And Their Children After Them Read online

  “We’re getting there,” said his cousin.

  A hundred yards ahead on the right, an old, tumbledown forest service cabin marked the beginning of the Pointu. The boys turned around to see how far behind their pursuers were. They didn’t seem to be catching up, and the counselors appeared to be having a big discussion. Even from a distance, the boys could tell they were irritated and arguing. At one moment someone stood up to make a point, and someone else made them sit back down. They finally turned back toward the recreation center. The cousins grinned at each other and Anthony allowed himself to give them the finger, now that their backs were turned.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “What do you think?”

  “They’re going to call the cops for sure.”

  “So what? Paddle!”

  They continued on their way through the reeds, staying close to shore. It was past four, and the light wasn’t as blinding. The sound of croaking rose from the mass of leaves and branches tangling the bank. Hoping to see frogs, Anthony kept his eye on the water’s surface.

  “Your hand okay?”

  “Yeah. Are we going to be there soon?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Fuck! This was really far!”

  “I told you. Just think about the bare asses.”

  Anthony could already imagine the place, as sort of like the porn section at the video store. He would sometimes slip in there, his belly tense with fear, looking at as much as he could before some adult came to kick him out. The urge to see girls’ bodies was overwhelming and constant. He kept magazines and videotapes in his drawers and under his bed, not to mention tissues. His pals at school were all the same way, totally obsessed. It was making them crazy, and explained most of the fights, now that he thought of it. One wrong look in a hallway would set them off, and suddenly they were at it, struggling with each other, rolling around on the tiles and yelling every name in the book. Some of the guys managed to go out with girls. Anthony had kissed a girl once, in the back of the bus. But she wouldn’t let him touch her breasts, so he dropped her. He was sorry now. Her name was Sandra; she had blue eyes and a cute ass in her C17 jeans.

  He was drawn from his ruminations by exhaust noises coming from behind the trees. He and his cousin immediately froze. People were coming their way. Anthony easily recognized the recreation center’s Piwi 50s, cranky little motocross trikes. The center had long offered motorbike activities, which had made it successful, much more than paddleball and orienteering courses.

  “They’re driving around the lake on the road.”

  “Looking for us, for sure.”

  “They shouldn’t be able to see us, though.”

  Just the same, the cousins weren’t taking any chances. Hearts pounding, they crouched down in their canoe and listened.

  “Get rid of your T-shirt,” muttered the cousin.

  “What?”

  “Your T-shirt. You can spot it a mile away.”

  Anthony pulled his Chicago Bulls tank top over his head and slipped it under his butt. The sharp chatter of the motorbikes hovered above their heads like a bird of prey. The boys kept quiet, impatient and motionless. A sweetish smell rose from the rotting vegetation on the water’s surface. Mingling with their sweat, it made them itch. Anthony shuddered at the thought of all the crawling things in the swampy water.

  “We’re gonna get there too late,” he said.

  “Shut up.”

  The motorbikes eventually drove away, leaving a vague quavering echo. Stealthily, the boys paddled on their way. When they rounded the Pointu spit, the horizon widened to reveal the other half of the lake. The famous bare-ass beach was finally in sight off to starboard. It was gray and enclosed, inaccessible from the road—and nearly deserted. A motorboat rode at anchor some thirty yards offshore.

  It had been a complete waste of time.

  “Fuck, there’s no one here,” moaned Anthony.

  In actual fact, there were two girls to be seen, but they were wearing bathing suits, even the tops. From a distance it was hard to tell if they were pretty or not.

  “So what do we do?”

  “As long as we’re here…”

  They got closer, and the girls began to stir restlessly. The boys could now see that they were very young, and nervous; worried, mainly. The smaller one stood up to call to the motorboat. Standing in the water, she whistled between her teeth very loudly, but without success. She ran back to her beach towel and sat close to her girlfriend.

  “They’re scared,” said Anthony.

  “And you’re not?”

  The cousins landed, pulled the canoe onshore, and sat down near the water’s edge. They couldn’t think of what else to do, so they lit cigarettes. They hadn’t exchanged a glance with the other people there. Mostly they were aware of their presence behind them, their dull, impenetrable hostility. Anthony now sort of felt like leaving. But at the same time, it would be a pity, after all the trouble they’d taken. They should’ve known how to go about it better.

  After a few minutes the girls gathered up their things at the other end of the beach. They were super cute, actually, with ponytails and girls’ legs, butts, tits—the works. They started calling to the motorboat again. Anthony shot little glances their way. He felt bad to be bothering them like this.

  “That’s the Durupt girl,” whispered his cousin.

  “Which one?”

  “The smaller one, in the white suit.”

  “What about the other girl?”

  His cousin didn’t know that one, but you couldn’t miss her. A neat, heavy figure from her neck to her ankles. Her hair, which was tied very high, tumbled down with a terrific impression of weight. Her bathing suit was laced across her hips. They probably left distinct lines on her skin when they were untied. Her ass, especially, was not to be believed.

  “Yeah…” agreed his cousin, who could sometimes read minds.

