The Years of Fire (33 page)

“What do you want from me, old buddy? Business ain’t so good as it was.… When things pick up, you’ll benefit as much as I will.”

Despite his pride, Charles asked De Bané for a two-hundred-dollar advance, to get his father off his back. De Bané agreed so readily that Charles was taken aback. “He thinks he’s got me on his hook for good,” he thought as he walked home. “Well, my good man, you’ll soon see who’s in control.”

Steve Lachapelle was bored to death living in Pointe-Saint-Charles. His boredom had been getting worse and worse since spring. He no longer went to school unless he felt like it, which wasn’t often, and he compensated for his lack of classroom learning by devoting most of his time to honing his skills in the arcades and pool halls of his neighbourhood. But they didn’t come close to filling the void that was consuming him.

Louisa, his Haitian girlfriend, had broken up with him the previous week. He thought it was funny, how it happened. The night before, they had made love like a colony of rabbits, after which Louisa, at Steve’s request, had left him her pretty pink slip with the lime-green lace trim, saying with an obscene gesture and a snigger or two that she had a pretty good idea what he was going to do with it. Then she had given him a long, hot goodbye kiss.

“It’s going to be a long night without you, my beautiful little teddy bear,” he’d whispered in her ear. Then she’d left.

As far as Steve was concerned, it had indeed been a long night, and he had finally been obliged to make use of the slip.

The next afternoon he’d called her to make a date. In a quiet but cool, clipped voice she’d told him she was busy, without giving him any details.

“How about tomorrow?”

“No, not tomorrow. And not any other night, either.”

He’d thought at first she was joking, and he gave his long Apache cry, like a wolf howling at the moon, a signal that he wasn’t going to let her treat him that way. But after a few minutes he had to admit to himself that
she had really tossed him into the garbage like a sack of rotten oranges. He therefore dredged up all his oratorical skills and finally managed to get her to agree to meet him in a restaurant for ten minutes – ten lousy minutes were all he could get for his efforts.

She was waiting for him, a pained expression on her face. She looked a little contrite, he thought, but with an air of having come to a decision. That worried him. She was as pretty as ever, wearing a fabulous pink dress that he hadn’t seen before, and she kept her hands folded on the table, looking at the tips of her fingers as though they held the secret to the cause of their breakup. He took one of them in his and noticed that she was also wearing a ring with an enormous diamond on it – a fake, of course, but a high-quality fake. He’d never seen the ring before, either. He asked her where it came from. She answered vaguely, looking away, then in one breath she told him she had found someone else. The news nearly knocked him over.

“Since when?”

“Not that long,” she replied, looking more and more uneasy. She refused to tell him another thing.

After a few minutes, not having pried another word out of her, he got up, picked up his helmet, and tapped the tip of her nose with the visor.

“Poor little Louisa. You’ve been whoring around, haven’t you? You should be more careful. You never know what you might pick up.”

And he left the restaurant. She came out on his heels. There was a huge brute with a red crewcut waiting for her in a Cadillac. She climbed in beside him, looking pathetic; he put his arm around her shoulder and gave poor Steve a tiny but ironic nod. Steve knew that he stood about as much chance against this guy and his money as a snail against a bulldozer. He contented himself with a few obscene gestures, shaking his rear end at them and mimicking a sodomite reaching an orgasm. The man burst out laughing and the Cadillac took off with a deep, contented purr.

The street on which Steve lived was remarkable for the number of bottles, cans, wrappers, and other detritus that littered it, but it was even more encumbered than usual this year by an astonishing number of Christmas trees, which, despite the lateness of the season, were sticking out of the melting snow that lined the sidewalks, pathetically waving their bits of tinsel in the breeze.

Steve considered them for a moment, made a disgusted face that lowered his left ear a fraction of an inch, and decided he definitely needed a change of air. He’d pay Charles a visit. He hadn’t seen him for a long time and it would be good to talk to him. But first he had to put something in his stomach. He hurried into his house, where his mother was talking on the telephone (on a good day, she could have supplied the entire telephonic network of Montreal with conversations); he managed to get her off long enough to take it into the bathroom and make a private call. Céline answered the phone. Charles was off making deliveries, she said, but he’d be home for supper.

“I’ll surprise him,” Steve decided.

He gave the phone back to his mother, who resumed her interrupted conversation, and made three enormous peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches – two of which he ate himself and the third he kept to eat on the way – and headed for the metro.

When he showed up at Charles’s house, they were just finishing supper. He thought he could have been made to feel a tad more welcome.

“Bad timing,” Charles told him. “I’ve got more deliveries to make.”

“For the pharmacy?”

“No.”

“I’ll come with you,” Steve said, intrigued. “We can chat as we go.”

Charles shook his head. “I’m afraid not,” he said in a low voice. “I’d be too ashamed.”

“Ashamed? Ashamed of what?”

Charles cursed himself for having let that slip out, and tried to think of some way to divert Steve’s suspicions, but nothing came to him.

“I’ll tell you some other time. I’m not up to it at the moment.”

“Hey, don’t go shushing me up, old buddy! What’s the matter, are you dealing drugs or something? Peddling your ass? Eh? You wouldn’t be the first of my gang to get into it, but I’d never have guessed it of you!”

