Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler

behind the bar reading EMPLOYES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.
    The Caboose had a notice board.
    SURPRISE DART COMPITITION
    FRIDAY NIGHT
    TROPHY’S
    The board listed a cottage for sale on Trouser Lake, last month’s Slo-Ball League schedule and a HONDA MOTORCYCLE LIKE BRAN NEW FOR SALE.
    The Caboose was a clapboard box mounted on cinder blocks, more flies inside than out. Tractors and dump trucks and pickups began to bounce into the parking lot around five P.M. , uniformly rust-eaten, dented badly here, taped together there, often an old coat hanger twisted to hold a rattling or leaky muffler in place. Once the men settled in they began to mull over the day’s events. Who had been found out by the welfare office and who was the latest to becaught putting it to Sneaker’s wife, Suzy, and was it Hi-Test again who was stealing those big outboards on the lake. Whether the new barmaid at Chez Bobby was worth the cost of a dinner first or if she was only trying it on because she had graduated from high school in Ontario, she said. Where you could get the best deal across the border on used tires for a grader and at the bottom of which hill were the fucken provincial police lying in wait right now.
    The lot outside The Caboose, punctured with potholes, overlooked a lush meadow lined with cedars. There were picnic tables out there as well as an enormous barbecue, the engine a salvage job done on an abandoned four-stroke lawn mower. Sundays in summer the truculent and hungover Rabbit would turn up at seven A.M. to begin roasting a pig or a couple of shoulders of beef for the community dinner, all you could eat for five bucks, proceeds to The Old Folks Home in Rock Island. The Rabbit was once dismissed for pissing in the fire. “People was looking and it puts them off their feed.” He was fired again for falling asleep in the grass after guzzling his umpteenth Molson and failing to notice that the spit hadn’t been revolving properly for more than an hour. Then he beat up an inspector from the Commission de la Langue Française outside The Thirsty Boot on the 243. According to reports the inspector had ordered The Thirsty Boot to take down their sign and replace it with a French one. “Sure thing,” the Rabbit had said, kneeing the inspector in the groin, just to cut him down to his own height before laying into him. “We’re gonna put up a pepper sign all right. Only it’s gonna read ‘De Tirsty Boot’.” After that he could do no wrong.
    Behind The Caboose there was a gravel pit and a fished-out pond and beyond that the mountains that had been lumbered twice too often, the cherry and ash and butternut long gone. Bunk, who also trapped during the winter, had a shack somewhere up there. He took the odd fisher, some fox and racoons and beaver. The deer were everywhere.
    Moses had stopped at The Caboose in the first place by accident. Late one afternoon six years earlier, having spent two days sifting through historical society files in Sherbrooke, searching for references to Brother Ephraim, he went out for a drive and got lost in theback roads. Desperate for a drink, he pulled in at The Caboose and considered not getting out of his Toyota because two men, Strawberry and Bunk, were fighting in the parking lot. Then he grasped that they were both so blind drunk that none of their punches were landing. Finally Strawberry reached back and put all he had into a roundhouse, sliding, collapsing in a mud puddle, and just lying there. A gleeful Bunk reeled over to his pickup, climbed in, the piglets in the back squealing as he gunned his motor, aiming himself at the prone Strawberry.
    â€œHey,” Moses yelled, leaping out of his car, “what in the hell are you trying to do?”
    â€œRun the fucker over.”
    â€œHe’ll bite a hole in your tires.”
    Bunk pondered. He scratched his jaw. “Good thinking,” he said, reversing into a cedar, jolting the protesting