The Homeless Millionaire

We spent the next day mostly lazing around. Our muscles hurt from all that rope climbing; we sat and talked some more about the museum robbery. I continued to have deep misgivings about us taking guns along. Roch continued persuading me that this didn't mean things would go badly, on the contrary, the guns would ensure that things went well. He was so confident that in the end some of his confidence infected me. Somehow I felt resentful that it did, so to shake Roch up a little I dragged him out for a walk to the house that burned down, and found and showed him the doll. It spooked him, I was glad to see. He picked it up and walked down to the shore of the lake and threw it into the water, as far away as he could. It didn't sink. It floated on the surface, its toy dress a splash of red on the gunmetal-colored water. I felt discontented on the way back home, as if we'd failed to complete an important job.

The next day was Saturday, official start of the long Labor Day weekend. Roch's family, or the Caron gang as he'd called it, arrived a few minutes after noon. It consisted of Roch's father, mother, and sister, the pimply Heloise. They all seemed pissed off, it seemed that they'd had a fight while driving down to the cottage. When Roch introduced me, his old man grunted and nodded as if he was reconciling himself to some bad news; his mother attempted a smile, and asked if I was from Toronto in a voice that implied being from Toronto was something deeply shameful. Heloise basically ignored me; when she passed me on her way inside the house, she threw me a sideways glance that indicated we weren't likely to become friends.

I thought it wise to remove myself. I strolled some distance away from the house and smoked cigarettes and looked at the trees and the lake. It was a beautiful sunny day, very warm; while I smoked, a bird in a nearby tree chirped optimistically. I searched the foliage with my eyes, but couldn't spot it.

"Nice to hear things are going well for you, guy," I said to the invisible bird. It fell silent.

I dragged my feet back to the house, intending to offer my services to whoever wanted my assistance with anything at all. I felt very much the unwanted guest. To my pleasant surprise, the general mood had improved in my absence. Roch's mother was in raptures over the renovated vegetable patch; it seemed that it was her pet project, one of those pet projects that never quite get off the ground. Roch's father was busy getting into the weekend party mode with a large glass of scotch on the deck. When I asked if I could help with anything, he frowned and pulled out a cigarette; I had a match lit for him even before he'd placed it between his lips. He blew out smoke and said sure, I there was something I could do, namely get myself a drink. Up close and without his hat, he didn't resemble a hitman for an upscale gang. His eyes were dark with a secret worry and he seemed resigned to something sad happening in the very near future.

I thanked him profusely for his offer of a drink and went inside the house to look for Roch. I found him in his room together with Heloise. They were talking in French when I entered, quietly but with an undertone that suggested some very unpleasant things were being said. Heloise looked to be around fifteen; she was thin and quite tall for her age, her head was level with Roch's shoulder. They both looked at me when I came in. Roch smiled; Heloise looked relieved that their conversation had been interrupted. She asked to be excused in French and brushed past me on her way out; I could see she was in a big hurry to get out of there.

"Hey, Roch," I said. "What's up? I have the feeling everyone's pissed off that I'm here."

"No, no. It's nothing to do with you. Just some family stuff you don't want to know about."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure. You know what, let's go for a walk. I need to get away from all this for a while."

When we'd walked some distance from the house, we stopped and lit cigarettes and Roch told me that my stay at his house in Montreal had been legitimized. I was to get the room I'd slept in right after arrival for just twenty bucks a month; in return, I was to help out Roch when he finally got around to working on the house. That wouldn't happen until the end of the year, at the earliest; there was still a lot of stuff he had to do in the house he was currently renovating.

"How many houses did you guys inherit from that aunt?" I asked, out of idle curiosity. "Three?"

"Four. We sold one right away, to have the funds for putting the rest of them in shape."

"Wow. Your aunt must have been a wealthy woman."

