Heroes

by Ray Robertson

  Once, in the middle of an incredibly exciting four-goal third period outburst that put the Leafs ahead to stay against arch enemy Detroit, Bayle got up to dance around the T.V. and generally whoop it up only to look up and see tears running down his mother’s face. Bayle froze in mid-celebration.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Peter, I’m all right,” his mother said, balled fist almost immediately taking care of the uncommon tears, a tender smile taking their place. “I just couldn’t help but see your father in you just now. That’s what he used to do all the time, you know. Look at me so happy and proud when Toronto would score. Sometimes his yelling when they’d finally get one would test my nerves, I won’t lie to you about that, I don’t mind telling you that now. But he would look so happy. Just like a happy little boy. Just the way you looked just now.”

  That Bayle, in the absence of his impounded own, had been wearing his father’s clothes ever since he’d gotten out of the hospital — blue and brown cotton work shirts and pants, all carted in from the garage by his mother and laid out on his bed waiting for him the day he arrived home — only made him more uncomfortable with his mother’s rare show of emotion. He didn’t have to worry.

  “Don’t forget about those butter tarts I put in the freezer this afternoon,” his mother said, dried eyes already back on her puzzle book. “Just pop a couple of them in the microwave for thirty seconds or so and put a scoop of ice cream on top afterwards if you want. I don’t care what Dr. McKay says, I say you’re still a little underweight.”

  Bayle relaxed, looked at his mother. “You must miss Dad a lot, don’t you, Mum?”

  His mother just kept looking intently at her book.

  “Hey, Mum, I said, ’You must —’”

  “Ah ha!” she said. “Found you, you little sneaky Sam!” His mother had discovered the hidden word she’d been searching for. Pleased with herself, she grinned and circled.

  Bayle smiled. “Maybe I will have a couple of those butter tarts,” he said.

  “Have as many as you want, dear, that’s what I made them for,” his mother said. “They don’t do any good just sitting there in the freezer.”

  Bayle looked back at the television just in time to see the Maple Leafs congratulating each other at game’s end on their come-from-behind victory.

  “These Leafs aren’t going to go down without a fight, Harry,” Bob Cole said to colour man Harry Neale.

  “It sure doesn’t look like it, Bob,” Harry said. “As long as there’s an ounce of hope left in these young fellas, you can bet they’re going to give it everything they’ve got.”

  44

  AND THE black-and-white movies and the music videos started to get old real quick and Bayle began puttering around the house, growing even more bored in the process, getting under his mother’s feet all the while. When the secretary from the philosophy department called to ask him to please clean out the small office he’d been assigned as a teaching assistant he felt relieved at having another reason besides his mother pleading with him to get out of the house for the first time in almost two months.

  The subway ride downtown; the walk from the station to the philosophy building in the nippy afternoon air; the oh-so-serious and oh-so-beautiful-for-it undergraduate girls going in and coming out of the library in their heavy sweaters and faded jeans with not one smile for all the men instantly falling in love with them (and them all the more beautiful for it): it felt good to get out. Admittedly a little awkward at first — the man at the subway station having to pound on the glass to remind Bayle to put his ticket in the cashbox — but good. Good for no good reason. Bayle wondered if this was how people who claimed to be happy all the time did it.

  Five seconds inside his tiny office and he knew he wouldn’t need a moving van. He’d never kept any of his books here, and nothing even remotely personal like photographs or a print or a poster disturbed the bare white walls. What there was was lots and lots of paper covering his desk and virtually everything else in the room. He considered the paper blizzard only briefly; left and came right back with the blue recycling box from the secretary’s office and swept every surface clean and emptied every desk drawer with real passion. When the box could take no more he hauled it down the hall and dumped it in the big plastic recycling bin the janitors used and came back for more. Done, no trace of him left anywhere in the room, he didn’t even take a last look, just flicked off the light and locked the door behind him.

  Returning the recycling box and key to the secretary’s office, he almost slammed right into Smith coming out with his mail.

  “Bayle,” Smith said, looking up from his handful of letters.

  “Smith.”

  They stood there in the doorway not knowing what to say until an anxious existentialist needed to get by. They stepped out into the hall.

  “I was just ....” Bayle held up the bin and the key to his office.

  “Right. So the new crop can move in. Actually, I just the other day met a new Ph.D candidate for the fall down here all the way from Colorado, Jeffery something or other. He’s thinking of having a go with the Hellenistic period, your old stomping grounds. I think it’s quite possible he might do some very interesting work.”

  “That’s great,” Bayle said.

  “Yes,” Smith said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I better get this stuff back before they think I’ve run off with it,” Bayle said.

  “Right. All right, then, Bayle.” Smith and Bayle shook hands. Smith walked down the hall to his own office and Bayle returned the bin and key to the secretary.

  A couple of minutes later, as Bayle waited for the elevator, Smith came back down the hallway with his unopened mail still in his hand.

  “I just have to know this one thing, Bayle,” he said. “I’ve thought about this and thought about this and I simply have to know.” The elevator arrived and slowly opened.

  “Okay,” Bayle said.

