The Guardians (32 page)

    It's
the damnedest thing. But no matter how many times I have returned to the boy in
my mind, no matter how vivid his presence in my dreams, I cannot conjure him in
the details Carl has just asked for.

    "Randy,"
I say, "why don't you start?"

    "I'm
not sure I can."

    "Why
not?"

    "It's
like being asked to describe, I don't know, air or something. Or loss, or
anger. You can't say what shape it takes, only what it does to you."

    Carl
claps his hands together. "If
that's
what you saw, then I've seen
him too."

    "I
could say more than that about him," I say. "He looked a lot like
me."

    "Or
like me," Randy says.

    "Or
me," Carl says.

    A
second rumble of thunder reaches us from an even greater distance than the
first. Yet this time, it continues to widen its sound. Bearing down on Grimshaw
with sustained fury.

    Carl
says something, or tries to but the noise is too great for us to hear him. It's
just his mouth opening into a circle and clenching shut, over and over.

    Pain!
Pain!

    Then
the terrible clatter of the wheels rolling over us. The trellis's steel crying
under its weight.

    "Train!
Train!"

    I
wait for the black cars to pass, my arms around my knees.

    Close
my eyes against the glint of Carl's teeth.

    It's
only the train, I know. But something sounds as though it has joined us down
here. Something that is screaming and will never stop.

    Over
the time it takes to reach the Queen's and check Carl in with my credit card, I
am wondering the same thing. I wonder it all the way to Caledonia Street, where
I stop at the curb opposite the Thurman house.

    Why
don't we talk about it?

    Why,
after all these years, do we not even mention the elephant in the room—the
elephant in our
lives
—that is what we did and saw in the winter of 1984?
One reason is that we promised never to speak of it again. And none of us
wished to be the first to break this promise.

    But
it's really more simple than that. We are men. Defined by the bearing of
terrible truths more than a fondness for sports, for sex, for the wish to be
left alone. It is as men that we remain silent to our horror.

    I
totter up the stairs to Ben's room. Roll onto the bed and sit up against the
headboard, planning to record another entry for my Memory Diary. But when I
reach for the Dictaphone on the bedside table, it's gone. At first, I assume I
put it down somewhere else. Twenty minutes of upturning pillows and cheek-
to-the-hardwood scans of the floor prove that it's not here.

    I
look out Ben's window. Wonder if the boy took it, and is now listening to it
over and over for his own pleasure.

    Then I
wonder something worse. What if it is now in the hands of someone who hears it
for what it really is, not a diary at all but the confession of a crime? What
if Betty McAuliffe is holding it to her ear under the sheets of her bed? What
if someone who knew it was here—Randy, or Carl, who would have seen me in the
window—came in and stole it? This last one being the worst possibility of all.
Not because my friends might be thieves, but because from this point on I will
be unable to prevent myself from wondering if they are.

    What
I need is a little bedtime reading. Something to slow my mind from its restless
thinking. Trouble is, the only thing I'm interested in is Ben's journal. This
time, as I curl up in his bed, I don't have the patience to move forward from
where I left off last time, and skip ahead to the final pages.

    
September
14, 2008

    
Woke
up this morning feeling strange. Not something strange in me-, but something
that had touched me in the night. A stranger in my room.

    
I
sat up in bed and saw that I was right.

    
A
message smudged onto the inside of the bedroom window:

    
i
found him

    After
this, the diary returned to its record of soups Ben had for lunch for a few days.
No sightings of the boy, no shooing visitors off the Thurman property. And then
the final entry:

    
September
20, 2008 This just happened.

    
It
is the end of things, I know. Forgive me. I have done my best but I am tired
now, so tired it's almost impossible to write this, to

    
push
the pen over this paper. I am tired and alone and I want only to

    
be
with him, to comfort him. It's funny. It's so stupid, but it's taken until now
to realize how much I've missed my father
.

    
Forgive
me

    + + +
+ +

    
Another
message on my window tonight.

    
I
had been keeping watch on the house, and turned away only long enough to get
the glass of water I'd left by the bed. But when I sat down again it was there
:

    
daddy's
waiting

    
I
slid the window open. The night smelled of lilacs and carnations. Not a good
smell, though. Flowers left too long in dry vases.

    
He
was sitting on the front steps. Stooped, elbows propped on his knees. He had
been waiting He looked even more tired than me. Like he'd been running and had
just stopped and was trying to remember what he'd been running from.

    
My
father stood when he saw me. I can't exactly say what expression he wore. It
was defeat, among other things. And sadness. So lonely it made him look hollow.

