The Guardians (5 page)

    Within
a minute, we are rolling into the old part of town at a walking pace. It gives
us a chance to study the Inventory Blowout! offerings at what used to be Krazy
Kevin's car lot, where Randy's dad worked, to catch a whiff of the fumes rising
from the Erie Burger's exhaust. There is even a welcome party of sorts. Three
kids smoking against the wall of the station, giving us the finger.

    When
the train stops I am alone in getting to my feet, hauling my bag off the rack
and stepping down onto the platform. The cars already moving again, easing into
the west end of town, where they will pass the high school, the courthouse
before speeding out onto the tobacco flats. All places I'd rather view through
double-paned glass. But now I'm here. The Grimshaw air. The midday moon staring
down, bug-eyed and bored.

    A
gust blows a Big Gulp cup against my leg. Dust devils swirl over the platform,
and within them, the laughing voice again.

    Welcome
home
.

    Randy
was Howdy Doody-freckled, knob-elbowed and goofy-haired, but girls liked him.
It was hard to know precisely what charms he possessed that got him into
perfumed back seats and onto darkened basement futons more frequently than the
rest of us. The easy answer would be his "sense of humour," which was
how most of the girls who came and went, unblamingly, through Randy's teens
would have explained it. But I'm not so sure. Yes, Randy was funny. But he was
more of a joke than a comedian. Someone to be next to and feel that here was a
fellow who needn't be taken seriously. I think this is what girls saw in Randy,
and still do. He made the idea of two people being with each other for a time
so much simpler than it was with anyone else.

    Take
Carl, for instance. Girls liked him too. In his case, it was a combination of
good looks and a reluctance to speak that was often mistaken for an air of
mystery. But Carl was restless. For him, female affection was something to
gorge on, swiftly and roughly, then leave behind without clearing his plate.
His habit was to break up with his girlfriends without telling them, refusing
to return their calls or meet their eyes in the school hallways. Unlike Randy,
Carl made girls cry.

    Ben,
on the other hand, mostly did without. Not that there weren't sideways
opportunities offered to him. Quieter girls, too studious or artsy to attract
more aggressive attention. Instead, they made themselves available to Ben (in
camouflaged ways), and he went about his business. And what
was
Ben's
business? Living in his head. Reading dragon and time-travel novels. He wrote
poetry. Stranger still, he
read
poetry.

    But
what Ben did more than anything else was watch. Our backup goalie, following
the play from the bench like a shoulder-padded Buddha. A silhouette in his
attic bedroom, staring at the house across from his.

    Of
the four of us, I was the "married man." Funny to think how true this
was at the time. And how, for the more than twenty years since I last saw Sarah
Mulgrave, I've been about as far from married as a man can get.

    The
obvious explanation for this would be the Thurman house. It messed all of us up
in different ways.

    Addiction.
Professional failure. Emotional amputations. For me, it was never being able to
love—or be loved by—a woman again.

    Personally,
I favour an even more sentimental explanation: Sarah was meant to be mine. And
the wound I am to bear is to have had her taken from me.

    Even
today, I whisper "Sarah Mulgrave" and she is with me. A wrinkled nose
when she laughed. Hair the colour of a new penny. A mouth that articulated as
much when listening as when speaking: sharply etched, blushed lips, amused
creases at the corners. And green eyes. Lovely in their colour but lovelier in
what they promised.

    Sarah
came to all the Guardians games, and though this earned her inclusion among the
"puck bunnies" who fawned over Carl and the older guys on the team,
the fact is she had little interest in sports. She would never have shown up to
sit at the top of the stands, clutching a hot chocolate beneath the maniacal,
hockey- stick-munching beaver of the Akins Lumber billboard, were it not to
shout for number 12. Me.

    Afterward,
if my dad wasn't using the car, I would drive her home. The last of the
wood-panelled Buick wagons. Hideous but handy. Because on those evenings we
would take a spin out of town. Spook ourselves by switching the headlights off
and flying over the night roads. Knowing that no harm could come to us because
we were
young
—not children anymore, but still immune to what grimly went
by the name of the

    Real
World. The car hurtling into darkness. A foreplay of screams.

    We
would slow only once we passed the "Welcome to the Village of
Harmony" sign. Park in an orchard of black walnut trees. The pulsing
silence of a killed engine.

    It
was often cold out. But the shared heat of our skin fought off the chill until
we lay side by side, our breath visible exclamations against the windows. My
dad would take measurements of the gas he left in the tank, so in heating the
car, we had to weigh the risk of discovery against the fear of frostbite. The
result was sporadic, short hits of warmth from the front vents. To avoid
getting up and baring my ass to those who might drive by, I learned to turn the
keys in the ignition with my toes.

    Sarah's
dad was friendly but strict. He liked me, and was even prepared to look the
other way when his daughter was returned home an hour past curfew, her cheeks
flushed, smelling faintly of cherry brandy. But the unspoken deal between us
was that he was permitting these liberties on the condition that, sooner rather
than later, I would propose to Sarah. He married Sarah's mom when they were
both only a couple of years older than we were then. Teen weddings in Grimshaw
were far from uncommon. Many kids knew what their professional lives were going
to be by that time, the house they would one day inherit. What was the point in
waiting?

