“Look, Timide. . Look how beautiful they are. . Come closer! See the way a girl’s nipples harden when you stroke them real gently?. . See? Come on, give it a try. . Hey, you’ve seen titties before, haven’t you? You sucked your mother’s titties when you were little like everybody else! It’s okay to like it, you know. .”
Edith laughs. She draws the two boys toward her, then purposely falls over backward so that Timide finds himself on top of her, his face squashed between her breasts. He jerks away, beside himself with fear. Edith laughs again.
“Hey, take it easy, big boy! I won’t bite!”
“N-no. . n-no. .”
“You getting hard down there. .? Nope. . soft as chicken liver. Don’t you know a thing about love, hey, Timide? Watch your friend Milo, he’ll show you the ropes. .”
And Milo, whether as a grotesque reenactment of the previous summer’s antics with Kim and Sherman or an involuntary replay of his violation at the hands of Jean-Joseph, tries to include poor Timide in this his first copulation with Edith, forcing the boy despite his tears and protestations to remain not only with but virtually between the two of them as they work themselves up, Milo’s boots scrabbling amidst rakes and brooms and Edith’s head banging up against the logs, Milo’s hips thrusting and Edith’s heaving, Milo’s throat emitting grunts and Edith’s squeals, finally attaining orgasm (Milo’s) in the sawdust.
When Milo comes to his senses, Timide is sobbing uncontrollably.
Edith helps the two of them to their feet and dusts them off, then hands them a box of cookies and a tin of sardines: “This is all I could find.”
CUT.
A long, depressing shot of the two boys walking through forest in silence: “I’m sorry, Timide. . I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
CUT TO: The boys’ dead campfire early in the morning. They’ve spent the night huddled against a hillside. As chill dawn whitens the sky, Milo scrambles to his feet.
“Let’s go,” he says, bending over the bumpy lump that is Timide’s body. “Today’s the big day.”
“Let me sleep, you bag of shit!”
“No, let’s go. Come on, Timide, let’s go. This is no time to fall apart. We’re almost there, I can feel it. Can’t you? Can’t you feel the big city right nearby? Come on, get the hell out of bed or I’ll finish the trip without you!”
As there’s nothing Timide dreads more than finding himself alone in the middle of nowhere, he angrily rises and gets dressed. The boys scramble up to the crest of the hill. . And there it is, shimmering and scintillating in the pink-mauve softness of the spring dawn, white ribbons of smoke rising from its chimneys and early sun rays glancing redly off its skyscrapers, rippling down from the mountain at its heart to the river whose long arms hold it in a tight embrace, stretching beyond mountain and river as far as the eye can see: the island city of Montreal.
Awed, Timide and Milo lie flat on their stomachs and gaze down at the unfathomable cement-and-glass beast.
“There’s my mother,” says Milo, stretching out an arm. “See? I told you we’d make it! She’s right there.”
The following second, in close-up, we see his body snap into a state of unbearable alertness. Pressed against the earth, his skin and flesh have sensed the vibration of a motor vehicle. Now his rearview vision records the silent blue flash of a revolving light. . and before Timide realizes what’s going on, the two of them have been roughly cuffed and shoved into the backseat of a police van.
HOW SHOULD WE film your jail stints, Astuto?
The nice thing about prisons as compared with closets is that you get to meet other prisoners. It was within the walls of that juvenile detention home that you first met and talked with Indians. At school you’d learned oodles of things about the British and the French and their proud, heroic, capitalist descendants in North America. . but about the native inhabitants of this land? Nothing but colorful shreds of phony folklore. The more Indians you met, the madder you got. Never in human history, it seemed to you, had a people so utterly accepted its defeat. The problem was that in addition to having had their land stolen and their way of life destroyed, Indian men had seen their youngest and prettiest women snatched away by swarms of ugly, aggressive, bearded, foul-smelling, land-hungry, profit-seeking white men — who, moreover, having crossed the ocean womanless, were as horny as bulls — so that within a couple of decades there was a huge métis-blood population. Undone, Indian men had basically locked themselves away for the past three hundred years in a resentful, alcoholic silence. Yeah, I know, Milo, protests and petitions by native Canadians managed to make a few improvements in the second half of the twentieth century, but basically it was way too little way too late. .
WE COME UPON our hero in his grandfather’s study. Close-up on his face at age sixteen: detention has changed him.
“So they put handcuffs on you, did they?”
Milo nods.
“A surprising sensation, isn’t it? Unforgettable.”
“You were arrested once, Grandpa?”
“I was, yes. But I was a grown man by then, several years older than you are now. You’ve always been precocious, eh, whippersnapper? First you skipped two grades at school and then you skipped straight to the juvenile delinquents’ home, without even stopping off at reform school along the way.”
“Dey’re talking of sending me to a reform school now.”
Neil puffs away at his pipe and rocks in his rocking chair, taking his time. Both men are happy and neither is impatient.
“What did you do, Grandpa?”
“We’ll come round to that. I can see why you ran away from that boarding school, Milo, given the punishments they’d been inflicting on you.”
“It was your fault.”
“Oh, yes? How’s that?”
“I talk back to de priest who ask me to confess.”
“What did you tell him?”
“None o’ your flamin’ business!”
“Ha! Good for you!”
Another pleasant pause. Neil knocks the burned tobacco out of his pipe into an ashtray. Refills the bowl with fresh tobacco from a green leather pouch Milo has always loved, tamps it and lights it with a taper drawn from the fire in the fireplace. Sucks slowly and sensuously at his pipe, causing not only the tobacco but the light in the western sky to smolder.
“And you stuck with your young partner all the way, did you?”
“. . Yeah.”
“That’s the main thing, to be trustworthy. To stand by those who’re counting on you. The worst crime isn’t robbery, Milo. If it were, all of our political leaders would be in jail. The worst crime is treachery, for that is a crime against one’s own soul.”
“What did you do, Grandad?”
“Well, you remember I took part in the Rising in Dublin, at Easter 1916. I was a member of the Irish rebels, who’d just then begun to call themselves Sinn Féin. Now, my cousin Thom and I were posted at the entrance to Saint Stephen’s Green, a lovely park in the city center. And on the Tuesday after Easter Monday, who should come striding toward us but Major John MacBride. The major was on our side, but he was also the sworn enemy of Willie Yeats, who for years had been in love with his wife, Maud Gonne. You remember my telling you about her?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, Milo’s Mighty Memory! Well, MacBride knew me to be a close friend of the poet’s. Running into me at Saint Stephen’s Green, he suddenly saw his chance of getting back at his rival. . and he denounced me to the Brits!”