"Yeah. It didn't do her much good. She got married very young to this guy that got himself killed in the war. She'd loved him a lot and she just went to pieces. She joined this group of people who were into occult shit, you know, spiritual seances and ouija boards and talking to the dead, that kind of bullshit. I met her a few times at family functions. She'd sit in a corner by herself wearing those dark glasses and very red lipstick, her mouth constantly working as if she was talking to herself. Everyone was kinda scared of her, you never knew what she would do next. She didn't actually do anything, she was always quiet and well-behaved, but you got this feeling that she might go full-time crazy at any moment, start screaming and beating up on people or whatever. Everyone gave her a wide berth, and was very nice to her, just in case."

"Sounds sad."

"It was sad. You could see she had been a very beautiful woman when she was young."

I laughed a short, bitter laugh and said:

"F.u.c.k. A beautiful woman with tons of money, the world at her feet, and she spends her life talking to ghosts and getting crazy."

"Yes," said Roch. "That's what love can do to you. All this love business, everyone believes that it's the best thing ever. Sometimes it's that way, sure. But most times it just f.u.c.ks you up."

"Hey," I said. "Sounds like you had some sort of an experience you didn't tell me about."

"No, man. I didn't have an unhappy love affair. I have been doing my best to keep out of love affairs."

"What are you talking about? You wrote me what, three-four months back, that you had this fantastic girlfriend. What happened?"

"I got a house of my own," said Roch. "And she started pressing me to get married. I told her, we're both nineteen, f.u.c.k, we've got plenty of time for that. We started having fights, pretty soon we were fighting all the time. So we broke up."

"You mean you broke up with her."

"Well, yeah, I guess so. Hey, don't look at me like that. I paid a heavy price. She did her best to make me feel like an asshole for nearly a month. She'd go on and on what an asshole I was and then she'd say that she loved me and there was no way she'd ever let me go. I felt like killing her a couple of times, you know? Now that really made me feel like an asshole."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Not half as sorry as I felt, at the time. I really regretted having met her at all."

"Kierkegaard strikes again."

"If you mention that guy to me one more time," said Roch, "I swear I'll bounce my fist off your face."

We started walking back to the house. I tried to make him feel better by providing him with some choice quotes from the fights I'd had with my parents, and it worked. When I'd caught him starting to smile, I said:

"Roch. There's something that bothers me about this museum job, apart from the guns."

That got rid of his incipient smile, all right. He said:

"What is it this time? You need to take along several pairs of spare underpants?"

"F.u.c.k, man. Don't pretend you aren't scared too, because that will really frighten me. It will mean you're f.u.c.k.i.n.g insane, or way overconfident. And that practically guarantees a f.u.c.kup of some sort."

"Listen, Mike. I'll tell you something else. If you can't do this with confidence, it's better you don't do it at all. Because you were right, something unexpected is bound to happen. And when it does and you're not confident everything will go well then it really won't go well. Because you'll scream and shit your pants and run and f.u.c.k up everything."

I took a deep breath and said:

"I'm confident we can do this job. What I'm not confident about is how we're going to deal with all that stuff we take. You said the other day we're going to sell it, right? You said the jewelry and the golden statuettes and shit will get sold. You didn't say how. You're gonna put it in a pawnshop? Or are you planning to walk around wearing a f.u.c.k.i.n.g sandwich board that says BIG ART SALE? We can't even go near a gallery, they'll all know where the stuff came from and the cops are going to get us even before we walk out of the place."

"Ah, that. Don't worry about that. Michel's fixed up everything. He knows a guy who knows a guy who is a professional fence. Connections with collectors all over the world. As a matter of fact, he might be talking to the fence guy right now. He was supposed to see him Saturday."

I didn't expect that. To buy time, I said:

"A professional fence, huh?"

"Yeah, a professional fence. Look, let's drop it for now. We're getting within earshot of the Caron gang."

I laughed and said:

"We should think of a name for our own gang. What shall we call ourselves? The Rope gang?"

We started to exchange ideas for various names and we were in good mood by the time we entered the house. That changed abruptly, because Roch's old man bawled him out for letting the barbecue grill gas bottle run low. We stood at attention and saluted and then got the f.u.c.k out of there, taking the nearly-empty gas bottle with us.

