THE BOAT

HE WAS BORN IN COTEAU-ROUGE, in a tarpaper shack. The doctor had had to tramp through an acre of snow up to his knees to bring him into the world. His mother cursed like a trucker. The only other witnesses to the event were two goats, huddled in a corner, their faces masks of fundamental and archaic vindictiveness.

In Jacques-Cartier, the working-class district that had spread across to the South Shore around a simple crossroads in the region known as Coteau-Rouge, career opportunities were divided neatly into two categories (unless you counted providing flesh for the good Brothers of Christian Instruction to fiddle with): crime and the police. Before even reaching the age of majority, Jacques Cardinal understood that between those two spheres of activity there existed intermediary zones that weren’t always as watertight as everyone pretended. One of them was politics.

He was one of those schoolyard jackals who hunted in silence. Later, he would be seen hanging around with a small gang at the billiard hall. Waiting for something to happen.

The inhabitants of this semi-rural slum were unacquainted with the benefits of running water. Those who had wells shared them with neighbours, others emptied their chemical toilets where they could, for example, in the washrooms of service stations. Coco’s brother, industrious and resourceful, put a fifty-gallon drum on a wagon and dragged it with a friend into one of the better-equipped neighbourhoods, like Longueuil-la-Bourgeosie, where they filled it from a fire hydrant, dragged it back along unpaved streets to Jacques-Cartier, and sold it for ten cents a bucket. One afternoon they came back in tears, their drum empty, boot marks on their asses. Big kids, they explained.

Coco Cardinal was fourteen.

“Stop your snivelling and come with me,” he said. “We’re going back.”

There was a stop sign in a stretch of the road, but no intersection. The sign was Longueuil’s way of saying: “Stop, stranger. If you’re Black, Chinese, Indian, or even just poor, go somewhere else.”

They passed it, leaving the poor district, and stopped at a fire hydrant on the other side of rue Chambly. Without looking around, Cardinal signalled to his brother, who took a monkey wrench he’d stolen from a construction shed, went up to the hydrant, and stood there while four young toughs casually walked out of a nearby yard. The one in front had good shoulders and a pack of cigarettes tucked under the sleeve of his T-shirt. He also had a length of steel wire in his hands, which he played with like a Greek fingering his worry beads. Coco surveyed them from the corner of his eye.

The kid with the wire loosened his jaw, found a bit of saliva at the back of his dry mouth, and spat.

Cardinal stood his ground in front of the hydrant, and the kid came up and squared off. He stretched the wire to its maximum extent between his fists.

“Hey. You got no business being here . . .”

“We just came to get some water.”

“Didn’t you get what I just said, Fatso?”

“Water belongs to everyone.”

The tough stopped playing with the wire and put it in his pocket.

“Not this water. This here’s good, clean water. It’s not for pigs.”

Coco never saw the punch coming. He took it full on the mouth and felt a cottonlike thickness spread through his jaw, taking the full weight of the punch on the lower half of his face. Staggering backward, he felt for the pipe wrench but couldn’t reach it. The tough fell on him, and they rolled around on the ground.

Managing to break free from his adversary, Coco stood up. Someone had snatched the pipe wrench from his brother, and now Coco took it full in the stomach and slowly fell to his knees. For a moment that seemed much longer, he did nothing but stare at the pavement and try to get his breath back. The wagon was kicked upside down, and he heard the heavy, metallic roll of the drum until it hit the curb somewhere far off. The same kid who’d sawn his insides in half with the wrench now used it to unscrew the cap on the fire hydrant. A large powerful jet of water flooded the street and turned the gutter into a dirty torrent. He could hear his brother bawling somewhere. He was grabbed from behind. He looked up and saw the grimacing face of the little tough above him, outlined against the blue sky.

“You want water? Help yourself . . .”

A few years later, when he was old enough to drink, by chance Coco came across the guy in a tavern in Longueuil. The tough was completely pissed, sitting at the bar staring at a large jar filled with a greenish liquid and a few hard-boiled eggs floating in vinegar. He was drinking a large Dow, his shoulders slumped forward. Cardinal took a seat a few stools down from him and watched him for a long time. No doubt about it, it was the same guy.

