Heroes (15 page)

Taking it all down, Bayle said that that was good, that that was a funny story. Just the sort of thing his editor was looking for. Thanks, he said.

“No problem,” Duceeder said, sipping from a large WUUS coffee mug. “Glad to be of help.”

Interview apparently over, Duceeder stood up and clicked
on the radio sitting on top of his filing cabinet while Bayle busied himself with gathering up his things. A commercial for a local steakhouse that offered in-house action movies and all the hot towels you could use saw Bayle almost to the door. Advertisement done, over the suddenly familiar music beginning its slow fade:

Welcome to today's program, folks, my name is I.M. Wright. I want to start up today's show by answering a question that a caller put to me before we actually came on the air. Yes, caller, it
is
a sad thing that the liberal media has once again decided to portray well-meaning Christians as somehow the problem with our society and not, as it should be doing, trumpeting it as the only real answer.

Bayle's ears and eyes stuck to the little white radio. Back behind his desk now, Duceeder put on a pair of black halfmoon reading glasses and noted Bayle standing there listening, but eventually gave his attention over to some paperwork on his desk.

In making C.A.C.A.W. out as an extremist group when you'll never read a mention of those babykillers uptown at Planned Parenthood, you once again get to see the
Eagle's
true agenda come shining through: Christian bashing, plain and simple.

“They tried to blow up a fucking building!” Bayle said, open left hand gesturing toward the radio. Duceeder peered over his reading glasses at Bayle, the radio, then back at Bayle again. Bayle's hand stayed extended as he stood there oblivious and motionless, continuing to listen. Duceeder's eyes stayed on Bayle.

I tell you, folks, it's real difficult for an ordinary Joe like me to understand how a group of God-fearing
Americans — a little misguided, perhaps, a little overzealous in their desire to stand up against the socialist threat and do the right thing, maybe — but avowed Christians and patriotic citizens nonetheless, can be labelled extremists, while the baby butchers downtown get off scot-free.

“Avowed Christians, my ass,” Bayle said. “The last time I read the Ten Commandments it didn't say, Thou Shalt Not Kill — Unless Those Murdered are Those You Happen to Disagree With, In That Case Bomb the Hell Out of Them.'” Arms folded tight across his chest, Bayle shook his head slowly but firmly from side to side, steady ready for Wright's next oral assault.

Duceeder cleared his throat, didn't get Bayle's attention, did it again — louder — and finally did. Bayle shook himself free of the radio and looked at Duceeder looking at Bayle over the top of his reading glasses.

“Anything else?” Duceeder said.

Bayle seemed stunned by the interruption.

“I said, 'Anything else?'” Duceeder said.

A moment's indecision, but only a moment's. “You see this?” Bayle demanded, unfurling today's newspaper, pointing to the headline on the front page.

“Yeah, so?”

“I could've been there. An hour earlier and that could've been me.”

“What were you doing at the
Eagle
at that hour?”

Bayle had to think for a second. “Dropping off Davidson's story.”

Duceeder's face suddenly filled with smile. “Oh, that's right,” he said. “That old fax machine just didn't seem to want to work for Harry last night, did it?”

“I could've been killed, Duceeder!” Bayle yelled, shaking the paper. “I could be flying back to Canada right now in a fucking body bag!”

“Okay, okay, but —”

“But what?” Bayle shouted. “But what?”

“But why the hell are you telling all this to me?”

Bayle didn't have an answer.

A streak of swift silver passed by him in the hallway heading in the direction of the front door of the arena.

“Gloria!” Bayle said, taking off down the hall. “Wait up!”

G
LORIA DIDN'T
know any more about the players' boycott than what Bayle had told her the night before. Samson couldn't tell her anything other than “Apparently the players have conducted a vote of some sort and decided they aren't speaking to Mr. Davidson anymore. Naturally, I'm very sorry.” She knew he wasn't lying, knew that the players had held a meeting to prohibit team contact with Davidson, but she also knew that there had to be more to it than that. In her experience, hockey players couldn't be expected to spell “puck” even if you spotted them the P and the K. Obviously someone must have put them up to it.

