiny container he placed on the counter between us.

I nodded.

“You know, Cowboy, it’s much cheaper when you buy a large container.”

“Yeah, but a small ones easier to carry.”

And he shoved it into the pocket of his jacket, while I stumbled on his logic. I heard him pronounce the ritual formula, “Put it on my tab.”

I pulled a yellow card with overcrowded columns from a folder.

Cowboy and the Kid lingered for a while. We spoke about this and that, about the Incident, Salomé, Flamand, and the hotel. Salomé had dropped out of sight for some time, and they told me she was back on the reserve, participating in a family celebration. Cowboy frowned when I queried him.

“Don’t know.”

“Has she returned to her mother?”

Cowboy and the Kid exchanged glances.

“Gisèle must be in Sans-Terre....”

“In the bars...”

“Sleeps with the guys...”

“When she’s able...”

“Lots of bars in Sans-Terre...”

“Bars filled with miners...”

“Miners?”

“Yeah, ‘cause of the mines.... Gold, copper...”

“Lots of fights in Sans-Terre bars....”

“She sleeps with miners...”

They left. Barely had the door closed, when I gave a violent start: the Old Mans inquisitive head was perched over the cash register.

“That’s how they are,” he began in a spiteful tone. “They don’t know the value of money! You could tell them a hundred times and it wouldn’t change a thing.... Moreover, it means profit for us,” he said, ending on an angelic note.

I understood he was referring to the tinned coffee.

He watched the two young people walk away.

“I overheard what you were saying.... Indians never forget an incident like that”

“What incident?”

He smacked his tongue, then continued, “The hotel incident! The young Boisvert fellas a dead man if he comes back here! A goner! Hell never set foot in Grande-Ourse again! Barred for life!”

He looked at me, speaking in a low voice.

“Eleven bullets! Eleven bullets in the back. I personally placed my fingers in the holes, young fella. I picked up the pieces...”

The Old Man said he’d been warned that night by the Muppet, who was taking a bath at his place to sober up, and who’d just picked up a whistling bullet in his water.

“A bath!” the Old Man exclaimed, staring at me. “At that hour, what a ridiculous idea!”

Night was about to fall over Grande-Ourse. In the congealing of the setting sun, through the fly specks, the low building could be seen, spanning its sinister mass of planks along the lake shore.

“Damned Boisvert!” whistled the Old Man between his teeth.

He scraped the dust with the tip of his shoe.

“What saved us the morning of the funeral is that everyone was there. Everyone! Whites and Indians! Spared us a civil war, that’s for sure! Seeing everyone at the church impressed the Indians....”

“Even Boisvert?”

He shook his head, chin in the air.

“No sir! Naturally.... The police had already taken the son away.... As a principal witness. As for the father, no one saw him for a long time.”

“Was he found guilty? The son, I mean....”

“Two years less a day in jail for the murder of a man, pal. It also didn’t hurt that he was a minor, obviously....”

“What about the father?”

The Old Man shook his filthy mop of hair. A fine halo emanated from it, which a nearly horizontal sunray coloured purple. He remained quiet, but finally admitted reluctantly, “He was cleared. It seems he was away the night it happened...”

I coughed slightly. “What happened to the young fella?”

Big Ben quietly crossed the room.

“Oh Ummm Don’t know Uh Hmmm. No one around here knows, no one.”

“And then,” the Old Man went on, “everything started happening to Jacques Boisvert. His wife drowned on a fishing trip that very summer.... And he raised a lot of eyebrows, afterwards, when he started hanging around with Giséle,...”

“Where does this Jacques Boisvert live now?”

I got the feeling the Old Man was peering deep into my soul

“Don’t be in too great a hurry, son.... You’ll see him soon enough, as well....”

The general store could no longer count on a watch-dog worthy of the name. His decline accelerated as a result of his spending the whole night tangled in his chain tied to a creaking clothesline sliding over the small yard. He’d bark at anything, at the least stroller who was already at the other end of the village. The tiniest quarter moon was now enough to prompt his wailings. In the morning he’d be found totally crestfallen, twisted in the inextricable tangle of his tether. He became the principal disturbance of the nights he was supposed to guard. The Old Man referred to his rifle, the dump. Benoît suggested we wait.

The Old Man acquired a kitten from the gutter to thwart a tiny group of mice that had the nasty habit of using spoons as lavatories. The newcomer displayed a great aptitude and his progress was so rapid that he soon appeared to be aiming for nothing less than the position of guardian-in-chief. To sharpen his skills, the Old Man took charge of imparting him with the light paranoia he believed essential to the task. As soon as the entrance door opened, letting in a customer, the kitten would steal towards it, rivetted to the floor, hypnotized by the luminous horizon. But the Old man quickly ascertained the intractable element, tearing off after him, arms swinging and legs wobbling, with a resounding, “Get back in there, you little Hérode!”¹

