Free The Years of Fire by Yves Beauchemin

Charles said after a moment’s hesitation.
    Thibodeau continued walking away without turning around. Maybe he hadn’t heard. With the five-dollar bill crumpled in the palm of his hand, Charles watched him go. Suddenly his shoulders shook and he began to cry, but whether from rage or relief or pity he couldn’t say. Perhaps it was from the unbearable feeling of helplessness that comes over us in cases of irreparable loss.

4
    F ernand’s Oldsmobile gave up the ghost on February the 10th, 1981, after eight years of faithful service. Buying a new car was out of the question, and so as soon as he arrived at the hardware store he began looking through the want ads for used cars. This occasioned a great deal of huffing and puffing.
    That same day two events opposite in nature took place in Charles’s life. Robert-Aimé Doyon relieved him of his duties as editor of the Jean-Baptiste-Meilleur newspaper because of a disrespectful remark that had appeared in it concerning the statue of the Sacred Heart; and the Lalancette Pharmacy hired him as a delivery boy at a salary of two dollars an hour.
    His job at the drugstore came about as the result of a series of curious circumstances involving french fries.
    Fire Station Number 19, at the corner of Fullum and Coupal, counted among its brave crew members a certain Romeo Pimparé, whom heaven had blessed with exceptional skill in the culinary arts. Give him an old turnip and a couple of wilted carrots, a bit of oil or butter, and some seasonings, and he would create a soup au gratin the aroma of which would draw half the station into the kitchen. But it was from french fries that he derived his greatest successes. His captain told anyone who would listen that he would gladly walk through three walls of flame for half a plateful of Pimparé’s french fries. Crispy on the outside, mushy on the inside, fried toa golden hue but never greasy, salted to perfection, they melted in the mouth and made anyone who tasted them swear that Romeo’s fries were the only food they would ever eat. Every Wednesday evening for eight years Romeo had been preparing his fries for his fellow firefighters, who devoured them with hamburgers or pineapple ham, or sometimes with chicken stuffed with apples and cubes of bread.
    This particular Wednesday, at about seven-thirty in the evening, Pimparé was keeping a sharp eye on his deep-fryer, in which the peanut oil (
de rigueur
for fries) was just beginning to come to a boil. Suddenly the alarm bell began to ring wildly throughout the station, summoning the firemen to the trucks. A major fire had broken out in the rear of the Woolworth’s store on rue Ontario and was threatening to spread to the neighbouring buildings, and it was essential that Station Number 19 arrive on the scene before Station Number 5, which for some time had been in fierce competition with Number 19 – ever since a certain report in the Montreal
Journal
had appeared after a fire in the basement of the Church of the Immaculate Conception on bingo night.
    Within thirty seconds, Romeo Pimparé was booted, helmeted, wearing his asbestos gloves, and hanging off the side of the truck as it took a hard left in the glacial air of the winter night. Two minutes, twenty seconds later they arrived at the scene of the fire. Pimparé was busy attaching a hose to a fire hydrant when Captain Flibotte ran up to him through the suffocating smoke and yelled to him furiously.
    “Never mind that! Hurry! We have to go back to the station! A fire’s broken out in the kitchen, you bloody idiot!”
    In his hurry to leave, the fireman had forgotten to turn off the gas burner under the deep-fryer, and flames were shooting joyously up through the window, as though in revenge for all the jets of water the firemen had inflicted on them over the years.
    Is there anything more comical or tragic than a fire in a fire station? The news spread throughout the neighbourhood as though whispered from ear to ear by the Holy