The Years of Fire

by Yves Beauchemin

  Her words reassured the pharmacist, and after a few hours he regained some of his quiet good humour. He even allowed himself a joke or two with his customers. But that night, lying in bed beside his sleeping wife, whose anti-aging cream smelled strongly of cucumbers and made the room smell depressingly like a cellar, his suspicions reasserted themselves, and sleep was a long time coming.

  It took a lot of courage for Charles to return to the hospital. Squeezed into an elevator with a tightly packed group of secretaries in sundresses who were visiting a friend who had gone into labour, he chewed his lips, lost in thought and oblivious to their giddy, schoolgirl chatter and the abundance of bronzed flesh oozing pleasure and life.

  It had been ten days since Fernand’s suicide attempt. The previous night Lucie had come home with good news. Doctor Berthiaume’s therapy sessions were beginning to bear fruit and Fernand was on the road to recovery. He had smiled three times, eaten his dinner without complaint, no longer talked of selling the hardware store, and was even beginning to find his stay in the hospital a tad overextended.

  “You must go and see him,” she’d said to Charles, with her mother-knows-best smile. “He asked me about you. He probably doesn’t even remember what he said the other day.”

  Charles had given the matter some thought. He was torn between the desire to tell Fernand that from now on, thanks to him, there was no more danger of a fire breaking out at the hardware store, and his fear of having to tell him why that was so.

  He pushed open the door to Room 6281 with a knot in his stomach and promised himself that he would keep a firm rein on his emotions. Fernand was sitting by the window, spreading his newspaper out in front of him with a loud crackle.

  “Hello there,” he said, looking sombrely at Charles as though trying to figure out what to say next.

  “Hello, Fernand,” Charles replied in a low voice. He stayed near the door, suddenly filled with apprehension and unable to walk farther into the room. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not too bad.”

  He smiled faintly, and Charles felt relief wash over him. He stepped away from the door.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Fernand said, indicating a chair. “You’re going to grow roots down into the floor.”

  Charles laughed, not at the joke, which was an old one, but because of the joy he felt inside: Was Fernand getting better? Could it be that their friendship was still intact?

  “You look good,” he said, sitting down.

  To be honest, it was the word “better” that had come to mind, but he substituted “good” as a way of encouragement. “Sick people recover faster,” he thought, “if they think they look like there’s nothing wrong with them.”

  “Well, that’s not what my mirror told me this morning when I shaved, but thanks anyway. It’s always nice to hear.”

  “No, I mean it,” Charles insisted, almost convinced of it himself. “You look good.”

  Fernand nodded with a skeptical smile. He folded his newspaper in half and tossed it on the radiator.

  Neither spoke for a time. This was what Charles had most feared. He searched his mind desperately for some way to start a conversation. Fernand sighed deeply.

  “I’m told I said something stupid to you the last time you were here. I don’t remember it, myself.”

  Charles smiled. “Neither do I,” he said.

  And he made a gesture to imply that as far as he was concerned the whole thing was of no importance at all.

  “All those shots they gave me, my brain was like a bowl of pea soup. And I was in pretty bad shape. I didn’t know where I was, everything was strange and sort of jumbled. I hope you didn’t take me seriously, eh?”

  “Don’t even think about it, Fernand,” Charles said, tears filling his eyes, and furious at not being able to keep his resolution not to cry.

  He placed a hand on Fernand’s knee.

  Now he wanted to tell Fernand the good news; his natural caution was giving way slowly to the pleasure it would give him. Fernand, however, always embarrassed by shows of emotion, changed the subject by talking about the quality of the food he was being served. At least they were helping him to lose weight, he said. But he was getting the best of care, really remarkable care, and it was made all the better by the beauty of his two nurses, one of whom, a magnificent Filipina woman, seemed to have developed a crush on him.

  “But it’s mostly Doctor Berthiaume who has helped me get through all this,” he added seriously.

  He tapped his temple with his forefinger.

  “He’s helping me understand what was going through my head, Charles. I can’t tell you everything because it’s still very complicated and mixed up. But there’s at least one thing I do understand, and that’s that I have a problem with anger. I was full of rage against myself, against everything that wasn’t going as well as I wanted it to, against Wilfrid, against the police, all that kind of thing. Anyway, instead of taking all that rage out on whatever it was I was angry at, and getting rid of all that negative energy, as they call it, and making myself feel better by pounding the living daylights out of whoever happened to deserve it, I was turning it against myself – which apparently was not a good thing. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But it never occurred to me that that’s what I was doing.”

  Charles looked at him for a moment.

  “Well, you don’t need to pound the living daylights out of anyone, Fernand,” he said. “I’ve done that for you.”

  Fernand looked at him like a dog who was hearing bagpipes for the first time.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve taken care of it for you,” Charles said, turning red.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I went looking for my father a few days ago. I had it out with him. He promised me we’ll never hear from him again, ever.”

  Fernand let out an incredulous laugh.

  “No, no, it’s true,” Charles continued, turning even redder. “It wasn’t just a drunken promise. He has no choice, he’s going to leave us in peace from now on. I’ve made sure of it.”

