Black Bird

by Michel Basilieres

  “Who wrote that?” asked the cop.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know these people.” But at last Jean-Baptiste realized he knew exactly who had written this one, and he understood very well why, and how it was just another wrong turn in a maze, a maze that might somewhere have a hidden exit, but was just as likely to have only wrong turns and unexpected collisions with mirrors.

  “I don’t believe you. Are you sure you’ve never seen this gun before?”

  “No.”

  “It was found at the kidnapping scene.” He unwrapped it once more, but was careful to handle only the cloth, not the gun itself. He held it out to Jean-Baptiste. “Take a closer look. Many guns look alike.”

  “I’ve never held a gun in my life and I won’t start now,” said Jean-Baptiste.

  The cop put the gun away. “Okay. Just one more thing and you can go back to your cell where you belong. Get up.”

  Jean-Baptiste stared.

  “Get up, stand away from the chair. Come on, quick!”

  Jean-Baptiste stood in confusion. He was scared. He knew the cop wanted his fingerprints on the gun, wanted to connect him to the kidnapping. My God, what had Marie done now? Was she really involved? Was it really some warped attempt to get him out of jail? It seemed hardly likely, when she knew he would walk free in only a matter of days; besides, there were other friends of hers still in prison, some in this very jail. She probably never thought he would be questioned, since she certainly knew he wasn’t in the FLQ. That is, if Marie even had anything to do with this kidnapping herself. But that manifesto …

  The cop opened the desk drawer and took out a long, flat and slender length of polished wood, with a grip at one end long enough for two hands.

  “All those manifestos and other treasonous crap are in French.” He walked around behind Jean-Baptiste. When Jean-Baptiste turned to follow him, the cop stopped him. “No, no. Stand still. But all your ‘literature’ is in English. You like the English? You like English games? Eh? You ever play cricket?”

  The cop began to strike him, first across the shoulder blades and then up and down his backside. Jean-Baptiste’s knees buckled when he was hit on his calves, but he caught himself before he fell. He stood quivering under the blows and made sense of the pain by thinking how Grandfather had been right, that he was beginning to learn the way of the world and the hard lessons it offered. Right now he was learning how easy it was to be punished for someone else’s actions, and how little Justice cared who suffered its retribution, as long as someone suffered indeed.

  Marie was sleeping only fitfully. She was nervous. Never before had she risked so much, carried such a burden so consciously over so long a time without relief. The fewer people who knew the whereabouts of the hostage, the better. Even her friends didn’t know.

  She took pains to hide it from her family. She could never count on a time to fetch his meals or clean his waste. Father was keeping a regular schedule but Grandfather and Uncle were bound to be awake after dark. Even though Dr. Hyde wasn’t buying their corpses any more, those graves were still full of rings, diamond tie clips and gold teeth. And Aline seemed to have as much trouble sleeping as Marie. Only Mother was really getting any rest.

  It was starting to drag on. She cursed herself this time. Could she really have been so stupid as to think the authorities would capitulate according to her schedule? She should have seen it coming. Incompetent and shit-scared politicians furiously chattering among themselves instead of doing something—wasn’t that just the reason people like herself were necessary, to cut through all the hypocritical bullshit of the parasitical poseurs? Meanwhile, the thuggish Keystone Kops could think of nothing more effective to do than run around arresting all the usual suspects. And even that was an insult in its way: hundreds of supposed fellow-travellers were cooling their heels at the Parthenais Detention Centre. Musicians and singers, nationalist newspaper columnists and university professors—writers, for fuck’s sake. They’d corralled all the eggheads and hippies in town and thrown them all together in a giant conference centre, as if stifling the most eloquent portion of the population was the same as striking the most active or the most productive. They were all probably forming new committees in their jail cells right now, planning their sociological dissertations and avant-garde film scripts while listening to the first drafts of new pop songs and merrily enjoying this period of imposed self-importance at the taxpayers’ expense. It maddened her, even more so when she was struck by the realization that Hubert would have loved it. The only saving grace was that it showed just how close Quebec was coming to open revolution: the authorities had jailed the intellectuals.

  How in the world those fools confused academic status with bravery and conviction was beyond Marie. But at least it kept them from her door for the time being.

  She poured the contents of the zinc pail into the toilet. It was the same pail Uncle had used to carry the heart up the mountain. This was what Cross and his kind produced, she thought. From birth to death, more and more of it every day. Piles of shit to stifle others with, to humiliate others with. And she was left to clean up after him.

  Worse, when she’d returned the pail, he’d said, “Pray with me.”

  “Mange de la marde, maudit tête carrée. Calice.” She threw the bucket to the floor.

  Thereafter, every time she stole unobserved into the basement and opened the door on him, there he was on his knees with his head bowed, praying, with the gold crucifix that dangled from his neck held between his outstretched fingers. No more pleadings for freedom or newspapers or to write to his family. Just catechisms, and invitations to join him.

  And then she’d have to go upstairs and listen to Aline reacting in shocked horror to the news reports about the growing alarm over the “crisis.” Whether the Quebec government was doing all it could, what the Canadian and British governments thought, what these anarchic madmen demanded in their communiqués, and whether all this was going to have a positive or negative effect on any upcoming referendum.

