Heroes (27 page)

“I tried,” he concluded, closing his eyes, lowering his head, equal parts simple fatigue and regret over how things had ended up. He attempted to remember with his nose just how inexplicably good the blowing-cold breeze outside had made him feel not thirty minutes before, but all he could smell was the bourbon.

“I know you did,” Gloria said. “I can tell how you feel about Harry just by the way I sometimes catch you looking at me in the hospital.”

Slightly panicking, Bayle picked up his glass and briefly considered it. Considered putting it back down. Considered this only briefly. Swallowed, gulped, then took another drink. “What do you mean?” he said.

“No reason to get all embarrassed, Bayle. You're just not able to hide the concern you're feeling for a sick friend, is all. Nothing wrong with that.”

Bayle attempted to show a sympathetic smile but settled instead on another drink of bourbon, emptying the glass in the process. Holding it aloft, “Do you mind if I ...?”

“You stay sitting and let me get it,” Gloria said, standing up and tenderly kneading Bayle's shoulders on the way to the counter. “Your night's been long enough as it is.”

“Mind you, I'm not saying I'm happy about the way things turned out,” she said, “because I know my plan would've worked.” She came back to the table and placed the glass down in front of Bayle, braless breasts like knives slicing through one of Davidson's white cotton workshirts as she leaned over to do the pouring.

“But at least that sonofabitch Duceeder is gonna get his. Even if it didn't go off just like the way we planned and things aren't ever gonna be the same again, something good's come out of all of this anyway. And it's all because of you, Bayle.”

All because of me. Golly gee yes. You should be real proud of yourself, Bayle, what with putting an innocent man
behind bars and likely making his son the pariah of Hays County Junior High.

Bayle raised his glass in fine faux-toast fashion and gratefully felt the first tingling effects of nascent drunkenness; shivered slightly, thinking: Did Gloria just tenderly knead my shoulder?

“Gloria, who's Dan Fenton?” Bayle said, the first thing that came to mind that didn't have a part of Gloria's naked body attached to it.

In a tone appreciably cooler, “Dan Fenton's nobody,” Gloria answered.

“That's what you said the last time I asked you.”

“Well, I guess it's still true then, isn't it?”

The booze starting to weigh in now, “C'mon, Gloria,” Bayle said. “Duceeder said —”

“Duceeder! Why are you listening to trash talk from that sonofabitch?”

“He wasn't trash talking,” Bayle said. “It's just that I was running an errand for Harry a while back, dropping off something for Duceeder's kid, and Duceeder mentioned a guy named Dan Fenton, and when I asked you about him before you said —”

“And so you think just because Duceeder knows who Dan Fenton is he also knows everything there is to know about everything?”

Bayle held up his non-drinking hand. “I don't think anything. That's why I asked you who Dan Fenton was in the first place.”

Gloria gave him a long, sceptical look. Eventually she went to the cupboard for another glass. When she came back she topped off Bayle's and then filled the other one halfway.

“You wanna know who Dan Fenton is? All right then. I'll tell you who Dan Fenton is.” She raised her glass within an inch of her mouth, involuntarily getting a whiff of the whiskey. Set it back down.

“Harry wasn't gonna go and die in some jungle in Vietnam just because Uncle Sam felt like kicking a little
Communist ass, all right?” she said. “That was the one thing he knew for sure. That's when he decided to make it on up to Canada, in the fall of '68.”

“Harry was a draft dodger?” Bayle said.

Gloria stared at him.

“Sorry,” Bayle said.

She picked up her glass, this time taking a drink and holding it in her mouth for a couple of seconds with closed eyes before finally swallowing. Almost wincing, she braced herself and took another drink.

“He knew his mother had a sister up in Alberta she didn't talk to much because of the man she was married to, a wife-beater supposed to be, so that's where he went. Didn't know a soul until he got there, but she was glad to see her sister's boy anyway because family's family, right?”

Bayle nodded.

