The following evening, a crew filmed Jules speaking at the Preston Mills Men’s Club. The club had invited him to talk about the jump at their monthly meeting. Jules brought a piece of bristol board covered with press clippings and photos of his past stunts, crowds cheering, cars flying through the air. And a poster-sized photo of the rocket car replica. (Jules wished he hadn’t enlarged the photo quite so much. You could see the gaps at the seams of the turbine where it was starting to come apart. If you looked close enough, you could see that the racing stripe was made of electrical tape.)
Jules soldiered on. He talked about watching Lightning Jones on TV, jumping the fountain in Las Vegas on his motorcycle, and his boyhood dream of pulling off the greatest stunt of all time. How happy he had been to find such a perfect site for the jump in Preston Mills.
When he finished his talk, a few of the men clapped. It sounded like the beginning of rain on a tin roof. Fat, occasional drops here and there. Slap. Pause. Slap, slap, slap. There was a shifting of chairs and a rumble of voices at the back of the room. Jules stood at the podium and waited for questions. The fluorescent lights flickered and hummed above.
“Anybody?”
At the back of the room, a big, burly wall of a man called Bill Puck leaned back in his chair and drummed his thick sausage fingers on the tabletop. Still seated, he yelled, “Hey, Tremblay!”
Jules scanned the room until he identified the speaker, saw him there, sprawled in his chair. “Yes, sir?”
“You and I have something in common.”
“Really?” said Jules. “What’s that?”
Giant Bill smiled a giant smile. “Neither one of us is ever gonna jump the goddamn St. Lawrence River in a fucking car.”