A Little More Free

by John McFetridge

  “We’re back in it,” Tommy said. “Now we just need to win the next two.”

  “Yeah, that’s all,” Dougherty said.

  “They’re coming on now,” Tommy said. “They can do it.” He was on his feet then, almost jumping up and down, and he said, “I’m going to go play,” and ran up the stairs.

  Dougherty waited a few minutes, and then went upstairs himself. He was going to make up some excuse and leave, but his mother was at the stove checking on the roast and she said, “Cheryl will be here soon.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I thought you’d want to go see Dad today.”

  “I’ll see him tomorrow after work.” She was peeling carrots. “He sleeps a lot during the day.”

  “You’re doing okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m fine. Vraiment.” She gave him a look and walked out of the kitchen.

  Dougherty went out onto the back balcony and had a smoke, and he was still there a while later when Cheryl got off the number five bus and walked up to the house.

  He said, “You made it.”

  “Nice to see you, too.” Sarcastic.

  Dougherty laughed, but he was feeling odd. Cheryl looked different than he’d expected, more grown-up, no jeans or t-shirt with a dead musician ironed on the front, she was wearing proper pants and a blouse and a jacket. She was carrying a purse.

  “You have another one of those?”

  He held out his pack and she took a cigarette. “Don’t let Mom see you.”

  “She won’t even notice,” Cheryl said. “She’s got so much going on.”

  Dougherty said, “She seems okay, considering.”

  “Really? That’s what you think?”

  They were sitting in deck chairs on the patio.

  “She’s worried about Dad, sure,” Dougherty said, “but she’s handling it. Some of the people I see …”

  Cheryl took a drag and blew smoke at the sky. “Are they ever in shock, the people you see? And have reactions later?”

  “I don’t know,” Dougherty said, “I’m not there later.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, what do you think is going to happen? Dad’s going to come home and things will go back to normal.”

  “Normal?”

  “As normal as things ever are here.”

  “She’s talking about moving back home.”

  “She is home.”

  “Back to New Brunswick.”

  Dougherty laughed.

  “It’s true, she’s talking about it.”

  “Well, that’s your shock.”

  “She’s talking about Gramma Hébert and Aunt Pauline. She misses them.”

  “And when she visits in the summer, she can’t wait to leave,” Dougherty said. “She hasn’t lived in the country since she was a teenager. She’s always loved it in Montreal.”

  “She used to,” Cheryl said. “Not so much anymore. It’s not the same these days.”

  Dougherty was feeling that way, too, but he didn’t want to admit it to Cheryl. He said, “She’s just scared, it’s understandable. Wait till Dad gets out of the hospital.”

  “You think everything will go back to normal?”

  He looked at his sister, so different than he was used to, and thought he had no idea what normal was anymore.

  But he said, “Yeah, I do. I think it will.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Gagnon said, “Je ne pensais pas que les folkies étaient rowdy comme ça,” and wiped more blood off his head.

  “C’est pas leur politiques,” Dougherty said, “it’s the two-asshole theory.”

  They were standing on Dorchester beside Gagnon’s radio car, just after midnight and the street was quiet. Dougherty had got there just as the fight was ending. Just as Gagnon started to get the upper hand and one guy ran off.

  Gagnon motioned to the guy in the back seat of the cop car and said, “He’s the asshole.”

  “Yeah, but there has to be two.” Dougherty was leaning back against his own car and he lit a cigarette. “If two guys get into something — one spills a beer on the other or a fender bender, something like that — if they’re two reasonable guys they work it out between themselves, they come to an understanding they can both accept.”

  Gagnon said, “Yeah,” and tossed the blood-covered handkerchief on the street.

  “And if one of them is an asshole then they’ll come to the same conclusion, it’ll just take longer while the asshole yells and screams and gets it out of his system.”

  Gagnon put his hat back on and said, “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, but if they’re both assholes then we get called.”

  “But maybe one guy started it, maybe the other guy didn’t do anything.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Dougherty said. “Whenever you show up you have to expect them both to take a swing at you. You’re only there because there are two assholes.”

  Gagnon nodded. “Well, everybody else took off when I got here.”

  Dougherty was looking at the small group of people standing by the door of the Hotel de Province and said, “Back inside for more peace and love?”

  The sign by the door said Jesse Winchester was playing.

  “No,” Gagnon said, “they all gone. Well, maybe a couple left.”

  “All right,” Dougherty said, “you take this guy back to Ten.”

  “You coming?”

  “I’ll just make sure everything is calm now.”

  Gagnon opened the squad-car door and said, “You won’t get overtime.”

  “I know.”

  Dougherty waited till Gagnon had driven away and then walked to the side door of the old building, the entrance to the club. There were a few people at the tables near the stage but the show was over and the place was quiet.

