The Years of Fire (9 page)

“One minute,” said the pharmacist. “What’s your name?”

Charles, though surprised by the question, told him.

“Do you live far from here?”

“Just at the corner of Dufresne and Ontario.”

“Hmm. Not far, then.… Are you working somewhere in your spare time?”

Charles shook his head and assumed the attentive, focused look that had so often gained him generous tips in his career as a delivery boy.

“It’s just that I’m looking for someone to do deliveries on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. Does that kind of work appeal to you? You look like a good worker.”

The man gave a very faint smile, which still was like a firework going off in the face of a totem pole.

“Yes, of course, I’m very interested, sir,” Charles replied, under the envious gaze of Henri. “When would you like me to begin?”

“Tomorrow, if that suits you. Get yourself here around five-thirty. I’ll pay you two dollars an hour.”

And so Charles became an employee of Henri Lalancette, pharmacist, a 1953 graduate from the University of Montreal, married, father of three (now grown and moved away), a taciturn man not normally given to fantastical notions, but dependable, a hard worker, and, all in all, an agreeable person to work for when accepted exactly as he was.

Beneath his hibernating-bear exterior, Lalancette had three hidden passions. The first was his daughter, Claire, whom by dint of patience and
kindness he had succeeded in rescuing from drug addiction when she was sixteen. She was now married and worked in a downtown travel agency; every Thursday evening he had dinner with her in a restaurant.

His second passion was diseases of the prostate gland, an interest he had had for many years. He and a former medical student, who now worked in the laboratory of a pharmaceutical company, had been conducting “experiments” on the beneficial effects of the dregs of port wine on such diseases, beneficial effects that he himself had experienced.

And thirdly, he was an inveterate collector of paintings, some of them of dubious quality, hinting perhaps too strongly of the bargain bin. His most precious acquisition was entitled “View from the
Montréal-Matin
Building, Nightfall, Winter’s Day,” painted in 1953 by John Little, which he had bought from a retired journalist. It reigned on the living-room wall above the settee, along with a few other works of lesser interest, and no one but he and he alone was allowed to so much as dust its frame.

The pharmacist congratulated himself on having hired Charles. He found the boy friendly, resourceful, and conscientious; after two weeks he raised Charles’s salary to two dollars and twenty-five cents, to show how satisfied he was with his work. For his part, Charles quickly learned that, despite Monsieur Lalancette’s dour expression, he was an interesting man with a sensitive heart, a man who could easily be taken advantage of (as his associate in prostate research knew very well). Claire came into the pharmacy one evening and talked for a while with Charles. She, too, found him charming, and said so to her father. Two days later, after closing time, Charles was favoured with a thirty-three-minute lecture on the dregs of port wine; the pharmacist expressed his regret that Charles was still an adolescent and therefore probably had a properly functioning prostate, otherwise he would be able to join his small group of guinea pigs. The following week he invited Charles to his home, to admire his collection of paintings.

Madame Lalancette, a small, portly, somewhat snobbish woman, was cool towards Charles at first, but was soon won over by his smile and good manners. She offered him a glass of milk and a piece of raspberry pie, cutting a large slice for herself as well, which she ate while telling him about
the week-long vacation she and her husband had taken in Cuba at the beginning of the winter.

Within a month Charles was nicely settled into his new job. True, the atmosphere in the pharmacy was infinitely less entertaining than Chez Robert’s restaurant had been. But the work would nonetheless draw him into a terrible experience.

Céline was busting out all over. Two impish bulges had appeared under her blouse that very morning, and far from being shy about them she paraded about the house as though to show them off. She kept her eyes lowered demurely, but there was a smile of satisfaction on her lips. Could they have appeared overnight? Hard to believe. And yet one day it had been difficult to see her as anything but a young girl, and all of a sudden she’d been mysteriously transformed into a young woman, easily overtaking both Charles and Henri on the road to maturity.

The stir she created that morning almost made Charles forget it was the last day of school and they were leaving Jean-Baptiste-Meilleur School – and its tyrannical principal – forever. At the breakfast table the boys teased Céline mercilessly (Charles asked her why she had two little puppies playing under her blouse). Their jokes, however, made not a dent in her good humour. She ate her cereal without saying a word, looking up occasionally to give them an indifferent glare, as though to say: “Puppies, are they? Well, they’re pretty good-looking puppies! And what do they look like now?”

That night, as he slid beneath the covers, Charles realized that a new object of desire had entered his thoughts to join the Black Goddess with the bouncing aluminum blouse, and was even threatening to edge the latter off the stage of his fantasies altogether. He worked especially feverishly that night to bring himself the relief he needed in order to go to sleep.

Charles was ending his second year of junior high school relatively successfully, having come first in French, English, and History. But he came
seventeenth in Math. Henri, who was not a particularly good student, did better than Charles in that subject, and aced Phys. Ed. and, oddly enough, Visual Art.

The summer began with a dismal week, filled with rain and cold wind. Charles lingered in bed in the mornings, reading an old, yellowed copy of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe, translated into French by Charles Baudelaire; at ten he got up and went to the pharmacy – Henri Lalancette had taken him on five days a week for the duration of the holidays. The health of Charles’s credit union account began to improve rapidly. After each deposit he checked his bankbook with a satisfaction that was not unmixed with anxiety. Business at the hardware store was still plummeting. If Fernand hadn’t owned the building and hadn’t been receiving rent from the other four tenants, he would almost certainly have had to close the store. He came home some evenings looking so woebegone that Charles couldn’t help thinking of the sacrifice he had made in order to keep his adopted son in the family. In fact it was still costing him, since Thibodeau had stopped sending money for Charles’s support.

