Chapter 9: Black Sea - Asbestos

Sunday, August 31, 1986

The day’s top stories were a rich vein of disasters to mine for our scrapbook. I’d have to remember to call Charlélie later, maybe after dinner, and tell him to make sure to hang on to tomorrow’s paper.

For now I was propped up on my bed, struggling to focus on my comic, The Smurfette. Distractions all around: the six o’clock news drifting in from the kitchen radio, making the house feel somehow less empty – Dad off fishing with Daniel for Labour Day Weekend; Mom in bed, migraines again – the drone of the neighbour’s lawnmower, the scent of cut grass wafting in through the open window, thoughts about going back to school, starting fifth grade, and Poulie, who I’d somehow managed to upset again that morning.

That stupid porn mag in my drawer like an unwelcome visitor. That woman with pale breasts.

Cleared of the charge of sowing discord in the village, Smurfette still went into voluntary exile, blaming herself for disrupting the orderly lives of the Smurfs, whose insipid, relentless desire for her had always struck me as gratuitous.

But wasn’t it just like my own feverish obsession with Poulie? My thoughts turned more often to my friend’s blasé reaction than to the woman’s breasts in the magazine. I wasn’t thinking about her at all; I dwelt on Charlélie’s lukewarm reaction, aware that these thoughts were overblown but powerless to push them down.

I wondered if Poulie had read The Smurfette. And what he’d have to say about it. And where was he now? Tomorrow was the last day of summer vacation. Would we spend it in our fort? At that exact moment, was he still mad, still mad at me? Just that morning, I’d again failed to be a good friend. I hadn’t been the good friend Charlélie deserved. How much longer would he stay friends with me?

Earlier that week, a letter delivered to our two homes sent a sweet surge of joy into the commotion of my days. On September 2, the two best friends in the whole world would start the new school year in the same fifth-grade class. Poulie had called at lunchtime to ask if I’d gotten the letter, and I saw that an envelope from the Asbestos School District had been dropped through the mail slot. I’d plucked up every ounce of courage to ask my father, who was on night shift that week and had just gotten up, for permission to open it. Asking him for anything was always a crapshoot, there was never any telling what tone he might take. But that day’s roll of the dice turned up an almost cheerful sure. His mood must have been lightened by his upcoming fishing trip.

Good news comes in pairs: we’d both be in Madame Diane’s class, escaping Madame Pauline of ominous repute.

And in the culmination of our blessed twinship, Camille had convinced the rec centre to let Charlélie into my Blue-level swim class. Our weekly lessons would start just before our tenth and eleventh birthdays.

September would be sweet. The news came on the radio and I pricked up my ears and inched closer to the kitchen.

A serious midair plane crash occurred around noon today, when a single-engine plane collided with an Aeroméxico DC-9. The airliner crashed into a residential neighbourhood in Cerritos, ten miles from Disneyland in Greater Los Angeles. The plane was carrying sixty-four passengers, including ten children, plus the crew. There were no survivors, and the three people aboard the small plane died as well. Ten casualties on the ground have also been reported, and at least five homes were destroyed by the crash, which caused a large fire. Eyewitnesses say that the small plane struck the DC-9 in midair, severing its tail and sending it crashing to the ground.

And this just in: a serious accident has occurred in the Black Sea. The Soviet passenger ship Admiral Nakhimov has sunk after a collision with a freighter, with heavy loss of life. The vessel, which can carry more than 1,000 passengers and a crew of 350, was sailing between Odessa, Ukraine, and Batumi, Georgia. According to an unofficial source, the freighter tore a hole in the hull of the ocean liner, which sank in less than twenty minutes. The number of victims is still unknown but is believed to be in the hundreds.

Good evening, and stay tuned!

* * *

Morning, the same day

A quintessential morning in my new summer life, the one I wish could have gone on forever. Cereal, Sunday cartoons – the opening credits of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, ‘Gone Fishing,’ had made me chuckle – and then I hopped on my bike, headed for 1354 Coleraine Street.

