The Years of Fire (25 page)

He was haunted by a terrifying thought: that his father would burn down the hardware store before he could contact him, leaving Charles burdened by the guilt of his odious actions without the solace of knowing that they were being put to some good use. He had to let his father know as soon as possible that he was working for him, and that the money he’d tried unsuccessfully to extort from Fernand would soon be falling into his lap. After their last encounter, however, Charles was afraid to go near him. And yet time was running out. He remembered Blonblon’s offer to act as an intermediary. Reconciliation was impossible, of course, but he might ask Blonblon to go with him. With a witness present, his father might be forced to restrain himself and to listen.

Blonblon would surely be amazed to see how much money Charles had, and how much he expected to make in the future. It would be necessary to tell him where it came from – that he was selling drugs. Too risky? Not really. His friend would never betray him. He was as incapable of such an action as he was of flapping his arms and flying up into the sky. Several times Charles had been tempted to confide in Marlene, who was also a close friend, but each time he’d held back. Marlene was a nice girl, but she could never keep anything to herself. Blonblon, on the other hand, was correctness and generosity pushed to its ultimate extreme, which was innocence. If he’d been born thirty years earlier, he might have become a missionary in Africa or at the North Pole. And who was to say he might not yet end up like that? There were times when there seemed to be a kind of light emanating from his eyes, the kind that had doubtless suggested the haloes that were often depicted around the heads of saints. And if it weren’t for the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman – and deeply in love – he could easily have been mistaken for a saint. Since he had started stealing drugs, Charles hadn’t seen much of his friend. A kind of uneasiness had crept over their friendship. When there are things going on that friends can’t talk to one another about, other words don’t come easily. Luckily, ruptures healed quickly with Blonblon.

Half an hour later, as if summoned on some telepathic telephone, Blonblon knocked on Charles’s door. Charles opened it joyfully and ushered
Blonblon into his room, where Boff, rudely awakened, shook himself mightily and, wagging his tail, jumped down from the bed to be petted.

“You’re getting fat, poor thing,” said Blonblon, scratching the dog behind the ears, “and you’ve got white hairs growing all over your chin.”

Charles patted Boff’s flank.

“He must be twelve years old,” he said. “Almost an old man. But his teeth are still good, that’s for sure. The other day he tore half of Céline’s bathrobe to shreds when she refused to give him a piece of chicken.”

Blonblon knelt in front of the dog and looked him in the eye.

“You’re a bad boy, you know that. You ought to get a boot up your ass when you do things like that!”

“If I hadn’t been there I think Fernand would have skinned him alive.”

Sensing that he was being talked about, and not kindly, Boff whimpered quietly; his head filled with images of torn cloth, furious faces and waving hands, and the sound of his name being shouted, accompanied by cries and angry phrases; he stood and stared apologetically at the floor, waiting for Charles’s and Blonblon’s attention to move on to something else.

“How is Monsieur Fafard doing?” Blonblon asked.

“Not too well. The doctor says he’s depressed. He hardly goes to the store any more. Lucie has to take care of everything, and the strain is beginning to show on her. I might have to drop out of school to give her a hand. Unless …”

Charles looked at a loss. He took out a pack of cigarettes and then slipped them back into his pocket, since it was absolutely forbidden to smoke in the house.

“In fact,” he went on, “that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Blonblon. You’re the only one I can turn to.”

And sitting on the edge of his bed, he began to describe the curious rescue mission he had begun a month earlier. Blonblon listened, flabbergasted and struggling to control his indignation. He let Charles go on without a single interruption. Then, when Charles was finished his story, he merely let out a long sigh.

“You find the whole thing disgusting, don’t you?” Charles said.

Blonblon scratched his knee, then the tip of his nose, searching for the right words. He was also trying to put some order to his thoughts.

“No, Charles,” he said at last. “Not disgusting. That’s not what disgusting means. You’re an idiot! For Christ’s sake, open your eyes! You’re in shit up to your eyeballs, man! I wouldn’t give two cents to be in your skin right now. This De Bané can do whatever he wants with you. Do you realize that? Do you realize you could go to prison, Charles? You can’t help Fernand from prison! And if you’re caught, who could help you? No one, my friend. No one.”

