Black Rock Read Free Page A

bail now, and everybody was confident there’d be some arrests in a few days.
    Dougherty translated for Helen, and she said it was too bad the arrests couldn’t have been a few days ago, and he nodded. Then she said his French was very good, and he told her about his mother being from Bathurst in northern New Brunswick and how she’d moved to Montreal to work in a munitions factory during the war and met his father, who was in the navy.
    Helen said, “How romantic,” and Dougherty shrugged and said, “Yeah, I guess.” He’d never thought about it like that.
    Helen said she had no idea how she was going to get home, and Dougherty said he could drive her. “In your police car?” she said, and he said, “Sure, this seems like an emergency.” She lived in a new apartment building near the river in LaSalle. She invited him to come up but Dougherty said he did have to get the car back at some point and she said, “At some point,” and ran her fingers lightly down his cheek.
    It took more than a few days, but it was only a couple of weeks later that the Montreal police and the RCMP put together a task force and raided dozens of apartments in one night. Dougherty was with the first group of cops up the stairs to apartment number four on the third floor of a building on St. Dominique, a block off the Main. They banged on the door and it opened. A young guy, Dougherty’s age but with long hair and a scraggly beard, stood there in his underwear. The cops pushed past him and right away saw the wooden crates of dynamite — must have been two hundred sticks, detonators and booby trap wires.
    One of the cops told the guy to unhook the trap, and the guy said, in English, even though the cop spoke to him in French, “Fuck you.” The cop slammed his nightstick into the guy’s stomach, doubling him over, and then said,
“Vide les autres,”
and Dougherty and a couple of the other cops who were still in the hall started knocking on the other doors and waking people up.
    Dougherty drove a man and his wife, Greek immigrants, and their kids, twins, to Station Seventeen, the guy talking the whole way, saying, “Noise, noise all the time from them. Many times I take broom, bang on walls, all drums, guitars, not music — noise.”
    Even from the hall, Dougherty had seen guitars in the apartment. And posters on the walls, the usual stuff: Che Guevara, Marx, Trotsky. Nothing very original. Nothing very original with the explosives, either, the bomb squad guy, Vachon, said, like he was complaining, “Always the same, an alarm clock, two wires, a detonator and the dynamite. Not like Ireland with the booby traps.”
    The long-haired guy in the apartment took the fall for all his buddies, refused to name any of them, said he did everything by himself, which was really crazy when the next day a couple of cops in St. Leonard found 141 sticks of dynamite wired into two bombs under the Metropolitan Expressway. But he still wouldn’t talk.
    Dougherty and Helen dated for a while and he managed to get her onto the floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel where John and Yoko were having their Bed-In for Peace. But it turned into a fight when Dougherty said the Beatle hadn’t really chosen Montreal for the next stop after Amsterdam, he was only in town because the marijuana bust kept him out of New York.
    Then when the Montreal cops went on a one-day strike and the city exploded into another riot — taxi drivers kicking it off this time, not students — and a man was killed, Helen went back to dating stockbrokers.
    At the end of September, a bomb exploded at the back door of the mayor’s house just before dawn. It blew a huge hole in the foundation, destroyed an office in the basement and the mayor’s darkroom.
    The rest of the world was still going crazy — riots, hijackings and kidnappings on every continent. Charles Manson and his hippie