The Years of Fire Read online

  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.

  “What have you been up to, eh?” Lucie said, looking at him suspiciously. “What have you done to your mouth?”

  She bent over and looked at his teeth.

  “Would you like to tell me what you’ve been chewing on, you little devil? Your mouth is full of blood! And you’ve broken a tooth! Come on, show me, show me what you’ve done. Bad boy!”

  Resigned to his fate, Boff led Lucie back to Charles’s room. Lucie looked around but didn’t see anything amiss. She checked the furniture in the rest o
f the house and, still finding nothing, let Boff go outside.

  It was Charles who discovered the disaster at suppertime. There was no doubt who the perpetrator had been. Furious, he went outside to look for Boff, but the dog was nowhere to be found. He would have to go back to work at the pharmacy without giving Boff the punishment he deserved.

  “Poor little Hachiko,” he murmured, devastated. “How am I going to fix you up? And why did he do this to you, the bloody idiot? If Monsieur Michaud sees you like this he’ll never give me another present!”

  He made a few deliveries. An old woman on rue Wurtele, who hobbled to the door on legs that looked like two hams stuffed into a pair of brown sausage casings, gave him a fifty-cent tip, but he was so wrapped up in dark thoughts that he barely thanked her. At eight o’clock things began to wind down at the pharmacy and, swallowing his pride, he decided to phone Blonblon. He was the only one he could think of who could save Hachiko. For once, Blonblon was home. He kindly agreed to have a look at the bronze dog that very night, and the two boys arranged to meet at nine by the Frontenac station.

  Two or three times as they were walking to his house, Charles came close to asking his friend how he had met Caroline, but since the young swain hadn’t brought up the subject and hence offered no opening into which to insert such a question, he thought it best to keep his curiosity to himself.

  “Hmm,” said Blonblon after taking a long look at Hachiko. “He really mangled this thing. I wonder what got into him?”

  “Who knows. The bugger hasn’t shown his face around here since. He knows what he’ll get when he does.”

  Blonblon continued his examination, then declared in a serious, thoughtful tone that he believed it would be possible to repair the statue with automobile body putty and a lick of paint, but that he couldn’t do it without a photograph of the original. Maybe Monsieur Michaud would have one.

  “I’ll go ask him right away,” Charles said.

  Parfait Michaud was a great reader and an assiduous music- and film-lover, and always stayed up late, so there was no risk of bothering him by turning up on his doorstep at nine-thirty at night.

  Charles hurried over to the notary’s house while Blonblon and Céline went into the Fafards’ backyard to look for Boff, whose absence was beginning to worry them.

  Amélie opened the door wearing a turquoise kimono with pink tassels and a scarf that gave off a strong scent of camphor oil and lemon.

  “He’s out visiting a friend,” she said, strangely reserved. “I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  She put a hand to her head, heaved a deep sigh, and shut the door. Disconcerted, Charles stood on the porch for several seconds wondering if he had been wrong about coming over so late, then slowly made his way back home. The evening was ending the way it had begun – detestably.

  At the corner of Gascon Avenue he automatically looked up at Médéric-Martin Park and thought he saw Boff in the distance, lying beside a chain-link fence. Could it be that his fear of being punished had made him run away from home? Ordinarily he never came this far from the neighbourhood. Charles called to him a few times, then, since the dog didn’t move, he ran towards him. He hadn’t gone twenty steps before the animal jumped up and ran to the other end of the park.

  Charles ran after him. “Boff! Boff!” he called. “Come back here! I’m not going to hurt you!”

  He was no longer certain that the dog was Boff. After a few minutes he stopped, out of breath. The dog had disappeared somewhere up rue de Rouen, which hummed faintly across from where he stood. Resuming the chase, he hurried to the street, arriving in time to see the dog, nose to the ground, disappear between two houses about fifty metres down. Charles called a few times without success, then recrossed the street, certain now that he had been mistaken. Boff would never have wandered this far away. He would have come home by now, penitent and excited, ready to take his punishment and trying to regain Charles’s favour with pathetic little whimpers.

