I heard a bwap bwap. It was Franck on his motocross bike. He was going this way also. Teenage boys are clever like that.
But it seemed he wasn’t attempting to flee the melee like everyone else. He was trailing Platon and the two fair officials, going slow, standing on his foot pegs.
He pulled in the clutch and let his cycle idle. And then he lurched ahead, toward Platon and the old men. He accelerated between them, knocking both of these old men to the ground. Or perhaps the loud sound of his motorcycle had startled them and caused them to lose their balance. Franck really was an asshole.
He skidded to a stop and set upon Platon, circling him and revving his motor. Platon looked panicked, a man far from home, far from what he knew. No one here to protect him.
“Stop this!” he shouted at Franck.
Platon was trying to get away from Franck’s motorcycle, but in each direction he moved, Franck cut him off.
Platon ran toward one of the huge log piles in the clearing. Safe harbor. An escape. A motorcycle cannot climb a stack of logs.
When Platon’s foot made contact with the third or fourth log, this log he had stepped on shifted, transferring weight from the log above it. Platon attempted to get clear of the falling log by going higher. He was wearing city shoes, dress shoes with hard leather soles, and as he tried to avoid the moving log, he slipped and proceeded to set even more logs moving. He lost his balance and fell. The logs laddered down from the top of the pile. They rolled over him. The pile collapsed, with Platon underneath.
Franck took off. Wanted no part. He opened his throttle and surged away.
I don’t blame you, Franck.
I ran up the little road, toward my car, my route of escape.
AS I TRAVELED NORTH on the D79, headed for a highway that would take me to a main autoroute, a fast and efficient toll road toward Paris, rural police and riot police and other police were passing me, streaming in the opposite direction. Fire trucks. A weird flat-front vehicle I understood to be a water cannon. Gendarmerie buses, one after another, empty, as if they were going to arrest the entire rural population of the greater Guyenne.
VIII
URSA MINOR
THEY PAID ME the exorbitant price I’d named.
Paid it without inquiries as to how things went.
An accident, declared as much officially, was more than good enough.
I blew off Malta.
Something had to change, and the good luck I’d been dealt had sealed it for me.
Instead of getting on a plane at Charles de Gaulle, after receiving my money I bought a car and drove it to Spain. And not a shitty Škoda, either, which, where were those cars even from?
I bought an E-Class Mercedes.
Pull the stamper or lose a hand. I’d pulled the stamper, and I was done pulling the stamper.
I shot right through Palafrugell, birthplace of the deceased subminister Pablo Platon y Platon. Poor Paul.
I could still hear his final high-pitched scream as the logs had crushed him.
I continued onward from Palafrugell to a tiny village on the rim of a cove that felt like a secret.
Clear turquoise water and soft yellow sand, limestone cliffs and stone pines, their branches sculpted by wind. The sand wasn’t soft. It had the consistency of marbles. I bought water shoes to protect my feet.
It was mid-October now. The tourist season was over. I was the lone occupant of the only hotel in this tiny village, whose clerks wore lavender jackets and stood behind a huge white desk. The floors were tile, also white. I walked around barefoot. It was that kind of place, built for people to enjoy the sea, and not to be formal.
I had been there a month and was friendly with the clerks, especially a young Catalonian woman with large sloe eyes and bleached hair, a husky voice. We had an agreement. She would tell me if anyone came around asking after someone who might be me. So far, no one had.
Every morning I swam, the only person in the cove. And every morning a cormorant sat on a little rock above the waterline. We each had a routine. In the silvery dawn light, the sea was as smooth and still as cast silicone, and so salt-rich that I floated almost out of the water. If you were pitched from a ship into water like this, you could live a long time. The salt would hold you. I lay on my back.
Me and my cormorant and the rock, we were like figures suspended in the silicone.
If the later day brought wind that riffled the surface of the sea, dawn was always the same. A reset. The silicone poured smooth.
It was an off-season hotel, the bathing Spaniards gone, back at work in Barcelona, but it was fishing season, and I watched as boats appeared, rusted old vessels that men and boys dragged up the beach.
I spent my afternoons on the hotel terrace, eating squid and drinking beer. But then I gave up the beer. Gave up drinking. Just stopped. That was it. No, it was not easy. But I did it.
Few things worth doing are easy.
Any habit that offers pleasure becomes a hassle if you need it to get from hour to hour.
I read the news.
The French papers, and the Spanish ones, too, had all but snickered about Platon’s fatal accident, and about the posted signs next to the logs, with pictures warning of danger.
Can he not interpret a pictogram? Designed to warn even those who cannot read?
But they had not been there, at the scene of his death. They didn’t know. It was Franck’s fault.
The protest at the lake in Vantôme had become a full-scale melee. Two hundred and fifty-eight people were arrested, including union leaders, Moulinards, anarchists who had traveled down from Tarnac, in the Corrèze, and the singer from the rock band who had been performing at the fair, who was accused of running at a cop with his microphone stand.
