Heroes

by Ray Robertson

  “Do you want something, Peter?”

  “As a matter of fact, yeah, I do. I want to sit down. I come all the way out here to deepest, darkest suburbia and you don’t even offer me a seat on your messy floor.”

  Patty blocked his way into the room.

  “Go sit in the livingroom,” she said. She went to shut the door but Bayle stopped it with his hand.

  “Let go of my door,” she said.

  “Not until you tell me what’s going on,” Bayle said.

  “Nothing’s going on. One hundred percent absolutely fucking nothings going on.”

  “Don’t tell me that, something’s going —”

  “What’s going on is I’m trying to shut my door!”

  She threw herself against the door and Bayle didn’t resist, door slamming shut in his face. He heard the lock snap back into place.

  Bayle stared overhead at a long ugly scar of a crack in the plaster ceiling. He knew that the plaster was white, but the hall light gave the entire corridor a jaundiced yellow glow. He knew she was on the other side of the door listening.

  He rested his head right against the wood. Softly, “Have you had a chance to do any painting yet?” he said. “God knows you bought enough stuff that morning to keep you in paint, varsol, and brushes for the next ten years.” Bayle knew she was listening. “Don’t forget: you promised to let me have the first self-portrait.”

  He waited for an answer that didn’t come and walked back to the kitchen. Flicked off the hall light when he’d reached the carpeted end.

  His mother looked up from her cup of tea.

  “Nothing,” Bayle said.

  The two of them sat at the table staring off in their separate directions.

  Finally, “Has she been painting?” Bayle said. “I mean, I know she hasn’t come out of her room to do it, but have you smelt any paint fumes or anything like that?”

  “Patty’s never painted,” his mother said.

  “I know,” Bayle answered, before going on to describe to her the early morning shopping spree at Picasso’s on Spadina the week before and Patty’s sudden enthusiasm for all things artistic. Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler: all names Bayle had never heard Patty mention before, and the closing of the subway doors at St. George the only thing that had finally managed to shut her up.

  “Now it makes sense,” his mother said. Bayle looked up from his hands.

  “It was last Monday,” she said. “The afternoon after Patty stayed over at your place. She finally came through the door a little after one and sat herself right down at the table and got out a bowl and spoon and the container of milk and ate nearly an entire box of Corn Flakes. When I asked her where she’d been — because when you’d called you said she was coming home early the next morning — she said she fell asleep on the subway and when the subway man woke her up at the Kennedy station it turned out she’d been riding the car back and forth for close to an hour. Well, naturally I was upset. And when I told her that that was a good way for a young woman to get herself violated, she said she already had. She said that while she’d been sleeping someone had stolen all the parcels she’d bought downtown that morning with you. When I asked her what had been in them, what had gotten stolen, she just keep on eating her cereal. But after she was all done eating and had put away the milk and cereal and had washed and dried her bowl and spoon, just before she went to her room — the last time I’ve seen her since then, now that I think of it — she said, Well, it looks like nobody is going to be doing any self-portraits around this house after all.’”

  16

  TOLD NOT to think of a pink elephant, one thinks of a pink elephant, the stronger the insistence not to, the larger and pinker the animal imagined.

  Already two days into his trip and commanding himself to cut to the chase, to put his cards on the table, to tell his lifeless life to himself like it was — the clock ticking, he knew, on when he had to return to Toronto and give Jane the good news that he was more than just literally back — Bayle did no such thing.

  Lingering over his complimentary breakfast of glazed donuts and black coffee every morning in The Range’s lounge, The Breakfast Corral, only made for a nervous stomach and, because of all the donuts he was eating, a small red pimple on the tip of his nose. Every time Bayle touched his nose it hurt. Naturally, he couldn’t stop touching his nose.

  Solitary walks up and down Main in the afternoon heat generated nothing but sweated-through underwear and an apparent allergic reaction to the car fumes from the busy street. The pharmacist told him to use the eye drops three times a day and to quit going for walks outside. Hadn’t Bayle ever heard of a treadmill?