All the hair on his back was raised, as the feline escaped to the kitchen where he fully expected to beg for more accessible consolations. He got his name from these repeated scoldings: Hérode. More than anyone or anything, he’d run into the cruel paradox that underpinned the administration of his masters: being surrounded by infinite space all round, but settling for cultivating a siege mentality in the dark, like a precious endive. Despite the traumatizing aspects of the experience, Hérode forged himself a vigorous attitude and never completely succumbed to the culture of living inside a shell, prime examples of which were to be found in the Outfitters’ general store: narrow-mindedness set up as a fortress; continence sublimated by a snarl at the whole world. Hérode was young and vigilant; he rapidly crossed, if not the entrance door, then the boundary between innocent games and real life, where wounds bleed, and suffering reigns. Endowed with a sandfly’s ferocity, but incomparably better equipped, he knew how to dig into your back with one paw. He got into the habit of lurking under a shelf, near the counter, nestled defiantly between large bags of dog food. When a customer moved along the rows of canned food, Hérode would pounce on his legs with a tiny cry of enthusiastic resolve. He’d bite away, making no distinction between hairy pillars and varicosed columns. More than one tall character would fall flat, forehead against the ground, and more than one mushy skinned creature nearly fainted while our friend sharpened his claws on calves marbled like blue cheese. If a customer made the mistake of sticking a blind forearm into the shadows beneath the lower shelf, resolved to grab a bag of dog food, he’d immediately pull it out covered with a strange fur implant. He’d created a kind of de facto blockade around the central supply source for the village dogs.

The Old Man was beginning to worry. He clearly distinguished between protecting the Outfitters’ assets and indiscriminately taking it out on all customers. But he also had to repress a smile when the people of Grande-Ourse started jigging in front of us, inspired by our cat’s ground-level attacks. Moreover, how could you not get intense delight when the tiny cat diligently lacerated the crooked legs of the Muppet who was gradually anaesthetized by visits to the cold room and who chatted as though he didn’t notice?

Admiral Nelson became the kitten’s friend and official protector. When the Old Man chased the kitten, Nelson intervened and pleaded his cause. But the Old Man was unyielding on that point. He stretched out his arms like twisted branches, trying to grasp the immense reality of the outside world, offering himself as an example to mankind: youth and freedom were two calamities he’d been able to dispose of long ago.

“Poor Ti-Kid! A tiny cat! I don’t give him an hour to live if he sets foot outside!”

One day, when Hérode had just taken an offensive position, rolled up in a ball amid cans of Dr. Ballard’s, as I was daydreaming with book in hand, the door swung open violently and wind swept through it. The movement of air, combined with the surprise effect, nearly threw me off my stool. I put the book face-down on the counter to mark the page. A trembling mountain moved before me in all directions at once, swallowing space like a malignant growth. I had a vision of a goddess with a thousand purple nipples, able to crush your skull like that of a newborn, a twisted image of maternity, filled to the breaking point with its own matter. Rolls of fat rippled across her flesh like waves over the water while she spread over the surrounding floor with the same humid generosity as the ocean. I immediately understood with whom I was dealing, and felt like praying.

Instinctively, I turned to the back of the store, but no living creature dared betray itself. The aisle seemed longer than ever.

Lili looked at me with the eyes of a grouper about to gobble a piece of anything. After sizing me up, sorting me irrevocably among the nonentities, she quietly passed by, breathing heavily. Hérode made a slight hesitant jump, tried to look like a man-eater, then froze on the spot. He sifted through the limited web of his recollection, searching for something related to that humongous flesh heap. Lili swung her foot, ready to crush him, and he barely managed to dodge her, gaining considerable speed in his retreat.

“A cat?” grumbled Lili. “Must be vermin in the building.... Doesn’t surprise me....”

She scoured the store, incessantly griping, sniffing the dust and pondering comments likely to be rather negative. She seemed quite determined to make me work for her money. Goods piled onto the counter at a distressing rate. Whenever I feigned to head towards the cash register, just to start reducing the heap quietly, she’d dryly tell me to stop.

“Not so fast, young fella! I’m not done.... You’ll get confused if other customers come in....”

It was more than a word of advice. Clenching my teeth, I smiled at her.

I got the jitters as I was about to convert all this into numbers. Lili was staring at me. The least carelessness could be fatal. I immediately started blundering, getting hopelessly confused. She quickly lined up her purchases for the sole pleasure of seeing me get flustered. I mumbled confused apologies while she stood quietly and coughed, gloating in her victory. Only the euphoric jiggling of her flesh testified to the operation’s complete success. She even added to the insult by pressing her glasses against the labels, giving me the prices in a loud and slow voice, filled with crushing superiority, as though she were dealing with a three year old. I had no doubt that following this demonstration she’d make it her duty to show everyone proof of my incompetence, as recorded in minute detail on the ribbon she angrily tore away as I cringed. Lili needed a scapegoat in life, and she thought I fit the bill. I felt this woman would get no rest from having reduced me to the level of an embryo only worthy of being expelled from this place with blows from a stick.

Grande-Ourse struggled at the extremity of its road like a fish at the end of a line. The world sometimes let the line out, enticing with meagre prospects, and unfulfilled promises; the village would then go off in all directions, roughshod and half-cocked. The world gave it some line as though to help it drown.

