The Garneau Block Read Online Free PDF Page B

Madison how to play the Deer Hunter video game. When they were both drunk, Madison noticed that Steve’s friends smiled every time they called him Steve. It occurred to her that Steve was not, traditionally, a French name.
    Minutes after she agreed to go back to his hotel room, so she could try the Québécois delicacy Map-o-Spread, Madison was quite certain that one of these friends called him Jean-François. Or was it Jean-Luc? Jean-Marc? Looking back, she had been disappointed to learn that Map-o-Spread was sugary goo with artificial maple flavouring. And that Steve didn’t believe in deodorant. And, finally, that he had impregnated her sometime between 3:00 and 3:05 in the morning.
    Jonas emerged from the Commercial Hotel liquor store with a beige tube labelled The Balvenie. “Next to the liquor store, all these sad old people are playing video lottery terminals. You wanna see?”
    â€œI’m good, Jonas, thanks.”
    They started east down Whyte Avenue. Even on Monday night it was a zoo of young drunks screaming at one another. Harleys and four-cylinder cars with modified muffers popped and roared past young women, and the young women ignored them. Madison remembered a word from high school biologythat defined this behaviour in the context of birds and baboons: displaying.
    Jonas pulled the Scotch bottle out of the tube, admired its shape aloud, and dropped it back inside.
    When the bars and nightclubs gave way to restaurants, clothing stores, and purveyors of French bread, they ventured north and walked up the dimly lit residential streets so Jonas could drink Scotch without getting a ticket. Lost in vague memories of her baby’s father and feeling guilty that she hadn’t been listening to any classical music in the last three months, Madison ignored Jonas. Somehow he had veered from video lottery terminals to the plight of Aboriginals. Inhabiting the great chief Lacumseh on stage had made him thoughtful.
    â€œIt’s the great social tragedy of our era,” he said, with a rolling slur. “What are we supposed to do?”
    Madison knew what her father would say, so she said something like it. “There isn’t enough money in the world to pay everyone whose parents or grandparents or great-great-grandparents have been wronged. We can only facilitate.”
    â€œThat doesn’t mean anything.”
    The dark living rooms of Strathcona flashed with blue television light. It felt later than midnight to Madison, who was losing her taste for an expedition. One of these days she would pass into her second trimester and she would stop feeling so tired and nauseous. Laundry detergent and roasted garlic would stop smelling like raw sewage.
    â€œJonas, what sort of expedition is this? It seems we’re going home.”
    â€œDon’t attack the dignity of the expedition.”
    â€œI’m pretty tired. If this expedition ends in my bed, I’ll be very pleased.”
    When they reached the block, Madison was overcome with fatigue. She hoped Jonas had drowned his expeditionary energy with The Balvenie. She followed him past his duplex and past her parents’ house next door, and stopped with him before the shadowed misery of 10 Garneau. Street lamps illuminated the logo’d trash on the front lawn, evidence of the university students who had walked through the block that morning on their way to school. Madison stopped on the sidewalk and opened her mouth to repeat her preference for going to sleep when Jonas stepped into the yard.
    â€œWhere are you going?”
    â€œLet’s move.”
    Madison hadn’t been on the property for two weeks, since the police and fire trucks and media vans had been parked out front. It was like walking under a ladder or crossing the path of a black cat or committing to atheism: maybe supernatural forces didn’t exist but maybe, just maybe, they did. She remained on the sidewalk.
    With the bottle of Scotch in one