He got up and went for a piss. There was no way the mug had recognized him. The stalls were filthy, the smell of urine suffocating. The blue ceramic urinal down the centre of the room looked like a watering trough for animals. Coco turned on a faucet and watched a stream of rusty brown water run into the sink, then turn yellow. The towel was a grey rag that had been tossed into a corner. There was no soap. He took a small bottle from his pocket and shook two capsules of Benzedrine into the palm of his hand, tossed them into his mouth, and washed them down with a few sips of tap water cupped in his palm. Then he patted his face with his wet hands, dried them on his pants, turned on his heel, and went back into the tavern.

He sat two bar stools down from the only other customer in the place and ordered a draft. He took a dime out of his pocket and, before sliding it over to the barman, held it up between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

“See that?” he said.

The barman, in his fifties, white shirt, top button undone, sleeves rolled up, dark patches of sweat under his arms, looked at Coco’s hand.

“What I see,” he said, “is a ten-cent piece, and in the thirty years I’ve been working here, my boy, this isn’t the first one I’ve seen come my way.”

“Take a closer look.”

The barman furrowed his brow.

“All I see is an old cow, why?”

“The other side,” Coco said, noticing his mistake. He flipped the coin over in his fingers. He picked up his draft with his other hand and took a big swallow. The bennies were beginning to work their magic.

“A boat . . .” said the barman.

“A schooner,” Coco corrected him. “A two-master. Built in Nova Scotia for fishing cod. But then they started racing it, and it won every race. You never heard of the Bluenose?”

“The only sailboat I know is the one on the Molson’s label . . .”

Coco rolled the coin between his thumb and index finger. In the yellowish light it flashed like gold above the bar.

“Yeah, well, when I get my boat . . . a two-master, just like this one, you won’t be seeing my face in here again. You know why?”

Look at me closely, Coco’s smile said.

“Because I’m gonna have a bar on it.”

The barman shrugged and took the coin, looking annoyed. Two stools down, the other customer broke into a shrill, almost demented laugh. Slowly, Coco turned on his bar stool and looked at him without laughing. From somewhere in the depths of his drunkenness, the other man rolled his eyes and shook his head with a knowing look and smiled up at the ceiling.

As though reluctantly, Coco turned away from his neighbour and back to the barman.

“Believe me, it’s gonna be one helluva fine boat . . .”

In the corner of his eye, he saw the steel-wire man weaving his way to the men’s washroom.

With a dreamy smile on his lips, Coco drained his glass, got up, and went into the toilet. When he pushed open the saloon-style swinging door, he saw the other man urinating with some difficulty. Coco grabbed him by the back of his neck and smashed his nose against the wall, then cracked his skull a few more times until the tiles were covered with red spray, like a slowly descending burst of fireworks. He threw the man on his back in the urinal, his cock in the air, his bladder continuing to spurt itself empty, let him look around for a second to get his bearings, then bent under the ancient, rickety, rusted sink, closed his fist around the drain pipe and, yanking it free, brandished it like a club. Water began shooting out from under the sink, wetting his pants and running down his legs, flooding the filthy floor around him. Coco went back to the urinal, raised the pipe above his head, and brought it down hard on the body slumped in the blue ceramic basin. Blood flowed and mingled with the piss and the mothballs scattered in the urinal as a disinfectant. Bubbles formed, and he pounded away and kept pounding until his arm was tired. Then he threw down the pipe and grabbed the man’s gurgling head by the hair to make sure his nose and mouth were well down in the mixture of blood and piss at the bottom of the urinal. Then he left the washroom.

“Water damage,” he said in response to the barman’s questioning look.

At election time, Jacques-Cartier was always taken over by the mob, from petty crooks to big leaguers. Any elections — school board, municipal board, provincial, or federal. Organizers wanting a little extra muscle found all they needed at the local pool halls. On polling days, groups of these little bantam roosters could be seen driving around, five or six to a car, going from polling station to polling station, as in a Western movie. For a few dollars, the streets belonged to them. Windows were broken, cars were sunk to the ground, all four tires slashed. Fires broke out in garages and garden sheds. Filthy messages in DayGlo red were painted on the sides of houses.

The small gang that gravitated around Coco had their unofficial headquarters in the pool hall in the new shopping centre, next to the five-and-dime. The hardware-store owner Dufour had made a bundle from the land the shopping centre was built on, and he knew Coco from having seen him sniffing around his daughter, a pale, dreamy-eyed blonde a bit on the thin side. The gang watched Dufour drive up in a white Lincoln Continental Mark II, a real boat of a car. They went out and had a good look at it, smoking and spitting, then went back into the pool hall to finish a game, the hardware-store owner at their heels.

