“All right, smart guy, I’m going. But think about it, Benjie. Your bed’s made up and waiting.”
On night eleven I wished Alexandre good night sleep tight as usual. At least he could sleep, lucky bastard, but his un-jointed limbs meant that he had to do it standing up, like an elephant. Even though he was horizontally challenged, I couldn’t help but be jealous that he was able to grab some shut-eye while I had to toothpick my lids open and grind my keys into my palm to keep awake.
I must have drifted off despite myself. I remember having a dream. My father had the starring role as usual. No other members of the family ever penetrated my subconscious. That club was restricted. Dad and I were on the beach, although we weren’t dressed for it. He had on a suit and I was wearing pyjamas. I looked to be around six. We were in Florida I think, not that I’ve ever been there. It just seemed Floridian to me in that weird way dreams have of echo-locating themselves. Dad took me to a cantine by the water and bought me an ice cream cone. Then we got into one of those pedal boats you can rent. It was rough going on the ocean, but we pumped like mad and somehow we ended up in the plastic driveway igloo back at our house. Only by now we weren’t in the pedal boat anymore. It had transformed itself into a Land Rover, the rugged ex-Afghanistan kind, not the suburban mommy knockoff. It was all caked with mud and had a row of those mucho-macho deer-hunter spotlights above the windshield. I turned to ask Dad where we’d left the boat, but the door on his side was wide open and he’d amscrayed.
My eyes popped open. So I could look for Dad I guess. But once I was awake it wasn’t him I found. Planted just beside me I made out a pair of shoes. Connected to a pair of legs. They weren’t Florsheim loafers so I could count Dad out, and they weren’t Alexandre’s boots. That left only one living soul those shoes could belong to. The thief was standing exactly where I wanted him to be, as if he’d read our script and knew his mark. I didn’t have the time or the sense to panic. I just reached out, latched on to his ankle, and jerked with all my might as if I was trying to start a testy power mower. True to Rossi’s prediction, the guy dropped like a stone, his skull knocking against the floor with an ugly epileptic klop. For all our detailed planning, we’d never anticipated that particular sound. To tell you the truth it scared the bejesus out of me. I was afraid to look down and see a head smashed on the floor Halloween-pumpkin style, brain pulp splattered like pie filling across the linoleum. All I’d wanted to do was reason with the guy. Killing him was never on my agenda. But then I heard a reassuring oooph waft up from the floor. I’d only knocked the wind out of him. I didn’t bother with the cuffs seeing as how he couldn’t help but stay earthbound until his lungs regained consciousness. I flicked on the lamp on my bicycle helmet, my new and only piece of specialized equipment, to see what type of fish I’d hooked.
A cocky one apparently. No ski mask to hide his face. No gloves even. In fact, he was dressed like my grandpa. He wore a powder blue polo shirt that clung to man-boobs that were in an advanced state of development. A white belt matched with white bucks. The few leftover strands of his grey hair were precision draped across his scalp in loving memory of its former coverage. What was this geezer doing robbing a museum in downtown Montreal? He should have been sitting around a card table in Fort Lauderdale playing rummy.
I was supposed to interrogate him in a brass-knuckles voice, but I was raised to treat older people with respect. The fact that he was an older felon didn’t change anything. So again I went off plan.
“Are you all right?” I asked him. “Anything broken?”
All he could manage were gasps. When Rossi and I planned all this we figured I’d be flipping a guy in his prime, a guy who could suffer the odd lump and bounce back to steal another day, but we were way off.
I propped my intruder up against the counter into a sitting position. He was one heavy guy. Tall and built solid, with a pair of Crown Royal shoulders on him. I had trouble concentrating on what I was going to say because the knot on his skull was growing before my eyes like he was sprouting a spare head.
“Want some water?”
“No thank you.” So at least he could talk now. I hadn’t ruined his brain by giving him an aneurysm or something. And he was surprisingly polite, considering. I sat down opposite him and waited.
“So I guess this means you found the stuff I replaced,” he finally came out with, probing the swelling on the back of his head, checking his fingers for blood.
“Stuff! You mean there was more than the plate?”
