Since my train was only leaving Monday, I continued to roam the next day, detouring to the Café Central Musings on tradition wandered through my head, and I’d barely slept. A chap was seated at the bar to my right, flopped on his elbows, busying himself with familiar rantings. No doubt pushing thirty, the two deep ridges stamping bitterness on each side of his mouth made him look much older. He was drinking brandy, and an empty stool lay between us.
“This is my own bottle,” he proudly explained. “Yeah, because around here, you see, they don’t carry this brand, they order it just for me...”
I struggled to ignore him. He got animated when he learned I was from Grande-Ourse, and going back. He told me he was working on a plan for a book inspired, as though coincidentally, by a story from that region. He didn’t have to explain, I knew what he meant.
“You know,” he whispered, leaning towards me, “one things always bothered me about that....”
“One thing?”
“Yeah, the guy, you know, the young guy who took the rap....”
“Yeah?”
“Well, turns out he...”
I looked around for the barmaid. She was busy flirting at the other end of the bar. Pivoting a few more degrees, my badgerer continued, “I think eleven bullets is a whole lot for one single magazine...”
I shrugged with an attentive and detached expression.
“From what I could gather, you’re not the only one who believes that...”
“Oh, really?”
“You want to write a detective novel?”
“Maybe...”
“Hows it moving along?”
“One step forward.... One step back...”
He mused for a moment.
“I don’t get it!”
“What’s that?”
I hadn’t been able to avoid showing annoyance. He was vexed, taking his time to answer.
“The subject...” he said slowly. “Or rather, the predicate... the one found guilty is only the predicate.... I already have a subject and a predicate, but still have to find a verb.”
He was breathing hard, both excited and weary, His confusion bothered me and all I could do was wish him luck. He exhaled smoke from his cigarette with unusual strength.
I gestured impatiently at the waitress, who seemed to be ignoring me. My neighbour then hailed her in a language I didn’t recognize and, before I was able to intervene, she brought over his personal bottle.
“You’re going to taste some of this, pal....”
He poured the rich mahogany liquid and, as he tilted the bottle in front of me, I read the label that shone beneath the streaks of light: Christian Brothers.
Then felt fire on my tongue during the night.
The train finally got under way. As we were about to leave Tocqueville and plunge into the forest, I drifted into the stream of my thoughts. I remembered a story I’d read in the papers before leaving about this famous railway: a fight had broken out between an Indian and the train staff one winter night bristling with black spruce, many kilometres from any inhabited area. Beer bottles had been used, and the miscreant passenger had been finally subdued and tossed off the train unceremoniously. Besides, this little train stopped rather frequently in the middle of nowhere, to let off a group of sportsmen or take on a band of Aboriginals who’d lit a fire along the tracks as a signal.
As the train pulled out of the small northern town, Cowboy and Karate Kid walked up the aisle, stopping beside me. Interrupting my daydream, they dropped onto the bench facing me. With no preamble, Cowboy spoke quickly, in a low voice, “D’you have twenty bucks to lend us? For the train guy.”
“The...?”
“We each give him ten bucks and he leaves us alone.”
I looked at them stupidly. Not fully understanding what this meant, I only shrugged. This refusal, whose expression was perhaps too vague, reassured them. Cowboy sank into his seat, Karate Kid as well, while I tried to fill the silence with a terse account of my urban problems. I noticed the Kid had a nice black eye.
“Things get rough in the bars?”
“They always want to fight”
I handed my ticket to the conductor when he came around. He then leaned over the two Indians, who looked at me with confidence, and waited. The railway employee, suspicious, glanced at me then focused on my counterparts.
“You don’t have your tickets,” he bellowed sullenly.
His tone made me react. I took out my wallet but, still hesitating, opted for a compromise, pulling out only ten dollars, telling Cowboy apologetically, “It’s all I have, pal”
Don’t know if he believed me, but the shame of this cowardice would follow me the rest of the trip. I felt that the trace of defiance I discovered in myself was ancient and well anchored, that I’d have a long way to go before shoving it aside and tearing it from my heart. Cowboy neglectfully stretched out his hand, snatched the bill and showed it to the conductor. An official admonition followed, after which the ticket puncher disappeared swearing to God he’d be pleased to toss out this vermin at the first opportunity. But his fingers, meanwhile, had clenched the ten-dollar bill. My friends were smiling again, seeming to feel that ten dollars was a more-than-adequate kickback in the circumstances.
Via Rail forgot the formalities and, to celebrate the success, the two fare-dodgers invited me to take part in a small ritual, well-known for its bonding virtues. We stepped outside to get better ventilation, forming a circle at the juncture of the two cars, amid the dizzying racket of the elastic anteroom, a nodal point where the colliding waves merged. Cowboy left the group for a moment, disappearing into the other car. He came back with a girlfriend who had a full bust, a beaming smile and jeans that stretched over well-rounded buttocks. She moved the whole lot like a professional tease. I’d often seen her with Cowboy and Karate Kid. Judith must’ve been nearly twenty-years old, and already had a girth likely to put any scale out of whack. Following a winter on the reserve, she was returning to live with her mother in a cabin located some distance from Grande-Ourse.
She immediately took a huge shining to me. With perverse complacency, I already could see myself squeezed by the fat girl in that infernal accordion.
Even before I first met Indians, I fully suspected that we’d inherited from their elders the custom of smoking in a circle. A childish habit, but always a good way to befriend your neighbour. The yellowish cylinder danced between our fingers and we passed it around, moving from side to side to keep our balance. Its quality was very average. Above a certain latitude, you smoke what you can. I looked at Judith through the joint smoke and, at that precise moment, she was extremely real, as it were.
Cowboy must’ve read my thoughts; he said, expelling the dope from his lungs, “Judith went to see her boyfriend.”
I remained quiet and the Kid added without hesitation that the boyfriend was none other than Big Alexandre, staying in a halfway house at the moment. The list of his misdeeds, I was told, included having broken into the general store twice.
No one spoke for quite some time. I furtively observed Cowboy, this secret Cowboy, his round cheeks pumping our communal joint. The lucidity brought on by the drug allowed me to penetrate into the shadow of that face shaped like a full moon where the melancholy and folly of his race went hand in hand. He suddenly started coughing uncontrollably.