The Guardians

by Andrew Pyper

  "It didn't happen that way," he said. "Or not exactly that way."

  "How would you know?"

  "Because when I saw her, she was alive."

  That's when we all went ape shit. Demanding to know why he hadn't told us this sooner, how he could know anything from a dream.

  "You never said it was Heather when you told me in music class," I said.

  "I didn't know then."

  "When I know something, I know it."

  "I'm happy for you, Trev."

  "Okay. Back up. This monster—"

  "I never called it that."

  "Fine. This not-a-tree-but-looks-like-one has someone in its arms. Heather. And she's trying to get away."

  "I just said I could tell she was alive."

  "For fuck's sake," Carl said.

  "I'll second that," Randy said.

  "Ben? Ben?" I moved from where I was sitting to stick my face in his line of sight. "Just tell us what you saw."

  Ben's nasty feet. The toes curled up, trying to hide.

  "A man—what I suppose could only be a man—had Miss Langham in his arms last night," Ben said. "Her eyes were open. Like she couldn't believe whatever was happening was actually happening."

  He took in a breath, and we thought he was readying for more. But he just exhaled it all wordlessly out again.

  "That it?"

  "Pretty much."

  "Is it or isn't it?"

  "None of this matters."

  "Why not?"

  "Because if she's still alive, I'm not sure how much longer she's going to be."

  I came in even closer to him. "Where is she?"

  Ben pointed out the window. Not up into the sky where the snow was illuminated by the orange streetlight but down, at what stood across the street. We knew what was there without looking. We looked anyway.

  For a long time, none of us said anything.

  Not true. Ben was murmuring something, the same thing, the whole time.

  "I don't know ... I don't know ... I don't know ..."

  "What don't you know, oh wise one? Oh great seer of visions?" I said, hoping it might come out funny. It didn't.

  "I don't know," he said for the last time. "But I think it was the coach."

  * * *

  [5]

  Randy pushes open the door to Jake's Pool 'n' Sports. Though I've never been in the place before, I immediately know I'm home. My grey overcoat and polished Oxfords might mark me as an outsider among the early-bird clientele, the hockey-jerseyed, puffy-faced men who line the bar, frowning up at the flatscreens showing highlights from last night's game, but that's who I would have been had I stayed. Who I am still, even after all the time away.

  We remain marked, we small-towners dressed in what, as Randy and I walk into Jake's, feels instantly like borrowed city- slicker duds. Beneath the camouflage, all of us in this room are branded by shared experience and ritual as indelibly as members of a religion who are alone in understanding its rules and expectations. I've noticed over the years how we recognize each other among strangers: something draws me to those who have grown up in a Grimshaw, despite our efforts to hide every embarrassing hickdom, every clue that might give away our corn-fed, tranquilized youths.

  Part of what we share is the knowledge that every small town has a second heart, smaller and darker than the one that pumps the blood of good intentions. We alone know that the picture of home cooking and oak trees and harmlessness is false.

  This is the secret that binds us. Along with the friends who share its weight.

  We take a table in the corner and order a pitcher from a pretty girl wearing the referee's stripes they make all the servers wear. She reminds me of someone. Or a composite of someones. There is a quality to her movements, the intelligent smile and playfully serious eyes, that I've seen before.

  "She looks like Heather," Randy says.

  "Oh yeah?"

  "Not exactly looks like her. More like she reminds me of her. Don't you think?"

  "Don't see it myself," I lie.

  The truth is, the waitress doesn't look like Heather Langham all that much, though they share some general characteristics— height, age, style of hair. But the girl in the referee outfit who now comes our way with a tray balanced on the flat of her hand has the same rare brand of charm as Heather had. An aura, I suppose. A goodness that doesn't disqualify desire, as goodness alone can often do.

  She returns with the frosted mugs, pours draft from the pitcher. It's Randy who chats with her. His goofy, going-nowhere banter that waitresses are happy to play along with. He's firing off queries regarding what's good on the menu ("All I can say is the kitchen passed inspection last time around," she says), what she's studying ("I took a year off backpacking in Europe last year, so now I'm chained to this place to save up for tuition") and if she grew up in town ("Grimshaw bored and raised!"). Then Randy notices the ring on her finger. A platinum band with an emerald shard embedded in it.

