Archibald Samuel - Arvida

“We’re even-steven, is that it?”

“That’s not what I said.”

Michel became sullen.

“How do you think the company’s going to be able to function? That makes twelve who are gone.”

“Ten.”

“Who’s going to keep things going?”

He stubbed out his cigarette.

“Between the two of us, I don’t think she gives a damn. She must have awarded herself ten salary hikes in the last five years. She should be earning not far from half a million now, not counting bonuses. Her father’s dead, her mother’s convinced that everything’s going just fine, and as long as our old contracts are bringing in money and she’s chopping the payroll, the investors are happy. I think she’s going to milk everyone like dairy cows and then shut things down.”

“How many of us are there?”

“About four hundred, if you count manufacturing.”

“What’s she going to do afterwards?”

“I don’t know. Get Botox shots. Adopt Chinese kids. That’s about all she’s been doing for five years.”

“It’s not right.”

“I never said it was.”

Michel shot him a dirty look.

“You’re still going to clear us out one after the other, like your mistress’s good dog.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“That doesn’t seem to bother you very much.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Why don’t you tell her to do her own dirty work?”

“Why didn’t you say anything when the others were being let go? I’m no different from anyone else, Michel. The city’s burning, and I’m praying that the fire will spare my house.”

“Where are we heading, like that?”

“Nowhere.”

Michel got up, tottered a bit, then found his feet.

He got up in turn, held out his hand, and said:

“No hard feelings?”

Michel stared at his hand vacantly, without taking it, more shaken than he wanted to show.

“You’re the executioner now. And an executioner has no friends. Maybe she thinks we’re worthless, but we’ll pull things together, you’ll see. We still have our clients, and we can sell them more than her garbage. But you? Have you thought that no one’s going to want to help you when your turn comes?”

He sighed and looked at his watch.

“I’m going to have to catch my plane.”

“Oh, excuse me. I don’t want to detain you. Can you give her a message for me?”

“Of course, Michel.”

“Tell her that I’d have liked her to have had some real children rather than the stupid little Chinese kids she’s adopted, who she shows off everywhere to make it look like she has a heart. Tell her that I’d have liked her to have a real heart and real children and to have one of those children die right in front of her eyes. Will you tell her that?”

“I doubt it.”

The seat was comfortable, but the third gin and tonic had been one too many. He felt groggy. His wife said he was drinking too much these days. She was wrong, he wasn’t drinking more than before. He’d always liked to drink. These days, he found that beer had an acrid smell, cocktails tasted bland, and whiskies gave off an unbearable medicinal scent, but he swallowed them all the same. That’s all that had changed.

He felt better now that it was over with Michel. He could sleep on the plane, and in a few hours he’d be home. He’d take a shower and drink a glass of wine. Wine was still good. A bit oily perhaps, but still good.

In the old house, his first wife had organized the gardens according to a tiresome geometry. The flowers and shrubs grew in tight rows, like in a greenhouse, they never mingled, you’d have thought it was the window of an industrious florist. The house was smaller now, the garden more confined, and his second wife had this virtue: she arranged the plants any old way. Perhaps there’d been some order in the beginning, but very quickly it had disappeared. He didn’t know where the soil got its richness, but by mid-July the back yard looked like a jungle. The daturas became actual bushes, and every day produced dozens of big white flowers; the morning glories ran riot, climbing the length of the hedges and stippling the garden with hundreds of purple, blue, and violet blossoms; the roses showed no restraint, and as of the middle of June the Europeana and the two Prairie Stars produced dozens of flowers with delicate petals, and roses like an old lady’s closed fists. There were also lilacs, an apple tree, tulips, and dozens of other species, perennials and annuals, climbers and crawlers. He liked to sit in the midst of all these exhalations, in a chaise longue, and sip Long Island Iced Tea while doing crossword puzzles. Between the stems of the flowers and the branches of the shrubs, black and yellow spiders tended large webs. He liked to watch them at work, see the good Lord’s flies and beasties become trapped in them and be devoured. It was strange, if he’d come upon spiders that big in the house, he would have been shocked. In the garden, he was not at all put off. The spiders, sometimes, fell on him. He took them in his bare hands and dropped them delicately onto the leaves.

Someone was shaking his shoulder.

“They’re announcing our flight.”

It was his companion from earlier on, standing beside the table. He remembered, his name was André. He wondered if he’d been sleeping. He picked up his overcoat and his briefcase, and strode towards the gate.

Before leaving, Michel had said that his turn would come. Of course his turn would come. He’d never thought otherwise. Enormous spiders lived in his garden. Soon it would all be over, and he would make his home in their company, the yellow and the black.

The first mistake we made was to think we could bring off a coup like that after the Towers.

Big Lé’s mother and sister had gone back to live two years in Costa Rica between 1999 and 2001. Lévis went to see them a lot during that time, including for almost three months in 2000, starting with the holidays, so as to make it through the millennium with his ass in the sun. That’s when he met América and Luis, in the hotel restaurant his mother ran.

América was a waitress, and Luis was living in San Francisco. They were in love, but they couldn’t find any way to bring her to the States. They never explained why. Maybe she had a record. She had no special skills to show the immigration people, and they couldn’t get her a green card or a visa.

Big Lé went several times with me to the States to see if the border with Canada was full of holes. He told Luis that he could get América through and dump her in San Francisco, if he paid the price. They talked about it a lot when Big Lé was down there. That’s the way it stood when Big Lé came back to Quebec.

Next summer Luis called him and asked if he’d agree to get América over the border for three thousand bucks. Lé should have said no, but he said yes. That’s how our problems started.

Meanwhile twelve fucking ragheads hijacked some planes to plough them here, there, and everywhere, right in Uncle Sam’s face.

Let’s just say the borders got a little less leaky after that.

*

The second mistake was to bring along Bezeau.

The original plan was to leave Arvida by car, pick up América at Dorval, sleep in Montreal at Cindy’s, my ex, then hit the road for Detroit the next day. We figured we could cross the border, then offer Luis, for a couple of thousand more, to bring his girlfriend all the way down to California. That made for a whole lot of driving, except between the time Luis called Big Lé to set things up, and when we were ready to head out, something else happened. The day after the Saint-Jean Baptiste party at Saint-Gédéon, Big Lé lost his licence when he hit a roadblock at nine in the morning where the road forked at Saint-Bruno. He’d swallowed some speed for dinner and some more at midnight. He wasn’t drunk any more, but the amount of alcohol he’d ingested between that morning and the day before was beyond calculation. We needed another driver, or else I’d have to do it all myself.