“Seems you taught that Duchesnay kid a lesson or two.”

Dufour acted as chief organizer for the candidate for the League of Social Vigilance.

“I guess I did,” Coco replied.

Then he turned away and became absorbed in contemplating the complicated network of potential trajectories on the pool table.

The hardware-store owner lit a cigarette. Ordered a round of Kik Colas. Indicating the Lincoln in the parking lot, one of the most expensive models in the history of the automobile industry, he said he needed a hand getting people to change their minds on the day of the elections.

“But careful, like,” he said. “I don’t want to see a scratch on it.”

“Why not?” Coco wanted to know, sincerely intrigued as he chalked the end of his pool cue.

“Because I might want to resell it.”

Coco looked at him without saying anything. More and more interesting.

“It’s politics,” said the hardware-store owner. “Don’t ask too many questions.”

Coco leaned over the table and sent the eight ball hard into the corner pocket.

The municipal elections in 1957 pitted the “mob candidate,” Big Raymond Girard, a jovial and skilled man whose methods apparently didn’t meet with unanimous approval, against Gilbert Giguère, who was running for the League of Social Vigilance. Giguère had vowed to put an end to the “reign of terror” that he said had been imposed on municipal democracy by organized crime. It is now known that the League was a front for the Order of Jacques-Cartier, better known as “La Patente,” a secret society that was an enemy of the Orange Lodge and worked in the background for the advancement of the French-Canadian race. In Montreal, the editors of the daily newspaper Le Devoir, infiltrated by La Patente and under the pen of its municipal affairs columnist Paul Lavoie, the future member of the legislature and Liberal minister, led a vigorous campaign against Girard, his Mafia ethics, and his dubious team of cohorts.

A Lincoln Continental was found with its four wheels in the air in the driveway of a bungalow in the suburbs in the small hours of the morning. It took a dozen men to do it: five to lift it up by its chassis and flip it over, the rest to catch it and let it down gently on its roof. They looked like a bunch of ants clustered around a piece of immaculate, white flesh. They deposited the beauty almost delicately on the driveway’s asphalt.

Coco gave the rear fender an affectionate kick to ease his conscience. He looked up at the house and thought he saw the curtain move. The hardware-store owner was right. It would have been a shame to damage the car.

The others had already taken off, but Coco held back, took his time walking away, his hands in his pockets, and after a few paces stopped and turned around. For a moment he stood in the middle of the road, legs spread defiantly. The living-room curtain opened a little farther. A single blonde braid.

Later that day, Coco saw a patrol car parked at the sidewalk in front of the hardware store. Inside, Dufour and two police officers were examining the store’s plate-glass window, which had a small, round hole with striations radiating from it, like a star. Coco stopped on the sidewalk and also looked at the hole in the glass from his side. When the hardware-store owner saw him, he gestured for Coco to move on. But instead of leaving, Coco motioned to the police officers to come outside. The two policemen knew him. After a moment, they came out, followed by Monsieur Dufour.

“Looks like a .303,” Coco told them.

“Yeah, it does. Why, do you know something?”

“No, except that the shot was fired from inside the hardware store,” Coco said, nodding his head. “But I guess you already knew that.”

“What? What makes you say that?”

Coco met the hardware-store owner’s murderous look. The man was livid. He looked away and lowered his head.

“Did you find any bits of glass inside the store?”

“No,” admitted the officers, their curiosity piqued.

Coco squatted on his heels and pointed to several small pieces of window and a small amount of powdered glass on the sidewalk.

“See that?” he said. “It ain’t complicated: the debris fell outside, therefore the rifle was fired inside the store.”

The two police officers turned toward the hardware-store owner, who had turned green. They waited for an explanation.

But Monsieur Dufour stuck to his story: the rifle shot had come from a passing car. The officers had to choose between the eyewitness account of a respectable citizen, a pillar of the community, and the ravings of a juvenile delinquent.

Coco was walking down the street when the patrol car pulled up beside him. The officer who was driving rolled down his window.

“Where are you off to, Coco?”

“To fuck my girlfriend. You okay with that?”