“Duceeder,” Bayle said.

“Duceeder,” Gloria seconded. She was also just as positive about why Duceeder would be behind the boycott.

“He's always had it in for Harry,” she said. “Throw in those articles Harry wrote about the Bunton Center that have got the owners so upset and threatening to leave town and Duceeder's just got to be the one. Besides, he's the G.M. He can do anything he wants to the players.”

“That bastard,” Bayle said.

“But at least we know what's going on now,” Gloria said. “And the truth shall make you free.”

“New Testament?” Bayle said.

“Harry Davidson,” she answered.

Gloria asked Bayle if he wanted a ride back to The Range and Bayle said that he guessed he wouldn't mind, but only if it wasn't too much trouble. Gloria told him that if it was too much trouble she wouldn't have asked, so Bayle said, Yes, in that case then he would, he would like a ride. They pushed their way through the arena doors, the one on the left aluminum-covered from shoulder to shoe, the one on the right in tweed jacket and blue jeans. The rain had relented slightly during the hour or so Bayle had spent inside the arena; it was still coming down, but only steadily, not in a torrent anymore.

Gloria started up the Volkswagen, flipped on the windshield wipers. “You want to, you can put on the radio if you like. Wouldn't want to be the one to stand between you and your hobby.”

“Thanks anyway,” Bayle said, “but I think I've had about all the I.M. Wright I can handle for today.”

“Then I expect you wouldn't mind if ...” I Leaning across him, the tips of her braless breasts underneath her costume just touching, faintly dragging across his knees, Gloria took a cassette out of the glove compartment and slipped it into the tape deck. A burst of airy strings flooded the small automobile like the pleasant shock of sudden sunlight on an up-to-then overcast day.

“I know this,” Bayle said. It was the sort of hummable piece of classical music even the non-musical like Bayle had heard a hundred times before. “Mozart? No, Brahms. No, wait. Vivaldi?
The Four Seasons?”

“Bach. Concerto number five in F major.”

Bayle pursed his lips, nodded his head a few rapid times as if recognizing the obviousness of his mistake. Recognizing no such thing, “That was your music at Harry's place?” he said.

“I keep my portable stereo over at his apartment. It keeps me from just having to cart it back and forth all the time.”

Bayle wanted to ask how a woman who drove home from her job outfitted in a B-movie alien outfit and who made her living inciting frothing farm hands at hockey games to cheer louder and louder for the home team had managed to cultivate an appreciation for Bach concertos. While he was at it, he would have also liked to ask where she'd learned how to figure-skate. His own mention of the harassed Harry, however, pushed Bayle's mind back onto more weighty subjects.

“Did Harry tell you how close we came to being at the newspaper last night when that bomb went off?” he said.

“No,” Gloria answered.

Bayle couldn't tell if the expression of intense concentration on Gloria's face was the result of the wet highway in front of her, the swirling music on the tape player, or the significance of Bayle's question.

“Well, the way they described it in the
Eagle,
it sounds like his own office might have gotten torched. I'm sure he'll tell you all about it when he gets back from the paper.”

“Harry's not getting back from nowhere. Harry's been at home all day, sick. And I know what you're thinking, but what Harry's sick with isn't from drinking.”

“Oh, yeah?” Bayle said, doubtfully. “What ails Mr. Davidson, then?”

Gloria ignored both the question and the insinuation in Bayle's voice.

Instead, “What sort of relationship you got with the players?” she said.

“Not much,” Bayle answered. “I've spoken to a bunch of them a few times for my article. Nothing outside the arena. Why?”

“Whatever it is that Duceeder's done to get the players to brush Harry off like they're doing is wrong. Harry isn't the easiest man in the world to get along with, but those players don't hate him like they're seeming to. If you found out what it is that Duceeder's done to put the fear into them then you could threaten to write it up in that article you're putting together and things could get back to like they was before.”

