The Guardians

by Andrew Pyper

  The coach wore wire-frame glasses, Hush Puppies, hid a receding hairline under a wool cap on game days.

  He looked more like an English teacher—which he in fact was between nine and three thirty, Monday to Friday—than a leader of anything more athletic than the chess club. But his rumpled-scholar appearance was both who he really was and a disguise. We all got him wrong at first, which was how he wanted it. We were always getting him wrong. And then, out of the blue, he would say or show something that struck us as so essential and unguarded and true we became his. We believed. We wanted more of that.

  The league's other coaches considered our success a freakish series of flukes. It wasn't any tactics or motivation our coach brought to the dressing room that lifted us to the top of the standings. How could it be? He didn't look like a hockey man. He didn't even swear.

  They got him wrong too.

  But what was it to get him right?

  We knew he was married. Childless. Moved to Grimshaw five years earlier from Toronto. There were questions we had about him. Not creepy suspicions (of the sort we had about Mr. Krueger, for instance, the knee- patting driver's ed. instructor), just a handful of missing links in what we could gather about his story- Information that might explain why, beneath the coach's calm surface, we could sense something being held down, a muffled second voice. It might have been anger. Or a sadness too unwieldy to be allowed free run within him. There was, we sensed, something he might be helped with.

  But he was the one who helped us. Our guardian. It was hard to see how this could ever be the other way around.

  Our school hired a new music teacher at the beginning of our grade eleven year. Mr. Asworth, the old music teacher, had left over the summer. (Yes, we had much obvious fun with his name, as in "Hey, what's his Ass-worth?" whispered between us as we filed out at the end of class, an insult he seemed to think he deserved, given the way he pretended not to hear.)

  Naturally, we'd tormented him. Makeout sessions in the drum-kit storage room, blowing cigarette smoke out of the tuba, snapping Melissa Conroy's bra until a red line was blazing across her freckled back. And as for Asworth teaching us to play music? His attempts to coax a melody out of Carl's flatulent trombone or get Randy to stop ringing the triangle and hollering "Come 'n' get it!" in the middle of "The Maple Leaf Forever" met with nothing but cacophonous failure.

  Asworth's replacement, Miss Langham, was a different story.

  In her presence we called her only Miss, but between us (and in our dreams) she was always Heather. At twenty-three, the youngest teacher at Grimshaw Collegiate by a decade. Long, chestnut hair we imagined slipping a hand through to touch the solitary mole on her throat. Green eyes, at once mirthful and encouraging. Tall but unstooped, unlike some of the senior basketball girls when they walked the halls, ashamed of their commanding physicality. Until Miss Langham arrived to teach us a surprisingly moving brass-band version of Pachelbel's Canon, we had witnessed only prettiness, tomboys, the promise of farmer-daughter curves. But Miss Langham exceeded any previous entry in our schoolboys' catalogue of feminine assets. We had no name for it then, and I hardly know what to call it now. Grace, I suppose.

  I believe I can say as well that we were all instantly in love with her. Desire was part of it, yes. But what we really wanted was to rescue her one day. Show her our as yet unappreciated worth. Grow into gentlemen before her very eyes.

  Sometimes, after school, we would head up to Ben's bedroom, gather at his window and wait to watch her go by. She was renting a room at the nurses' residence up the hill on the hospital grounds ("No Male Visitors After 8 P.M.," a sign at the door declared). Most days she would take Caledonia Street, advancing with long strides up its slope, a leather satchel bumping against her hip. Alone.

  When I think of the Thurman house now, what comes to mind isn't a horrific image or stab of guilt. Not at first. What I see before any of that is Miss Langham walking home along the sidewalk past its brooding facade. A juxtaposition of youth and poise against its clutching shadows. Her sure step, the hint of smile she wore even when no one was coming the other way to wish good day to. Heather Langham was all future. And the house possessed only the wet rot, the foul longing of the past.

