PERCÉ, SUMMER 1969

THE WATER AROUND THE MILOISEAU was churning. Birds swam over from the base of the cliff and fought each other for the capelin that were rising from the blue depths of the sea. Gannets cut through the air like swords, necks straightened, wings tight to their bodies. Waves exploded on the brick-red rocks below the cliff, where a puffin stood with three smelts in its colourful beak. Higher up, razor-billed auks were lined up along a ledge. On the boat they had to yell to be heard above the roar of crashing waves, piercing bird cries, squawking and shrieking, as though the red cliff face was being bombarded by explosions of feathers and webbed feet. Griffin’s face was the colour and consistency of the rock. Godefroid and the captain didn’t need words to understand each other. It was enough that their gazes met from time to time. The way they tried to match their movements to the violent but regular rhythm of the sea was a kind of intimacy. The net flying through the air, then falling, then flying again, the long-line quickly hauled aboard with both hands, and shaken, the fish unhooked . . . In the middle of the boat was a pile of glistening guts and thick, moustachioed heads. The day’s take must be around three-quarters of a tonne, according to the captain. Since they’d found the school of cod that had been going after the same capelin the gannets were spearing in their frenzied chase to the surface, they had caught fish after fish without a break.

Wilfrid Griffin’s eyes, with their hint of Ireland set deeply in the crazed network of grooves in the burnt leather of his face, fixed on a point somewhere behind Gode. The latter followed the captain’s glance. Griffin was the sole master of the Miloiseau, one of those solidly made Gaspé fishing boats, decked and graced with an elegant line and a forward cabin; this one was twelve metres long, with deck planks of hemlock spruce and a hull of Nova Scotian white oak. Squinting into the sun, Gode saw a sail, an immaculate white triangle, rounding the island’s tip, leaning into the whitecaps that broke and lapped appealingly against its hull.

He followed the apparition for a moment, then turned back to the captain. By way of response, the captain threw out the net again, drew in another twelve kilos of cod with smooth, alternating movements of his arms. With a simple flick of his wrist, he detached the three-pronged hooks from the fishes’ gullets and finished the motion by throwing the fish onto the heaving pile behind him. Then, after again throwing in his jigger line and wedging it, the coastal fisherman spat into the sea.

The lobster boat was pulled up alongside the Miloiseau, a line of empty beer bottles trailing in its wake almost all the way to the horizon. The newcomers had a propane stove on board on which they’d set a pot of seawater to boil, and the boarding consisted of a typical exchange of freshly caught and cooked lobster for a few sun-warmed Labatt 50s. Gode grabbed the dripping, bright orange-red lobster that was tossed to him, cracked the shell of a large claw against the boat’s side and chewed the aromatic flesh. When he was finished, Captain Will passed him another beer. He applied the neck to the boat rail, polished by the incessant rubbing of lines, and hit the cap with his fist, letting the foam spurt out. While he went back to working on his lobster, a shout made him look up. The lobster boat was about twenty metres off, heading into the wind. The excited fishermen scrutinized the distance between the island and the shore. Gode followed their gaze. A tiny sailboat was coming straight toward them, giving the impression that it had taken off from the red cliff face to dive like a gannet on the two boats.

It was a Sunfish, about four metres long. About thirty metres separated the Miloiseau and the lobster boat. They were running parallel to each other, and the Sunfish, without even changing course, passed directly between them. A tall blonde was at the helm, navigating by herself, her body leaning completely over the side so that her long, curly hair blew in the wind and touched the water, the air ecstatic in her white sailing pants and sailor’s T-shirt with navy-blue stripes. The men watched her go by, mouths hanging open. It didn’t matter where this rig ended up, they knew they had their conversational topic in the tavern for the next month.

Gode took time to read the name painted in red letters on the tailboard: Those Were the Days.

The captain spit into the water.

“I’d haul that one below.”

