The Years of Fire (37 page)

“Okay, enough fooling around, Wilfrid. You’ve still got all your manly parts. Now get the money. Where is it?”

“I … I spent most of it, you know,” Thibodeau said, giving him a look of hatred and fear.

Fernand grabbed him by the belt.

“You want me to put you back up on the stove, Wilf? I know a great recipe for braised bollocks.”

“All I got is twelve hundred!” Thibodeau cried, pushing Fernand’s hands away. “That’s all I got left! I’ll let you have it right now. It’s in my dresser.”

Fernand accompanied him into the bedroom, where he took the thick pile of banknotes. He counted the money carefully and put it in his pocket.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, taking advantage of your son like that.”

“He came to me, after all. He’s old enough to know what he’s doing.”

“And what about you? Aren’t you old enough to know this money wasn’t falling out of the sky?”

“I don’t know nothing about where he got it.”

“Give me a break. You make me sick, you do. Your mouth is like a sewer talking to me.… I’m going to give you two little pieces of advice, Wilfrid.”

He pushed Thibodeau back on the bed and sat down beside him. Then he grabbed his cheeks, stretched them as wide as they would go, and brought Thibodeau’s face close to his.

“First: you have nothing more to do with Charles. At all. Understood? Get that into your thick skull. And two: don’t ever come anywhere near my store. Never mind the wide innocent eyes, I’m not as stupid as you think I am. And if you’re ever unfortunate enough as to forget what I just told you, I’m going to come after you, you snivelling little rat, and when I catch you I’m going to
personally
shove my hand down your throat and pull your guts out through your mouth. Are we clear about that?”

And to give added force to his words he smacked Thibodeau across the face so hard his nose began to bleed.

C
harles and Céline had returned to the house. Lucie pretended she didn’t notice their amorous looks. She was equally discreet about asking her daughter what she had been up to.

When Fernand came home he took Charles and Lucie into the living room and closed the door. They were in there for a good hour. Boff stretched himself out in front of the door and scratched at it from time to time. Finally, losing patience, Henri seized the dog by the collar and took him outside for a walk.

When Charles came out of the room he looked chastened but happy again, almost serene. Lucie’s eyes were red from crying, and Fernand looked as haughty and beneficent as Jupiter, ruler of Olympus; it was hard to believe that this was the same man who, ten months earlier, had slit his wrists.

After consulting with Parfait Michaud, Fernand and Charles agreed that the twelve hundred dollars would be donated to the Portage Rehabilitation Centre. Charles quit his job at the pharmacy, and Henri Lalancette was circumspect enough not to ask any questions. René De Bané, whose business had expanded significantly over the previous few months, was visited in the middle of the night by the police and became an overnight guest of the State, spending a lot of time being interviewed. Three days later, a ten-thousand-dollar bail bond put him back on the street while he awaited trial, but Montreal seemed to have lost much of its appeal for him, and he fell into a fit of melancholy from which neither pool nor beer could lift
him. He decided to find a new line of work; he had a fertile imagination and an inexhaustible supply of energy, and he was sure that several avenues would suggest themselves to him before too long.

Charles returned happily to his quiet, regulated life; everyone in the Fafard household acted as though the episode involving the trafficking of prescription drugs had never taken place. His love for Céline was new and delicious and went a long way towards easing his feelings of remorse. They flared up occasionally, however, and when they did, nothing and no one could relieve his mind.

“You needn’t beat yourself up over it too badly,” Blonblon said to him one day when he was feeling particularly depressed. “After all, you did what you did for a good reason.”

“That doesn’t mean anything! If a man kills his wife with a butcher knife because she’s been unfaithful, you can say he did what he did for a good reason, but he’s still a monster!”

Blonblon smiled and patted him affectionately on the shoulder. Despite his fondness for Charles, he was having trouble understanding the reason for his sadness. After a disastrous love affair, he too had taken up with a new girlfriend, and everyone knew that new love went a long way towards calming the soul.

Blonblon had only recently discovered the pleasures of sex, the cement that bonded two hearts together, and the euphoria in which he bathed from morning to night had somewhat removed him from the troubles of humanity. He forced himself to listen to Charles, but all the time he was thinking of Isabel, the young Chilean student he’d met in a department store. He was fascinated by the beauty of her eyes. Her father had been a gynecologist in Chile, but as a political refugee he was now driving a taxi until the Quebec College of Physicians deigned to allow him to practise his profession.

Blonblon was proud of his conquest and had wanted to introduce her to Charles more than once, but Charles always backed out of the dates Blonblon tried to set up for the four of them.

“I’m not in the mood tonight,” he would invariably say. “Maybe next week.”

And he would stay home with Céline, or go out with her to visit one of their friends, who would lend them their apartment.

“Charles, listen to me,” Céline said to him one day. “It’s over. Let it go.” It worried her to see him fall so often into these bouts of sadness. “Why do you keep going back to it? Turn the page, throw the book away, get on with your life. Charles, I’m begging you.… When I see you like this, I feel as though I can never make you happy.”

“Oh, no, Céline, it’s not that at all. Believe me,” he said, taking her in his arms and covering her with kisses. “What you do for me isn’t nothing! Quite the contrary. If you hadn’t come looking for me that day, where would I be now? I might not even be alive!”

“And where would I be?” Céline said. “In a nuthouse, probably, crazy as a loon. Charles, Charles, you’re too hard on yourself.… You can’t accept that you made a mistake. How are you ever going to live with yourself?”

The young man’s face darkened.

“If you’d had a father like mine, you’d understand.”

