One or the Other

by John McFetridge

  They shook hands, and Legault said, “This is my husband, Réal,” and then to her husband, “this is the Montreal cop I told you about.”

  Still holding Dougherty’s hand, Réal looked at Legault and said, “Anglais?”

  Dougherty continued speaking French. “I just stopped by to see how she was doing.”

  Réal held up the bags and said, “I didn’t know you were here, I only got two. She didn’t want hospital food. I can share with you.” Réal was still wearing his work clothes, jeans and a t-shirt covered with white plaster and paint.

  “No, that’s okay,” Dougherty said, “I should be going.” He was thinking it was funny that he hadn’t told Judy he was working with a female cop and Legault hadn’t told her husband she was working with an Anglo cop.

  From the bed, Legault said, “Thank you for coming.”

  “No problem. I’ll come back tomorrow.” He looked at Réal and said, “My parents live in Greenfield Park, I’m visiting them.”

  “Okay, sure. Nice to meet you.”

  They shook hands again and Dougherty left.

  Instead of taking the busy Taschereau Boulevard, Dougherty drove through the quiet residential streets of Greenfield Park. His parents liked it out here in the suburbs: the Park had a small-town feel even though it was just across the bridge from Montreal. They moved there from Point St. Charles when Dougherty was in his last year of high school and he commuted to Verdun High rather than enrolling in the local Royal George High School. At the time it was a small school, and it went all the way from grade one through to the end of high school, but a few years ago the new English high school was built.

  The street Dougherty drove down was lined with identical red-brick side-by-side duplexes surrounded by green lawns, exactly like the one his parents had bought. The whole area was a housing development that went in at the same time as the Greenfield Park Shopping Centre, which still bragged it was the biggest indoor mall on the south shore, though Dougherty wasn’t sure if that was still true. He never really spent any time in the Park: the day they moved in, it felt too small for him, too isolated, but he was starting to see the appeal of that small-town feel, not quite twenty thousand people and almost all of them English-speaking, surrounded by a couple hundred thousand French speakers in Longueuil, St. Hubert and Brossard. Even in the suburbs it was the two solitudes.

  He parked in front of his parents’ house on the corner and went in through the back door that led into the kitchen. His mother was at the sink putting the last dish on the drying rack, and she said, “Eddie, I didn’t know you were coming. Do you want some supper?”

  He didn’t want her to go to the trouble so he said, “No, that’s okay, I just ate.”

  “You sure? It’s no trouble.”

  His father had stepped into the kitchen from the living room then and said, “Of course, if you’re looking for dessert there isn’t anything.”

  “That’s okay, I’m fine.” It was a running joke when Dougherty was growing up: after every dinner his father would ask if there was anything sweet and his mother would say no. By the time Dougherty moved out, they were still saying it, but it had long stopped being funny and had taken on an edge. Dougherty held up a bottle in a paper bag and said, “I got you this. There’s going to be a strike.”

  His father said, “You didn’t have to do that,” but he took the bottle. “How much do I owe you?”

  “It fell off the back of a truck. I’m working at the Queen E, watching them unload.”

  His mother said, “What happened?” She looked stricken.

  Dougherty laughed. “No, I’m still on the force, that’s what they’ve got me doing, looking for mad bombers and hijackers hiding in laundry trucks.”

  “You getting overtime?” his father said. He was pulling the bottle out of the paper bag and looking at the label, Captain Morgan’s dark, his drink. “I’ll make us a couple.” He looked at his wife and said, “Do you want one?” and she said, “Just a small one.” Another running gag that wasn’t funny anymore.

  Dougherty sat down at the kitchen table and said, “I was out here visiting someone at the Charles-LeMoyne, a Longueuil cop I’m working with. Tried to stop a jumper on the bridge and fell, ended up in the hospital.”

  “Is he hurt bad?”

  “She,” Dougherty said. “Yeah, she broke an arm and a leg.”

  His father brought a rum and Coke, Pepsi really, to the table and handed it Dougherty. He took a sip — just enough Pepsi to give it some colour.

  Going back to the counter, his father said, “What are you working on in Longueuil?”

  “Didn’t I tell you, a couple of kids were killed. Well,” he said, “we think they were killed. They washed up downriver — one on the Montreal side and one on an island.”

  Dougherty’s mother sat down and said, “Île du Fort?”

  “No, I don’t know that one, it was Île Charron.”

  His mother said, “La même chose, they change the name.”

  “You think they were killed?”

  “The bodies were in the water for a while,” Dougherty said, “so it’s hard to tell. They were strangled, but they were alive when they hit the water.”

  His mother closed her eyes and said, “Mon Dieu, quel âge ont les enfants?”

  “Dougherty said, “Fifteen, sixteen.”

  “Le même que Tommy.”

  Dougherty nodded. He drank his rum and Pepsi and got out his cigarettes. “They were coming back from a concert on Île Sainte-Hélène. They walked over the bridge.”

  Dougherty’s father handed him a lighter and got out his own Player’s Plain.