They called us outsiders, bums, crud, fleabags, hippies, beatniks, filth, students. According to the chief of police, Big Tony Tousignant, we were always having orgies at our place, between “persons of both sexes aged thirteen to thirty,” which delighted the journalists when things got hot and the press started showing up. The mayor (Gill Fournier, who also sported a huge beer belly) was quick to say that our presence in his little fishing port encouraged the consumption of drugs, the corruption of minors, theft, and murder. The whole village was on edge ever since the owner of a motel had been villainously assassinated at the beginning of the summer. Percé was a colony of artists, motels, campgrounds, and a few souvenir shops: shell ashtrays, agate necklaces, Made in Japan junk. A fishing village for whom the principal catch was tourists, and the season lasted two weeks. Local businessmen filled their pockets as long as the manna kept coming and the hole in the famous rock stayed where it belonged. Millions of Kodak moments had turned it into one of the most famous nature postcards on the continent.

After spending nearly a year getting ourselves organized, the Lafleur brothers and I simply wanted to take a vacation. The Fisherman’s Hut was a dilapidated shack filled with old fishing nets, but it was a few feet from the dock, and we rented it and turned it into a café. A few tables, the fishing nets now hanging on the wall with a few crab shells and half-rotten starfish stuck in them. Someone showed up with an old jukebox, and the party was underway.

* * *

Mayor Gill Fournier’s Pontiac hurtled down the Three Sisters, the triplet of low mountains that blocked the horizon to the north. Seen from this angle, the famous rock didn’t look so remarkable, with its hole demurely hidden by several million tonnes of limestone. As if the local cash cow was protecting herself from the prying eyes of anyone who’d come from the direction of Gaspé, which is what Fat Gill was doing. He had just bought himself a hunting rifle at the sports shop in the regional capital and was dying to try it out. The beautiful, brand-new 12-gauge pump-action was sitting on the back seat, still in its case.

Crossing through the village, he noticed the cluster of tents around the new Fisherman’s Hut at the end of the quay. The owners of the motels, campgrounds, and restaurants were already complaining to the municipal council. Not to mention the grumbling from the local population, him included, that could be heard over beers in the hotel. Not hard to figure out why: the hippies were charging nothing, zero, free, gratis, to pitch a tent in the field full of crabgrass, dandelions, and thistles adjacent to their café. They sold food for what it cost to make it. He could even name one or two fishermen who were providing them with fresh cod for no better reason than that it gave them an excuse to hang around with the hippy chicks with eyes as blue as those of a northern gannet. And if that wasn’t a case of high treason, you had to wonder what was.

From Highway 132, which when it went through the village became the main street, you could see a few of them hanging out, barefoot, their hair down around their shoulders, lounging in the sun with nothing to do but lean back against the old rail fence or sit on their asses on the steps of the Hut, or on the ground, like savages. No ambition at all.

Just before the road headed off up Surprise Coast, Gill parked his car, took the shotgun out of its case, and started walking along the beach. Bird Island rose up across from him. The shore at Percé, with its swaths of beached kelp rotting under the July sun and swarming with sand fleas, gave off, in the mayor’s opinion, a rotten stench. His vocabulary was somewhat limited, and for him “briny,” “salty,” “humid,” and “rotten” all pretty much described the same smell.

He reached into his pocket and took out a shell filled with a number 4 buckshot and slid it into the chamber of his new shotgun. He figured there was plenty of space around here for trying out the gun. A movement caught his attention, and he looked up and saw a gull coming toward him, its wings flapping confidently and regularly in the light sea breeze. The palmiped was flying in a straight line parallel to the edge of the seashore, about twenty metres up. Gill released the safety, shouldered his shotgun, quickly took aim at the moving bird, and fired a fusillade of pellets. The gull spiralled down like a struck fighter plane. It hadn’t even reached the silvered surface of the wavelets before Gill turned and walked away.

