River City (73 page)
“Good roast pork today,” Sir Herbert mentioned upon reaching street level.
“Succulent.” Sir Charles smacked his lips.
Sir Edward had a sudden thought. “I say, Sir Herbert, we’re going your way.” “That’s true, we are,” Sir Charles concurred.
“Jolly good, then,” Sir Herbert offered. “Fall into step. Look lively now.”
The three old men shuffled their way east on Sherbrooke Street, enjoying the escort of the four riflemen. They smiled at their friends, waved to those who gazed from windows, feeling that victory was in the air, even that they were somewhat younger again—stalwart lads, heroes returned from the trenches to commandeer their country’s devotion.
Only when she went out with him did she realize how lonely she’d allowed herself to become. Only when she laughed with Roger did she understand that her spirit had cracked, that she’d been living on a fortitude nurtured deep within herself. She did not recognize her reflection, not as she had appeared back then and certainly not now, this fresh smile in her eyes, this sudden jittery laughter in the throat. Who is this dame? She recognized only her fierce determination to neither succumb nor die. Now she was seeing someone else—the person she
might become, but also, the person she had always meant herself to be. Only when she kissed him did she realize that she was worn, that in another month without him, or a week, or an hour, she’d have been worn right down, forever. Only when he held her in his arms under the rear porch light to her home—because she still could not enter by the front door—did she grasp that her life these days was dangerous, that anyone entering her life submitted to danger. The only man who could love her had had to be a man with big fists and a brave heart, and maybe even a pistol on his hip. Who else could survive her existence? So he was perfect.
His imperfections made him perfect.
When she guided him into her bed, she didn’t let him up. She let him know that she wasn’t going to be padlocked under his great bulk. He was astonished by the force of her desire. She told him what to do and how to behave, and he had never heard of a woman like this. He complied until he was unable to do anything other than move with her. She exhausted him first. Later, she let him hold her, drop that heavy arm around her while she slept. Only then did she accept that she now needed and loved this man. If he had ideas in his head she despised, she’d hate those ideas, but she’d still love
him.
She admitted that she had no choice in the matter. If Roger loved her, too, then she’d be free, and count herself as blessed. If he didn’t—but she could not imagine that, so would not allow herself to try.
Roger loved her. He said so often. When she teased that all men spoke foolish things to the women sleeping with them, he was nearly apoplectic. He couldn’t stand that she might not believe him. She was still only teasing, just kidding around, when she said, “So prove it.”
“How?” He’d climb mountains, learn to swim seas, fix her shingles … what?
“What’s wrong with my shingles?”
“Don’t change the subject. How do I prove it?”
“You don’t like my roof?”
“Have you taken a look at it lately? What can I do to prove myself?” “I dunno. Marry me, I guess.”
He didn’t hesitate for a second. He immediately dropped to one knee and asked her properly. She then tried to talk him out of it, tickled him and
laughed him off and told him to be serious and scolded him for being a big, dumb, well-built thug. She put her hands on her hips and stomped a foot and screamed his name, “Roger!” as if trying to call him back from the land of the clinically insane, but he would not be dissuaded. So she said yes. “Yes?” he asked.
“Yes,” she repeated, very quietly, her well of determination surfacing again. Why not? She had never claimed ownership of her life before. Now she did.
Problems arose that were not typical of most married couples. Roger led a battalion of goons to a picket line, intending to clear the way for thirty female scabs on a bus. The men piled out of their cars with baseball bats and wire cutters to open a hole in the factory fence away from the entrance where the picketers had gathered, when the strikers spotted them and converged. They were all women. The men put their bats down because they weren’t willing to use them on women. Then Roger realized that the voice over the bullhorn was speaking directly to him. “Roger Clément! Get away from that fence!”
The goons thought it strange that their leader was being addressed by name, and they looked at the woman, then back at Roger, who said, “Uh-oh.”
“Roger! Get away from the fence!”
He walked up to the woman with the megaphone and tried to speak so that he would not be heard by the others. “Carole, what are you doing here?” She chose to speak through the bullhorn. “What are you doing here?” “I’m breaking up this strike,” he whispered. “I’m leading the scabs inside.” She shouted into the bullhorn, “He says he’s breaking up the strike!” Eighty women shouted back,
“NO!”
