The Guardians (26 page)

    Ben
untied his hands. Offered the coach a ham sandwich, which he took but didn't
eat. Instead, he stuffed it into the front pocket of his parka to join the last
two sandwiches we'd brought him.

    "You
have to eat something," I told him.

    "I've
lost my taste for meat."

    "We'll
bring you something else, then."

    "No,
no, no," he said agreeably, in an I-don't-want- to-be-any-trouble voice.
"This will do fine."

    That's
when he bit Ben.

    Launched
forward without any change in expression or posture, not a twitch. He was
sitting on the floor, rubbing his wrists. Then he was on his knees, snarling,
clamping down on Ben's knuckles.

    Ben
screamed. Someone else screamed too. Not me, I don't think.

    The
blood startled me. Quick and forceful. The rhythmic pulses, like jumping up and
down on a hose. How the coach swallowed it without letting go.

    "
Don't
!"

    It
took my voice for him to spit out Ben's hand. Then he leaned back against the
post. Crossed his arms over his chest, his teeth outlined in crimson.

    Ben
was already wrapping his hand in a rag from the floor.

    "Didn't
your mother ever tell you to keep your fingers out of the monkey cage, Benji?
Or maybe that was your daddy's department. Wait. Wait! Your daddy did himself
in, didn't he?"

    "Shut
up," Ben whispered.

    "Checked
out early. Benji's dear old dad."

    
Shut
up,
Ben's lips said again.

    "Can
I ask you something? Nobody actually believes he drove into a hydro pole doing
a hundred by
accident,
do they? So what do you think his problem was?
Didn't have the stomach to see how useless his only son turned out to be?"

    None
of us ever mentioned Ben's father's suicide. I was surprised the coach even
knew about it. But then it occurred to me: Ben was the one who had told him.
He'd confessed this to the coach in the same way we had confessed our own
secrets, and for the same reason. We thought the coach was the only adult we
could wholly trust.

    Yet
the coach wasn't the coach anymore. And it was impossible to know whether what
he was saying came from him or the vile other that was halfway to claiming him.

    "But
I suppose something good came out of your dad hitting the gas instead of the
brake," the coach said to Ben. "That cute little group hug you and
your fairy-boy friends had upstairs."

    Ben's
eyes widened. "I didn't tell you about that."

    "I
didn't say you did."

    "Then
how do you know?"

    The
coach grinned in a way that changed his face. Stopped it from being his.

    "No
more," I told him.

    "But
I
like
this game," he said, turning to me. "Now, let's see,
what about you? Oh yes. Peeping Trevor."

    "What
are you talking about?"

    "Our
moonlight chicken-choker. Our wanking voyeur."

    "I
don't—"

    "Hiding
behind trees on the hospital grounds to look into lovely Heather's window at
night."

    "That's
bullshit!"

    "It's
only what you told me."

    "I
never
told you that because it isn't
true."

    "No?
What do you think, Benji? You think Trev here likes to get his rocks off
watching ladies changing into their nighties before lights out?"

    Ben
looked at me.

    "He's
lying," I said.

    "Am
I?" The coach's voice was no longer his, but the boy's. "Isn't it
true that Randy dreams of graduating from class clown to great actor? Has he
told you that? 'Like Pacino in
The Godfather.'
Pathetic, isn't it? Poor
Handy Randy."

    "That's
enough," Ben said.

    "Or
Carl? You want to know his big secret? Oh, it's
good.
It's a
real
surprise."

    Ben held
out his good hand for the gun. When I gave it to him he walked up to the coach
and swung the side of the revolver against his cheek.

    "I
don't want to hear any more of that," Ben said. "I only want to hear
what you did."

    Ben
clicked on the tape recorder in his pocket. Started reciting the same questions
he'd been asking all along.

    
Tell
us the truth
.

    The
coach's eyes rolled white. A line of blood making its way to his jaw. Then he
was smiling again like the madman he was, or we'd made him into.

    Ben
stepped away to lean against the wall. Fatigue bloomed pale and puffy over his
face, a weakness that pulled down at his arms as though lead weights were
stitched to his sleeves.

    "Why
Heather?" I asked.

    It
was the first time any of us had asked this. And for the first time, the coach
was prepared to answer.

    "Why
Heather
? Have you
seen
my wife?" he exclaimed, and it seemed he
was about to follow with the punchline to some well-worn joke, but instead, a
second later, he was fighting tears.

    "What
about her?"

    "Laura
saved
me."

    "Saved
you?"

    "Before
I came here, I'd done some things. But she stood by me. A beautiful woman. On
the
inside.
Heather? She had it on the outside too." He threw us a
conspiratorial leer. "I mean, that ass? I thought I was through wanting
that. God was kind enough to give me a new start over here in old Grimshaw. All
I had to do was snuggle in, keep quiet, be good. And I was good. Then guess
what? Heather Langham shows up."