  Charles continued along Gascon, which ran beside the park towards rue de Rouen. Across the street, a man and a woman came out of a house and began walking in his direction. He stopped, taken aback. He recognized the man as Monsieur Michaud. The tall, stooped body, that way of stepping as though afraid of crushing something or of getting his feet wet, could only belong to his friend and mentor the notary. He didn’t know who the woman was. The couple were talking in a friendly, animated way, the way people do after two or three glasses of wine, and they had not yet seen him. Charles had the feeling that the notary would not be pleased to run into him at this moment, and, seeing a hedge to his right, he quickly hid behind it. And not a minute too soon, because the notary and his companion decided at that moment to cross the street and were headed straight for him. He studied the woman from his hiding place; she seemed much younger than Monsieur Michaud, pretty enough, but with a kind of sugary sweetness and a way of holding her elbows to her sides and swaying her hips that reminded Charles of an actress in a French comedy. She leaned into her companion and whispered something in his ear.

  “Wonderful! Wonderful!” cried Michaud, giving a great laugh (Charles had never heard him laugh like that). “You always have such wonderful ideas, you know, my sexy little temptress!”

  And, putting his arm around her waist, he planted a kiss on her cheek.

  Charles waited until the two were gone, then slowly walked to his house, thinking furiously. Céline came up to him looking worried. Boff had not returned. Blonblon had gone home.

  “I don’t want to scare you, son,” said Fernand, coming out of the living room with a newspaper in his hand (Trudeau and Chrétien smiling, looking down), “but it’s possible someone has taken him.”

  “No, Papa, Boff is too smart for that!” said Henri, coming up behind his father. But even he didn’t look convinced.

  Charles put his hands on his hips. “I’ll bet my bottom dollar he’s out there hiding under the shed.”

  He went out into the yard and called. Several minutes went by, but no dog appeared.

  “Boff!” he called, now becoming as alarmed as the others. “Come out from hiding, Boff! There’s a good boy! I know you’re out there.… I won’t punish you … not much, anyway!”

  He looked around the yard, then with a deep sigh bent down and put his head under the shed. No doubt about it, this had been a rotten day. And his encounter with the notary certainly hadn’t improved it. He felt as though he’d been deceived, and it left a bad taste in his mouth. But at the same time, Monsieur Michaud’s arch, somewhat humorous mannerisms, which Charles had known for many years and had grown quite fond of, now took on a mysterious importance. And that only troubled him more.

  Boff was not seen again until ten o’clock the next morning. It must have been hunger that brought him home, unless it was the need to expiate his guilt. Charles and Henri were out taping notices to the telephone poles in the neighbourhood, giving Boff’s description and their telephone number.

  When Charles came home and saw him stretched out on his bed looking contrite, it was all he could do to stop himself from running to him with a cry of joy. But with a serious, theatrical gesture he seized the statue of Hachiko and waved it under the dog’s nose.

  “Boff, what’s this? Why did you do this, eh? Don’t you know what this statue means to me? I love Hachiko. And now I don’t know if it can even be repaired!”

  He then took Boff’s muzzle in his hand, but all he did was give it a rough shaking. Céline, who was watching from the doorway, sympathized with Charles’s leniency and showed it by coming over and rubbing his back, which sent a shiver all the way down to his heels.

  That evening Blonblon showed up with a box of auto putty and a can of spray paint. He spent a long time repairing the statue, because the hole required a great deal of filling that was difficult to mask. A photo would have been useful, he said. Charles pretended that the notary hadn’t had one. But after a while Hachiko looked as good as new, almost. Charles was happy with the resu
lt, and this time he put the statue on top of his dresser where he knew Boff couldn’t get at it. Then the two friends went off to tour the neighbourhood on their bicycles.

  The streets had been baking all day, and even though the sun had set an hour earlier, the walls, sidewalks, and pavement still radiated a stifling heat. Blonblon said he was thirsty and suggested stopping somewhere for a soft drink. They had turned their backs on the Blue Bird, feeling it was their duty to boycott the place, and so they headed to Villa Frontenac, a restaurant across from the metro station that had been famous for almost thirty years for serving the best smoked-meat sandwiches in Montreal East.

  “My treat,” Charles said, feeling glad to be with Blonblon again.

  After their sandwiches and fries, Charles suggested a bowl of ice cream for dessert, and, after a brief moment of polite reticence, Blonblon accepted.

  For a while the two boys ate in silence, absorbed in the pleasures of their dessert. From time to time Blonblon looked up and smiled at Charles, who gave a little smile of contentment in reply. But it was not unadulterated; Charles was feeling bad for having lied to Blonblon about Monsieur Michaud. Last night’s unexpected meeting with the notary still haunted him, and he felt the urge to confide in someone. Who better to lend an ear than Blonblon?

  After using his spoon to carefully scrape the last fragments of nuts and almonds from the far reaches of his bowl, then taking a long drink of his 7-Up, he let out a deep sigh and looked his friend in the eye.