    
He
turned and walked into the house. Like he'd been called in for bed. Like it was
the end of a long, long day.

    
Forgive
me.

    Later
that same night, Randy called to tell me Ben was gone.

    We
watched them come.

    A
lone police cruiser at first. The officer's shirt straining against the bulge
around his waist. When he came out he wasn't wearing his cap anymore.

    We
stood together. Unseen behind the curtains in the front room of Ben's house,
his mother out on a grocery run. When the paramedics and bearded man in a suit
who must have been the coroner finally emerged with the black bags laid out on
gurneys—one, and then the smaller other—we held our breaths.

    We
remember all this, though still not everything.

    And
some of the things we remember may not have happened at all.

    The
letter, amazingly, was Randy's idea.

    We
were sitting in the Ford before school, no more than twenty minutes after Carl and
I had witnessed the coach blow the side of his head off. I suppose the two of
us must have been exhibiting some symptoms of shock, but I can't recall any
tears or stony stares into space. Maybe this was because everything, as they
say, was
happening so fast.
And we had each other. The most horrific
events remained an inch within the bounds of the manageable so long as there
was at least one Guardian to share them with.

    We
quickly agreed that hoping it would all go away was no longer an option. Neighbours
might have heard the firing of Carl's revolver. Or perhaps someone passing by
saw the coach in one of the windows. Or maybe someone other than us—a junkie
kicked out of his room at the Y, young lovers looking for a wall to screw
against—had smelled the morgueish taint in the house's air and knew it to be
more than a poisoned rat. In any case, Heather Langham and the coach would soon
be found, if they hadn't been already. And the likelihood of their trails
leading to us, one way or another, was high, unless we could prevent an
investigation from starting in the first place. A story that made sense out of
what we knew to be senseless.

    They
were both teachers, seen to be friendly, sharing books in the staff lounge. One
night, a shared flask, an empty house. But something had gone wrong—the blows
to Heather's skull showed that, along with her hasty burial. A day or two
passed, long enough for the coach to be pushed all the way over the edge, and
he returned to the scene to do himself in. Some version of a narrative like
this happened all the time, if not in Grimshaw then in some other hicksville
they flashed the name of at the bottom of the screen on the supper- time news.

    Two
problems, though. One: the police had to see it this way. Two: if we were going
to go in this direction, we had to start now.

    That's
when Randy mentioned the letter. He pointed out that, if we wanted it to look
like a murder-and-then-a-later-suicide, a confession from the coach was the way
to go. The trick was that it would have to appear as though it were composed
when he was still alive.

    Ben
pulled out his wallet and unfolded a piece of paper from its slot.

    "We'll
use this," he said.

    It
was the paper the coach had signed but otherwise left blank. A confession he
challenged us to fill in ourselves. Which is what we did.

    We
went to Carl's apartment. There was an electric typewriter under his sofa that
we plugged in, and we typed what we hoped would be taken as the coach's
admission of guilt:

    
321
Caledonia

    We
folded it into thirds, deciding against an envelope. As an afterthought, Carl
typed URGENT on the outside.

    Our
first idea was to drop it off at police headquarters. But Carl, who'd been
inside the cop shop more than the rest of us, remembered they had security
cameras at the front and back doors. We were stumped for a minute after that,
until I suggested leaving it at the
Beacon
offices. No cameras there,
and there was the possibility of someone in its sleepy newsroom coming across a
piece of paper marked URGENT and going to the trouble of reading it.

    This
was how Ben (who nominated himself, and who somehow seemed right for the task)
came to run the three blocks from Carl's to slip the folded paper into the mail
slot next to the front doors of
The Grimshaw Beacon.

    When
Ben met up with us again, he said, "My mom's out shopping. Then she's
getting her hair done."

    "So?"
Randy said.

    "So
we can watch from my place."

    One
of us probably should have pointed out that this was an unnecessary risk.
Besides, spying on the authorities as they arrived at the Thurman house to push
the soil off Heather Langham and elbow the bedroom door open to the coach's
bloody spatters—it might make us feel even more guilty than we already did.

    But
we started over to Ben's house without discussion. The thing is, we wanted to
see. To observe others go inside and come out changed.

    We
got away with it. The family-destroying trial, the humiliations of prison.
There was none of that for any of us. We were free.

    But
getting away with the sort of thing we did can ruin a man. It can ruin four of
them.

    Here's
another thing I know: there are people who have got away with things all around
you. Mothers and fathers, the fellow who helps lift your stroller onto the bus,
the ball of rags you walk by when it asks for change. You might work with them,
play beer-league ball with them, sleep with them. Good guys. And you'd never
know they were one of us.