  This is how I try to hold her in place as long as I can, before the other pictures force their way through: Miss Langham clipping past Grimshaw's darkest place. It was, for all the moment's simplicity, an act of subtle defiance. We never saw her cross the street to pass it at a safer distance, as we ourselves did. In fact, she seemed oblivious to the house altogether. A refusal to acknowledge the rudeness of its stare.

  But in this, of course, was the suggestion that she knew she was being watched. She was a woman already well used to being looked at. Usually, this looking inspired admiration and yearning in the observer. But we could sense that the Thurman house—or the idea of whatever inhuman thing lived in it—instead felt only bitterness. A reminder of its place in death and hers so vividly in life.

  * * *

  [3]

  There are moments when the tremors disappear all on their own. Whole chunks of time when my body and I are reunited, warring soldiers clinking tin mugs over a Christmas ceasefire. I'll be looking out the window, and the hands that had been squeaking against the glass will be calmed. Or now Sitting on the milk run to Grimshaw, the train starting away from the platform with a lurch, my heart giving enlarging shape to Randy's announcement of the end of things: Ben's dead, Trev. As we pick up speed, I can feel the closing distance between myself and the past, an oncoming collision my newspaper-reading and text-messaging fellow passengers are unaware of. And yet, I am still. Silently weeping into the sleeve of my jacket but physically in control, my limbs awaiting their orders.

  You can't help anyone, a voice suggests within me. You can't help yourself. Why not do what Ben did while you're still able?

  Not my voice, though it's instantly familiar. A voice I haven't heard in twenty-four years.

  The train rolls out from under the covered platform and the city is there, the glass towers firing off shards of sunlight in a farewell salute. All at once, I'm certain I will never come back. I escaped something in Grimshaw once. But it won't let me go a second time.

  Ticket, please, the voice says, laughing.

  "Ticket, please," the conductor tries again.

  It was thought, when they built the four lanes running west between Toronto and the border at Detroit a couple years before I was born, that the highway's proximity to Grimshaw would lend new purpose to what was before then not much other than a service town for the county's farmers. But there was no more reason to take the Grimshaw exit than there had previously been to limp in its direction on the old, rutted two-lane. Like many of the communities its size on the broad arrowhead of farmland stuck between the Great Lakes, it remained a forgotten place. Never industrial enough to be outright abandoned in the way of the ghost towns of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, but not alert enough to attempt re-invention. Grimshaw was content to merely hang on, to take a subdued pride in its century homes on tree-lined streets, the stained facades of its Victorian storefronts, its daughters or sons who met with success upon moving away. Now, entering it as a stranger, one might see a gothic charm in the wilful oldness of the place, its loyalty to the vine-covered, the paint-peeled. But for those who grew up here, it was only as it had always been.

  There are times of the year when certain places seem to be themselves more than any other time. Springtime in Paris, Christmas in New York. Toronto frozen at Valentine's. Even before the bad things happened, I saw Grimshaw as a Halloween town. Sparsely streetlit, thickly treed. The houses never grand but large, built at a time that favoured rear staircases, widow's-peaked attics, so that they all had their own secret hiding places. Founded by Scots Presbyterians and consistently conservative in the backbenchers it sent to Parliament, Grimshaw had little sympathy for the mystical. Any mention of the supernatural was considered nothing more than foolishness, the side effe
cts of too many matinees indulged at the Vogue. Ghosts? "Catholic voodoo," as my father put it.

  Yet at the same time, it was its dour Protestant character that endeared its inhabitants to the everyday tragic, to the stories of broken lives and cruel, inexplicable fate. For our parents, the dead lived on, but only in dinner-table and church-tea tales of misfortune.

  Grimshaw's adults could never see their home as haunted. Their children, on the other hand, had no choice.

  The train slows as we approach the town limits. The hardened fields yield to weedy outskirts, the low-rent acres of half-hearted development: the trailer park, the go-kart track, the drive-in movie screen with "See U Next Summer!" on the marquee (a promise that, by the vandalized look of things, has not been kept for a dozen years or more). Then the more permanent claims. Shaggy backyards crisscrossed with laundry lines. A school with paper witches taped to the windows. Dumpsters left open- mouthed, choking on black plastic.

