Last Days of Montreal Page 5

  But something was happening. What?…The sky…What? Donald turned to see a bright spot opening above the river. The grim wind wove into itself, building, relentless…and was transmuted, now a biblical tone was echoing in his ears. Don’t look back, thought Donald. Keep walking! Keep your eyes to the ground! Then Donald had to look. He had to see a cane, its crook extended earthward, just now being retracted, back behind the clouds. He had to hear the wondrous music breaking apart, scattering into hum-like fragments, dissolving back to wind… Donald had to run for his car.

  They were right behind him. “Hey! Donald!” They came rushing up, the two of them lugging the soaking bag, unzipped. “It’s not a cat, it’s books.” Dropping the bag at Donald’s feet, pulling out a soggy hardcover edition. “English books,” declared the younger one. The boy scowled as he crouched, studying a page or two of a child’s picture book. It was filled with pictures of explorers. Then he pulled out another. “From the bibliothèque.” He showed his brother the card-sleeve and date-list under the back cover.

  Donald snatched the books from their hands. They stared at him with dry contempt.

  The older one held up a dripping Polaroid of a woman on a bicycle. “C’est qui, cette femme?”

  Donald snatched it from his fingers. “None of your business. Where did you get your English?”

  “Our mother.”

  “You tricked me!”

  “You lied!”

  “Me?” cried Donald. “I never lied! I’m an honest citizen. I speak both languages. It’s Lucien who lied! None of this would have happened if Lucien had told the truth!” Donald knelt, collecting the bag and books, his pictures, his history, grasping the messy bundle into his trembling arms.

  The two boys watched. They seemed to understand perfectly. The elder brother bored into Donald with his black stare. “Lucien does not lie. C’est les fédéralistes qui mentent!”

  “Toujours!” shouted the younger one, waving a tiny fist.

  Donald walked away from this. They followed, fearless, the older boy taunting. “Tu retournes maintenant, eh, Donald? C’est loin, chez vous?…Chez les anglos! Ici, c’est le Québec!”

  Donald screamed, “He lied. He always lies! About history, about Trudeau, about the question!”

  The boy repeated his charge. “You lied!”

  “No! It was your damn referendum!”

  “Our ref — ” He seemed to choke on it. He tried again. “Our refer…”

  His brother chimed in, “Our ref…ref…ref…” but likewise, could not seem to free the word from his mouth.

  Donald mocked them as he flung his mess back into the trunk and slammed it. “Well, come on, boys, spit it out. It’s the same word in either language. Try now. Tell me about your referendum.”

  But the word had triggered a reaction these boys could not control. Although both strained to keep their lips closed tight, in a moment they were spitting violently — not at Donald, but aimlessly in all directions, caught in the throes of some kind of spitting fit. Donald understood. Real or imagined, these were Lucien’s boys, sons of a saint who did not know how to deal with it. The only thing for Donald to do was leave them to it. “Sure must be hell,” said Donald, then took himself away.

  9.

  Traffic was bad; it was 6:15 when he got home.

  “Donald?” Pascale called from the bathroom as he was hanging up his coat.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Nowhere. Driving around.”

  She came slowly down the stairs, distracted, studying her thermometer. “What did you say?”

  “I went to the river and threw myself in. To celebrate the news of Lucien.”

  “Oh, Donald…” Pascale held the thermometer up to the light, squinting; “don’t be cynical.”

  “I’m not cynical! Lucien is cynical!”

  “Oui, oui, je sais, je sais. But where have you been?”

  “Couldn’t work again…went for a drive by the river. Sat there and read the paper.”

  Which was also true. Donald had been cutting clippings. Donald’s car was filled with news.

  “Ah, mon pauvre petit homme.” But she was grinning, eyes sparkling.

  “What?” snarled Donald. No, he couldn’t bear to see it.

  “Tu veux faire l’amour ce soir?”

  “Ce soir? It’s Tuesday.”

  “Oui, but…” Pascale waved her thermometer; “I am very fertile today…”

  “Oh.”

  “It is time for a baby, Donald. Je veux un petit garçon pour l’appeler Lucien.”

  “Pour l’appeler Lucien!”

  “B’en oui.”

  Was she kidding? How could she? Donald looked into her incredible eyes and sniffed, “He won’t be de souche.”

  “Of course he will. Everyone in Quebec is a Quebecer. Lucien has said this.”

