River City (93 page)

As expected, Carole had plenty of suggestions, none of which inspired him.

“I don’t see why I can’t just go out and have a beer with a bunch of the guys and ask them to behave themselves. If not, I’ll say, the monsignor will ship them to hell in a limo.”

“Because they’ll get drunk and forget about the monsignor and forget about hell. Not everyone’s as worried about hell as you are. They’ll only laugh.”

“They’ll get drunk no matter what I say. Why do I have to make a speech? That’ll be an excuse to get drunk, if they’re forced to listen to me.”

“Not a speech. A kitchen chat, we call it. Go into the miners’ homes. Don’t only talk to the men, but to their wives and kids. Get everybody in the community behind the strategy. Then if the men get drunk, they’ll have to answer to their wives and neighbours. They’ll think about that first.”

“Bloody hell,” he said, an English phrase he’d picked up in the internment camp. Once in a while, the English knew how to express themselves.

“You can do it,” she encouraged him.

“This is starting to sound like real work to me,” he said with a sigh.

When she spun around to chastise him, she discovered him smiling brightly in full tease. They kissed, and let it linger.

“Babysitter?” he asked, as they stepped away from their embrace.

“Anik’s coming with us this morning. She’s a great icebreaker. Gets everybody gabbing. She’s a union girl, our child, right from the get-go.”

“Bloody hell,” he repeated. Anik was going to be a union girl because she wouldn’t have a choice. Her mother would see to that. Someday, he might have to face the two of them across a picket line, and wouldn’t that be a picnic.

He awoke thirsty in the night. From the hotel window, Roger Clément spotted fires. He got dressed. Pistol, knife and knuckle dusters were thrust into his jacket pockets and zippered securely. He laced up his boots, for this was no battle for a man in shoes. Leaving his room, he slammed the door behind him. The thin walls of the shabby hotel shook.

He hollered in the corridor and pounded his fists on doors. “Wake up, you intellectual shitheads! Wake up! You wanna be part of this? Wake up!”

He heard men stirring, but no one dared open a door to investigate. He continued to lumber down the corridor, pounding doors, yelling.

Pelletier was the first to emerge, tall and imposing, holding a towel around his waist, sleepily scowling. “What the hell’s going on?”

The door opposite his opened. Trudeau poked his sleepy head out.

Another door yawned ajar, so Marchand was also awake, and across from him, Chartrand, who’d lit up a smoke first, stood forth in speckled shorts.

“A battle’s starting up. Unless we stop it.”

“What battle? Don’t stop it. Join in!” chirped Chartrand. He jumped back into his room to dress.

“Who’re you?” Pelletier asked.

“Don’t give me that shit. You know who I am by now. A battle’s forming. Whether you’re a journalist or union, you don’t want to miss it. I need your help.”

“What kind of help?” Trudeau asked. To him, the thug in the hall didn’t sound crazy, he just behaved that way.

“If the union fights the cops, it’ll be a slaughter. Is that what you want?”

Chartrand had looked out his window and seen the parade of torches, the miners and cops heading for a confrontation. “He’s right. They’re gonna brawl. We’ll see about who gets slaughtered!” Still pulling on his clothes and carrying his boots, he was off, hobbling down the stairs with his stuff.

“Help me,” Roger demanded. “It might start out as fists, but it’ll end up as guns against bricks. Is that what you want?”

“Whose side are you on?” Marchand asked, still skeptical. Roger was right—they’d checked him out. His long record as a Duplessis and Houde henchman, as a union buster, wasn’t hard to dig up, but he had also done time
in an interment camp as a communist sympathizer, and he was hanging out with a known fascist. No one knew what to make of his presence here.

“Monsignor Charbonneau hired me to preserve the peace. That man’s faith is in God, but it’s also in me. How can I do this by myself?”

“We’ll get killed if we’re in the middle,” Trudeau pointed out. He sounded neither afraid nor reluctant, only prudent. Through the varied contours of his intellectual life he had persevered as a man of faith himself. He respected Monsignor Charbonneau, which might have dictated one course of action, but logic countermanded that response. “What do you expect us to do?”

“Get dressed,” Roger suggested, then ran after Chartrand to intersect the brawl.

Fires in empty oil drums delineated a scruffy vacant lot, which yielded to a sloping hillside where the two gangs were intent on hostilities. Miners carried torches to light their way. The cops had lit a couple themselves, which cast long and wavering shadows as they walked down a curving, descending dirt road, but most of them carried flashlights. They were out of uniform. This was a private brawl, supposedly, instigated by the hotheads on both sides jawing at each other all day. No badges, no guns, that was the deal—men against men, twenty to a side. Young men all, looking to settle scores and insults and enjoy a rowdy fight. Roger was no dope, and he guessed that not everyone on both sides was a dope, either. Whatever anyone had agreed to, this would not be a battle in good faith. Both sides made sure that covert reinforcements were ready and nearby. If the fight was fair, they might never be called in, but let one side break the contract, or even lose badly, and the night could succumb to disaster.

He thought he detected a shadow spread out and move along a higher ridge. More cops, snaking down. Towards the gentle valley where the miners lived, he could see nothing, but this was their turf. They knew how to move through this town undetected.

A couple of boys, miners’ sons, were responsible for lighting the barrels, and as the two groups moved onto the field Roger jogged there on his own. Only Chartrand had reached the battleground ahead of him.

“We don’t want this to happen,” Roger told him, hoping the man possessed a modicum of sense.
“I do. Send twenty cops to the hospital and this strike takes a different turn.”

“Or twenty dead miners.”

“A fight’s a fight,” Chartrand warned him. “Anyway, it’s too late to stop it.” He feared the man was right.

The men from the hotel arrived just as the miners were forming at one end of the square field, their numbers lit by the smoky, flaring barrels. As they lifted their torches, their faces shone as if disembodied, their clothes dark, their forms indistinguishable. A bank of cloud cover eclipsed the moon. At the opposite end, cops spread out into a single line, flashlights held low around their waists, beams daring the darkness. Except for the nervous lamps, they could scarcely be seen.

The so-called intellectuals joined Roger at the edge of the field between the two groups. They stood still as the warring factions moved closer in makeshift battle formation, each of the combatants assuming a stride and, when he stood still, a stance meant to show no fear, to intimidate.

Moving alone to the centre of the field between them, Roger Clément stood as a darkened figure, a stout form, and soon, a voice. Just by standing between them, he secured the brawler’s attention and stalled their advance.

“You cannot do this,” he called out in the dark.

A cop answered. “Out of the way, whoever the fuck you are.”

He turned to face the police. “How come you think so much of these guys, the miners?”

A few scornful laughs. A cop said, “They insulted my mother, the bastards. They insulted my sister, my wife. They insulted my dog, my cat and my nose. Tonight, they pay for that, the cocksuckers.”

“Buddy, I can’t see your nose in the dark, so I can’t say if that was justified, but the rest of it, that’s what men say on a picket line. Cops have to live with that.”

“I remember that nose,” a miner shouted out. “It’s an obscene nose! It needs to be flattened against his ugly face!”

“Who are you, anyways?” a cop demanded. “You’re one of them, only chicken-livered.”

“You think I’m chicken-livered?” Roger shot back.

“And yellow-bellied.”

“You think I’m yellow-bellied?”

“Probably. Why not? Is that a yellow line or chicken feathers running up your spine? It’s hard to tell in the dark.”

Even a few miners laughed at the comment, and a number of cops clucked like chickens.

“You don’t want to fight? You’re a coward.”

“Out of the way, fucker, or both sides will stomp you into the ground!” That was a miner talking. Inwardly, Roger smiled. At least he had gotten both sides to agree on something.

Each line took steps towards the other, then stopped and traded invective.

“Hang on,” Roger called out. “Hang on.”

“Let him speak!” a voice from the sidelines shouted. A journalist.

“Fuck him! We’re here to kick police ass!” This voice also came from the sidelines. Roger recognized it. Reggie Chartrand.
You little bugger.

“Listen to what he has to say!” the unknown voice from the side called out. “I’m a journalist. You know how angry the public is. Any more cop violence and heads will start to roll. You cops will be the scapegoats. Listen to him, or we’ll report you in the papers.” Pelletier was pleading for peace, although he had no clue how Roger could finagle his way out of this one.

The presence of journalists gave the cops something to think about, something more than a miner’s fist to fear. Like air from a balloon, a portion of the fight went out of them.