  Within a minute, we are rolling into the old part of town at a walking pace. It gives us a chance to study the Inventory Blowout! offerings at what used to be Krazy Kevin's car lot, where Randy's dad worked, to catch a whiff of the fumes rising from the Erie Burger's exhaust. There is even a welcome party of sorts. Three kids smoking against the wall of the station, giving us the finger.

  When the train stops I am alone in getting to my feet, hauling my bag off the rack and stepping down onto the platform. The cars already moving again, easing into the west end of town, where they will pass the high school, the courthouse before speeding out onto the tobacco flats. All places I'd rather view through double-paned glass. But now I'm here. The Grimshaw air. The midday moon staring down, bug-eyed and bored.

  A gust blows a Big Gulp cup against my leg. Dust devils swirl over the platform, and within them, the laughing voice again.

  Welcome home.

  * * *

  MEMORY DIARY

  Entry No. 4

  Randy was Howdy Doody-freckled, knob-elbowed and goofy-haired, but girls liked him. It was hard to know precisely what charms he possessed that got him into perfumed back seats and onto darkened basement futons more frequently than the rest of us. The easy answer would be his "sense of humour," which was how most of the girls who came and went, unblamingly, through Randy's teens would have explained it. But I'm not so sure. Yes, Randy was funny. But he was more of a joke than a comedian. Someone to be next to and feel that here was a fellow who needn't be taken seriously. I think this is what girls saw in Randy, and still do. He made the idea of two people being with each other for a time so much simpler than it was with anyone else.

  Take Carl, for instance. Girls liked him too. In his case, it was a combination of good looks and a reluctance to speak that was often mistaken for an air of mystery. But Carl was restless. For him, female affection was something to gorge on, swiftly and roughly, then leave behind without clearing his plate. His habit was to break up with his girlfriends without telling them, refusing to return their calls or meet their eyes in the school hallways. Unlike Randy, Carl made girls cry.

  Ben, on the other hand, mostly did without. Not that there weren't sideways opportunities offered to him. Quieter girls, too studious or artsy to attract more aggressive attention. Instead, they made themselves available to Ben (in camouflaged ways), and he went about his business. And what was Ben's business? Living in his head. Reading dragon and time-travel novels. He wrote poetry. Stranger still, he read poetry.

  But what Ben did more than anything else was watch. Our backup goalie, following the play from the bench like a shoulder-padded Buddha. A silhouette in his attic bedroom, staring at the house across from his.

  Of the four of us, I was the "married man." Funny to think how true this was at the time. And how, for the more than twenty years since I last saw Sarah Mulgrave, I've been about as far from married as a man can get.

  The obvious explanation for this would be the Thurman house. It messed all of us up in different ways.

  Addiction. Professional failure. Emotional amputations. For me, it was never being able to love—or be loved by—a woman again.

  Personally, I favour an even more sentimental explanation: Sarah was meant to be mine. And the wound I am to bear is to have had her taken from me.

  Even today, I whisper "Sarah Mulgrave" and she is with me. A wrinkled nose when she laughed. Hair the colour of a new penny. A mouth that articulated as much when listening as when speaking: sharply etched, blushed lips, amused creases at the corners. And green eyes. Lovely in their colour but lovelier in what they promised.

  Sarah came to all the Guardians games, and though this earned her inclusion among the "puck bunnies" who fawned over Carl and the older guys on the team, the fact is she had little interest in sports. She would never have shown up to sit at the top of the stands, clutching a hot chocolate beneath the maniacal, hockey- stick-munching beaver of the Akins Lumber billboard, were it not to shout for number 12. Me.