  Eventually, the people in the boat responded. They turned out to be a couple, an athletic-looking guy and a woman so blond it almost hurt your eyes. They quickly pulled themselves together, and the jock yanked hard on the starter cord. The boat swung around with a long whine like a food blender and reached the beach in nothing flat. The guy asked the girls if they were okay, and they said yes. Meanwhile, the blonde was staring at the cousins as if they’d just ridden through her bedroom on a moped. Anthony noticed that the jock was wearing brand-new Nike Airs and hadn’t even bothered to take them off before jumping into the water. He was now striding toward them, followed by the girls. You could tell he was determined to lay down the law. The cousin stood up to face him, then Anthony did, too.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So what do you want?”

  This was a slippery slope. The jock wasn’t as tall as the cousin, but he looked tough and confident. He wasn’t about to drop things just like that. Anthony had already clenched his fists. But his cousin defused the situation with a word.

  “Do you have any rolling papers?” he asked.

  Nobody had an answer for that. Anthony was standing with his head cocked at an angle, a habit he’d picked up to hide his sad eye. His cousin pulled out a wet package of OCB papers.

  “I dropped mine in the water.”

  “You have something to smoke?” asked the guy in surprise.

  Anthony’s cousin took a Kodak film canister from his pocket and rattled the little ball of hash inside. Abruptly, everyone relaxed, especially the jock. Without even noticing, they began to mingle. The guy had rolling papers. Now he was all excited.

  “Where did you score that? There’s nothing available right now.”

  “I have some weed, too,” said the cousin. “You interested?”

  Clearly, yes. Two weeks earlier the local cops had been jerked around by the kids i
n the ZUP housing project. As payback, they launched a fairly well-informed raid on some apartments in the Degas tower. Word was that half the Meryem family was more or less in jail, and you couldn’t make a single score in the whole town. In the middle of the summer, that was the shits.

  Other networks were thrown together, fast. The inbreds were making round trips to Maastricht, and the cousin had set up a thing with some Belgians in the campground—two brothers with piercings who spent their time doing X while listening to techno music. As luck would have it, they were spending two weeks in Heillange on a family vacation. Thanks to them, a shuttle from Mons brought Dutch skunk and something like Moroccan Red that made you feel like dipping cookies in warm milk and watching Meg Ryan movies. The cousin was selling it around the Grappe housing development at twice the normal price, a hundred francs a gram. The consumers bitched a little but preferred to pay up rather than to stay straight.

  When Anthony took a last ride around the neighborhood on his bicycle in the evening, he could catch the smell of that special dope filtering out through half-open skylights. Up in the attic, kids barely older than him were getting bombed while playing Street Fighter. On the ground floor, their father was watching Intervilles with a beer in his hand.

  The cousin lit a three-sheet blunt and handed it to the jock, whose name was Alex and who was becoming more and more friendly. Then it was Anthony’s turn. He took a few hits and passed it on. He knew the Durupt girl by name. Her father was a doctor and she had a reputation of being fairly brazen. In particular it was said she’d wrecked her old man’s BMW one Saturday evening, which was pretty remarkable for someone who didn’t even have a learner’s permit. She put out, too. Looking at her, Anthony imagined doing things.

  By contrast, the other girl had appeared out of nowhere. She’d plopped down right next to him, which is how he noticed her freckles, the fuzz on her thighs, and the drop of sweat sliding from her navel down to her bathing suit waistband.

  Right away, his cousin rolled another blunt, and Alex bought two hundred francs’ worth of skunk from him. Everybody was nice and relaxed now, laughing easily, their mouths pasty. The girls, who had brought bottles of Vittel water, handed them around.

  “Mainly, we came here to see girls topless.”

  “What you heard was bullshit. Nobody ever gets naked here.”

  “Maybe they used to.”

  “Maybe you want us to strip?”

  Anthony turned to his neighbor, the girl who had asked the question. She was full of surprises. At first glance she gave an impression of passivity, of almost animal indifference. Seeing her like that, lazy and vague, you’d imagine her sitting on a station platform waiting for a train. But she was also a wiseass, funny, and determined to have a good time. She’d pretty much dozed off after the first joint. She smelled really good, too.

  “Hey, listen to that!”

  In the distance you could hear the whine of 50cc engines, the same ones as before, with their high notes and deep backfires.

  “They’re looking for us.”

  “Who is?”

  “The guys from the recreation center.”

  “Wow, they’re hotheads this year!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The fires, that was them.”

  “No, it wasn’t. That was the inbreds.”

  “So what are they after you for?”

  “The canoe. We swiped it from the center.”

  “No shit, you really did that?”

  They laughed for a good long time, feeling sheltered, stoned, and relaxed. The heat had dropped and something soft, a smell of charcoal, woods, and parched pine trees, rose to their nostrils. The setting sun had quieted the insects, leaving only the lapping of the lake, the distant hum of the highway, and bursts of two-stroke engines occasionally ripping the air. The girls had put on T-shirts and removed their bathing suit tops. You could see their breasts moving under the fabric. They didn’t care, and the boys pretended not to care either. Anthony eventually took off his sunglasses. At one point he caught his neighbor trying to make sense of his off-kilter face. Then, a little after six o’clock, the girls began to get impatient and restless. It was probably time to go home. When the girl sitting on the ground close to Anthony got up, her knee brushed his. A girl feels really soft; it’s something you never really get used to.