“He says he’s leading the scabs inside.”
“NO!”
the women shouted back as one. “What do you say to that?” Carole asked the throng.
“NO!”
the women roared back, and circled closer.
She put the bullhorn right up to his face. “Are you going to use those baseball bats on women?” she asked the strikebreaker. “If you do, mine is the first head you’ll have to crack, just so you know. Are you going to drive that scab bus over our bodies?”
One of the thugs behind Roger defiantly called back, “If we have to!” “Because I’ll be first to lie down in the road!” Carole called through the horn.
“That’s okay with me!” the thug shouted back. Roger turned around to face him. “She’s my wife,” he told him. “What?” he asked. Then he told the others. “She’s his wife.” “Carole, come on, what’re you doing here? You don’t work here.” She lowered the horn to her side. “This is what I do. Defend striking women.”
“Well, this is what
I
do. I bust up strikes.” “Not today. Not this strike.”
“Yes, today,” he argued back. But then he caught himself. “They’ll send other guys if I fail.”
“Fine. I’ll bust their balls, too.”
The standoff was short-lived. Roger turned to lead his men away, and they all expected to be going at that point. After all, a man could not beat up his wife in public, not even when it was his
job.
Carole called, “Hey.”
Roger turned to face her again.
She kissed him on the lips.
Then she picked up her bullhorn and shouted, “Go home!” The women promptly responded to the cue. “GO
HOME!”
“GO HOME!”
“GO HOME!”
Before that rising chorus, the thugs and the scab bus departed. The women beat their fists upon the cars and the bus and cheered as the vehicles vanished down the road. For Carole, the day was a lovely victory.
Roger, on the other hand, had some explaining to do to his bosses.
The couple tried to find Roger a new profession. He tried factory work first. Men were eager to take on the guy with the fists, with the big reputation. He’d come home bleeding and feeling vilified. Nobody wanted the former hockey lug lifting cement bags or picking out the defects on an assembly line. They wanted him to take on challengers during the noon break, or to crack the
boss’s nuts, or to come along with a bunch of the guys for a drink after work, and after that—
you know how it is
—they wanted him to work over this one guy who owed this other guy money from an unpaid bet that the first guy said he’d never made. They wouldn’t leave him alone, and sometimes Roger talked about it to Carole around the kitchen table.
“When I was paid to use my fists, I never had to. I never hit nobody. Almost never. Hardly ever. I just showed up, and maybe I smashed some tables and chairs, or knocked out a window. I damaged the furniture. The worst I did—”
“The worst you did was lock my front door.”
“Right. But the next worst thing, this one guy had a toy train set. He had the Rocky Mountains in there and everything. A little postman delivering the mail, and milk trucks. He had bridges and rivers and a complete village, with tiny dogs and women in fancy clothes, everything just right. The train went around in a circle, into a tunnel for a while—it was really neat—then it came back out, blowing its teensy horn.
Toot-toot!
So anyways, I smashed his toy train set, and I think, afterwards, he’d've preferred it if I crushed his skull. Anyways, that was the next worst thing to locking your door. Okay, the occasional bloody nose—nothing big, you understand me? I intimidate, that’s the word for it. That’s all I do. I never hurt nobody unless a guy was stupid enough to take the first swing.”
“Yeah. So? You’re not doing that anymore.” They were talking by candlelight and she gently caressed the back of his big right hand. His friends said his right hand could knock out a truck.
“I’ve already beat up six guys from my factory. Look at my knuckles, they’re all cut, bloody. Tomorrow, there’s two tough guys coming over from the factory
four blocks down
to see if one of them can take me.”
Carole sighed. He did have a problem. The good honest life of the workingman just wasn’t up to snuff. “You could lose,” she suggested. “Then maybe nobody will care about taking you on anymore.”
He looked at her as though she’d lost her mind.
“What?” she asked him.
“You don’t understand,” he pointed out to her. “Losing means I end up half-dead. Or all dead.”