  “If you weren’t going to meet Hunter — if you knew you weren’t going to meet him — why didn’t you at least call to let him know? Or even call later and give him an excuse why you didn’t show. It’s simply not feasible to me that you didn’t realize how difficult if not downright impossible it was going to be for you to get a decent job in this country after literally standing up a man of his reputation.”

  Bayle stepped into the elevator and faced Smith. “I’ll answer your question,” he said, “if you answer mine.”

  Smith seemed slightly taken aback. “All right,” he said. “What?”

  “Why does an atheist keep a cross hanging up in his bathroom?”

  Smith stood silent for a few seconds. “Is this some kind of joke?” he said. “What are you looking for, Bayle, a punchline? My question was sincere.”

  “So was mine,” Bayle said.

  Bayle pushed GROUND, waved to Smith a final goodbye, and the elevator doors closed tight.

  Home, his mother had left his mail out for him on the kitchen table, two letters and a large manila envelope, quite a haul considering he hadn’t told anyone where he was. The kitchen was oven-warm. Bayle guessed meatloaf.

  Two of the items he couldn’t even be bothered to open. The latest envelope from the offices of Johnson, Johnson, and Bailey went right into the garbage pail under the sink. The letter from the government he didn’t even want to guess. The last, however, appeared to be an actual letter from an actual person, Bayle’s name and the address of the U of T philosophy department printed in careful, childlike script, the word CANADA in blocks and underlined twice. He checked the postage and saw that it was postmarked Kansas City, KS, NEXT DAY DELIVERY, and had been forwarded to his mother’s house by the school.

  Dear Bayle,

  Harry is dead. He died this morning. After you left he never got better like I thought he would. The doctors said Harry died of I forget the exact name but a hemmorage the main idea. All the other things that were wrong with him that they never figured out just got
worse and helped make way for the hemmorage they said. The doctor says he couldn’t have felt much and we all kind of saw it coming. My mother used to say the only thing a person can wish for in this life is to die in their sleep so I guess there is that

  After they announced the team was moving and all the people that were going to lose their jobs it’s like a cementary around here. Oh well not my problem anymore because I’m leaving for Macon, Georgia, as soon as the last game is over this Saturday night and I’m all done as the Warrior. A cousin whose got a restaruant down there says 1 can help out until I get something somewhere else. Who knows? You wont believe this but they’ve got a hockey team down there now called the Macon Whoopi. Maybe I’ll be their mascot next year. Ha ha.

  I guess you wouldn’t know but right after Duceeder got bail the case against him for the cocaine got thrown out because of something to do with the police and illegal entry or something else his lawyer cooked up and he got let off. Which means you and that peppermint tin you were so worried about is off the hook now. But Davidson did get fired by the team and him and his family moved away from town and that’s better than nothing I guess. Samson in the Eagle said something about the Warriors being a family business and them having to keep up the team’s image.

  I wanted you to know about Harry and to let you know we are going to bury him four days from now on Saturday. Harry has some cousins and an aunt up in Alberta and I’m hoping by waiting they can get here. I guess I could have called your school to try and talk to you but I know you probably cant come all the way down here. But I thought I should send this letter because I know Harry would have wanted you to know. Harry liked you Bayle. He said you were all right. And Harry doesn’t say that about too many people I bet you know that.

  Take care of yourself and don’t worry if you cant make it. But I thought you should know.

  Yours truly,

  Gloria

  Bayle put the letter back in its envelope and then in the pocket of his workshirt. He called to his mother in the livingroom that he was going out for a walk.

  “Make it a short walk,” she said. “That meatloaf is only about thirty minutes away from being ready.”

  Like most Etobicoke homes, Bayle’s parents’ house wasn’t so much a part of a neighbourhood where one could, as Bayle later learned to love to do in Toronto, walk for wonderfully distracted hours with an always-changing cityscape scrolling by, as it was simply one of several houses that formed a street which in turn formed part of a block. The schools where the children went; the variety stores where the adults bought their cigarettes and lottery tickets; the sports bars that had the satellite dishes: all meant getting on a bus or driving your car. Unless one wanted to walk the forty-minute walk along the busy road that all the traffic had to travel on in order to get to the stores and subway station in downtown Etobicoke, it wasn’t possible to do anything but take a short walk up and down one’s own street past all the identical houses or, maybe for a little variety, the virtually indistinguishable street two or three over. But there was the hydro-electrical field.

  Ten minutes from Bayle’s parents’ house there was a large, overgrown field, almost a quarter acre of knee-high grass and weeds, out of which grew eleven hydro-electrical towers. Eleven mighty steel oaks with thick twisting cables connecting them all at their tops according to some unfathomable system of hydro-electrical science. No one, not even Bayle’s Ontario Hydro-employed father, knew exactly how the towers did what they did, but everyone knew that the hydro towers were somehow responsible for keeping their part of Etobicoke pulsing alive. And everyone knew that you were supposed to stay away from them.