Marie-France was tall and sinuous, her plump ass leaving harmonious waves in the wake of her undulating walk. The way she filled her bell-bottomed Wrangler jeans was the very height of eroticism. She had a devastating smile, a few spots of rouge, a voice that ranged from simpering to guttural, and an easy laugh, a sort of throaty bray that added a destabilizing touch of vulgarity to her personality, which was far from disagreeable.

Gode was twenty-two, and his crippling awkwardness had allowed him to get through Expo 67 and May ’68 practically without a hitch. He’d come out of those two great laboratories of free love more or less intact but more confused than ever. He was still incapable of seeing opportunities with the girls who moved around him, the silent signals woven into the coded thickness of the nights. And then along came Marie-France. No separatist had ever held a bomb like her in his hands.

She was touring the Gaspésie with her friend Nicole. The car belonged to Nicole, the sailboat on the trailer behind it was Marie-France’s. Nicole, a petite brunette, was a nurse in Rivière-des-Prairies and no sailor. She was much too busy to cruise around on a boat. Marie-France was different. Among all these good little women in bell-bottoms who seemed happy to have exchanged a seduction code involving patience and ritual for another that centred on simple sexual availability, she had a character in which inclination and a moral sense seemed to be able to exist at the same time. She was studying to become a legal secretary, but hastened to add that that was only until she could afford to study law at a university.

René cast his net for Nicole first. The youngest of the Lafleur brothers broke the ice, and Gode threw himself into the water after him. They were a dozen or so sitting around a bonfire on the beach, driftwood crackling like the poles of a tipi on which someone had thrown some old tires. A thick, oily smoke filled the hot night, or rather the early morning, in the small fishing port cum tourist trap. A guy named Latraverse, a tall, bony type, was scraping on a guitar in the light from the flames and sang like he was chewing on sandpaper.

Gode stood up, a small O’Keefe in his left hand, and walked around the fire to sit beside Nicole, Marie-France, and René, who already had the two women laughing uproariously. I’ll jump through the flames if I have to, but there’s no way I’m going to stay sitting down. He hummed Dalida’s Those Were the Days.

After opening on the twenty-sixth of June, the Hut became a café, the café a restaurant, the restaurant an inn, and the inn a colony. On any given weekend, there could be a hundred people packed into the place. On the evening of July 20, a Sunday, René had disappeared into the guts of an old black-and-white television he’d found somewhere, emerging in time for them to catch the dark, shadowy figure of Neil Armstrong’s boot setting down on the surface of the moon. Some among them were awed by the magnitude of the historical event and suspended their critical faculties and political opinions. Others saw in it an extreme example of Manifest Destiny, and it fed their fierce resistance: Vietnam, salmon rivers, and the Sea of Tranquility, just different aspects of the same fight.

The next day started out as a true summer day à la Gaspésie: wall-to-wall wind and cold rain with no relief in sight. About thirty of them were hanging around, minding their own business, when a police officer presented himself at the door at about nine o’clock in the evening. The following is the official version of the order of the events that followed:

That was playing on the jukebox. There was also a piano. And sitting at the piano that night, Marie-France played Clair de lune with Gode sitting beside her on the bench, rain drumming on the roof, their thighs and hips and sides touching but their hands not, their hands keeping their distance, hers making music and his down on his knees, gripping his thighs to prevent them from flying up to rest on her shoulder as she played the sonata. Or to hold her by her waist. And Marie-France pretending to be concentrating on the genius of Beethoven when in fact all she could think about was how much she wanted something to happen, and Gode was beginning to look like a desperate case.

A woman will forgive a man for rushing an opportunity, but never for missing one. She’d read that somewhere, maybe it was Cocteau, while flipping through a dictionary of quotations. She decided that if nothing had happened by the time she finished the last bars of the sonata, she’d give up on this Godefroid, this cold goad (the audacity of her little play on words brought a smile to her lips).

She played the final notes of the sonata and looked at Gode, but he wasn’t looking at her, apparently being more interested in what was happening at the front door. She opened her mouth to say something to him, but just at that moment a furious gush of white foam smashed into her chest and took her breath away. Then she was flying across the room on a roaring geyser that smashed everything in its path, and her hand closed around another hand that was closed around hers, holding on with all its strength. Gode, at last.

