The Years of Fire (12 page)

When the game was finished, the man invited the boys over to the bar and offered to buy them a beer.

“They’re underage, these two, De Bané,” said the owner, pointing at Steve and Charles.

“Aw, c’mon,” said the man, his eyes widening. “One beer never hurt anyone!”

“Maybe not, but it would hurt my licence. Coke, 7-Up, coffee, or the street, your choice. You might like running after trouble, but I’d rather chase something else.”

De Bané turned to his guests and shrugged, his body sagging, his face twisted into a grimace. Charles realized he bore an astonishing resemblance to Steve, as though the two of them were distantly related: the same raw-boned body, the same contortions, even the same penchant for clownish behaviour.

“What can you do?” the man said. “If he won’t serve you, he won’t serve you. I could twist his arm, but it wouldn’t do any good.”

“Coke,” said Charles.

“7-Up,” said Steve.

“I’ll have an Ex, and make it cold as possible,” said the man. “My buy.”

The owner signalled to Nadine to serve them. He didn’t seem to care much for the man in the checked shirt. Charles was hypnotized by Nadine’s navel. He had to make an effort not to stare at it. She also had a way of moving her hips and lifting her arms and turning her head to give her hair a slight ripple that caused him a certain amount of sweet discomfort.

René De Bané didn’t seem put off by getting the cold shoulder from the owner. He launched into an account of his day, which had been fairly eventful. It turned out he was a plumber.

“… So I get to this guy’s house on rue des Érables and he shows me into the kitchen. ‘The sink’s plugged,’ he says. ‘I tried everything. I even poured battery acid down it. Nothing worked.’ As for me, it wasn’t the sink that bothered me, it was this huge, big-eared dog that was lying curled up in front of the stove, staring at me and growling. ‘Oh, don’t mind him,’ the guy says, ‘he’s never bitten anyone. That’s just his way of telling you this is his house. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ ‘No problem,’ I says to him. ‘I’ve seen a few dogs in my day. They don’t bother me.’ And I go to work on the sink. I can tell right away I’m gonna hafta take off the trap. It was so goddamn rusted it looked like it’d been buried out in the garden for the past ten years. I try turnin’ it with my pipe wrench, but it don’t give an inch. Meanwhile the guy’s gone off who knows where and there I am alone in the kitchen with this dog, which is still staring at me and growling.

“So anyways I brace my feet against the bottom of the counter and pull on the wrench as hard as I can. Suddenly there’s this
crack!
and the trap gives and I fall on my back with my head two inches from the dog’s mouth! Ay-yi-yi! I jump up pretty quick, you can bet on that! If I hadn’t had a wrench in my hand that friggin’ animal would’ve bit off half my face! ‘Hey! What’s-yer-face!’ I call to the guy. ‘Put your dog outside or I’m leavin’!’ I’m calling and calling and – nothin’. No answer. I’m alone in the house with this friggin’ dog. Can you believe it? I try to leave the kitchen, the dog blocks my way and starts barking its friggin’ head off. Okay, I says, he’ll calm down eventually, you never hear a dog bark for ten hours straight. I can wait. I
got my wrench handy to give him a whack up the side’a the head if I hafta.

“Finally the mutt goes back and lays down in front of the stove, but he’s still starin’ right at me, right? Well, I says to myself, since I got the trap off I might as well clean it out, but I keep an eye behind me on that dog, you wanna believe it. Well, you shoulda seen what come outta that trap. Some kind of thick black goop full of lumps and chunks, and it didn’t smell like anything the Baby Jesus might’ve left in his diaper, I can tell you that! You’re not gonna believe this, but as soon as the dog sees that slimy mess he’s up on his feet and waggin’ his tail and comin’ at me: he wants to scarf the goddamn stuff! ‘Okay,’ I says to him and I push the piece of crud towards him, ‘go nuts, you dumb dog!’ So all the time I’m reattachin’ the trap, he’s lickin’ this mess up off the floor like it’s a bowl of gourmet Gravy Train, doesn’t leave a drop. I don’t believe it!

“So then the guy comes back, eh, lookin’ all cool, colour in his cheeks, face all calm, wants to see how I’m gettin’ on with my work. And there’s his dog laying there on the floor belchin’ like an old wino, and I says to him, ‘That’s not a dog you got there, buddy, that’s a friggin’ garburator!’ And I tell him what’s just gone down. ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’ the guy says, gettin’ all hot and bothered. ‘Stop him?’ I says. ‘Are you kiddin’? What with? He woulda taken my arm off, maybe both of them! Where were you? Didn’t you hear him barkin’ his head off a few minutes ago? They could probably hear him all the way to Verdun!’ All the time we’re yellin’ at each other the dog’s layin’ there burpin’ and his gut’s ballooning out. I tell you, that was one sick puppy. As I was goin’ out the door I’m pretty sure it was his death rattle I was hearin’. Good riddance, I say! The guy wants to sue me, go ahead! He’ll hafta find me first!”

All the while De Bané was talking, Nadine was moving back and forth behind the counter, listening, sometimes shaking with laughter, while the owner merely lifted his shoulders as though he was hard of hearing. Suddenly Charles realized he was late getting home, so he thanked the plumber for the Coke and left, followed by Steve, who first made a date with De Bané for a game of pool the next evening at eight o’clock.

“Do you believe his story?” Charles asked his friend.

“Don’t you?” Steve said, surprised. “Anyway, I thought it was hilarious! He’s a great storyteller. Makes the time go by pretty quickly. And he always picks up the tab. If the owner hadn’t been there we would’ve had us a beer.”

