The priest grinned. "Yes. Big car, big tank. Passes everything on the road but a gas station." He laughed again and gave a bill to Mr. Turcott. "Hope you don't mind, it's all I have."
Mr. Turcott shook his head and walked silently back to the garage with the money pinched tightly between thumb and forefinger, like a hot cup of tea. The priest leaned on his car and wiped his face with a clean white handkerchief. Then he smiled again and asked them how they liked school.
The boy had never seen anyone smile so much, and thought it strange, especially for a priest -- all of his Catholic friends said they were afraid of priests. He thought that any priest from Quebec who drove a white Cadillac and smiled too much, must be a Commie spy or something like that, just like in the newspapers. They said Commies did suspicious things, but he couldn't remember what. He turned his back and wrote down the license number with a pen he kept in his pocket, on a scrap of paper from his wallet.
Earl's father returned, and painfully counted a mountain of grubby bills into the priest's clean, white hands. The priest smiled again, got into his car, waved goodbye and glided up the long hill into Quebec.
There was an angry silence, then Earl's father spat onto the ground. "Pope's got all the money, that's fer sure. Imagine that! A bloody hundred dollar bill!" He turned to glare balefully at the boy. "Don't you hafta go home?"
He gulped his drink, eyes goggling when the cold liquid hit the fillings in his teeth. Finally daring to swallow, he crunched on grit from the top of the can. He scrubbed his lips on his wrist and threw the can onto a pile of trash by the side of the road.
He walked slowly back to his car. It was parked on a street lined with tidy little bungalows, most of them clean and freshly painted, with drapes tightly closed to keep out strangers. This was more like the Labyrinth Lake he remembered.
He wondered where Bradley had lived. He thought he remembered a red insulbrick building with a stairway at the back, leading up to a second floor apartment. Only one building on this street could possibly fit, but it was too small. Either the old place had been demolished or this wasn't the street. Not that it really mattered -- nothing he could do if he found it.
White window curtains snapped back to vertical at the corner of his vision, and he realized he must look out of place, even threatening. Someone might do their duty by phoning the police; it would give them something to talk about besides television. He got into his car and started it, the hot motor gasping and choking on fuel vapor. He would just take a look at his old house before he left.
He drove slowly down the street, then turned left. It was like driving into an old photograph or a reoccurring dream; what he could see was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't remember what was around the next corner, or behind any house. There was not a hedge or a woodshed or a garden on this street that had held a secret from him as a child, yet now he couldn't remember the names of the families who had lived there.
Which had been his house? He was shocked to realize he wasn't sure. Must have been that one, the one now painted blue, with the front peak of the roof sliced off at an angle. The one with the two children sitting on the front steps. Yes, that one, but the fence was gone, and the driveway was so narrow -- how could the driveway be so narrow? And the children! A boy and girl; the girl shrieking and giggling as the boy tickled her, she tickling him in return the instant he looked away. The old photograph again! For a moment he saw himself as a ghost wandering through time, trying to re-create himself with the threads of his past life. He wondered if the boy slept in his old bedroom.
"This way. Hold it this way . . . . see?" Bradley showed the boy how to place his fingers on the strings of the guitar. "You gotta press them right down onto the frets . . . . these things . . . . see? That's how you get them to make different notes when you pluck them."
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