Sinking ships...

I hadn't been back to the local Hells Angels hangout, The Princess Club, since my adventures with what passes for local law enforcement. The embarrassment of my run-in with a fat bastard flatfoot had been bad enough but I'd mostly recovered, particularly when it became apparent that I was about to get a fat cheque from the province. No, it was my empty house that had captured me and now held me in its cold thrall. I'd gotten the idea that if I left for just five minutes, my wife and daughter would come back, then split becasue the place was empty. I clearly remember thinking this actually made sense but when the goodbye letter from the lawyer got delivered, it was clear the marriage was over. She'd acquired some of the natural cruelty of her mother, and refused to let me see our daughter or tell me where she was. I hired a useless private detective who did nothing but bill me weekly. I tried the bottle but being a terrible drunk, couldn't do it seriously. After a fucked-up ten days, I pushed myself up Mountain Street into the big hills for long rambling hikes. A large white German Sherherd-type dog attached himself to me and we made a good pair. He'd go his way, I'd go mine. At some unlikely point, I'd turn and there he'd be. One Indian summer afternoon, I fell asleep on the edge of a tall grass field. When I woke up, I could feel his weight against my shoulder. When I turned to the trail, there were three men standing absolutely still, terrified. When I moved my arm to wave, they jumped back moving away at speed. I guess they thought the big white dog was a wolf guarding his kill. A week later, as we climbed up out of the foothills, a voice called out. "Hey, Kerouac, wait up." I didn't recognize him until he dropped the hood of his jacket. It was Jean-Louis. I could hardly believe it - Jean -Louis in the great outdoors. Something big had happened. "Take a wrong turn, Jean?" "Fuck you, Charlie. I come to comiss...to comizur...to comissarate with you and you dump on my ass. Nice manners." I almost laughed, then I realized he was serious. "Sorry, man. Seeing you like this...after the last few weeks....it threw me off. You gonna hike up?" Jean-Louis turned to me with a sweep. "That's why I took off my cowboy boots and bought these babies here." He was wearing expensive French hiking boots made for the big mountains of central Europe or Nepal. What the hell - intention is everything, right? White Dog ignored Jean-Louis after a careful crotch sniffing and led us up, taking off into the woods just before the top. We turned onto the Mount Condor lookout trail up through noisy piles of dried leaves, following the switchbacks to the top. In those days, the lookout was an open space with a gigantic buried boulder to sit on. Jean took out a joint and a bottle of decent wine. We waited for the drugs and the view to calm our restless spirits. Jean asked me about the break and enter deal, and didn't laugh too much. I volunteered the story of my marriage wreck. He said nothing, just stared. "No shit. Well that makes two of us. I came back from a business trip and the house was empty. She only took what was hers or what she needed for the kid. I stood in the living room for I don't know how long. I was afraid what I'd see if I went in the bedrooms. I kept waiting to blow up, explode, tear the place apart, send out some men to find her. But there was nothing. Just like a blank wall in my brain. I was like that for two days, then I got a letter from some straight lawyer in town, "I love you, I care for you, but I have to think about the princess. You know what the life has done to you. I want the man I used to know. That sounds like soap opera but life has a way of imitating bad art, doesn't it? If you ever want to get out and find me, use this lawyer." Jean was fucked up. At his rank, if he left the Angels, he'd get tapped some night and end up in the Ottawa River inside a sleeping bag with an truck transmission tied to his neck. I never asked him what he was going to do but the next two times I visited him at the club, he was sober as a monk, talking non-stop into my tiny voice recorder, jamming everything in that he could. A week later, his mansion up above Ste-Adele burned to the ground. There was one charred body in it, never identified. I hoped he had pulled it off, had found his woman and his little girl, and disappeared. Jean-Louis was too good to waste. Two years later, someone left a postcard on the counter of my bike store in Val Morin. I didn't read it until late that night. "Up Mt. Condor to the open range and over the edge to freedom. JL."