The season had secreted its full complement of saps and juices, the thick canopy of leaves rustled easefully, the wild animals had grown fat, and all was shrouded in a milky mist. The breeze’s caresses sent vapours rising from our bodies into the air. Even the mine had nothing to say.

Poulie and I were pedalling along, guided by everything and nothing, our symbiosis fuel enough to keep us in motion, a swarm of two. Down on one knee in front of the spring tap, he was lapping up water. I watched his little blond mouth meet the trickle with a laugh.

The second he was back in the saddle, Poulie started chattering away, flitting between observations and questions, which I answered with no care for keeping our conversation aloft; Charlélie was a natural echo whose affability carried it for us both. At times a gentle silence fell, only heightening our awareness of each other’s presence in the shrubs and low-hanging branches, a pause before my friend got back to his pollen-gathering.

Oh how I hoped to be enough for him. The shuffling of students from the fourth- to fifth-grade class lists had fulfilled our wish to be together, but I couldn’t shake the fear lodged like a small stone in the shoe of my consciousness. I imagined Charlélie bonding with others, I imagined him picking a new best friend, a better best friend than me. About these small intrusive stones I had an intuition that it was up to me to act, before they festered into a tumour, a black hole.

Say there were aliens watching us riding our bikes. Would they think we were insects? Or crustaceans?

I took some time to chew on that. I think aliens would know that crustaceans live in water.

You’re right. And I think we act more like insects.

Poulie’s gaze flipped back and forth between the alien sky and me, as he slalomed down the middle of the deserted road.

Like now, just watching us riding our bikes … just from the way we move, they could for sure tell we’re best friends.

My heart opened like a peony.

We’d passed my house and I hadn’t even noticed, then meandered to the bend in Black Lake Road, a few yards from the path to Monsieur Joly’s fabric storehouse, just barely visible through the trees. Our random wandering was starting to seem less random. I glanced over at Poulie, his expression a mix of surprise and sudden attraction.

Without a word, I knew what was happening and resigned myself to the inevitable. We were going back for another look.

We dropped our bikes in the ferns and tiptoed toward the small garage nestled under the evergreens amid chirring crickets, trilling sparrows, hissing snakes.

Just like the last time here, I was a ball of stress. My gut, my head, and my nerves in a knot, and the voice of reason in my head reminding me that what we were doing was at worst breaking and entering and at best trespass with illicit intent. Not to mention the irrational impression that we were desecrating a corpse – patently absurd since Monsieur Joly hadn’t died here. The car accident that killed him happened on the other side of town, over on Smith Boulevard. But just being here prowling around creeped me out. Poulie’s fixation with this place, on which he’d pinned his noble hopes of furnishing our fort, was increasingly feeling like some kind of mania, an orphic mystery cult that left me bewildered and my friend beyond any reasonable caution.

The side door was still locked of course. The broken windowpane next to it had lost its protective cardboard. Poulie considered this development. If a kid our size found a way to hoist himself up to window height, he could certainly squeeze through the frame. But we knew there was a further factor to consider: this enterer would need to be a breaker too, finishing off the window and then covering the shards that would litter the frame. It would be like crawling over barbed wire.

Maybe with a big piece of fabric … Poulie whispered.

That preposterous idea was too much. The whole reason we’re trying to get into the garage is to get some fabric, I protested. Why would we show up with a bunch of fabric just to steal more fabric?

Shhhh. Poulie put his index finger to his lips. He looked at me with gravitas, and then gazed all around, surveying the scene with his chin in the air. I was drowning in bile blacker than the bottom of the deepest sea.

Poulie had surreptitiously disappeared and then reappeared by my side, a picture of innocence. The log in his hand made my blood run cold.

Back up a bit.

Until my dying day I’ll curse the moment I failed to stand up to my friend’s reckless urge or burn hot enough to set my boundaries and assert my desires – even if they were timorous, even if they just made me king of the scaredy-cats.