“You got something you want to tell us?”

“Not here.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t feel like it.”

“The street’s all right as far as it goes, Coco, but you can’t stay a fuckin’ bum all your life.”

“That’s none of your Christly business.”

“You should come back into the Force.”

On voting day, the provincial authorities proclaimed the Riot Act. The situation on the South Shore seemed to have got out of control. As well as the usual clashes at the polling stations, this time there were direct attacks on members of the League. Cars overturned, death threats issued. Someone even fired a rifle through the window of a downtown hardware store. The owner of the establishment, a Monsieur Louis-Georges Dufour, publicly vituperated against the young thugs who had dared to vandalize his brand-new Lincoln Continental Mark II. He noted that his position as a League organizer, as well as his irreproachable standing as a citizen and parishioner, had made him a target in the eyes of the bandits. “You’d think we were living in the Wild West,” he concluded.

It was generally thought that Quebec’s reading of the Riot Act led to the restoration of law and order, and favoured the re-election of Mayor Giguère, the candidate for the League of Social Vigilance.

Three days later, Coco knocked on Dufour’s door. The hardware-store owner wasn’t happy to see him.

“Not a good idea, coming here like this . . .”

“After paying my guys,” Coco said, “there wasn’t anything left for me. I need more money.”

“I don’t have any more work for you. The elections are over, Coco . . .”

Coco looked over the man’s shoulder, toward the hall. The hardware-store owner’s daughter was walking down it to the brightly lit kitchen. Her father saw Coco looking at her.

“I don’t have anything for you, my boy.”

“I don’t want money . . .”

Coco looked him in the eye with a tight smile on his wide face. He was a head taller than the master of the house.

“The Lincoln.”

“What about the Lincoln?”

“How much?”

The hardware-store owner burst out laughing.

“I don’t think it’s in your price range.”

“It would be if you gave me more work.”

“Come see me before the next elections, okay?”

“No. I’ll be paying a visit to Big Raymond Girard before that.”

His smile equalled that of the hardware-store owner, who was the first to look away.

“I just want to try it out,” Coco said quietly.

“You just . . . what?”

“The Lincoln. Just for a spin. Afterward I’ll bring it back. I’ll be careful with it,” he added as the hardware-store owner handed him the keys.

Dufour didn’t like the smile he saw flash across the face of this good-for-nothing with a bright future ahead of him.

The second time he took the Lincoln, he also laid claim to the owner’s daughter and a quarter of the owner’s chromosomes. They went to a Western, with John Wayne, at the local drive-in. It was early June and the evening was warm, much warmer in the car after the film was over. They drove south along the road to Chambly and then took the Eastern Townships autoroute to the Acadie River. In Quebec, there are as many places called Îles aux Fesses as there are Green Lakes and Long Lakes. Somewhere between Île aux Lièvres and Île Goyer, they found one where, after crossing a small bridge, they stopped in front of a clutch of cottages.

The Acadie is a flat river the colour of mud because of all the farms it runs through. Clumps of trees and shrubs extend down to the gentle riverbank. Just after midnight, Coco drove into a narrow meadow and pushed the nose of the car into the tall grass between two ruts until it was barely visible from anywhere.

Ginette guided his hand. Her breasts were like two loaves of bread fresh from the oven, bursting with life, and he told her so. Not long after that, the white Mark II began rocking between the cattails and the stars.

Afterward, they smoked a cigarette.

“I saw you the other morning,” Ginette said. “You with were those guys who turned Dad’s car upside-down. What I don’t get is how he could lend you the car after that.”

“It’s just politics,” Coco replied. “Don’t ask too many questions.”

He rolled down the window and threw his cigarette butt into the wet grass, then opened the door and got out. She saw him tuck his shirt-tail back into his pants, then walk back to the trunk. She heard him open it. When she got out on her side, she felt swallowed up by the sky and the night. The sound of frogs. A few feet ahead of her, Coco was holding a rifle, a .303 Lee Enfield, army issue, fitted with a scope. He raised it to his shoulder and peered through the cross-hairs into the dark.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking,” said Coco, aiming the rifle at something on the far side of the river.

He cocked it. A sharp, almost joyful sound came from the mechanism, metallic clicks slightly muffled by the heavy wooden stock. It pleased him.

“It’s his deer-hunting rifle,” Ginette said. “He goes every year.”

