Extreme Vinyl Café (15 page)

He certainly couldn’t put it back in the trunk. And the cop wouldn’t let Dave drive home with a loose rat in his car.

“Well?” said Dave.

The cop gave Dave and the rat a ride home. But he made them sit in the back, behind the barrier.

As they pulled in to the driveway, Dave could see Sam peering at them through the living-room window. Dave leaned forward in his seat and tapped the barrier lightly.

“Hey,” he said to the police officer. “Can you do me one more favour?”

The next morning Sam was so excited about Dave’s present that Morley could barely get him to open any other gifts. His father had bought him a rat. And not just any rat. As Sam told everyone, his dad had given him an official, licensed, certified
police
rat. It was delivered in a squad car, by a real police officer. With a badge. It was the
perfect
gift.

A
nd that’s what Dave got Kenny for his birthday this year— a rat like Sam’s. This time he bought a cage. He gave it to Kenny at lunch. “It’s an official police rat,” he said.

Kenny said, “What do I want with a rat? I run a restaurant.”

Dave smiled. “I’ll tell you,” said Dave, sitting down at the counter. “Get me a couple of bowls of that rice pudding. It’s a long story.”

Dear Stuart,

As francophone Canadians, we really appreciate it when you feature French-Canadian history, music and culture on
The Vinyl Cafe
, but we do have one question. Not to be too blunt about it, where exactly did you learn to speak French?

Sincerely,
Michel and Lise

Dear Michel and Lise,

Thanks for your letter. I learned to speak French much the way my young friend Sam did. Except sadly there was no girl.

T
hey left on a Monday morning, at 7:30. The annual grade-eight trip to Quebec City. Seven-thirty in the morning and the entire neighbourhood was revved up. All the mothers and fathers. You would have thought they were leaving for war. Jenny Moore, Peter’s mother, hovering by the bus with her eyes full of tears and her hands full of Kleenex.

And Jenny wasn’t the only one crying—just the most obvious. Jenny was Ping-Ponging from one teacher to another:
Would they remember Peter was allergic to eggs? Was there a bathroom on the bus? She had given him sixty dollars. Yes, she knew it was supposed to be forty, but the extra twenty just in case
.

Peter was already on board. Peter had clambered onto the bus the moment it arrived.

Murphy was second. And when Murphy found out about the extra twenty dollars, he re-appeared out the front door and used the information to pry an additional twenty dollars from
his
father.

All the parents gathered around the kids. All the kids, with their fancy packsacks, ignoring them. There were brothers and sisters, a nanny or two and Mark Portnoy, on the edge of
it all, looking lost. The only kid who came by himself. The only kid carrying his stuff in a plastic bag.

Before you knew it, it was time to go. The kids pushed onto the bus and headed for the back, bouncing around the seats and colliding in the aisles. Parent volunteers settled into the seats at the front. And Mr. Reynolds, with his clipboard, stuck his head out the front door, looking up and down the street uncertainly. Sure enough, there they were. Dave and Sam running down the street, backpacks slapping their thighs, Arthur barking as he tried to keep up.

“Sorry,” puffed Dave when they got there, “the alarm didn’t go off.”

Dave had actually volunteered to be one of the parent supervisors. Mr. Reynolds had demurred.

“Oh,” lied Mr. Reynolds when Dave had called, “that’s very kind. But we already have a full complement.”

“Put me down as a backup,” said Dave.

Over my dead body
, thought Mr. Reynolds.

A
fter months of anticipation, and weeks of planning, they were finally ready. Outside, the parents lined up on either side of the bus and waved at kids they couldn’t see through the tinted windows. Inside, the kids couldn’t have cared less. When the bus finally pulled away, the two groups of parents found themselves waving at each other. Everyone cracked up, waved even harder and then walked down the street in twos and threes.

Everyone except for Peter’s mom. She sprinted to the next corner so she could catch the bus as it turned at the end of the block. Poor Jenny Moore waving all by herself, at no one
at all. The only person who saw her was twenty-two-year-old Pierre Massicotte, a second-year social science major at Université Laval. Pierre was sitting in the jump seat in the stairwell to the driver’s right. And Pierre was too preoccupied to pay Jenny Moore any mind. Pierre was going over and over the speech he had been preparing all week.

