Métis Beach

by Claudine Bourbonnais

  She shivered. “So you’ll never come home?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Yes, that’s what you said. You’ve been gone six years. You never think about your mother?” Her lips were trembling. “If you’d only listened to your father, none of this would have happened.”

  Of course, back to that old chestnut — my father. I was giving her good news, and she needed to bring me down. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

  She stiffened, “Happy, why?”

  Things weren’t going as I had hoped.

  Our meal arrived, veal scallopini for my mother, penne alla vodka for me, and a bottle of Chianti I’d be the only one drinking. I was in a sour mood now. I emptied my glass of champagne and started in on my bottle of wine.

  “Romain, you drink too much.…”

  I ignored the remark. I continued, annoyed, “You’ll tell him about Robert Egan? You’ll tell him that the police, the real police, never looked for me? That Robert Egan did all of that to scare me. That I’m not a criminal.” She paled. “That’s what he thinks of me, isn’t it? That I’m a scoundrel, a screw-up. I’m sure it’s convenient for him, for the old man, to think his son is worthless. He always hated me. I could barely walk, and he hated me already.”

  “Romain!” she exclaimed, indignant.

  “I didn’t rape Gail! It isn’t that hard to understand!”

  “Shush! Not so loud!”

  “Nobody can understand us!”

  She closed her eyes, and wavered. I tried to calm down, despite the blood pounding in my ears. I said, “I share Dad’s anger. Robert Egan invented everything and then made sure he lost his contracts. What a bastard.…”

  “It’s been hard on your father since then. You should understand.…”

  I clenched my jaw, “I do understand! That’s what I’m saying!”

  “Lower your voice!”

  “I understand very well, and I also know Dad. I know that if Robert Egan offered him a job tomorrow, he wouldn’t hesitate to kiss his.…”

  “Enough! You can’t talk about your father like that!”

  I grabbed the bottle of Chianti and poured myself a large glass.

  “How can you live with such a coward, Ma?”

  “How dare you say something like that!”

  “I’m not trying to insult you, I’m just asking.”

  “You should know, young man, that I learned what duty means! You accept your problems, and you deal with them. We didn’t run away from them like … you kids.”

  “Is that a personal attack?”

  “I’m not insulting you, I’m just saying how we do things.”

  She shoved her plate away from her. “I’m not hungry anymore. I want to go back to the hotel.”

  “You’re not going to leave like that, are you? You barely touched your plate.” I took her hand, but she freed it impatiently. “I’m sorry, Ma. You know I get so mad when I talk about Dad. Ma, please!”

  Furious, she grabbed her handbag off the chair, got up, and made her way to the exit.

  “Ma! Wait for me!”

  The waiter grabbed me by the arm. “Hey, now! Leaving without paying?”

  I didn’t sleep all night. My mother didn’t either. More than once I heard her turning on the tap, and the water running down the drain. The next morning, she barely touched her breakfast and refused to get a coffee at Tony’s, despite having promised him the day before. All my half-hearted apologies fell on deaf ears. Letting her leave this way broke my heart. “Ma?” Again, she simply shrugged. Her luggage was ready, and she waited out the morning in the small living room, her eyes dark. It was quarter to eight. Her train left at ten.

  “Ma?” She ended up bursting into tears, saying that she understood what I was feeling, but my father wasn’t the monster I thought him to be.

  “Okay, Ma.”

  Before leaving the suite, she covered her head with her horrible yellow hat, the one for grand occasions. I took her luggage; she insisted that she carry Ethel’s small oil painting, carefully covered in brown paper.

  We were quite the sight on the platform at Grand Central, both stiff with embarrassment. As if the past days spent together hadn’t brought us closer at all. A hug? Not a chance. Two noisy little kisses on each other’s cheeks. I helped her get on board, placed her suitcase in the luggage compartment.

  She seemed sad to see me go, “When will you come home?”

  “I don’t know. Soon, perhaps.”

  A shadow of disappointment veiled her eyes. Dana’s house in Métis Beach? I’d talk to her some other time about it. Moïse might take care of it when he went up there with Louise. For now, it would be best to just leave it at that.

  “Come for Christmas at least. I’ll make you tourtières.”

  “Maybe.”

