He could have tallied it any old way, but try to figure how such minds work.
There were about a dozen of them, the last-born, all burdened with a nickname they hated, born into old-style families to aging ladies who ought to have stopped having children long before, but whose husbands and priests never gave them any peace as long as there was one egg left in their innards. Their brothers and sisters had left town to become doctors and lawyers or else had stuck around and found work in the factory, like their fathers. These were all getting close to retirement. As for the last-born, they never strayed very far. A few had just reached their forties, and lived at home with their parents until the parents died. After, their brothers and sisters pocketed the money from the house sale, and the last-born went to live on their disability pensions or their welfare cheques in low-rent lodgings, apartment blocks or semi-basements, at the four corners of the town.
They made it through the month doing odd jobs. From time to time, in the summer, on the first of the month, at the neighbourhood fairs or when some of them had made more money than expected on a little rebuilding contract, they got drunk. They were found in the morning, asleep in the town’s parks or on strangers’ lawns, fallen in action on the return trip by foot or bicycle. Raisin was one of the better coordinated: most often they found him on the same lawn, that of the Laberges, in the same position (an improbable intertwining of his limbs with the wheels and frame of his old ten-speed), barely the worse for wear or miraculously untouched. The Laberges were affable and gentle folks, once friends to his parents. They never woke him. It was July’s burning sun or the chill of late August mornings that brought him back to life and sent him wobbling homeward.
None of the last-born were truly cretins or morons, even if that’s what giggling children sometimes accused them of on their way out of school. None of them were Nobel prize-winners in chemistry either. In those parts, people sometimes said that someone was “not nasty enough to start a fire, but also not bright enough to put it out.” That was not a bad depiction of the last-born. There was no raving madman in their ranks, no one severely handicapped mentally, but they were all lacking in some small thing.
Bozzo, up to Grade 10, had been good at arithmetic and dictation, but he couldn’t finish a sentence if his life depended on it. He knew just what he wanted to say, took a deep breath, started to speak, but after a few words had to stop short. Syntax shrivelled up in his mouth and ideas unthreaded in his mind as soon as he tried to relay them from his neurons to his vocal chords. He could only express himself in puny little sentence fragments, and most of the time opted to laugh or grunt. Or swear. Swearing was practical, with the right inflection it could say all sorts of things, and in just one word. He would put several end to end without losing track. Jesus Christ goddamn piss-all fuckshit son of a bitch.
Minou had the clearest skin, the bluest eyes, and the most sublime face a man could have, but even when his mother was absent he was not the sharpest member of the household, which also included three cats, a poodle, and a king parrot. Among the last-born he was the youngest, and perhaps the only one who would not be left to his own devices when his mother died. Minou was a total ninny. What was odd was that on festive occasions, when his mother dressed him up in a good suit, he looked like a model. He was so comely that from time to time young women refused to admit to themselves that he hadn’t changed, even when they saw all the signs. Once, at a Dubé boy’s baptism, a lady led him behind a shed, took hold of his hand, and slid it under her skirt and between her legs, until Minou’s fingers made contact with her unclad sex. Minou took off wailing like one possessed, and he was found two days later rolled into a ball under a fir tree on the golf course, almost ten kilometres away.
Caboche had a head too big for his body and always had to lean it against something when he was seated, otherwise it could drop down and pop his vertebrae. The year before, while he was caddying for the Knights of Columbus classic golf tournament, an exceptionally long drive by the notary Lalonde had bounced off the top of his skull. That hadn’t helped at all.
Jambon was a chatterbox and an epileptic.
Popeye talked a lot as well, except that what he said was always inaudible, even more so when he drank and appeared to be expressing himself in a foreign language.
Among the last-born, Raisin was the most cunning, and he was strong as a horse. That gave him a certain prestige, because he was the one who worked the most. The only problem was his fingers. They were like thick carrot stubs, and just as useless. You couldn’t do much with fingers like that, not typing at a machine or playing the piano, not even digging in your nose. Once he’d got hold of an object, he could lift it and manipulate it almost normally until it dropped from his hands. He was called on for house moving, for mowing lawns, or outside renovation jobs. He was reputed to be good for “heavy work.”
For ten years he’d taken care of his sick mother as well as his clumsy fingers would allow. During all that time people had sympathy for him, then pity. When his mother died and his brothers and sisters decided to sell the house, Monsieur Blackburn had offered him, for a modest sum, the small apartment he’d fixed up in his basement. Raisin had accepted. The Blackburns let him entertain up to three guests on the front balcony, and when they left on vacation they let him swim in the pool. Raisin made modest use of these privileges. He rarely authorized the last-born to join him and preferred hanging out with them on the baseball field. He was more likely to invite his most troubled clients, those who were always looking for somewhere they could drink out of range of their wives. He also invited Martial, who was not married, often hung around the brasserie, and liked talking to Raisin, who enjoyed listening to him.
In the neighbourhood, you didn’t talk about “bikers,” about “gangsters,” or about “organized crime,” but about the “gaffe.” Martial wasn’t a real member of the gaffe, but he’d hovered about it for a long time. He did little jobs for the guys in the gaffe, deliveries, driving, that kind of thing. From time to time they let him deal in small quantities of drugs, and in his free time he got involved in all sorts of schemes, and broke into houses to steal television sets or jewellery. He’d also done a bit of prison. He was small, scrawny, and nervous. He had blonde hair, long and greasy, little faded tattoos on each forearm, and joints that stuck out like broken bottles.
That’s probably how it all came about, in fact. Martial had spent his life imagining he was tough enough to order up a murder, and Raisin, who had tolerated ten years of pitying looks from all and sundry while he was taking care of his mother, would swill the aftertaste of pity out of his mouth by imagining that he was capable of killing someone. The two were made for each other.
In any case, one evening, while they were talking quietly on the steps of the Blackburns, Martial let slip:
“That asshole Sanguinet, I wish he were dead.”
Raisin replied:
“I could take care of that.”
There was silence. Martial began to perspire. He didn’t quite know what to say. His only thought was to ask: