October 1970 by Louis Hamelin

tell you that, now that he’s not here any more. He saw you going far  . . . ”
    â€œI write little squibs. I send reviews to newspapers. I run around after freelance assignments.”
    â€œWhat I’m saying is that he counted on you a great deal. He told me so. Chevalier  . . . saw something in you.”
    â€œChevalier was always seeing something, Emma. Maybe he was a visionary. But maybe not. Maybe he was just mistaken. All those years  . . . There was never any plot. And the second part of Elucubrations is lost, and that’s a damned shame.”
    â€œToo many keys and not enough locks, was how he summed up the Lavoie Affair. He was sitting right where you’re sitting now. I can still see his big gleaming eyes, his sad old face, and the amused and sorry look on it when he said to me: ‘You know, Emma, in all this I find myself confronted by people who are a lot stronger than I am.’”
    â€œHe said that?”
    â€œHe was never able to follow the path to the end. It was his biggest regret, and he took it with him to the grave. I wanted you to know that  . . . ”
    Embarrassed, Sam turned to look out the window. With a sudden, diminishing clatter, a pigeon detached itself from the sill.

THE BOAT
    HE WAS BORN IN COTEAU-ROUGE, in a tarpaper shack. The doctor had had to tramp through an acre of snow up to his knees to bring him into the world. His mother cursed like a trucker. The only other witnesses to the event were two goats, huddled in a corner, their faces masks of fundamental and archaic vindictiveness.
    In Jacques-Cartier, the working-class district that had spread across to the South Shore around a simple crossroads in the region known as Coteau-Rouge, career opportunities were divided neatly into two categories (unless you counted providing flesh for the good Brothers of Christian Instruction to fiddle with): crime and the police. Before even reaching the age of majority, Jacques Cardinal understood that between those two spheres of activity there existed intermediary zones that weren’t always as watertight as everyone pretended. One of them was politics.
    He was one of those schoolyard jackals who hunted in silence. Later, he would be seen hanging around with a small gang at the billiard hall. Waiting for something to happen.
    The inhabitants of this semi-rural slum were unacquainted with the benefits of running water. Those who had wells shared them with neighbours, others emptied their chemical toilets where they could, for example, in the washrooms of service stations. Coco’s brother, industrious and resourceful, put a fifty-gallon drum on a wagon and dragged it with a friend into one of the better-equipped neighbourhoods, like Longueuil-la-Bourgeosie, where they filled it from a fire hydrant, dragged it back along unpaved streets to Jacques-Cartier, and sold it for ten cents a bucket. One afternoon they came back in tears, their drum empty, boot marks on their asses. Big kids, they explained.
    Coco Cardinal was fourteen.
    â€œStop your snivelling and come with me,” he said. “We’re going back.”
    There was a stop sign in a stretch of the road, but no intersection. The sign was Longueuil’s way of saying: “Stop, stranger. If you’re Black, Chinese, Indian, or even just poor, go somewhere else.”
    They passed it, leaving the poor district, and stopped at a fire hydrant on the other side of rue Chambly. Without looking around, Cardinal signalled to his brother, who took a monkey wrench he’d stolen from a construction shed, went up to the hydrant, and stood there while four young toughs casually walked out of a nearby yard. The one in front had good shoulders and a pack of cigarettes tucked under the sleeve of his T-shirt. He also had a length of steel wire in his hands, which he played with like a Greek fingering his worry beads. Coco surveyed them from the corner of his eye.
    The