“You didn’t notice the pelt?”
“What do you mean, the pelt? I checked everything.”
“Shine your light over there.” I put on the high beam and aimed my headlamp where he was pointing. “See the third one over?” he said. “The one that’s meant to be from a fox? It’s actually from your run-of-the-mill urban squirrel, Sciurus Carolinensis.”
“You killed a squirrel and skinned it?” Trapping Hannibal Lecter’s older brother was more than I’d bargained for. I was starting to feel queasy stuck in close quarters with him.
“I found it dead on the street. Must have been hit by a car. I did skin it though. I used to be a furrier in my old life. It was no big deal. I’m used to it.” This explanation, assuming it was true, put me at ease. Sort of. I got up and brought the false pelt over to where we were sitting since my prisoner showed no signs of making a run for it. I studied it inside out. It was a dead ringer. I’d never have guessed. Some expert I was.
“So why?” I asked him after we’d sat for a while.
“Why? Simple. The fur business went down the toilet. All those crazy activists up north. Brigitte Bardot crying over the poor little seals. Paul McCartney and that animal-rights wife of his. The EU ban. Women wearing furs getting beaned with rotten eggs. Cripes! I couldn’t get another job. No one wanted to hire anybody my age. I had debts. Made some lousy investments. It was the perfect storm. I didn’t have a choice.”
This sob story was supposed to make me feel sympathy for the old-timer I guess. Forced into a late-onset life of crime by circumstances outside his control. So far it wasn’t working.
“What did you do to the guard, drug him?”
“What would I have to do that for? The deadbeat spends the whole night in the mattress department. I did my homework.”
“You weren’t worried about the security cameras?” I gestured up to the ceiling. “You didn’t even bother to wear a mask.” I took it as a slap in the face that my museum didn’t even merit a thief willing to go through the motions.
“Bah,” he dismissed them. “Those cameras date from the fur trade. Most nights they forget to put the beaver in to run the wheel.” I had to hand it to him. He really had done his homework.
“You didn’t wear gloves either.”
“Why would I? My fingerprints aren’t on file anywhere. I’ve never been arrested. Never had so much as a parking ticket. Besides, I figured if they found a lot of strange prints around the stolen objects, it would take some of the heat off you.”
“A real humanitarian you are.”
He shrugged. “I did what I could.”
All those details; gloves, cameras, disguises, I asked because Rossi would be expecting a full report. But I didn’t really care about the answers in the end. Whether he doped the guard, bound and gagged him, or slipped him a bundle of hush money, what difference did it make to my life? There was only one question that gnawed away at my insides, and I left it till last. “You could have robbed anyplace. Stores with jewellery, cash, electronics. You could have stuck up a bank or a gas station. Why, out of all the possible places on earth did you have to pick here?”
“I have a particular interest in the fur trade,” he said. “It’s a hobby of mine, you might say. More than that really. A passion you’d have to call it. What I don’t know about the fur trade isn’t worth knowing.” The raw arrogance of his claim made me want to grab a paddle from the canoe display and finish off the job that the head bump had started, me who h
ad trouble squishing a spider. Who did he think he was, this fossil, to barge in on my territory and treat it like a u-pick, and then, as if that wasn’t enough, to pass off my personal passion as his own. It was practically identity theft.
“Is that so?” I said, cool as anything, though my effort to sound detached cost me, let me tell you. “What were you going to rip off next then, if not the furs?”
“The coins I had my eye on. The tools too. Fine specimens. Beautifully preserved. But if I had my druthers, what I’d really love to get out of here is the canoe. She’s a honey. An original. Mint condition. Probably rides the water smooth as silk. Any museum would kill to have a canoe like that in its collection.”
“This is a museum, may I remind you.” I tended to get a bit sniffy when someone dissed my place of employment.
“Sorry, son, but even you have to admit this isn’t exactly the Smithsonian.”
That stung.
“So what are you planning on doing with me?” he asked finally.
Good question. He’d stolen from me, insulted me, and mouthed off that he knew more about the fur trade than me.
