The Main

tissue had held up pretty-well, it had given him no trouble for twelve years. Looked at that way, he was lucky.

As he sat listening to the young doctor’s quiet, confident voice, LaPointe remembered the yellow cat with the kinked tail and one forepaw off the ground.

The doctor had handled many situations like this; he prided himself on being good at this sort of thing. Keep it factual, keep it upbeat. Once the doctor permits a little hole in the dike of emotion, he can end up twenty minutes—even half an hour—behind in his appointments. “In cases like this, when a man doesn’t have any immediate family, I make it a habit to explain everything as clearly and truthfully as I can. To be frank, with a mature man, I don’t think a doctor has the right to withhold anything that might delay the patient’s attending to his personal affairs. You understand what I mean, M. Dupont?”

LaPointe had given him a false name and had said he was retired from the army, where he had received the wound in combat.

“Now, your first question, quite naturally, is what kind of time do I have? It’s not possible to say, M. Dupont. You see, we doctors really don’t know everything.” He smiled at the admission. “It could come tomorrow. On the other hand, you could have six months. Even eight. Who knows? One thing is sure; it will happen like that.” The doctor snapped his fingers softly. “No pain. No warning. Really just about the best way to go.”

“Is that right?”

“Oh, yes. To be perfectly honest, M. Dupont, it’s the way I would like to go, when my time comes. In that respect, you’re really quite lucky.”

There was a young receptionist with a fussy, cheerful manner and a modish uniform that swished when she moved. She made an appointment for the next week and gave LaPointe a printed reminder card. He never returned. What was the point?

He walked the streets, displaced. It was September, Montreal’s beautiful month. Little girls chanted as they skipped rope; boys played tin-can hockey in the narrow streets, spending most of their energy arguing about who was cheating. He wanted to—expected to—feel something different, dramatic; but he did not, except that he kept getting tangled up in memories of his boyhood, memories so deep that he would look up and find that he had walked a long way without noticing it.

Evening came, and he was back on the Main. Automatically, he chatted with shopkeepers, took coffee in the cafes, reaffirmed his presence in the tougher bars. Night came, and he strolled through back streets, occasionally checking the locks on doors.

The next morning he woke, made coffee, carried down the garbage, and went to his office. Everything felt artificial; not because things were different, but because they were unchanged. He was stunned by the normalcy of it all; a little dazed by a significant absence, as a man going down a flight of stairs in the dark might be jolted by reaching the bottom when he thought there was another step to go.

And yet, he had guessed what was wrong before he went to the doctor. For a couple of months there had been that effervescence in his blood, that constriction in his upper arms and chest, those jagged little pains at the tops and bottoms of breaths.

In the middle of that first morning, there was one outburst of rage. He was pecking away at an overdue report, looking up the spelling of a word, when suddenly he ripped the page from his dictionary and threw the book against the wall. What the fucking use is a fucking dictionary! How can you look up the spelling of a fucking word when you don’t know how to spell the fucking thing?

He sat behind his desk, stiff and silent, his fingers interlaced and the knuckles white with pressure. His eyes stung with the unfairness of it. But he couldn’t push through to feeling sorry for himself. He could not grieve for himself. After all, he had not grieved for Lucille.

He insulated himself from his impending death by accepting it only as a fact. Not a real fact, like the coming of autumn; more like… the number of feet in a mile. You don’t do anything about the number of feet in a mile. You don’t complain about it. It’s just a fact.

With great patience, he mended the torn page in his dictionary with transparent tape.

LaPointe pulls the string of the bathroom ceiling light and goes into the bedroom. The springs creak as he settles down on his back and looks up at the ceiling, glowing dimly from the streetlamp outside.

His breathing deepens and he finds himself vaguely considering the problem of worn-out water hosing. Last Sunday he spent a lazy morning sitting in his chair by the window, reading La Presse. There was a do-it-yourself article describing things you could make around the house with old water hosing. He has a house; a fantasy house in Laval, where he lives with Lucille and the two girls. Whenever he passes shops that have garden tools, he daydreams about working in his garden. Several years ago he put in a flagstone patio from the plans in a special section of the paper devoted to Fifteen Things You Can Do to Improve the Value of Your House. That patio figures often in his reveries just before sleep. He and Lucille are having lemonade under a sun umbrella he once saw in a hardware store window—Clearance!!! Up to 2/3 Off!!! The girls are off somewhere, and they have the house to themselves for a change. Sometimes, in his imaginings, his girls are kids, sometimes teen- agers, and sometimes already married with children of their own. During the first years after Lucille’s death, the number and sex of their children shifted around, but it finally settled on two girls, three years apart. A pretty one, and a smart one. Not that the pretty one is what you would call a dummy, but…

He turns over in bed, ready to sleep now. The springs creak. Even when it was new, the bed had clacked and creaked. At first, the noise made Lucille tense and apprehensive. But later, she used to giggle silently at the thought of imagined neighbors listening beyond the wall, shocked at such carryings-on…

3

The phone rings.

Half of the sound blends into the eddy of a dream; half is jagged and real, still echoing in the dark room.

The phone rings again.

He swings out of bed and gropes into the dark living room. The floor is icy.

The phone ri—

“Yes! LaPointe.”

“Sorry, Lieutenant.” The voice is young. “I hate to wake you up, but—”

“Never mind that. What’s wrong?”

“A man’s been killed on your patch.” The caller’s French is accurate, but it has a continental accent. He is an Anglophone Canadian.

“Murdered?” LaPointe asks. Stupid question. Would they call him for an automobile accident? He still isn’t fully awake.

“Yes, sir. Knifed.”

“Where?”

“Little alley near the corner of Rue Lozeau and St. Dominique. That’s just across from—”

“I know where it is. When?”

“Sir?”

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know. I just got here with Detective Sergeant Gaspard. We took an incoming from a patrol car. The Sergeant asked me to call you.”

“All right. Ten minutes.” LaPointe hangs up.

He dresses quickly, with fumbling hands. As he leaves he remembers to take the paper bag of garbage with him. He may not get back in time for the collection.

It is three-thirty, the coldest part of the night. Following the pattern of this pig weather, the overcast has lifted with the early hours of morning, taking with it the smell of city soot. The air is still and crystalline, and the exhaust from a patrol car parked halfway up the narrow alley shoots a long funnel of vapor out into the street. A revolving roof light skids shafts of red along the brick walls and over the chests and faces of the half-dozen policemen and detectives working around the corpse. Bursts of blue-white glare periodically fill the alley, freezing men in mid-gesture, as the forensic photographer takes shots from every angle. Two uniformed officers stand guard