The next morning, back on the job site, he hammered his sledge against a jammed beam. He’d begun to sweat. He struck three more times and then flattened his hand against the iron, reared, and drove the sledge down. The flesh split like a bean pod, revealing the white, knuckled bone.
He was renting a room on Montreal’s Plateau and, in the days after leaving the hospital, he sat on the fire escape, teaching himself English from a book. He’d bought an eight-track and listened to rock ’n’ roll. He went to a few boxing matches, frequented bars, and tried liquors whose labels were as foreign as the logos on the sides of trucks he’d watched pass as a kid. He held his bandaged finger before him like a symbol of nobility.
When he was almost out of money and nearly healed, he ran into Gaétan, a wolfish man from the high-rises who had a gift for making men laugh two hundred feet up while standing on a twelve-inch I beam. They talked about the poor pay and Martin’s death. Then Gaétan admitted he’d quit his job and said he was moving that afternoon. He asked if my father would help.
“You drive,” Gaétan said and directed my father into an alley behind an apartment building and told him to wait. My father wondered how Gaétan could afford to live there or own such a nice car or why he’d insisted on putting the ragtop down, when clothes started falling from a balcony—silk dresses and pinstriped suits, a small wooden chest that bruised the upholstery, a jewelry box with a mirror that shattered. Rings tumbled along the floorboards.
When Gaétan swung down from the fire escape, my father was furious. But Gaétan was already in the car and said, “Dépêche-toi!”
My father hit the gas, and they raced off.
As he drove, Gaétan showed him a Judy Garland record. “C’est de quoi, ça!”
My father didn’t respond. When he reached the east end, he parked and got out and began walking. Gaétan called after him that if he wanted to make real money, he could ask for him in the bar.
My father left Montreal, afraid to be tied to the robbery. He took a job on a dam up north. He was there for several months. Sundays, he skipped Mass to go fishing, and just before sunset he sat on the scaffolding and smoked, staring off toward the west.
But within a month he had an accident. He’d been working at the top of the dam, standing on the wooden forms to pour concrete into them. As he guided the sluice behind the truck, the sun rose through mist and clouds, sometimes pale yellow or silver white, at times blinding. Bulldozers shifted mud and rock below the dam. He heard a cracking sound and grabbed the wood beneath his feet as the form he stood on broke free. The wall of the dam was rushing past, and he gripped the two-by-four frame that skidded like a sled along the concrete cliff, nails striking sparks.
He reached the shallow water below, crouched, his heart oddly calm, his mind empty, as if he’d been made for this and nothing could be more natural. When the men along the rim saw that he was still on his feet, they began to cheer, and at first he couldn’t understand why.
The next morning, he packed and took his final paycheck. At the post office, he divided his money and sent half to his family. He began hitchhiking west with what remained.
✴
HE CROSSED THE continent west, amazed at the endless variety of earth and people. Nothing was promised—meals and beds coming into his life with a power like revelation. But eventually, when he was penniless, he returned to Montreal.
“Gaétan introduced me to the man who taught me safecracking. I was good at it. I liked the challenge. Safecracking’s not for idiots. It takes concentration. It was like a game. I’d test myself. I knew I was good. But he didn’t pay much. We’d steal a thousand, and he’d give me a hundred. I wanted to go out on my own. I told him I wasn’t making much more than in the mines. He’s the one who set me up.”
The night my father broke into the sporting-goods store, he huddled in the doorway—wet streets, coronas beneath hooded lamps, no sound of footsteps. A long car with finned rear fenders passed, throwing up lines of spray. His hands were tight in his pockets, his chin to his collar, his heart and mind still. He began to understand this strangeness in him, that he was at home only in uncertainty.
Then he exhaled, the sound loud in the darkness, surprising him. He turned and slid a flat bar from inside his coat and jimmied the lock. Inside, he let his eyes adjust. He crept past racks of hockey sticks, shelves of ice skates and helmets. At the back, his hands hunted over the panels of a door. With a stab, he locked the bar and levered it. Slivers of wood crunched beneath his boots, screws trilling on the uneven floorboards.
In the next room, past the desk, he found the safe. As he knelt, the doorway flared. He rushed out. Blinded by the brightness, he slammed into a shelf. Balls fell and bounced across the floor. Each window was a brilliant grid, red and blue eddying behind the keen light.
He never described being arrested, only prison—the inmates no tougher than the men in his village—and the constant tension, the almost-sexual sizing up as he passed cells and brushed shoulders. He hated the thin cots that smelled of sweat, the exposed toilet and the sink stained from the drip of rusty water, the blood on its rim after that first fight,