  This one was called Stéphanie Chaussoy.

  That was the summer Anthony turned fourteen. It all had to start somewhere.

  2

  Having hidden the canoe, the two boys rode their bicycles home through the Petit-Fougeray woods. As usual, Anthony played at slaloming between the dashes on the center line, a habit that gave his cousin fits. While climbing the hill near the warehouses a few days earlier, Anthony found himself facing an oncoming VW bus. The driver had had to swerve aside. When his cousin asked if he wasn’t a little stupid, Anthony said he had the right of way.

  “What right of way? You were in the middle of the road!”

  At times, Anthony drove him crazy. It made you wonder if he was really all there.

  But the road was empty now and the boys pedaled fast, facing the sun, followed by their shadows. After the afternoon heat, the surrounding woods seemed to sigh and relax. The declining day felt like a countdown, because Alex the jock had made the boys a proposal. A friend was throwing a big party at his parents’ place, and Anthony and his cousin were welcome to drop by, provided they brought their dope, of course. The festivities were supposed to take place in a big house with a pool. There would be liquor, girls, music, and a midnight swim. Anthony and his cousin said okay, they would see what they could do. Being cool seemed to require a lot of concentration.

  Problem was, the party in question would be in Drimblois, a twenty-five-mile round trip, and by bicycle. That is, unless they borrowed Anthony’s father’s Yamaha YZ. The motorcycle had been languishing under a tarp in the back of their garage for years. But that wasn’t even worth considering. Anthony didn’t mind facing an oncoming VW bus, but dealing with his old man was no joke.

  “Who cares? He won’t even notice,” argued his cousin.

  “No, it’s too risky,” said Anthony. “We’ll just have to do it by bike.”

  “C’mon, it’s already seven o’clock, it’ll be a lost cause.”

  “I can’t! I mean it. He’d kill me if I took his motorcycle. You don’t know him.”

  In fact, his cousin knew Patrick Casati pretty well. He wasn’t a bad guy, but sometimes just a finger smudge on the TV screen could put him in a state that was painful to watch. The worst part came later, when he realized what he had done. Embarrassed, paralyzed with guilt, unable to apologize, he would try to win forgiveness by talking quietly and offering to dry the dishes. Anthony’s mother, Hélène, had packed her bags and gone to stay with her sister several times. When she came back, life resumed as if nothing had happened. Still, a kind of heaviness hung between them, something that didn’t give you much of a taste for family life.

  “Your sweetie will be there,” the cousin insisted. “We gotta go.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  “Oh, come off it. You know very well.”

  “Yeah…”

  Stéphanie was already like one of those jingles that get stuck in your head and drive you crazy. Anthony’s life had been turned upside down. Nothing had moved, but nothing was where it used to be. He was suffering; it felt good.

  “That chick is something else, no kidding.”

  “Yeah, sure is.”

  His cousin chuckled. He recognized the look on Anthony’s face. It was the same as when he was in seventh grade and had a crush on Natasha Glassman, a girl with different-colored eyes who wore Kickers. Stung, Anthony stood up on his bike, needing to burn off all his extra energy. Pedaling out of the saddle, he sped off—in the middle of the road, of course.

  The cousin live
d with his mother and sister in a narrow, two-story row house with a peeling stucco facade and geraniums in the windows. When they got there, the boys ditched their bicycles in the gravel and ran inside. In the living room, the cousin’s mother was watching Santa Barbara. She had a habit of raising the TV’s volume to the max, so Cruz Castillo’s voice took on a somewhat unexpected prophetic dimension. Hearing them race up the stairs, she yelled:

  “Take your shoes off before going up there!”

  Because there was carpeting upstairs, of course. Reaching the landing, Anthony glanced into his cousin Carine’s room. The door was ajar and he could see someone in short shorts sitting on the floor with her legs extended: Vanessa. The insults started flying right away: Pee-wee, little weirdo, jerk-off. Carine was eighteen and hung out with Vanessa, who was only sixteen. The two friends spent all their time together, bad-mouthing people, doing nothing, and imagining sad love stories for themselves. In summertime they combined these activities with tanning their bare breasts in the Léonards’ yard. Vanessa’s father would pop up unannounced from time to time. The girls laughed it off, but Vanessa thought it was kind of creepy. What they didn’t know was that Anthony, who lived in the same housing development, sometimes spied on them through the hedge. They were a pair of real snakes, and he was careful to keep his distance. He now beat a retreat before they came after him physically. It had happened before. They were pretty tough.

  Once in his cousin’s room, he flopped down on the bed. The place was right under the roof and hot as hell, despite the fan. The walls had shelves of VHS tapes, some Baywatch photos, and a poster of Bruce Lee, looking very relaxed for once. Plus a big TV in a fake wood case, a four-track video player, and an empty aquarium that a neurasthenic python had once briefly occupied. Strewn in the corners were dirty socks, motorcycle magazines, empty beer cans, and a baseball bat. His cousin was already rolling a two-sheet joint.