Beyond a stretch of prowling dust strewn with sparse and shivering weeds, among the scattered houses that seemed to have been tossed there like dice on a green carpet, the Outfitters’ warehouse raised its sheet-metal undulations, while the morning sun covered its sides with pools of light. The warehouse had served as a garage for the heavy machinery used back in the days of prosperity. Salvaged by the new owners, it now contained only a few dozen metal barrels filled with helicopter fuel. Hardly any of the air craft were now seen in the region, but people subconsciously watched for them; they were the roaring oracles of a recovery. Everyone knew that the Company’s measurers were in the habit of cleaving through the air in one of those machines to cast their sharp glances at lines of future logs. Frees had started to regenerate north of Grande-Ourse and, in some places, you could see the kind of nearly mature plantings that make the calculators of surveyors quiver. As soon as a section of forest was thirty-or-so-feet high, regardless of trunk size, greed would kindle behind the expanding pupil of a planner holed up in his faraway lair. The most optimistic of the village’s unrelenting dreamers discussed the possibility of attracting a sawmill, the last hope for this hamlet of seventy-five souls. Company measurers had in fact been seen flying over the surrounding area. People who mentioned the mill always did so with a respectful shudder. And sceptics, among whom the Old Man always held centre stage, would reply that people who only argued from morning till very late at night couldn’t work towards a common goal.

Though many residents harboured a certain animosity towards the Outfitters, I learned that Lilis dissatisfaction had a specific origin. A former cashier at the general store, as spiteful as she was irritable, she’d been ousted from her livelihood as part of the rejuvenation program, from which my being hired sprang, having bumped into a pocket of resistance in the Old Man. Lili was also rebellious. To get the better of her, Mr. Administrator had pushed thoughtfulness to the point of paying for her stay in a Montreal clinic where a team of doctors, studying the problem of her proportions, had finally recommended drastic measures. But the Lili type doesn’t sweat it out very long at latitudes below the forty-eighth parallel. Designed to withstand intense cold, she’d return very quickly, between treatments, to nestle within her geographic navel. A well-known law of biology predicts that the size of a specimen within a variety will increase the nearer it gets to the pole. Lili illustrated that axiom. Her case was idiosyncratic. Specialists had lopped off thick slabs, but even rid of a hundred pounds she was still a nice whale calf.

She’d been hired in the days of the old Company and, over the years, her corpulence had become a measure of the town’s prosperity for the locals. Lili had reached her record weight when high voltage wires had been installed, a time when ravenous males left their encampments at the edge of Grande-Ourse each night to eat and get concomitant attentions. As far as anyone remembered, no apron could’ve been tied around her waist, but Lili had a solid reputation as a gourmet cook. Her cuisine had been popular at the time, and the bed with a reinforced box spring awaiting nearby had also known heavy use. The hostess was able to make space for well-filled stomachs, since she slept sitting up, only in fits and starts, as it were.

Lili had kept her job in the store when the transfer of power occurred, and continued to impose the impeccable order that characterized her reign. She’d fiercely combatted rot and waste, mercilessly scrapping any suspicious product. The village’s decline had made her lose a little weight, providing more space for wrinkles on her skin. Once easy men had departed, she began to moan. The villagers got used to it, but her attitude, in Mr. Administrator’s view, was lamentable. Still, the dispensers of cash didn’t come to Grande-Ourse to be terrorized. Lili awakened a primeval panic in men, an irrepressible fear of getting lost in a cavern of flesh, of disappearing beneath it with the sound of an avenging gurgle.

Fat Moreau’s house was another symbol of the slump. The restaurant owner spent his time drinking at the hotel, devoting all his energy to spreading disorder. When told he was over-extended, he negotiated a credit margin with his fists. Besides, everyone knew where his money had gone. At the high point of the economic boom, when his restaurant’s grills were red hot from dawn to dusk, he’d set out to give spatial dimension to his success. After jumbling the main lines of a plan on paper, he’d thrown himself into a housing adventure on his own. Everyone quickly agreed that it was immoderate. A hybrid construction, more Spanish castle than bungalow, was born on a neighbouring hill, as though to spurn the village. Moreau thought he was a handyman, working with the obtuse fervour and simplistic technique of a lumberjack building a log cabin. He’d chosen the only property available in the area, a lot in theory belonging to the British Crown, and counted on that conceited building to finally be able to scoff Grande-Ourse’s new owners at leisure. Suddenly thinking he was a millionaire, he sank all his money into the project.

At first, the house had swelled up like a ball on the granite knoll, getting farther and farther from any reasonable proportion or notion of harmony. Meanwhile, he had to settle for a miserable hovel squeezed into a corner of the restaurant, surrounded by the smell of rank oil, arguing with his wife when returning from daily sessions at the hotel. His wife suffered from ringworm, and was as skinny and ugly as he was sturdy. She thought she was prodding her big bear’s creative inclinations as best she could with her ceaseless recriminations, but the effort had hung fire. The sudden blossoming of materials, beams and boards, joists and slats, mouldings and piers, had languished. The residence really did dominate the village, but still had no glass in its windows, handrails on its stairs, doors on its hinges, shingles on its roof. Only bare wood, black paper, cement blocks, and plastic house wrap, while the project manager was immersed in prolonged contemplations, nose in his glass a little lower down the slope. Moreau and his wife continued to live in an atmosphere of cooled grease, sleeping and tearing each other to shreds, the image of a dream delivered prematurely between them.