  And the extended baths he took at the conclusion of each day gave Bayle wrinkled fingers and toes but no important breakthroughs as to why he was so disinclined to become Dr. Bayle. He was disappointed but not really surprised. Patty had always been the reflective one.

  Bayle’s sister had had her enthusiasms; Bayle, His Place. Bayle-sized cardboard boxes as a toddler. An off-limits-to-everyone-but-Bayle tree fort in the backyard in the summer and snow fort in the winter as an adolescent. A makeshift “study” in the basement laundry room as a just-turned teen (a small, fake walnut desk and neat row of incomplete World Book Encyclopedias behind him sharing the tiny room with his mother’s washing machine and humming, three-speed dryer). Bayle in His Place was what Bayle liked best. A place, to be sure, of not intense self-scrutiny, but that wasn’t the point of His Place. Patty did enough of that for everyone. More than enough.

  Patty at age 7 would put on magic shows with the whole family for her audience and then mope around the house for days afterward because card tricks and find-the-peanut-under-the-shell games, no matter how successfully executed, were not nearly the same thing as sawing a lady in half and making thirty-two handkerchiefs of as many different colours emerge from your beautiful assistant’s mouth. Bayle at that age had liked to sit inside a cardboard box.

  But Bayle was running out of boxes to sit in. And runny eyes and a throbbing red nose were only a couple of the occupational hazards of a man without a box.

  17

  A CHANGE in the weather, if not the actual weather. Still hot and humid, the radio weatherman sorry to say he still couldn’t hold out any hope for relief from this unseasonably warm October, relief for Bayle, at least, in the form of the discovery of his thesis advisor’s fax, still stuck in his suit jacket pocket three days after his arrival in town.

  By Monday, two days later, Bayle hadn’t been in the least enticed to visit Larry’s, had been a good-boy journalist and forced himself to talk to as many strangers as was possible, and had generally attempted to behave like a conscientious correspondent should (staying sober, doing interviews, reading articles, taking notes, making a first draft for about the first third of the projected hockey piece). He wrote in the evening, in his room, on his bed, his laptop fittingly positioned on his lap. The writing went fairly easily, mostly just quotes, facts, and figures arranged in agreeably journalistic order, the occasion to work welcome if not entirely absorbing.

  Still, he persevered, an honest buzz of energy humming throughout his body and brain, the fax he’d taken to carrying with him everywhere pulled out and read over every time the informational banality it was his job to process bored him to temporary distraction or the sweltering five minute walk from The Range to the bus stop seemed as if it might liquify him down to nothing more than a messy puddle of blue jeans, suit jacket, and a few of his more basic elements.

  Remember the fax, Bayle thought. Help is on the way. Read the fax.

  Thomas Smith

  371 Huron Street

  University of Toronto

  Dept. of Philosophy

  #129

  16 October

  Bayle,

  Needless to say, the message you left on my voice mail at school about your little trip south was unexpected. No matter. Your propensity for unexpected vacations from your responsibilities are
, by now, getting to be almost expected, aren’t they? I hope this letter finds you and your hockey team mutually edifying.

  I’ve shown my friend Hunter at Saint Jerome’s College in Waterloo a draft of your thesis and he’s very interested. They have a tenure-track position in post-Plato Greek opening up and he would like to talk to you in person. They’ll have to advertise the job nationally and conduct interviews at APA in January, but it’s basically his decision as to who gets the job.

  I informed him that you will have defended your thesis by the end of the winter session. This was what we had agreed upon at our last meeting. But then again, who knows? These dates that we periodically set for your getting on with your career always seem to be more like interesting suggestions to you than actual deadlines, don’t they?

  Call Hunter now (519-396-6789) and have your thesis on my desk by courier no later than Friday next. Your oral is at ten a.m. at the School of Graduate Studies, November 14. We should meet in advance of then.

  Smith

  Waterloo ... Not Toronto, no, but not ... this, either, Bayle concluded, eyes moving from the framed singing-cowboys-at-the-campfire print hanging on the wall over his bed to the copy of today’s Eagle strewn across the wall-to-wall carpeted floor.