“He uses it for other things besides deer hunting,” Coco said in a mocking tone, the rifle still raised to his shoulder.

He told her about the incident with the window.

“I still don’t understand why he lent you his car,” Ginette remarked.

Next to her, Coco could see invisible frogs in the tumultuous riverbed. He lowered the rifle and smiled to himself.

“Because I’ve got him,” he said, then said it again, for emphasis: “I’ve got him by the balls.”

Ginette would never admit it, but she was impressed.

There were many Saturday-night drives to the Île aux Fesses. They played with each other, made love in the back seat, being careful, as much as they could, not to start a family, and then, sitting up in the big Detroit boat of a car, smoking cigarettes, they watched the river flow by them through the darkness.

“One day,” Coco said, “I’m going to have a boat and I’ll take you out on it. I’m not talking about a little rowboat either, I’m talking about a two-master, a real sailboat, Ginette, my own, sweet Ginny. I’m talking about a boat we can sail around the world . . .”

Three months later, when the hardware-store owner showed up at the pool hall, it wasn’t to give Jacques Cardinal another cushy job, it was to tell him that he had to take responsibility for his actions. The ceremony took place on a day of wet snow, slush, and ice. After a night of drinking, Coco had to swallow half a dozen bennies just to stand up. He forgot to bring the marriage licence. As it turned out, he’d just misplaced it: he found it stuck between the cushions in the back seat of the Lincoln. They drove off in the car after the wedding, through freezing rain and a hail of confetti, accompanied by the traditional concert of horns, their faces split by Pepsi smiles.

Honeymoon in the Laurentians, at Colford Lodge, near Lachute. Ginette went into the bathroom to take off her wedding paraphernalia. She had a brief moment of panic when she saw how young she looked in the mirror above the sink. She decided against the negligée that her mother had given her and returned bravely naked to the bedroom. Coco lay stretched out across the bed, snoring like a chainsaw.

The father-in-law had connections in the Montreal police. That was one thing being in La Patente was good for. Coco joined the force.

There was the sound of something smashing and a string of curses coming from the kitchen. As she lay awake, waiting for the next crash, he came into the bedroom and fell onto the bed. And stayed there without moving, fully clothed. She could smell his rough, heavy breath filling the room. She shoved him with both hands.

“Wake up.”

Eventually, he opened one eye.

“What . . .”

“I’m having contractions . . . Take me to the hospital.”

He tore three buttons from her pyjama top getting it open, exposing her heavy, swollen, expectant breasts. She gasped as, his breathing cutting through the silence broken only by the clicking of his metal buckle, he knelt above her on the bed and undid his pants. He roughly grabbed the two sides of the pyjama top, tearing them apart, the bottom button flying off into the air in an arc, at the apex of which it seemed to hover for a fraction of a second, like a woodcock over a thicket.

“Jacques, no . . .”

Cardinal grabbed the elastic waistband of the pyjama bottoms and with a grunt exposed the incredible moon that rose in the room, as solemn as marble beneath his fingers. The strong biochemical smell rising from her did not deter him. Just the opposite: the intense mucousy emanations seemed to excite him.

Afterward, he slept where he fell, on the floor, alone, like a dog.

Before daylight she tried to wake him. At the word “hospital,” he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

Her contractions were coming in constant waves when Coco, still drunk, climbed behind the wheel of the Mark II and drove them into the night.

He was promoted to the morality squad. He eventually gave his wife three more children, alternating girls and boys. Work was a universe of illegal houses, gambling, and debauchery, long nights in Montreal. The mayor was a reformed sinner, incorruptible, who had built his reputation on an immoderate passion for decency and upright behaviour. While a young lawyer, he had attacked the Augean stables and accomplished the notable achievement of padlocking the red-light district, then had himself elected mayor and extended his heavy-handed crusade to city hall, where someone was put in charge of explaining the realities of life to him.

The essential services rendered to Director-in-Chief Salaberry by a certain madame whose establishment in the quarter had reopened, its façade spruced up and its suggestive sign made more discreet, was an open secret in the force. Tenants in cat houses were warned in advance of police raids by telephone calls from a high-ranking officer, as was only right. The men brought in a few hookers to show that they were not turning a blind eye to the corruption that was gaining ground, spreading like gangrene into the legs of the city’s politicians, while the turgidity of the mayor’s speeches increased in direct proportion to his secret and shameful lubricity. So they would bring in a few girls and lock them up for the night.