  Before returning to my place in the West Village, I had a meeting in Flatbush, in Brooklyn. Some long-haired guy was trying to sell his 1966 Westfalia. I’d seen the ad on a bulletin board in a Village coffee house. The van was in almost mint condition, a beautiful velvet green. I paid nine hundred dollars cash, filled out the paperwork, and drove back to Manhattan.

  I was thinking about my mother. She simply couldn’t understand my need to move forward, not backwards. The events in Métis Beach in 1962, and now Dana’s death in New York. I needed to move on to something else. Breathe and live a little, breathe and be fully alive. The St. Regis, the gifts and moments spent with my mother, I gave them to her knowing I’d be leaving, even farther this time. It was the last time we saw each other. She died three years later, at the age of fifty-eight.

  I packed my bags, gave the loft keys to the doorman, leaving everything inside. I was rich and free. In my 1966 Westfalia, heading west, my heart filled with promise, I glanced in my rear-view mirror. Behind me,

  Gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded — at least that’s what I thought then.

  You couldn’t have said it better than Jack Kerouac.…

  IV

  KEN, PETE, BOBBY, AND THE REST

  1

  Two ghosts, their heads smooth like bowling balls, desperately waving their arms, covered in mud, stinking of sweat and fear, terrified by what they’d seen in Fort Lewis. The summary execution of a soldier from their company, a simpleton (yes, the army drafted them too), barely eighteen. His crime had been to steal a grenade from the munitions dump and threaten to pull the pin.

  I picked the guys up on Route 160 south of Sacramento. Two GIs on the run, AWOL — deserters, in other words. They appeared out of nowhere, in the rain, and jumped in front of the Westfalia which, by chance, hadn’t been going very fast. They’d scared me shitless! I slammed on the brakes, and the Volks skidded on the wet pavement. They slammed their dirty hands against the windows, which I was not opening. What do you want? I quickly understood they were at their wits’ end, begging me to let them climb aboard. So I did, though not without a certain pang of emotion when I saw them dirty my backseat with their muddy boots and soiled clothes. Relieved, grateful, they told me, still in shock over what had been done to the poor guy, a young black killed right in front of them in Fort Lewis, in Washington state. One of them, the one called Pete, said, “He was like a seven-year-old, in his head, I mean, for God’s sake!” The other, John, added, “He should have been in an asylum, not in the army! But it’s like the rest of it, they don’t give a fuck!” Pete took over, breathless, wiping his eyes with his large, dirty hands, “John and me, man, we tried to reason with him, but he was laughing and shouting, ‘Boom! Boom!’ pretending to pull the pin. I was going to go for him from behind, to neutralize him, you know. But that goddamn sergeant ordered me to stand down.” He caught his breath and went on, his voice racked with emotion, “And the m
otherfucker shot him down in front of us. Like he was a wild turkey.”

  I had saved their lives, or so they kept telling me as the Westfalia cut through the night and rain, as dark and wet as their soiled clothes. They knew they’d find a friend in a Westfalia, “a hippie van,” you could see it coming down the road even in the dark by the shape of its headlights. They asked me where I was going. “San Francisco? Great.” They mentioned some party in Berkeley, as excited as teenagers, “You absolutely have to come with us. We want to thank you.” A madhouse of a party, they said. They’d go wild for a night or two before slipping underground, free from goddamn Vietnam, the goddamn army, those goddamn madmen.

  Between Sacramento and Berkeley, I became their Canadian friend. They slapped me on the back, we laughed together. “Canada? God, you’re lucky!” We got into Berkeley late, driving through poorly lit streets lined with modest houses. They told me to park the Westfalia in front of one of them, stucco peeling. Impatiently, they dragged me inside, a dirty place heavy with cigarette smoke, pot and hashish as well, and the stench of unwashed bodies. Throbbing music — the Doors — loud enough to tear your skull into a thousand pieces. On all sides, young men and women lay slumped, eyes staring emptily, others were fucking in rooms around the house, in twos and threes and more. One guy was vomiting in the toilet (it might have been a girl, it was hard to tell). “California hospitality!” Pete laughed at my astonished air. He draped his arm around my shoulders and led me to the tiny kitchen littered with empty bottles and old pizza boxes; both he and John grabbed a beer and offered me one. “Our way of saying thanks,” Pete said. “You can drink what you want, fuck who you want. Here, that’s all the girls are waiting for.” Pete and John were already on their second beer, then third, then fourth. Ready to get back to civilian life, though sentenced to living underground. They pulled their shirts off to reveal muscled chests and started cruising for available girls. It wasn’t my sort of place, my sort of thing, my sort of people. A few guys were looking at me as if I’d just gotten off a spaceship, with my short hair and the back of my neck shaved. I was about to thank Pete and John and get back on the road for San Francisco when a girl threw herself on me — “Hey, you, handsome!” — her hand already in my pants. Pete burst out laughing, “Welcome to California!”