  And the admittedly blunt prospect of spending his working life teaching the intricacies of the syllogism and the cosmological argument to row after row of bored freshmen and serving on faculty committees set up to decide whether white or off-white wallpaper should cover the staff washroom walls? The very academic vapidness of spending all day talking about things he no longer burned bright to talk about? Yes, but not ... these, either, he also concluded, mind moving from his two most recent attempts at honest employment — overeducated proofreader and underqualified journalist — to the not entirely implausible notion of a committed colleague or two to goad him back into thinking about high-minded thinking.

  Waterloo also wasn’t much more than an hour’s drive from Toronto. The prospect of the fully employed and once again altogether purposeful Bayle spending his weekends back in the city not making philosophically sophomoric crank calls from the pay phone outside the filthy men’s room at Knott’s Place but, instead, being once again desirous of ploughing with regularity the once-again sated Jane was not an insubstantial cherry to be added to the already appetizing prospect that would be his return to the world of the happily engaged. As erotically anaemic over the last year as Jane had grown steadily impatient with his lack of between-the-sheets interest, Bayle looked forward to once again being a fully realized woman-pursuant maleman. Where his desire for performing his delivering duties had disappeared to he didn’t know, only that he wanted it back and that perhaps having a grown-up life to call his own might just be the thing to restore the thing that was keeping him from wanting to once again wield his Jane-seeking thing.

  That Bayle hadn’t even been able to manage an erection in more months than it pained him to remember allowed him to generously overlook the fact that putting him down in her date book for Wednesday and Friday night intercourse was just the sort of amorous automation on Jane’s part that at one time had begun to pique Bayle so very much. From where he was standing right now, Wednesday and Friday nights sounded just fine. Sign me up.

  Gingerly, Bayle fingered his recovering but still-red-scabbed knuckles. Waterloo, he thought. St. Jerome’s College. Professor Bayle.

  18

  “HEY, GANG!”

  “Theodore. How’s half of the best play-by-play team in the entire South Central Hockey League doing this evening?”

  “Just fine, Mr. Samson, just fine.”

  Game two of the Warriors’ young season found Bayle back in press box row, against what he considered his better interests slightly anxious watching for Davidson’s arrival. Warm-up was already over, the zamboni beginning its final pre-game circling of the ice.

  “I can only stay a minute, we’re on a station break, pregame stuff, but I just wanted to see if we’re going to have a special guest in the broadcast booth tonight.” Able cut his eyes hopefully Bayle’s way.

  “What a wonderful idea,” Samson said. “Get the boy right in on the action and away from us old fuddie-duddies.”

  As if on cue, the peak of Davidson’s felt hat could be spotted coming up the arena steps. He carried his customary can of Coke and computerized tools of the trade, but looked even more sotted-slow than usual, the methodical steps of before seeming almost cautionary this time. Eventually managing to make it to row fifteen, he collapsed himself onto the nearest stool behind the press box.

  Stationary at last, Davidson took a deep breath, exhaled. Blankly staring over the ice surface he slowly wetted his bloodless lips several times, weakly popping open the top on his Coke can, the long fizzle of escaping carbonation his only explanation for his sorry-looking state.

  “Well,” Able said, breaking the silence, “if you’re game, Petey, we really should be getting a move on. Bob tends to get a little antsy when I’m late coming back from a commercial.”

  Bayle stood up but didn’t move from his spot. Staring at the end of the press box counter at the still catatonic and pasty-faced Davidson, “Is he going to be all right, you think?” he said.

  “Oh, I’ll be sure to keep a careful eye on Mr. Davidson, Mr. Bayle,” Samson said. “You and Theodore run along now and enjoy yourselves.”

  Bayle nodded, slowly gathering up his laptop and pages of notes, yet still staying where he stood. He continued to watch the feebly sipping and staring Davidson.

  “Mr. Samson’s right, Petey,” Able said, “we should already be up in the booth by now.”

  “I guess,” Bayle said.

  “That’s the spirit. Grab your stuff and follow me. You’re going to just love the view we’ve got up there.”

