The Years of Fire Read online

  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 …?”

  And on he went with the usual banalities that parents hand out to their children in the naive conviction that experience is something that can be transmitted from one generation to the next, and that the fact that they are right is all the justification they need to impose their views on their offspring.

  In the end, Fernand asked Charles to stay away from the pool hall during the week, before his studies – to say nothing about other aspects of his life – began to suffer. Charles argued that he was in the top percentile at Pierre-Dupuy, that he was getting good marks, and that it wasn’t as if hanging around the house every night would make his marks go up. Pool halls were not healthy places for kids to hang out, Fernand objected. They were for layabouts and welfare bums and people with shady pasts. The only things he would learn there were bad habits – like smoking, for example, he added with a bitter smile, which, though it was probably the least damaging thing he could pick up, would sooner or later ruin his health.

  His health was his business, Charles countered, he had the right to do with it what he wanted. And as for those kinds of people Fernand spoke of, he’d never seen anyone like that in the Orleans. He invited Fernand to come and judge for himself what kind of place the Orleans was.

  “Nothing to be done,” sighed Fernand when he joined his wife in the kitchen. “Everyone has to make their own mistakes, I guess, if they’re going to learn about life. I just hope the mistake he’s making isn’t too serious.”

  “Who says he’s going to make mistakes?” Lucie said. “You always let your temper get the better of you, my poor Fernand. You go flying off the handle, you say things you don’t mean, and you get people’s backs up. Does it make you feel any better? Let him do what he has to do, at least for a while. He’ll get over it. He has a good brain in his head. Have a bit of confidence in him. We’ll keep an eye on him, of course. There’ll always be time to grab him by the scruff of the neck if he starts doing anything foolish.”

  Morning break had just begun; students spread out in front of the school’s main entrance were talking and smoking in the heavy rumble of the Grover factory working at top speed across the street. The ancient brick building with its enormous dusty windows seemed to vibrate at such times, as though it were about to explode from the sheer effort of expending so much energy.

  Suddenly a large black cat with a gold collar came out from between two parked cars. It seemed disoriented. The end of its tail was broken and one ear was in tatters. After sniffing a tire for a few seconds, it ran out into the street in front of a speeding delivery truck. A shriek arose from several nearby students, and a small group gathered around the animal. Its hind leg had been crushed. Splayed out on the asphalt, it stared up at the onlookers with a bewildered eye as a trickle of blood ran down its side. One grinning student tossed an empty cigarette pack at its head.

  “Hey! You idiot!” shouted Blonblon. “Leave the poor thing alone! Don’t you think it has enough problems without you pestering it?”

  Two or three girls muttered their agreement. Blonblon kneeled down before the cat, which reared up onto its three good legs and started spitting and growling at him, ferociously defending what little remained of its life. Blonblon pushed some of the students out of its way, giving it room to escape, and the cat dragged itself off.

  Just then Charles came up, cigarette lighter in one hand and the other reaching into the inside pocket of his windbreaker. When he saw the gathering he stopped, curious to know what was going on. The smartass who’d thrown the cigarette pack was giving Blonblon a hard time, shouting at him and digging his finger into Blonblon’s chest. Someone filled Charles in on what had happened. He looked around for the cat, which had disappeared between two buildings, and then went over and stepped between Blonblon and the smartass.

  “Take a hike, man,” he said to the latter. “I want to talk to him. It’s important. You can pound the shit out of him later.”

  The smartass went on shouting for a few seconds, then went off in a huff with two of his comrades.

  “Would you like to make a few bucks?” Charles asked Blonb
lon. “Monsieur Michaud has just bought a whole library. Nearly a thousand books. He wants us to move it for him and put it on shelves.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight, if that’s cool, or else over the weekend.”

  “Not tonight,” Steve interrupted, joining the two boys and looking at Charles with a secretive smile. He seemed bubbling over with barely suppressed excitement. “Tonight, my friend, we’re going to play pool, you and I, and I don’t think you’ll want to miss it. No, I don’t think you’ll want to miss one minute of it, may my dick fall off if I’m wrong!”

  And he laughed as though already enjoying the fun that was in store for Charles. Charles looked at him in surprise and some irritation, wondering what clever trick Lachapelle had up his sleeve. But the latter took himself off, still laughing, after telling Charles to be at the Orleans at seven-thirty.

  Blonblon had already wandered off to look for the cat. Ever since he’d been struck by lightning he hadn’t had much time for the frivolities of this world. All he cared about was love. The cat was nowhere to be found.

  For the rest of the day Charles scratched his head trying to figure out what it was that Steve had lined up. It could only be some kind of trick. At three o’clock, the biology teacher, Monsieur Belzile, noticing Charles’s preoccupied air, asked him to come up to the board and write down the principal functions of the liver. Charles stood at the board for a long time, completely befuddled, which delighted his classmates, then went back to his desk, smiling bravely but blushing to the roots of his hair, knowing for the first time in his life what it was like to be a complete dunce.

  He walked into the pool hall around seven. As usual, Nadine gave him a big smile from behind the bar, filling him (also as usual) with a quivering, timid rapture. Obviously she thought he was attractive and that the three years that separated their ages did not in theory mean they couldn’t go out together (provided, of course, that he could somehow supplant the owner). But he was paralyzed by her beauty. On top of which, and causing him no small amount of confusion, there was a certain hardness in her mannerisms and in her expression that told him that, despite her youth, she had already seen her share of life, and she was not afraid of it. As a result, when he was around her he felt he was still a bit of a child.