The Years of Fire

by Yves Beauchemin

  He looked around the room. Only three of the tables were being used, and Steve hadn’t arrived yet. But just then he heard Steve’s voice coming up the stairs. High-pitched, excited, slightly weird. Who could he be talking to? There was a burst of laughter. A girl’s laughter. Then Lachapelle stood at the door, bracketed by two plump brunettes who were about the same height as him, not bad-looking. Charles recognized them from school, but he couldn’t remember their names.

  “Hey, Thibodeau! Here already?”

  He looked down at his companions, who were laughing as hard as they could.

  “You know Marlene Jobidon? No? She’s in the same class as Henri. And Agatha Forcier?”

  “One of my uncles owns the Blue Bird,” she said, as though that were one of her personality traits.

  “Oh really? I didn’t know that,” Charles said, not knowing how else to respond.

  They began chatting about this and that. Every now and then Charles looked questioningly at Steve, who assumed an innocent air and went on telling joke after joke, making the girls laugh and generally bringing them up to his own level of excitement. He explained that Marlene and Agatha had expressed an interest in learning how to play pool. “So I said that you and I were pretty good with our sticks” – here the girls broke into laughter again – “and we’d be happy if they joined us to make a foursome.”

  Renewed hilarity from Agatha and Marlene.

  After discreetly ensuring that Charles was willing to split the cost, Steve went over to the cash to arrange for a table. Charles had never seen him in such a lively mood. He heard Nadine telling Steve that the owner had gone out for the evening.

  “Far out!” said Steve. “Bring us four drafts.”

  But she refused him outright. If the pool hall lost its licence would he be able to get them a new one?

  They started playing. Charles soon realized that teaching Marlene how to play pool was nothing but a pretext for bringing them together. Certain intimacies shared between Steve and Agatha suggested that their acquaintance was already fairly well advanced. Of the two, Charles would have preferred Agatha for himself. Marlene was altogether too pudgy: pudgy cheeks, pudgy chin, pudgy nose, pudgy behind, even the tips of her shoes seemed pudgy. But her skin was superb, like cream, and she had a frank, easy laugh that was a pleasure to listen to. There didn’t seem to be anything complicated about her. Not wanting to appear ungrateful, Charles set about imitating his friend. When Marlene succeeded in putting a little backspin on the cue ball, however accidentally, he kissed her on the cheek. When she made a second decent shot, she let him kiss her lips.

  Charles felt a strange sensation spread through him, a mixture of curiosity, lust, and fear. The others were obviously running the show, but it was without malice; clearly his companions wanted nothing more than to have a good time. But part of him would have liked his friend to leave him alone in his innocence, to let him go on being a child, instead of making him feel that his illusions were being shattered every minute by the gestures and pleasantries shared by Steve and the two girls.

  The next day, during one of their final bike rides of the season (since snow would soon be putting a stop to them for a few months), Steve would tell him that Marlene had had her eye on him for a long time, and had even bet Agatha that she would pluck his cherry before the week was out. The two girls had talked to Vicky, Steve’s stepsister, and she had passed the word on to Steve. The latter, after having spent a few highly enjoyable hours with Agatha at Marlene’s place, had agreed to set something up, and the idea of a game of pool had seemed the best way to put their plan into action.

  They had just racked the balls for a second game when René De Bané appeared. His arm was in a sling and his face looked as though it had been pummelled with a pair of baseball cleats. The surprising and, to some extent, unfortunate thing was that for once he appeared to have a real story to tell, but he was in much too foul and uncommunicative a mood to tell it. When she saw him, Nadine gave an exclamation of surprise and asked him what had happened.

  “Nothing you’d be interested in,” he muttered.

  The look he gave her told her that if she pressed him she’d be sticking her head into a lion’s mouth. He ordered a beer and took it over to a table by the bar, where he sat staring darkly into his glass.

  One of the pool players saw him, went over to say hello, and also remarked on his devastated face. But before he could ask him about it, De Bané suggested he go outside and play in the traffic on Boulevard Metropolitain. After two or three beers, however, his mood seemed to lift a little; he stood up, beer in hand, and leaned against a pillar watching the somewhat lively game that Steve and Charles were playing with their two friends.

