The Guardians (29 page)

    We're
up in Ben's room, passing around a mickey of Lamb's that Randy picked up on the
way over. It helps. The rum's warmth lends some humour to the situation. We are
nothing more than a pair of grown men contemplating a harmless stunt. The
hiring of a stag-party stripper or cocooning the groom's car in toilet paper.

    "Did
you like it?" Randy asks after a couple swallows. "The whole
nightclub business. Was it what you wanted?"

    "It
was very profitable for a time."

    "I'm
not asking about that:"

    "I
know you're not." Randy passes the bottle and I take a swallow.
"Okay. This is going to sound ridiculous."

    "And
what we're doing tonight isn't?"

    "I
think I worked so hard the past fifteen years to build something I could hide
behind," I say. "People think anybody who runs a place like mine is
in it for the girls or the dope or having people stop to look as you drive by
in your Merc with the personalized Retox plates. But honestly, I didn't really
care about any of that."

    "Doesn't
sound too bad to me."

    "It
wasn't. It was neither good nor bad, nor anything. It was just this
thoughtless, gleaming, perfect skin I could wear."

    I
hold the Lamb's out to Randy, who takes a glug. And then another.

    "It's
a funny thing," he says. "But I think I was trying to do the exact
opposite."

    "How's
that?"

    "All
this time I've been working to take my skin
off
Show what lies beneath.
Which might sound like drama school crap, but I believed it."

    "You
didn't seem to take it too seriously."

    "But
I
did.
," he says, passing the bottle back to me. '"Just act
normal.' Remember?"

    "Acting
was more than just a job for you? That what you're saying?"

    "It
wasn't a job at all. In fact, it's the job part that I hate."

    "Or
not
getting
the job."

    "Yes.
That sucks too."

    I try
to screw the cap back onto the bottle, but my fingers aren't cooperating, so I
take another drink instead and leave it open.

    "I've
never understood something about the whole drama thing," I say.

    "What?"

    "Are
actors faking being someone else or opening up what they already are?"

    "The
lousy ones—the ones like me-—are just making faces and saying lines they memorized.
The good ones
become."

    "Become
what?"

    "Something
new out of something they've always been."

    Randy
appears reflective, and at first I suspect it is the beginning of a routine, a
comic mask of seriousness he's put on to set a mood before delivering the
punchline. But when he speaks next, it doesn't sound anything like humour.

    "You
know what the worst part of getting old is?"

    "Old?"
I say. "We're only forty, Randy."

    "Don't
give me that 'only forty' bullshit. Because I
know
you know what I'm
talking about."

    "Okay,
you got me. What's the worst part?"

    "Realizing
you haven't done a goddamn thing with your life."

    "There's
only so many Nobel Prizes to go around."

    "It
doesn't have to be that big. Nobody else even needs to know about it other than
you. It just has to be, I don't know,
remarkable."

    "There's
still time."

    "I
don't think so," Randy says, and the lost look in his eyes is suddenly
real, a joke-repellent sadness. "That's all I've wanted since I left this
place. To do one small, remarkable thing. It could have changed
everything."

    "Changed
you, you mean?"

    "Everything."

    Outside,
the wind blows night over the town. A grey sand that settles on the roof shingles
and in the crooks of tree limbs. Randy is watching it come when he asks, for
the first time out loud, a question I have asked myself a thousand times
before.

    "Who
is he?" he says.

    "I
don't know."

    "What
do you think he wants?"

    "I've
got a theory on that one."

    "Shoot."

    "More."

    "More
what?"

    "Whatever
it is someone might be able to give him. More of themselves."

    "The
worst part of themselves."

    "Exactly."

    "It's
like he
pushes
you."

    "And
he does it by pretending he knows you," I say. "He's almost
sympathetic
, you know?
We're all flawed, all have impure thoughts, no
big deal. So let's have some fun.
He makes it feel like the two of you are
best friends."

    "Except
he actually hates you," Randy says. "He hates you, and he wants you
to rot and hate in there with him."

    It's
night now. Dinnertime, though it could be any of the long hours between now and
the reluctant October dawn. This, and our talk of the boy, has chilled the
previous illusion of good humour and left us stone-faced and cold, wishing for
homes we haven't known for half a lifetime.

    "This
was my idea, so I guess I ought to lead the way," I announce finally,
working my way to the top of the attic stairs. For the time it takes me to
reach the second-floor landing, I can't hear any steps behind me and figure
Randy has decided to stay behind. Yet when I look back he is there.

    "Night,
Mrs. McAuliffe," I call through her closed bedroom door as we pass.

    "You
boys try to stay out of trouble!"

    "In
Grimshaw?"

    "Oh,
you can find trouble just about anywhere if you're looking for it," the
old woman says, and from under the door, the light from her bedside lamp
retreats into shadow.