  Donald turned away. “I can’t.” But Donald still did not know why. How so much of himself could be so bound to it. Why intimacy was trumped by history, how history could get so lost in fearful dreams. What exactly did he stand to lose? It came down to the simple fact of being too ashamed to tell his wife where it had brought him. And left him. While Pascale waited, halfway down the stairs.

  She finally told him, “Donald, I am thinking maybe you should go to Toronto for a rest.”

  So he got his supper on the road. A donut. The worst of the storm turned north toward Ottawa and he drove through gentle snowflakes. An hour into Ontario he made a short detour south and stopped under a clearing sky on a lonely bridge near Long Sault. Here the St. Lawrence was sheltered by islands. It flowed swift but calm. If Champlain had passed this place, it would have been in a canoe.

  Goddamn Champlain! Donald dropped his bag. It sank immediately. He leaned on the rail, trying to see below the surface, trying to gauge the depth. Snowflakes disappeared as they alighted on the patterns of current passing over the spot. A cloud passed, the moon returned and spread its light along the river. The bag was gone. The next cloud formed and it was dark again. He got back in his car and drove away.

  The highway was lonely, Toronto a good five hours still, and it felt like he was being followed.

  But as he drove westward through the night, a voice began creeping through. It was a voice from history, something like his mom’s: The river is a state of mind, Donald. “I know, I know.” That bag will drift back to Quebec. Eventually. They’ll know…“Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t my fault.” Do you think they’ll believe that? Stealing books from the Westmount Library, Donald, really! “I don’t care! They’re useless. Worse than useless! I’m doing Anglo kids a favour!” Calm down, Donald. “Sorry, can’t.” Why not, my darling? “That Lucien won’t go away.” Ah, maybe you would like a story. “Sure,” said Donald, “tell me a story.”

  Picture Donald Beeton moving backwards through history, heading home.

  Last Days of Montreal…

  On a raw March morning, northeast wind ripping through a sky grey as an undertaker’s glove, evil snow-spirits dance in the intersection at de Lorimier and Notre Dame, grease-stained spumes, moaning, swirling. The black underside of the Cartier Bridge hovers above, any tears it might have shed long frozen. The beer factory steams and stinks. The hellish river, fifty metres away, will kill you in less than a minute — you only have to give yourself. On its far bank, the Ferris wheel at La Ronde waits grimly, like an abandoned pet. From out of the east comes a legless man called Last Days, rolling on in a motorized chair. His jacket’s wide open, his hair’s like nails, the hand on the joystick’s spotty white. He doesn’t give a damn; what’s left of him’s been numb since November. The brutal, bullying wind scrapes against his hoary cheek and trips over itself. Whoa! who was that? A passing trucker sees the twisted grin, exultant! revelling in cold slaps…a trucker sees it and feels like driving off the road, over the tracks, straight into the cradle of the silent flow. Oh, the life here is ugly!

  Now the spinning spumes form quadrilles, part i
n bleak formation. The crazy man beetles through, hits black ice, spins four times and crashes headlong over the curb, thlump! onto the median, half a body lying there laughing. Those icy ghosts reform and start to sing:

  Hey! Last Days…welcome, man! Bienvenue!

  And what an entrance! More than perfect!

  Oh, b’en oui! (Oh yeah, yeah, yeah!)

  Don’t us all wanna be like you!

  Last Days bares his teeth. Licks his snowy wrist.

  Ah, poor guy, it’s tragic… Someone stops, gets out, approaches.

  He spits it at him: “Va-t-en…va-t-en! You fuck off, you!” Both official languages, no problem.

  Another good citizen backs away, turns, runs for his car. Lord almighty!…civilization’s gone straight to hell and this is it. And who could argue? It takes twenty painful minutes, crawling around and bumping along on his attenuated ass, putting himself together again. Then he’s back in the saddle, starts ’er up and off he goes… Leaving you stuck there, your own moral crutches rudely snatched away, trying to catch hold, crippled by the mystery of Last Days.

  But where could he be heading?

  Everywhere!…he’s spreading.

  Last Days?