Bouncing like a pinball between alcohol and pills, Coco soared up mountains of euphoria and plunged into pits of despondency as he wove from party to party. He’d bring friends home, couples. One night, Ginette went to sleep hoping that the shouting and the breaking glass wouldn’t wake up the children. When she opened her eyes, a young colleague of her husband’s had slipped into bed with her and was grinning like an idiot, wearing only his boxer shorts and socks. She went after him like a mother dog protecting her pups.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Well . . . Coco told me it would be all right.”

The speedometer registered 110 miles per hour. On the seat between Ginette and Coco was a case of Molson’s Ex. He was driving with his foot to the floor, a bottle between his legs, charging up behind cars until their fenders were nearly touching, then swerving out to pass, racing toward trucks coming in the opposite direction before cutting back into his own lane at the last second. Laughing at his wife’s terror, ignoring her pleas to stop.

Somewhere near Berthier he turned a corner too sharply, and the case of beer flew off the seat and crashed onto the brake pedal. The Lincoln flew across the road, crashed through a fence, and carried on for a hundred metres before coming to a stop in the middle of a field. Eventually, Ginette stopped screaming. Coco sat staring in front of him, eyes bulging out of his head, fists clamped on the steering wheel, jaws squeezed so tight Ginette could hear his teeth grating.

Another time, they were driving through some woods not far from Morin-Heights when Ginette, gripping the dashboard, had a nervous breakdown. Unable to make her shut up, Coco threatened to put her out of the car and leave her by the side of the road. Thirty miles farther on, he’d had enough. She was still crying her eyes out. He stopped the car, calmed himself, then got out, walked around the front of the car to the passenger side, opened the door, grabbed his wife by her wrist, and yanked her out of the car.

She watched as the car burned rubber on the pavement and vanished around a curve. Then she sat down and waited for him to come back for her. But he never did.

The exact reasons for Coco’s ejection from the Montreal Police Force are not known. At the time, there was talk of fraud, of irregularities with union funds. The fact remains that in the mid-sixties, Good-Time Coco left the force. What he said to his wife was that he’d quit of his own accord. All there was to it. Case closed.

Not that she thought of complaining. The squad had been a bad influence on him, but its effect receded with time. The new Jacques was free to spend some quality time at home. He looked after the youngest child, told stories to the older one. He cooked, an apron stretched around his ample girth. She became pregnant with their third child. They had no television, and so he spent his evenings after dinner reading books he’d borrowed from the library. The big Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World reawakened his dreams of travelling. He memorized the names of all the seas and sailed them in his imagination: Azov, Marmara, Barents, Aral, Aegean, Oman, Kara.

They were living beyond the business section of town, where well-nourished rats scuttled through the breeze-blocks. The end of their street opened onto a field. The only thing Ginette had brought to the marriage was the Lincoln Continental Mark II, and it was now worth a small fortune, but Coco would rather be run over by a Volkswagen until he was dead before he would sell that car. When creditors outnumbered the mouths he had to feed, Coco began looking around for a connection or two.

He could usually be found in the Vegas Sports Palace on boulevard Taschereau, on the South Shore. The establishment belonged to Luigi Temperio, right-hand to the Montreal Mafia boss Giuseppe Scarpino, who was related to the Bonanno family in New York. Coco’s police contacts gave him access to some new friends. He started coming home late again, went back to drinking and chewing amphetamines like they were those candies threaded onto necklaces they sold at Labelle’s in Coteau-Rouge when he was a kid. When deliveries from Labelle’s Self Service Store had been made in a horse and wagon. The milk truck had also been drawn by a horse. And the chip truck . . .

And for running water, for running water, there had been that little wagon.

But today he drove around in a Lincoln Continental, while princes of darkness paid for his cognac.

Coco felt he had the soul of a patriot. He joined the separatist group Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale. Impatient for action, factions within this movement tinkered with bombs that rattled the symbols of power as well as the walls of barracks. Radical separatist groups formed, expanded, and disappeared faster than it took to name them, and history was made. Coco participated in meetings of the Comité indépendance-socialisme started by Francis Braffort, where he also met members of the Intellectuels et ouvriers patriotes de Québec, a workers’ party founded by two former police officers. It was bizarre, two cops putting together a Marxist group, but in those days anything could happen.

