Free October 1970 by Louis Hamelin Page B

him access to some new friends. He started coming home late again, went back to drinking and chewing amphetamines like they were those candies threaded onto necklaces they sold at Labelle’s in Coteau-Rouge when he was a kid. When deliveries from Labelle’s Self Service Store had been made in a horse and wagon. The milk truck had also been drawn by a horse. And the chip truck  . . .
    And for running water, for running water, there had been that little wagon.
    But today he drove around in a Lincoln Continental, while princes of darkness paid for his cognac.
    Coco felt he had the soul of a patriot. He joined the separatist group Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale. Impatient for action, factions within this movement tinkered with bombs that rattled the symbols of power as well as the walls of barracks. Radical separatist groups formed, expanded, and disappeared faster than it took to name them, and history was made. Coco participated in meetings of the Comité indépendance-socialisme started by Francis Braffort, where he also met members of the Intellectuels et ouvriers patriotes de Québec, a workers’ party founded by two former police officers. It was bizarre, two cops putting together a Marxist group, but in those days anything could happen.
    One evening, Richard Kimball showed up at the apartment.
    Kimball was a twenty-one-year-old from northern Michigan, Marquette, or somewhere around there. He had left the States out of idealism, so that he wouldn’t have to do what was expected of him, which would have meant letting himself be eaten alive by insects and, if possible, killing a few Vietnamese. A draft dodger. He was a strange case. Kimball told Coco that in 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson opened the United States pavilion at Expo 67, he’d hidden in a tree on Île Sainte-Hélène and taken a potshot, not at the president but at the young fellow whose job it had been to raise the American flag during the ceremony. He later told Coco that the protocol office and the secret service had had the bright idea of having the flag raised by a Boy Scout, because they were convinced that no potential assassin would shoot at a child. Kimball added that the kid wore a bulletproof vest when he raised the goddamned Star-Spangled Banner. Those were the kinds of stories Kimball told.
    Sometimes Coco believed him, sometimes he didn’t. There were some things he could do without knowing.
    Kimball was blond, gifted with a winning smile, and had a dangerous sense of humour. He apparently considered his rural accent from the Upper Peninsula to be a superior form of speech, and everyone around him had to bow down to it in the interest of maintaining good relations between civilized peoples. Ginette took an immediate dislike to him. He brought girls over. He lived on avenue Mont-Royal, in a huge five-and-a-half-room apartment. When he showed up, Coco and Ginette’s place filled with smoke and a mental fog that lasted until the next morning. The first time Kimball brought Lucie, she climbed up on the table and took her clothes off. Someone took photos. Then Richard carried her into the bedroom, laid her down on the bed, and went to work on her. The other guests talked among themselves, while Coco, who had a ringside seat next to the bedroom, didn’t dare stand up.
    One morning, after watching Coco swallow a couple of bennies with a glass of water from the kitchen tap, Kimball took from the pocket of his vest a mirror like the one Ginette used to powder her face, a razor blade, one edge of which was covered with tape, and a plastic bag containing maybe a gram of cocaine. He poured some of the cocaine on the mirror, spread it out, and worked it with the razor blade. Coco’s eyes never left Kimball’s hands; he watched with the rapt attention of one observing a sacred ritual.
    Kimball scraped the cocaine into two parallel lines, each about five centimetres