  "Now that's a lovely stone. Matches your eyes," he says, taking her hand in his to inspect it more closely. "Don't tell me it's an engagement ring? You'd kill me."

  "I don't know. Pre-engagement, I guess."

  "No worries, then," Randy says with a laugh. "Everything is pre-engagement when you think about it, darlin'."

  As Randy and she tease, he turns to give me a wink both the waitress and I are meant to see, a shared pleasure in the moment. It's the first bloom of alcohol, the comfort of being with a friend you know well and who asks nothing of you. As for the waitress, she doesn't seem in any particular rush to leave our side, though she shows no special interest in us either. She is simply, generously, unselfconsciously making our day and nothing more.

  As the afternoon turns to evening, the pitchers come and go in steady succession. The sudden emotion that had gripped us earlier is replaced with easy talk, catching up. He takes me on a comic tour of the low points of his acting career ("I've got nothing but low points!"), the cattle calls and megalomaniac furniture-commercial directors and gigs as an extra on a handful of Hollywood blockbusters, most notably as "a bartender who slides a Manhattan over to George Clooney . . . which apparently I was doing wrong somehow, because they cut me out and spliced in somebody else's hand." I tell him about my Parkinson's. How I sold Retox and was doing little but waiting for things to get worse. Somehow, though, I felt I related all this misfortune in the same tone Randy related his: plainly and without self- pity, each of us acknowledging that we had been visited by our measure of failure and regret, as everyone has at our stage of the game.

  And through it all, we remember Ben. How his life was wasted on a pointless obsession. And then his death, so preventable and yet unsurprising, even fated. But we quickly shift away from the outcome of Ben McAuliffe's narrative to a greatest hits of scenes from his youth, his dorky visions, his sleepy goaltending. Soon Randy and I are laughing and coughing and laughing again, which we're thankful for, seeing as it makes our anguished tears look to the rest of the room like beer-fuelled hilarity.

  Some time later I make my way to the men's room and see how busy the place has gotten. The work crews kicking the mud off their boots, the girls-night-outers squeezed into their finest denim. Even a clutch of suits tossing back a couple of after-work quickies before heading home to the newer streets north of the river.

  And then two faces I recognize. Stepping out of the crowd and offering hands to shake. A big fellow in a Canada Post parka first, followed by his stout, patchily bearded friend.

  "Trev? Holy shit! I was right. It's you!" the first one says, and claps me in a bear hug.

  "Todd?"

  "Glad to know the grey hair didn't throw you off too much."

  "Todd Flanagan?"

  "Last name too. Nice work."

  "How's Tina? You two still together?"

  "Long gone," Todd reports. "Tina was not a stick-around sort of girl." Todd loops his arm around the bearded guy's neck. "Here's another test. Can you recall the name of this walking sieve rig
ht here?"

  "Vince Sproule," I announce, catching in the toothy grin a glimpse of the eighteen-year-old he once was. "Grimshaw's greatest goalie ever."

  "He was quick, wasn't he?"

  "Not so much these days," Vince says, pretending to snatch an oncoming puck out of the air. "Three kids and too many Egg McMuffins can slow you down after a while."

  Todd and Vince were Guardians too, teammates on the high- school team. And though they were only two years ahead of us at the time, they look a decade older than we do now, bloated and shambling. But content too, I'd say. The added pounds that come with snacks in front of the game-of-the-week and unrenewed gym memberships.

  "A terrible thing," Todd says, his hand on my shoulder. "About Ben."

  "It is."

  "Guess you're here for the funeral."

  "Randy too."

  "No shit?"

  "He's sitting over there. In the corner."

  Todd and Vince squint over the heads of other patrons to find Randy waving back at us, like a long-lost cousin at airport arrivals.

  "It's a goddamn team reunion," Vince says.

  "Wish it could have been for better reasons," Todd adds, and I'm moved by how plainly he means it.

