WE DROVE DOWN THE HIGHWAY, PAST ROWS OF farmhouses that looked like a line of lunch boxes on a bench at the back of the class. The radio was playing a late-night show. The DJ’s bosses were asleep. Otherwise, surely, he would be fired for playing music that was so profoundly sad. The notes from the piano were like raindrops falling on the lake.
We drove past the exits to towns named after saints. There was Sainte-Julie, who was conceived one Christmas night when her father swore he’d put a condom on. There was Saint-Jacob, who woke up after a night of heavy drinking to find that a tattoo of the Virgin Mary had miraculously appeared on his arm. And Saint-Martin, who got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, and when he turned on the faucet, beer came out.
Nicolas and I were conceived in a small town like this. But I was tired of believing the Lily Sainte-Marie creation story. It made no sense to me. It was easier to believe that a cow was licking maple syrup off a stone for an hour until the stone began to cry and stretched out its little arms in the air. Or to believe that a wolf gave birth to Nicolas and me under the rotten floorboards of one of the rotten houses in Val-des-Loups.
The house was down a path in the woods. The headlights illuminated the woods, like a spotlight that shines on the stage before the circus begins.
It belonged to one of the Bleeding Sparrows. I expected it to be a dump. On the contrary, the house was made out of wood and was painted white and was really pretty. The rent was only three hundred dollars, because there was no work in the area. I had never been in a house that size. There was a green Indian carpet with salmon pink flowers. There was a couch with deer all over it, and framed needlepoints of deer on the wall. There were actual deer out in the forest. You could hear them making the sound of pulling off their boots.
The mattress let out a cry when I flopped onto it. Raphaël was burning sage and waving it all over the room to get the evil spirits out as I fell asleep.
Raphaël threw his clothes into the garbage bin behind the house. Why he did this, I have no idea. Maybe he thought they had bad karma. In a pair of jean shorts, he drove to the local dump and filled a paper bag with clothes. Someone had thrown out an entire wardrobe from the seventies. The collars on all the shirts were too long and the buttons on the jackets were gigantic. Raphaël came into the kitchen wearing a pair of bell-bottoms and a polyester undershirt with a red and brown tweed pattern on it. He was wearing a pair of flip-flops on his enormous feet. None of the shoes at the dump were big enough for him.
I liked his style. It was like we had gone back in time to before we were born. Raphaël had proven his thesis that you could indeed move backwards in time as well as forward.
“I need some sort of outdoor work,” Raphaël said.
“You don’t even know what that means.”
That evening, Raphaël asked me to pass him his red jacket as he pointed to a black one on the back of a chair. I passed him the jacket and he seemed happy with it. I guess he didn’t subscribe to the idea that words belonged exclusively to their definitions. That, or he was reading a different dictionary than the rest of us.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours,” he said.
“I’m going with you.”
“Suit yourself. But I’d rather you not interfere with my transactions.”
I had on a skirt and a turtleneck that was too big. My hands kept getting lost in the sleeves. I grabbed my boots and put them on.
“Are you going to be a drug dealer?”
“No. The guy who owns this house is doing two years in Kingston Penitentiary for that sort of thing. That’s why we get to stay here for so cheap.”
“It’s so lonely though.”
“I’m going to get a guard dog to help with that.”
Part of Raphaël’s probation conditions was that he wasn’t allowed to have a dog. It was worse than all the drugs. That he was getting a dog was a clear sign that he was going down the same old path he’d gone down before.
As we drove, we passed the one Chinese restaurant for fifty miles. Old women still wore their hair in beehives out here. The teenagers were always being killed hitchhiking home from heavy metal concerts in the city. Half the dogs were named Princesse.
“You can’t have a dog, you know,” I said.
“Don’t Daddy know it to be the bitter truth. But Daddy gonna take care of you, baby-child.”
On principle, I ignored guys when they chose to talk like forties pimps from Chicago. We drove down the highway. We passed all the black-eyed Susans weeping about how badly their boyfriends had treated them. But we had no time for them.