  “René,” Steve ventured, “what happened to you?”

  “Accident at work,” was all the jack-of-all-trades would say. In an obvious effort to change the subject, he added, “If you’d taken that last shot off the rail you’d have dropped the seven in the corner pocket, no sweat.”

  “What kind of accident, René?” Steve persisted. “You fall down a chimney or something? Did a bus suddenly decide to give you a peck on the cheek? I mean, shoot, you don’t often see a face as mangled as yours.”

  “Accident at work, I told you. I’ll tell you about it some other time. I don’t want to talk about it just now. You kids,” he went on, settling into a vaguely philosophical bitterness, “you don’t know what it’s like to work for a living. When you get to know a bit about life you’ll realize it’s not always a bed of roses. Pushing pencils all day, that’s nothing. A pastime for pussies!”

  “I’ve been working since I was eight years old,” Charles said, irked.

  “Oh yeah? So you don’t just push pencils, you sharpen them from time to time, eh?”

  Agatha and Marlene laughed.

  “No, I delivered pizzas for Chez Robert, my friend. I also sold chocolate bars on the street, and now I’m working as a delivery boy for Lalancette Pharmacy.”

  At this news René De Bané abruptly changed his attitude. He congratulated Charles for his courage and energy, delivered a paean of praise for any youngster who at least partly paid his own way while still going to school, and questioned Charles assiduously about his work at the pharmacy. How long had he been working there? How did he like the owner? Did he get along well with him? Was business good? And so on.

  “It’s your shot, Charles,” Marlene interrupted, taking him by the arm. In the process she managed to run her hand along his thigh.

  “You’re ruining our concentration, René,” Steve said sourly.

  “Sorry, guys, sorry … didn’t mean to butt in.… Hey, who wants a beer?

  My round. Speak now or forever hold your peace!”

  He went over to the bar and ordered five Molsons. Nadine refused him outright, knowing who they were for. De Bané protested, saying that if he felt like drinking ten beers in a row it was his business and no law could stop him as long as he conducted himself in a proper manner. Then to reinforce his argument he slapped a five-dollar bill on the counter. The owner’s absence robbed Nadine of a major portion of her moral authority and reduced the strength of her convictions; in the end she gave in, grumbling, and De Bané returned to the pool table with the beer.

  The atmosphere around the table picked up considerably. Charles had never liked beer much, but that night, for some reason, he drained his glass in three gulps. His nervousness soon vanished and he began taking great pleasure in this odd game of pool arranged for his benefit with two girls he barely knew. He began to see Marlene in a new light, and even though Agatha still seemed to him to be the sharper of the two, certainly the more lively and bubbly, Marlene was beginning to gain on her with her good humour, her warmth of spirit, and her overall easygoing, childlike manner. At a certain juncture, when he was trying to guide her arm for a particularly delicate shot, he leaned his body against hers and gently rubbed the back of her hand; she responded with a movement of her rear that left no doubt about wher
e the evening was headed.

  De Bané continued watching them, unstinting in his advice and his running commentary. He suddenly seemed to think Charles could do no wrong; he marvelled at Charles’s skill, clapped loudly at each good shot, and Charles, despite the scorn that De Bané usually inspired in him with his constant bouncing and clowning around, couldn’t help taking a certain pleasure in his approval. After all, De Bané was a good player.

  “That calls for another round,” De Bané cried when Agatha, who until then had seemed intent on tearing the felt to shreds, sank two balls in a row. And off he went, back to the bar.

  “Let’s drink them fast and get out of here,” Steve said quietly. He seemed to be getting more and more resentful of De Bané’s presence. “I can’t stand looking at his hacked-up face, can you?”

  Ten minutes later the four were making their way to the door after having warmly thanked their somewhat piqued benefactor. Charles hadn’t been able to finish his beer; a strange dizziness was coming over him, bringing with it some unpleasant memories.

