Chapter 11: Tiger’s Eye - Asbestos

Saturday, August 31, 1991

Why did you save my life? Chang asks Tintin.

Oh, Charlélie. I’m not Tintin. How I would have loved to be the boy reporter saving you from the flooding Yangtze River. I missed the spectacle of your drowning in the forest, pierced through the throat, your hanged boy’s sandals dangling in the air above an overturned log, four hundred paces from our tree fort in the pine forest. How I would have loved to be tall, fast, and strong, to lift you up and lay you down on a bed of pine needles. To be a hero, a firefighter. I would have loved to be Tintin, a noble, brave ronin who would have stanched the fire of your bleeding with his lips and breathed all the air in the forest back into your chest, so you could be born again.

Our pine forest is still just as cool, even in summer.

I often wonder if you ever existed at all.

A siren shrieks, and others soon join it. The engines of the mine trucks answer. They’ve heard the call to flee. Four o’clock, time to blow up the mine, widening its crater with the absolute patience of a black hole.

The fourth siren call hangs suspended in the broken silence. Something is about to splinter.

The blasting is light, barely a dull tremor. Some days the sound of a dynamited rock face crumbling in the distance resembles the percussive clatter of surf on a pebble beach, and on others it’s like the brief, nerve-shattering slam of a thunder-clap. But nothing comes close to the sheer force of an actual thunderclap on the heels of a lightning flash in the pit of the mine, reverberating in the night.

It’s time to explode. I’m wracked by twitches, especially my face and knuckles. What a stupid moment, I’m ashamed and I’m cursing and it ruins what seemed like a lovely idea last night, when I couldn’t sleep and my mother couldn’t either. The moment is inanely ceremonial. No one’s watching, no one’s here. There are no firefighters, no heroes. Just a dead boy. He’s the hero. Let’s get it over with.

I’m sitting on what’s left of our fort, a few damp planks that haven’t rotted away. My legs dangle over the side, ten feet above the amber ground. I open the small brown leather pouch on my knees and push back a thousand stupid feelings dredged up by my senses, flying carpets of memories and words that have vanished into these treetops. The pine’s trunk gently presses into my back, like Winnie-the-Pooh’s belly – another silly image that I jettison. Almost fifteen and still stirred by foolish, secret thoughts.

I thought I had more to remember Poulie by, but there are just these three things. The Starmania tape that I left in my room: no need to hide it anymore, I think. Charlélie’s tiny school photo, without a single crease or damaged corner, pristine as all my other belongings. Frozen in time, like every object that has ever meant something to me. Poulie’s slightly sleepy smile, his prominent cheekbones beneath his little eyes, his mahogany hair, his mischief and his kindness: all frozen in time. Had he held on to the photo of me that he got when we traded at the end of fourth grade? Had he looked at it once in a while? Poulie was the kid who lost everything, just as I was the one who kept everything. My ever-awkward face must have ended up in one of the bags that were taken to the Goodwill a few months after his death. Pit had decided to empty out Charlélie’s room, fill it up with plants. He’d taken up bonsai. It reminds me of the fragility of life, he’d said almost serenely, as he laid a tender hand on my head. I hadn’t picked out anything from the toys and clothes Poulie’s parents had offered me.

Grotesque to be here wondering if my friend might have kept my photo, or even pulled it out sometimes. To look at what? His friend the eternal wet blanket? His friend who was too scared to help him climb through a window? To remember what? My hand touching him while he slept?

Disgust smothers me.

I place the tiny photo back in the leather pouch, and then take out the bracelet. I don’t know, I’ve never known if it was properly mine, or Camille’s – or if not, whose? Charlélie had given me a bracelet that I’d never had the courage to wear. Lying on my back in bed last night, worrying the metal bracelet as if I were telling an oracle, drawing the jewel up to my face between pious fingers, breathing it in and furtively caressing the softness of the rounded stone with my lips, I’d had an idea. Entrust it to gravity, try my hands at the arts of radiesthesia, the way of the tiger’s eye.

I can’t slip the feeling that my solemn ceremony is absurd and embarrassing. Or the imminent possibility of bursting into tears. Or an unbearable surge of guilt untempered by five years of half-hearted efforts to beat it back, lashed to whatever remains and brings any sort of comfort, however cruel. There’s no escaping this monumental guilty verdict, a constantly repeating five-beat cautionary tale, a haunting poem whose scansion yields the magic number, five: You killed your best friend. Five years equals today, the anniversary of his death, my fault, a death caused by the negligence and cowardice that have always held me back before everything that threatens to destroy me. I don’t kiss the tiger’s eye. I toss the bracelet into the air where it spins like a coin oscillating between heads and tails.

At the fawn-coloured foot of our tall pine, the tiger’s eye proclaims its fate. To the east. The bracelet belongs to the Poulin-Fugère family.

* * *

Two months earlier: July 1, 1991

To the west, an adipose star melted into the crest of the tailings heap, about to be eclipsed by these dumps, just as they blotted out everything else in this landscape. From Pompeii to Siberia, how few sunsets ever attain such awful telluric intensity? This was just how the long summer evenings in Mitchelltown burn out.

I was riding my mountain bike, as I often did when I was bored, over the dirt bike tracks in the quicksilver dumps next to Alfred Street. On a few of the accessible plateaus between the great mounds, the plant life was starting to grow back, grass and wildflowers and staghorn sumac. Some of the steeper hillsides were carved into paisley patterns by the dirt bikes climbing and bombing down, like skateboarders on a half-pipe but with two-stroke engines revving full-throttle as they ripped over slopes of presumably carcinogenic waste.

