[203] on the street’s east side, and hits, its waxed bottom making a clunk, hits the glass pane in the locked front shop door with a sound for all the world like the rap of a knuckle, so that in a minute a burly bearded thoroughly Canadian figure in one of those Canadianly inevitable checked-flannel shirts appears out of the dim light in the shop’s back room and wipes its mouth on first one sleeve then the other and opens up the front door with a loud hinge-squeak and looks around a bit, viz. for who knocked, looking not overly pleased at being interrupted at what his sleeves betray as a foreign supper, and also, below that harried expression, looking edgy and emotionally pale, which might explain the X of small-arms ammo-belts across his checked chest and the rather absurdly large.44 revolver tucked and straining in the waistband of his jeans. Lucien Antitoi’s equally burly partner and brother Bertraund — currently still back there in the little back room where they sleep on cots with serious weaponry underneath and listen to CQBC radio and scheme and smoke killer U.S.A. hydroponic dope and cut and mount glass and sew flags and cook over sterno in L.L. Bean upscale survivalist cookware, he’s back there eating Habitant soupe aux pois and bread with Bread & Circus molasses and some sort of oblong blue-veined patties of a meat your thinking American wouldn’t even want to try to identify — Bertraund’s forever laughing in Québecois and telling Lucien he looks forward with humorous anticipation to the day Lucien forgets to check the big Colt’s safety before he jams it into the waistband of his pants and goes lumbering around the shop in his hobnail boots making every reflective and blown-glass item in the place tinkle and clink. The unauto-matic revolver, it is a souvenir of affiliation. Once or twice doing work of affiliation with the Separatist/Anti-O.N.A.N. F.L.Q., they are for the most part a not very terrifying insurgent cell, the Antitois, more or less loners, self-contained, a monomitotic cell, eccentric and borderline-incompetent, protected gently by their late regional patron M. Guillaume DuPlessis of the Gaspé Peninsula, spurned by F.L.Q. after DuPlessis’s assassination and also ridiculed by the more malignant anti-O.N.A.N. cells. Betraund Antitoi is in charge, the brains of the outfit, pretty much by default, since Lucien Antitoi is one of the very few natives of Notre Rat Pays ever who cannot understand French, just never caught on, and so has very limited veto-powers, even when it comes to such harebrained Bertraund-schemes as hanging a sword-stemmed fleur-de-lis flag from the nose of a U.S.A. Civic War hero’s Boyl-ston St. statue when it would simply be cut down by bored O.N.A.N.ite chiens-courants gendarmes the next morning, or taping bricks to the return-postage-paid solicitation cards of Sans-Christe Gentle’s C.U.S.P. party, or fashioning Astroturf doormats with a likeness of Sans-Christe Gentle on them and distributing them gratis to home-supply outlets throughout their insurgency-grid — puerile and on the whole rather sad little gestures that M. DuPlessis would have interdicted with a merry laugh and a friendly hand on Bertraund’s bowling ball of a shoulder. But M. DuPlessis had been martyred, an assassination only O.N.A.N. would be stupid enough to believe Command would be stupid enough to believe was merely an unfortunate burglary-and-mucus mishap. And Bertraund Antitoi, after DuPlessis’s death and F.L.Q.’s rejection left to his own conceptual devices for the first time since their all-terrain vehicle was packed with quality Van Buskirk of Montreal exotic reflective glasswares and glass-blowing hardware and broom and ordnance and survivalist cookware and hip postcards and black-lather gag soap and cheesy old low-demand InterLace 3rd-Grid cartridges and hand-buzzers and fraudulent but seductive X-ray spectacles and they were sent through the remains of Provincial Autoroute 557 U.S.A. 91 in protective garb they’d shed and buried just south of the Convexity’s Bellow’s Falls VT O.N.A.N.ite checkpoint, sent as a kind of primitive two-celled organism to establish a respectable front and abet more malignant cells and to insurge and terrorize in small sad anti-experialist ways, now Bertraund has shown a previously DuPlessis-restrained flair for stupid wastes of time, including this branching out into harmful pharmaceuticals as an attack on the fiber of New New England’s youth — as if the U.S.A. youth were not already more than fiberless enough, in Lucien’s mute opinion. Bertraund had actually been credulous enough with a wrinkled long-haired person of advanced years in a paisley Nehru jacket also of great age and a puzzling cap with a skeleton playing at the violin emblazoned upon it, on the front, wearing also the most stupid-appearing small round wire spectacles with salmon-colored lenses, and also continually forming the letter of V with fingers of his hand and directing this letter of V at Bertraund and Lucien — Bertraund felt the gesture was a subtle affirmation of solidarity with patriotic Struggle everywhere and stood for Victoire, but Lucien suspected a U.S.A. obscenity laughingly flashed at persons who would not comprehend its insult, just as one of Lucien’s sadistic école-spéciale tutors back in Ste.-Anne-des-Monts had spent weeks in Second Form teaching Lucien to say ‘Va cbier, putain!’ which he (the tutor) claimed meant ‘Look Maman I can speak French and thus finally express my love and devotion to you’ — Bertraund had been starry-eyed enough to agree to barter the person an antique blue lava-lamp and a lavender-tinged apothecary’s mirror for eighteen unexceptional-looking and old lozenges the long-haired old person had claimed in a jumble of West-Swiss-accented French were 650 mg. of a trop-formidable harmful pharmaceutical no longer available and guaranteed to make one’s most hair-raising psychedelic experience look like a day on the massage-tables of a Basel hot-springs resort, throwing in as well a kitchen-can waste bag filled with crusty old mossy boot-and-leg Read-Only cartridges, sans any labels, that appeared to have been stored in a person’s rear yard and then run through a gaseous dryer of clothes, as if Lucien did not have already more than plenty of crusty old cartridges which Bertraund removed from Inter-Lace dumpsters or was cheated in barters for and brought back to the shop for Lucien’s job to view and label and organize the cartridges for storing and were never bought except the occasional cartridge in Portuguese, or porno-graphical. And the aged person had flopped off in his cap and sandals with a lamp and an apothecary’s mirror to which Lucien had been personally much attached, particularly to the lavender mirror, flashing this covert obscenity of V and with smiles urging the brothers to write their name and address on the palm of their hands with the drenching-sweat-proof ink before they dropped any of the so-called ‘tu-sais-quoi,’ if they were going to be the persons who ingested these lozenges.