  “And how did you do that, may I ask? By sprinkling his forehead with holy water from St. Joseph’s Oratory?”

  Charles stood up, deciding that now was a good time to leave.

  “I can’t tell you just yet … maybe later. But from now on you can rest easy, cross my heart!”

  He reached out to take Fernand’s hand.

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I’d like to, I’d like to,” murmured Fernand without conviction. “Are you leaving so soon? We’ve hardly had a chance to talk.”

  His face had sunk as though from enormous fatigue. He seemed to have aged another ten years.

  “I have to make a delivery,” Charles said, looking away. “And you have to rest.”

  Pushing up on the arms of his chair, Fernand slowly rose to his feet.

  “Rest,” he said, sighing. “That’s all I ever do around here.”

  He walked Charles to the door, and they shook hands again. He watched Charles thoughtfully, and with some concern, as he disappeared down the corridor. The Filipina nurse passed and said hello to him, smiling; normally he would have replied with a joke, but this time nothing came to him. He went back to his bed, and with the heavy slowness of an insect numbed by the cold, crawled between the sheets, his body shivering despite the stifling heat of the room.

  “I wonder what he could have said to him,” he murmured two or three times, until his eyes lost their focus and he slipped into a comfortable slumber.

  When they were youngsters, Charles and Henri had been almost inseparable, but as their personalities and tastes developed they had grown away from one another, until now any sense of solidarity they shared was mostly from habit, from living in the same house, their former closeness having dissolved into indifference. They still got along well enough, but they ran into one another only occasionally outside the house or school. Each had his own friends and his own preoccupations. Whi
ch at least meant there were no problems having to do with rivalry.

  Nonetheless, a kind of secret jealousy lingered in Henri. Charles’s arrival in the family had ousted him from his position as the only son. Charles wasn’t as physically strong as Henri, he wasn’t as good in sports or much of a fighter, but he had charm, and more sparkle; Henri sometimes wondered if his parents didn’t exhibit a preference for the newcomer. Obviously no such thoughts bothered Céline, though. On the contrary, it had been a very long time since Henri had shown as much affection for Charles as Céline did. Her feelings for Charles had made her the target of much teasing, and the subject of many quarrels.

  Henri had also noticed that a change had come over Charles. He hadn’t given it much thought until one day when he’d accidentally overheard the tail end of a conversation between Charles and Blonblon in a quiet corridor at Pierre-Dupuy High School. He’d heard only a few sentences, and he couldn’t have said what they were about, but he had picked up the reproachful tone in which Blonblon was speaking to Charles, and the embarrassed, irritated way in which Charles replied, and he’d guessed that something serious was under discussion. He’d gone up to them as though he suspected nothing, and they’d immediately changed the subject.

  From then on, however, he’d kept a closer eye on his adoptive brother.

  One day, for example, Charles happened to take out his wallet when Henri was there; it was fat with a thick wad of bills.

  “Holy cow! You’re rolling in it. Where’d you get all that?”

  “I saved it up,” Charles replied insolently, but in a tone that failed to hide his embarrassment. And he quickly put his wallet back in his pocket and moved off.

  Fernand returned from the hospital looking weak and thin, but apparently in good spirits. His hair was turning grey and the skin under his chin was loose. Before long he was back at the hardware store, at first for only a few hours a day, leaving in the middle of the afternoon looking tired and drawn. But before too long he was his old strong, vigorous, sometimes impatient self again. One evening, ever the dutiful neighbour, he helped the son of a friend who lived down the street move into his own apartment, amazing everyone with his bullish strength by moving a refrigerator single-handed. Although still somewhat worried, Lucie was happy to have her old Fernand back; the next day, however, he stayed in bed until ten o’clock, obviously exhausted by his effort, and made only a token appearance at the store.

  Twice a week he went to his psychiatrist, Dr. Berthiaume, whom he considered his “saviour” and “such a genius he should run for the United Nations, maybe even for secretary-general.” One Sunday at noon, during lunch, he declared that, in fact, he had two saviours, and he placed one hand on Charles’s head with an affectionate, teasing smile.

  “Believe it or not,” he said, “this boy has taken care of the problem of those fires at the store. Don’t ask me how, he doesn’t want me to know. But it doesn’t matter; one of these days, I’m going to nominate him for Fire Chief for the City of Montreal.”

  He was joking, but beneath the bantering tone lurked a sincere gratitude. Charles looked down at his plate, his face as red as a beet, and forced a kind of smile, not answering any of the questions that were put to him.

  It wasn’t difficult for Henri to make a connection between this mysterious episode, the conversation he’d overheard at Pierre-Dupuy, and Charles’s thick wallet. That evening he voiced his suspicions to Charles, who reacted so angrily that Henri was certain he was correct. He began keeping an even closer eye on Charles than ever.

  He soon noticed that Charles was making frequent trips to the credit union to make deposits. He didn’t think the job at the pharmacy could be paying well enough to explain such an abundance of money. Then one night in September he saw Charles having a conversation on a street corner with a decidedly suspicious-looking individual, someone he’d seen a few times around the neighbourhood. Another connection was made in his mind, and he felt that the final revelation was not far off.

