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 kept telling 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-coloured water.

The next day was Saturday, official start of the long Labour Day weekend. Roch's family, or the Caron gang as he'd called it, arrived a few minutes after noon.

The Caron gang 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 walked 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 I couldn't see it.

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

I dragged my feet back to the house with the intent to offer my services to whoever wanted my assistance with anything at all. I felt very much the unwanted guest. I also got paranoid that somehow, Roch's parents had worked out I'd been staying at their cottage all along. The official version was that I'd arrived with Roch the previous day.

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. Roch's father was busy getting into the weekend party mode with a large glass of scotch on the rocks. When I asked if I could help with anything, he frowned and pulled out a cigarette; I had a match lit for him before he'd placed it between his lips.

He blew out smoke and said sure, 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 near future.

I thanked him profusely for his offer 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 a tone that suggested 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 the conversation had been interrupted. She asked to be excused in French and brushed past me on her way out; 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. Better: I've got some good news. 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 would 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 other two houses.

"How many houses did you guys inherit from that aunt?" I asked. "Three?"

"Four. We sold one right away. It costs a lot to put the rest of them in shape."

"Wow. Your aunt must've been a wealthy woman."

"Yeah. It didn't do her much good. She got married when she was 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."

"Sounds sad."

"It was sad. My mother said that she was a very beautiful woman when she was young."

I laughed a short, bitter laugh and said:

"Fuck. 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 fucks 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?"

"What happened was that I got to own a house," said Roch. "And she started pressing me to get married. I told her, we're both nineteen, fuck, we've got plenty of time for that. We started having fights, pretty quickly 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."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

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

"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 caught him smiling, I said:

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

That got rid of his new smile right away. He said:

"What is it this time?"

"What are we going to do with all that stuff we take? You said the other day we're going to sell it, right? You think it's easy to sell a stolen painting? And what about the jewelry and gold and shit? You're going to put it in a pawnshop?"

"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:

"The magic Michel who climbs brick walls and fixes everything."

"That's right, the magic Michel. Look, let's drop it for now. We're getting within earshot of my fucking family."

When we got back 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 fuck 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. But of course we rode in the shitty shoebox. It was a ten-minute drive to the nearest gas station. We passed the time trying to come up with a name for our gang—the Spidermen? The Rope Bandits?—and we were laughing out loud by the time we got to the gas station.

There was great joy at the cottage when we returned with gas for the grill. 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, and the way she held it suggested it wasn't the first one.

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. Heloise disappeared into the kitchen to get another beer and spent a long time in there. She reappeared with a fresh, untouched bottle 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. The food was delicious, there was salmon apart from the inevitable hamburgers and steaks, and that was a nice change. Everyone ate like pigs, using lots of booze to wash all that food down. Everyone was really, really hungry.

No one talked until we all were well into the meal. When conversation started, it was in French. I drank and smoked and sneaked discreet glances at the house across the lake. After a while, the Caron gang began attempting to include me in their conversation. They would ask me something in English and I would smile and respond and nod to indicate that it was perfectly all right for them to switch back into their secret French.

Night fell, and after a while Heloise tried to excuse herself. Her unsuccessful bid for freedom was the signal to begin clearing the table. There was a lot of washing up to be done, and Heloise was pressed into service drying the dishes while Roch and his old man cleaned the grill. They scrubbed it clean and smoked a cigarette each and went back inside the house with perfect timing: all the work in the kitchen had been completed.

I stayed on the deck to smoke a final cigarette. I was feeling wonderfully full of food and pleasantly tight. I was letting my thoughts drift the way they do in dreams 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 around. I 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 after two more cigarettes, and I went to bed.