The Years of Fire

by Yves Beauchemin

  “I’ll come with you,” Céline said. “Give me a minute to jump into some clothes.”

  But Charles told her no, she was too young to be allowed into a bar.

  Twenty minutes later it was he who was being ejected from the bar. As soon as he’d seen Charles enter, the owner had asked to see some ID, and after looking Charles over briefly he’d told him he couldn’t be served.

  “I didn’t come here to drink,” Charles declared, looking around the room. “I’m looking for someone. A Monsieur Turgeon, Oscar Turgeon.”

  “He never shows up here before two o’clock on Saturdays. Wait for him outside, my lad. The fresh air’ll do you good.”

  And he’d bowed with an elegant, exaggerated arm movement that managed to hint at more direct methods of expulsion.

  Charles left, shamefaced, but glad that he had not let Céline come along. According to his watch it was a quarter to one. There was nothing he could do but wait. The wind was blowing hard and pellets of snow were stinging his eyes. It was a damp, heavy wind, merciless and tenacious, freezing his cheeks and his earlobes and making him feel as though icy snakes were crawling all over his body, despite the thickness of his hood and toque and coat. He looked up and down the street, but there was no corner store or restaurant from which he could keep an eye on the bar. There was a bus shelter a few feet away and he stood in that. If he kept perfectly still and straight, with one shoulder leaning against the glass wall of the shelter in such a way that the skin of his legs touched as little of the icy material of his trousers as possible, then after a few minutes a kind of buffer of warm air built up between him and the glacial dampness.

  Fifteen minutes passed. Three men entered the bar, one after the other, bent over against the wind and walking quickly, but none of them looked like Oscar Turgeon. Charles shivered but remained stoical. His shoulder was frozen where it touched the shelter wall. The cold chewed furiously at his toes. Maybe the bad weather was a warning, he thought. “Why are you chasing after your father, Charles? Nothing good has ever come from your contact with him.”

  A young woman came into the bus shelter with her three young children, numbed by the cold. She looked Arabic. She was wearing a long, heavy coat and her head was wrapped in brightly coloured shawls that encased her face like a shell. Then three adolescents came in, bare-headed, acting excited; one of them had a cat under his coat, which was looking about wildly. A bus stopped with a long squealing of brakes and Charles was alone again, feeling colder than ever. He hiked up his coat sleeve and looked at his watch: it was only twenty after one. His method of trapping calories by not moving was reaching the limit of its effectiveness. It wasn’t working for his feet at all: he could no longer feel them except for a sort of tingling sensation in the heels. How much longer could he last?

  Another bus came and stopped, but when Charles didn’t move it left again with an angry growl, leaving behind the acrid stench of diesel fuel. He coughed, rubbed his frozen shoulder, thought about lighting a cigarette but didn’t have the courage to get one out. “I’ll count to three hundred,” he decided, “and if he doesn’t come by then, I’m out of here.” The storm raged on more furiously than ever. It now had complete possession of the deserted streets. It was crazy to be waiting for someone outdoors in such weather.

  He’d almost reached two hundred when a silhouette appeared in the distance, walking in his direction, surrounded by swirls of flying snow that made him stagger and sometimes come to a full stop; the figure disappeared completely in a white cloud, then appeared again on the move, hobbling along with jerky movements. The silhouette seemed familiar. It was a man, that much was clear. Whoever it was turned his back into the fury of the wind to catch his breath, and as he readjusted his hood Charles suddenly recognized him. He ran out of the bus shelter.

  “Steve!” he shouted as loudly as he could. “Over here!”

  The figure jumped, raised its arms in the air, tried to run but slipped and fell onto the sidewalk. A few seconds later he was sitting beside Charles on the bench inside the shelter.

  “I was at loose ends,” he said, brushing snow from his face, “so I thought I’d come downtown and see what was up. Céline told me where you were.… Christ, you sure picked a good day for it!”

  And he gave Charles a big smile.