“It’s ridiculous,” whined the Old Man, contemplating the mess. “Try to imagine what the Americans will think when they see that! After all, they know a thing or two about nice properties!”

He’d paced back and forth all night, scratching himself everywhere, very carefully turning away from the shower room each time he passed it in the hall.

“This is the big weekend, boys!” he constantly barked out. “The Big Weekend! You’ll see, they’re real gentlemen, mark my word! Real gentlemen! All the credit cards; you name it, they’ve got it!”

He was choking with anticipation, stroking his money purse, arching his back like a turkey, still chuckling, “The Big Weekend, boys! Victoria Day! Time for us to make a little profit, friends!”

And, indeed, came the morning of the opening. The Americans were there.

They’d arrived in the night, after going through the road decline inherent to such an expedition: luxuriously paved and panoramic freeways in the land of Uncle Sam; Ontario motorways that were still pleasant to drive on; flat and linear Quebec highways still very suited to vehicles; provincial roads that narrowed increasingly, broken up and worn down by pulpwood trucks in the upper stretches of the network; finally, the last leg, icing on the cake, the Grande-Ourse road: dust, bumps, stones, craters, potholes, and washboards. The Americans parked on the slightly angled ground, checked to see if they were still in one piece, then awaited day break. As the Old Man said so well, “Americans respect the sleep of others! A chap from Pennsylvania is allowed to shoot when someone bothers him at night!”

We found the Americans in our yard, early in the morning: three or four off-road vehicles, loaded like mules. The clock showed 5:00 a.m. The Old Man rushed to the door with Benoît on his heels. They hadn’t been able to keep still since the previous day.

Still half asleep, the Yankees dragged themselves inside, putting their bones back into place. Those being initiated stared wide-eyed, asking all around, with timid smiles, “Are you open? Where are we now? Is this place open?”

Having driven through a steady procession of dark trees, they still didn’t completely believe in the magic of this store surging out of the forest late at night. For a few hours, their civilized confidence had ebbed in the obscurity of the woods. Opening his arms wide, the Old Man thundered, “For you, pals, we’re always open. Come in! Come in!”

They were marked by a slight stiffness, a subtle wariness of the gait. They walked as though in a conquered country, in enemy territory, guarding their rear, wearing wide-brimmed hats and sunglasses, chewing fine cigars and shivering in the morning; they were American. The Old Man offered rounds of fresh strong coffee, in real cups if you please, no styrofoam between us. Many knew him well and hailed him happily, comforted by this initial contact. Regulars who came up once or twice a season, saving all year to treat themselves to this trip in fish country. They weren’t millionaires, but small investors who’d started with nothing, having grown relatively prosperous through hard work, and remaining sufficiently familiar with being hard up to not disown their origins. They shook the Old Man’s hand, greeting him with heartfelt “How’ve you been, old sucker?” And he, the familiar face in this unknown territory, puffed out his chest, finally turning his back on this miserable village barely floating above the mud of its rancour.

As far as business was concerned, however, it was a completely different story. When these guys headed to the woods, they outfitted themselves as though the next war had been scheduled for their holidays. The previous day, the Old Man had made me fill a plexiglass window with an entire assortment of colourful baubles bristling with fish-hooks. Expensive for the most part, they rattled entrancmgly when shaken. The Americans converged on the display, handling a few baubles, tossing a few of the most promising lures onto the counter to complement their tackle. But sales remained well below forecasts. They already had all the trinkets needed to confront the unfathomable.

America’s large fortunes, the Old Man liked to repeat, were built on gasoline and the consumption deriving from it. The previous day, the Surgaz company’s tank truck had generously irrigated the subsoil around the store, and the fuel pumps stood in the light like stelae ready to spit out smoke and gas. Benoît was the head pump attendant. While the Old Man made the Southerner’s drool with stories of local abundance (shoals of walleye piled so high they came out of the water, hefty pike whose eyes you might poke out just by dipping the propeller, a huge bear who’d sharpened his claws on every healthy tree in the region), Benoît was on duty by the window. His protruding eyes suddenly widened. I edged up near him to peak over his shoulder.

A vehicle with Pennsylvania plates had pulled up in front of the lead-free gas pump. A chap wearing a long sportsmans cap emerged, and stood facing the pumps, a little stooped, holding a camera. He vaguely resembled a pilgrim praying before a row of menhirs. It was a while before I understood that the fellow was immortalizing with film the numbers on the pump’s gauge. Of course, Grande-Ourse gas prices were astronomical because of the distance. But Benoît marked the occasion. He valued all of this a great deal.

“He’ll at least have that to show his friends....” I said to console him.

The way he agreed told me this would be another long day for him.

“They even bring their own gas!”

The Old Man groaned, incredulous, gently knocking his head against the walls.

“How can an honest businessman make any profit? They even carry their own gas!”

The general tendency was for them to take precautions against the hazards of the local economy. The Americans let their host country take care of the wildlife, but preferred making provisions for everything touching their comfort. On this road which, past the village, kept winding northwards another fifty or so kilometres, vehicles crammed with gear hauled trailers where forty-five gallon drums rocked softly with the bumps. Hiccuping and belching blue smoke, the wheezing machine stormed up the overpass. The foothills of Kilimanjaro wouldn’t have been more of a challenge.

