“All my life I was afraid,” says Claudine, to no one in particular. “I don’t even know what I was afraid of. Of seeing the world as it was, I think, of not being strong enough to face reality. I was guilty, like everyone else; I went along with it because he paid us, because he dazzled us, because he was from our world and knew how to talk to us, because I believed it would lift us out of our misery, because my daughter wanted so much to be chosen to act on that show. My God how she wanted... We were always telling her she had to believe in her dreams. Cursed, shitty dreams.”
Stunned by the violence of these last words, Raphaëlle clings to Victoria’s fat leg as the woman strokes her hair, puts a vagabond barrette carefully back in place. Géraldine sets the photo down, between portraits of a faded Jehane Benoit and a dashing Ricardo. Of the lovely little doe-eyed brunette in the white porcelain frame, nothing remains. Not the faintest glimmer in her eyes. Everything has been ravaged, lost. A shipwreck.
“I was a bad mother. But today I paid my dues. Yes, I killed him. And then I killed his wife, the journalist, and my husband. I killed them all, and my turn will come. I’m not afraid anymore.” Claudine smiles at David and Géraldine, straightening her thin shoulders proudly. This small, frail, nondescript woman of sixty, whom everyone pushed aside without a thought, was capable of the worst.
David turns toward Géraldine and detects no sign of distress on her smooth face. He’s not surprised. He sometimes wonders if his partner didn’t leave her soul behind in the massacre at Nyamata.
“When I’m on the inside, and too weak to say it, you’ll tell the journalists.”
“What’s that, Madame Lachance?” Géraldine asks in a calm voice.
“You’ll tell them that my daughter, my Victoria, was a pretty little girl, such a pretty little girl.”
Three Tshakapesh Dreams
by Samuel Archibald
Translated from French by Donald Winkler
Centre-Sud
Yeah, I remember the story, even if I don’t get to tell it very often.
It happened after the war. They found the kid in the Frontenac Library bathroom with a needle sticking out of his arm. It was no surprise he’d been shooting up. Ontario Street’s known for its poets, whores, and druggies. Simon was all three. He often peddled his ass to pay for his dope, then when he got straight for a while, he gave poetry readings. Sometimes, like on that day, he went to the library and left his dogs tied to a bicycle rack at the door while he picked up books by Carole David or Patrice Desbiens. No one knew how long he’d been dead. No one knew what to do with his dogs. The medics brought out the body, with help from the Montreal police. They kept the dogs at the pound for a bit, in separate cages. There wasn’t much chance of them being adopted. They were two pit bulls full of fleas and with shitty pedigrees. After a week, the vet came to give them the needle too.
That’s how families bite the dust in the Centre-Sud.
In those days, no one knew the Indian was a cop.
It was Brisebois, his contact at the provincial police, who called him at home to tell him Simon was dead. The Indian asked if they were going to do an autopsy. Brisebois said everyone could see it was an overdose, but the Indian just laughed. Later, the Indian would tell me: “Simon may have had his faults, but he knew how to shoot up.”
When you say the war around here, you don’t mean Iraq or Afghanistan. You mean the Great Quebec Biker War. You had to be in Montreal at the end of the 1990s to understand: Maurice “Mom” Boucher thinking he’s Joseph Stalin, the independents against the Hells Angels, about 160 dead, nearly 200 attempted murders, and bombs exploding all over the place. People stopped going out. It wasn’t Montreal anymore; it was Belfast. When the government and the police got fed up, they threw everyone inside.
The Indian was too young to play a role in the 2001 deployment, he was still in Nicolet. His superiors posted him in Montreal afterward, undercover, so he could keep an eye on things in the city. He did little jobs around the neighborhood, like peddling stolen goods and driving taxis for escorts. He lived just below us, in Dan Quesnel’s triplex on Larivière Street. It was just by Saint-Eusèbe Church and the McDonald’s cigarette factory, where in spring and summer the dried tobacco smells so much like cinnamon buns that it’s been twenty years since I’ve eaten one of those damned buns.
The Indian made Brisebois promise to at least check out the stash they’d found in Simon’s pockets.
Brisebois called him back the next day to tell him they’d found coke and a bag of almost-pure heroin.
The Indian went to an AA meeting on Wednesday. People were used to seeing him there; being an alcoholic was part of his cover. He picked up a donut and listened as people spilled their guts until the cigarette break. Then he went to ask Keven Savoie if he knew where to find Kim. The guy told him that Kim barely came around anymore, but he could find her on Mondays and Thursdays at Walter Stewart Park. She played in a lesbian softball league.
He caught up with Kim the next night, after her game. She played shortstop, really good hands. Kim was Simon’s oldest friend, but since she’d stopped using, she hadn’t seen him much. After getting herself clean, Kim started working for Stella, a sex workers organization. She handed out condoms and guidance to the girls in that part of town.
Kim and the Indian sobbed in each other’s arms for ten minutes. Kim couldn’t tell him a lot, but she had the same thought that he did: there was something fishy about Simon dying from a heroin overdose. Smack, for him, was a rich kid’s drug, and he mainly shot coke. Besides, where would he have gotten pure heroin with half the country’s criminals behind bars?
In those days, the Indian called himself Dave Tshakapesh.
He’d taken the name in memory of his grandfather, who had been a bush pilot for Hydro-Québec and for outfitters in the north. He’d married a Robertson from Pointe-Bleue and spent most of his life with the Innu, the Atikamekw, and the Cree. He knew lots of stories, which he’d told Dave years ago, when he was just a kid. Stories about Carcajou, the Wendigo, and especially Tshakapesh, the boy who succeeds in everything he undertakes.
Tshakapesh was born prematurely, when the black bear devoured his father and his mother. It was his sister who found him, rolled into a ball in the uterus that had been ripped from his mother’s body. Tshakapesh’s sister brought the little creature back to camp, where he wormed his way out of the womb all by himself. Then he stood up and asked his sister to go and get his bow and arrows so that he could avenge his parents. Dave loved that idea: a baby born ready for war.
When Simon died, Dave knew something terrible was going to happen. He’d dreamed that a giant bear was marching through the Centre-Sud, holding onto the big L-shaped tower of the Quebec police, the building all the kids on Ontario Street see when they look to the sky, the building everyone still calls by its old name: the Parthenais Prison.
The following afternoon, Dave went to see Big Derek.
You don’t see Big Derek around here much anymore, but back then, he was kind of a celebrity. He trained for strongman competitions, and he had his picture in the paper along with Hugo Girard. In the crime world, he was known as the doorman at Sex Mania, the strip club at the corner of Ontario and Bercy. He was a pimp. He dealt dope to the strippers and collected debts for the Ontario Street loan sharks. People got really good at digging out money when Derek came to the door. He appeared to weigh three hundred pounds, he had tattoos up and down his arms, and he could pull a fire truck with his jaws. That fucker had muscles in places good Christians don’t even have skin.