The Years of Fire

by Yves Beauchemin

  “Where did you get that from, The Watchtower?”

  “I didn’t get it from anywhere, Charles. It came from my own head. And you know what Laframboise did? He took my advice. Phaneuf told me yesterday, he saw him and Doris in the Lafayette Restaurant, and things seemed to have been patched up. What do you have to say to that, Charles?”

  “Laframboise is not my father.”

  “When you manage to find the right words, Charles, you can almost always reach what is good in a person – and there is some good in all of us, believe me.”

  “Not in my father, not any more. Once, maybe. But it’s been completely eaten up by the bad stuff. He’s an asshole, Blonblon.”

  And he ended the discussion by telling Blonblon that any attempted intervention between him and his father would be the end of their friendship. Blonblon bowed his head and sighed, and they went in to class.

  That evening Charles went to the Orleans. He had no particular plan of action in mind. All he knew was that he was going to need a lot of money in a hurry. Nothing could get in his way.

  René De Bané was sitting at a table, drinking beer. There were two young men with him, both with scraggly moustaches and bony faces. They looked like brothers. Charles hadn’t seen them before. When De Bané saw Charles, he cheerfully waved his long monkey-arms.

  “Charlie, my boy! Good ol’ Charlie! Come over and have a beer with us!”

  He introduced Charles to his two companions, who looked vaguely over at him and went on with their conversation.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” Charles murmured to De Bané as he took his place at the table.

  “I could tell just by looking at you, Charlie boy, and I’m not in the least surprised. You’re a smart kid, and a smart kid never lets a good opportunity pass him by. Sorry, boys,” he said, turning to the two young men, “but I’m going to have to catch you later. Charlie and I have a few things to talk about.”

  “No problem, René,” the two replied in unison, in a subservient tone that surprised Charles.

  “I suddenly feel like a hot dog,” De Bané announced as they were going down the stairs. “We could go across the street, if you like. It’s usually fairly quiet this time of night.”

  The three main features of Angelo’s Grill were:

  1. Its pale-blue (when washed) linoleum floor, with one large, bare patch along the counter through which the subfloor could be seen, which was also partly worn through;

  2. The interminable card game being played by a group of loud retirees every morning from eight to eleven, behind a cloud of cigarette smoke and amid the smell of hot grease; and

  3. The almost total absence of customers in the evening, which, however, did not prevent its persevering owner from keeping it open, year after year, until ten o’clock, in the perpetually unrealized expectation of a sudden change in the eating habits of the local citizenry.

  As for its hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, and poutine, they were neither better nor worse than those of any other similar establishment.

  De Bané ordered three hot dogs with mustard, relish, and ketchup – the bright, clean colours reminiscent of certain paintings of the German Expressionist school – and devoured them with the avidity of a crocodile swallowing a sparrow. Then he talked quietly to Charles, who was sitting across from him, looking intense yet vaguely morose. From time to time De Bané would turn his long, narrow face to make sure old Angelo was still nodding off at the end of his counter.

  The interview lasted about half an hour, after which the two men left the restaurant and Charles went home, thinking hard as he walked. He had promised De Bané an answer the following day. He left rue Ontario after a block or two and found himself on a dark, deserted side street, corduroyed by speed bumps and bordered by tiny squares that were the backyards of two rows of houses. He longed for quiet and solitude – and also sleep. For some reason, his short conversation with De Bané had exhausted him.

  As he made his way towards home, walking quickly with his head down, the sound of a gunshot caused him to look up. It had come through a half-opened window a few metres to his right. The curtains had been partly drawn, probably to allow some fresh air into the room, and a large man with white hair was splayed out on a sofa, his shirt unbuttoned, watching television; he appeared so hopeless and discouraged that Charles could hardly bear to look at him. He looked like a man who had been shipwrecked, left to die on an iceberg. Charles watched him with a kind of fascination. He would have liked to knock on the man’s door and talk to him, comfort him, and be comforted by him, for the man seemed so much like himself. Abandoned. And adrift.

  His sleep that night was so restless that for once Boff decided to spend the night in Henri’s room. When Lucie saw his face in the morning she said he looked like death warmed over and asked him if he was feeling all right.

  In a small, weak voice he assured her he was fine. Fernand, paging glumly through the sections of Le Devoir, looked up, studied him for a second, then went back to his reading. Leaning her head out of the bathroom door, Céline gave Charles a worried smile. He frowned back at her and went into his room to get a schoolbook. Hachiko was perched on the dresser, watching, unperturbed, as patches of sunlight lit up its body in shafts of fire. Charles looked back at the statuette. The play of light and shadow on its flanks made it look as though it were breathing. He walked over to the dresser and looked into the dog’s bronze eyes.

  “Does loyalty go that far, Hachiko?” he murmured under his breath. “Tell me, does it go so far?”

  The statuette’s lower jaw seemed to tremble, and Charles felt almost as though its mouth were going to open. But whatever Hachiko’s thoughts were it kept them to itself and went on sitting impassively in the warm sun.

  That day, although Charles was physically present in all his classes, had he been asked what any of them were about he wouldn’t have had a clue. Cupidon Goulet, the chemistry teacher (who of course was called Cupid the Ghoul), exasperated by Charles’s wool-gathering, asked him if he wanted to go home to sleep. Charles thanked him and said no, he was getting plenty of sleep where he was. The other students laughed, and Charles spent the rest of the class in the hallway, contemplating his sharp tongue.

  During morning break, Blonblon tried two or three times to talk to him, but Charles managed to avoid being alone with him. Blonblon called the house that evening; Charles told him offhandedly that he was still “working on a solution” and changed the subject when Blonblon tried to pump him for more details. An hour later, feeling even more worried, Blonblon called again. Charles had Céline tell him that he had come down with a headache and had gone to bed, and that he’d see him the following day.

  At ten o’clock, however, he left the house saying he needed some fresh air and went down to the pool hall. René De Bané was playing with one of the two young men with the scraggly moustaches who had been there the night before. Charles took De Bané aside.

  “I’m going to take a pass,” he told him. “I’m not interested.”

  “You’re making a big mistake, boyo,” De Bané said. “It’s a golden opportunity I’m offering you, and there’s no risk!”

  “So you keep saying.”

  De Bané looked at him a moment, then put his hand in his pocket and took out his wallet, which he half opened to show Charles its contents. He fanned his thumb across a thick wad of bills, which made a delicate, fluttering sound.

  “If business isn’t as good as I say, where do you think I got so many of these brown babies?” he said. “Look at all the hundreds in there! Look at the twenties! It’s a Cabinet minister’s portfolio!”

  Charles hesitated for a second. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t want to get mixed up in it. It’s dirty money.”

  De Bané passed a hand slowly over his long face, and his friendly manner changed suddenly into an icy stare.

  “Whatever you say, Charlie, my boy. I’m not going to twist your arm. But I’m sure you know enough to keep all this to yourself, e
h? People with big mouths sometimes lose their teeth …”

  One June night after supper, when Lucie had asked Henri for the third time to put the dishes in the dishwasher and tidy up the kitchen because it was his turn, and Henri had refused, also for the third time, each time more insolently than the last, saying inaccurately that it had been his sister’s job all week and she’d barely lifted a finger the whole time and therefore she should be the one to fill the dishwasher, Fernand awakened from his nap and appeared in the living room and told his son to shut up and get to work without another word.

  “No way!” Henri replied, thrusting out his chin and looking at his father belligerently.

  At which point Fernand picked Henri up bodily, dragged him to the back door, which he opened with a kick, and threw him into the yard, where fortunately he landed without injury.

  “If you don’t want to live by the rules of this house,” Fernand bellowed in a barely recognizable voice, “go live somewhere else!”

  Never in the history of the Fafard family, not even going back several generations, had anything like this happened before. Céline, Lucie, and Charles stared at Fernand in horror as he made his way back to his bedroom, lumbering down the hall like a bear that had been disturbed from his winter hibernation. Everyone understood then that there was something seriously wrong going on inside poor Fernand’s head.

  It was true that, the day before, one of his most important suppliers had told him the company was reducing his discount because of the continued decline in the number of orders Fernand had been making of late; and then the owner of the store next to the hardware had come in to say that the previous night she’d seen some dark, shadowy figure skulking about in the yard behind the storage shed.

  Two hours later, Fernand apologized to his son. Henri, who had had quite a fright, accepted with good grace. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and, closing the book on the incident, filed it away in the drawer labelled “Unhappy Memories.”

  The next day, however, Fernand refused to get out of bed to go to work, saying he was extremely tired and heartily sick of the things of this world. Lucie went to the store herself, and that night, when she returned home, found Fernand still in bed. Not even Parfait Michaud, who was called over to speak to his friend, was able to bring him around.

  “It’s like trying to get a telephone pole to sing,” he told Lucie, holding up his long hands in a gesture of powerlessness. “Your husband is not well, my dear. You must call a doctor.”

  When she asked Fernand about it, he replied that, exhausted though he was, he would still find the strength to throw a doctor out of the house. “Just leave me alone, once and for all,” he told her breathlessly, although his expression was ferocious. Nothing interested him any more, least of all his business, which was either going down the tubes or up in flames.

  Charles understood then that he no longer had the luxury of indecision, and that he had to do whatever it would take to save this man from ruin. Fernand had generously come to Charles’s aid when he needed it most, and now he must do the same for him. He left the house without saying a word and set off quickly for the pool hall.

  He didn’t even have to go that far, for it is a fact that it is far easier to grab the Devil by the tail than it is to escape his evil designs. De Bané, who had exchanged his powder-blue jogging pants for a fuchsia pair that created an even more curious effect, was standing on rue Ontario, a cigarette hanging from his lips, his back against the darkened window of a dry cleaner’s, looking for all the world as though he were waiting for someone to come along and engage him in an intimate conversation.

  Charles saw him first, paled slightly, then walked up to him.

  “Aha! How’s it going, there, Charlie boy?” said De Bané.

  He moved about on his long legs in a kind of dance, as though he could tell from the expression on the adolescent’s face that his patient efforts were about to bear fruit.

