Black Rock Page 22

  Dougherty thought, Shit, Vietnam, isn’t that what these people are trying to avoid? Other parts of the pamphlet talked about how they needed to be more like the Black Panthers and “prepare themselves for armed combat, for urban guerilla warfare.”

  The other cop came back into the kitchen, holding a girl by the arm. “They’re not here.”

  For a moment Dougherty thought about saying something about that “reliable intelligence in the draft-dodger community,” but it passed and he said, “So what are you doing?”

  “We’re taking these ones in.”

  “What for?”

  “Boisjoli says he’ll think of something on the way.”

  The cop let go of the girl, and Dougherty realized that meant she was all his. She’d gotten dressed, pulled on some jeans and a blouse, but she was barefoot and her hair was all over her face. “Okay, let’s go,” Dougherty said.

  She looked at him and he realized she was at least his age, maybe even a couple of years older.

  She said, “Can I get my boots?” and motioned to where a few pairs of shoes and boots stood in a neat row by the door.

  Dougherty said sure, and watched her pick up a pair of work boots, steel-toed like his father wore on the job, and sit down on one of the chairs. When she finished tying the laces she stood up and looked around the kitchen, and Dougherty got the feeling that it was her place, she was in charge of it, though by the way she looked as they were going out the back door, Dougherty thought she might be getting tired of it.

  He led her into the lane where his squad car was parked. The sun was up then, the beginning of a hot, humid August day, and Dougherty still had his regular shift to work.

  He opened the back door and said, “Watch your head.”

  “You’re not going to slam it into the roof of the car?”

  “This is a clean shirt,” Dougherty said, “and I don’t have any more.”

  She looked at him like she didn’t understand for a moment and then she said, “Oh,” and nodded. “A joke?”

  “You’re older,” Dougherty said.

  Getting into the back seat she said, “Older than what?”

  Dougherty pulled out of the lane slowly. “Do you all live there together in that apartment?”

  In the back seat the woman rolled her eyes and looked away, shaking her head and saying, “Yes, it’s nothing but drugs and orgies, all day and all night.”

  “Yeah? Who keeps the kitchen so clean?”

  Dougherty was looking in the rear-view mirror, and she was looking out the window.

  And then he was thinking how crazy that sounded, orgies all the time, and how it was probably also crazy that the women Bill killed had been sexual deviants. They were just normal women, they could have been anyone.

  And Bill probably looked like a normal guy.

  He could be anyone.

  chapter

  twenty-one

  It poured Sunday afternoon. Dougherty took Tommy out to Jarry Park, hoping the rain would stop and the Expos could play.

  But every once in a while it looked like it might clear up so they stayed in their seats. They sat for almost an hour before the game was postponed to Monday night. Tommy was wearing a jacket and his red, white and blue Expos cap — Dougherty remembered when they’d first introduced the uniform and some reporter held up the hat and said, “Where’s the propeller?” — but Dougherty was just getting wet. They were eating hot dogs and Dougherty was drinking a beer.

  Tommy said, “They won yesterday, did you see?” and Dougherty said, “No, did you?”

  “I heard it on the radio, John Bateman got a couple of hits.”

  “I hope John Boccabella is playing today,” Dougherty said, “I like the way the announcer says his name,” and he and Tommy said it at the same time, drawing it way out like the P.A. announcer: “Jooooohnnn Boc-a-BELL-aaaaaaaaaa,” and they both laughed.

  “Steve Renko pitched a great game.”

  “Is he your favourite?”

  Tommy said, “I don’t know.” He looked out at the left field bleachers and said, “Last time I sat in Jonesville.”

  “Did Dad bring you?”

  “No. Our hockey team came. Expos lost.”

  “Who did they play?”

  “The Mets.”

  A hostess came by and offered Dougherty a hat, and he said, “No thanks,” and she smiled and said, “If there’s anything else you’d like.”

  “Thanks.”

  Back in Greenfield Park, their mom said it was too bad the game was rained out but that meant he could stay for dinner, and Dougherty couldn’t come up with a good reason not to.

  Cheryl didn’t show but they were pretty sure she was still in town somewhere. “That last festival,” his dad said, “was a disaster.”

  Dougherty said yeah. The Manseau Festival had been pretty much rained out but even before that not many tickets had been sold and there were rumours the whole thing was just a fraud. Didn’t seem like there would be any more Woodstocks.

  “And that girl from Ville LaSalle,” Dougherty’s mother said, shaking her head. Dougherty didn’t know what she was talking about. LaSalle was where they’d found Brenda Webber’s body but he hadn’t heard of any other girls killed there, and his father said, “Murdered in British Columbia.”

  “Dead a month when they found her,” his mother said. “In the woods. Eighteen-year-old.”

  Dougherty didn’t have anything to say to that.

  After dinner and after his mother had done the dishes and cleaned the kitchen, Dougherty was ready to leave but his father said, “Do you want a drink?” and Dougherty said okay. He sat at the kitchen table and watched him fill a couple of glasses with ice, then rum and Coke, rum and Pepsi, really.

  His dad said it was too bad the game was rained out, “But Tommy had a good time anyway.”