Bayle considered the honest impulse to do Davidson a good turn; in turn, found the inclination toward helpful Harry-intervention quickly countered with even greater force by Empiricus directive number two declaring loud and clear in Bayle's wavering ear that not involving oneself in the conflicts of others is an essential step toward freedom from conflict within oneself. Victory, then, to the compulsion toward non-conflict. Bayle, mind your own business.

“I'd like to help, Gloria, I really would, but it's not that kind of an article,” he said.

“Oh, what kind of article is it?” she spat out.

“Look, I think it's just as terrible as you do what's been going on between Harry and the team, but it's not that kind of journalism and I'm not that kind of journalist. In fact, I'm not any kind of journalist.”

“No?”

“Believe me, no. The only reason I'm even here is because a friend thought I needed a vacation. And the article I'm doing is not about anything more than how a Canadian sport gets played in middle-America and how a team like that goes about conducting itself down here.”

“Seems like they're conducting themselves pretty badly if you ask me. Isn't that worth you writing about?”

“It's bad, all right, but I'm pretty sure that my editor wouldn't find it within the scope of my article.”

“Oh, well, your editor wouldn't find it within your scope. Why didn't you just so say in the first place.”

The car turned silent but for the Bach. Unit upon unit of virtually indistinguishable track housing declared that they'd hit the perimeter of town, each new brown-roofed hive proudly proclaimed as a
Selective Living and Deluxe Recreational 24-Hour Secured Community.

“I don't know how Harry's doing financially,” Bayle said at last, “but maybe it wouldn't even be the worst thing in the world right now for him to leave the
Eagle
for awhile. Getting away from Duceeder and the all the rest of those bastards might be just what he needs to get his drinking under control.”

“What Harry needs is his job back. He gets his job back, he'll be fine.”

Abandoned tennis courts and rain-pocked swimming pools drifted by Bayle's window. A large roadside billboard reading,
Come Join the Crowd and Get In on the Fun at Windsor Estates,
forced itself upon him and then was gone.

“Do they know about the boycott at the
Eagle
yet?” Bayle asked.

“If they don't, they will soon enough. Man can't do his job if the players don't talk to him.”

Bayle didn't have an answer; wished he did — really, truly wished he did — but he didn't.

“Besides, the Warriors are leaving for their road trip tomorrow and I'm going home the day after,” he said. “Plus, I've already got pretty much all the information I need to get from the players and everybody else that I needed to talk to.”

“You say you're leaving Friday?” Gloria said.

“That's right.”

In a small, hard voice, “Fuck,” she said. Gloria turned the car onto Bayle's street with a violent whip of the steering wheel that shook Bayle in his seat nearly as much as did hearing the normally profanity-free Gloria so wholly profane. Gravity-pressed against his door, Bayle looked at Gloria's face for an inkling of explanation.

Recovered, the car back on course and making its way down Main, “Sorry,” Gloria said.

“No problem,” Bayle replied, unrumpling himself from the interior of the Volkswagen.

“It's just that I'm leaving town with the team tomorrow,” Gloria said. “I was hoping you might check up on Harry. I don't want to leave him all alone as sick as he is.”

Gloria pulled the car in front of The Range, the wipers still working and the ignition still running. Each sat without speaking, watched the specks of rain on the windshield get erased and return, only to be erased then return again. The music, not lively as before, almost matched the day in its melancholy strokes of cello and violin. Bayle knew he was free to say his thanks and be on his way any time he liked.

“How did you and Harry meet? Through the team?”

Gloria gave Bayle a tired look across the front seat of the Volkswagen. “Some other time, okay?”

“Come on, I'm interested,” he said.

She looked at him a few seconds before speaking. “Thought you said you had an article you got to work on.”

“The article can wait. I want to know. Really. Was it when you started skating as ....”

“The Warrior?”

“Right.”

“Harry's the one who helped get me the job skating for the team. We knew each other a good while before” — Gloria pointed to her costume — “this.”