That Saturday, there was a non-stop procession. The general store was only a stop along the road, and people often forgot to do the honours. Mr. Administrators concept was shattered. Other hosts, located higher up along the shores of the large reservoir, attracted fishermen in a hurry to drop their lines. They preferred plywood camps to the ghost town cottages offering CITY COMFORT IN THE MIDDLE OF NATURE. Waters there were more bountiful. To be honest, Grande-Ourse’s immediate surroundings had long ago been cleaned out of any legitimate aspirant to the record books.

Collapsed, head in hands, the Old Man understood, he certainly did, his American friends.

“They’ll get their nice Evinrudes stolen in the village! You can’t leave anything at the edge of a lake around here! An Apache will take off with it, then Legris will syphon your gas!”

The weight of years suddenly caught up with him, and he let out, in a voice that was the essence of disillusionment, “I’m through, young fellas.... Through! It’s my last summer here, guaranteed! I’m through....”

Benoît had heard that speech hundreds of times, knowing it by heart right to the end. When the Old Man, to complete his act, began to juggle with the fantasy so dear to him, which he contemplated with affection like an old mistress, concerning the pontoon he’d buy one day. It would be a spacious platform he’d transform into a genuine aquatic lounge, with deck chairs and a built-in bar, ice-filled coolers for the fish those gentlemen would catch continuously, simply pivoting on their well-padded chairs as though they were still seated behind one of those desks where they run an entire conglomerate. Yes, the Old Man would build himself a clientele, a real one, this time, golden pensioners, people of private means and heads of empires who’d open the floodgates of their opulence for him, and the Old Man would then be far from Grande-Ourse, living much higher up, on the shores of the large reservoir, and limitless horizons would open before his pontoon covered in filthy-rich American fishermen.

He withdrew for a short nap. We could rest easy. When the Old Man said he was through, the emphasis of the assertion seemed to spin him around like a stripped screw inside a nut.

On Victoria Day Monday, Donald Big-Arms showed up at the store completely drunk. He’d just gotten off the train, helped by a slight nudge from the conductor. His right fist was bandaged. All hell had broken loose in Sans-Terre, he confided modestly. The Old Man had been alerted and rushed in. Spotting the Indian gesticulating, he looked at him from the depths of his despondency, solemn, seeming to say: one more nail in my cross. Go ahead. Bring them on. A guy from Pennsylvania would take out his gun. Bring on some Indians.

Donald Big-Arms informed me that a large American had laughed at him and said he was dirty. If this were hard to deny after three days of partying, it still wasn’t something to tell him. I could see the violence going back up his arms, filling his huge fists.

“Next time, you’ll see.... Next time”

With no transition, he struck a shelf with a heavy blow, sending three ketchup bottles tumbling down. Benoît rushed over to pick them up, furious. “Hey! That’ll do!”

Donald Big-Arms looked at him, and Benoît appeared less anxious to make his intentions clear. The Old Man didn’t even bat an eyelid. In the face of this new snub, he seemed ready for the worst. He gave into the laws of adversity with limp gratitude. But a shock suddenly brought him back to life. His face lit up and, while the Indian examined the deep gashes in his hands with detachment, he scurried towards the door. “Crazy Sam! Oh Boy! Crazy Sam! You old bastard!”

“He’s one of the gang,” Donald breathed into my face.

The newcomer looked rather old, with his triangular head covered in white curls, weather-beaten face, several-day-old beard, and eyes surrounded by diverse wrinkles. The whole array was shaded by the inevitable cowboy hat pulled down over his forehead. He lifted his hat with a flick of his finger and the men embraced ruggedly. At first blush, Crazy Sam suited his nickname: his gaze was a little crazed, livid and quirky; you never knew whether it was focused on you, fell a little short or if, on the contrary, it went over your head, losing itself in the distance.

“Certainly a little cracked,” I said, affecting a polite cheerfulness.

The Old Man wrapped his arm around him and made the introductions, The hand, strangely cold, rooted me on the spot for an instant, while the Old Man launched into an ode to his friend. “This is a good customer! A real good customer, boys! Crazy Sam has been coming here; to Grande-Ourse, for at least twelve years! Old Sam’s never missed a season! Comes up in his Jeep, light as a feather, and has a trailer permanently parked at Lac du Fou. Buys everything at the store! Everything!”

Crazy Sams conduct certainly deserved a certificate for good behaviour. The Old Man plunged his free hand straight into Crazy Sams pocket and howled, at the height of euphoria, “Everything in his pockets, nothing in his hands! A real good customer, I tell you! Not the kind to drag a forty-five gallon drum from the United States.... Crazy Sam understands the economy!”

The Old Man had just been revived, and was wildly enthusiastic. Crazy Sam was his kind of tourist: once rich, and now just about ruined (no one knew it yet), but always extravagant. A former marine who’d been a magnate before going bonkers, he was now easing into early retirement by writing in-depth articles on hunting and fishing for specialized magazines. He and the Old Man were a nice couple, two complementary individuals: the naive rich man and the clever skinflint.

I stared at the newcomer intensely, while he glanced at us with his interior drift. His eyes floated above his gaze like two corks over the waves.