  “We ate a lot of hot dogs and we went to Orange Julep and had ice cream.”

  “That’s good. He didn’t get much of a summer vacation. I think he was bored in New Brunswick.”

  “But you stopped at Frontier Town on the way back, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  September was only a week away and school would be starting.

  “How come Tommy isn’t going to a French school, like I did?”

  “There’s a school two blocks away.”

  “It’s public, it’s not even Catholic.”

  “Your mother’s not so insistent anymore,” his father said, “about that or the French.”

  “But he’ll need it.”

  Dougherty’s father took a swig of his rum and Pepsi and said, “Now it feels like we’re being forced.”

  That sounded a little more pointed than Dougherty expected from his father, and he said, “It feels like?”

  “We just get it all the time, it’s all anybody talks about anymore.”

  “Yeah.” Dougherty got that all right. “It’s like every conversation is political.”

  “Like it’s the only issue,” his father said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s at work or at the Legion or at the store.”

  Dougherty was pretty sure his father never went to the Legion, but maybe that was something else that was changing.

  Then his father said, “They’re talking about a wage freeze, about inflation, everybody’s going on strike. And the only thing we talk about is language politics, as if it would be okay if we all lost our jobs as long as we speak the right language.”

  “I think the idea,” Dougherty said, “is that when they get rid of the English bosses everything will be great and we’ll all get raises.”

  “We, kemosabe?”

  “Everywhere I go I see pictures of Che Guevara and Fidel; it’s supposed to be a socialist revolution.”

  “These idiots aren’t Wobblies — nobody’s talkin
g about One Big Union. They’re not socialists, they’re nationalists, they’re fascists, they just don’t realize it.”

  “But they’re not the politicians.”

  “Did you hear Lévesque? This kind of thing provokes explosions.”

  “What? I didn’t hear that.”

  “Talking about the next election. We just had an election and he’s already talking about the next one.”

  “But what’s this about explosions?” Dougherty had noticed the stack of newspapers by the garbage cans in the backyard, his father reading the two dailies, the Gazette and the Star, every day, and now the Sunday Express, too. At least there didn’t seem to be any Allo Police in the stack.

  “Because the separatists got twenty percent of the vote but only six seats. Lévesque is supposed to be the level-headed one, and he says some people will be tempted to destroy democratic institutions.”

  Dougherty thought, Shit, more bombs. He liked René Lévesque with his comb-over and a smoke always in his hand, the way he tried to shrug everything off, but since he’d left the Liberal party and started up the Parti Québécois and made separation the priority, there was a whole gang with him that Dougherty wasn’t sure Lévesque could control.

  “Well,” he said, “it could be worse, we could be back in Ireland. They’ve got more riots and they say they’re on the verge of civil war.”

  Dougherty’s father finished his drink and walked to the counter to make another. Dougherty had barely made a dent in his own.

  “It’s everywhere,” his father said. “Did you see the two FLQ guys in Jordan?”

  “Where?”

  “Training they say, with Palestinian commandos.” He motioned to a pile of magazines on the little table under the telephone on the kitchen wall.

  Dougherty picked up the magazine on top of the pile, Weekend, that came with the Saturday Star and flipped through to the article his father was talking about. Two men, their faces covered with some kind of scarves, standing in a desert somewhere. Dougherty read the boldface under the pictures: “They say their names are ‘Salem’ and ‘Sélim’ and they say they’ve taken part in 20 FLQ ‘incidents’ up to 1969, when they slipped out of Quebec.”

  As he read the article, though, all the talk was about how “we want to orient our military tactics towards selective assassination. For too long the FLQ has been synonymous with bombs and useless violence. We intend to pick our targets so that the people who are responsible will pay.” It went on: “We are learning more how to kill than how to mobilize popular movements.” It seemed off to Dougherty, it didn’t sound like any of the guys they’d arrested. He’d never heard anyone say anything like “orient our tactics” or “mobilize movements,” and he could hear Ruth’s voice saying something about how all the student groups in the U.S. had been infiltrated by the FBI. He couldn’t really imagine any of the RCMP guys he’d met pulling something like this, but anything was possible.

  Still, he looked at his father, now back down at the kitchen table and lighting another Player’s Plain, and figured that for guys like him it sounded right.

  It sounded scary.

  “They’re just punks,” Dougherty said. “They just want to be like the rest of the world.”

  “And they will be,” his father said. “It’s easy — just set off some bombs and hijack some planes, assassinate a few people like Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.”

  He downed his drink and stood to make yet another one, this time saying, “You want a nightcap?” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, okay.” He didn’t really want another drink, but he felt like he should stay and get his father talking about something else. It was true: it was the only topic of conversations these days.

  Except, Dougherty thought, when he was with Ruth, when they talked about women being murdered.

  These days …

  When his father returned to the table with fresh drinks, Dougherty said, “You’ve got to stop reading the papers,” and his father said, “Yeah, that’ll solve everything.”

  They’d never talked hockey or much of anything when Dougherty was growing up, and then the arguments started, and now it seemed a little late for small talk. They tried for a few minutes but it was nothing but awkward.

