Arvida

  He could have tallied it any old way, but try to figure how such minds work.

  There were about a dozen of them, the last-born, all burdened with a nickname they hated, born into old-style families to aging ladies who ought to have stopped having children long before, but whose husbands and priests never gave them any peace as long as there was one egg left in their innards. Their brothers and sisters had left town to become doctors and lawyers or else had stuck around and found work in the factory, like their fathers. These were all getting close to retirement. As for the last-born, they never strayed very far. A few had just reached their forties, and lived at home with their parents until the parents died. After, their brothers and sisters pocketed the money from the house sale, and the last-born went to live on their disability pensions or their welfare cheques in low-rent lodgings, apartment blocks or semi-basements, at the four corners of the town.

  They made it through the month doing odd jobs. From time to time, in the summer, on the first of the month, at the neighbourhood fairs or when some of them had made more money than expected on a little rebuilding contract, they got drunk. They were found in the morning, asleep in the town’s parks or on strangers’ lawns, fallen in action on the return trip by foot or bicycle. Raisin was one of the better coordinated: most often they found him on the same lawn, that of the Laberges, in the same position (an improbable intertwining of his limbs with the wheels and frame of his old ten-speed), barely the worse for wear or miraculously untouched. The Laberges were affable and gentle folks, once friends to his parents. They never woke him. It was July’s burning sun or the chill of late August mornings that brought him back to life and sent him wobbling homeward.

  None of the last-born were truly cretins or morons, even if that’s what giggling children sometimes accused them of on their way out of school. None of them were Nobel prize-winners in chemistry either. In those parts, people sometimes said that someone was “not nasty enough to start a fire, but also not bright enough to put it out.” That was not a bad depiction of the last-born. There was no raving madman in their ranks, no one severely handicapped mentally, but they were all lacking in some small thing.

  Bozzo, up to Grade 10, had been good at arithmetic and dictation, but he couldn’t finish a sentence if his life depended on it. He knew just what he wanted to say, took a deep breath, started to speak, but after a few words had to stop short. Syntax shrivelled up in his mouth and ideas unthreaded in his mind as soon as he tried to relay them from his neurons to his vocal chords. He could only express himself in puny little sentence fragments, and most of the time opted to laugh or grunt. Or swear. Swearing was practical, with the right inflection it could say all sorts of things, and in just one word. He would put several end to end without losing track. Jesus Christ goddamn piss-all fuckshit son of a bitch.

  Minou had the clearest skin, the bluest eyes, and the most sublime face a man could have, but even when his mother was absent he was not the sharpest member of the household, which also included three cats, a poodle, and a king parrot. Among the last-born he was the youngest, and perhaps the only one who would not be left to his own devices when his mother died. Minou was a total ninny. What was odd was that on festive occasions, when his mother dressed him up in a good suit, he looked like a model. He was so comely that from time to time young women refused to admit to themselves that he hadn’t changed, even when they saw all the signs. Once, at a Dubé boy’s baptism, a lady led him behind a shed, took hold of his hand, and slid it under her skirt and between her legs, until Minou’s fingers made contact with her unclad sex. Minou took off wailing like one possessed, and he was found two days later rolled into a ball under a fir tree on the golf course, almost ten kilometres away.

  Caboche had a head too big for his body and always had to lean it against something when he was seated, otherwise it could drop down and pop his vertebrae. The year before, while he was caddying for the Knights of Columbus classic golf tournament, an exceptionally long drive by the notary Lalonde had bounced off the top of his skull. That hadn’t helped at all.

  Jambon was a chatterbox and an epileptic.

  Popeye talked a lot as well, except that what he said was always inaudible, even more so when he drank and appeared to be expressing himself in a foreign language.

  Among the last-born, Raisin was the most cunning, and he was strong as a horse. That gave him a certain prestige, because he was the one who worked the most. The only problem was his fingers. They were like thick carrot stubs, and just as useless. You couldn’t do much with fingers like that, not typing at a machine or playing the piano, not even digging in your nose. Once he’d got hold of an object, he could lift it and manipulate it almost normally until it dropped from his hands. He was called on for house moving, for mowing lawns, or outside renovation jobs. He was reputed to be good for “heavy work.”

  For ten years he’d taken care of his sick mother as well as his clumsy fingers would allow. During all that time people had sympathy for him, then pity. When his mother died and his brothers and sisters decided to sell the house, Monsieur Blackburn had offered him, for a modest sum, the small apartment he’d fixed up in his basement. Raisin had accepted. The Blackburns let him entertain up to three guests on the front balcony, and when they left on vacation they let him swim in the pool. Raisin made modest use of these privileges. He rarely authorized the last-born to join him and preferred hanging out with them on the baseball field. He was more likely to invite his most troubled clients, those who were always looking for somewhere they could drink out of range of their wives. He also invited Martial, who was not married, often hung around the brasserie, and liked talking to Raisin, who enjoyed listening to him.

