Arvida Read online

  The trick was to never write anything down. He’d read somewhere that at the end of the nineteenth century, some people refused to have their pictures taken, fearing that the apparatus would steal their souls. It was probably a superstition, but this for him was a proven fact: you would never remember anything as long as you didn’t get out of the habit of noting everything, everywhere, every chance you got.

  Behind the airport’s windowed walls, rain was pouring down. It was like being in a car wash. The planes, far off on the runway, were blurred, and perched on the asphalt, seemed hunched over like big wet crows. He took another sip. He could not for the life of him remember the damned name. He really must have been out of sorts. What’s more, the guy was ready to eat out of his hand, to lend him his summer house for a month, and, if pressured a bit, to pay him ten cents a litre for the water that flowed from his tap. But that too was his line of work. To sell. He was very good at it, but that’s not why he was here.

  Michel arrived at about 4:30. That gave him about three quarters of an hour before catching his return flight. He took leave from his anonymous friend, left the bar, and sat at a table with Michel, a few metres away. He lit a cigarette. He’d stopped smoking ten years earlier, and had started again two weeks ago.

  Michel had bad breath and wore a cheap suit that seemed to have spent the last week in a garbage bag. He disliked him intensely for that. He’d spent the entire flight going over everything that irritated him about Michel. His hygiene was suspect. Michel had lived in Montreal and spent his time trying to recall it, citing street names, restaurants, and bars to which everyone (he in any case) was totally indifferent. Michel carried around in his wallet dozens of photos of his three ugly daughters, and trotted them out on the slightest pretext. Michel was also a consummate ass-licker, who had concocted his own personal technique for flattering your ego in a way that was both understated and obscene. It was hard to go on in that vein, because in the end he was a good guy and everyone liked him fine. But he had to set all that aside. In the beginning he’d embarked on these meetings full of empathy and compassion, and it had almost done him in.

  They talked about this and that for a few minutes, and three times he forestalled Michel’s launching into his diorama of ugly daughters. A waiter brought another gin and tonic and a cup of hot water. Another reason to loathe Michel: he’d stopped drinking a long time ago. Tippling in an airport bar seemed even grimmer when he had to do it in the company of an abstemious imbecile who wandered the world with his pockets full of herbal teabags.

  He short-circuited the conversation to the point where a deadening silence set in. He stared at Michel for a long time, pulling on his cigarette and blowing smoke over his head until he was sweating, squirming in his chair, and feeling strangled by the knot in his tie. Soon Michel could no longer endure his gaze, and he fixed his eyes on the water snaking its way down the windows, cleared his throat, and asked:

  “Are you here for what I think?”

  Without saying a word, without moving his head, with only his eyes, he confirmed, “Yes.”

  Michel gave a small, tight blow to the table with his fist.

  “Does she know how much I brought in for her in the last year?”

  “Almost 700,000 dollars. She had me and two accountants to remind her of that, but you know her: she’s pretty well certain that without her no one would be able to see their nose in front of their face.”

  “Meanwhile, you’re doing her dirty work.”

  “I’m chief executioner now. It’s all I’ve been doing for months. Not one contract, not one sale.”

  Michel exploded:

  “You want me to cry for you, maybe? I’m fifty-two years old, for God’s sake. Fifty-two years old, a sick wife, and three daughters at university. What am I supposed to do, can you tell me that? What does that fucking cow think we’re all going to do? That fucking fucking fucking cow...”

  “Enough.”

  “Do you know everything I did for her, and her father before her?”

  “You worked, Michel.”

  “We gave them our lives.”

  “And they gave you yours.”

  “We’re even-steven, is that it?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  Michel became sullen.

  “How do you think the company’s going to be able to function? That makes twelve who are gone.”

  “Ten.”

  “Who’s going to keep things going?”

  He stubbed out his cigarette.

  “Between the two of us, I don’t think she gives a damn. She must have awarded herself ten salary hikes in the last five years. She should be earning not far from half a million now, not counting bonuses. Her father’s dead, her mother’s convinced that everything’s going just fine, and as long as our old contracts are bringing in money and she’s chopping the payroll, the investors are happy. I think she’s going to milk everyone like dairy cows and then shut things down.”

  “How many of us are there?”

  “About four hundred, if you count manufacturing.”

  “What’s she going to do afterwards?”

  “I don’t know. Get Botox shots. Adopt Chinese kids. That’s about all she’s been doing for five years.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “I never said it was.”

  Michel shot him a dirty look.

  “You’re still going to clear us out one after the other, like your mistress’s good dog.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “That doesn’t seem to bother you very much.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Why don’t you tell her to do her own dirty work?”

  “Why didn’t you say anything when the others were being let go? I’m no different from anyone else, Michel. The city’s burning, and I’m praying that the fire will spare my house.”

  “Where are we heading, like that?”

  “Nowhere.”

  Michel got up, tottered a bit, then found his feet.

  He got up in turn, held out his hand, and said:

  “No hard feelings?”

  Michel stared at his hand vacantly, without taking it, more shaken than he wanted to show.

