Black Alley Read online

  “Listen to me carefully, you guys,” CB continues. “If you treat me right, I’ll treat you right. But watch out, no bullshit.”

  He snaps his fingers and immediately one of the Haitians leans in towards him. There follows a short, whispered exchange in Creole. All Pato can make out is the name of the boy, Mixon, and he remembers a story his brother told about him. Once, in class, he fell asleep during an exam and the teacher had to wake him up. He picked up the kid’s paper and held it up by the tips of his fingers: it was dripping with saliva. Mixon rummages around in a cooler, takes out two Popsicles and hands one each to him and Alfonso. Surprised, they remain motionless for a moment, their Popsicles in their hands, not daring to unwrap them. CB motions towards them with his chin, and they hurriedly rip open the paper and start to lick the red ice.

  “Tell me one thing,” CB asks, fixing his eyes on Pato. “Was it your brother’s idea to rob me?”

  “No. Lalo had nothing to do with it. I swear.”

  “Then it was Flaco’s idea?”

  “Not his either. I swear.”

  “Then it was your idea?”

  Since Pato remains silent, CB slumps back down in his chair.

  “I think I see what you’re up to, you little wuss. You wanted Latino Power to accept you, right? You wanted to show them you could pull off a robbery like a big boy. And what could be better than robbing the leader of the Bad Boys, right? I already said it once, but I’ll tell you again, you’re a pretty clever guy.”

  Behind CB, a wave of sniggering immediately dies out.

  “What else did you take from me?”

  What if they decide to search me? wonders Pato. What if they tie me to a tree? What if they beat me like a dog and then abandon me there?

  “Nothing else,” he hears himself say. “I swear.”

  “You swear a little too much for my taste, wuss. In my opinion, that means one of two things. Either you lie like the devil himself, or you’re planning to become a priest.”

  Again, his remark sparks laughter.

  “You like to run?”

  The question surprises Pato, who then replies, yes, he likes to.

  “Isn’t it true nothing’s more fun than jogging in a park?”

  “It’s true. Nothing’s more fun.”

  “On a nice summer day, with your friends following along and all that?”

  “That’s true, CB.”

  “It would be too bad if something unfortunate happened to your legs, wouldn’t it?”

  Pato is silent.

  “Answer!”

  “Yes, that would be too bad.”

  “Okay, let’s say it would be too bad. It would really be too bad if you lied to me.”

  CB directs an enquiring gaze at Alfonso. “What about you, wuss, what do you think? Is your little friend here lying to me or not?”

  Pato sees the sweat pearling on the heavy boy’s forehead, as he turns his head towards him, and to his great displeasure, he notices the frightened, hesitant shine in his eyes. Pointing a finger at Alfonso, Ketcia declares, “Just look at him, CB. The guy’s shitting his pants. I think it means they’re hiding something.”

  “Yeah, I can feel it, too. These two are just politely shoving a cucumber up my ass.”

  CB’s eyes turn back to Pato. His breathing becomes shorter and sharper.

  “Deep down, I really don’t care if you’re lying to me. First of all, I made a peace agreement with Flaco not too long ago. Also, because tomorrow, one way or another, I’ll know if you’re telling me the truth or not now. And because you’re nothing but morons, I really wouldn’t enjoy giving you a beating. But there’s just one thing . . .”

  He jumps up and brings his face in close to Pato’s.

  “It’s true I don’t like liars, but there’s one category of people I hate, who I never forgive for anything. Every time I’ve fought in my life, it was to beat one of them up. Now, we’re going to see if you two fall into that category.”

  Pato hears CB’s whistled breathing and smells a mix of cigarettes and mint candies. It occurs to him to take one step back, but he is unable to do it, as if his body is no longer following his orders.

  “Why did so many Black men die during the Vietnam war?” CB asks them, dead serious.

  The Latinos exchange a surprised glance, and, one after the other, reply that they don’t know.