  A couple people looked over at Dougherty and then looked away. No one was going to start anything.

  Except maybe one person he recognized. The one he was looking for. He gave a quick nod and walked away.

  * * *

  Judy lit a cigarette and said, “You ever think about getting a real apartment?”

  Dougherty took the match and lit his own cigarette. They were both on their backs in his bed, blowing smoke at the ceiling, and he said, “No, not really,” but now he was thinking about that stewardess and her apartment in the high-rise, her car getting broken into and her moving out to Dorval.

  “This is worse than student housing. It feels so temporary.”

  “I took it because it was so close to Station Ten,” Dougherty said.

  “At least you don’t have any roommates.”

  She took a drag and exhaled.

  “I’m hardly ever here,” Dougherty said.

  After he’d seen Judy in the bar at the Hotel de Province and she’d seen him, Dougherty clocked out and walked the couple blocks to his apartment. Judy was waiting on the steps.

  Now she said, “I’m getting tired of roommates.”

  “But David Murray was never home,” Dougherty said.

  “We still haven’t rented out his room. It’s just there and no one’s doing anything. We’ll be short on the rent.”

  “You getting tired of doing all the work?”

  “I don’t do all the work.”

  Dougherty turned his head a little and looked at her, but Judy was staring at the ceiling, blowing smoke rings.

  Then she said, “Yeah, I’m getting tired of doing all the work.”

  “Where do you think David was staying?”

  “I don’t know, girlfriend’s?”

  “Did he have a girlfriend?”

  “No.” She took another drag and e
xhaled quickly and said, “It’s funny, since he’s been killed no one’s come forward, you know? Wherever he was sleeping, whatever he was doing, no one’s saying anything.”

  “Maybe he was having an affair, a married woman or something.”

  “I guess it’s possible,” Judy said. “Just doesn’t seem like him.”

  “So, the week before, what was going on? I’ve been looking into it but it just seems so long ago.”

  “A month.”

  “Before the Wagon Wheel fire, before my dad’s heart attack.”

  Judy said, “Let me think. End of August? Lot of people were out of town.” She took a drag and leaned off the bed to flick ash on the saucer on the night table. The sheet slid off and Dougherty was looking at her naked back, smooth skin all the way down to her butt.

  She lay back down on the bed and said, “I remember there was a kind of party at the Yellow Door.”

  “What for?”

  “It was a Monday night, it’s usually closed, but Nixon said in an interview on the weekend that he was going to eliminate the draft. People just started showing up on Monday and some people played music.”

  “Eliminate the draft, sounds like a big deal.”

  “It’s been heading this way, since he put in the lottery.”

  “Nixon?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dougherty said, “That make a big difference, the lottery?”

  “Oh yeah, you should hear these guys,” Judy said. “They all know their number, exactly how high it is.”

  “Must be weird.”

  “Yeah. And there are about twenty-five million people between eighteen and twenty-five in America, Nixon wants those votes.”

  “Will he get many of them?”

  “More than you might think,” Judy said. “The draft has been slowing down, there were only about twenty-five thousand called so far this year.”

  “Sounds like a lot of guys,” Dougherty said, “twenty-five thousand.”

  “It was two hundred and fifty thousand in ’69.”

  “I didn’t realize it was so many.”

  “You should come to a meeting.”

  Dougherty smoked and said, “But David wasn’t at the party?”

  Judy said, “No. It wasn’t planned or anything, it was just people stopping by when the news came out.”

  “The good news.”

  “Meanwhile the 7th Fleet is still bombing the crap out of Haiphong, so it’s not like the war is over.”

  “Yeah, but John Lennon put up those billboards.”

  “And there are the ads on TV.”

  “What ads?”

  “Unsell the war, you haven’t seen them?”

  Dougherty said no, and Judy said, “My favourite is the one with the pie — you haven’t seen it? A bunch of people sitting around a table, average Americans, and Uncle Sam is cutting up an apple pie? Everybody gets a really small piece, just a bite, but the general gets a huge chunk.”

  “Oh yeah,” Dougherty said, “maybe I have seen that one, the general’s smoking a cigar?”

  “Yeah. A lot of people like the motherhood one, the old lady talking about the mother bomb that drops the baby bombs.”

  “I don’t know that one.”

  “I don’t know if they’re doing any good.”

  “Must be doing something,” Dougherty said.

  Judy took a drag and leaned over and stubbed out her smoke on the plate.

  Then she said, “It’s like people are just getting tired of it.”

  “Tired of the war?”

  “Tired of protesting.”

  “You’ve been doing it a long time?”

  Judy nodded a little, serious, and said, “Since Expo.”

  “Expo 67?”

  “It was in all the papers.”

  Dougherty said, “That’s what my dad says about the war — the world war, not Vietnam.”