  “You’re the executioner now. And an executioner has no friends. Maybe she thinks we’re worthless, but we’ll pull things together, you’ll see. We still have our clients, and we can sell them more than her garbage. But you? Have you thought that no one’s going to want to help you when your turn comes?”

  He sighed and looked at his watch.

  “I’m going to have to catch my plane.”

  “Oh, excuse me. I don’t want to detain you. Can you give her a message for me?”

  “Of course, Michel.”

  “Tell her that I’d have liked her to have had some real children rather than the stupid little Chinese kids she’s adopted, who she shows off everywhere to make it look like she has a heart. Tell her that I’d have liked her to have a real heart and real children and to have one of those children die right in front of her eyes. Will you tell her that?”

  “I doubt it.”

  The seat was comfortable, but the third gin and tonic had been one too many. He felt groggy. His wife said he was drinking too much these days. She was wrong, he wasn’t drinking more than before. He’d always liked to drink. These days, he found that beer had an acrid smell, cocktails tasted bland, and whiskies gave off an unbearable medicinal scent, but he swallowed them all the same. That’s all that had changed.

  He felt better now that it was over with Michel. He could sleep on the plane, and in a few hours he’d be home. He’d take a shower and drink a glass of wine. Wine was still good. A bit oily perhaps, but still good.

  In the old house, his first wife had organized the gardens according to a tiresome geometry. The flowers and shrub
s grew in tight rows, like in a greenhouse, they never mingled, you’d have thought it was the window of an industrious florist. The house was smaller now, the garden more confined, and his second wife had this virtue: she arranged the plants any old way. Perhaps there’d been some order in the beginning, but very quickly it had disappeared. He didn’t know where the soil got its richness, but by mid-July the back yard looked like a jungle. The daturas became actual bushes, and every day produced dozens of big white flowers; the morning glories ran riot, climbing the length of the hedges and stippling the garden with hundreds of purple, blue, and violet blossoms; the roses showed no restraint, and as of the middle of June the Europeana and the two Prairie Stars produced dozens of flowers with delicate petals, and roses like an old lady’s closed fists. There were also lilacs, an apple tree, tulips, and dozens of other species, perennials and annuals, climbers and crawlers. He liked to sit in the midst of all these exhalations, in a chaise longue, and sip Long Island Iced Tea while doing crossword puzzles. Between the stems of the flowers and the branches of the shrubs, black and yellow spiders tended large webs. He liked to watch them at work, see the good Lord’s flies and beasties become trapped in them and be devoured. It was strange, if he’d come upon spiders that big in the house, he would have been shocked. In the garden, he was not at all put off. The spiders, sometimes, fell on him. He took them in his bare hands and dropped them delicately onto the leaves.

  Someone was shaking his shoulder.

  “They’re announcing our flight.”

  It was his companion from earlier on, standing beside the table. He remembered, his name was André. He wondered if he’d been sleeping. He picked up his overcoat and his briefcase, and strode towards the gate.

  Before leaving, Michel had said that his turn would come. Of course his turn would come. He’d never thought otherwise. Enormous spiders lived in his garden. Soon it would all be over, and he would make his home in their company, the yellow and the black.

  América

  The first mistake we made was to think we could bring off a coup like that after the Towers.

  Big Lé’s mother and sister had gone back to live two years in Costa Rica between 1999 and 2001. Lévis went to see them a lot during that time, including for almost three months in 2000, starting with the holidays, so as to make it through the millennium with his ass in the sun. That’s when he met América and Luis, in the hotel restaurant his mother ran.

  América was a waitress, and Luis was living in San Francisco. They were in love, but they couldn’t find any way to bring her to the States. They never explained why. Maybe she had a record. She had no special skills to show the immigration people, and they couldn’t get her a green card or a visa.

  Big Lé went several times with me to the States to see if the border with Canada was full of holes. He told Luis that he could get América through and dump her in San Francisco, if he paid the price. They talked about it a lot when Big Lé was down there. That’s the way it stood when Big Lé came back to Quebec.

  Next summer Luis called him and asked if he’d agree to get América over the border for three thousand bucks. Lé should have said no, but he said yes. That’s how our problems started.

  Meanwhile twelve fucking ragheads hijacked some planes to plough them here, there, and everywhere, right in Uncle Sam’s face.

  Let’s just say the borders got a little less leaky after that.

  *

  The second mistake was to bring along Bezeau.

  The original plan was to leave Arvida by car, pick up América at Dorval, sleep in Montreal at Cindy’s, my ex, then hit the road for Detroit the next day. We figured we could cross the border, then offer Luis, for a couple of thousand more, to bring his girlfriend all the way down to California. That made for a whole lot of driving, except between the time Luis called Big Lé to set things up, and when we were ready to head out, something else happened. The day after the Saint-Jean Baptiste party at Saint-Gédéon, Big Lé lost his licence when he hit a roadblock at nine in the morning where the road forked at Saint-Bruno. He’d swallowed some speed for dinner and some more at midnight. He wasn’t drunk any more, but the amount of alcohol he’d ingested between that morning and the day before was beyond calculation. We needed another driver, or else I’d have to do it all myself.

