I love my Reepah.
I love you, too. I want more beer, please. Thanks for beer. I want boyfriend in Montréal.
I'm your boyfriend in Montréal.
I want it.
The night before she went back home she sat with him on the hotel balcony gazing down into nothing and when he asked her if she liked the parade that was going on below them she worked her lower lip and nodded and that was all; she'd virtually given up speaking. Only in the middle of the night when she woke up drunk would she say anything; usually she'd laugh and say: I want to kill myself. — Why? he'd say. — Because I hate myself. — Why? — I don't know. — Then they had another fight because she wanted him to buy a bottle of vodka for her to take back and he'd said OK but since it was Sunday all the Sociétés des alcools were closed and the grocery stores didn't have it. She didn't understand, and blamed him. He'd bought her a sixpack of beer as a consolation prize but that wasn't good enough anymore although she'd been drinking nothing else the whole time except for ginger ale; every night at about two or three she'd wake him up by tickling him and then demand one beer, one cigarette and one ginger ale; all she'd enjoyed doing was going to more sex clubs, getting drunk and wishing she were beautiful enough to be a stripper, too. No, the sixpack wasn't good enough. She kept saying in that new hard and angry voice: You stupid. You stupid. — For the first time in the yean he'd known her he felt rage. He opened one of the bottles and poured it down the toilet. — Don't call me stupid anymore, he said.
You stupid.
He poured out the second bottle. So it went with the third, the fourth, and the fifth. She looked at the last bottle and her thirsty greed momentarily overmastered her pride, so she said: OK. I'm sorry OK.
Then a moment later she looked him full in the face and said: You stupid. I hate you.
He poured the bottle out.
She took her suitcase and went into that Montréal midnight with the intention of leaving him forever, and he sat in anguish worrying about her because she didn't have any money; she'd come without money and he'd doled it out this time so she couldn't get crazy drunk and cause more trouble; what would happen to her? But she was free; she didn't want him; she had to make her own way. She came back because she'd forgotten something; then she went out again. Through the window he glimpsed her down on Saint-Denis between the giant grinning green plastic monster heads where the music went whirling crazily like a Russian orgy, singing up over the street of those shouting jigging heads from which she had previously curled timidly back; she vanished there now.
He stood at the window and saw chess-chested kicking girls and bluehaired greenfooted drummers.
An hour later she came back quietly, her face screwed up by weeping, wearing those same low brownish wrinkles he'd seen in the indigo sea salted with ice. — My friend went away, she explained. He said I can't go with him.
OK, he said. Let's go to sleep.
They turned out the light and he rolled tight against the wall to avoid annoying her. She said very softly: Please don't come to the Inukjuak anymore.
His heart almost exploded. For a moment he could not speak. — I'll go where I want, he said finally.
Please. Please.
OK. I won't go to Inukjuak anymore.
Then she laughed with relief and touched him and made love to him and said she loved him. That was the worst.
He lay awake thinking how the previous night she'd gotten drunk and said: I want to go to Inukjuak, so I can see my boyfriend in Heaven.
How did he die?
From rifle. He killed himself.
When will you kill yourself?
When I go to Inukjuak.
Early the next morning he took her to the airport and the last he saw of her she was walking away, wiping his goodbye kiss off her mouth with the back of her hand, a gesture he recognized from somewhere, although she'd never unkissed him before; then as he went to get his bus he realized that it had been with that same slow forceful-ness that she used to squash mosquitoes against the wall of the tent.
In Coral Harbour a boy had asked him why Reepah would meet him in Montréal but not in a northern town.
Maybe the south is more interesting for her because she doesn't live there, he said. Maybe she's ashamed to be seen by other Inuit when she's with a Qaallunaat.*
Don't worry, the Inuk said kindly. Lots of our girls have ugly boyfriends and we don't mind it. One girl even goes with a man with a wooden leg.
Later still, walking upon the tundra, he remembered Reepah stepping so easily and confidently from rock to tussock, never wetting her toe in any hidden puddle, never needing to look.
* White man.
WHERE ARE YOU TODAY
In the reddish-black light of a bar that stank of cigarette smoke, four men sat around a table watching their hands. They had big pale arms. Drunkenness gleamed on their waxy foreheads, and their pale shirts lay open to the chest. They were sweating and grayhaired. The U-shaped shadows across their faces and paunches cheated the checked shadows around their dark eyes that burned like cigarette-ends. Their features were bland and flushed. Their glasses were as empty as falsehoods we tell every night.
The drunken artist slowly signed his worthless painting. He had the same last name as the best chess player in the world. Slowly he rolled his cigarette between thumb and forefinger and shook it like a baton.
The drunken zombie said: The time I was dead, dead, dead, it was real medicine. I used medicine that my body couldn't accept. That was the day I died. My heart had the pulse zero. It was only sleep, a very deep sleep like heroin. You see, brothers, I'd spent more than three years in India. That was the time yellow fever was popular. At least eighty percent of the junkies caught yellow fever. But I was playing with fever. It was something like playing poker or one-eyed jack. That's how it was when I was dead.
The drunken gypsy said: There is no most beautiful. Let's say tomorrow I am free, I am — I don't have to work. . No! I want brandy! And one beer for all of us, just to water it. .
The drunken soldier, the old one in the plaid shirt, was the only one who still had money. He got brandy and one beer for all. He shook his fingers at the others, a glass of brandy in his other hand, brandy on his breath.
The drunken zombie said: They took my passport in 1978 for making samples of medicine for myself. .
Silence! Silence! cried the drunken gypsy. The soldier wishes to sing.
Bowing, the drunken soldier placed his fingers on the drunken gypsy's arm. Then he began to sing, demonstrating that he almost had teeth. His singing was a series of spitting sounds.
The drunken artist, the beefy one, squeezed his own biceps and wept as the bikini-girl twitched in the flesh of him. He'd tattooed her into marrying him so long ago that she was faded to the color of old chewing gum. He wept, and whispered: Children, everyone wants my money.
Take it easy, said the drunken gypsy, who was happy.