Heroes (32 page)

“Put down that fucking tray and go and get your coat. We're leaving. And don't forget Simon's present to me in the bedroom.”

Remembering the dinner party seemed to make giving up the tray a little bit easier. August set it down on the coffee table, if with slight regret, and disappeared down the hall.

Jane turned around, looking stunned that Bayle was still standing there.

“What? What do you want?” she said.

“Nothing I can get here, I guess,” Bayle said. He
thought about putting on the sweater (he was cold and it was his), but somehow it seemed to make more sense to just leave it behind.

He tossed the sweater onto the couch. “Give this to your butler, will you? One size fits all.” Bayle headed for the door.

Jane called out after him. “Do you see what happens when you try to help someone? I go out on a limb and give you an all-expense paid chance to get some distance on your life, to re-establish your priorities, to save your very own career, and what do I get in return but all the ridicule and headache that comes from having an ex-lover of mine steal from my employers.”

Bayle turned around.
“'A
chance to re-establish my priorities? Jane, you purposefully flew me out of the country so you could start screwing someone else. If that's what you really think, if that's what you really call trying to help somebody out, then you're even worse off than I thought you were.”

“I knew the first day that I met you there were a lot of things you weren't going to do and be in life, Peter, but I never figured you for a common criminal. I thought you had a bit more going for you than that.”

Bayle opened up the door. “Yeah, well, the more I think about it, there are a lot of things I never figured myself for, either. And you know something? Maybe you did do me a favour, maybe you and that magazine of yours did buy me a chance to get away from it all. Because from where I'm standing right now, common criminal doesn't even come close to being the worst of them.”

And when August returned to the livingroom all bundled up and ready to go with a Union Jack folded neatly over his arm, a distinguishing white bleach spot right there in its upper right-hand corner, Bayle suddenly felt ten times as drunk as he'd been all day and more sober than he ever thought possible. Pointing at the flag, “Where did ....?”

Doing up the buttons on her coat, “Actually, this might be of some interest to you, Peter,” Jane said. “A very good friend of my father's, Simon Johnson, got that for me, one of
the lawyers who is going to prosecute you to the full extent of the law. I rather offhandedly mentioned to him when visiting my parents ages and ages ago that I'd been invited to a mock-United Nations dinner party where everyone was supposed to bring with them a national flag, and what do you think he presented me with just this last week? A Union Jack. That's the kind of man you're going to be dealing with, Peter. A mind like a steel trap. A brilliant man of the law. A mind that never forgets anything.”

Bayle took back Patty's flag with little struggle from August and grabbed a bottle of Absolut Vodka off the top of the liquor cabinet as he stalked out the door and down the hall. Just over the noise of his flopping wet shoes, heard:

“Oh, let him go. The last thing I need is another reason to have to deal with Peter Bayle.”

“But what about the British flag? Now we don't have anything for the party. Jane, we need a flag.”

“That tacky convenience store over by the video shop has got every flag under the sun in their t-shirt section. We'll just pick up another one on the way. And who said it had to be British? Let's be a little different, shall we? I'll bet everybody and his brother will be bringing a British flag with them tonight.”

H
E HIT
every bar that would take his money. At those that wouldn't, he hit whatever he could still manage to see, a list that included a doorman at Grossman's Tavern who was just doing his job and a beefy waiter at The Rex Hotel who demanded that Bayle either quit waving his Goddamn British flag around in the faces of the other patrons or take his business elsewhere. It was just the sort of invitation Bayle had been waiting for.

The waiter popped him once hard and square in the nose and led Bayle, nauseous with pain and half-blinded with booze and blood, out into the still-pouring night. He sat on the curb, rain rivering down his face, one hand holding his bloody nose, the other Patty's flag. The Saturday night Queen Street foot traffic walked right around him.

Eventually, Etobicoke, his mother's house, around dawn. His mother put him to bed in his old room and did her best for four days to keep the fever down. But Bayle's temperature just kept going up. When he started hallucinating, calling out Patty's name and a bunch of others his mother didn't recognize — Davidson's, Gloria's, Warren's, Duceeder's and his son's — she called for an ambulance.

For nearly two months Bayle wore a clear plastic wristband that identified him as patient number 387366, Ward Three, Etobicoke General Hospital. At first it was just pneumonia, albeit a severe enough case — tubes to feed him and a succession of nurses to clean him — to cause the doctors to be concerned for awhile and to keep his mother bedside every day during both afternoon and evening visiting hours. Then a lung that filled up with fluid when he started to get better from the pneumonia, and, after that, a reaction to the medication for the problem with the lung. He finally went home with his mother early in the new year, thirteen pounds lighter but walking on his own and without the wristband.

Mostly he just slept and ate and lay around on the couch watching television. The Maple Leafs were their usual lousy selves again after teasing their fans with respectability for a couple of brief years in the early nineties, but the Wednesday night game on Global and “Hockey Night in Canada” on Saturday were the highlights of Bayle's week. For the first time since his father had died Bayle knew exactly where he'd be whenever the Leafs were on TV. Bayle had become a fan again.

And the empty expression stuck to his face since he'd gotten out of the hospital seemed to say that he watched the hockey with no more interest than he did MuchMusic and the black-and-white late-night double feature on CBC. But
his mother could see the slow signs of change in her son as the days began to get longer outside and the Leafs briefly flirted with the last Western Conference playoff spot.

At first, just the occasional comment from his now customary horizontal position on the couch to his mother sitting in her old armchair working away on one of her “Find and Circle the Hidden Word” game books when an especially pretty Leaf goal was scored or, more often, a feverish Toronto comeback late in the game fell short. In time, leaning up on his elbows to get a better view when a replay of a disputed goal or contentious penalty was shown. Eventually — and before a late-February, six-game losing streak all but mathematically eliminated the Leafs from the playoff picture — sitting up on the edge of the couch only a few feet from the set the entire game long, anxiously tapping his feet whenever Toronto would get boxed in their own end while killing a penalty, pumping his fist and shouting “Yes” and smiling his mother's way when the Leafs managed to put one in the net.

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.”

A
ND 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?”