  He persuaded Charles to leave the shelter, where they were certainly about to freeze to death, and warm themselves up in the nearest restaurant. His friend’s arrival changed Charles’s mood, and he no longer felt like fulfilling his quest. It had been a long time since he’d seen Steve. Stretched out on a chair, his feet pressed up against a radiator, he told Steve about his last encounter with his father, only slightly exaggerating his courage. Every now and then he cast a glance out the window, where the storm was building up into a huge spectacle. He’d come down to the Amis du Sport, he explained, because he wanted to be sure that his victory was definitive.

  “Forget it,” Steve said, with princely nonchalance. “Fifteen hundred bucks! Can’t you imagine where he is? Curled up in the bottom of a bottle. You won’t hear from him again, I’ll bet my mother’s butt on it! It cost you a bundle, but it was worth it. Bingo! So, what do you say we go down to the Orleans and play a little pool?”

  Charles hadn’t set foot in the pool hall since his friend had moved out to the suburbs. He liked the idea of a game. He needed to unwind, and with Steve, unwinding was easy. The guy seemed made for nothing else. They decided to split the cost of a taxi, and one arrived within half an hour.

  “You’re not going far, I hope,” the driver said, giving them a suspicious look. “The streets will be totally blocked soon. You got enough money?” he added when Lachapelle gave him the address.

  “If I don’t have enough money for a cab, I walk,” Steve said, piqued.

  René De Bané was playing alone in the otherwise empty room. He welcomed Steve and Charles the way a castaway on a desert island might welcome a buxom blonde carrying a barbecued chicken and a case of wine.

  “Holy cow!” he said. “A royal visit! It’s been ages since I’ve seen you guys! You just get out of jail or something?”

  “Yeah,” said Charles. “We had your old cell.”

  After laughing heartily at Charles’s repartee, De Bané asked them what was new, told them how good they were looking, thanked Fate for having sent them to him on such a miserable day, and went over to the counter to confer with Nadine. He came back with three bottles of beer, and the game began. It was an animated, enjoyable session, punctuated by hilarious jokes and spectacular shots that allowed each player to share the limelight in turn. Charles was delighted to have hooked up with Steve again. His friend still clowned around and acted on impulse, and the fact that he’d come into town on purpose to spend time with him felt good, especially since, as he reproached himself, he had almost forgotten about Lachapelle. As for De Bané, the man couldn’t be friendly enough. He laughed at the smallest joke his companions made, marvelled at their skill, and was generous with his tips for playing championship pool, since, as he said, “you have to give a leg up to the next generation, especially when they’re as talented as you two.”

  Around four o’clock they began to feel hungry, and De Bané, as usual, invited them to join him at a restaurant. He insisted on driving them to the Villa Frontenac, despite the weather, where they feasted on smoked-meat sandwiches, fries, ice cream, and chocolate cake.

  “You must be rolling in dough, René,” Charles said, leaning back in his chair, stuffed.

  “It’s not hard when you know how to use your head,” De Bané replied with a secretive smile. “Coffee? Hot chocolate? Come on, drink up, it’s on me!”

  “Tell me something, René,” Steve said, very directly. “Are you queer, or what?” He wiggled his hips like a belly dancer, holding his elbows above the table. “Because if you are, my ass isn’t for sale.”

  “Nor mine,” added Charles, becoming serious.

  “You guys kidding me?” De Bané sputtered
, almost choking on a mouthful of chocolate cake. When he got his breath back he assured them he was nothing of the kind, that he had fathered five children with three different women, that he liked a bit of poontang as much as they did, if not more, that nothing pissed him off more than running into one of those kiddie-diddlers, and he’d kicked the stuffing out of more than his share of them in bars and pool halls and other, similar places.

  They finished their meal. De Bané suggested going back to the Orleans for another game, on him, of course, because he loved playing against really skilled opponents. But Charles and Steve declined his invitation, saying they had other things to do.

  “You still working at that pharmacy, Charles?” he asked when Steve had left the table to make a phone call.

  “Yup. I took today off, but normally I’m there every Saturday and one or two nights during the week.”