  Shortly after that, he was leaving school with Charles one day when the latter suddenly said he had an errand to run. It was pouring rain; Henri said he thought it was an odd time to be running errands without an umbrella, and he pointedly offered to go with him. Charles made a face and said that if he’d wanted Henri’s company he would have asked for it, and then hurried off. Henri waited impatiently for two or three minutes, then set off to follow him. He didn’t have far to go.

  Charles left rue Parthenais, on which the school was located, and turned onto rue Fullum, which ran parallel to it. He headed south, then almost immediately returned to Parthenais and rang the bell to a lodging almost directly across from the prison. His heart pounding with the thrill of his exploit, Henri hid behind a dumpster that was parked in front of a building being renovated, mindless of the drizzle that was soaking through his clothing.

  After a few minutes, Charles reappeared and passed within a few feet of him, a worried look on his face, and turned off at the first corner. Whom had he gone to see? Henri left his hiding place, made a note of the address, and retraced his steps, uncertain as to what to do next. Ringing the doorbell himself didn’t seem like a good idea. What reason could he give to whoever answered the door? He thought of taking up his vigil behind the dumpster again until the person came out, but that could take a long time.… Then he saw the corner convenience store. Maybe he could gather some information in there. A large, red-headed woman was smoking a cigarette behind the cash. She was in her fifties, still with remnants of her former beauty, though it apparently had been of a fairly cheap type. Her eyes were glued to a television set. He bought a chocolate bar and tore off the wrapper; his adventure had given him an appetite.

  “Do you know who lives at number 1670?” he asked the woman, sounding as disinterested as he could manage.

  She looked at him in surprise, and more than a bit suspiciously.

  “Why do you want to know?” she asked.

  “My mother asked me to deliver a letter to one of her aunts, but I’m not sure what her address is.”

  “It’s a Monsieur Thibodeau who lives there. He lives by himself. What’s her name, this aunt of your mother’s?”

  Henri barely registered the question. He left the store and walked down the sidewalk, whistling a merry tune to himself.

  The picture was slowly taking shape. Charles had got himself involved in some way with a guy who dressed like a circus clown and paid him a lot of money, which he was giving to his father, who was obviously blackmailing him. Henri could already hear the congratulations heading his way. It wouldn’t be long before everyone would know which of the two of them was the smartest! Or at the very least which one was more honest. There was only one problem to be solved: What was Charles selling to be making so much money? It had to be drugs. What else could it be? And he had to be getting the drugs from the pharmacy.

  This idea gave him pause. By exposing Charles he ran the risk of getting him into serious trouble – he could even end up sending him to prison! His success at divining Charles’s little secret was pleasing, but he had no desire to play the role of informer. That would dirty his reputation forever. Honesty was all well and good, but not when it took on the form of betrayal.

  On the other hand, if Charles knew that his secret was now out in the open – or as good as – it might force him to give it up, and one day he might even thank Henri for it. At any rate, it was quite clear that it was up to Henri to make Charles clean up his act …

  A week went by, and still Henri hesitated. He wouldn’t admit it even to himself, but he was afraid of how Charles would react. Charles could be all over the map sometimes. And then there was Fernand; still fragile, the last thing he needed was something like this to add to his worries.

  But then one evening the problem took care of itself.

  It was a Saturday. For once, Charles and Henri were both home at the same time. Fernand had gone to bed just after nine, Lucie had joined him shortly afterwards, and Céline h
ad just left to visit a friend. The two boys were sitting in the living room, each with a beer, watching an American sitcom on television. A sleepy quiet had settled over the house. The only movement came from Boff, who was lying on the rug furiously chewing his claws.

  Was it the alcohol? Or perhaps the absolute boredom that had set in after half an hour of watching drivel on TV? Whatever it was, Henri turned suddenly towards Charles and, in a kind of disengaged tone mixed with a hint of impertinence, said: “I know everything, Charles.”

  Charles looked at him quizzically.

  “I’m telling you, I know everything.”

  “What are you talking about?” Charles asked impatiently.

  “You know very well what I’m talking about. I know everything, and I’ve known it for quite some time.”

  And he began telling Charles exactly how he had been keeping track of his movements, and what he had learned and deduced from them.

  “You get them from the pharmacy, right?” he added, triumphantly. “I don’t know what you’re handing over to your pusher buddy, but if I were you I’d give it up, now, because sooner or later you’re going to find yourself in the soup, my friend, and it’ll be as hot as hell.”

  Charles looked at him, astonished, dumbfounded, and furious. Slowly he placed his beer on the carpet and stared down at it, as though waiting for the solution to the terrible fix he was in to rise up out of the bottle. Then, looking up again, he ran a hand over his face. A trembling hand.

  “You miserable little piece of shit,” he said, with such suppressed anger that the smile of satisfaction vanished from Henri’s lips. “I never thought you could be such a complete idiot. You make me sick. What are you doing, messing around in my business? What have I ever done to you? Do you have any idea why I’m doing what I am? No. You don’t know anything about anything, and yet you play around at being the little detective and then come to me with your shit morality! You prick! Go ahead, turn me in! The four of you will be a lot better off when they come to arrest me.”