There were two angles to his strategy that Dave hadn’t told me about. First, he knew that the big guys and tall guys had a tendency to drag things out. Second, he always wore shoes that looked like plain city shoes, but they had steel toes. He took a run, five steps, and hammered Derek right under his jaw, like he was punting. We heard the jaw split along its length like a wooden splint. For about ten seconds, Derek tried to shut his mouth, sucking at the air like a fish. Then he fell back onto his bent knees. His legs were shaking. Dave came up to hit him again, but he held back. Derek was spewing a huge pink-and-red geyser into the air. It took five of us to turn him on his side, and if we hadn’t had the idea, he’d have choked to death on his broken teeth.
By the time we’d done that, the Indian had disappeared.
The next day, people honored an old Centre-Sud tradition.
Early in the morning, they tossed twenty dozen eggs at the wall of Dan Quesnel’s triplex. It was their way of marking the houses of those who’d talked to the police. Dave didn’t even hear it. He was high as a kite from the painkillers he’d been given at the hospital. He’d been released during the night. They’d wrapped up his hand, put his face together a bit, and made him promise to come back right away if he started shitting or pissing blood.
It was the smell of rotten eggs cooking in the sun that woke him at about ten thirty. The smell, and the pain that had returned. He went out into the street. Monsieur Quesnel and I were trying to assess the damage. Dave apologized to the owner of the house and gave me three hundred dollars in twenties and fifties to rent a pressure hose and buy him a forty-ouncer of Johnnie Walker and a bag of ice. He watched me work all afternoon, sitting in a folding chair on the sidewalk, with his Scotch on one side of him and the pail of ice on the other. He soaked his hand — all messed up with staples, scabs, and stitches — in the cold water, and from time to time he dipped his fingers in his glass to collect some ice cubes. All afternoon we heard police sirens in the Centre-Sud. It was the guys from the provincial police and the Montreal police coming to arrest Teddy Bear and his boys. They’d had to move the operation up because of Dave’s acting out, and they weren’t too happy about that.
One day later the Indian left, and we never saw him again. Never saw Derek again either. When he got out of the hospital, he headed for the North Shore. We later heard that he had gotten himself arrested for forcing a thirteen-year-old girl into porn.
On that day before Dave left, I finished cleaning off the wall at six o’clock, and he gave me more money. He told me to go and buy hot dogs for us to eat in the stands of Walter Stewart Park. He wanted to see Kim play softball one last time. The heat had let up a little, and we felt good.
That night, for the first time, I decided to ask Dave if it bothered him that everyone called him the Indian. Did he find it racist or anything like that? Should we have called him something else?
“It’s hard to answer, because where I come from, the word means two different things. If you say someone dead or gone is a real Indian, it means he’s brave. Someone who knows how to live and honors the ancestors. My uncle Robertson once said of my grandfather that he was almost an Indian. That’s the only time in my life I’ve heard that said about a white man, and I can’t imagine a bigger compliment. On the other hand, if you say of someone, behind his back or to his face, that he’s a goddamn Indian or a fucking Indian, it means he’s a drunk, a fool, or a hothead, a guy you can’t trust and who really doesn’t know how to take care of his people.”
So I asked him again: “Well, do you mind that?”
He grinned and said: “Nah. I’m good either way.”
The Haunted Crack House
by Michel Basilières
Boulevard Saint-Laurent
Ryan the Rat — Academy Award winner and cousin to Mickey Mouse (or so he said) — was red-faced and waving his arms, spittle flying, defending his turf. He shouted. He swore. He threatened to call the cops. But the bigger, burlier, toothless, bald-headed panhandler grabbed Ryan’s entire face with one fat hand and shoved him to the ground, beating him with a white cane.
In the slush, Ryan twisted and crawled away. The victor leaned on his glinting white cane and faced the door of the restaurant, smiling at the customers shuffling in and out of the cold. Puffs of steam escaped the open door, carrying the smell of smoked meat, french fries, and beer across Boulevard Saint-Laurent and into the bookstore.
I sat on a high stool behind a wooden counter, facing the display window. Every day I watched people line up, rain or shine, to eat at Schwartz’s. Whether it was broiling in the summer or freezing in the winter, the restaurant’s queue stretched for over an hour’s wait. Even after midnight you had to share a table.
Ryan stood ten feet away from the interloper who had just beaten him, yelling still, but now looking for a gap in the traffic. Finding one, he made a break for it. He loped and staggered across the street, pulling himself up into the recessed entrance, and yanked hard on the handle. He stepped up across the threshold and jumped away as the ancient coiled springs slammed the wooden, glass-paneled door back to the frame. The bell rang.
“Hi, Ryan.”
He was twitching, his wire-frame glasses askew, his tattered cotton coat open. “Jesus fucking Christ. That fucker beat me. Did you see that?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuckin’ took my spot. That was my spot. Suppertime, that’s my spot.”
“I thought you guys had a schedule.”
“Yeah, we do. Now’s my time. Fucker took my spot, how am I going to make my money now?” He made his way to the center of the bookstore, took off his coat, and sat on the couch. “Can I dry my coat on the heater?”
“Sure. Don’t let it catch fire.”
It was a dark evening in late November and no customers were in the store. I was pricing a box of paperbacks I’d bought earlier. Across the street, Fucker was nonchalantly panhandling. He seemed to be doing well. Panhandlers come and go, but in this neighborhood they are mostly fixtures. Guys like Ryan actually lived, grew up, and fell apart here. This guy with the cane was new.
“I don’t recognize him,” I said.
Ryan took off his toque, shook out his head, walked over, and stood in front of my counter.
“I don’t know who he is, either. I told him we got a system here, and that he wasn’t welcome in our territory.”
“Gonna get your buddies together and talk some sense into him?” I asked. There were four or five of them, mostly spindly derelicts, but numbers count. And even though Cane Man — or Fucker — was big, Ryan’s closest ally on the street, Billy One-Eye, was a scrapper. I’d seen him hold off more than one cop at a time.
“I ain’t seen anybody all day,” Ryan said. “Can I use the bathroom?”
The toilet in the back room wasn’t for customers, but we often let our friends use it. Ryan was wet with dirty slush. “Go ahead. Don’t mess it up.”