  His mother looked at his father and said, “Does Tommy go to concerts there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dougherty said, “Where is he?”

  “Out. Around, somewhere.”

  For the first time, Dougherty started to feel the emptiness in the house. He hadn’t spent a lot of time there even when he’d lived there, a couple of years after high school and the first couple of years after he joined the police force, but all his friends were still on the island in the Point and Verdun. Although with these days of being more honest with himself he’d have to admit he didn’t really have many friends from high school. He was thinking maybe the move to the south shore was more of a break than he’d realized at the time, but then he thought, No, it had a lot more to do with joining the police. The police were the enemy in the Point and Verdun.

  Dougherty’s mother said, “He gets in trouble at school.”

  “It’s July,” Dougherty said, “he’s not getting in trouble now.”

  His mother shook her head and said, “No.”

  “So, he only has one more year, right?”

  His mother got up from the table and started dragging a dishcloth over the sparkling clean countertop.

  His father said, “He’s got no idea what he’s going to do then.”

  “Does he have to know that now?” Dougherty said, “He’s got plenty of time.” He wanted to say compared to the teenagers he arrested Tommy was completely fine, but then he realized he didn’t really know Tommy that well — he still thought of him as ten years old.

  “How’s Judy?” his father said, changing the subject.

  “Good,” Dougherty said. “She got a job.”

  “That’s great.”

  His mother turned from the counter and said, “Where is it?”

  “It’s in LaSalle, at the Protestant school.”

  His father said, “Full time?”

  “Yeah, it looks good.” Dougherty finished his drink and his father picked up the empty glass and went to the counter to make another one.

  Dougherty said, “So, she’s getting an apartment there, in LaSalle.”

  With his back to Dougherty his father said, “That’s good, is
it near the river or in the Heights?”

  “Near the river. Between the river and the aqueduct. It’s a nice neighbourhood.”

  His father put the glass down in front of him, and Dougherty said, “I’m going to move in, too.”

  His mother said, “To LaSalle.”

  “Yeah, LaSalle. To the apartment.”

  “Vivre ensemble?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Not married?”

  “Her parents just broke up, I told you that, remember? Her father’s got an apartment downtown. It doesn’t seem like a good time to get married.”

  “Mais c’est bien de vivre ensemble.” It wasn’t a question.

  Dougherty tried to laugh it off and say, “It’s not a big deal, we’re going to get married. I got a ring.”

  His mother walked out of the kitchen.

  “I really didn’t think it would be such a big deal.”

  His father spoke quietly, saying, “Why would you think that?”

  “I just figured after Cheryl did it.”

  And then he realized his parents still didn’t know Cheryl was living with her boyfriend. After graduating from Concordia University, his younger sister had moved to Calgary, two thousand miles away. They both found work there when they couldn’t in Montreal, and that was bad enough for his parents. Now Dougherty felt guilty for letting the living arrangements slip. But really, he couldn’t believe anyone still believed Cheryl’s story about living with a girlfriend.

  His father just said, “Don’t tell your mother.”

  Now he was laughing out loud, the nervous tension driving it but he also was starting to find the whole thing ridiculous. “All right, sure, if you don’t want to know, we’ll keep secrets.”

  “It’s been hard enough on her with Cheryl so far away.”

  “How’s she going to feel when she finds out?”

  “She doesn’t have to find out.”

  “The truth always comes out,” Dougherty said. “That’s what my whole job is based on.”

  His father said, “This isn’t a police investigation, it’s family.”

  “That’s what most of them are.”

  Then his father didn’t say anything. He drank his rum and Pepsi and lit another Player’s Plain.

  Dougherty said, “If Cheryl was here she’d be giving you a hard time for still smoking, especially unfiltereds, after the open-heart surgery. You don’t miss that, do you?”

  He was hoping for a laugh but his father just said, “Yes, I do.”

  “Okay, fine.” Then Dougherty didn’t say anything for a moment. When it started to get awkward he said, “We’re going to get married. I really do have the ring.”

  “Why don’t you stay in your apartment until then? Just keep the apartment.”

  “I don’t know,” Dougherty said. “We went out to look at the school and we saw an apartment for rent, it just kind of happened.”

  “It hasn’t happened yet.”

  “I didn’t think it would be such a big deal, we’re not kids.”

  His father didn’t say anything.

  Dougherty let out a sigh and stood up, saying, “All right, well, I better get home. Big day tomorrow watching the maids make the beds.”

  “All right.”

  Dougherty walked to the back door and stopped and said, “It’s going to be okay.”

  “I know.”

  Outside it was starting to get dark, and the streets were quiet. Dougherty drove through town again instead of heading straight to Taschereau. It was all flat, must have been farmers’ fields before it became suburbs, though there were also older houses in Greenfield Park, wooden houses that probably dated back a hundred years. Dougherty passed Royal George School, an old red-brick building that was now Royal George Elementary and had a few portable classrooms in the parking lot for the last of the Baby Boomers.