If I thought a flock of northern gannets made a deafening racket on the red cliffs of their island, that was before I heard Marie-France having an orgasm in the wheelhouse of the Miloiseau. I was sure the entire village of Percé was following our every move on its municipal seismograph. She came oceanically. It was as if she wanted to shout to the whole world that yes, she was coming and it had only taken seven seconds, and it wasn’t going to stop any time soon. I was sitting with my pants down around my ankles and this magnificent blonde impaled on me with her dress hiked up above her navel.

Later, we stood on the bridge. There was the smell of fish. The sea rocked us gently. We couldn’t go back to the Hut. They’d destroyed everything.

* * *

The wrecking of the Fisherman’s Hut perpetrated by the police, with the assistance of the volunteer fire department, which had furnished the truck and the fire hoses, and of a dozen or more thugs wielding crowbars, marked the beginning of what became known as the Fisherman’s Hut Affair.

The day after the showdown, the young people who had dispersed during the night ripped off the padlocks on the door and gathered in the Hut with eight superficial wounds in their ranks. To that total they added the nervous shock suffered by one of the women, the destroyed furniture, water damage, and the wrecked piano.

For a few days it seemed that life would go back to normal. Gode worked in the café, spent his nights with Marie-France, got up before dawn to go out in the boat with Griffin to furnish the Hut with fresh cod. After a week, he looked wasted.

On Saturday, Gill Fournier called a special meeting of the municipal council and had them vote in a resolution denouncing the permanent scandal visited upon their village by the presence of professional agitators and drug addicts in the persons of the Percé hippies, and ordering said young people to vacate the premises by Monday at five o’clock. And so they were back to square one.

Jean-Paul hired a French-from-France chef. He was a magician. You gave him plaice and he turned it into Dover sole. On Monday, when the ultimatum ran out, there were snow crab claws on the menu, which no one on the entire peninsula regarded as human food. During the night, the firefighters’ truck drew up in front of the Hut and the boys from the brigade were back at it. Earlier in the day, Gros Tony Tousignant had enlisted a couple of dozen citizens, transformed them into keepers of the peace, and sensitized them to the hippie problem. Some of them had had a few drinks . . . And it was this pack of hooligans from the corner tavern, generously armed with baseball bats, Johnson bars, axe handles, and bicycle chains, that the mayor and the chief of police unleashed on the Fisherman’s Hut at the expiration of the ultimatum.

This time, the deluge lasted a good fifteen minutes, during which time jets of water smashed whatever furniture and chinaware had survived the first onslaught. After that, the auxiliary forces broke into the Hut, shouting and swinging clubs and whips and other improvised weapons.

“Time for your baths, you pieces of shit!”

“We’re gonna drown you like the dirty dogs you are!”

“We’re gonna kill you!”

In the ensuing confusion, Wilfrid Griffin was seen standing up to Gros Tony Tousignant. He dropped the chair he’d been using as a shield and grabbed the police chief’s head in his huge, calloused hands, crevassed by years of handling lines, and held him in his unbreakable grip as though he was going to give him a big, wet kiss. Then he smashed his big, Irish forehead between Gros Tony’s eyes and the chief went down like a ton of bricks.

Shortly after that, Jean-Paul, trying to avoid a massacre, entered the fray waving a white napkin as a flag. Falling in behind him, the young people left the building, fists raised, soaked from head to foot, with the word “Freedom” in their throats.

They had nowhere to go. From the direction of L’Anse-à-Beaufils came a distant rumbling sound that made everyone’s head turn. A few minutes later, a rolling as of thunder came down from the Surprise Coast Road and spread throughout the village. Everyone, virtuous citizens with a few beers in them, young rebels stoked to the eyeballs, was now looking in the same direction.