And he began whistling as though he didn’t have a care in the world.

Charles began hanging out at the Orleans Billiards Hall. He went there with Steve once or twice a week, and Saturday nights after work at the pharmacy. René De Bané invariably showed up early in the evening, hands thrust into the pockets of his baggy track pants, always with an amusing story to tell.

Destiny seemed to have reserved its zaniest adventures just for him. One day, when he was repairing the plaster walls on the ground floor of a house on rue Wolfe, he noticed that some of the cracks he’d just replastered had opened up again. After filling them in a second, and then a third time, only to see them start to yawn open once again, he decided he must have been using an inferior grade of plaster. He was just about to take it back to the hardware store and complain when he felt the floor start to vibrate, just a little, and then suddenly it dropped six inches. He barely had time to dive for the door before the entire ceiling came crashing down in a huge cloud of plaster dust.

“What address was that on Wolfe?” the owner asked caustically.

“Eighteen thirty-seven, my friend.”

“I passed by there this morning. I didn’t see anything.”

“We were working at the back,” De Bané replied, not in the least disconcerted. “You can’t see it from the street.”

That was how Charles discovered that De Bané was not only a plumber, but also a plasterer. After a while he learned that the true extent of the man’s talents, according to the man himself, was almost without limit.

De Bané knew all the pool hall regulars. Most of them laughed at his farfetched stories and took him for a harmless crackpot, albeit a generous and
good-natured one; others, however, regarded him with a certain restraint, as though they suspected that his hail-fellow-well-met act hid some darker aspect of his personality, one they would rather not get to know. All agreed that he was a good pool player and had won his share of tournaments, and he set about passing on what he knew to Charles, who made rapid progress under his tutelage. Charles also succeeded in becoming a heavy smoker, thanks to the ready packet of cigarettes the plasterer-plumber made available to him at all times.

Charles’s new interest took him a few steps farther from his friendship with Blonblon, who was already caught up in his own love life. They saw a great deal of each other in school and accompanied each other to and from Pierre-Dupuy, at least when Caroline’s timetable didn’t permit her to walk home with her boyfriend. Charles did his best to persuade Blonblon to take up pool, but the latter showed no interest in the game whatsoever, saying that places like pool halls were generally held in fairly low esteem since they attracted a lot of low-lifes and good-for-nothings.

“You’ve met some of these people?” Charles asked him mockingly.

“No I haven’t, because I’ve never set foot in a pool hall. But one hears things, you know. You don’t have to actually go to war to know that wars are dangerous.”

“So in your opinion the Orleans Billiards Hall is a dangerous place?” Charles pressed, smiling cruelly.

“Don’t mess with my head, Charlie me boyo. I’m sure you’ve met a few bizarre types there, people who don’t necessarily tell you everything they do during the day.”

“Gee, you really know a lot about things, Blonblon. I can’t wait to see what you’re like when you’re thirty. You’ll no doubt go to mass every morning, surrounded by bodyguards in case one of the priests tries to mug you. You think the Orleans is dangerous? That’s a laugh! It’s about as dangerous as sticking your tongue out at a blind man. Ask Steve, if you don’t believe me.”

At the mention of Steve, Blonblon smiled but said nothing. He hated speaking ill of anyone, and in any case, he liked the big oaf who was
always willing to help others and who had a decided knack for making his friends laugh.

By the end of November, Fernand and Lucie were beginning to worry about Charles’s infatuation with pool. It was keeping him away from the house and also interfering with his studies. Not to mention the smell of tobacco that had impregnated his clothes, which told the hardware-store owner – who had a delicate nose and a horror of cigarettes – that, like so many other adolescents, his adopted son had fallen prey to the lure of nicotine.

One night after supper he took Charles aside in the living room.

“We don’t see much of you any more, Charles,” he said by way of preamble in his “this is an important occasion” voice. “You always seem to be busy, yet for no good reason I know of.”

“I try to keep busy,” Charles replied drily, “so I don’t get bored.”

“Yes …” said Fernand, nodding his head and smiling. “Hard to argue with that kind of logic.”

“Why would you want to argue with it?” Charles shot back.

There followed a moment of silence during which Fernand went over in his mind the careful strategy he had worked out during dinner.

“You’ve developed an interest in billiards, I believe,” he said, after a session of rubbing his palms on his trouser legs.

“Yes.”

“Is this Orleans place above board?”

“Yes.”

“No low-lifes in it, by any chance?”

“None.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes.”

“I’m only asking,” said Fernand, stifling a show of impatience, “because it’s the kind of place where gangsters like to hang out.”

“I don’t know any gangsters.”

“They don’t advertise that they’re gangsters.”

“I suppose not.”

Fernand took a deep breath through his nose, closed his eyes, ran his hand under his chin, then managed to smile.

“Charles, everyone knows that it’s in places like the Orleans that people sell drugs, get together to plan robberies, and meet up with prostitutes …”

“It’s perfectly obvious that you’ve never set foot in a pool hall,” Charles said, disdain dripping from his voice. “Those’re all just a lot of old wives’ tales.”

“Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice!” Fernand thundered, banging his fist on the arm of his chair. (Boff, who was lying outside the room in the hallway, raised his head and looked threateningly at the living-room door.) “You’re not speaking to your dog here, you’re speaking to your father … at least, that’s how I see myself … unless you have any objections? I’m only trying to warn you. You must understand that it’s for your own good, for crying out loud, Charles! That’s all Lucie and I ever want, your own good. Do you imagine for one second that I’m saying this for the good of my own health …?”