  “And I do the play-by-play and the Bobster here handles the colour end of things and that’s about that. This is our fifth year working together for the Warriors and no one’s caught on to us yet, have they Bob?”

  “A minute and a half to air.”

  “Bob gets the signals from Doris back at the station about commercials and the like. He’s the technical brains of the partnership.”

  Bayle sat between Able and Munson in the small broadcast booth overlooking the Bunton Center ice surface. The fit was a little bit tight and the company less than ideal, but he was determined to keep his mind on the journalistic job at hand.

  “But to answer your question,” Able said, “to tell you the truth, no. I did football for more years than I want to admit up at the state college — just I-AA stuff, you understand, but it looks good on the old résumé, you know. And Bob and I did boys basketball at the junior college in town for, oh, how long would you say we worked those Cougar games, Bob?”

  “One minute.”

  “So neither of us did any hockey before we started up with the Warriors. I can’t speak for Bob, but I’d never even seen a hockey game in person until I called my first one, an exhibition game against Oklahoma back in ’92. We did a few practice broadcasts working from NHL games on cable, but let me tell you, it was nothing like calling the real thing. Let’s just say that the tapes from those first couple games are never going to see the light of day, if you know what I mean.”

  “Fifteen seconds to air.”

  “Excuse me while I put this thing on,” Able said. He pulled on a bulky black headset identical to the one Munson was already wearing and clicked a couple of silver switches on the lighted control board in front of him to the ON position. “But, hey, when you get right down to it, it’s really not that different, is it?”

  “Five seconds.”

  “At least that’s what I tell myself everytime I go on the air: It’s really all the same game.”

  “We’re on,” Munson said.

  Good evening, everybody, this is Ted Able. Greetings from the beautiful Bunton Center and welcome to the second game of the Warriors’ march towards their first South Central Hockey League championship. Tonig
ht’s opponent is the Tulsa Tumblers, last year’s champs, and it looks like we’ve got a good one for you tonight, gang. As I said before the Wichita game a few nights ago, Bob Munson and I are just thrilled to be back for another year of fast-paced, hard-hitting Warrior hockey and we hope you’ll be with us every step of the way. But before we get to tonight’s starting lineups, the Warriors would like to thank the following sponsors of Warrior hockey: McNally’s Home Furnishings, J.P. Brown Tailoring, Fatty’s Burgers, Sanderson Pharmacy, Burger King, Sparky Jensen Motors, The Sandwich Shop, Sassy New You Boutique, Esposito’s Chain of Fine Family Restaurants, Southside Towing, The Men’s Corner, Wal-Mart, Anderson’s Gag Emporium, The Church of the Holy Redeemer, Waigle Liquor, The Sound Shop, Yarn N’ Stuff, Coca-Cola, Boone Chiropractic, Elson Landscaping, Billie Joe-Bob’s Barbecue and Ribs, You’re Safe Storage, Rankin Insurance, The Muffler Guy, B.J.’s School of Dance, Jack Gibson — Attorney at Law, Tuxedo Junction, Whitby Flowers, Watson Hearing Aids, Franklin Air Conditioning and Heating Repair, Judd Trust, Windsor Apartments, Donuts Galore, Westfall Construction, Noyes Boys Mobile Homes, G.M. Trucks, Jeanie’s Houseware, and Big Jim’s Pawnshop. The Warriors would also like to give a very special thank you to the following Warrior boosters: CDH Security Services: we’re not selling protection, we’re selling peace of mind; Simpson Audio and Video Rentals: buy it or rent it, just make sure you get it from Simpson’s; Happy Day Cable: Happy Day cable for all your cable needs; Bunton Family Grocery Stores, where freshness is next to Godliness; and radio station WUUS, the voice of America’s heartland, featuring the I.M. Wright show every weekday from two until five. We’ll be right back, gang, right after these important commercial messages.

  “We’re off,” Munson said.

  “Yes, sir, Petey,” Able said, taking off his headset, wiping clean the lenses of his glasses with a pocket-produced tissue, “when you get right down to it, it’s all really the same game, isn’t it?