  “Well, I’m going to tell you why. When they were getting bombed and the general would say ‘Get down,’ the Blacks would all start to dance instead of lying down on the ground.”

  The Haitians roar with laughter.

  “Christ, that’s a good one, CB!” Mixon comments, between two torrents of laughter. “I didn’t know that one.”

  Pato repeats the last line of the joke in his head, then looks up at the Haitians and sees shadows swaying in the night, shadows with white teeth sparkling like diamonds. And suddenly, feeling like he could just as easily start to cry, he bursts out in strange laughter, too. Alfonso does likewise. Deep down, and Pato knows this, they aren’t laughing, they’re so worried the sound they’re making is more like a moo. The Haitians laugh even harder, but CB settles for just an amused smile.

  “So – did we have a good laugh?” he asks after a bit of time has passed.

  “Yeah,” Pato says, in an exhausted voice. “That joke of yours was really a good one.”

  “That’s right, it was good, wasn’t it? . . . But now, let’s move on to more serious things. Why did you like it?”

  “Well, I don’t know, because it was good. What? I don’t understand the question.”

  “Why was it good?”

  Not really knowing what to answer, Pato says, “It’s funny, when I saw you all laughing, I wanted to laugh, too.”

  Sinister-looking faces draw closer to him, exhaling noisily through their noses.

  “What?” says CB. “You were laughing at us?”

  Suddenly Pato feels like the ground is going to open up beneath his feet and swallow him up.

  “No, that’s not it. It’s that . . . the way you opened your mouths, I don’t know how to say it, but I thought it was funny.”

  “You thought our mouths were funny? Is that what you’re trying to tell us?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. No . . . Wait . . . I mean . . . I’m all mixed up.”

  CB lets out a long, tired, unenthusiastic laugh, and then Pato is as surprised as the others to hear himself sobbing. Then, Alfonso begins to wail like a baby, too.

  “You didn’t pass the test!” CB articulates above the concert of whining. “You get an F-! You know what, you’re a racist!”

  He steps back, laughing quietly.

  “Be glad you’re nothing but a little wuss, or else I would have taken care of you myself.”

  And going back to sit down, “They’re all yours!”

  The other Haitians surround them, taking the Popsicles from their hands. Now, Pato closes his eyes, and forces himself to cry in silence. Like a man, he says to himself. He feels someone take him by the collar and lift him up. With the first punch, he feels a warm liquid running over his lips. The pain is so intense it makes him dizzy. But after the second punch, he doesn’t feel anything else, it’s like some other person’s face is being pounded on.

  Usually, after Phys. Ed., we’d push our way upstairs, sweating and shoving in the lineup, and then take over the classroom with rowdy conversations. Sister Cécile would pace back and forth, furtively observing the ruckus, and once they were all quietly seated at their desks, and this sometimes took a long time, she would look at her watch: in order to make up the lost time, class would end, let’s see, ten minutes late. And she’d better not hear any complaining! Then, inevitably, she’d go into a long speech about proper behaviour at school: fists and jostling should be left to the animals, did they understand? Also, the young ladies had to pay special attention not to be taken as “easy.” Did they understand what she meant?

  On that day, however, the students filed in, surprisingl
y quietly, grouped around the new boy. And several of them told Sister Cécile about his exploit in Phys. Ed. And right away she said, that’s wonderful, congratulations, but it would be even better if he were good in French, too. What country was he from? Haiti? That’s what she thought, she’d recognized the accent. How long had he been in Canada? Lord, time was flying, she’d speak to him after class. The rest of you, that’s enough, it’s time to take your seats.

  Remember the postcards she handed out that day: the Rockies asleep under a snowy blanket, the Laurentian lakes still as mirrors and stands of pine trees as wide as the sea. They had to choose one and use it to inspire memories of a family vacation, and then come to the board and tell the class about it. At the slightest stutter, memory lapse or nervous gesture, the whole class would start to laugh. Remember the madness when it was Cléo’s turn. Four times, Marcelo, four times, he repeated the same sentence: Hello, my name is Cléo . . . unable to go any farther. That enigmatic smile on his lips the whole time. All the respect he’d managed to earn with his run evaporated. The laughing was so loud a head appeared in the doorway: could they, please, lower their voices? Mr. Daigneault had sent someone to ask. Sister Cécile: yes, yes, she’d take care of it. She stood up, placed one fist on her hip, pursed her lips: come now, children, what’s got into you! This is how you welcome newcomers now? You have no manners!