“But he’s
not
your father any more!” she cried, exasperated. “He hasn’t been for eight years!”

“Yes, you’re right,” Charles sighed, taking her in his arms (and on the verge of tears). “Be patient, Céline. I’ve been through so much. It’s bound to take time.”

But summer came and Charles found that time wasn’t healing any wounds. He finished his fifth year of secondary school with honours, and an essay he wrote on “Future Choices for Quebec” had been circulated among all the teachers. Céline adored him, and his love for her deepened each day, assuming an intensity that amazed and delighted him. And yet the episode of the Blond Angel and the life he had fallen into continued to torment him.

One night he felt he had to talk about the whole thing with someone who would give him good advice. Not knowing any psychiatrists or psychologists, he decided he would go and see Parfait Michaud.

He found the notary home alone, sitting with a glass of port, wearing blue jeans and a flowered T-shirt, thumbing through the
Grand Robert
dictionary looking up the origin of the expression “knight of industry,” which had come to his attention earlier that evening. Amélie had left a week earlier for a month’s stay in a health spa, one that specialized in thalasso-therapy, energy transfers, deep breathing, and other forms of holistic medicine that were supposed to bring about the total rejuvenation of one’s being to anyone who had the means to pay for the treatments.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the couple were getting along well.

Michaud had been given all the details about Charles’s misadventures, but, being a discreet man, he had judged it best not to intervene directly. He knew that Fernand and Lucie had things well in hand. He would have liked to have seen Charles, to whom he had always felt a deep attachment, and he was sorry that the young man’s friendship for him had seemed to weaken over the years. And so his welcome to Charles was so joyful it gave the latter the courage to bring up the delicate subject he wanted to discuss.

“Madame Michaud is well?” he asked, as a way of easing into the conversation.

“Oh, you know her, Charles. She’s only well when she isn’t thinking about herself.… As soon as she turns her attention to her health everything goes off the rails. Deep down, she only lives to be sick. Her health is killing her.”

He told Charles that he’d been a bachelor for a week and would be until the tenth of August, and that, all things considered, he wasn’t minding it much at all.

Charles gave a knowing smile and began to take unexpected pleasure in their “manly” conversation. Michaud, encouraged by Charles’s smile, began making more and more obvious allusions to the kind of freedom his wife’s absence was affording him.

“Marriage, Charles,” he concluded cleverly, “is the most noble of institutions. The only problem with it is that it goes totally against human nature.”

Charles laughed, although such a remark a few years ago would have scandalized him. Now he was fortified by the indestructible love between
himself and Céline, as well as by the example of Fernand and Lucie. He could laugh because he knew the notary was wrong.

Michaud, curious about Charles’s visit and wanting to put him at ease, brought out the port bottle and another glass, which he filled to the brim.

Charles had never tasted port before and found it delicious; the notary refilled his glass. Two red patches warmed Charles’s cheeks, and his eyes became bright and ardent. He found his old friend more charming and humorous than ever, and he was sorry he had been avoiding him for so long. How many good times had he let slip through his fingers? He promised himself that from now on he would visit the notary more often.

“Monsieur Michaud,” he said suddenly, “I have a question to ask you.”

“Call me Parfait, Charles, please, as I’ve asked you many times before. That is, after all, what I am.”

And he burst out laughing, as though his old joke had just leapt to his lips for the first time.

“You know about everything that’s happened to me, don’t you?” Charles went on, becoming serious.

“Is that what you came here to talk about?”

“Yes.”

“And so?”

Charles hesitated and glanced at his glass. The notary reached for the bottle of port.

“No, thanks. I’ve had enough to drink.”

Michaud uncorked the bottle anyway and refilled his own glass.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

The notary took a sip and swished the port around in his mouth with a small smile, his eyes half closed. His visitor waited in silence.

“And so, Charles?”

“Well, what I’d like to know … is … well, what do you think of me, Monsieur … Parfait?”

“You mean, as a result of this business?”

“Yes.”

Michaud brought the glass to his lips again, but hesitated a moment before drinking as he thought about his response.

“Well, to be honest with you, Charles, I think you behaved … ahem … like a complete asshole. Pardon my language, but there’s really no other word for it.”

The pink patches on Charles’s cheeks turned pinker, bordering on red, and he sucked in his breath quickly.

“That being said,” Michaud went on, “everyone sooner or later behaves like an asshole. I’ve even acted like an asshole a few times myself, and I can’t swear it won’t happen again. What’s important, however, is that you learn something from your own stupidity. And I think that’s what you’ve done, haven’t you?”

“I can’t stop learning from it,” Charles sighed.

“Only imbeciles don’t learn from their mistakes. They’re like fish who manage to get themselves off the hook by thrashing about like mad, and then five minutes later chomp down on another hook. Well, it’s their own tough luck, I say. And of course what’s also important, in my view, is the question of motive. Are you sure you won’t have another drop of port?” he said, interrupting himself. “Just a drop to dampen the bottom of the glass?”

Charles held out his glass and the promised drop became a cascade.

“In effect, it’s all there, my dear boy,” continued Michaud after refilling his own glass (by now his hand had become rather heavy). “As I mentioned earlier, Fernand and Lucie have told me your story. If I’d learned that you had become involved with trafficking simply to make a fast buck, I’d’ve been mightily disappointed in you, I don’t mind admitting it, because I would have had to say to myself, ‘Charles has turned into one of those little street urchins that every Montreal neighbourhood turns out. What a waste. I thought he was going to make something of himself some day. I was wrong.’ But that wasn’t the case, praise God.”

“Do you think Fernand and Lucie have the same opinion as you do?”