  But for all the strong warnings Bayle and Patty and all the other children on the block were given as soon as they were old enough to understand the danger of playing near the towers, there wasn’t anything like a ten-foot-high brick wall or a barbed wire fence to keep them out. Only a modest, five-foot high version with a rusty padlocked gate. It wasn’t as good as having somewhere nice to walk to or anything to do like a nearby park or playground, but the high grass that hid them and the simple fact that they weren’t supposed to be there made the hydro field a veritable place of rite of passage for every child who grew up in its shadow. Bayle and Patty were no different.

  Bayle was initiated into the secret, just-turned-teen joys of poring over somebody’s father’s copy of Playboy and smoking your first cigarette in the camouflage of the tall grass by a gang of local boys led up by a fat bossy older kid everyone called “Skipper.” And conscientious big brother that he was, Bayle did the same for his sister, although loner Patty’s tastes ran more toward solitary afternoon Dunhills while working her way through a fat summer stack of paperback novels.

  As far as Bayle and all the other kids knew, no one ever came even close to getting injured in the field. Many long summer afternoons, in fact, were spent lounging in the grass smoking and idly wondering how someone actually could get hurt. There were no hanging wires to touch. And the towers themselves weren’t going to fall down on you. Everyone always agreed that the only way anyone could possibly harm themselves was by climbing up one of the flatsided smooth steel towers — not impossible, but a fairly impressive athletic feat all the same — and literally putting their hand against one of the exposed, curling electrical coils and waiting there suspended for a charge to come. And like anybody’s going to do that. As if.

  Inevitably, with the beckoning of high school, the summer shelter of the hydro field got left behind in a cherry Kool-Aid mist, right there along with Pixi-Sticks and hockey cards and Saturday night sleep-overs. Hanging out in somebody’s car, sharing a case of beer at a house party, going downtown to Toronto — that’s what a real Etobicoke teenager did. But never being one to do what was she was supposed to do, Patty never entirely quit the field. And even if her solo meditations there were occasionally compromised by a new generation of shrieking first-time smokers and porno-readers, Bayle always knew where to find his sister if she wasn’t in her room listening to music or reading up on a recent enthusiasm.

  The day after Bayle went out to his parents’ house at his mother’s insistence and Patty refused to see him, his mother called him up again, this time in a panic because she hadn’t seen Patty all day, didn’t know where she was, couldn’t find her anywhere. She’d found Patty’s bedroom door wide open late that afternoon for the first time in over a week, but without a note or anything saying where she’d gone.

  His mother had checked out all the places she might have been in Etobicoke — the local library branch, the little greasy spoon she sometimes liked to linger over a plate of fries at and read, the repertory movie theatre — but no, nothing. Had Patty called him? his mother wanted to know. Was there someplace in Toronto she might be that his mother should look? Should she call the police? And all this, his mother said, after Dr. McKay, their family doctor, had been good enough to agree and squeeze her into his busy schedule tomorrow morning to see if he could try and figure out what might be wrong with her.

  “Don’t go anywhere else or call anybody until I get there,” Bayle said.

  Downtown, from the St. George subway stop, west, to the Royal York station. From there, usually no more than a fiveminute wait for a bus that took you to the stop closest to Bayle’s parents’ house. Or, the bus stop before, near the hydro field.

  The grey steel towers looked like some giant child’s tinker toy set in the soft yellow glow of the after-dinner setting sun. Bayle pulled the buzzer and stood up without knowing he was going to get off until he did.

  He hopped the fence of the field for the first time in years and worried he might rip his pants or worse. But the motion going over came right back to him. The field was only cut once each summer and was almost chest high now, mosquitos and little buzzing black things passing in front of Bayle’s nose and eyes, circling around his head. He kept his eyes directly in front of him, on the grass and weeds falling underneath his steps. He kept his head down.

  All he h
ad to do was shut her eyes and gently close her mouth and it was Patty. He picked up the copy of Pascal’s Pensees lying beside her and opened it up to its only paperclipped page and read the highlighted and starred line.

  What must I do? I see nothing but obscurity on every side.

  Bayle hurled the book as far as he could. Heard it disappear in the tall grass with a soft settling swoosh.

  Later, after the chaos of his mother and the ambulance and the police and the gawking neighbours, in the middle of the night in his housecoat and slippers and armed with a flashlight and a bottle of Canadian Club, Bayle was determined to find the flung Pascal. He looked for hours, over and over swiping the beam of the flashlight through the grass and weeds of the field until he got so tired and drunk he had to sit down and take a rest. When he woke up near dawn in the dew-soaked field, every inch of his flesh exposed to the night and the mosquitos had turned into a red pulpy mess.

  When Bayle’s mother heard him come in the front door back from his walk she called out from the kitchen for him to wash up because it was almost time for dinner. Bayle answered back that he’d be there in a minute and not to set the table, he’d do it, but there was something else he had to do first.

  Not much from the night of over three months before when he’d ended up on his mother’s front step remained clear, but her shock at seeing him dragging Patty’s Union Jack behind him through the door being almost as great as her distress over his disorderly and obviously ailing state Bayle remembered almost perfectly. Also, before peeling off his wet clothes and while his mother prepared a scalding hot tub and pot of tea, where he’d put the flag.