  When we brought him in on the deal, Bezeau was famous.

  He’d just done two years for holding up the Walmart in Chicoutimi. That idiot had gone in with a 12-gauge shotgun and come out with the cash from the registers. Then the cops had got on his heels as he was leaving the parking lot. Don’t ask me how, but he was able to outrun those guys for half an hour with his frigging old Topaz that did zero to 100 kilometres in about twelve minutes. They had to put down spike strips on the Boulevard des Saguenéens in front of the 247 convenience store. People saw him get out of the car and wait for the cops to come up to him, his arms in the air, giving them the finger.

  We thought a guy like that must have steady nerves.

  We were wrong.

  In an old Reader’s Digest at my father’s they told the story of a man-eating tiger in India that had fed its whole litter with human flesh. A tiger that’s tasted human flesh will be a man-eater for the rest of its life, because our meat is salted from the salt we eat.

  It took fifty years to get rid of the five crazy tigers and their mother.

  The oldest of the Bezeau brothers, he’d done more or less the same thing for his little brothers, but with cocaine.

  Mike, the Bezeau who came with us, got into coke when he was twelve. He came from a tribe of thieves and bottom feeders who broke into cottages and garages for about a hundred miles around. And I don’t think we’re going to be rid of them before the end of the world.

  A lot later we learned that he’d been totally out of his skull during his famous Walmart coup. He’d heard his brothers talking around the table about a dumb urban legend claiming that in all the Walmarts in the world there was a million dollars in hundred dollar bills stashed in a safe. Bezeau told everyone he was going to the convenience store, he picked up the one-shot 12-gauge that had belonged to his dead grandfather, and he took off for the Place du Royaume. It must have been 8:30 at night. Once there he stormed in, shouting at the top of his voice that he wanted the million. He bonked a cashier who called him a moron, he charged the cash desk, and, somewhat hysterical, he fired in the air, by some miracle not killing anyone. He realized that he’d left the rest of his cartridges in the car, and he fled the scene with about a hundred and sixty dollars in his pockets.

  We’d already figured out that our criminal genius was mildly retarded. The day before we left, Big Lé gave him five hundred dollars out of the fifteen hundred he’d received as an advance. He told him to fill up on gas and to buy beer in cans, Molson Ex or Labatt Blue, so they’d look like Coke or Pepsi, and to buy lots to eat so we wouldn’t have to stop much on the way. When Bezeau came back, he’d bought us each a beef jerky, plain chips, vinegar chips, ketchup chips, and five grams of coke.

  He apologized for having forgotten the gas and the beer, but he boasted about having got a good deal on the coke.

  The worst of it was that crossing south through the parkland was like his very own Kryptonite. He’d only done it once, to go to prison, and by the time we got to the other end he was scared of his own shadow. Everything spooked him, he was afraid of being caught, and the last night, before crossing the border, he said:

  “Anyway, if it’s a fuck-up tomorrow, I’m spilling everything. I’m not going back inside just for your stupid plan.”

  There were two double beds in the room. América slept in one, Lévis and me in the other, and we’d installed Bezeau on the floor at the end of our bed like a little dog. I was the one who’d wanted to strangle him for the last two days, but finally it was Lévy who jumped him, with his two hundred and forty odd pounds. He threw himself at him on the floor and start
ed hammering him with his fists on both sides of his head, shouting:

  “Shut the fuck up, Bezeau. Shut your fucking mouth.”

  América, down on the ground, was weeping and wailing, “Están locos, están completamente locos.”

  Lévis got up, looked at her, and said:

  “Cállate tú también. No jodas con la policía. No jodas con la coca. Quédate aquí y deja de llorar. Mañana estarás en Estados Unidos.”

  *

  Our third mistake was not to have asked for enough money.

  We left Montreal early, about seven in the morning. We took the 401 to the Ontario border, and drove until evening to Windsor, stopping to eat.

  Before looking for a motel, we went for a walk along the Detroit River. At one point, there was a telescope. Big Lé put a whole quarter into the slot so América could see the other shore. She stayed there for a long time, gazing at Detroit. When Bezeau started getting restless, Lé said, “Just lay off, leave her alone.”

  As far as I know, she’d never seen the States so close.

  I saw Lévis was getting nervous. We found a seedy-looking motel and checked in. Bezeau went to bed, and América came with the rest of us onto the terrace to take in the sun. Lévis told me there wasn’t much money left out of the $1500. We phoned one of our buddies in Montreal, who knew a lot about the law, to ask his advice. The first thing he asked Lévis was:

  “How much are you doing this for?”

  “Three thousand.”

  “You guys really are babes in the woods.”

  Then he asked how we thought we were going to come back into the country with one passenger missing. Especially since Lévis had sponsored her for a visa.

  “I thought I’d play dumb. At Canadian customs. I’ll say I got taken and the girl took off with my cash.”

  “That’s not bad. You won’t be able to go back to the States for a good long time, but that’s not bad. As long as Jay backs your story like he should. If I were you, I’d leave the other cokehead at the motel.”