  "We're going to miss him," I say.

  "Us too," Todd says. "It's a funny thing. I probably saw him more than anyone the past while."

  "You visited?"

  "I'm a mailman," Todd says, pointing to the Canada Post patch on the chest of his jacket as though to offer proof. "Been delivering to Ben's neighbourhood pretty much since I took the job. I'd wave up at him in that window, Monday to Friday, before going up the steps to drop off the bills."

  "Did he ever come down? To talk?"

  "Not a once."

  "Always was an oddball," Vince Sproule says, shaking his head. "But then there's a point when oddballs turn just sad. You know what I mean?"

  "I do."

  "Never much of a goalie, either," Todd says.

  "It's a good thing we had you, Vince."

  "You ever wonder how far we could have gone that year, Trev?" Todd asks.

  "I don't really think about it."

  "It was tragic. What happened. But maybe not just for, you know, those involved. You were a pretty good sniper yourself."

  "It doesn't—"

  "Who knows who would have noticed you. You could have—"

  "I told you, I don't think about it. I do my best not to think about a lot of things."

  "Sure. I can understand that," Todd says, nodding as though at an insight into his own condition he'd long been blind to.

  Then something happens that delivers a sharp stab of jealousy: our waitress, the pretty referee, walks up and gives Todd a kiss on the cheek.

  "Don't you just love this guy?" she says before slipping back into the crowd, and though it's just more waitress banter, it's obvious that she does love him. Lucky Todd Flanagan. Tina Uxbridge might have fooled around on him a few hundred times before dumping him. But if this referee is Todd's new girlfriend, he's bounced back quite nicely.

  Todd is grinning like a monkey. "You remember Tracey."

  "Tracey?"

  "She was a lot smaller then."

  Then I get it. The bundle of squawking joy Tina used to bring to the Guardians games.

  "That's your daughter?"

  "You fancy-suit, big-city guys. They all as sharp as you?"

  "She was just a baby."

  "Still is."

  "Well, I have to thank you, Todd. You've just made me feel incredibly old."

  "C'mon. You didn't need me for that, did you?"

  I carry on to the men's room, and when I return Todd and Vince have joined Randy at our table, a fresh pitcher already between them. I suppose it's all the beer that helps in creating the sense that the four of us still have so much in common, when really all we talk about is how lousy the hockey got on TV after they started giving "these Russian pretty boys five million to fake a concussion every time the wind blows" (as Vince puts it), our women troubles, the body's first betrayals that attend the lapsing of its forty- year warranty.

  Or maybe I'm wrong in that. Maybe we are still friends, and I've just forgotten what they are.

  Eventually, Todd and Vince announce they have to go home and get some sleep. Todd has his mail rounds in the morning and Vince has to replace the brakes on a minivan at the garage he co-owns before they have to put on Sunday clothes for Ben's funeral in the afternoon. Yet even then we stay on for one more pitcher to add to the previous half-dozen or so, all served by Tracey Flanagan, Todd's baby girl.

  When we finally head out into the night, the air has cooled several degrees. I stand with Randy on the sidewalk, deciding which way to go. Around us, the town has been sharpened by the cold, the old storefronts grey and looming.

  The two of us shake off a chill. It's the shared notion that for all the time we were inside Jake's Pool 'n' Sports, in the deceptive warmth of light and company, Grimshaw was waiting for us.

  I think we were hoping to find it gone. Torn down to make way for a triplex, or finally razed for safety reasons, leaving only an empty lot behind. We don't entertain these possibilities aloud, in any case. Once we'd paid our tab at Jake's, it was still only nine, and Randy wanted a cigarette, so I joined him on a tipsy wander through the streets, taking the long way back to the Queen's.

  Neither of us acknowledged it when we turned the corner onto Caledonia Street. We started up the long slope toward the hospital, noting how remarkably little had changed about the houses, the modest gardens, even the mailboxes lashed to the streetlight poles to thwart kids from tipping them over. When the McAuliffe house comes into view we automatically cross the street to be on the same side it's on. We pause in front for a moment, gazing up at Ben's window.