  Afterward, if my dad wasn't using the car, I would drive her home. The last of the wood-panelled Buick wagons. Hideous but handy. Because on those evenings we would take a spin out of town. Spook ourselves by switching the headlights off and flying over the night roads. Knowing that no harm could come to us because we were young—not children anymore, but still immune to what grimly went by the name of the

  Real World. The car hurtling into darkness. A foreplay of screams.

  We would slow only once we passed the "Welcome to the Village of Harmony" sign. Park in an orchard of black walnut trees. The pulsing silence of a killed engine.

  It was often cold out. But the shared heat of our skin fought off the chill until we lay side by side, our breath visible exclamations against the windows. My dad would take measurements of the gas he left in the tank, so in heating the car, we had to weigh the risk of discovery against the fear of frostbite. The result was sporadic, short hits of warmth from the front vents. To avoid getting up and baring my ass to those who might drive by, I learned to turn the keys in the ignition with my toes.

  Sarah's dad was friendly but strict. He liked me, and was even prepared to look the other way when his daughter was returned home an hour past curfew, her cheeks flushed, smelling faintly of cherry brandy. But the unspoken deal between us was that he was permitting these liberties on the condition that, sooner rather than later, I would propose to Sarah. He married Sarah's mom when they were both only a couple of years older than we were then. Teen weddings in Grimshaw were far from uncommon. Many kids knew what their professional lives were going to be by that time, the house they would one day inherit. What was the point in waiting?

  It was a plan I was happy to entertain myself. I had no sense, as Carl and Randy had (and maybe Ben too, though who could tell?), that we were too young to judge who was right for us, that more sophisticated, realized women awaited us in our post-Grimshaw lives. There was nothing I could imagine wanting beyond Sarah anyway. I would marry her, just as her father wished. Why not? Sarah and I would look out for each other and let our lives, long and benign, wash over us.

  And I would give my right arm (for what it's shakily worth) to know how that life would have turned out. Sarah could have waitressed, I could have found work on a construction crew or factory floor. We would have had our own apartment, something on the second floor over a shoe store or laundromat, the bedroom in the back. Just the two of us (the three? the four?), getting along fine without a coach or Heather Langham or friends I felt I should be ready to die for. Without a Thurman house.

  For that, go ahead. Take both arms.

  * * *

  [4]

  My room smells of ammonia and wet dog.

  I'm on the top floor—the third—of the Queen's Hotel. A brick cube whose one gesture toward grandeur, a tin cupola over the corner suite, had over the decades been painted with coats of blue and yellow and green that wouldn't stick, so that these days it appears psychedelically polka-dotted. Other than a couple of motels on the edge of town—the inexplicably in
ternational Swiss Cottage and Golden Gate—the Queen's is the only place to stay in Grimshaw. For this reason alone, it enjoyed a reputation for fanciness that was never deserved. Though there were sporadic efforts to renovate its rooms or hire a "French chef" to pour sherry and cream over the menu, eventually the Queen's always returned to its fatigued self

  I open the window that looks out over Ontario Street and breathe. Grimshaw is a farming town, and in the summer and fall there is always a breeze carrying the perfume of cow manure to remind you of the fact. Not to mention the afternoon traffic of eighteen-wheelers hauling livestock to slaughter. Pig snouts and cattle tails and chicken feathers poking through the slats of passing trailers. As a kid, I felt that only the pigs knew what was coming. Watching them now, the pink nostrils flaring, I feel the same thing.

  I lie down on the bed for a time. I must have, because when there's a knock at the door, that's where I am.

  "Who is it?"

  "Wayne Gretzky. Team Canada needs you, son."

  I open the door and Randy is standing there. And while I am almost light-headed with happiness to see him, I have, at first, an even more overwhelming thought.

  Good God, you look old.

  And then, after a glimpse of ourselves in the hall mirror: We both do. The indoor skin, the lines of shoulder and chin grown soft. Randy and I look as though some internal dimmer switch has been lowered, pulling us into partial shadow.

  What the hell happened?

  The worst part is we know the answer.