  And when Mother’s friends came visiting, how obviously frightened they were, even in broad daylight in their own hometown. “Who knows what’ll happen next?” asked the cigarette-puffing Mrs. Harrison, waving a column of ash precariously over the parlour carpet. “They’re crazy.”

  And Mrs. Pangloss, with, “I’m telling you, God is punishing us. The world’s going to hell because we’ve reached too far. Ever since the Americans went to the moon, look what’s come to us: a separatist government, for Christ’s sake, and now this. We’re being punished.”

  Yes, thought Marie. We’re being punished.

  And then, incredibly, came a joint televised conference with the prime minister of Canada and the Péquiste premier: two long-time political enemies, two old university classmates, announcing the imposition of the War Measures Act.

  Even as they spoke, Canadian troops were being deployed, in numbers not seen since the Second World War—Angus’s war—on Canada’s own soil. As she listened unbelievingly, Marie began to hear a thunder from the sky. Downtown Montreal was being invaded. Such drastic measures were deemed necessary in these extraordinary times, to protect the population and ensure the survival of Democracy itself. Neither Canada nor Quebec would be held hostage by terrorists. Let the forces of evil do as they would; but the Péquiste premier assured all Québécois, of every political opinion, that he would have no dealings with criminals.

  Marie was aghast. Through the window she could see the lights of a convoy of military vehicles passing on Park Avenue, right in front of her house. In the sky she saw the slow dance of enormous helicopters descending over downtown squares, and still, atop the mountain, the cross glowing in the early evening twilight.

  So there it was: the Canadian government showing its true colours. Democracy? At the end of a gun barrel. They voted in the Soviet Union too. And also had these massive military parades.

  She had to get away from everyone. She dashed to the basement and stood in darknes
s, trying to reconcile her conflicting, charged emotions. She was afraid. Damn it, she was scared. They’d just sent the whole fucking army after her. She paced and stumbled over things. Slowly her eyes grew more accustomed but she hardly noticed. She wasn’t thinking of her physical whereabouts. Why did everything turn out so contrary to her expectations? What was it that frustrated her ambitions even in her successes? She was caught now between her own prisoner and her family, an inescapable trap.

  The whole of her life had been a trap, and it was her parents’ fault. Why did they have to mix up their marriage like that, the way Canada tried to impose a union between French and English? She hated the English. They never understood, not from the first. She hated being partly English. It meant she was tainted; it meant she must hate what she was herself. It was just like being part of her frustrating, hateful family. She didn’t relish being poor, she didn’t relish listening to her friends when they railed against Anglos, because they all knew that somewhere deep inside her was something that hurt when prodded. She didn’t relish her family’s way of life either: their insular, provincial opinions, their acceptance of the English, their source of income. She didn’t want to belong to a family of body snatchers.

  Yet she couldn’t escape them. Through the arguments and the bitterness, through the deprivation and discouragement, they supported her. They were familiar to her. She knew their faces and their habits, she knew how they spoke and what pleased them, she knew how little they cared for her ideals, how futilely they pursued their own ends against her wishes and advice. She had a place amongst them, and that was as stifling as it was comforting.

  And the only way to make more room for herself inside her family was to strike back when their image of her contradicted her own image of herself. She must scream, she must argue, she must threaten violence, as she always had. As she had since infancy. She was not like Jean-Baptiste; it wasn’t possible for her to withdraw to some private reality where everything was mixed together fantastically and improbably, where things were never what they really were, where they changed into their opposites to suit his understanding. Things meant something else for her brother, meant something she’d never imagine, because he was so Anglo. It made him think in another way, a way that conflicted with hers. She was Québécoise, French, and more so than some without English or other blood, because for her it was a conscious choice.

  Still, if it weren’t for the English, she would be totally French. Quebec would be French. It would be New France, France with a new outlook, new opportunities, a new face. The best of all possible worlds. But history had been against it. Just at the moment when France itself had embraced the clearing away of the old in order to free itself for the future, Quebec had been grabbed by the English and stifled, held down and repressed. No wonder Quebec had been backward, poor, religious for so long. The Great Darkness.

  The revolution had been a long time coming. It was time for a cleansing.

  It was probably time to empty that bucket again. When she opened the door, there he was, praying. He disgusted her. The smell from his pail was strong and he hadn’t had a bath in days, and his hair was stringy, greasy, unkempt. His clothes were limp and wrinkled from prolonged use. His face was dark with stubble. He didn’t even look up at her, continued his whispered mumblings into his hands as if it were she, not God, who was absent. As if he was too good for her, too good to notice when she entered. That was so typical of the English, assuming their superiority and enforcing it for their own benefit while proclaiming their humanitarian intent.

