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