winding northwards another fifty or so kilometres, vehicles crammed with gear hauled trailers where forty-five gallon drums rocked softly with the bumps. Hiccuping and belching blue smoke, the wheezing machine stormed up the overpass. The foothills of Kilimanjaro wouldn’t have been more of a challenge.
That Saturday, there was a non-stop procession. The general store was only a stop along the road, and people often forgot to do the honours. Mr. Administrators concept was shattered. Other hosts, located higher up along the shores of the large reservoir, attracted fishermen in a hurry to drop their lines. They preferred plywood camps to the ghost town cottages offering CITY COMFORT IN THE MIDDLE OF NATURE. Waters there were more bountiful. To be honest, Grande-Ourse’s immediate surroundings had long ago been cleaned out of any legitimate aspirant to the record books.
Collapsed, head in hands, the Old Man understood, he certainly did, his American friends.
“They’ll get their nice Evinrudes stolen in the village! You can’t leave anything at the edge of a lake around here! An Apache will take off with it, then Legris will syphon your gas!”
The weight of years suddenly caught up with him, and he let out, in a voice that was the essence of disillusionment, “I’m through, young fellas.... Through! It’s my last summer here, guaranteed! I’m through....”
Benoît had heard that speech hundreds of times, knowing it by heart right to the end. When the Old Man, to complete his act, began to juggle with the fantasy so dear to him, which he contemplated with affection like an old mistress, concerning the pontoon he’d buy one day. It would be a spacious platform he’d transform into a genuine aquatic lounge, with deck chairs and a built-in bar, ice-filled coolers for the fish those gentlemen would catch continuously, simply pivoting on their well-padded chairs as though they were still seated behind one of those desks where they run an entire conglomerate. Yes, the Old Man would build himself a clientele, a real one, this time, golden pensioners, people of private means and heads of empires who’d open the floodgates of their opulence for him, and the Old Man would then be far from Grande-Ourse, living much higher up, on the shores of the large reservoir, and limitless horizons would open before his pontoon covered in filthy-rich American fishermen.
He withdrew for a short nap. We could rest easy. When the Old Man said he was through, the emphasis of the assertion seemed to spin him around like a stripped screw inside a nut.
On Victoria Day Monday, Donald Big-Arms showed up at the store completely drunk. He’d just gotten off the train, helped by a slight nudge from the conductor. His right fist was bandaged. All hell had broken loose in Sans-Terre, he confided modestly. The Old Man had been alerted and rushed in. Spotting the Indian gesticulating, he looked at him from the depths of his despondency, solemn, seeming to say: one more nail in my cross. Go ahead. Bring them on. A guy from Pennsylvania would take out his gun. Bring on some Indians.
Donald Big-Arms informed me that a large American had laughed at him and said he was dirty. If this were hard to deny after three days of partying, it still wasn’t something to tell him. I could see the violence going back up his arms, filling his huge fists.
“Next time, you’ll see.... Next time”
With no transition, he struck a shelf with a heavy blow, sending three ketchup bottles tumbling down. Benoît rushed over to pick them up, furious. “Hey! That’ll do!”
Donald Big-Arms looked at him, and Benoît appeared less anxious to make his intentions clear. The Old Man didn’t even bat an eyelid. In the face of this new snub, he seemed ready for the worst. He gave into the laws of adversity with limp gratitude. But a shock suddenly brought him back to life. His face lit up and, while the Indian examined the deep gashes in his hands with detachment, he scurried towards the door. “Crazy Sam! Oh Boy! Crazy Sam! You old bastard!”
“He’s one of the gang,” Donald breathed into my face.
The newcomer looked rather old, with his triangular head covered in white curls, weather-beaten face, several-day-old beard, and eyes surrounded by diverse wrinkles. The whole array was shaded by the inevitable cowboy hat pulled down over his forehead. He lifted his hat with a flick of his finger and the men embraced ruggedly. At first blush, Crazy Sam suited his nickname: his gaze was a little crazed, livid and quirky; you never knew whether it was focused on you, fell a little short or if, on the contrary, it went over your head, losing itself in the distance.
“Certainly a little cracked,” I said, affecting a polite cheerfulness.
The Old Man wrapped his arm around him and made the introductions, The hand, strangely cold, rooted me on the spot for an instant, while the Old Man launched into an ode to his friend. “This is a good customer! A real good customer, boys! Crazy Sam has been coming here; to Grande-Ourse, for at least twelve years! Old Sam’s never missed a season! Comes up in his Jeep, light as a feather, and has a trailer permanently parked at Lac du Fou. Buys everything at the store! Everything!”
Crazy Sams conduct certainly deserved a certificate for good behaviour. The Old Man plunged his free hand straight into Crazy Sams pocket and howled, at the height of euphoria, “Everything in his pockets, nothing in his hands! A real good customer, I tell you! Not the kind to drag a forty-five gallon drum from the United States.... Crazy Sam understands the economy!”
The Old Man had just been revived, and was wildly enthusiastic. Crazy Sam was his kind of tourist: once rich, and now just about ruined (no one knew it yet), but always extravagant. A former marine who’d been a magnate before going bonkers, he was now easing into early retirement by writing in-depth articles on hunting and fishing for specialized magazines. He and the Old Man were a nice couple, two complementary individuals: the naive rich man and the clever skinflint.
I stared at the newcomer intensely, while he glanced at us with his interior drift. His eyes floated above his gaze like two corks over the waves.
We heard a booming sound behind us. Donald Big-Arms, whom everyone had forgotten, had given another blow on the upright of a shelf, and more ketchup bottles came crashing down.
After supper, weighed down by a pair of those hamburgers patented by the Old Man, I went down by the lake to stretch my legs. The weather was crisp, the lake rippled and sombre. A gaggle of alert geese glided along its surface behind the hotel Every year, they lingered on the lake, prolonging their migratory pause; it was said they’d then place themselves under the protection of Jacques Boisvert, the pilot. More than once, he’d nearly beheaded some boater who’d gotten a little too close to his winged brood.
The generator saturated the low sky with its serpentine vapours. As long as it burned diesel, it remained the symbol of the village’s vitality, of its refusal of cartographical euthanasia. Farther on, the setting sun set fire to the hangar’s sheet metal.
My legs, aching from inactivity, took me to the other end of the village. I picked up the pace when I passed by the hotel. My fascination with that den of depravity was equalled only by the terror I felt at the prospect of going in without invitation. I went down a sandy trail which opened onto the dryness of a spruce forest; that’s how I accidentally stumbled on the cemetery.
It was disarmingly simple and poignantly small: a crude enclosure covering a hundred-or-so metres, with a roughly built cross at the centre, and graves lined up on both sides of the perimeter. A rather basic wire fence guarded the sleep of the dead. I opened the pitiful gate and walked into the enclosure.
The tombstones were scattered. Many graves were only marked with small rudimentary crosses, completely crooked and engraved with laconic epitaphs. I slowly walked