It began like this:

We are going on a fantastic trip. And I want you to leave everything you know behind you. I want you to pretend we are in a boat, not a bus. And I want you to pretend that we have just left France. And just like the French people in the seventeenth century who climbed into their boats, we don’t know where we are going or what is going to happen to us.

Pierre was the student guide. And this was his first-ever class trip. He had put a lot of thought and effort into his presentation.

He waited until the bus hit the highway and he stood up and reached for the mic. He took a deep breath.

“We are going to Nouvelle France. And we are going to be there for four days. I want you to be adventurers. I want you to give me your five senses for four days.”

Instead of the rapt audience he had imagined, Pierre was greeted with the sounds of candy wrappers ripping, pop cans popping, Game Boys buzzing, iPods leaking, and snoring, from one of the parent volunteers.

Murphy turned to Sam and said, “Last year they went to the IMAX. Do you think we will go to the IMAX?”

The only people listening to Pierre were two girls sitting way up front who said, “
Oui monsieur, oui monsieur
,” right from the start, and who were now poring over Will Ferguson’s
Canadian History for Dummies
, apparently checking Pierre’s facts.

It was not the reception Pierre had imagined. But Pierre didn’t give up. Pierre kept going.

“The food we are going to eat is not the same as your parents’ food. I want you to
taste
the food. The houses are not your parents’ houses. They are made of stone. I want you to
touch
the stone walls. The French and the British built them two to three hundred years ago. I want you to
smell
the horses and buggies, and the smells coming out of the horses.”

Someone at the back of the bus made a fart noise and everyone laughed. Then Mark Portnoy put up his hand. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said loudly. And finally, everyone was listening.

“There is a toilet at the back,” said Pierre.

“It’s gross,” said Mark. “Can’t we stop at a Tim Hortons?”

The bus broke into applause.

In a few months’ time, after a few more trips, Pierre will recognize this kind of interruption as the perfect way to get the kids to listen. “Where,” he will ask, in a few more months, “do you think you would go to the bathroom, if you were in Quebec City three hundred years ago?”

That will get their attention. And once he gets it, he will continue.

“You’d go in the same place as the horses—in the street. I want you to smell the horses because that’s what it smelled like three hundred years ago. Smell the horses,
taste
the food,
touch
the stones and listen to the language that you will hear all around you.”

But this was Pierre’s first trip. And he didn’t say any of that. Pierre just sighed, and said, “We aren’t stopping for another two hours,” and he sat down and turned off the PA.

He had lost them. He wasn’t getting them back. And he knew it.

B
y mid-morning they were rolling through the rich and green valley of the Fleuve St-Laurent.

“One of the great rivers of the world,” said Pierre. He had been planning on telling all of the students about the river. Instead he was talking to the two girls sitting in the first row.

“Everything else on the continent goes north–south. This river flowing this way,” he pointed east along the highway, “made the idea of Canada possible.”

“Oh,” said one of the girls. She was looking toward the back of the bus. They were watching DVDs back there. Her history text had slipped to the floor.

At Gananoque they left the hustle of Highway 401 for the pastoral beauty of the Thousand Islands Parkway. Pierre pointed at a clump of green islands in the river.

“That’s Canada’s smallest national park,” he said. But the two girls had moved to the back of the bus. He was talking to the bus driver.

They passed Mallorytown, and Butternut Bay, and Cardinal, and they stopped by the Iroquois Lock to eat the picnic lunches their parents had packed them.

“Part of the St. Lawrence Seaway,” said Pierre, to no one in particular.

The sky was blue and the clouds were white and the world was perfect—made more so when an impossibly large laker
glided through the lock, moving as smoothly as if it were on tracks. The boat was almost close enough to touch.

I
t was late afternoon before they closed in on Quebec City— North America’s only walled city. The breathtaking stone turrets and towers of the Château Frontenac guard the cliffs and cobblestones of old Quebec like an ancient castle. The Gibraltar of America.