  How could this man, this English man, be allowed to exist, to live, when Hubert had been plucked out by death? And in his arrogance he calls upon the power of his God. The English have always had God on their side; they’ve always claimed divine right. It was always God who was against us in this province. Even the French Catholic priests, black-frocked vultures, pederasts, preaching the revenge of the cradle as if it were for our own good, as if it meant something liberating for us. When for so many it was a trap, a stifling inescapable slavery whose only alternative, the only choice she’d had—what else could she have done, even if she’d wanted the little bastard?—was a haunting, a loss, a bereavement unrecognized by anyone else, as illegitimate as the birth would have been. Not a baby, not a death. No hopes and fears, no loss, no gains, no future—one big No, the vote the English campaigned for: No.

  What was really needed in Quebec, even needed all over the world, was a Yes, an affirmation, a welcoming, an embracing …

  All of them. The doctors, the priests, Hubert himself. Even her father with his typical male expectations of what she was worth—every one of them had reached right inside her and killed something. Was death so easy to mete out? Like serving dinner or handing over a business card?

  John Cross expected his religion to lift him up and set him free, this same religion that had so effectively and for so long suppressed and restrained the people of Quebec, and Marie personally. Worship was painful, a physical suffering just like Christ’s, and she bore the scars from her youth, she still bled where she’d been marked in that profane baptism. But he seemed not to know this. He seemed to truly believe that his faith would protect him from any physical trial, as if when his saviour had died for his sins he’d also agreed to take on any corporal suffering that might occur.

  In a rage she knew she’d have to show him, to break through his mindless, brainwashed innocence with an immediate and very material demonstration. It was a revelation: the chain around his neck. She took the cross from his fingers, enveloped it with her own small hand and twisted the gold links into his neck.

  The ends of the crucifix stuck out between her fingers like the points of brass knuckles. His face turned red, he struggled, his eyes turned up. She beat him with her free hand, twisting the chain again. He gulped air as she loosened her grip but she only took more slack in her own hand, and began strangling him in earnest.

  “Where’s God now, Mr. Cross? Has he forsaken you at last?” The crucifix dug into her flesh as he struggled desperately. She was afraid he’d break free and so held her right hand over her left, using the strength of both fists to contain the cross. He was making harsh, dry barking noises and his face was so red and full it seemed it might burst. He convulsed, and the points of the cross bit into Marie’s hand.

  With barely enough breath, shooting out of him like a rude noise from a freed balloon, John Cross tried to say, “You alone are capable of building a free society.”

  He managed enough for Marie to recognize his words, words straight out of the FLQ manifesto. But it was too late now. She’d long ago passed the point where she could abandon this direction in her life. It was like the arrow of time, moving ever and ever forward. Even if she was capable of doubting her immediate actions, her current struggle, she was beyond being shocked back into any kind of repulsion at what she’d become or what she was doing. She was incapable of sympathy for this man or even for herself now, and was performing an act as coldly as drowning an unwanted kitten, or slaughtering a chicken for dinner.

  “You alone are capable of building a free society.”

  It wasn’t even ironic, as perhaps Cross had intended it, much less an appeal to any personal morality it might waken in her. It neither strengthened nor weakened her resolve, it neither amused nor chastised her. Somehow John Cross had drained the phrase of any meaning just as she was extinguishing his life. Words. All that remained of it were words.

  And that was exactly the problem with words, and had always been the problem, and why she resented her brother so, and his love of them: they changed. In some magical way the same words that once had been a solace, an inspiration and a call to arms could now be an accusation, a derision, an insult. The very words on which rested all her certainty were suddenly the cause of all her doubt.

  Slowly he turned purple, and just as he gave up the ghost and went limp, Marie felt her own flesh breaking. He slumped; he was dead. She relaxed her hands; as she did so, she felt
a sharp bite and a warm trickle. She opened her left hand and let the crucifix fall out onto his chest.

  Her palm was bleeding.

  Just the one.

  The certainty of Cross’s corpse became for Marie the one fixed point in a universe of doubt. She was suddenly flooded throughout her body with a shuddering of her muscles, each one tightening and loosening again in an instant, and then her stomach shrank in on itself and rose up again under her rib cage.

  But all his muscles had relaxed.

  And whatever her doubts or certainties, she was now left with the problem of the corpse. As if she had finally inherited the family business.

  Marie vomited uncontrollably.

  Into his bucket.

  Aline was humming a lively La Bolduc tune as she plunged the knife into Grandfather’s right eye with her left hand. She had decided to name this year’s jack-o’-lantern after her husband. She remembered how much her own mother’d enjoyed Halloween, sharing it with her daughter and teaching her its liberating spirit:

  “And now, who’s the biggest pumpkin-head in our lives, Aline? Who do we dislike this year?”

  Aline would name some current neighbourhood bully or some rival classmate, and her papa would call from the living room with the name of a current politician or his boss, and her mother would cackle with glee and suggest her sister-in-law, or Aline’s babysitter—whom she’d caught flirting with Papa—and then her mother showed Aline how much fun it was to stick a knife into a pumpkin named for an antagonist.

  Aline’s mother loved Halloween. It was the one day in her proper Catholic existence when she didn’t feel bound by her social constrictions as a woman. It was practically the only time she laughed aloud, and she sang as she prepared for the trick-or-treating. She smoked cigarettes. She had a drink, and then another. She even swore, by God.