  That’s what they call him. He’s made a sign for the back of his seat. Red paint, Day-Glo, reversible and in the right proportions for the pleasure of the language cops, and with little red Christmas lights wired around it so you’ll know him when he passes in the night: Last Days of Montreal…

  The ellipsis is a flourish. Damn right you’re meant to notice. It serves the mystery of his degradation. An ellipsis sends it outward, sends it forward through time...it helps to make it always yours. So go ahead, by all means, follow if you like. But don’t be like that sap who tried to offer help. Don’t cry for Last Days. He’s far too busy for your lousy pity. Last Days is an emmerdeur, a spoiler of what little good remains. That’s his job, a dark variation on the theme of pride and duty. Maybe the last variation for these lousy final times.

  Last Days, Last Days…

  He’s come to fuck you up!

  One of his favourite things to do is drink six beers at the corner of St. Catherine and Mansfield, then piss his pants in the entrance to chez Eaton. Gross and pathetic: soaking, lolling, belching. Or he wheels into the bakery in the train station and buys a cake, a big one, birthday-sized, then goes out in front of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and eats the whole thing right there on the corner, icing all over his beard and lips, dirty fingers, even some of it in his nose; disgusting…locking his wheels and doing half-turns, leering at the people. “Vingt-cinq sous pour un café, madame? Un café avec mon petit gateau?”

  Your scorn only makes him excited. Go ahead, tell him he’s abominable. Last Days gets a great erection every time. He’ll wait at bus stops, perverse, throbbing. He waits for that perfect look, the one that half-looks, then looks away, ashamed of the horrid fascination. And then he sneaks it out. Explodes! Whew!…yeah! Schoolkids tell parents and parents tell police. Police roll down their windows and wag their fingers, sending a message. Last Days hears ’em and knows he’s hooked into the system like a deadly strain of flu. Like the time one of those transsexuals got off at Parc Lafontaine — turquoise high heels, pancake face gunk an inch thick — and stood there, arms folded, false doe eyes frozen wide, locked on Last Days’ member. He (she?) tried a smile or two. Last Days wouldn’t bite. A standoff (you could say). But there’s no way to beat our guy at this game. That fragile lovely finally had to cry.

  Last Days meets their eyes and dares ’em:

  Who’s more oppressed here — me or you?

  Eh, man, eh, lady — Who? Who? Who?

  He dares ’em all to tell him who!

  Speaking of crying, Last Days found a piece of thrown-out steak behind a ritzy resto. So he took it over to Westmount and waited on Sherbrooke Street. Pretty soon along comes a charter member of the tailored sweatsuit jogging crowd, trailing an ugly Boxer on one of those give-and-take-type leads. Perfect. Last Days wheels in beside ’em, waves the meat under the doggy’s nose, then zooms across through traffic. The dumb thing follows like a greedy maniac. Gets yanked back, tries again. Gets yanked again… It finally bites the woman’s hand, makes a break for the steak and gets whammed by a Jag XJ. Last Days wished he’d had a tape recorder for the woman. Could’ve used it in his theme song. No, not nice at all, that Last Days.

  And Westmount’s got those great hills. Last Days rides down howling, flat out, out of control, straight at anyone, child or granny, a Filipina nanny, whoever’s in the way. Before too long the neighbours are after him, screaming, “Who the hell are you?” He leads them in neurotic circles. Then he parks at the end of Brian’s driveway and digs into his garbage, to see if he’s thrown out any shoes.

  Not that Last Days needs a pair of shoes. (But he knows some guys who might.)

  And not that he’s anti-Anglo. Mais non, don’t get the wrong idea here. Last Days had a French mom and an English dad, and various counsellors have intimated this is usually the most pathological of founding race combinations. And don’t try to call him anti-Conservative either. It’s politicians in general. There’s a guy down at the shelter who has spent some time in Ottawa camping in the PM’s backyard, says he can get in the back door in the middle of the night, no sweat, and kill the prick. He’s got the knife, just needs bus fare back to the Capital. Last Days sets aside a little of the coin they throw at him each day and makes a contribution. Sure, love to help out with that one. And he’s making plans to steal Lucien’s leg. Not to put it on; what’s Last Days going to do with one leg? He wants to cut it in half and use it as a salad bowl. (Length-wise? B’en oui, stupid.) Émile, the chef at the shelter, says he’ll kill him. But Father Larry, who’s Émile’s boss, says why not? — it’s hard to get the men to eat their greens. Last Days will sell the other half to a man from Ontario, or trade it to a biker for something good to smoke.