Charles had seen his father on the street two or three times, each time looking scrawnier and more hunched over. Whenever Thibodeau spotted Charles he would skulk off, as though afraid of having anything more to do with him, and Charles felt the old, familiar rage rising inside. One night he dreamed he’d cornered his father in a quarry, with two huge blocks of granite preventing him from escaping. Leaning over the edge of the quarry, Charles began pelting his father with stones. His father moaned and begged, but far from moving him to pity, his pleas merely served to increase Charles’s hatred, and more stones flew through the air with a murderous, whistling sound (for some reason, he kept his eyes fixed on the ground, as though unable to stand the sight of his father). Suddenly, Wilfrid shouted in a deafening voice: “Okay! Take your money and for Chrissakes leave me alone!” The air around Charles immediately filled with a thick cloud of banknotes. He woke up suffocating, and sat up in bed with hot tears rolling down his cheeks.

On July 7th another bomb went off. Charles was on his way home for supper – it was just after six o’clock – and when he turned onto rue Dufresne he saw Henri leaning against the fence as though waiting for someone. As soon as he saw Charles he ran towards him in an obvious state of high excitement.

“Hey, you want to hear something cool? Blonblon’s got himself a girlfriend!”

Henri had seen Blonblon an hour before in Médéric-Martin Park, walking hand in hand with a thin-legged girl he didn’t recognize but who must have lived in Frontenac Towers.

Suddenly Charles understood why Blonblon had been acting so strangely lately, not answering any of his phone calls, walking around with that irritating air of mystery he affected on the rare occasions he came out to spend an hour or two with his friends. But why be so secretive about it? Was he doing something he was ashamed of? Or did he think Charles and Henri were too stupid to be taken into his confidence?

Charles, feeling hurt, called Blonblon’s number as soon as he finished eating. The phone was answered by Madame Blondin.

“Michel?” she said. “He just left. He must be meeting Caroline somewhere. We don’t see much of him these days, I’m afraid, Charles. He hardly shows up for meals. He jumps out of bed in the morning, throws on some clothes, and he’s gone! I’ll tell him you called.”

“What’s the matter?” Fernand asked, taking a toothpick from his mouth. A shred of meat fell onto his trousers and he flicked it off with a finger.

“Bad news?” asked Lucie.

“No, no,” Charles replied, laughing, “nothing like that. Don’t worry, it’s nothing.”

But he looked worried as he walked to his room. He was surprised at the feeling of abandonment that Blonblon’s defection had caused him. Was that what friends did, dropped you just like that without a word of warning? Stretched out on his bed, a book in his hand, but with no desire to read, he stared up at the ceiling and let his mind drift. A second question popped
into his head, so new and unforeseen that he had no idea how to answer it. How did someone go about finding a girlfriend?

Boff was gripped by a violent hatred for the dog Hachiko. Of course he knew it wasn’t a real dog. It didn’t move a muscle all day, just sat in its corner of the bedroom, as cold and inert as the bed and the dresser. But every time Boff went into the room and saw it, sitting so arrogantly with its muzzle in the air, its huge forepaws looking as solid as two chunks of wood, its bronze fur shining in the light from the sun or the overhead fixture, a repressed rage began to bubble up in his chest; he would give a long, low growl, walk slowly up to it and bare his teeth at it, give it a few disdainful sniffs, then trot off more furious than ever, disgusted by the faint odour of metal that mingled with the scent of his beloved Charles.

And that was what he found the hardest to bear, those caresses his master bestowed each day on that stupid dog, the sweet words he whispered into its metallic ears. As though the thing were able to hear them! All it did was make him, Boff, feel as though it were he who was the lifeless toy.

One afternoon when Charles was out God-knew-where, without going to the trouble of taking him with him, as usual, Boff went into Charles’s room, jumped up on the bed, and lay there staring at the dog. Every now and then he would shake his head and sneeze. Hachiko had declared war, and Boff had to put him in his proper place. He jumped off the bed, went over to the door to make sure no one was watching, and cocked an ear for any sounds coming from the house. All he heard was Lucie humming to herself as she stirred something in a saucepan in the kitchen.

He went over to Hachiko and seized the dog’s snout between his teeth. It was hard as rock! He’d never battled anything as tough as this before! After ten minutes of chewing, his teeth were hurting so much he had to stop, and yet there were only a few barely visible scratches on the statue. The damned thing was laughing at him! His eyes narrowed to slits that
shot out needles of fire. His nose wrinkled fiercely; his nostrils became two deep, pink-lined pits; his mouth took on a terrifying aspect, the bared gums seeming to show twice the normal number of teeth; he gave a low, deep growl that would have frightened Charles himself and went back to work on the dog with demented fury. After several minutes there was a loud crack followed by a metallic tinkling; Boff had defeated his enemy, but in the process had broken a tooth, and a piece of it had fallen into the base of the statue. He sat back to admire his handiwork; there were drops of blood on the floor and even on Hachiko’s muzzle, which now had a hole in it about the size of a dime a few centimetres up from its nostrils. The hole gaped like a kind of evil eye, making the statue look strange and sinister. Boff carefully licked the blood off the floor, gave a triumphant howl, then went into the kitchen to ask to be let outside. He had a sudden impulse to hide. He knew he was in trouble, maybe trouble such as he had never known, and he wanted to put it off for as long as possible. When it came, though, he would accept it. Trouble was the price he was willing to pay for victory, a victory he’d been lusting after for weeks.