  Intrigued by the question, Charles looked at De Bané through partly closed lids.

  “If you’re interested, we could do some business, you and I,” De Bané said.

  “Business?”

  “Business, yeah. Smooth as shit and twice as easy. You could make a lot of money, and do it with your eyes closed.”

  “Oh yeah? How?”

  His suspicious and somewhat sarcastic tone brought a smile that split the pool shark’s long face in two.

  “Maybe this isn’t the best time to talk about it. I don’t want to keep you too long. But take a couple of days to think about my proposition, Charlie, my boy. If you’re interested, let me know. You know where to find me.”

  “He’s selling dope,” Steve said when Charles told him about the conversation. “Watch yourself, buddy. You could end up in shit up to your neck.”

  Charles shrugged. “Thanks for the advice,” he said. “I’ll give it some thought.”

  The storm had nearly passed. Steve had called Louisa, his girlfriend from Haiti, whom he had met that summer in Pointe-Saint-Charles, and convinced her to come and join them. The three of them walked to Marlene’s place; Charles hadn’t seen her for nearly two weeks. She didn’t seem to hold it against him, and gave him a long, wet kiss on the mouth. Louisa was a little bit of a thing, very bubbly and nervous. It was her first winter in Quebec. The snowstorm had sent her into a fit of ecstasy from which nothing could bring her down. She wanted to go outside and play. Marlene looked at her with a condescending smile.

  “We could make a snow fort,” Steve suggested, anxious to please his girlfriend.

  “The snow won’t stick,” Marlene objected. “It’s too cold.”

  “We just have to spray it with a hose,” Charles said. “The fort will be there until spring. We could even sell it to Club Med!”

  They frolicked in the snow until it was too dark to see, stacking blocks of snow and laughing like children. Every now and then they dashed into the apartment to warm up with cups of coffee. Finally, Louisa, exhausted by the cold, nearly fell asleep on the sofa.

  So they devoted the rest of the night to other occupations.

  9

  In the middle of the night of May 6th a fire broke out behind the storage shed at the Fafard hardware store. A chartered accountant, unable to sleep, was out walking his dog when he saw the plume of smoke rising above the courtyard and small, short flames flickering diabolically beneath a barred window. “Hey!” he shouted in indignation. He was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of firefighters, and so he came from a family that considered fire a hereditary enemy, the defeat of which was a moral duty. He therefore ran to the nearest front door and banged on it with his fist. When there was no response, he tried the handle and the door swung open.

  “Fire! Fire!” he shouted, running into a darkened room. “Someone please call the Fire Department!”

  He saw a wall-mounted telephone in the kitchen, faintly lit by the glow of a night-light. He ran to it and was performing his duty as a good citizen when he became aware of a small, old woman watching him from the doorway, trembling in her pink, cotton nightgown. He signalled to her to go to the window in the living room to see what was happening in the street, and then returned his attention to the phone. A second “Hey!” – muted this time – followed by “Have mercy on us, Sweet Jesus” told him that the reason for his unannounced intrusion into this woman’s house was now sufficiently clear for there to be no disagreeable scene. He hung up, gently patted his involuntary hostess on the shoulder (her dentures clacking at the sight of so much smoke in the street), then went back outside and joined the small group of gawkers that had assembled in front of the store. Within minutes, sirens from the fire trucks were waking up the entire neighbourhood.

  All this time, Fernand had been lying in his bed with his teeth clenched and his arms and legs held rigid, swerving violently back and forth at the wheel of a huge eighteen-wheeler on the Turcot Interchange, which hardly seemed a plausible thing to be doing, given that he’d never driven such a truck in his life. In any case, when Lucie woke him to tell him that the hardware store was on fire, he was already in the appropriate state of mind for receiving the news. He was outside the store in a matter of minutes, plunged in gloom, his wife at his side, along with his two children and Charles, whose expression of anger and distress attracted wondering glances from several of the onlookers.