We heard a booming sound behind us. Donald Big-Arms, whom everyone had forgotten, had given another blow on the upright of a shelf, and more ketchup bottles came crashing down.

After supper, weighed down by a pair of those hamburgers patented by the Old Man, I went down by the lake to stretch my legs. The weather was crisp, the lake rippled and sombre. A gaggle of alert geese glided along its surface behind the hotel Every year, they lingered on the lake, prolonging their migratory pause; it was said they’d then place themselves under the protection of Jacques Boisvert, the pilot. More than once, he’d nearly beheaded some boater who’d gotten a little too close to his winged brood.

The generator saturated the low sky with its serpentine vapours. As long as it burned diesel, it remained the symbol of the village’s vitality, of its refusal of cartographical euthanasia. Farther on, the setting sun set fire to the hangar’s sheet metal.

My legs, aching from inactivity, took me to the other end of the village. I picked up the pace when I passed by the hotel. My fascination with that den of depravity was equalled only by the terror I felt at the prospect of going in without invitation. I went down a sandy trail which opened onto the dryness of a spruce forest; that’s how I accidentally stumbled on the cemetery.

It was disarmingly simple and poignantly small: a crude enclosure covering a hundred-or-so metres, with a roughly built cross at the centre, and graves lined up on both sides of the perimeter. A rather basic wire fence guarded the sleep of the dead. I opened the pitiful gate and walked into the enclosure.

The tombstones were scattered. Many graves were only marked with small rudimentary crosses, completely crooked and engraved with laconic epitaphs. I slowly walked around. The soft grass and dry scrub had been pulled out. The mineral soil was bare and the heavy sand seemingly wanted to hold back every step.

Cemeteries are usually fertile areas where rich lawns and flowerbeds thrive, thanks to the humus of decomposing bodies. But the soil here was sterile as the back of a dune, and the enclosure looked like an arena. I lingered over the inscriptions. Any soil filled with corpses seems attractive and studying societies through their final resting places is informative. In Grande-Ourse, industrialization still hadn’t reached the market of the dead. It was a far cry from society life. A raven cawed in the distance, and I thought of those platforms where Indians once placed their stiffs, abandoning them to the vultures.

Closer to thee, my Lord.

Among the meagre monuments, a peculiar corner quickly caught my eye. A rectangle of yellowed grass covering the exact area of a grave. In short, it was imported grass: two or three rolls of greenery which, in suburbs, are spread like carpets over freshly tilled soil. Tufts of yellow weeds clung to this patch of dried and crackled grass. A faded pink floret tilted its soft corolla over the site. The cynical sand, the patient mineral, triumphed all around, matter’s inert mask. This corpse was alone among his peers in not having been forgotten. With the help of vegetation, a semblance of life persisted beneath this final facade, He’d been honoured with a beautifully crafted grey headstone, decorated with a modest painting: a forest and water scene filled with fish and game. A canoe floated over the waters chalky course, and its occupant was armed.

You could say epitaphs are the most finished of literary forms. I was looking at something very succinct. For summaries of the hereafter, numbers speak best.

Two dates: 1956-1975. Life is a simple parenthesis, we are sandwich-souls. Romeo Flamand, dead before his twentieth birthday. Roméo Flamand. Shot in the back. That’s what should’ve been written. He’d barely reached manhood when he was buried in this large sand patch. The stone, with its rounded top, looked like a milepost the road to Grande-Ourse had led to over the last twelve years.

I felt strange, standing there motionless. I knew the Indian still wielded his axe beneath this bed of sorrow and this wilted flower. You could’ve rolled up the grass and taken it away, blown on the flower to extinguish its waning bloom. But you couldn’t have done the same with the past smouldering beneath the rebel grass, its roots sinking into blood.

Trying to find my way back, I detoured over a hill to get a bearing and stumbled on another kind of cemetery: the village scrap) yard. I decided to drift among the bodies for a while. Lacking a permanent police force, Grande-Ourse had acquired a reputation as an ideal hideaway for stolen vehicles. By limiting their travels to the immediate area, people could openly drive around without licence plates. But vehicles setting out on this Calvary rarely lasted long enough to hope to make the trip back. The car graveyard was densely populated.

I suddenly stopped before the remains of a hydroplane. The aircraft’s tail, deprived of its stabilizers, stood vertically, supported by the crushed cabin that formed its plinth. The paint on the fuselage was peeling, having carried off part of the lettering and identification number. I couldn’t help whistling in admiration. The plane seemed to have crashed right there. I was sure the pilot had survived; my only explanation being an impression: the structure standing above the cockpit exuded a defiance of death.

I headed back to the lake, but a densely thicketed embankment blocked my way. Lowering my head, I tried to weave through, but a root caught my foot and I nosedived, landing on my elbows, tumbling downwards while branches savagely whipped me in passing. I landed hard at the edge of a clearing, stunned and nearly out cold.

