Free October 1970 by Louis Hamelin Page A

mountains of euphoria and plunged into pits of despondency as he wove from party to party. He’d bring friends home, couples. One night, Ginette went to sleep hoping that the shouting and the breaking glass wouldn’t wake up the children. When she opened her eyes, a young colleague of her husband’s had slipped into bed with her and was grinning like an idiot, wearing only his boxer shorts and socks. She went after him like a mother dog protecting her pups.
    â€œWhat the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
    â€œWell  . . . Coco told me it would be all right.”
    The speedometer registered 110 miles per hour. On the seat between Ginette and Coco was a case of Molson’s Ex. He was driving with his foot to the floor, a bottle between his legs, charging up behind cars until their fenders were nearly touching, then swerving out to pass, racing toward trucks coming in the opposite direction before cutting back into his own lane at the last second. Laughing at his wife’s terror, ignoring her pleas to stop.
    Somewhere near Berthier he turned a corner too sharply, and the case of beer flew off the seat and crashed onto the brake pedal. The Lincoln flew across the road, crashed through a fence, and carried on for a hundred metres before coming to a stop in the middle of a field. Eventually, Ginette stopped screaming. Coco sat staring in front of him, eyes bulging out of his head, fists clamped on the steering wheel, jaws squeezed so tight Ginette could hear his teeth grating.
    Another time, they were driving through some woods not far from Morin-Heights when Ginette, gripping the dashboard, had a nervous breakdown. Unable to make her shut up, Coco threatened to put her out of the car and leave her by the side of the road. Thirty miles farther on, he’d had enough. She was still crying her eyes out. He stopped the car, calmed himself, then got out, walked around the front of the car to the passenger side, opened the door, grabbed his wife by her wrist, and yanked her out of the car.
    She watched as the car burned rubber on the pavement and vanished around a curve. Then she sat down and waited for him to come back for her. But he never did.
    The exact reasons for Coco’s ejection from the Montreal Police Force are not known. At the time, there was talk of fraud, of irregularities with union funds. The fact remains that in the mid-sixties, Good-Time Coco left the force. What he said to his wife was that he’d quit of his own accord. All there was to it. Case closed.
    Not that she thought of complaining. The squad had been a bad influence on him, but its effect receded with time. The new Jacques was free to spend some quality time at home. He looked after the youngest child, told stories to the older one. He cooked, an apron stretched around his ample girth. She became pregnant with their third child. They had no television, and so he spent his evenings after dinner reading books he’d borrowed from the library. The big Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World reawakened his dreams of travelling. He memorized the names of all the seas and sailed them in his imagination: Azov, Marmara, Barents, Aral, Aegean, Oman, Kara.
    They were living beyond the business section of town, where well-nourished rats scuttled through the breeze-blocks. The end of their street opened onto a field. The only thing Ginette had brought to the marriage was the Lincoln Continental Mark II, and it was now worth a small fortune, but Coco would rather be run over by a Volkswagen until he was dead before he would sell that car. When creditors outnumbered the mouths he had to feed, Coco began looking around for a connection or two.
    He could usually be found in the Vegas Sports Palace on boulevard Taschereau, on the South Shore. The establishment belonged to Luigi Temperio, right-hand to the Montreal Mafia boss Giuseppe Scarpino, who was related to the Bonanno family in New York. Coco’s police contacts gave