The first motorcycle was followed by a second, then a third, then ten, then twenty, until a whole pack of Harleys suddenly surged out of the night. At their head was the most improbable apparition: the lead biker wore no helmet, had hair flying back like a musketeer’s in a windstorm, but was dressed not in the leather vest painted with the Sun Downers colours, as those behind him were wearing, but in the flowing robes of a lawyer, its long, black cuffs flapping behind him like a vampire’s cape.

Maître Mario Brien seemed incapable of addressing any young woman without resorting to such endearments as “my sweet,” “my beauty,” “my heart,” “my dear,” and so on. Before a week was up, the first graffiti praising the lawyer and his famous cigar began appearing on the bushes in the area of the Hut. His role in the defence of placers of bombs vaguely associated with the FLQ was well known, but his flamboyant arrival at the head of the Sun Downers was a simple coincidence: two members of the gang had been beaten up during the first assault on the Hut, and the Sun Downers had decided to roll down to the Gaspé to take a look. At Mont-Joli they’d run into Maître Brien: the bizarre lawman was also out on a run down the lower St. Lawrence on his Harley, and his generous distribution of goodies at a pull-off beside the highway (Benzedrine, mescalin, hash, coke, a bit of pot) had been so appreciated by the bikers that they’d allowed him to ride in their company.

That night there was another great party aboard the Miloiseau. The next day, the hippies once again cut the locks off the Hut’s door and reoccupied the premises, while the municipal authorities deliberated afresh on how to put an end to it.

When Gode saw Marie-France sit down at the piano to assess the damage, and the lawyer get up, follow her, and sit down facing her astride the piano bench, about as subtle as a dog in heat, he knew he was in trouble. What chance did he have against a silver-tongued devil, a lawyer no less, with a growing reputation?

“What are you playing, my sweet?”

“Clair de lune.’”

“Ha! That’s something else the Americans have stolen from us . . .”

Marie-France gave him a quick glance, then played a chord.

“That’s a stupid thing to say,” she said.

“What do you mean? Who’s stupid? Me?”

“Loony,” she said, casting a final look in his direction.

And that was the end of that conversation.

Later that summer, the group staged a sit-in at a salmon-fishing club on the Bonaventure River, to denounce the club’s exclusively American membership, which was not uncommon in the area. They forced the gourmet fishermen to fish at night with nets or with spotlights and pitchforks. Operation Bonaventure succeeded in disturbing the halieutic activities of a high-ranking hero of the Vietnam War, a certain General Gore, since he’d been looking forward to flogging the smaragdine waters of the Bonaventure with his favourite Black Bomber: a number-one hook garnished with golden pheasant and black hen feathers and a tuft of black squirrel.

Maître Mario then had the protesters march from the prison in Chandler, a sleepy little village dominated by the smell of rotten eggs, shouting at the tops of their lungs. He kept them busy. Cheques signed by the members of the collective had an annoying habit of bouncing. A girl belonging to the group was caught emptying the collection box at the church. She said she was simply financing her political activities. The rest of that summer was spent more or less going back and forth from the Hut to the police station to the Percé prison to the courthouse.

The police harassment intensified. Penniless youths caught panhandling were rounded up and escorted to the outskirts of town.

Passing through Percé, René Lévesque held a spontaneous press conference on the dock. Around him, men up to their chests in cod were forking piles of fish out of their boats with manure forks. A trawler was unloading mullet. A political attachée held the umbrella under which the thin little man in the wrinkled raincoat spread his hands, cigarette dangling from his mouth. It was raining cats and dogs.

“If you ask my opinion of the Fisherman’s Hut,” he said in a voice that sounded like a sour lime grated on pewter, “and the so-called [apologetic smile] hippies, and this business that is so much in question here at the moment, and not just here but elsewhere as well, I would say that I, when I see what’s going on, as does the whole world, I ask myself questions. Because when we see the young who are engaged in these things, it’s natural that we ask ourselves who’s behind all this goddamned stuff. A handful of professional agitators, who come down here to be fair-weather friends [pout], okay, well, if they want fair weather they’ll have to come another day [apologetic smile], but to me, in response to your question, it seems obvious that these so-called Percé hippies are being supported, either locally or from afar, by someone who has the means to finance their let’s call it bloody . . .”