One evening, Richard Kimball showed up at the apartment.

Kimball was a twenty-one-year-old from northern Michigan, Marquette, or somewhere around there. He had left the States out of idealism, so that he wouldn’t have to do what was expected of him, which would have meant letting himself be eaten alive by insects and, if possible, killing a few Vietnamese. A draft dodger. He was a strange case. Kimball told Coco that in 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson opened the United States pavilion at Expo 67, he’d hidden in a tree on Île Sainte-Hélène and taken a potshot, not at the president but at the young fellow whose job it had been to raise the American flag during the ceremony. He later told Coco that the protocol office and the secret service had had the bright idea of having the flag raised by a Boy Scout, because they were convinced that no potential assassin would shoot at a child. Kimball added that the kid wore a bulletproof vest when he raised the goddamned Star-Spangled Banner. Those were the kinds of stories Kimball told.

Sometimes Coco believed him, sometimes he didn’t. There were some things he could do without knowing.

Kimball was blond, gifted with a winning smile, and had a dangerous sense of humour. He apparently considered his rural accent from the Upper Peninsula to be a superior form of speech, and everyone around him had to bow down to it in the interest of maintaining good relations between civilized peoples. Ginette took an immediate dislike to him. He brought girls over. He lived on avenue Mont-Royal, in a huge five-and-a-half-room apartment. When he showed up, Coco and Ginette’s place filled with smoke and a mental fog that lasted until the next morning. The first time Kimball brought Lucie, she climbed up on the table and took her clothes off. Someone took photos. Then Richard carried her into the bedroom, laid her down on the bed, and went to work on her. The other guests talked among themselves, while Coco, who had a ringside seat next to the bedroom, didn’t dare stand up.

One morning, after watching Coco swallow a couple of bennies with a glass of water from the kitchen tap, Kimball took from the pocket of his vest a mirror like the one Ginette used to powder her face, a razor blade, one edge of which was covered with tape, and a plastic bag containing maybe a gram of cocaine. He poured some of the cocaine on the mirror, spread it out, and worked it with the razor blade. Coco’s eyes never left Kimball’s hands; he watched with the rapt attention of one observing a sacred ritual.

Kimball scraped the cocaine into two parallel lines, each about five centimetres long.

“This is the good stuff,” he said.

“How . . . how good is it?” asked Coco.

In the bright morning light that filled the kitchen, Kimball looked at Coco as though he’d never really bothered to look at him until then. He smiled.

“Too good for you,” he said.

One night after Coco took a swing at Ginette, Lucie brought her into the bathroom while Kimball turned a blind eye, muttering that as a matter of principle he never interfered in Canadian domestic affairs. Lucie pressed a wet facecloth to Ginette’s black eye and promised to help her with the children as soon as the men went out.

“How old are you?” Ginette asked her.

“I just turned eighteen.”

“I don’t understand what you see in a guy like that.”

Lucie smiled.

“And I don’t understand what you see in a guy like your husband.”

Ginette felt herself turning bright red.

“What does Kimball live on?”

“He works for a company. That’s all I know, and it’s best if you don’t ask questions.”

“But seriously, aren’t you afraid of him?”

She seemed to think about it.

“Come with me,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

They left the building by a side door that gave onto the alley and took the spiral, wrought-iron staircase down to street level. Kimball’s Z-28 was parked in the gravelled backyard.

“Come take a look,” Lucie said.

She opened the trunk and pulled back a blanket. Ginette knew nothing about weapons. In the weak light from a neighbouring balcony she saw barrels, gunstocks, triggers, cartridge clips, an entire arsenal jammed into the back of the trunk, against a row of boxes.

“Do you know what’s in those boxes? Look at what’s written on them.”

DANGER EXPLOSIVES

Kimball was driving around with cases of dynamite in the back of his Camaro.

The front doorbell rang. A little girl was crying in one of the bedrooms. Ginette opened the door, still holding the butcher’s knife she’d been thinking of using to slit her wrists. From the door, water could be heard running in the bathtub. She found herself looking at two police officers.

They told her that the neighbours had called the division because of some noise and asked her if everything was all right. The one who’d spoken kept his eyes on the knife. Ginette assured them as best she could. As they were turning to leave, she felt she had to say something and told them she was going to murder her husband.