A purpling sky filled my eyes. The glistening blade of a large scythe swung over me like a monstrous wing. The setting sun sparkled blood-coloured reflections on it. I could see nothing else: a long curved blade filled my horizon. Dull and icy laughter greeted my astonishment. I rose to my knees; a man stood before me. His silvery hair betrayed his age, but his body was vigorous. He had a wizened and hard appearance, a sun-baked face, a very white smile beaming with sweat and sarcasm. He again burst out laughing. I became aware of my grotesque position, kneeling in front of him, and stood up. He held his scythe with both hands, with instinctive off-handedness. I couldn’t help but move back when he swayed it slightly.

I’d surprised him while he was clearing what could be called a yard. Wild stems proliferated near a mobile home at the edge of the lake. Farther on, hydroplanes dangled between the sky and a reflection of the forest on the perfectly still water. The man looked around, breathed, and quietly said, “Damned underbrush, grows back every spring! Oh, well.... If it wasn’t that, it’d be something else....”

He gracefully twisted his wrists, and a tiny section of greenery flew towards the tip of my feet. I held back a start, remaining calm. For a moment, he seemed only vaguely aware of my presence. Then he lowered his tool, observing me with interest.

“What are you doing here?”

The tone was sharp, but not excessively hostile.

I was about to explain that my sense of direction was defective when he cut me off.

“And who exactly are you?”

He again burst out laughing, as I opened my mouth. Then, no longer paying attention to me, he resumed his mowing, in large fluid movements, supple and relentless, It looked easy. At the end of one harmonious sweep, I had to break into a dance step to dodge the sharp point. He moved away, turning his back to me. A wooden sign on the house’s pediment bore the inscription, BOISVERT AIR SERVICE.

Pared back by budgetary restraint, the train consisted of one locomotive and two cars. When I climbed aboard, the ticket inspector discreetly pointed me to the back. Later, during the Tocqueville stop, in the middle of the night, the same man directed the Indians to the other side. A barely enforced segregation, a mild apartheid which seemed completely natural to the train’s staff. You didn’t need first and second classes: everything was subtly suggested. Aboriginal families, the mother nearly always accompanied by a swarm of children, and the husband, more often than not cheered up by recent drinking, made rather touching groups. They’d likely disturb the rest of the few solitary and sleepy business travellers whose heads nodded gently over the benches, in the quiet car reserved for Whites.

Drawn out of my drowsiness by a stop, I sat up and looked out at Tocqueville, a mid-sized industrial town pressed against the Company mill, beneath a smelly and blazing fire. The SaintChristophe Hotel’s tired neon sign could be seen in front of the station across the street. Indians getting off the train often went over directly, placing themselves in the protection of the patron saint of travellers, only leaving the sordid bar to climb into one of the large cars, heading for new adventures. There as well, racial compartmentalization was the rule. Boozers from both camps shared parallel haunts and habits.

I’d had to go to Montreal to deal with a family obligation (a wedding on the eve of Pentecost). Afterwards, I’d wandered a little through the city, sad and unsettled. No sentimental ties held me back and I was relieved to again have to quit the avid and glowing metropolis. I was returning to the simplicity of Grande-Ourse, to the complexity of its desires.

Since my train was only leaving Monday, I continued to roam the next day, detouring to the Café Central Musings on tradition wandered through my head, and I’d barely slept. A chap was seated at the bar to my right, flopped on his elbows, busying himself with familiar rantings. No doubt pushing thirty, the two deep ridges stamping bitterness on each side of his mouth made him look much older. He was drinking brandy, and an empty stool lay between us.

“This is my own bottle,” he proudly explained. “Yeah, because around here, you see, they don’t carry this brand, they order it just for me...”

I struggled to ignore him. He got animated when he learned I was from Grande-Ourse, and going back. He told me he was working on a plan for a book inspired, as though coincidentally, by a story from that region. He didn’t have to explain, I knew what he meant.

“You know,” he whispered, leaning towards me, “one things always bothered me about that....”

“One thing?”

“Yeah, the guy, you know, the young guy who took the rap....”

“Yeah?”

“Well, turns out he...”

I looked around for the barmaid. She was busy flirting at the other end of the bar. Pivoting a few more degrees, my badgerer continued, “I think eleven bullets is a whole lot for one single magazine...”

I shrugged with an attentive and detached expression.

“From what I could gather, you’re not the only one who believes that...”

“Oh, really?”

“You want to write a detective novel?”

“Maybe...”

“Hows it moving along?”

“One step forward.... One step back...”

He mused for a moment.

“I don’t get it!”

“What’s that?”

I hadn’t been able to avoid showing annoyance. He was vexed, taking his time to answer.

“The subject...” he said slowly. “Or rather, the predicate... the one found guilty is only the predicate.... I already have a subject and a predicate, but still have to find a verb.”

He was breathing hard, both excited and weary, His confusion bothered me and all I could do was wish him luck. He exhaled smoke from his cigarette with unusual strength.

I gestured impatiently at the waitress, who seemed to be ignoring me. My neighbour then hailed her in a language I didn’t recognize and, before I was able to intervene, she brought over his personal bottle.

“You’re going to taste some of this, pal....”

He poured the rich mahogany liquid and, as he tilted the bottle in front of me, I read the label that shone beneath the streaks of light: Christian Brothers.

Then felt fire on my tongue during the night.