  They clattered loudly down the stairs. Halfway down, Marlene stopped.

  “Let’s go to my place,” she said. “My father’s away for the weekend. We’ll have the apartment to ourselves.”

  Agatha and Steve went on ahead, hand in hand and calling back, while Marlene gave Charles a long look, arms at her sides, hands held palms up towards him. He took her in his arms and it was there, half drunk and halfway down the staircase of the Orleans Billiards Hall, with the smell of Javex and cigarette smoke in his nostrils, that he experienced his first really sensual kiss.

  Marlene lived on Prince George, a few doors down from the high school. They walked east along Ontario and Charles stopped her in the dripping, noisy tunnel under the railroad overpass for another kiss; he gave out an involuntary groan when she ran a practised hand down the front of his pants.

  “Let’s go, speed it up there, you two lovebirds!” Steve shouted. He seemed in a hurry to get to where they were going.

  Prince George was a short, quiet cul-de-sac that butted up against the back of the Grover factory. Marlene and her father lived on the ground floor of an old, two-storey brick building with a fine mansard roof. The building contained twelve apartments. A few months earlier, Monsieur Jobidon, who was on good terms with the building’s owner, a distant cousin of his, had managed to annex a room in the basement as a bedroom for Marlene.

  “Smells funny in here,” Steve said with a grimace when they entered the apartment.

  He turned his head this way and that, sniffing the air with a look of distaste. They were in a room almost completely occupied by an enormous television, an armchair, and a huge sofa covered in crinkled black leather.

  “Oh, it’s our damned cat!” Marlene said, laughing. “He pissed in here yesterday. We leave him outside now.”

  She went into a long, involved story concerning their cat, Puffball. The previous week when she’d come home from school one afternoon she’d found three little brats who had trapped Puffy under the hood of a car and were scaring it to death with the horn. She heard the poor thing’s desperate meows and ran out into the street. How long had it been going on? At least half an hour, according to a neighbour. And Puffy still wasn’t completely over it. Half crazy and almost deaf, it wouldn’t let anyone get anywhere near it, except maybe Monsieur Jobidon when he was home. It wandered up and down the neighbourhood all night, wailing like a banshee. Last night her father had managed to coax it into the apartment and give it something to eat, hoping that would calm it down. Puffy had always been so well behaved, but it had spent the night marking everything with its own smell and tearing up the arm of the sofa with its claws. In the morning her father had been so furious he’d thrown the animal outside, saying it’d never be allowed inside again.

  “But he used to love his little Puffball,” Marlene added, laughing. “One day I went into the bathroom thinking it was empty, and there he was on the throne, trying to wipe himself with one hand and pet the cat with the other! It was hilarious!”

  Steve and Agatha laughed heartily and Charles tried to join in, but he was beginning to find Marlene a little coarse for his taste. Not that that detracted from her attractiveness.

  “Can a guy get a beer in this place?” asked Steve. De Bané’s generosity hadn’t quenched his thirst.

  “The fridge is full,” Marlene replied.

  “But we can’t touch them,” warned Agatha. “Your father probably counted them before he left, like he always does, and you’ll be in big trouble, girl, if he comes back and there’s any missing!”

  Steve shrugged. “No problem, we’ll score some later at the corner store. Won’t we, Thibodeau?”

  “They won’t sell us beer.”

  “The one near our place will. No sweat.”

  With these assurances Marlene went into the kitchen and came back carrying four bottles. Charles didn’t feel up to more drinking, but to go along with his friends and to avoid being teased he took a few mouthfuls. Marlene knelt in a corner in front of a portable record player, and a song by The Police filled the room. Charles took out his pack of smokes and offered them around, but Steve stopped him with a gesture.

  “I’ve got something better,” he said.

  Picking up his jacket from the sofa, he took from the pocket a small plastic bag half filled with pot and a packet of cigarette papers. He rolled two joints, with the others looking on eagerly.