I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
5
I had to admit it. Even if it did burn me. My thief’s stroke was beautiful to behold. Morrie skimmed across the water in his kayak like he was goddamn Hiawatha. Us? Our strokes were choppy. Pathetic. We slapped at the river as if we’d never made the connection between paddles and forward motion, lurching along all spastic. We were self-taught. From YouTube. But the video we’d studied seemed to have left out a crucial step. Either that or the splashed water on the lens blurried up the fine points. That first day out as a group, we’d corkscrewed in the water, humiliatingly unable to put any distance between ourselves and the dock. Eventually the kid at the rental shed stopped laughing long enough to give us a few pointers. Shmuck. We’d figured things out paddle-wise since then of course. Still we weren’t what you’d call stylish kayakers. But Morrie. Ooh, he was smooth. And fast too. He paused at the far bend of the river so we wouldn’t lose sight of him.
Things were not progressing as planned. I’d invited Mr. Big-Talking-Fur-Trade-Hotshot out on the water with us to show him up. Not the reverse. “What I don’t know about the fur trade isn’t worth knowing,” he’d crowed back at the museum. To me, he had the nerve to say that, to me of all people on this earth. The blowhard couldn’t throw down a gauntlet like that and not expect me to pick it up and smack him down with it. Hard.
Lucky for me there was more to fur trade know-how than paddling. I picked up a whack load of points on the clothing side of the board with my voyageur outfit which I’d upgraded specially for the occasion. I’d splurged on a pair of breeches on Kijiji, castoffs from a re-enactor in Winnipeg who’d shifted his allegiance to the War of 1812. This seemed as good a time as any to put them to the test. I pre-dirtied them with lint from the dryer trap and matched them up with some lisle stockings that upped my look into the stratosphere of authenticity. Morrie, on the other hand, was dressed like old people do for a transatlantic flight, in a track suit and running shoes. All he was missing was the neck pillow. To give him his due, the guy wasn’t aware that this was a competition. He thought I invited him out to enjoy what I’d finally informed him back at the museum was a common interest of ours. Sap. Did he really believe that I’d forgive him all his trespasses because he was a fellow fur trade freak?
I did some serious paddling to catch up to him. My wimpy shoulders were crying out for mercy and my blisters were growing blisters, but I couldn’t let them call the shots now. I had something to prove. Once I was a few lengths short of him Morrie started up again, but slower, more deliberate, exaggerating his strokes just enough. I got the message. I’d been going at it totally wrong all this time turns out, giving my torso a pass when it should have been carrying the load. I mimicked his style, matched my strokes and my grip to his, tweaked my posture, and for the first time since I’d lowered myself into one of these glorified tub toys my kayak scooted along as if I was the boss, heading where I aimed it instead of where it damn well pleased. And it zipped instead of crawled, as if it had eaten some energy bars for breakfast.
I came up starboard to Morrie and we fell into an easy rhythm beside each other. Before long we were so far out on the river I couldn’t even pick out the rest of the guys as pinpricks. I’d never made it this far from our starting point before, where the river widens and makes like it’s a lake. The bistros and antique stores that line the shore were completely lost from view. Nothing out there ahead of us but an IMAX panorama of trees and sky.
The water was strangely clear. Every other Sunday when I looked over the side, empty soda cans and cast-off condoms looked back up at me. Glassy-eyed fish floated belly up in the scuzzy sea-foam that had knocked them off in the first place. How was it that here, not even a kilometre off my regular route, the water was crystalline, and the fish so energetic that they leapt out of the water, practically begging to be hooked? These fish were too peppy to have been nourished on lake grunge, elite athletes compared to the street-people fish that normally plied their gimpy paths under the surface of Lac Saint-Louis.
The air smelled of doused campfire, an odour I’d never picked up before. Doused campfire and pine needles. I sniffed to be sure my nostrils weren’t hallucinating but there was no trace of the exhaust that they ordinarily had to snort up from those muscle-bound Sea-Doos that churned up a chop. Their hung-over owners must have been home sleeping it off.
