Suddenly a horn was slammed- and held. It blew towards his ears on the wind, wavered, vanished, returned. Wind lashed off the mighty Saint-Laurent, cold enough to anaesthetize bare skin in minutes. Instinctively James braced himself for the crash of an accident, but when the crash didn’t come he looked back over his shoulder and saw a giant snowplough, the first he had seen in his life save for an episode of The Simpsons, straddling the curb near the corner of Haldimand and Mont Carmal. Huge tires scudding haplessly along the icy footpath. Snow everywhere. People screaming.
The truck was making no attempt to right its course. Perhaps fifty meters away there stood the old man who had been shoveling snow from a shop entrance some time earlier, when James had passed. They had waved to each other, even said bonjour. Now the shovel was limp at the old man’s side and it seemed impossible that he would not be hit. Cupping his hands over his mouth in terror, James spluttered as he gulped in too much frigid air, caustic on his lungs. He couldn’t look away. He watched as, by some miracle, the snowplough’s enormous yellow bulk came to a halt at the last possible moment. He watched the old man grab snow from the ground with gloveless hands and pelt it at the passenger side window. Gesticulate madly. And finally he watched as the old man took off his Canada Goose jacket, laughed, climbed aboard. Meanwhile she had kept on walking and was now some distance up the hill, almost undetectable in the whiteness.
So they were friends. This dead of winter which made people indoors claustrophobic and dry-lipped and people outdoors, under their huge coats and balaclavas, anguished with cold; as he quickened his steps to catch her James thought how comforting it was to see a little spirit on display, no matter how reckless. After all, weren’t the Quebecois renowned for their sense of humour? Through shock and exertion his blood seemed sprung to life, he could move his toes again. Hear the thud of a rising heartbeat and the silence of car tires on fresh powder. Falling more heavily now the snow veiled buildings, made snot gush from his nose and freeze solid on his moustache, salty icicles goading the tongue, lick them off lick them off, when to do so would only make more.
It felt as if they had been climbing forever. To James’ left was proof of that ascendance; the old port, the bus terminal next door, the maple markets (he had bought some apple butter for his mother there), the Old City walls, all slowly coming into view. Sparse, sweeping outskirts dotted with low-income apartments and shopping malls. But above all there was the Saint-Laurent. Half-frozen, run into by scores of tributaries, the nation’s most powerful river in all its staggering immenseness. Next to it the Murray was a murky leak, the great sheets of ice floating downstream as wide as the Yarra itself. Not far from where he stood it would begin to form an estuary amongst the largest in the world. Stopping to let a woman pass on the narrow sidewalk, James bore the brunt of the wind and gazed riverward and she said merci and he, having to think a second, said c’est rien back. She was talking on the phone. Moins vingt-sept was all he understood. Then the huge gables of Chateau Frontenac appeared. Behind them the sun’s orb, sheathed in white cloud, looked paler than normal, as if the sky were a tremendous egg laid by a starving hen. As the rest of the building took shape in front of him James was forced to take shelter in the gift shop of the old funicular, his fingers feeling incurably frostbitten under his gloves. So much for the $100 price tag. An urge to piss roused him and, as the river left his mind, she entered it. He pressed back out into the open, strained his eyes in both directions. There was no sign of her anywhere. Something to show you: that enigmatic sentence was the entire justification for this walk, this suicide mission. And now she was gone.
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