  The next morning, I opened my eyes, head pounding (something slipped into my drink?). The girl with whom I’d supposedly spent the night, a vague memory, was gone now. My head heavy, ready to explode, I got up, got dressed. I found the girl in the living room in the arms of another guy, both of them naked and sleeping, mouths open. I left the house, my ears buzzing, ready to drive to San Francisco, when a guy called out to me on the street.

  “Yours?”

  He was contemplating the Westfalia, circling around it, limping, a penguin’s gait.

  “Yes.”

  “Nice wheels.”

  He glanced at the licence plate, furrowed his brow.

  “New York state?”

  “New York City. Got in yesterday.”

  He smiled. Turned his eyes back to the Volks, as if I had just made him an offer and he was thinking about the price. Then he glanced back at the house I had come out of. The rain had stopped, the sky was clear.

  “I’m here to see a friend. You were at the party?”

  I nodded. He barked a disdainful laugh, “I hate those happenings.”

  And I thought, me too.

  Pete came out of the house, bare-chested, his combat boots unlaced, and they fell into each other’s arms. Pete told me they were childhood friends, had grown up in the same neighbourhood in Oakland, their fathers had worked in the same factory.

  He was called Ken Lafayette. A face half-angel, half-devil. A hungry mouth, a turned-up nose, round cheeks like Jon Voight — with whom he also shared his feminine blondness and intense stare, always teasing. He studied sociology at the University of California at Berkeley and led the antiwar committee on campus. “He’s incredible,” Pete said. “He’s the best.”

  His voice filled with gratitude, Pete told him how I’d “saved” them, John and him. (Apparently, someone was supposed to pick them up north of Sacramento, but he never showed, forcing them to hitchhike, a risky proposition for two AWOL soldiers the FBI would soon be looking for.) Their reunion quickly turned sour. “So what should we have done?” Pete asked. Ken shook his head, annoyed. And Pete, trying to calm down, told Ken how lucky they’d been to have come upon me. “Roman is Canadian and has an American friend who fled to Canada.”

  Ken ran his hand through his hair. “Really? You’re Canadian? Travelling?”

  “No. I’m a permanent resident. Have been for five years. Medical exemption. Eye problem. An accident.”

  He stared at me. Intense, judging eyes, separated by two hard lines between his eyebrows, as if he was constantly fighting a headache.

  “And what are you doing here?”

  Forgetting New York, I thought. Instead, I said in a falsely joyful tone, “I came to see California. Spend a bit of time here. Maybe settle down in San Francisco. I don’t know yet. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  He didn’t want to know more than that. He turned towards Pete, slapped him on the back. “Well, this morning I’ve got to take care of Pete and John. But after, come and see the committee. I’ll show you what we’re doing here.”

  Despite his eyes, dancing with strange fire, I agreed. Ken Lafayette was one of those rare people with an unexplainable, powerful magnetism.

  2

  My visit to the antiwar committee should have been my first warning.

  We agreed to meet at his place, a large apartment on Le Roy Avenue, with tons of books in every room and little furniture. I got there on time, two o’clock in the afternoon. He opened the door, his chest bare. He seemed surprised to see me. “Ah, yes,” he said after a moment. “I know who you are. The Canadian. Okay, well, no matter. I need to go to the committee today anyway. Give me a minute, let me find a shirt.”