Charles tried to convince his friend that there was no problem, that if De Bané tried to rat on him he would simply return the money, and if he didn’t, once he’d made enough to pay off his father he’d give up stealing drugs.

Blonblon shook his head sadly.

“That’s what they all say, Charles, that’s what they all say.” Charles blushed and leapt to his feet.

“Yeah, well, I’m not just anyone, you know! I’ve seen what other people are like. When I decide to do something, I do it. I’m not going to let that asshole tell me what to do. I do what I want. And only what I want.”

He sat down just as sharply as he had got to his feet, and a strange, pleading look came over his face.

“But I need your help, Blonblon, if I’m going to carry out my plan. I absolutely need you to help me. You can’t refuse to do what I ask.”

And he begged Blonblon to go with him to his father’s. For a long time they continued their conversation, speaking in low voices. Boff, lying on the floor with his muzzle between his paws, watched the two of them with an anxious, puzzled look. He’d never seen them so serious, so tense. Every so often he beat his tail on the floor to bring a bit of levity back into the room, but neither of them noticed. He gave a deep sigh and went to sleep. He barely looked up when Charles and Blonblon left the room, merely half opening one eye in time to see that Charles looked relieved and Blonblon looked worried.

F
ernand lay on his bed staring up at the ceiling. The heat and humidity filling the room had robbed him of whatever strength he’d been able to muster during the night. Outside the window a faint breeze gently stirred the branches of the basswood tree, and their shadows on the ceiling formed a black-and-white lacework pattern that he’d been studying with satisfaction for a long time.

At eight o’clock he’d eaten breakfast, then dressed, with the firm intention of going to the hardware store. He knew full well that Lucie was becoming exhausted after weeks of picking up his slack, and that it wouldn’t be long before she reached the limit of her endurance. But the heat and the humidity had fallen so suddenly over the city, and the three cups of coffee he’d drunk to give himself a lift had had the opposite effect, completely draining his limited resources. Feeling like a huge barrel of boiling water, he’d decided the best thing he could do would be to go back to bed, take a load off his feet. He’d been fast asleep in seconds.

He’d been awakened by the sound of a door closing. He recognized the voices of Charles and his friend, Michel Blondin. They went into Charles’s room and started a lengthy discussion, the details of which he couldn’t catch. All he could make out was a low murmur, but there was something in their tone that told him they were talking about him. It was the tone people used when they talked about the recently dead, or someone whose business had just failed, or a pregnant woman who had
just lost her baby. He listened, still unable to make out individual words, staring up at the pattern of light and shadow on the ceiling, and the certainty that he was completely and utterly finished came over him more strongly by the minute. If he had been told he had AIDS, that new sickness that was killing people by the thousands, the effect on him couldn’t have been worse.

The boys finally left the house, and Fernand was once again alone. Totally alone. As alone as if the Earth had suddenly become depopulated, or as if he’d been sealed in a barrel and dropped to the bottom of the ocean. Unbearably alone. He realized now that he had always been like this, even when the frenetic activity that had become his way of life shielded from him the stultifying reality of his loneliness. He was alone and he was finished. The faint breeze that stirred the curtain, the damp mattress beneath him, the mahogany bedroom furniture, the delicate rose-coloured walls, the play of light and shadow on the ceiling, all of that was nothing but a delusion, a cruel deception, orchestrated by God-knew-who to keep him from grasping the lamentable futility of his situation.

He sat up on the bed, unable to breathe. He had to do something, it didn’t matter what. He couldn’t go on like this. A groan escaped his lips, a groan directed at no one because there was no one there to hear it. He stood up, wobbly on his feet, hands outstretched as though he were blind, and left the room. Boff appeared in the hallway and, when he saw Fernand, began emitting small, plaintive noises.

“Go away, dog,” Fernand murmured under his breath.