  And then, unstoppably, we turn to follow what was his line of sight for most of his waking adult life.

  It's still unoccupied, judging from the black, uncurtained windows, the wood trim bristled with mildew, the knee-high seedlings dotting the yard. Nevertheless, given the little care paid to it over the last thirty or more years, the Thurman house looks reasonably solid, testimony to the stone foundation and brick work of its builders over a century ago. Even the headless rooster still tops the attic gable.

  "Why don't they just tear it down?" I ask.

  "Can't. It's privately owned."

  "How do you know?"

  "Mrs. McAuliffe told me. It's been handed down and handed down. The owners are out-of-towners. Never even visit."

  "Why not sell?"

  "Maybe they're waiting for an upturn in the market."

  "In the Grimshaw market?"

  "I wonder if it misses him," Randy says, stubbing his cigarette out under the heel of his shoe. "Ben must have been its only friend."

  "He wasn't its friend," I say, sharper than I expected to.

  We stay there a minute longer. Staring at the Thurman house from the far side of Caledonia Street, a perspective we had returned to countless times in sleep-spoiling dreams. Watching for what Ben had been watching for. A white flash of motion. Opened eyes. A glint of teeth.

  I'm first to start back to the hotel. The moon leading us on, peeping through the branches.

  Randy laughs. "Guess it knows we're here now."

  I do my best to join him in it, if only to prevent the sound of his forced humour from drifting unconvincingly in the night air. And to push away the thought that we had already made mistakes. Coming back to Grimshaw. Pretending that we could avoid certain topics if we simply told ourselves to. Most of all, the mistake of letting it know we're here.

  We had forgotten what Ben reminded himself of every day: the Thurman house never allowed itself to be observed without a corresponding price.

  Every time you looked into it, it looked into you.

  * * *

  MEMORY DIARY

  Entry No. 6

  Most days, I'd stop to pick up Sarah so the two of us could walk the rest of the way to school to
gether. It had become habit for me to knock at her side door on the mornings I didn't have one of the Guardians' deadly pre-dawn practices, and for her mom to offer me homemade waffles or bacon sandwiches, something that would have been a Christmas treat in my house. I would decline at first, but I always ended up snarfing down a second breakfast all the same as I waited for Sarah to come downstairs. I liked these stolen minutes, the anticipation of Sarah's face, me telling her mother something that made her laugh too loudly for a woman so petite and religious. Sarah's father had already left for work. Now that I think of it, maybe he'd planned it that way. Maybe he'd designed these moments in the kitchen to say Nice, isn't it? Make an honest woman of my daughter and all this could be yours.

  But on the morning of the day after Ben told us he'd witnessed—or felt, or dreamed—the coach carrying Heather Langham into the Thurman house in the middle of the night, I walked past Sarah's place without stopping. The world that she and I inhabited together— the hand-holding walks, the drives out to Harmony, the thrilled admissions of love beyond the football field's endzone—had been soiled by the speculations of the night before. Not irrevocably. Not yet. There was, on that February Wednesday, still a chance for certain courses to be avoided.

  But they wouldn't be. Even as I drifted by Sarah's house and realized she wasn't walking next to me only after I stepped out onto the playing field's 40-yard line, I could tell there would be choices coming my way. What they would involve I couldn't guess. All that was clear was that Sarah would have to be shielded from their outcomes.

  We had opened our minds to their darkest possibilities. There was no going back from that. But such liberties came with obligations. Like the walls of the Thurman house, we would have to try to keep the darkness inside.

  Grimshaw Collegiate sits atop the highest hill within the town's limits, which isn't saying much as hills go. A pocked mound of stone and thistles just steep enough for toboggans to reach a speed that might coax a whoop out of six-year-olds. Still, in a town free of topographic features worth mentioning, the cubist mess of the school building—brick gym from the 1890s, colour- panelled '60s wing of classrooms sticking out the rear, the cinder-block science department added on the cheap—appeared with enhanced importance on its piebald throne, looking down over the mud playing field, the river gurgling next to it, the parking lot surrounded by trees that provided shade for the small crimes entertained within students' cars.