The racket of civilization didn’t reach us out here, none of the honking cars or revving motorcycles that usually poked a finger in the eye of my voyageur daydreams. Even the church bells were on mute. All we could hear was the gentle whipping of our paddles through the water, the gulls kee-keeing overhead, and the insects sawing out their backdrop buzz. But then the soundtrack changed. Morrie heard it too. I could tell from the tilt of his head. A scrap of a song was drifting in on the breeze. It wasn’t pumping out of some speaker from shore. No way. We were too far out. Besides, it had the raggedy off-keyish sound of a group of guys belting it out live. The song had a thumping rhythm to it, a real chain-gang beat. And it was getting louder and louder. I gave it a good listen and I recognized it. From my research at the museum of all places. It was “C’est l’aviron,” a regular on the voyageur top forty from the 1780s. Nobody’d sung it since the fur trade went bust.
Christ! It was happening. After all my fantasizing about just such a possibility we’d actually stumbled onto the doggie door that opened up onto another age and paddled right through. We stopped advancing and bobbed on the water, letting ourselves be swallowed up by yesterday, waiting to greet our fellow travellers who now sounded almost close enough to lock paddles with. Neither of us was breathing. Who needed oxygen at a time like this? We stared straight ahead not wanting to miss the moment when they first appeared to us, our role models, our heroes.
“God, what’s up with you guys?” Our heads whiplashed at the sound of Renaud’s voice shouting out to us from behind. He was paddling like mad in our direction. Shit. Shit. Shit. He blew our chance, the gate-crasher. Wrecked it all. The singing stopped dead at the sound of Renaud’s voice and the scene morphed back to Sunday normal. Hydro poles and cell phone towers popped back into view among the trees, the fish swallowed their valium, and those superior wet-suited assholes in their jet boats zoomed in right on top of us to douse us with spray. I could see Morrie’s whole body deflating.
“Aren’t you going to pull in for lunch?” Renaud asked us. “The others are already half done eating. They suckered me into going out to catch up with you. Whew, that was one helluva workout. Now I’m really starved. You two planning on coming back for a bite any time in this century?” His particular choice of words only served to twist the knife. But what was the point of hanging around at the spot where our head-to-head with history had imploded. In glum silence Morrie and I paddled back to shore with Renaud where we picked at our lunches.
&
nbsp; It was an odd break. My crew could tell I was trying to impress the senior citizen I’d brought along for some reason they couldn’t fathom, so they toned down the goofiness, and threw around some fur trade jargon to make it look like they weren’t a bunch of ignoramuses.
“You’re not going to quiz us from the book?” Nick was feeling lucky and was eager to pump up his dinky score.
“Nah, I left it in my other pants.”
The truth was that I wasn’t in an emcee mood. Something freaky had happened back there on the water and I needed peace and quiet to knock it around in my mind. Which translated into no Q&A with the guys for the day. Their scores would hold over till next week. Without the prospect of a quiz show to keep them occupied, Sam, Renaud, and Nick drifted off to play hacky-sack, a game that I sanctioned as group leader. In all my digging through sources I never came across any evidence that voyageurs ever really played it, but it seemed plausible to me that they might stuff a beaver’s stomach with sand or pebbles and kick it around for sport like a dead haggis.
Morrie folded back up the paper lunch bag from his egg salad sandwich and put it in his pocket. He made himself comfy up against a stump, pulled a plug of wood out of his tracksuit and started to whittle. It was a bird call. Nothing fancy, but he knew which side of a pocket knife was up. He put the call up to his lips and tootled through the hole once or twice to see if it fit his specs and then shaved off some surplus here and there. We didn’t talk about what had just happened to us while we were out in our kayaks. He whittled. I watched. It was as if we agreed that the situation we’d found ourselves in was too fragile to be poked or prodded. If we were to put it into words, all the magic would fall out of it. At least that’s how I felt.
The longer I sat there and mulled it all over, the more I decided that Morrie had his head on straight. He wasn’t fixated like I was by the petty trappings of the fur traders, their food, their clothes, and all that stuff. While I had stubbornly insisted on taking a dump in the bushes, nature-boy style, before we’d set off on the water, he’d used the nearby portalet. Somehow this guy had managed to drill down to the Zen of the voyageur. I could learn a lot from him.
My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur Page 5