The window shattered, the log swallowed up by Monsieur Joly’s dark and cryptic treasure trove.

After a few seconds of the most fraught silence I had ever known, as Poulie and I held our breath and even stilled the beating of our hearts to listen for the slightest sound of police, neighbours, or perhaps divine judgment, the fulmination inside me at last gushed out in sobs I tried with all my strength to smother, terrified that my friend would see. Instinct had carried me back to my bike.

Where are you going?

I turned back to him, looking at the ground.

Happy now? You broke the window.

Can you just give me a boost, so I can look inside? Or you can step up on my back, I’ll bend over …

I don’t care what’s in there. What do you want us to do? Go in through the broken window? How will we get out after? And there’s cars going by. We’ll get caught for sure. I’m out of here.

Okay, okay, don’t freak out.

The rest is a blur: biking off, Poulie nattering away again, stopping at the corner store for gum, sitting on the swings at the park, riding some more, something like that. Our act of vandalism with its sound of breaking glass and whistling in my ears was etched in my mind. While I ruminated over the unknown impending repercussions of what we had done, Poulie seemed to have forgotten and moved on, as he flitted from joy to joy in an eternal present.

By early afternoon, our restlessness had carried us to my house. No car in the driveway. My mom was probably still sleeping, and I was starting to get hungry. It would have been easy enough to ask Poulie if I could go over to his house for lunch. But my house was right there, but my racing thoughts, but the way I never listened to myself, but regrets: in the end it was easiest just to say bye.

Charlélie Poulin looked over and answered, faintly, Bye.

* * *

Sunday, August 31, 1986

Good evening, and stay tuned!

The neighbour’s lawnmower cut out.

An ambulance with sirens blaring drove past toward Black Lake.

Classical music on the radio.

I felt like I was waking up from a deep sleep. I was sitting on my bed looking out the window. The colours seemed unusually vivid. A perfect elongated cloud spun slowly in the azure sky.

Then more sirens: a police car this time, speeding down the road toward Black Lake.

The sound faded away, and it struck me that it had faded not far from here. No farther than the fork in the road. Really not far at all.

Not too far for me to go see what was going on. I could be there in three minutes on my bike. But after two minutes, I knew.

A few cars and a motorbike were parked on the road. People milling around on the tree-lined gravel road. The ambulance had driven off toward Thetford. I set my bike down in the same tucked-away clump of ferns. I didn’t budge, or make a sound, or even breathe. Everything, absolutely everything, was interrupted.

From the ferns, peering through the spruce and pine, I could clearly make out Monsieur Joly’s little warehouse. I saw the broken window on the side, the window we’d broken. But another log had appeared on the ground beneath the sill. A streak of liquid gleamed against the grey siding. The sunlight left fiery highlights in the garnet stain.

A woman from the neighbourhood spotted me, and I thought she’d report me to the two officers who had gotten out of their car. I thought I heard more police cars on their way. I had to get out of there.

I was back in my room, sitting on my bed with my back to the window.

The phone rang.

I didn’t jump.

My mother picked up in the kitchen. I hadn’t realized she was awake.

A longish silence, and then I heard my mother say, Oh, dear God. She said it in English, again and again. Then, in French, Yes, I have their number, just a moment.

I heard her rifling through her address book.

It’s 335-3686.

A white whistling split my ears like a bursting gas main. I didn’t hear my mother asking, quietly: Do you know if it’s serious?

I also didn’t hear her say, one final time before hanging up, Oh, dear God.

From my room, I could once again hear perfectly. Everything around me seemed to be floating through the air, weightless – even sounds. Everything broke free of gravity and began drifting away. I could hear my mother standing still, bolt upright, breathing deeply. The clack of her ring against the kitchen counter as she set one hand down. I heard her lips part, the click of her tongue leaving the roof of her mouth, a sibilant inhale, and a word that faltered out as if it were the most fragile and solitary utterance in the universe. Steve?

That’s when I caught fire.