  In the neighbourhood, you didn’t talk about “bikers,” about “gangsters,” or about “organized crime,” but about the “gaffe.” Martial wasn’t a real member of the gaffe, but he’d hovered about it for a long time. He did little jobs for the guys in the gaffe, deliveries, driving, that kind of thing. From time to time they let him deal in small quantities of drugs, and in his free time he got involved in all sorts of schemes, and broke into houses to steal television sets or jewellery. He’d also done a bit of prison. He was small, scrawny, and nervous. He had blonde hair, long and greasy, little faded tattoos on each forearm, and joints that stuck out like broken bottles.

  That’s probably how it all came about, in fact. Martial had spent his life imagining he was tough enough to order up a murder, and Raisin, who had tolerated ten years of pitying looks from all and sundry while he was taking care of his mother, would swill the aftertaste of pity out of his mouth by imagining that he was capable of killing someone. The two were made for each other.

  In any case, one evening, while they were talking quietly on the steps of the Blackburns, Martial let slip:

  “That asshole Sanguinet, I wish he were dead.”

  Raisin replied:

  “I could take care of that.”

  There was silence. Martial began to perspire. He didn’t quite know what to say. His only thought was to ask:

  “Would you do it for two thousand?”

  And Raisin replied:

  “Yes. Five hundred now and the rest after.”

  They’d just taken a big step. A kind of moronic one, obviously, but a step all the same. Two normal people would have changed their minds, would have found a way to unsay what had been said while still saving face, but not them. Their whole relationship was a sham. Each one told himself, through the mediation of the other, that he was more dangerous than people thought, that he wasn’t just a petty crook and a simple soul. They could have gone on pretending to be tough. To have made believe that the conversation had never taken place, and to have kept on telling themselves that they were really the sort to talk that way. They could have, but, in truth, that would have made huge demands on their respective capacities for abstraction.

  They parted with a handshake, and
each went his way, stepping briskly, to the rhythm of two hearts beating wildly in their rib cages.

  Raisin had pondered the question for a long time. His father had owned a small .22 calibre long gun for years, never registered. It was in a closet in the basement, stored in its case along with an old box of bullets. When his mother died, Raisin was able to hide the rifle and save it from being sold off. No one in the family, or outside it, knew about its existence. He could easily kill someone with it and go somewhere to bury it. What was crucial, and this he’d learned from cop films, was never to be caught with the gun.

  And so Sanguinet was going to die, because he’d refused to let Martial, after the deadline, change his bet on a football match, he who insisted in betting on sports even if he knew nothing about them, and kept on asking Sanguinet to alter his bets even though he knew the bookmaker couldn’t do so.

  Sanguinet was a professional bookmaker and gambler. He held the bets on all the international sporting matches, and had feelers out everywhere that enabled him to lay money on local games. He also sold contraband cigarettes. He was the kind of harmless criminal that respectable men like to associate with, so as to mix with the underworld at little cost. The police never made trouble for him, never made him open the trunk of his Buick; several of them placed bets with him, and some smoked his cigarettes.

  He was virtually a last-born. He was an only child at a time when families were still large, born of the curious union of a factory worker who arrived out of nowhere one filthy January night, and a woman whom he presented as his wife, but who strangely resembled him, and who for a long time was rumoured to be his sister. His father and mother were tall and bony, he was fleshy and short in stature. He’d lived with his parents until their death, and had never really worked.

  He spent his days going back and forth between his clients’ houses and an assortment of bars. At night he sat on his porch behind the house, which gave on the woods that separated the golf course from the water purification plant. When a client had to find him he met him there, or knocked on the windows of the patio door if Sanguinet was watching television inside.

  For a few days Raisin made a study of how he spent his time. One night, at an ungodly hour when good people were sleeping, Raisin went out with his rifle in hand and wound his way through alleyways and yards, trying not to rouse the dogs. He himself knocked on the glass. When Sanguinet opened the door, he managed, despite his nerves and clumsy hands, to shoot off the gun and fire a round into the gambler’s midriff.

  Beyond that, Raisin had no plan. He’d not foreseen the noise of the discharge that jolted everyone awake nearby, nor the dumbfounded look that Sanguinet gave him after falling on his behind through the vertical blinds, to land on the dining room floor. Raisin had assumed he’d be capable of killing Sanguinet because he didn’t much like people, though he liked animals and would never have caused any harm to a cat or a pup. Unfortunately for him, that’s exactly what Sanguinet looked like with his blood-stained hands clutching his perforated belly, and his eyes wide open with fear.

  Raisin tossed the gun into the flower bed, took Sanguinet in his arms as if he weighed nothing at all, and carried him, running, to the hospital, twenty minutes away, without pausing for a moment.

