She took her suitcase and went into that Montréal midnight with the intention of leaving him forever, and he sat in anguish worrying about her because she didn't have any money; she'd come without money and he'd doled it out this time so she couldn't get crazy drunk and cause more trouble; what would happen to her? But she was free; she didn't want him; she had to make her own way. She came back because she'd forgotten something; then she went out again. Through the window he glimpsed her down on Saint-Denis between the giant grinning green plastic monster heads where the music went whirling crazily like a Russian orgy, singing up over the street of those shouting jigging heads from which she had previously curled timidly back; she vanished there now.
He stood at the window and saw chess-chested kicking girls and bluehaired greenfooted drummers.
An hour later she came back quietly, her face screwed up by weeping, wearing those same low brownish wrinkles he'd seen in the indigo sea salted with ice. — My friend went away, she explained. He said I can't go with him.
OK, he said. Let's go to sleep.
They turned out the light and he rolled tight against the wall to avoid annoying her. She said very softly: Please don't come to the Inukjuak anymore.
His heart almost exploded. For a moment he could not speak. — I'll go where I want, he said finally.
Please. Please.
OK. I won't go to Inukjuak anymore.
Then she laughed with relief and touched him and made love to him and said she loved him. That was the worst.
He lay awake thinking how the previous night she'd gotten drunk and said: I want to go to Inukjuak, so I can see my boyfriend in Heaven.
How did he die?
From rifle. He killed himself.
When will you kill yourself?
When I go to Inukjuak.
Early the next morning he took her to the airport and the last he saw of her she was walking away, wiping his goodbye kiss off her mouth with the back of her hand, a gesture he recognized from somewhere, although she'd never unkissed him before; then as he went to get his bus he realized that it had been with that same slow forceful-ness that she used to squash mosquitoes against the wall of the tent.
In Coral Harbour a boy had asked him why Reepah would meet him in Montréal but not in a northern town.
Maybe the south is more interesting for her because she doesn't live there, he said. Maybe she's ashamed to be seen by other Inuit when she's with a
Don't worry, the Inuk said kindly. Lots of our girls have ugly boyfriends and we don't mind it. One girl even goes with a man with a wooden leg.
Later still, walking upon the tundra, he remembered Reepah stepping so easily and confidently from rock to tussock, never wetting her toe in any hidden puddle, never needing to look.
* White man.
In the reddish-black light of a bar that stank of cigarette smoke, four men sat around a table watching their hands. They had big pale arms. Drunkenness gleamed on their waxy foreheads, and their pale shirts lay open to the chest. They were sweating and grayhaired. The U-shaped shadows across their faces and paunches cheated the checked shadows around their dark eyes that burned like cigarette-ends. Their features were bland and flushed. Their glasses were as empty as falsehoods we tell every night.
The drunken artist slowly signed his worthless painting. He had the same last name as the best chess player in the world. Slowly he rolled his cigarette between thumb and forefinger and shook it like a baton.
The drunken zombie said: The time I was dead, dead, dead, it was real medicine. I used medicine that my body couldn't accept. That was the day I died. My heart had the pulse zero. It was only sleep, a very deep sleep like heroin. You see, brothers, I'd spent more than three years in India. That was the time yellow fever was popular. At least eighty percent of the junkies caught yellow fever. But I was
The drunken gypsy said: There is no most beautiful. Let's say tomorrow I am free, I am — I don't have to work. . No! I want brandy! And one beer for all of us, just to water it. .
The drunken soldier, the old one in the plaid shirt, was the only one who still had money. He got brandy and one beer for all. He shook his fingers at the others, a glass of brandy in his other hand, brandy on his breath.
The drunken zombie said: They took my passport in 1978 for making samples of medicine for myself. .
Silence! Silence! cried the drunken gypsy. The soldier wishes to sing.
Bowing, the drunken soldier placed his fingers on the drunken gypsy's arm. Then he began to sing, demonstrating that he almost had teeth. His singing was a series of spitting sounds.