“Okay, so one of the reasons his aunt's so glad to see Harry is because she's divorced by now and she's got a sixteen-year-old son by the name of James — Harry's cousin. No more than a week or two around town and Harry's already got himself a job writing at the local newspaper, a car, a nice little apartment downtown — all the things her son needs to see a man can do if he puts his mind to it and does more than drink beer and watch hockey on T.V. And everything's okay for a long time. Harry's not having to try and kill no Vietnamese and no Vietnamese trying to kill Harry, and his aunt's son and his best friend, a boy by the name of Dan, Dan Fenton, they both practically worshipping Harry. They stop skipping classes at the high school, both of them get themselves part-time jobs at the local arena, even start wearing side burns just like Harry.” Gloria laughed. “You imagine that? Harry with sideburns? I've seen the pictures, I swear it's true.” Bayle laughed too. They each sipped their drinks.

“But this Dan Fenton, he gets into some trouble with a girl from the high school. And not only does he put the girl in a family way, but if that's not bad enough, she's a girl from the reservation nearby, and that's something white boys from
good families just aren't supposed to do in Medicine Hat, Alberta, in 1968. Probably still not supposed to do. Doesn't matter none that the two of them say they're in love and wanting to keep the baby and wanting to get married and all the rest of it. Dan's parents just aren't gonna have their baby boy ruin his life because some squaw slut can't keep her panties on. So they think they're real smart and got things all figured out by convincing the girl to let them pay for an abortion in Calgary and getting her to agree to never see their son again. But what happens is the girl takes the five hundred dollars and runs off to Toronto to have the kid, and Dan, he joins the Canadian Armed Forces so that when the baby gets born he and the girl can get married and he'll be an officer and a gentleman and they'll all live happily ever after. And just before he enlists he gives Harry — Harry, mind you, not his friend James — all the money he's got saved up from working at the rink and asks him to hold on to it for him and to give it to his girl if anything should happen to him. Of course Harry tells him to put it in the bank or just give it to the girl now since she could probably use it, even if it is just four or five hundred bucks, but Dan ... Dan, he watches too many war movies and he wants Harry to keep it for him. Practically begs him to. Forces him to. Harry finally says okay, he'll do it, and thinks that's the end of that. Except that Dan gets shipped over to Vietnam within twelve weeks and is home wearing a toe-tag in fourteen.”

Bayle looked down into his drink, Gloria too.

“After the funeral, Harry and his cousin try to get ahold of the girl as best they can, but the address they got isn't hers no more and nobody down in Toronto has heard of a pregnant Indian girl from Medicine Hat. Harry, he doesn't want this boy's money, so he tries to give it to Dan's parents. But they think he had something to do with Dan enlisting and dying over there so they say they don't want any Goddamn guilt money from a Goddamn draft dodger and slam the door in his face. Harry does the only sensible thing he can think to do: throws the money in the bank and forgets about it.”

Gloria had finished her drink, Bayle only half. She lifted the bottle and poured nearly as much into his as she did into hers, bourbon quick to the brim of Bayle's glass and spilling over the edges. Gloria didn't notice. She wasn't looking at Bayle anymore, only at her own drink. Bayle watched the pool of liquid on the formica table slowly tide his way.

“Years go by and Harry moves away from Medicine Hat and gets a better job at a bigger paper in Edmonton. A nicer car, a nicer apartment, all of it. Lives his life. But when Carter, President Carter, when he makes it okay for everybody who was against the war and went north to go back, Harry decides it's time to come home.”

“But why?” Bayle said. “I mean, it sounds like things were going pretty well for him up in Canada.”

“People go home, Bayle. Don't need any reason. They just do.”

Bayle nodded; took a sip and nodded again.

“But Harry, he feels sorry for his cousin still stuck back there in Medicine Hat, his cousin James who's done nothing with his life since Harry left except get his high school diploma and be a gopher for the junior hockey team. So Harry says he'll take him along with him when he goes south. Help him get settled, try to use his sportswriting connections to get him work in the hockey business.” Gloria paused. “Harry takes Goddamn Duceeder along.”

“Duceeder?” Bayle said. “You mean James as in James Duceeder? As in Harry and Duceeder are cousins?” Gloria didn't hear him.