Everyone was pressed to a window as the bus rolled onto the Quebec Bridge. Pierre reached for the microphone.

“Longest cantilevered bridge in the world,” said Pierre.

He waited until they were high above the river, about halfway across, and added, as if it was just an afterthought, “It has collapsed twice.”

That produced the first reaction Pierre got all afternoon.

T
he hotel that had been booked for the trip was a
pension
inside the walls of the old city. The floors were uneven, the stairways narrow. There was an elevator with a frayed green carpet decorated with gold fleurs-de-lys. The elevator looked as old as the city, and the fleurs-de-lys were like little worn moths. No more than two people with suitcases could ride in the elevator at the same time, and everyone except the two girls from the front of the bus banged their suitcases up the stairs.

The kids were billeted four to a room, two to a bed. They had half an hour to settle in to their rooms and argue about who was going to sleep with whom. Then they were to meet in the lobby.

There were signs on their beds that said
Phone the front
desk if you need more pillows
. The kids felt like royalty. It took about five minutes before the woman at the front desk stopped answering the phone.

When they went downstairs, Pierre circled them up in the lobby. “We have an hour before dinner,” he said. “Go explore. No one go alone. And not beyond the Porte Saint-Jean or Rue Ste-Anne.”

They couldn’t believe it. Sure, most of them had been away from their parents before. A lot of them had even been to camp. But at camp there was always someone watching. At camp they never dropped you in some town and let you wander around unsupervised. It was beyond the realm of their imaginations. They stood in the lobby for a moment in shock. And then off they went. The shy ones stuck to the teachers. But most of them headed off in groups of two and three.

Peter Moore was like a cat let off a leash.

“Come on,” he said.

Murphy and Sam followed him out the front door of the hotel and down the street. Murphy led them into the first depanneur they saw.

“I want to get some Red Bull for tonight,” said Murphy.

“Look at this,” said Peter. Peter was holding the biggest plastic troll doll they had ever seen. It was almost two feet high and had bright-orange hair that stuck out in all directions. Its troll hands were perched on its hips.

Peter said, “Watch this.”

The troll’s eyes lit up and began to flash.

“There’s a button on the back of its head,” said Peter. “It’s only twenty-one dollars.”

A
t five o’clock they gathered in the hotel lobby and marched off like just another army set on conquering Quebec—up the Côte de la Fabrique, along Rue du Trésor. They stopped at Champlain’s statue in the Place d’Armes and then headed along the Rue St-Louis. Pierre pulled up in front of a little stone house with a steep red roof.

“Built in 1677,” he said as they marched into a restaurant that was much too good for them. Prix fixe: boeuf bourguignon, salad and dessert.

“This meat looks like dog food,” called a voice from the back.

Less than half of them ate their stew. But they all devoured their dessert—sugar pie.

A
t ten o’clock that night, Mr. Reynolds went from room to room checking that everyone was present and accounted for. He had a roll of masking tape in his pocket. As he left each room, he tossed the masking tape in the air and caught it.

“I’m putting a strip of tape across your door,” he said. Then he told them about the all-night security guard. If the guard saw the tape on their door was broken, he would know they had left their room. They didn’t want to
know
how much trouble they’d be in if that happened.

“Is the guard
armed
?” asked Peter Moore.

“He has a Kalashnikov,” said Mr. Reynolds. “He’s Israeli.”

Then he said, “Lights off at 10:30. Right?”

“Yes, Mr. Reynolds. Yes, sir. We’re pretty tired, sir.”

“Good night, boys.”

“Good night, Mr. Reynolds.”

T
en-thirty? There wasn’t a light out by two-thirty. There was much too much do. In Eleanor Michelin’s room, four little girls had set up a spa and were attempting to turn the bathroom into a steam room by running the shower at full hot.

Two floors above, in Room 421, Mark Portnoy, the only kid with a bed to himself, was about to show his three goggle-eyed roommates, who were sleeping in the other bed, how to make a blowtorch using a can of hairspray and a cigarette lighter in the shape of a cannon that he had bought on Rue St-Jean.