  When the day was over, you were walking alongside Akira on Rue Carlton, and you could still see the new boy’s face. Despite his smile, you had read the despair in the glimmer of his eyes. Your school bag on your back, you were walking nonchalantly, as Akira described the images in Magic Sword, the new Super Nintendo game his cousin had got for his birthday. The guys were incredible, the drawings were even better than in King of Dragons, which had been his favourite game till then. But you weren’t listening anymore: behind you, Cléo was walking alone kicking at the fallen leaves covering the sidewalk and pretending to daydream. How long had he been following you like that? Akira motioned for him to join you and he ran up, holding his school bag in one hand and his lunch box in the other.

  Akira continued to describe the video game: now he was going on about how many points you got for stabbing someone with a sword, or tripping them or winning a fist fight. Then he turned towards Cléo, “Where do you live?”

  Cléo thought a minute, then he shook his head. Crap, he’d forgotten the name of the street again. It was because they’d just moved. The day before yesterday in fact. But he knew how to get home, he’d recognize the street when he saw it.

  “You just came to Canada?” Akira asked.

  “No, I lived in Saint-Léonard for three months. But my mother didn’t think there were enough Haitians.”

  “That’s an Italian neighbourhood,” Akira remarked. “My cousin says if you’re not Italian over there, in no time, you’ve got the Mafia on your ass. They think they own the whole neighbourhood.”

  “Your cousin lives over there?”

  “You kidding? His family barely lasted a month, not a day more! My father told them to move down here. Côte-des-Neiges ain’t exactly full of Japanese, either, but at least around here he won’t get beaten up when he gets out of school.”

  “One time,” remembered Cléo, “I beat a guy at marbles. His name was Luigi. He said he was going to shut me up in a locker because I’d cheated. I thought it was crazy, because it really wasn’t true what he was saying. It’s lucky I was faster than him. After a few days he got tired of chasing me around. So he’d just shout insults at me. And I’d just laugh.”

  “Well,” you said, “when it comes to running, you sure run fast. With you we’ve got a pretty good chance of making it to the Jeux du Québec.”

  “In my class in Haiti, I wasn’t even one of the best. Now if I’m a pretty good runner, it’s because my mother used to send me to buy bread in Port-au-Prince, and she’d say, ‘C’mon, Cléo, hurry up.’ It was good practice.”

  You’d turned left at Avenue Légaré and you saw cars, one behind the other, in something that looked like a traffic jam. In the very front, a man had his head stuck under the hood of a black Dodge with a seriously rusted body.

  “In Haiti,” Cléo continued, “all the guys play soccer. They don’t know what hockey is.”

  “In Chile, it’s the same way,” you explained. “In my letters, when I told my cousins about the Montreal Canadiens, they thought I was talking about people who lived in Canada.”

  “What a bunch of jerks!” exclaimed Akira.

  “Well, how were they supposed to know?”

  “I’d like to play hockey,” said Cléo. “I’ve never played.”

  “You can play with us,” Akira offered. “We play all the time. In the summer, we play in the street with a tennis ball. In the winter, we play in the park, on the rink, with a real puck.”

  He stopped for a moment, then, in a solemn voice, said, “Hockey is my favourite sport.”

  “You any good?”

  “I’m really good!”

  At the red light on the corner of Van Horne you stopped on the cement median where the cars were racing by, then you walked as far as Avenue Linton.

  “Here it is!” shouted Cléo. “This is it, this is my street.”

  You and Akira looked at each other and laughed.

  “You live on the same street as us!” you said. “Wow, are you ever a space cadet!”