  “Mine, too, that’s the joke.” She turned her head a little towards him and Dougherty smiled and said, “Right.”

  She held his look for a moment and then turned away, looked back at the ceiling and said, “That’s when it started for me.”

  “Was it the American pavilion? I worked construction on that.”

  “No, not that one. Do you remember the Christian­ity pavilion?”

  Dougherty said, “I must have missed that one.”

  She shoved him a little with her shoulder and said, “It wasn’t all wild parties and drinking and drugs.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “They showed a movie, just a short one, a few minutes, but it had all these scenes of wars, all these images of … violence and suffering and death. It wasn’t like any movie I’d ever seen.”

  She was serious, and Dougherty didn’t say anything.

  “Women and kids. Men, too, of course, but just average people, you know, just people all being killed. There was a controversy, they said the movie shouldn’t be shown.”

  “But you saw it?”

  “I went back and saw it again and again. I wanted everyone to see it — drove my friends crazy.”

  “Really? You?”

  “Hard to believe, I know.”

  Dougherty waited a moment, thinking about making another joke, saying something to lighten the mood, but he was feeling it, too, the seriousness of the situation, of the world, really, and he said, “But you found people who agreed with you.”

  “I started at McGill that fall. It’s not like in the papers, the campus isn’t all protests all the time, but there were some.”

  “But now,” Dougherty said, “they’re getting tired of it?”

  “People graduate, they move on. People are moving to Toronto.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “It’s changing, too, there are a lot of people there now.”

  “They put a man on the moon, too,” Dougherty said, “I wouldn’t want to move there.”

  “Or they don’t graduate and they move on. Roberta and Tom joined the Hare Krishnas.”

  “Wearing the robes, shaving their heads?”

  “People are getting into EST, have you heard of that?”

  “Like reading minds?”

  “That’s ESP. This is some kind of therapy. There are a lot of therapies now, scream therapy, all kinds.”

  “I guess.”

  “Lots of splintering,” Judy said. “People going their own way. ”

  “You’re still protesting the Milton Park develop­ment.”

  “Yeah,” Judy said, “that’s right, but it’s changing.”

  Dougherty leaned across Judy and stubbed out his own smoke. They looked at one another for a moment, their faces close and neither one saying anything, and then Dougherty rolled back and looked up at the ceiling.

  “What do you mean, changing?”

  “Well, it’s really happening, they started phase one, they knocked down all those houses.”

  “How many?”

  Judy shook her head a little. “Two hundred and fifty-five. That was in July, remember?”

  “Yeah, there were some demonstrations.”

  Judy smiled a little and said, “Yeah, there were.” Then she got serious again and said, “But the houses came down anyway. People had been living in those houses for a long time, paying their rent every month, then they just got kicked out and the buildings knocked down.”

  “When my parents moved out of the Point,” Dougherty said, “and bought a house on the South Shore, I was mad, I didn’t want to move. I remember we had fights about it. My dad trying to explain to me what a difference it makes when you own your own house.”

  “How old were you?”

  “My last year of high school.”

  “My parents bought our house when I was a baby,” Judy s
aid. “But Montreal is a rental city, all these houses are rentals.”

  “It’s changing,” Dougherty said.

  “Change is hard for people. Now they’re closing all the stores on Park and Jeanne-Mance. They’re just going to knock everything down.”

  “You’re still going to protest?”

  Judy nodded a little and turned her head sideways. “This is some pillow talk — you trying to be a spy?”

  “Come on,” Dougherty said, “we’ve talked about this. I’m just trying to find out who killed David Murray.”

  “Well, he hadn’t been to any meetings in a while so it didn’t have anything to do with that. But now that I’m thinking about it, he was the first one to talk about this, about the way things were changing.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t remember exactly, but he kind of warned me about the way it was going, the way people were starting to break off into small groups and talk about direct action.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  She didn’t look at him. “People were talking about Concordia Estates, who owns it, where they live.”

  Dougherty said, “Oh.”

  “I remember at one of the meetings David said something about that kind of action never working, how it was just what they wanted, how we’d lose public support.”

  “But some people didn’t agree with him?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who?”

  Now Judy turned her head and looked at Dougherty. He waited and after a minute she said, “I don’t remember.”

  “You sure?”

  “David being killed, it couldn’t have had anything to do with Milton Park.”

  “If people were talking about direct action,” Dougherty said, “then anything’s possible.”

  “It was just talk, nothing happened.”

  “Not exactly nothing,” Dougherty said. “Someone killed David Murray.”

  Judy turned her head away from Dougherty and said, “I can’t believe anyone at our meetings had anything to do with it.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time somebody trying to talk people out of direct action got themselves killed, would it?”

  Judy said, “I don’t know, would it?”