  The small calibre bullet hadn’t caused much damage. They extracted it from Sanguinet’s abdomen and let him rest until the next day. Raisin stayed in the waiting room all during the operation, then spent part of the night at the wounded man’s bedside. No one could get him to say anything, nor make him understand that it was time to leave, nor even make him budge. No one, until the police arrived. They’d been alerted by the doctor on duty, who had to report any bullet wounds. Unable to get anything out of him, they handcuffed Raisin and put him in preventive detention, pending some clarification of what had occurred.

  Constable Leduc couldn’t talk to Sanguinet until the next afternoon. Sanguinet immediately asked him where Raisin was.

  “We’ve placed him under observation. He was in a state of shock. Is he the one who shot you?”

  “Yes, but it was an accident. Go to my house, he must have left the gun there. It belonged to my father. I wasn’t sure whether I should register it or throw it away, so I asked Raisin to come and help me see if it was still working. That’s how it happened. We were sure it wouldn’t fire. Raisin must have forgotten to remove the bullet that was in the chamber, and when we went to close it up, it went off.

  “Why did you ask Raisin to help you?

  “He’s my friend.”

  “You’re Raisin Tremblay’s friend? That’s news to me.”

  “Aw, you know what I mean. He helps me with my rock garden in front, I give him some painting contracts, things like that. Sometimes he comes over for a beer. He knows about guns.”

  “Raisin Tremblay knows nothing about anything. And are you going to tell me why you’d ask a semi-retard to help you try out your rifles at two in the morning?”

  “I know, I know. It wasn’t a good idea.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  “Do you have any more questions?”

  Leduc cleared his throat.

  “Are you sure you don’t have any other answers to give me?”

  Sanguinet kept to his story, and later that day, after having been released, he went to pick up Raisin at the police station. They didn’t exchange a word during the trip. Sanguinet left him off in front of the Blackburns and said goodbye, but Raisin got out of the car and went in without saying a word.

  That night, Raisin took part of Martial’s five hundred dollars and went to buy a lot of beer at the corner store. He walked as far as the baseball field, where for the time being there was no last-born in sight, sat on the players’ bench, and downed, one by one, the twenty-four bottles in the case. Zigzagging home, he looked like a domestic bull to which one had administered a powerful sedative. At the steps to the Blackburns, his cat, which had again run off, was rolled into a ball in front of the door. Raisin grabbed the cat by the skin of its neck, kicked open the door, and heaved it inside. In the air, the terrorized animal, which was not a cat but a skunk, emptied its sphincters full force, showering Raisin and the walls with a foul liquid, part ammonia and part excrement.

  Raisin felt sick, he wept from the pain and the sadness, and didn’t know what to do. He reeled, reeking, the three blocks to Sanguinet’s house, and knocked at the door. Sanguinet opened it, and without giving him a chance to dodge his embrace and the odour that came along with it, Raisin sobbed in his arms for a good half hour.

  They spent part of the night cleaning Sanguinet’s house, slept for a few hours, with Raisin on the couch and Sanguinet in the bedroom, and on waking they went together to disinfect the Blackburns’ so they wouldn’t have to face the nauseating smell when they returned from their vacation.

  From that point on, Sanguinet began to take Raisin with him on his rounds. The word was that Sanguinet had decided that Raisin’s big fists could be good for something, and that he’d made him his collector. In fact, Sanguinet never asked Raisin to beat up anyone, never mind to kill somebody. And he never even asked him why he’d come knocking at his door that night with a rifle in his hands.

  The next year, during the summer, without thinking, Martial, who’d tried hard to forget the whole story and given up for good on getting his five hundred dollars back, let his feet guide him to the front of the Blackburn house. Sanguinet and Raisin were there on the stoop, beers in hand, watching the sun go down behind the backstop. Raisin waved to him.

  “Hey, Martial.”

  Martial froze and broke out in a sweat. He waved back.

  “How ya doing, boys?”

  Sanguinet offered:

  “Come have a beer with us, Martial.”

  Martial still hesitated, then, not knowing what else to do, he sat down beside them.

  The night was soft and calm, and you coul
d hear the stomachs of Raisin and Martial as they gurgled in the evening air. At first, all three sucked on their beers in silence, then the conversation found its rhythm. They talked about the weather, the sports scores, and the enticing neckline of a barmaid at the brasserie. Subjects that seemed to have been invented, that night, just for them, just so people like them might have something to talk about.

  House Bound

  Hardly anyone believes me, but when I bought the house in 1993 it had settled so far down that I had to take eighteen inches off the height of each wall before shoring up the foundations. I revved up my chainsaw right in the middle of the living room and carved away like a madman, just watching so as not to slice through any load-bearing beams. It was no big deal because in the beginning it was all mine to fix up. A lot of people said “That couldn’t be,” and I don’t blame them because there are lots of stories that are hard to fathom when it comes to that house.