  Fernand never knew which good soul he had to thank for the speed with which the firemen had been called; by the time he arrived the fire was already well under control and the good soul in question had gone home to try to catch a couple of hours of sleep, exhausted by his efforts and satisfied that the Enemy had been delivered a crushing defeat.

  The fire damaged one wall and destroyed some merchandise. It had been halted next to a flat of paints, solvents, and thinners, which, had it caught fire, would have turned the storage shed into a blazing inferno and the hardware store into a hazy memory. There was considerable water and smoke damage, however. The source of the fire had been destroyed as well, as often happens, theoretically removing the evidence that a crime had even been committed. The claims adjuster, when called in first thing in the morning, estimated the damage at ten thousand dollars and congratulated Fernand on his good fortune.

  “Such as it is,” muttered the hardware store owner darkly.

  Lucie, her face pale and the cords in her throat standing out like those of an old woman, took her husband’s arm encouragingly.

  But Fernand was devastated. He might have been lucky this time, but there would surely be a next time, and fortune might not be so kind in the future. He walked through the store muttering unintelligibly to himself, his face sagging, looking lost. Henri watched him in silence, visibly distraught. His father seemed to have aged ten years in a few hours; the barrel-chested colossus had changed into a broken shell of a man. Lucie sat on the counter, her legs dangling, her sandals hanging from her toes, wiping her eyes with a dustcloth, while Charles and Céline went out to clean up the storage shed.

  Charles stopped suddenly in front of Céline, a dustpan piled with debris in his hand, his lower jaw protruding, and his face ugly with rage.

  “He won’t get away with this, Céline,” he said in a strangled voice. “I’ll make sure of that.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  All he could do then was shake his head and go back to work in silence. Half an hour later, however, after hastily gulping down the breakfast Lucie had ordered from a nearby restaurant, he left for school. During the morning break he took Blonblon aside and told him what had happened; he had to speak to someone about it, if only to dilute his anger and his fear.

  “I’ll go look for him,” Blonblon said, in a spirit of noble generosity. “I’m going to try to reconcile the two of you. Yes, Charles, we have to try. I don’t like to get mixed up in your business, but it won’t be hard for me to act as a kind of intermediary, try to negotiate some kind of … Charles! Listen to me, Charles, please: you’ve got to talk to him. It’s always better to talk than to fight! The worst that can happen is that I waste my ti
me. But fighting …” He shook his head sympathetically.

  Charles heard him out, open-mouthed, touched by Blonblon’s candour. But he turned the offer down flat.

  “Please, Charles,” Blonblon begged. “At least let me try. What have you got to lose?”

  “Blonblon, you’re getting on my nerves. You sound like a Jehovah’s Witness or something. What, are you going door to door now? We’re not in kindergarten any more, this isn’t about settling a little set- to in the hallway. Smell the coffee, man! My father is a total asshole! He’s already tried to kill me, or have you forgotten that little detail? It was thanks to him that I had to change families. He doesn’t work because he’s no longer capable of working. All he does is drink or take drugs, or both for all I know, and he needs money, lots of money, and he’ll do anything he can to get it. He proved that last night, Blonblon. It’s a miracle the store wasn’t burned to the ground and Fernand isn’t a ruined man. By going to see him, all you’ll do is warn him that I’m coming after him. You’ll make what I have to do twice as difficult.”

  “You’re going at it the wrong way, Charles. And you’ll regret it.”

  “I’d regret doing nothing even more.”

  “I know how to talk to people, Charles. You’ve seen me do it before. Just last Thursday, Laframboise wanted to punch Mathieu Laplante’s face in because he thought Laplante had stolen his girlfriend. Well, I talked to him for fifteen minutes, quietly, explaining to him that you can’t steal a girl from someone the way you steal a jackknife or a bicycle. I told him the real problem must have been between him and his girlfriend, and it was her he should talk to, ask her what went wrong. I told him, ask her what went wrong, don’t try to strangle it out of her, or drag her down the street by the hair. You don’t get anywhere by fighting. When you ask questions, you might get a few answers, you might learn something. Then you can fix whatever it is that isn’t working.”