  We walked along Hearst Avenue. Ken kept talking, walking quickly, despite a pronounced limp. One of his legs was shorter than the other, at least I thought. It gave him that singular walk. With pride, he told me about his latest action on campus — “under my orders,” dozens of students had barricaded themselves in a building to protest the refusal of the board to allow Eldridge Cleaver to hold a seminar on racism.

  “You know who I’m talking about?”

  “The Black Panther.”

  “Exactly. You know what Ronald Reagan, our benevolent governor, said? If Cleaver was allowed to teach students, they’d go home that night and slit their parents’ throats!” He burst out laughing. “But we won! Cleaver will come to Berkeley, as it should be. We’ll see if the blood of infidels is spilled behind the white picket fences!”

  I shuddered, thinking of the women Cleaver admitted to raping in Soul on Ice, written in prison. “Rape was an insurrectionary act.” White women, but black ones too — he had trained and perfected his technique. Dana read the book before tearing it apart, page by page. “The monster! The bastard! And the pathetic intellectuals praising him! They should all be hung by the kishkes!”

  “The what?”

  “The balls, Romain.” Furious, she began writing a long opinion piece that the New York Times published, “What would Cleaver say if we trivialized the situation of blacks the way he trivializes rape?” In the days that followed, she received hundreds of hateful letters for having dared attack a charismatic leader of the black resistance.

  “You’ll come and listen to him?” asked an enthusiastic Ken. “You can’t miss it.”

  Bow down to an impenitent rapist! Never!

  But instead, like a coward, I blurted out, “You’re right. Can’t miss it.”

  At the committee office, a handful of volunteers were talking all at once. Phones ringing off the hook, a dense cloud of cigarette smoke
in the air, thick enough to cut with a knife. As soon as they saw Ken, they rushed to surround him. In the confusion, I learned that one of them had just been arrested; it seemed serious, they spoke of accusations of sabotage, a factory whose production had been interrupted, injuries perhaps? Workers evacuated?

  “Shut up!” Ken ordered. “Can’t you see I’m with someone?”

  Silence fell. They lowered their eyes. Ken introduced me, the Canadian. I wanted to disappear. A tall guy with long hair and a dishevelled beard said, almost supplicating, “You need to call the lawyer. It’s serious, this time.” “Later,” Ken shut him up. “It can wait.” Resigned, the guy mumbled, “Fine, you’re the boss.” And the crowd around us dissolved, returned to their desks.

  “Listen, Ken,” I said, embarrassed. “We’ll catch up some other time. They seem to need you.”

  “If they don’t have the nerve, they should go back to their mothers. Courage isn’t given to everyone, right?”

  “But we’re talking about one of your activists, no?”

  “We need arrests. We need trials.” He spoke with enthusiasm, but sounded almost annoyed. “It’s the means we have to make sure they talk about us, to spread our ideas. We’re fighting imperialism. The greatest revolutionaries all spoke from prison cells.” Paraphrasing Henry David Thoreau, as if the words of the great man were his own.

  He invited me to stay in his large apartment on Le Roy Avenue. It was generous and unexpected coming from a guy who showed so little regard for those around him. I accepted, thankful; it would let me explore the city, its surroundings, as well as San Francisco some twenty minutes away. It would give me time to decide where I wanted to settle down. To my great surprise, I discovered an affable, solicitous young man; he let me stay in the larger of the two bedrooms, the one with a window at the back and not on the street. We spent hours talking together, discussions that seemed more like political science lessons than an exchange of ideas. He gave me all sorts of suggestions about what to read — Marxist philosophers, those of the Frankfurt School in particular — and his house was full of them, I could stretch out my arm out and grab one from the numerous makeshift bookcases, old boards lying on bricks. There were magazines as well, Monthly Review, and Radical America, and Ramparts, rather off-putting and ponderous reading, which I suspected students on campus read the way others start smoking cigarettes, to look cool, to be part of a group, not to be suspect. “Marxism is the unavoidable philosophy of our time,” Ken would repeat. Though he never mentioned the origin of that gem, Jean-Paul Sartre. But I listened to him, impressed to an extent that surprised even myself. He was so knowledgeable, and he had this way of talking to you, looking at you straight in the eye as if hypnotizing you, manipulating activist jargon with disconcerting skill to win you over to the Cause, which he called The Big C, or better yet, make you look like a fool if you didn’t have the right opinions.