  “I’ve had second thoughts about your offer,” Charles declared, standing in front of De Bané. “I’m ready to roll.”

  “I knew it, I knew it,” De Bané crowed jubilantly, although he kept his voice low in the approved style of a man of mystery. “I told myself you were too smart to let a chance like this slip through your fingers. When do you go back to work at the pharmacy?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What time?”

  “In the evening, just after seven.”

  “Okay, listen up. I’ll be waiting right here for you at six-thirty with all the stuff you’ll need. Bring your school bag with you. If your boss wants to know what it’s for, tell him you need to do homework between deliveries or something, whatever, I don’t care what you tell him as long as he buys it.”

  And he told Charles in minute detail exactly how he was to proceed.

  10

  In the early 1980s, psychotropic drugs hadn’t yet appeared on the prescription drug market. The psychiatric pharmacopia consisted essentially of anxiety-reducing drugs, tranquilizers (notably Valium and Librium), which had been in use for two decades, long enough for plenty of people to have become hooked on them. Valium came in the form of pills and Librium in capsules. Placebos, which have more or less disappeared these days, existed for many of the drugs, to the greater profit of traffickers, who got hold of prescription drugs fraudulently from pharmacies and switched the real drugs with placebos. Capsules were easily opened, and drug dealers simply replaced the Librium with flour or starch, and Valium with fake pills.

  The surest and simplest way to practise this low-level fraud was by working out an arrangement with a delivery person. Which is what René De Bané had just succeeded in doing, without any knowledge of the reason behind his success.

  The following day at six-thirty he supplied Charles with a stapler and two hundred fake pills and capsules. All Charles had to do when he was on a delivery was to pry open the staples sealing the paper bag containing the medication, make the appropriate switch, and re-staple the bag. Since he usually made three or four deliveries of tranqs a day, and De Bané had told him he would pay him a dollar per capsule or pill, this had the potential to add up, easily and quickly, to a lucrative arrangement.

  “But listen up, Charlie boy,” warned the drug dealer, whose easygoing manner and air of buffoonery had suddenly changed to a chilly and commanding gravity. “If our little team effort is going to work out, you have to be able to use your head. Always keep your cool, take it very easy, capiche? Never take a chance, even if it looks tempting.”

  The adolescent, taken aback by this abrupt change of tone and feeling as though he were talking to a complete stranger, nodded a bit fearfully, already regretting that he had agreed to go along with such a proposition.

  “One other thing: I depend on you, and you depend on me. If one of us trips up somewhere, the other goes down too. You got that? So we always have to think for two. If you start just thinking about yourself, some day you might get the idea that you can pull something over on me, you know what I’m saying? But just remember this, Charlie boy: I’m always gonna find out in the end – and the end will come a lot sooner than you might think, because I’ve got the nose of a bloodhound for that kind of stuff, believe me. And if that ever happens, Charlie, well, what can I say …?”

  He raised his hands and shrugged his shoulders as though to say that things would take their natural course and there wasn’t much he could do about that.

  Then he let loose a burst of laughter.

  “So, good luck!” he said, slapping Charles on the shoulder. “We’ll meet again next Wednesday at the Orleans. Eight o’clock sharp. Okay?”

  Charles had no specific plan in mind regarding his father. The only thing he knew for certain was that he was going to need money, and lots of it. Was he going to try to buy his father off? Or would he pay someone to remove Thibodeau from the scene? This last option seemed horrifying to him, but he hadn’t rejected it outright. He would put off making a decision until later. The haze that surrounded hi
m was preventing him from thinking straight. He simply didn’t have the strength to look down to the end of the road on which he had just embarked.

  He had often seen Monsieur Lalancette scooping pills from the amber-coloured glass jars that contained the medication that so many turned to for the comfort they were unable to find by usual means. The pills had to be taken in moderation and with caution, the pharmacist had said, because their repeated use could lead to a strong dependency. And he had mentioned the amount of trafficking that took place, the nightmare it represented for all pharmacists, and the trap it had been for more than a few of them. Luckily, so far he himself had been shielded against such hooliganism, except for once, several years ago, when he had caught one of his delivery boys in the act of pocketing a prescription.

  “I sent him packing. Oh, he cried, telling me it was the first time, he’d never do it again. But I told him to save his breath. I have no use for people like that, Charles, and I make sure they keep their distance from me. They make me sick.”

  A grimace of disgust crossed his face, which ordinarily was as expressionless as a block of wood.

  This time the delivery boy was named Charles, but unlike his predecessor’s, his descent into a life of crime was not motivated by personal gain, rather by generosity and gratitude. The result, however, was the same. From that day on he was a member of the ignoble fraternity of thieves, and knowing that made his hatred of his father even more intense.

  It turned out to be a fruitful week: in three days he made a dozen deliveries of tranquilizers, which found their way into his backpack to be replaced by the blanks supplied by De Bané. Only twice did he not have the heart to make the substitutions.

  The first time was when he made a delivery to Amélie Michaud, who had just been given a prescription for Valium. How could he bring himself to play such a low trick on that strange and fragile woman, who had always shown him such affection? He rang her doorbell and handed her the package, avoiding her eyes.