She thought about that. Then the reality of his life occurred to her, why he was feeling so badly.
“Roger, do you mean that, when you fight, you—” She didn’t want to say it.
“Usually the other guy ends up in the hospital. Sometimes I knock a guy out with just one punch. He’s out cold, but at least that way he’s not a bloody mess.”
Maybe he should go back to being a goon. Life was more peaceful that way.
“I don’t like beating up all these guys,” he said. “I didn’t like it in hockey, I don’t like it now.”
“Tell you what,” she said. Gently, she placed her fingers on his muscled forearm. “Go earn your living whatever way you know how. Something better will come along. For now, I’ll stay out of it.”
“You have to tell me what picket lines you’re on.”
“That’s a deal.”
She didn’t like it though when he smashed up politicians’ offices. “Roger. He’s the good guy.” “What makes him so good?” She’d have to explain it.
“Then he should hire me to smash up the other guy’s office.” “Roger, sweetie, that’s
why
he’s the good guy, because he doesn’t hire goons.” She was especially unhappy when he disrupted polling booths and frightened voters away.
“Was that necessary?” “It’s my job.”
“To destroy democracy? To stand in the way of the people? To not allow working men and women to exercise their right to vote? Roger, that’s wrong.” “But they’re voting the wrong way.”
She’d have to explain it to him. “Even though I prefer that votes go one way and not another, I accept that people have the right to their own choice. That’s why we have a vote—so that everybody can decide who wins, not some pack of goons.”
“I don’t decide who wins.”
“Ah, honey, sweetie, actually, you do. You know nothing about politics, nothing about the issues, nothing about the politicians involved, yet you, sweetie, you and your two big fists and all your ballot-stuffing friends, you decide who wins. Now, do you think that’s right?”
He didn’t know if it was right, but he thought better of himself somehow.
“No, sweetie, that’s not the point.”
“Anyways, what’s so wrong with ballot stuffing? Nobody gets hurt and we get the right result.”
That’s when she realized that he was teasing her, and she smacked him on the bicep, then held her sore hand and winced. By the end of the discussion, as they did after so many others, they took one another to bed and enjoyed all that, too.
A
S A YOUNG BUCK DEMOBILIZED FROM THE ARMY AND INTENT ON
becoming a cop, Armand Touton had tangled with a corrupt physician. He believed, twenty years on, that rather than invent varicose veins, the man should have displayed X-rays of his war wounds. He’d have paid the charlatan’s price back then, signed a blank cheque. Today he’d forfeit his pension to any quack offering a night’s relief.
Due to the pain, the end of his career was approaching prematurely.
Along the floor at the back of his desk, stacks of old reports formed a staunch barrier. No one could peer below the modesty skirt where he’d positioned worn-out seat cushions—flattened by time and the rotund posteriors of cops—on crates at various heights. Gingerly, he transferred his right foot from one level to another to ease his general discomfort, later bringing it back to the rung of a chair while elevating his left foot to enjoy, for minutes at a time, the pleasure of a fresh setting.
Opposite him, Detective Fleury from Policy knew what the boss was doing, but never let on as the captain scrunched down to raise a foot higher or stretch it forward. Officer Cinq-Mars, sitting up straight in the chair on Fleury’s right flank, could not comprehend his superior officer’s bizarre posture. He seemed to be slumping down as any drunk might do who’d surpassed his upper limit, and having detected the scent of whiskey in the room, the young cop privately scorned the officer he otherwise so admired.
Fleury took the whiskey to be medicinal.
“If I hear you right,” Touton summarized, sliding lower, “you want to march up to Parliament Hill, strut into the prime minister’s office and take a seat—maybe straighten your tie, comb your hair, make yourself look presentable—then you want my permission to accuse the PM of being in possession of a murder weapon—”
“Sir—” Constable Émile Cinq-Mars endeavoured to interrupt, cut short by a hand rising from the captain’s half-prone body.
The man yawned before speaking again. “—because you had an anonymous ‘tip,’ you were saying, from a left-wing radical—”
“I didn’t say—” Cinq-Mars began, only to be prevented from speaking further by that authoritative hand.