They thought she was joking. They asked her a few questions then advised her to put the knife away.

That night she slept soundly. The bathtub overflowed.

The sex was good. Household Finance had them by the short and curlies. Coco would disappear, phone her and tell her to have supper ready, then not show up. One night she saw the Lincoln drive by the building without stopping; she threw her coat over her shoulders and found the car parked in the field at the end of the street with her husband at the wheel and Lucie, looking a bit embarrassed, with her T-shirt rolled up above her breasts. Ginette swore it was the last time. She became depressed. A doctor came and gave her some injections. According to him, all she needed was some peace and quiet.

Then Coco tried to kill her. In a rage, he started breaking everything in the kitchen, split open bags of flour and flung their contents everywhere. He grabbed his wife by her hair and forced her to the floor. She fought him off until the neighbours broke down the door. Coco chased them off, throwing anything at them that came to hand, including their four-slice toaster.

When he turned back to her, he was holding the toaster cord in his hands, a strange smile on his lips. He looked at her coldly, still moving toward her.

“Are you afraid of me?”

She couldn’t speak, her voice had given out. Someone pounded on the door. The police.

Coco knew them.

“Hey, Coco, what’s the score?”

“He’s trying to kill me,” Ginette told them.

She did, in fact, have two or three bruises that were hard to explain.

“She’s crazy,” Coco assured them. “I was just roughing her up a bit.”

“All the same,” said one of the patrolmen, “you should be careful.”

“What’ll you do if we leave you here with her?” asked the other one.

“Finish the job,” said Coco.

They had to admire his honesty, but they took him in anyway. They didn’t use the cuffs. The next day the hardware-store owner went to the apartment without calling first and left with his daughter and the children.

But guess what. She went back to him. Rolled up her sleeves, went back to work. Sex. Reconciliation. Barbecued chicken from St.-Hubert every Sunday. Little notes left on the table in the morning, almost poems. Her sister took the kids for a week. They drove to New Brunswick with a little camping stove in the car and fifty-three dollars in their pocket. Two footloose lovers. Coco had always wanted to see boats. They slept in the car. He’d stopped driving like a suicidal maniac, had become quite the charmer. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other around his wife, the Mark II turning heads all the way from Mont-Joli to Shippagan. They crossed the gulf of the Baie-des-Chaleurs on the bridge to Campbellton then followed the coastline. Small, dun-coloured villages, a few pulp and paper mills. Across the water were the red cliffs of Miguasha. At night they ate lobster on picnic tables. Walked on the pebbled beaches holding hands. Coco talked to fishermen on the wharves. Got himself invited onto their boats. Learned about knots and currents, the secrets the horizon held. Long-lined a two-hundred-pound halibut. Bouncing over the waves, the smell erasing everything, a new start from square one. On clear days they could see the Gaspé coast.

It was dark when they pulled into Shippagan, at the very tip of the Acadian peninsula. Coco drove right out onto the beach and they made love on the same back seat as the first time. “I love you, wife of mine,” he said to her. Said it again. Then collapsed into tears. Ginette couldn’t stop herself either. She’d never been so happy.

That night she dreamed of whales ridden by sailors wearing pea jackets and sou’westers, sitting in submersibles attached to the whales’ backs, and when they left port they glided between a myriad of islands on the surface of blue-green waters, infused with light, like a gold lamé dress studded with diamonds stretching over the whole world. And the whales talked to one another as they swam with the same slow, peaceful, oscillating motion as the majestic swaying of elephants carrying tiger hunters in India that she had seen in a National Geographic special on TV. Or sometimes they dove and swam playfully like otters, without worrying about the boats tied to their backs.

As the first glimmer of light filtered through the grey crack of dawn, Ginette opened her eyes and sat up in the grip of a strange sensation. It didn’t take her long to figure out why. The Lincoln was completely surrounded by water.

“Jacques! Wake up . . .”

He slowly emerged from sleep and looked around the car in amazement. The sea was halfway up the doors.

“One day, Ginette, you’ll see . . . I’ll have it. My boat. One day . . .”

They returned to Montreal with little more than a can of beans between them, the genetic make-up for a fourth child conserved in a safe place. They were three hundred metres from their apartment and they had enough money for gas to get there.