    "So
you decided you had to kill her?"

    "Kill
her?" Those teeth again. "No. I decided I had to, I really
needed
to . . . well, let's not be
crude.
Let's just say that the first night
after she introduces herself to all the dried mushrooms in the teachers'
lounge, I'm dreaming of her. Bad, bad dreams."

    "Then
what?"

    "Then
I play Harmless Married Guy. Share some of my favourite books with her, ask
what brought her to the noble profession of teaching, et cetera. 'I'm a good
listener,' said I. 'We have so much in common!' said she. I knew it was over
when she told me all she needed to be happy in Grimshaw was a friend. Well,
that's all I needed too!"

    "You
brought her here."

    "My
contribution was the flask of Jack Daniel's out in my car. Loosened things up
considerably. 'Where do we go now?' says I. 'I know a place,' says she. A
haunted house, she called it. I just knew it as that derelict place where some
of the guys on the team went to drink beer. Turns out she was more right than I
was."

    I remember
searching for something hurtful to say to him. Something as disembowelling as
his mention of Ben's dad. A way of showing how furious I was at him for talking
about Heather this way.

    
Show
him,
the boy said but didn't say.
Wake him up.

    Before
I knew what I was doing, the toe of my boot met with the coach's mouth. And it
did
wake him up. Eyes aflutter with liquid blinks. Spitting out blood
pinked with mucus.

    "You
can't blame a house for what you did!"

    When
he focused on me, he seemed pleased that I was here. That it had been
my
boot.

    "It
was you," I said. "Not a place, not a building. It was you."

    "You're
right. Quite right, Trevor," now the proper English teacher, patiently
expanding on a student's rudimentary observation. "All this place gives us
is a •licence to act. It's a stage, but a bare one. A theatre without sets,
without a script. And most important, without an audience!"

    He
laughed. Not the coach's laugh. Not a living sound at all.

    "You
hurt her here because you could? Is that it?"

    "Here?
Here?"
The coach swung his head around, peering into every corner.
"There's no
here
here!"

    "What
did you do?"

    We'd
asked him this perhaps a hundred times since he slipped into Carl's Ford half a
block from his house. But now the coach looked up at me as though it was a
fresh and intriguing query.

    "What
did
I do?"

    "Just
tell us and it'll be over."

    "You
don't get to decide that."

    "We'll
let you go."

    "Every
time you come down here, I leave when you go, piece by piece," he said,
his voice flattening. "I'll get out whether you open the door for me or
not."

    "Who
are you?"

    "I'm
the coach."

    "You
were
him. Who are you now?"

    "Whoever
I need to be."

    "To
do what?"

    "Keep
you here."

    I
took the gun out of Ben's hand. I must have, because there it was, pointed at
the coach's forehead.

    "I'd
like to know what you did to Heather. Right now."

    "I
brought her here to do what all of you would have liked to do," he said,
the voice dead as a dial tone. "To fuck her pretty pink behind."

    
Pretty.
The word my father had used. More than this, it was like he knew that it was.

    "Where?"

    "In
the living room. Standing up, because she thought the carpet was too
dirty."

    "Were
you alone?"

    "Alone
as two people can be. Our coitus was interruptus, though. Something heavy
falling onto the floor above us. And maybe a voice too. No ... a breath. Who
cared
what it was?"

    "You
didn't go upstairs to check?"

    "I
did.
Nervous Heather asked me to make sure nothing was amiss. So up I went.
Nobody there. But by the time I came back down, she was gone. I figured she'd
changed her mind and left. On my way out, though, I noticed the door to the
cellar was open, and it definitely wasn't when we first came in. Down I go. And
there's Heather. Had time to put her panties on, but that's about all."

    The
coach grinned fondly now, shook his head as though at an amusing turn in a
practised anecdote.

    "'Hey,
doll,' I said. Never called a woman that before. But she
looked
like a
doll. Those big glass eyes staring at me but not seeing anything. I didn't want
to touch her. She was soiled. I was having a good old time with pretty Heather,
and now she disgusted me. Trembling lips, chin all folded up. So scared she was
sickening.
These were the kind of thoughts I had. But they
weren't
my
thoughts."

    "Whose
were they?"

    The
coach rubbed his chin in a stage gesture of deep thought.

    "You're
both men, give or take, right? You know those naughty little whispers that you
hear all the time, but that you're able to hold down, hold in place? Well,
those naughty whispers became all I could hear."

    "And
they told you to bash her head in."

    "They
told me nothing really counted. Not here."

    "So?"

    "There
was a piece of wood on the ground. I didn't notice it before. A long piece of
wood with a screw in it. I think Heather knew what I was going to do before I
did."

    "You
hit her."

    "Once.
Maybe twice."

    "It
was enough to kill her."

    "No,
it wasn't. Because the next thing I knew—next thing I saw—the wood was on the
ground and Heather was alive."