    Just
as we crossed Caledonia Street with the intention of entering the Thurman house
when we were sixteen, we don't even try the front door, and instead prowl along
the hedgerow to the back. On our way, I measure the side windows that look into
the living room, half expecting to still see the
fuckt
drawn into the
dust. But there is no message there at all now except for the streaks of
condensation that have left lines over the glass like tear stains.

    The
backyard is the same as I remember it, if smaller. The rusted swing set and
see-saw built for dwarves, the fence around the lot that looks like even I
could heave myself over it if I came at it with a little speed.

    And
then we look up at the back of the house, and it seems to have grown over the
second we took our eyes off it. The brick arse of the place looming over where
we stand, the windows unshuttered and lightless. The headless rooster weather
vane spinning left, then right, then back again, as though trying to decide
which way offers the best route for escape.

    "It's
just the same as every other place along this street," Randy whispers.
"So why is it the only one that's so friggin' ugly?"

    "Because
it's not the same as every other place," I answer, and start toward the
back door.

    Start,
then stop. Wait for Randy to take my arm for a few steps when my legs refuse to
carry me any closer.

    "You
okay?" he asks, and with my nod, he goes in.

    Which
leaves me on my own. And I'm turning around. Ready to get as far from the bad
smell that exhales from the open doorway as my feet are prepared to take me.

    
Hold
on, Trev,
the boy says
.
You don't want Handy Randy to see the
show without you, do you
?

    No. I
want to see the show too.

    From the
kitchen, Randy asks where I've got to. Then I'm in too. The sound of Randy's
steps pacing over the curled linoleum. Along with the internal cold that
signals the arrival of a virus. A sensation located more in the mind than the
body. A degradation. The unshakeable idea that, in merely being here, I have
shamed myself.

    "How
do you want to do this?" Randy asks once I feel my way to where he is.

    
I
don't know. But let's stay together
, I want to say, but instead say,
"I'll take the cellar. You look around on this floor and upstairs."

    "Better
you than me."

    Then
he's gone.

    It
could be courage that has me shuffle over to the cellar door and push it open,
staring down into the dark, but it doesn't feel like it. It is merely a
surrender to the next moment.

    What's
suddenly clear is that it wasn't Tracey Flanagan who brought me here. I am here
because the house was lonely for me. And in a way I can't possibly explain, I
am lonely for it too.

    I
turn on the flashlight, and an orb of yellow plays over the stairwell's plaster
walls.

    But
there is nothing to see. I'll have to go down there to find whatever might be
found. And it's not something I am able to do without someone else going down
first. Or being pushed.

    Pushed.
The last time I stood here I'd wondered the same thing. Wondered if Carl, who
stood behind me, was someone else entirely. Someone wearing a convincing Carl
suit.

    But
it
was
Carl, only changed in the way all of us had been changed.

    "It's
different," he had said at the time, and I hadn't known what he'd meant.
Though I do now.

    I'm
three steps down when I hear Randy's voice. Speaking my name from the other end
of the hall. Careful not to shout, as though trying not to disturb another's
sleep.

    I
backstep up the cellar stairs and scuff to the hall. Randy is standing against
the front door, so that at first I think he's trying to prevent it from
opening. But as I get closer I see that his back isn't touching the door at
all.

    "Up
there," he whispers.

    Now the
two of us stand at the bottom of the stairs. Nervous suitors waiting for our
prom dates to come down.

    But
when someone appears at the top of the stairs it's not a girl in a chiffon
dress. It isn't Tracey Flanagan, and it isn't the boy. It's one of us, unshaven
and hunched. Alive but with all the years of regret and negligence written over
him like a useless map.

    This
is what frightens Randy and me, what we can see clearly for the first time:

    There
is the unreal.

    And
then there is the real, which can sometimes be the more surprising of the two.

    I
didn't ask Ben how the coach had managed to get untied and take the gun from
him. We walked out the back door together without talking of the boy, or the
scene the blue light of the passing snowplow had revealed to me upstairs. Ben
just crossed Caledonia Street and shuffled up the front steps of his house,
kicked his boots against the wall to knock off the snow and slipped inside. I
looked back at the Thurman house, half expecting some new display in one of its
windows, but each pane of glass was a hollow iris, taking in me, the street,
the slumbering homes of Grimshaw, giving nothing in return.

    I
don't remember speaking to my parents when I came in (my father captaining the
remote, my mother asleep sitting up on the sofa, a basket of half-folded
laundry at her feet—their usual evening positions). It was strange how, after
all that had happened in the house that night, I walked out and didn't speak a
word to anyone until the next morning, when I called Carl and, before he could
say hello, blurted out "It's over" as if we'd been dating.

    "I
know."