  On his way back, Dougherty decided to take the Victoria Bridge instead of the Champlain and the expressway.

  He drove through the Point, examining all the parked cars, but the only Lincoln he saw was black and it looked ten years old.

  The parking lot behind the Arawana Tavern was empty.

  chapter

  twenty-two

  “Where we going?”

  Dougherty got in behind the wheel and said, “The Hawaiian Lounge.”

  “On Peel?”

  Dougherty pulled the squad car out of the parking lot behind the station house, the red light flashing but no siren, and said, “No, that’s the Kon Tiki. Hawaiian’s on Stanley.”

  The other cop, a rookie named Gagnon, a couple years younger than Dougherty, held on and said, “Oh yeah, that the fag bar?”

  “No,” Dougherty said, “that’s Bud’s, downstairs.”

  Gagnon said, “You know them all, eh,” and Dougherty said, “Haven’t you worked overnights before?” and Gagnon started to say, “Yeah, sure, it’s just …” but Dougherty cut him off, turning hard onto Dorchester. “The fight’s in the back.”

  They drove fast on Dorchester, and then took a hard left into oncoming traffic and blaring horns and onto Drummond. Dougherty got out of the car, nightstick in his hand, and rushed into the fight, pushing his way through the outer circle, maybe six or eight guys, and grabbing an arm pulling back for a punch.

  The guy turned around fast and jabbed at Dougherty, but the nightstick took care of him. Another guy jumped at him, and Dougherty landed another hit but took a punch in the side of the head he didn’t see coming and staggered. Then another punch to the back of the head.

  Dougherty lunged forward, falling to his knees, but as he did he caught a glimpse of a man on the ground getting up and lunging past him, driving a punch.

  On his feet again, Dougherty saw Gagnon get his nightstick across a guy’s throat and yank, dropping him to the ground, then going after another guy.

  The crowd was scattering then, guys going up and down the lane and disappearing into the dark and, breathless.

  Gagnon said, “Do we go after them?” Even the guy he’d choked had gotten up and run.

  Dougherty said no and looked at the guy who’d been on the ground and come up swinging. “Hey Mick.”

  “Finally you get here,” the guy said.

  They were all catching their breath.

  Then Mick said, “I threw them out, two of them, but they came back in this way,” pointing to the back door. “The others got into it, too.” He kind of smiled and winked at Dougherty.

  Dougherty said, “It’s not supposed to be fun,” and Mick said, “It’s not?” Then he motioned to Dougherty and said, “Come on, let’s clean that up.”

  Dougherty touched his own neck and realized there was blood coming from a wound on his head. “It’s okay.”

  “Come on.”

  Dougherty looked at Gagnon and then motioned to Mick. “This is the manager of this place, you’ll get to know him.”

  Gagnon didn’t look too happy about that.

  Inside, the band was still playing. Dougherty barely recognized Proud Mary rolling on the river, and then he saw that all four members of the band were women.

  He followed Mick around the edge of the club, guys yelling, “Shake ’em, baby,” and saw all the band members were topless, nothing but pasties and G-strings.

  They put the big finish on “Proud Mary,” the girl playing the organ holding one hand up and pumping it and the guys yelling, “Oh yeah, baby,” and then they went right into “Sugar, Sugar.”

  Mi
ck held the door and Dougherty followed him into the dressing room, looking back at Gagnon, who said, “I’ll wait here.”

  “Yeah,” Dougherty said, “of course you will.”

  In the dressing room it wasn’t quite so loud, and Mick said, “They’re good-looking broads, but they can’t fucking play a note.”

  “The crowd doesn’t seem to mind.”

  Mick dug around in the piles of make-up and clothes on the table and tossed a small towel to Dougherty, who took a seat on the couch shoved into the corner.

  The door opened and a waitress, topless, stuck her head in. “Everything okay?”

  Mick said, “Yeah, but we’re thirsty. Bring us a couple of drinks.”

  Dougherty said, “No, I’m fine,” but she was already gone and Mick was beside him with a couple of Band-Aids, saying, “Your head really is square, you know.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  All patched up, Dougherty leaned back on the couch and relaxed for the first time since the call had come in. When he’d heard it was the Hawaiian he knew there’d be action, the place being a lot more tough than tropical these days. The downtown nightlife was all moving downscale from what Dougherty could see, no more getting dressed up for the Stork Club, no more big bands.

  The waitress was back then with a couple of beer bottles and a couple of shots on her tray. Dougherty took the small glass and downed it and then shuddered a little, and Mick said, “Canadian Club it’s not,” and knocked his own back.

  With the door open, Dougherty could hear the ending of “Sloop John B” building, the line about being so broke and wanting to go home sung with the first real emotion he’d heard from the band.

  There wasn’t much applause.

  Mick said, “They call themselves Eight of a Kind, but it’s not true — only two of them really have any tits.”

  A woman’s voice said, “I thought more than a handful was a waste,” and the four topless girls were coming into the dressing room, a couple of them ­grabbing jackets and purses and heading right out, and a couple sitting down and looking at Dougherty, one of them saying, “Our brave boys in blue,” giggling.