I was quietly hoping for a drive in that magnificent Impala. The Corolla that stood beside it looked like a shitty shoebox, in comparison. Of course we rode in the shoebox. It was a ten-minute drive to the nearest gas station. We spent them trying to come with some more names for our gang and we were laughing out loud by the time we got there.

We lugged the gas bottle out of the trunk and into the station store. The guy running that store was on the wrong side of middle age. He hadn't shaved and hadn't properly combed the long black-grey strands of hair he'd retained. They stuck out at all angles over the mottled dome of his skull. He wore old-fashioned half-moon glasses and peered at us over them suspiciously. What he saw made his mouth go sour. I was very glad that it was Roch who had to talk to him. I split when he fired off something in French at the sour guy, and walked away a few steps, idly glancing at the stuff around the store. A fresh copy of True Crime magazine was on prominent display. The cover featured a series of faces you really wouldn't want to get to know any closer. I started thinking about doing a pencil drawing of all those faces looking at each other, and then I saw the raincoat.

It was a shiny red and was hanging over the backrest of a spare chair near the end of the counter. It definitely didn't belong to the guy behind the counter, unless he also liked to put on lipstick and stockings in his private moments. It was Tracy's raincoat, or at the very least an identical raincoat.

I pondered that for a while, waiting for Roch to finalize what sounded like a complex negotiation at the counter. Then I walked up to it and asked the sour guy:

"Hey, that raincoat over there - I think it belongs to a friend. Did she leave it here?"

The sour guy disliked me. He disliked me speaking English, he disliked me asking him questions, he disliked my being in his store, he disliked my existence. His eyes said as much over the half-moon glasses. His mouth tightened further and he didn't answer me. Fortunately Roch came to the rescue and repeated my question in French. He was in the process of handing over some money, so the sour guy was obliged to answer.

"Yeah, he says some woman forgot it in the store a few days ago. He's hoping she'll come by again and pick it up."

I wanted to ask a lot of extra questions. But Roch was grinning at me - he'd recognized that raincoat too - and the sour guy was giving me the evil eye with such intensity that I swallowed what I wanted to ask and said instead:

"You guys done?"

We loaded a fresh bottle of gas into the trunk and drove back to the cottage. We talked about a lot of things on the way back, carefully avoiding the subject of my little red romance. When we got back, our arrival sparked an explosion of joy. The Caron gang had been getting hungry, and they had gotten started on booze and snacks in the meantime, even the pimply Heloise had a bottle of beer in her hand. Roch and his old man got going with the grill while his mother questioned me about my life in Toronto, her eyes sparkling with joie de vivre and alcohol and what have you. Heloise disappeared into the kitchen to get a fresh beer and she reappeared a quarter of an hour later, with an untouched fresh bottle of beer and glassy eyes.

I was ordered to seat myself next to Heloise when the food was ready; at least it meant I didn't have to face her pimples. I made sure there were several inches of air between us at all times. The food was delicious, there was salmon as well as hamburgers and steaks and that was a very nice change. Everyone ate like pigs, to the point of suffocating, and subsequently used lots of booze to wash all that food down. Roch and the rest of the Caron gang switched to French while I drank and smoked and sometimes looked at the house across the lake. They kept trying to include me in their conversation by asking me something in English from time to time, and I would smile a slightly suffering smile and respond politely, and then do some more silent smiling to indicate that it was perfectly all right for them to switch back into their secret French.

Night fell, and around half an hour later we all got busy clearing stuff up. Then they all went back into the house: Roch to hit the can, his old man to make coffee, the female Carons to wash the dishes and so on. I stood at the front of the deck, leaning on the railing and smoking a cigarette and looking at nothing in particular when the light in the house across the water came on.

I very nearly dropped my cigarette. I wanted to rush inside and get the binoculars, but of course I couldn't do that with everyone else around. So I just stared as hard as I could until I felt tears forming in my eyes. There was just this single light in the window of what I thought was the kitchen. I saw nothing else and heard no car.

The light was still there when it was time to go to bed.