  But it goes deeper than the politics. Politics is only where it begins.

  It’s the leg itself, those Italian shoes — the gesture meant to touch the people’s soul.

  It’s those summer days, when the buses arrive carrying the faithful to the Oratoire Saint Joe. Last Days shows up and makes his chair climb the stairs. This is harder than it looks, and it looks excruciating, and just when he gets there, he’ll tip over backward and fall all the way back down. Usually splits his head open in a couple of places, breaks a finger or a tooth. But it gets all sorts of people lost deep inside their guilt.

  Or his poster campaigns. Céline salope! The singer’s army of brain-dead fans came looking for him. Saku sucks the big one! When the Finn was the only good thing about the Canadiens, Last Days zeroed in. Hockey’s like a drug in this damn place, keeps people distracted from reality, but Last Days was on the case. And there was Pet pet Parizeau. Basically, Jacques is a fart. And remember when that ass in Rosemount got his face in the paper for putting up his Christmas lights the day after Halloween? Last Days cut the centrefold out of an old copy of Shaved Quarterly he found in the TV room at the shelter, glued it up on a board with the word Immaculée!, then draped his own Christmas lights around it and worked the front of the guy’s house for a couple of nights till they called the cops.

  Some ploys are more desperate than others. Hearing about the tax drain to the suburbs, Last Days risked his life motoring along the shoulder of the 2 & 20 out to Île Perrot, where he “relieved himself” on the 17th green — as those ladies characterized it in their deposition. Last Days has never called it that. But whatever you call it, when you got no legs it’s never an easy thing, even in the best of circumstances. To pull it off with a foursome in pink Bermudas and yellow knee socks waving putters and threatening jail was a heroic act. “Go back downtown!” he bellowed at them; “this would never happen downtown!” The Mayor declined to commend him or even come to his aid. Not his jurisdiction.

  Yeah, well, the Mayor’s a pussy, everyone knows that.

  Because when you ge
t down to it, who else is there — apart from a few paranoid Anglos wailing as they leave town — to draw attention to the fact that Montreal is doomed? To Last Days, who sees the roads and alleys from the vantage point of a broken muffler, it’s obvious. He spends his life navigating potholes five times the size of any politician’s mouth…as big as graves! Like a bloody war zone! And when sludge splashes all over your face, it’s nastier than a raging welfare agent’s breath. The roads tell the story in no uncertain terms, but most people pretend it’s not happening. They pretend not to see their city crumbling like dried-out loam. They walk around the holes, pay rent, eat out, go shopping.

  Some even give him money!

  Sometimes he’ll take their money. (Last Days is crazy — not stupid.) Other times he’ll throw their money straight back in their faces. He doesn’t want money. He wants his city! Montreal! The powers that be have let it fall through its own cracks. Last Days used to sit in the middle of the road and yell about it, but a car in some dignitary’s motorcade backed up without warning and rolled over his legs. Now all he’s got is his sign, his chair, a bed at the shelter (and one at the Douglas should he feel the need to return), and a small monthly cheque to keep him in beer. What he mainly has is the irrefutable decimation of himself. You could say his is a vocational thing. You could say the powers that be are always backing up.

  Although he’s not above a bit of joy. In May he lucked into a pair of Expos tickets at the shelter. They’d been dropped off by a big-hearted dentist from Laval. Father Larry held a little draw and Réjean got ’em; said he’d take Jimmy, who used to play some ball. Last Days gave both Jim and Reggie some of these pills he scored from one of those homeless kids with Martian hair — maybe four each? — told them it would make the game a thing to remember forever. Jimmy went to change his shirt, and still no one’s heard from him. Réjean? They had to call Urgences-Santé. But he left those tickets sitting right there.

  The Expos are dying too, so forget about trying to scalp a ticket, you’ll never make a dime there, mes braves. Instead, on his way out to the Big O, Last Days gave the other one to this pretty junkie hooking at the corner of St. Catherine and Pie-IX. Josée. They smuggled in a twelve-pack of Wildcat Beer (Josée made a deal with the door guy) and for a while they were having the greatest time. Pretty soon everyone in their section knew she wasn’t wearing any underpants. Last Days was roaring his head off. Best time he’d had in a coon’s age. But Josée disappeared when the door guy got off duty at the end of the sixth (according to their deal) and Last Days was ejected during the seventh inning stretch.