    It
was a plan I was happy to entertain myself. I had no sense, as Carl and Randy
had (and maybe Ben too, though who could tell?), that we were too young to
judge who was right for us, that more sophisticated, realized women awaited us
in our post-Grimshaw lives. There was nothing I could imagine wanting beyond
Sarah anyway. I would marry her, just as her father wished. Why not? Sarah and
I would look out for each other and let our lives, long and benign, wash over
us.

    And I
would give my right arm (for what it's shakily worth) to know how that life
would have turned out. Sarah could have waitressed, I could have found work on
a construction crew or factory floor. We would have had our own apartment,
something on the second floor over a shoe store or laundromat, the bedroom in
the back. Just the two of us (the three? the four?), getting along fine without
a coach or Heather Langham or friends I felt I should be ready to die for.
Without a Thurman house.

    For
that,
go ahead. Take both arms.

    My
room smells of ammonia and wet dog.

    I'm
on the top floor—the third—of the Queen's Hotel. A brick cube whose one gesture
toward grandeur, a tin cupola over the corner suite, had over the decades been
painted with coats of blue and yellow and green that wouldn't stick, so that
these days it appears psychedelically polka-dotted. Other than a couple of
motels on the edge of town—the inexplicably international Swiss Cottage and
Golden Gate—the Queen's is the only place to stay in Grimshaw. For this reason
alone, it enjoyed a reputation for fanciness that was never deserved. Though
there were sporadic efforts to renovate its rooms or hire a "French
chef" to pour sherry and cream over the menu, eventually the Queen's
always returned to its fatigued self

    I
open the window that looks out over Ontario Street and breathe. Grimshaw is a
farming town, and in the summer and fall there is always a breeze carrying the
perfume of cow manure to remind you of the fact. Not to mention the afternoon
traffic of eighteen-wheelers hauling livestock to slaughter. Pig snouts and
cattle tails and chicken feathers poking through the slats of passing trailers.
As a kid, I felt that only the pigs knew what was coming. Watching them now,
the pink nostrils flaring, I feel the same thing.

    I lie
down on the bed for a time. I must have, because when there's a knock at the
door, that's where I am.

    "Who
is it?"

    "Wayne
Gretzky. Team Canada needs you, son."

    I
open the door and Randy is standing there. And while I am almost light-headed
with happiness to see him, I have, at first, an even more overwhelming thought.

    
Good
God, you look old
.

    And
then, after a glimpse of ourselves in the hall mirror:
We both do.
The
indoor skin, the lines of shoulder and chin grown soft. Randy and I look as
though some internal dimmer switch has been lowered, pulling us into partial
shadow.

    
What
the hell happened
?

    The worst
part is we know the answer.

    The
project of Being a Man had shifted with overnight suddenness, so that we
awakened one morning with the hungover certainty that something was wrong. All
the things we had been working for, what we had managed to achieve, now
required maintenance. For most it is a home, a family. For Randy, an acting
career limited to bit parts and commercials. For me, it was Retox, the
girlfriend with a bar code tattooed on her inner thigh. Whatever it was, it
would prove to be too much. Some of it was bound to slip away. It
had
been slipping away.

    But
here Randy and I are together again. Overdressed and middle-aged, improbably
standing in a bare room of the Queen's Hotel like actors in a Beckett play
who've forgotten their lines.

    
You
too
.

    That's
what we see in each other's eyes, what we silently share in the pause between
recognition and brotherly embrace.

    
I
see it got you too
.

    "Well,"
Randy says, slapping both of my shoulders. "We're here."

    "Yes,
we goddamn are."

    "Have
you been around town yet? It's like a time capsule. The world's most
pointless
time capsule."

    "Can't
wait to see all the sights."

    "I
guess Ben's the only one who could have brought us back."

    "Ben's
the only one who could have got us to do a whole lot of things."

    I was
referring only to harmless stuff, of how Ben could talk us into goofing around
with a Ouija board or playing Dungeons & Dragons, but as soon as it was
out, I heard how it could seem that I was speaking of something else.

    "You
know what's funny?" Randy announces finally. "The last time I was in
the Queen's, it was with Tina Uxbridge."

    "Todd
Flanagan's girlfriend?"

    "It
was her idea, swear to God. I liked Todd. But I liked Tina more."

    "She
had his kid, didn't she? In grade twelve or something?" And then:
"Jesus, Randy. Maybe it was
yours."

    
"Not
mine. Trust me, I checked the calendar."

    "Wait.
I'm still a little dizzy here. You slept with
Tina Uxbridge?
"

    "Just
down the hall."

    "You
amaze me, Randy."

    "And
she
amazed
me."

    I
look around the room, checking the corners.

    "I
tried," Randy says. "Followed up again on every number Carl ever gave
me. Nobody knows where he is."

    "He
ought to be here."

    "Did
you ever talk to him?"

    "Not
much the last few years."

    "So
you never saw him after things got bad."

    The
two of us still standing in the room's entryway. I should move aside, give us
some space. But I need to hear what Randy is now obliged to tell me.