  Wreaths of bluish smoke rose above their heads. After each toke, Charles concentrated on holding back a small, dry cough, each one more rasping than the last. This time, to his consternation, the weed was apparently having no effect on him. Then, after a few minutes, it seemed to him the music was becoming louder and taking on a new and quite wonderful dimension. His legs suddenly felt weak. Steve was staring off into space with a solemn, languid expression that made Agatha laugh. “He does look like a bit of an idiot,” thought Charles. Then he felt Marlene’s arm on his shoulder, and they were kissing so passionately he forgot to breathe. Every now and then he sneaked a look at Steve and Agatha, who were entwined on the sofa, hoping they would give him a clue as to what came next. He was completely clueless about his next move.

  “Come on,” Marlene whispered in his ear, “let’s go down to my room.”

  Taking his hand, she led him into the kitchen. It was a very small room with grease-stained walls and an impressively high pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Beside the fridge a door stood open, disclosing a narrow staircase leading down to the basement. It was low-ceilinged, with a poured concrete floor. A purple runner led from the bottom of the stairs to a second door in a newly constructed wall.

  “My bedroom,” Marlene said proudly, taking him through the second door into a fairly large room. Everything in it was blue – the walls, the wall-to-wall carpet, the down-filled duvet on the bed – and the monotone was given added emphasis by a blue bulb in a lamp hanging in one corner. Above the bed was a high window covered with blue-flowered curtains, and on the bed itself sprawled an enormous chocolate-coloured teddy bear. Posters of Blondie, Joan Jett, and Jean Michel Jarre decorated the walls. A dresser burdened with trinkets stood in a corner beside a desk. The room was as tidy as a cell in a convent.

  “You like?”

  He nodded yes. But his excitement was beginning to wane, replaced by a strange sensation he had never felt before, a mixture of exaltation and terror, anguish and burning curiosity. He felt helpless in its grip. A thousand questions flew through his mind. What did Marlene expect him to do? Were there some things to avoid doing? Was it as great as everyone said it was? Maybe she didn’t really want to make love. How would he know? He should have brought his beer with him. Mechanically he patted his pockets looking for his cigarettes.

  She saw the trouble he was in and it made him seem even more desirable to her. What a treat to be the first for such a handsome specimen! She smiled at him, drew him to the bed, and they began kissing again. After a moment she saw that
he wasn’t making a move to undress her, so she gently pushed him back and began unbuttoning her blouse, still smiling sweetly. He undid the buttons of his own shirt. Something flashed in his head, as though all the beer he had drunk during the course of the evening suddenly began working at once. He stared at her breasts, large but firm and jutting out beautifully, the same creamy white as her face. Their supreme beauty engulfed him. He reached out shyly and touched them, then gently caressed them with his trembling hands. Then he leaned over and kissed them as she tried to take off her pantyhose. She laughed and pushed his head away.

  “Slowly, slowly, you naughty boy! Take your clothes off first.… Don’t you want me to see your ass? You don’t need a safe,” she added, in case he was worried, “I’ve just finished my period.”

  The next instant his jeans and her slip were on the floor, and he was on her.

  “Take off your socks,” she murmured. “I’m not a hooker.”

  He took them off, hardly aware that she was speaking. Her caresses sent flames shooting through his entire body. He squeezed and kissed her; she opened her legs and guided his hand but, misunderstanding what she wanted, he tried to penetrate her right away. In any case, it was too late. A spasm came over him and he squirted three whitish streams over her vagina and abdomen. Kneeling before her he looked up with a penitent smile.

  “Not to worry,” she said gently. “We’ll have another go.… My, my, what a cute little thing you have there.”

  She stretched out her arm and, opening the drawer of her night table, took out a handful of Kleenex.

  Meanwhile, Puffball had crept along the outside wall of the building and stretched itself out against the basement window. It had spent the afternoon lying beneath a balcony, licking the paw that earlier that day had been run over by a truck. It would have slept, but the pain was ferocious and spreading through the lower half of its body, giving it no respite. It was having difficulty breathing. Its mouth was dry and filled with the bitter taste of blood. It panted, changing position, repeatedly trying to get comfortable. Finally it had decided to return home in the hope that this time they would let it in.