A hand reached out of a boat like an oar and Chrome-Dome grabbed it and went over to the Miloiseau.

“How’s the fishing?”

“Not bad. We’ve got problems with the goddamn draggers . . .”

“The what?”

“Draggers. When they come here for scallops, they turn over the seabed. They cause a lot of devastation . . .”

“Okay, thanks, that’s good,” said Chrome-Dome.

Gode and Griffin watched him move away.

“What the hell?” asked Gode.

This time, Griffin didn’t spit into the sea.

While looking for sand dollars, Gode and Marie-France found a seabird carcass cast up by the tide. It was already beginning to stink. Gode kicked at it with his foot. It looked something like a puffin, about a foot and a half long, with a heavy, compressed bill grooved laterally by a white stripe.

“Alca torda,” a passing tourist told them, binoculars slung around his neck. “Razorbilled auk. Around the Gulf of St. Lawrence they’re called godes . . .”

Gode found Jean-Paul talking to a girl, an English girl, on the dock in front of the Hut. Jean-Paul had just gotten out of jail for trying to bounce a rubber cheque in one of the local shops. While in the clink, he’d met France’s future public enemy number one, a fellow named Jacques Mesrine, who was suspected of having strangled a motel guest earlier that summer. Mesrine was at the start of a career that would claim thirty assassinations and, before ten years were up, would end with him receiving eighteen slugs shot from a canvas-covered truck in central Paris. The two hit it off immediately. Mesrine took Lafleur under his wing and, to teach him a trick or two, beat the shit out of another detainee before his eyes, without giving him a chance. Lesson number one: no pity.

By the end of the summer, Jean-Paul had changed. They’d all changed, but Jean-Paul had changed more. His brilliant eyes now shone with a harder light.

“It’s beginning to get pretty hot around here,” he confided to Gode.

“You mean the girl?”

From the Hut’s porch, they looked at the young woman lying on the beach.

Jean-Paul shook his head, smiling wanly.

“No. This place. We’re getting to be too well known, too much under surveillance. Too many people passing through . . .”

“Yeah, well, there’s too much bickering going on in the Hut for me. I could use a break.”

Jean-Paul’s gaze settled on him.

“Where to?”

“Camping on the island with Marie-France.”

“Yeah, don’t go getting fed up with us, eh, buddy . . .”

He gave him a friendly shove.

“Who’s the chick?” Gode asked.

“What chick?”

“The English chick.”

“Oh, her. A real aristocrat,” said Jean-Paul with a shrug. ”Janet Travers. Her father’s some kind of British diplomat, I think . . .”

Those Were the Days rode the waves with Gode crouched in the hull, terrified by the force of the wind and the height of the whitecaps, the steep slope of the rudder as Marie-France, hanging over the edge grinning like a cartoon whale, steered the boat toward Île Bonaventure.

They walked along the island’s deserted shore, drank muscatel from the bottle and had sex on a woollen blanket that made a bright red splash on the pebbled beach. The gannets that earlier in the summer had covered the top of the cliff like a living duvet had all but disappeared, dispersed along the coast and up the estuary and out to sea. Gode’s penis was still buried in the warmth beneath Marie-France’s blonde pubic bush when he fell as sound asleep as a rock.

When he awoke, Marie-France was looking through the binoculars at an excursion boat full of tourists that was just rounding the point, en route for the cliffs on the opposite shore. It was called The Island Gannet, according to the name she read on its side.

Fat Gill’s company. Business was booming. Percé was on everyone’s itinerary, it seemed. All the motels and campgrounds were full. Vacationers were having to sleep in their cars. In the early mornings they could be found walking on the beach near the extinguished bonfires, in the hopes of surprising a nude sleeper. The mayor himself had had to admit that hippies had become a tourist attraction.