  Without thinking about it, he realized he was taking Victoria Bridge into the city instead of the newer Champlain that hooked up to the expressways. This was more like driving through town. What he was thinking about was the way people were committing to one another these days. Did it make a difference if Cheryl and her boyfriend got married or if he and Judy got married? They’d still be together, they’d still be committed to one another.

  As he crossed the bridge, going over the section that lifted for the locks so the roadway was always close to the river, so different from the Jacques Cartier Bridge, he was thinking about Legault in the hospital and how she said she was a separatist. The politics didn’t really mean anything to Dougherty, what flags flew, what areas called themselves a country, where the borders were. He crossed into the United States often enough — going camping with his parents when he was a kid, going to the drive-in when he started dating, he and Judy had been to Vermont so many times it didn’t feel like another country.

  Anyway, it really didn’t seem like separation was going to go anywhere, it felt like another thing leftover from the ’60s.

  But marriage seemed like the right thing. Dougherty was thinking it did make a difference, it wasn’t the same as living together. He was going to ask Judy to get married. They weren’t anything like her parents — it was totally different.

  Then the Olympics started and he was working twenty-four hours a day.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  First there was the dismantling of the Corridart, a four-mile-long art installation by sixty artists along Sherbrooke Street leading from downtown to the shiny, almost-finished Olympic Stadium.

  The exhibits had taken months to put up along the street, and a few days before the opening ceremony the mayor ordered them taken down and hundreds of cops stood guard in the middle of the night while all the art was thrown into dump trucks and taken away.

  Dougherty was one of a few dozen detectives walking the street and sitting in unmarked cars looking to see who came by to protest. There was a lot of shouting and a couple of people had to be kept away by uniform cops but no one was arrested.

  In the car, watching what looked like a three-storey building being pulled down, LeBlanc said, “Why is that art?”

  “I don’t know, it looks just like that building,” Dougherty said, pointing to a real three-storey brick building on the next block. The real building and the façade on the front of aluminum scaffolding looked exactly the same. Except the façade was being ripped down and tossed into dump trucks.

  LeBlanc said, “Why is it being torn down?”

  “I don’t know.” No one did, the order was simply to take it all down. Dougherty heard rumours that the mayor, after years and years of constant praise for everything from Expo 67 to the Métro to the expressways, was finally being criticized. Corridart had been up for six days and was supposed to be up throughout the Olympics. There were even two stages set up along the way that were supposed to have hundreds of performances. But some of the art pointed out how much money was being spent on a two-week sporting event hardly anyone really cared about and some of it was about housing, but most of it was too abstract for Dougherty. He thought there was probably some truth to the criticism, but he also figured the mayor was probably due for some pushback. All that building that went on the past few decades wasn’t all sunshine and roses.

  Dougherty met Judy when she was protesting a plan to kick thousands of people out of their homes that were then going to be bulldozed to put up huge apartment buildings and condominiums, and while they had managed to stop some of the development — only phase one got built — that was one small victory in years of losses: Griffintown in the Point was lost, a bunch of the east end was torn up to make way for the Ville-Marie Expressway and a lot of houses in NDG were lost for the Décarie Expressway. There were protests, of course, but the people were tossed out and the new buildings and roads were built.

  Now the Olympics felt like the final straw, t
he last big build that people were willing to put up with, and the artists of Corridart were going to let everyone know.

  “We’ll be getting overtime every day now,” LeBlanc said. “From now till the end of the Olympics.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “It’s good. We’re not getting a raise this year. We can’t go on strike like everyone else.”

  “No.”

  “I might get a new car,” LeBlanc said.

  It was starting to get light out, and Dougherty was watching a few people coming towards them down St. Famille Street looking like they were ready to make trouble.

  “Maybe a Datsun. You ever drive a Datsun?”

  “No.”

  “Or a Peugeot, my uncle has a Peugeot, it’s all right. Maybe a Renault. You ever work youth services? They drive Renaults.”

  There were three people coming down the street, and Dougherty tensed up as they turned onto Sherbrooke.

  “You like American cars? Maybe a Duster.”

  “Those guys look like trouble to you?” Dougherty pointed at the three men, all of them maybe twenty years old, skinny with long hair and wearing t-shirts and jeans.

  “Yeah,” LeBlanc said, “if you’re a plate of bacon and eggs. They look like they worked all night and they’re going to breakfast.”

  “What did they do all night?”

  “They look like a cleaning crew.”

  Dougherty watched the three young men cross Sherbrooke and head farther south towards St. Catherine. They glanced at the destruction going on for miles along the street and kept walking.

  LeBlanc said, “Are you back this afternoon, four to midnight?”

  “No,” Dougherty said, “I’m off for a couple of days.”

  “You took time off now, with all this overtime? You crazy?”

  “What about those guys,” Dougherty said, pointing. “What are they doing?”

  “The bus driver?”

  “No, those guys beside him.”

  Three people standing by the open door of the bus, the driver with a cup of coffee in his hand.

  LeBlanc said, “You do need some sleep — you’re starting to sound like the Mounties, you see bogeymen everywhere.”