“And then one day ....” She took a long swallow of bourbon — too long — and gagged slightly at trying to keep it down.

Steadying herself, taking a deep breath, “And then one day,” she continued, “strung-out so bad I was almost hoping I'd get caught and somebody'd show me some mercy and put a cap between my eyes just to save me the trouble, I decide to car-jack Harry's truck on a Friday afternoon on the hottest day in August anybody around here has ever seen. And Harry — I think he's going for a piece when he reaches across to the
glove box, right? So I put my blade right upside his kidney and tell him not to move unless he wants to feel seven inches of steel inside him — you know what Harry says to me when he pulls out his flask? 'You look like hell, woman. Have some of the bird.' I didn't know whether to stick him or laugh and have a drink.”

“You didn't knife him, though.”

“No, I didn't.”

“You took a drink?”

“I took a drink.”

“Did you laugh?”

“I wasn't quite ready for any laughing yet. But that flask of his passed back and forth between us until it was empty and we needed another bottle. And another bottle took us back to Harry's place, and that one put me to sleep on his couch where I woke up a few hours later with a splitting headache and a note on the pillow from Harry saying he'd be back in a few hours, that he was gone to the rink to cover the hockey game, and for me to use the bathroom to get cleaned up and to help myself to whatever I wanted in the fridge. I can't believe it. Broke and practically shivering for a fix by now, and here I am left all alone in the house. Except there isn't anything to steal! Black-and-white T.V. from God knows when, got no stereo, no computer, no cash stashed around the place as far as I could see. I finally just took the rest of the bottle of Wild Turkey and cursed the old bastard's name.”

Forming a V with his hands on the tabletop, Bayle tried to stop the stream of spilt bourbon from his glass now threatening to run onto the floor. He turned back most of it, but some still managed to drip over the edge and onto his jeans.

“The next time I saw Harry I was lying on his front step at six o'clock the next morning with a serious case of withdrawal and holding on to an empty Wild Turkey bottle.”

“What for?” Bayle said. “You knew he didn't have any money.”

“I ask myself that.”

“And?”

“And I suppose I'm still asking. And after Harry put me to bed and figures out he can't keep me drunk forever, he calls around and gets the name of a place in Kansas City that's supposed to have something like a ninety percent success rate with users. Except it costs twenty-one hundred dollars that Harry doesn't got. So Harry, he tries to get the money everywhere he can, but —”

“But wait, wait, hold on,” Bayle said. “Go back. Why? Why would Harry care enough about a complete stranger — somebody who only the day before might have knifed him — to bother and try to scrap together that kind of money? Don't you ask yourself that one too?”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

Both glasses empty, Gloria and Bayle each went to pick up the bottle at the same time, fingertips brushing at point of bottle-gripping contact. Bayle instantly pulled back his hand. Gloria calmly poured out two more big ones, dripping the last of the bourbon into Bayle's glass.

“Sometimes, I do,” she said. “But mostly I'm just thankful. Harry saved my life. If it wasn't for him eventually getting that twenty-one hundred dollars together, him remembering the five hundred and something of Dan Fenton's he put in the bank way back in 1968 and that after doing some digging it turning out to be nearly two thousand — that, and driving me to Kansas City in his pickup truck with the heat turned on full blast with the windows shut tight in the middle of August, me shivering like it's ten below zero and him doling me out codeine cough syrup every half hour to try and keep me from having a fit — I wouldn't be here talking to you right now. Maybe not that night on his step, maybe not the night after that, but sometime, some night not too long after, I'd be dead. You reach out for help like I did and then someone comes along and gives you your life back like Harry did, you tend not to think too much about the why of it all so much as just the fact that it happened. The fact that it happened and, no matter how bad things get after that, how glad you are you're here and not ... I don't know ... wherever it is you are when
you're not. But maybe you've got to be lucky enough to be saved like I've been to know what I'm talking about. Or maybe save somebody else.” Gloria took a long drink from her glass. “Bayle?”

Nothing.

Placing her hand on Bayle's knee, leaning across the table to better see what was the matter, “Bayle? What's wrong?” Gloria said. “Bayle?”