My thoughts turned to the handful of subjects that had held my interest since the end of school. I mentally reviewed the first-aid techniques learned in my Bronze Cross course, scanning the many mnemonic acronyms – AVPU, CHARTE, LOC, LITE, OPQRST, RICE, WARTS – into rhythmic patterns I doggedly attempted to break down into sets of five. My lucky number five could be assembled into units, sets, or phases, depending on the desired outcome. This obsessive, unsolvable dance distracted me from the ambient tension of the world, to the point of dissociation. I’d completed a phase, an achievement that was somewhat discouraging since it meant coming up with a new five-phase resolution to create a pyramid super-arrangement, and then a park – when a flicker of movement in the distance snapped me away from my pathetic pastime.

I’d gotten back on my bike. The sun had sunk behind the dump, revealing a backlit silhouette in the iridescent twilight. I came to a cautious stop a few yards in front of the slender shadow heading toward me over the darkened tracks. Boots, black jeans, and long arms, black as well. An orange diamond printed on the chest of their shirt caught my eye: the ‘flammable’ pictogram familiar from my first-aid workbooks. The saffron-coloured shape burned and flickered like a mirage against the coal-black hills.

It took me a few seconds to recognize this person whose hair was tied back in a tight ponytail that revealed her forehead, highlighting her dark eyebrows and assertive yet inquisitive gaze.

Hey, Steve. Long time no see.

Hi. For sure.

A few years earlier, with her sidelong winks in the elementary school yard or playing DJ at the front of the bus, Cindy Drouin had been in another league, age-wise – just over two years in chronological time, light-years in confidence. Now, though I was about to start Grade 10 and she was headed off to junior college, our age difference seemed less meaningful. Her self-assured manner no longer intimidated me. Now, after a few words, we were fast friends. Cindy knew how to steer our conversations in new directions, to find areas that were interesting without scaring me away. When we talked about music it was serious but still chill. I listened, rapt, as she described the bands she’d gotten into in Toronto. I hadn’t even known that the Drouin family – father Raymond, lawyer; mother, name and profession unknown; brother Mikaël; and Cindy herself – had left five years ago. And now, to Cindy’s dismay, they’d moved back to this ‘shithole town.’

Why’d you come back?

The bosses at the mine brought my dad back on. They’re closing it for good. She stopped talking and studied me for a second. And there’s this …

Cindy lifted the cuff of the long-sleeved shirt she had on under her Massive Attack tee and showed me the inside of her forearm. Ten or twelve long, puffy scars glowed an eerie white in the twilight.

They think I did this to … They don’t get it. She pulled her sleeve back down to her wrist. Idiots.

I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t have any. She had known suffering; I had known suffering. The bald fact of this brought us together with no need for explanations. It just felt good to have her here with me in this shithole town. We’d been sitting for a while in the thick tufts of grass, looking ahead at the faint lights of downtown in the distance. Cindy handed me an earbud and pressed Play on her Walkman – the black model. Nothing like what I listened to: this music was dark, slow, jagged – omi -nous somehow. Toward the end of the song, I noticed Cindy’s lips mouthing the lyrics, I caught the words respect and suicide. The tape stopped.

It’s cool you understand English, Cindy said.

And a little later: Your dad’s going to lose his job, you know.

They’ve been saying that for years. Last time they just transferred him to the Bell mine.

This time’s for real.

I could have tried to care more, could have considered the unquestionably violent repercussions my father’s layoff would have on my physical safety. I could have imagined his angry outbursts becoming more frequent and dangerous, constant, potentially unstoppable. I listened to Cindy’s quietly powerful arguments against exploiting natural resources, harming workers’ health. Just turning toward her was enough to make my apprehensions fade away.

A long shriek startled us, followed by a vast red flowering in the opaque sky. The explosions of the Canada Day fireworks reached us at a delay, leaving pockets of inhaling silence. From our hiding spot, we kept up our conversation under the explosives, fierce whispers plotting against this fire-retardant town, this island bent on thwarting our inchoate half-formed plans. Cindy wanted to topple capitalism; I hoped to kiss a girl or a boy before graduating high school.

Then the subject of Poulie came up, and I told her the whole story over what felt like an entire sleepless, stormy night.

* * *

Saturday, August 31, 1991

Before picking up the bracelet from the ground, I remembered my mother, voice lifeless and features drawn from lack of sleep, shyly entrusting me with a task: proofread the text she’d spent three days writing, which would run in the Courrier Frontenac this week. I pulled a folded sheet of paper from my shorts pocket.

With sadness, the family of Pierre Dubois of Thetford Mines announces his sudden accidental passing, in Trois-Rivières, at age 41. He is survived by his mother, Gaétane (Rogatien, known as Roger Dubois, deceased); his sister, France (Dr. Jacques Meilleur); his nieces, Émilie-Lune Meilleur (Dave Grenier) and Marie-Douce Meilleur; his wife, Claire Dubois (née Robin); and his beloved children, Daniel (Nathalie Veilleux) and Steve. He was predeceased by his father; his mother- and father-in-law, Christopher and Cécile Robin (née Wilson); and his brother-in-law, Andrew Robin. He is survived as well by his co-workers and friends at the King-Beaver and Bell mines. Funeral on Sunday, September 8, at 11 a.m., at Saint Alphonse Parish Church in Thetford Mines. The body will be laid to rest at the cemetery of the same name at 1 p.m. Flowers or donations to charitable organizations are gratefully appreciated.