“I was saying,” Roger called out to the cops. “You must think a lot of these miners if you think this is all who showed up. Think they’ll fight fair? Get the upper hand, and the rest will come out of the shadows, ten to a man. And you, miners!” He turned. “Do you really think their buddies with submachine guns aren’t far away? I’ve already seen them on the move. This is not going to work, guys. It’s a nice idea, but you guys don’t trust each other enough. So it’s not going to work.”

“I’ve seen them, too,” Trudeau called out. He’d been in the homes of many of these men and knew their families. “More cops are coming down the hill.”

“There’s just us!” one cop called out, but he didn’t sound convincing. “You’re a liar!” another insisted, shouting at Trudeau. “They got their backups, we got ours,” a miner admitted. “Keeps it fair. Us against them.”

“It’ll be a bloodbath. And that won’t be the end of it, either. Think about your wives, your babies. How many of you do they need dead? You think it won’t happen? Think again—think! This is a bad situation. It won’t work.”

“Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

“I represent the Catholic Church,” Roger called out at the top of his lungs, which took both gangs by surprise. “I’m here talking for Monsignor Charbonneau. You’re all Catholics. Now go home, or I’m telling you,
you’ll all be sent to hell
!”

His trump card, and he should have known that Carole was right. They only laughed at him for that. Times had certainly changed in the province of Quebec. At least, the saving grace, both sides were chuckling now, totally amused.

Then Chartrand called out, “Let’s get on with it. Beat the crap out of them. Remember what they did to our boys.”

In shouting out again, Roger knew he was taking words right out of the mouth of his wife, who often had exhorted strikers and cops to behave. “You’re all Quebecers! You’re all brothers. All of you, you draw paycheques to feed your kids. You’re not fighting the bosses here. You’re not fighting the system or the English. You’re fighting each other, and that makes no damn sense. Now cut it out!”

“First, we’ll beat the crap out of him!” Chartrand suggested.

“All right! Do that!” Roger agreed. “If you’re man enough!” His voice was powerful in the still night, and the idea sufficiently absurd, that both sides fell silent to await his explanation. “I’ll take you both on,” he challenged. “I’ll take on whatever cop they want to send up against me. Then I’ll take you on, Reggie. You’re small, but you’re a boxer. We’ll see how tough you are. Show me how tough you are. You want to fight each other? Prove it. Prove you deserve it. One guy out of two beats me, you’ll have your brawl. Okay? The journalists here, they’ll keep their mouths shut, they’ll close their eyes, they’ll walk away.
You can fight in peace. But if I beat whatever cop the police send up against me, then if I beat Reggie, or whatever miner the miners send up, if I’m the last one standing, then you all go back to wherever the fuck you’re supposed to be right now.”

Every man was pumped with adrenaline, looking for trouble. The offer was a good one, for they couldn’t step away from the challenge, nor could either side expect to lose. A miner, though, voiced an objection.

“You can beat up a cop, I don’t see no problem. They’re lazy, fat fucks. But you want to take on Reggie—he’s smaller than you. That’s one-sided.”

“I can take him,” Chartrand sneered, but his tone sounded more like bravado than confidence.

“Like I said, if you want to send somebody else out, that’s fine with me. I’ll take him on. But he’s the one doing most of the talking. I just wanted to shut his yap for an hour or two.”

“How about if I take on Reggie instead?” a voice from the sidelines inquired.

People turned, trying to see in the dark. The cops aimed their flashlights, and discovered the determined face of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

“I’m about the same size,” the young man pointed out.

Leaner, though, and he did not possess a pugilist’s bulky physique.

“You’ve been working out, sir?” Roger asked him. He’d seen that he was quick enough, he was probably smart enough, but that didn’t make him a likely victor.

“Canoed all summer.”

Miners laughed, but to Roger his response sounded promising.

“I’ll take on the rich kid,” Chartrand declared, suddenly more keen.

Neither the cops nor the miners could turn down the deal. The big guy in the middle might be able to take whomever the police put forward, nobody knew, but the prospects for Chartrand to beat up the upper-class city intellectual who’d been talking to the miners about economics and discipline within the ranks—that was pretty much a foregone conclusion. The cops liked those odds as well. As soon as Chartrand disposed of Trudeau, they could all go at it, kill each other even, while the journalists would be bound to secrecy.