He made his way to the kitchen and opened the door to the backyard. Boff followed him, and he booted the dog outside, which launched Boff into such a state of stupefaction that he urinated on the porch. Then Fernand went into the bathroom. He leaned both hands on the sink and breathed heavily, staring at himself in the mirror on the medicine cabinet. What he saw horrified him. Who was this? Not Fernand Fafard, surely? Not this foolish old man with the hollow cheeks, the forehead glistening with sweat, the dazed look of someone searching for something he had no hope of ever finding?

He flung open the cabinet door, which banged against the wall. His eyes swept the bottles of pills, feverishly looking for something that would give him some relief, any kind of relief; what he saw was a packet of razor blades.

A light went on in his head. He picked up the packet, opened it, and took out a blade. He held the blade up and examined it closely. Here was a way to put an end to his misery. Simple, nothing complicated about it, the choice of thousands; all it required was a bit of courage. Not even courage, really. Surely it took more courage to go on living the way he was!

Holding the blade firmly between his thumb and forefinger, he ran it gently, gently, across his wrist. He felt nothing but a slight tickling sensation. He repeated the gesture several times, to get used to the feeling and to prepare himself for the real thrust, the one that would surely make him feel pain.

Then suddenly, quickly, he slashed through the flesh. He felt a sharp burn, but a very localized one, something he could easily stand. Blood spurted out in small, crimson arcs and poured down into the sink, making tiny sounds that pulsed to the rhythm of his pounding heart. It wasn’t nearly as messy as he would have expected. And it was so easy, as though this were something he was supposed to be doing. He watched his blood run into the sink with a kind of detached interest, only his throat a bit tight from the line of fire that was burning his wrist. He was astonished that such a thing could be accomplished so easily.

There was a small stepladder behind the door. Holding his left arm over the sink, he reached for the ladder with his right hand, opened it with a jerk, and sat on it. His legs were beginning to feel weak. In fact his whole body was beginning to sag. Black spots had begun to leap around him, as though thrown into some wild kind of dance. He understood that in a few more minutes he would be dead. What was it, this death? A one-way street. But leading where? No one knew. The only sure thing was that the choice he had just made superseded all the other choices he would ever make.

The burning on his wrist was almost gone, but the heaviness continued to weigh him down. It felt to him like a relentless pressure. The blood still trickled into the sink; it had made a sort of pink tulip shape at the
bottom, lighter at the edges, very pretty, except that it was vibrating, constantly coming into and out of focus. It was his vision that was failing, he thought, and rapidly. A curious gurgling sound rose from the drain and blended with the pounding that now filled his eardrums.

He realized suddenly that it was himself that was running down that black hole, from which there now came a faintly disagreeable odour. He was going to vanish forever! A sense of horror gripped him, forced him to cry out, although weakly. He ran his right hand along the shelves of the medicine cabinet, knocking everything onto the floor. A Band-Aid, where were the Band-Aids? A kind of mist was filling the room, making his search more difficult. He finally found a roll of gauze and, grabbing it in both hands, unrolled a long strip and tried to tear it off with his teeth. This caused the blood to drip onto his shirt and down to the floor, where it landed with a series of dull splats. The gauze would not tear. Desperate now, he wound it around his wrist anyway and pulled it as tight as he could manage. His skin was slippery with blood and the gauze would not stay wound. He took a toothbrush and slid it under the gauze, then turned it like a tourniquet. Slowly the bleeding lessened. He stood up from the stepladder and left the bathroom, staggering, careening off the walls. The nearest phone was in the kitchen. He could barely see it. After every step he had to stop to catch his breath. “My God,” he said to himself, “what have I just done?” A confused noise began to rise within him, turning into a small voice that told his head to start spinning dangerously. He found himself standing by a table with the television remote in his hand. He must have spun into the living room. The pressure had now reached his head, making any sort of thinking impossible. His fingers played awkwardly over the telephone buttons as they danced before his eyes. A woman’s voice answered. He spluttered a few words, looked around for something to lean against and, not finding anything, crashed heavily to the floor. Outside, sensing something bad was happening, Boff began attacking the back door, sending up a spray of wood chips.