Charles stared at the floor in silence, more and more embarrassed. Then he sighed and shook his head as though ridding it of a tormenting thought.

“No, some other time.”

“Okay, okay.… Keep your little secrets locked up in your little heart, sweetie. I doubt if I’d find them that interesting anyway.”

“I have to go alone, Steve. It’d be too complicated with someone else there.… Don’t make faces at me! Okay, I’ve got a bit of time. Let’s go somewhere for a Coke. But I warn you, fifteen minutes and I have to go.”

He sighed again. The two boys walked towards rue Ontario.

“Things aren’t going so well for me, either,” Steve confided when they were seated at a table. “I had a load of shit dropped on my head this afternoon.”

And he recounted the story of Louisa’s betrayal. Charles waxed indignant: the sick feeling that had been churning his insides for days seemed to have let up a bit.

“Count yourself lucky, Steve. If she can be bought that easily she couldn’t have been worth much. You’re better off without her.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself, but still.… What a girl, man. I really thought she was the one, you know, deep down? She was the best, you don’t know how good she was. Oho! Hey, sourpuss, I just realized why you’ve been sitting there wheezing like a broken accordion: it’s because of that actress of yours, isn’t it?”

Charles hadn’t been able to keep from telling Steve about Brigitte Loiseau, to whom he was still delivering Valium.

“You’re out of your gourd, you dummy,” he said, half telling the truth. “Stop interrogating me. You haven’t got a clue!”

Still full of roast beef from dinner, Charles drank his Coke slowly, more out of solidarity with Steve, who, with tears in his eyes, had gone back to fulminating against the faithless Louisa. Charles tried to console him,
telling him that a guy with his silver tongue would find another girl in no time. Then, glancing at his watch, he said he had to be going.

“We hardly see each other any more,” Steve said. “And when we do, lately anyway, you’ve had a face on you like a funeral director. Get yourself straightened out, man. I’m worried about you. I don’t have so many friends that I can afford to lose one.”

Charles shook his hand – a solemn and unusual gesture in their circle, and one heavy with significance.

“Call me the day after tomorrow. We’ll play some pool at the Orleans.”

He returned home, slipped along the side of the house, and went into the backyard. It was already almost dark. After making sure no one was watching, he opened the shed and took his delivery bag, which he’d hidden under an old tarpaulin, and quietly went back the way he had come.

He had three deliveries to make. He was saving the Blond Angel for last. The last time, she’d invited him to stay for a coffee. They’d talked for a while; she hadn’t said anything particularly extraordinary, but she’d been so relaxed, so soft and confiding, that he’d felt almost honoured to be in her presence. He could have sat for hours letting her voice wash over him, watching the graciousness of her movements, the purity of her face that contrasted so sharply with her deadly habits. She’d told him about her life as an actress, which she loved but was thinking of giving up because there were so many hurdles. He’d tried to dissuade her, speaking so eloquently and admiringly of her talents that she’d smiled, touched and amused and almost comforted. Then she’d asked him about his life, what he liked, who his friends were, and he’d told her things he hadn’t thought he would, the kind of confidences one makes only with strangers who have made a real impression. The phone had rung. She’d got up, said a few words in a low voice, and when she’d returned there was something in her face, a vague embarrassment, that had told Charles it was time for him to leave.

The night was warm and humid, the breeze redolent with the mingled odours of the city and the first hints of summer. He felt wrapped in them as he walked rapidly along the street, suddenly filled with a kind
of luminous joy. “By the time the weather turns hot,” he told himself, “I’ll be finished with this disgusting business for good.”

The first customer lived on rue Préfontaine, not far from Hochelaga and a few doors from the metro station. He was a fat, bald man with soft features, as though he were melting; he took the envelope Charles gave him with a weak hand and gave him back a handful of warm coins as a tip, which was unusual since De Bané’s pills didn’t come cheap and almost never inspired generosity on the part of his clients.

The next customer lived not far from there, on rue Dézéry. Charles rang two or three times, waited in the hall shuffling his feet impatiently, then left muttering curses: he would have to come back the next day without knowing if anyone would be there then, either, since De Bané never gave him his customers’ names or phone numbers.

That left only the Blond Angel of rue Rachel. He quickened his pace, hoping she would ask him in for another conversation. Although he’d been a long way from La Fontaine Park, he made the trip in twenty-five minutes.

“Damn it!” he muttered when no one answered her door either.

Maybe she was sleeping, as she had been the first time? He rang again, then twice more, then paced back and forth on the landing, waiting, for what, he didn’t know. A huge tabby cat with wide jowls ran out from behind the building, started up the stairs, and then stopped, meowing quietly and staring up at Charles, not daring to continue. “Maybe it’s her cat,” he thought. He knelt down and called to the animal, rubbing his thumb on the tips of his fingers as though he had some food for it. The cat took a couple of cautious steps up, then, seized by some undefinable fear, turned and ran back the way it had come, uttering cries of lamentation.

Charles stood up, surprised by its reaction, and tried to see where it had gone. He was suddenly overcome by a strange presentiment. He rang the doorbell again, and when there was still no response he tried the knob. The door opened. He stepped into the vestibule and called out. There was no sound from the darkened apartment except the echo of his own voice; he felt a chill come over him. “Odd she didn’t lock the door when she left,” he said to himself, taking a few more steps inside.