Tanner’s Tiger

“Well-”

“Jesus God,” he said. He looked over his shoulder. I don’t know why; all he saw that way was the door of his own house. “One thing I don’t want,” he said, “is to get involved.”

“I don’t know where we can go, really. You’re our last chance.”

He looked over his shoulder again. I wondered if it might be a nervous tic. “I gotta start the bakery route in a couple hours. The customers don’t get their bread and rolls on time, they can make a lot of trouble. You wouldn’t believe it.”

Ah, a spirit filled with revolutionary zeal. “I suppose we could wait here until you’re done-”

“Jesus, that’s all I need. You and the kid getting arrested here, in my house, with a fifteen-year mortgage still on it, that’s just what I need. Listen a minute, I could run you across the Peace Bridge. There’s Fort Erie, Crystal Beach, you could get a bus there.”

“Just so we get across the border.”

He drove us there in a year-old Dodge station wagon. He took the spare tire out of its well and put our suitcase in its place, then filled the station wagon’s luggage compartment with bathing suits and towels. “We tell them we’re going to Crystal Beach,” he said. “Just for the day, just to go swimming, see? We don’t want ’em to see no suitcase. Got it?”

We had it.

“They’ll ask, you know, where you were born. Say Buffalo. I always say Buffalo. Lodz I was born in, you think I’m going to say Lodz when they ask me? I should show ’em proof of naturalization, all that crap? I say Buffalo, I speak good English. You do it the same way. Where were you born, you say Buffalo. Buffalo, New York, even. That’s how you can say it, or just Buffalo. I just say Buffalo most of the time. Don’t matter.”

He drove us through the heart of the city to the Peace Bridge entrance on the lower west side. We crossed the Niagara River, and a Canadian guard asked us where we were born. Jerzy was shaking as if suffering from Parkinson’s Syndrome. We all said that we were born in Buffalo and we were all evidently believed. Jerzy a

“This here’s Fort Erie,” Jerzy said. “I think you can get a bus from here to Toronto. The downtown’s over this way, I’ll see if we can’t find the bus station and-”

And the tire blew.

Of course the spare was in the garage in Buffalo. I had begun anticipating a blowout the moment he went through his act with tire and suitcase, and had merely hoped the tires would hold until we crossed the bridge. “Wait here,” I told him. “I’ll pick up a tire at the nearest gas station and help you change it. Do you know the tire size offhand? I-”

“No.” He was shaking his big head with great determination. “You just go on,” he said. “You just take the suitcase and go on, you and the kid. I can manage myself with the damn car.”

“But-”

“Listen, all I want is the two of you the hell out of the car and out of the house. Money is one thing, a donation is one thing, but I could lose my job, I could get in all kinds of trouble. You get the suitcase and you keep walking that way and you get a bus.”

He was being ridiculous, but it was his car and his problem and, the border safely crossed, no longer mine. I reached out a hand. “You are a good comrade, a faithful worker,” I began.

“You crazy man, speak English!”

“And Poland thanks you,” I concluded in English. I took the suitcase with one hand and Mi

“Why did we need him?” she asked, reasonably.

“He got us across the border.”

“Could we not have walked across?”

“Perhaps. He seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“He was a very nervous man, Evan.”

“Yes. That was a good idea of yours, somebody chasing us.”

“Thank you. I did not know if it was the right thing to say, but I thought it was fu

Evidently Jerzy’s nervousness was contagious. We were almost monotonously safe by that time, but I couldn’t entirely avoid stiffening automatically every time a policeman entered the bus station. I bought Toronto and Montreal and Buffalo newspapers, partly to read and partly to hide behind. Mi

Chapter 4

Our hotel was not exactly that. All the advance pla

The two-stage bus trip there, via Toronto, was every bit as bad as I had expected it would be. As a general rule, I try not to spend more than an hour on any bus, ever. Coming as it did on the heels of three plane rides and Jerzy Pryzeshweski, this particular trip was less welcome than most. The roads were good, but the bus’s shock absorbers were not. The only good thing about the bus was that it got us to Montreal, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that that was good, either.

Outside our hotel I turned left and started walking toward the downtown section of the city. It was late, but Rue Ste. Catherine remained brightly lit, and thick with pedestrian traffic. There was something very unreal about the area, and it took me a few blocks to realize what it was. Everything looked very American – supermarkets, car lots, stores with such exotic names as Woolworth’s and Rexall Drugs – but absolutely everything was written in French. This left the place with the air of a What’s Wrong With This Picture? feature, as unreal as a brace of Beefeaters promenading to and fro in front of the Eiffel Tower.

The city was officially bilingual, of course. So, for that matter, is all of Canada, but outside of Quebec one encounters French only on government forms and the like. Here in Montreal, where the city was officially 65 percent French – probably a low estimate – an overwhelming Gallic accent predominated. Some stores had signs only in French, others supplied English signs as well, but French was always the major language.

I walked through the streets, letting my ear accustom itself to the language around me. Quebec French is not nearly as much of a corruption of the original tongue as a Parisian would have one believe. A Cornishman and a Northumbrian Geordie, both of them living in England itself, would have considerably more difficulty communicating than would a Montrealer and someone from the French mainland. There is a distinct Canadian accent, certainly, a definite tone and rhythm to Quebecois speech, but anyone who speaks French and has any kind of ear for languages can pick it up in a hurry.

I let myself hear the language and forced myself to think in it – if you can’t think in a language, you don’t really have it down yet – and as I did this, stopping at a lunch counter for a smoked meat sandwich, stopping at a tavern for a glass of wine, an odd thing happened.