The train finally got under way. As we were about to leave Tocqueville and plunge into the forest, I drifted into the stream of my thoughts. I remembered a story I’d read in the papers before leaving about this famous railway: a fight had broken out between an Indian and the train staff one winter night bristling with black spruce, many kilometres from any inhabited area. Beer bottles had been used, and the miscreant passenger had been finally subdued and tossed off the train unceremoniously. Besides, this little train stopped rather frequently in the middle of nowhere, to let off a group of sportsmen or take on a band of Aboriginals who’d lit a fire along the tracks as a signal.

As the train pulled out of the small northern town, Cowboy and Karate Kid walked up the aisle, stopping beside me. Interrupting my daydream, they dropped onto the bench facing me. With no preamble, Cowboy spoke quickly, in a low voice, “D’you have twenty bucks to lend us? For the train guy.”

“The...?”

“We each give him ten bucks and he leaves us alone.”

I looked at them stupidly. Not fully understanding what this meant, I only shrugged. This refusal, whose expression was perhaps too vague, reassured them. Cowboy sank into his seat, Karate Kid as well, while I tried to fill the silence with a terse account of my urban problems. I noticed the Kid had a nice black eye.

“Things get rough in the bars?”

“They always want to fight”

I handed my ticket to the conductor when he came around. He then leaned over the two Indians, who looked at me with confidence, and waited. The railway employee, suspicious, glanced at me then focused on my counterparts.

“You don’t have your tickets,” he bellowed sullenly.

His tone made me react. I took out my wallet but, still hesitating, opted for a compromise, pulling out only ten dollars, telling Cowboy apologetically, “It’s all I have, pal”

Don’t know if he believed me, but the shame of this cowardice would follow me the rest of the trip. I felt that the trace of defiance I discovered in myself was ancient and well anchored, that I’d have a long way to go before shoving it aside and tearing it from my heart. Cowboy neglectfully stretched out his hand, snatched the bill and showed it to the conductor. An official admonition followed, after which the ticket puncher disappeared swearing to God he’d be pleased to toss out this vermin at the first opportunity. But his fingers, meanwhile, had clenched the ten-dollar bill. My friends were smiling again, seeming to feel that ten dollars was a more-than-adequate kickback in the circumstances.

Via Rail forgot the formalities and, to celebrate the success, the two fare-dodgers invited me to take part in a small ritual, well-known for its bonding virtues. We stepped outside to get better ventilation, forming a circle at the juncture of the two cars, amid the dizzying racket of the elastic anteroom, a nodal point where the colliding waves merged. Cowboy left the group for a moment, disappearing into the other car. He came back with a girlfriend who had a full bust, a beaming smile and jeans that stretched over well-rounded buttocks. She moved the whole lot like a professional tease. I’d often seen her with Cowboy and Karate Kid. Judith must’ve been nearly twenty-years old, and already had a girth likely to put any scale out of whack. Following a winter on the reserve, she was returning to live with her mother in a cabin located some distance from Grande-Ourse.

She immediately took a huge shining to me. With perverse complacency, I already could see myself squeezed by the fat girl in that infernal accordion.

Even before I first met Indians, I fully suspected that we’d inherited from their elders the custom of smoking in a circle. A childish habit, but always a good way to befriend your neighbour. The yellowish cylinder danced between our fingers and we passed it around, moving from side to side to keep our balance. Its quality was very average. Above a certain latitude, you smoke what you can. I looked at Judith through the joint smoke and, at that precise moment, she was extremely real, as it were.

Cowboy must’ve read my thoughts; he said, expelling the dope from his lungs, “Judith went to see her boyfriend.”

I remained quiet and the Kid added without hesitation that the boyfriend was none other than Big Alexandre, staying in a halfway house at the moment. The list of his misdeeds, I was told, included having broken into the general store twice.

No one spoke for quite some time. I furtively observed Cowboy, this secret Cowboy, his round cheeks pumping our communal joint. The lucidity brought on by the drug allowed me to penetrate into the shadow of that face shaped like a full moon where the melancholy and folly of his race went hand in hand. He suddenly started coughing uncontrollably.

Karate Kid opened his mouth and eyes that were now frenzied and protruding, like a fish hooked in the mouth, death already taking hold of his body. He was getting emotional, and becoming comical.

“You’re a friend, Gilles,” he said gravely.

I pretended not to have heard and, now at a loss for words, turned around, leaning towards the window which sucked in the bracing air. I exhaled a plume of smoke into the cold air devoured by the metal, and what I saw took my breath away. A long stretch of countryside paraded by against the trains undulating side, and beyond the tight rows of spruce gathered like mourners beside the railway. And above, oh above, a flurry of frozen stars filled the ether with its milky light. The ink had receded everywhere, space had vanished, millions of light years had changed into confetti for my sole pleasure. I was becoming a puff of smoke. Head tilted back, as the sky filled with the satin stream of the aurora borealis, mouth open, throat burning, I was inhaling this astounding night, like Brel’s sailors blow their nose in the stars and, intoxicated by the benevolent power of the locomotive, speeding along its iron furrow like a prehistoric mole, I understood that the real night was here, at the bottom of this large gold-bearing cauldron and in these earthly smokes mixed with the amoebic masses of the galaxies, and that I was already a part of everything that would happen under the darkness from now on. The train howled as it swept me along towards the north of the night.