  You burst out laughing. Cléo looked hurt.

  “What does ‘space cadet’ mean?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” you answered. “It’s not harsh. It just means you’re a little . . . how can I explain . . . a little out of it.”

  Linton, Marcelo, the street you grew up on, that street of dreams and tragic disappointments. In all Montreal, was there a grimier, more dilapidated, more hopeless street? So how do you explain that every time a colour, a face, a noise brings you back there, the emotion that rises in you is both sweet and unsettling? ¡Ay, Marcelito! Lined with three-storey buildings, almost all made of faded orange brick, Avenue Linton was really like a dumping ground for the island. Garbage cans were always overflowing, and the grass, which had been dead for ages, was as yellow in spring as it was in summer. Do you remember the early days of July, when everyone was moving house? The City would clear out two or three buildings where the vermin had taken over, you all liked it when that happened, because then you would take them over next, and you’d play in them, or the older kids would take them over so they could smoke or make love. At night, from the beginning of spring till the end of fall, under the streetlights, teenagers would gather and sit or lie down on the parked cars. But you all were too young to be part of those groups, your parents wouldn’t let you go out at night.

  “You have any brothers or sisters?” you asked.

  No, he was an only child. He lived alone with his mother.

  “What about your father?”

  His father? You saw the expression on his face change, like when Sylvain kept pushing to see if he’d ever slept with a girl. You’d felt like you’d put your foot in it when you’d asked that question.

  “My father? He’s usually away. He’s in business.”

  “Does he come to see you sometimes?” asked Akira.

  “Not a lot. But he calls me on the phone. When he finishes his business, he’s coming home and he’ll bring me lots of toys.”

  “My parents got divorced,” Akira continued. “It doesn’t really bother me much, it happened when I was little. My mother’s the one who left, but she comes to see me every weekend.”

  “Well, my parents are still together,” you said, “but they fight all the time. Sometimes I can’t even get my homework done. Lots of times they yell at each other and then they start laughing: even they can’t believe how much they fight over stupid stuff.”

  You stopped in front of a building that was just like the others, except that the front door was cracked all the way through as if someone had tried to break it down. Hesitating, with a shy laugh, Cléo started d
own the alley: I think I’d better go home. So you said, Okay, whatever, see you tomorrow. But he came back, scratching his forehead: you like marbles? You looked at each other: yeah, yeah, we like marbles. Why don’t you come over then? He was going to show you his collection. Okay, why not, and the three of you stepped into the building. You climbed the stairs leading to the second floor, and at apartment number three Cléo took out a key he wore around his neck.

  “My mother will be asleep. So, don’t make any noise,” he ordered, with his finger on his lips.

  He let you into the living room: sit down, I’ll be right back, and he was lost in the darkness of a narrow hallway. You and Akira sat there for quite a while with your mouths gaping open, you’d never seen so many paintings. There were paintings on the floor, piled one on top of the other, on the sofa, on the desk and on all the walls. The canvases were crammed with very bright colours: black-skinned men and women were labouring in sugar cane fields, carrying baskets on their heads, or crafting straw hats. In one corner of the room dozens of masks were piled up, their oval faces seemed to wish to extract both laughter and tears from anyone who looked at them too long. Nonetheless, in the very middle of the living room, what attracted your attention most was an easel, which bore a painting that was just being sketched out. Cléo came back with two small bags in his hands.

  “Is your mother a painter?” you asked in a low voice.

  Circling his arms to encompass the whole room, Cléo answered, “She’s the one who painted everything you see here.”

  You were especially fascinated by the masks: you examined them, touched them, weighed them in your hands, turned them all around. Akira put one of them on and pretended to roar. Cléo immediately rushed towards you: he’d told you – absolutely no noise!

  “I know what we’ll do,” Cléo said softly. “You can each take a mask home. If your parents like them, tell them we’ll sell them for forty dollars. If they don’t like them, you can bring them back. But tell them they sell for double that in other places.”