The Guardians (6 page)

    "He
was using, Trev."

    "Did
you—I don't know—confront him?"

    "Confront
Carl
?"

    "No.
I wouldn't have either."

    "He
called every once in a while. Then, maybe two years ago, even the calls
stopped."

    "He
never called me."

    "He
was
ashamed
," Randy says. "He looked up to you more than any
of us."

    "He
did?"

    "The
best hockey player. Successful businessman. You were steady."

    I'd
been standing with my arms crossed over my chest. Now I release them, hold them
out in front of me and let them shake. "Who's steady now?"

    It's
meant as a joke, but it only makes Randy uncomfortable. I step aside to let him
into the room. He goes and stands at the window. Speaking against the glass.

    "I
visited Mrs. McAuliffe this morning," he says. "Apparently Ben had a
will. And he named you executor of his estate."

    "What
estate?"

    "You
mean aside from some hockey cards and a jar of dimes? Not much."

    The
room closes in on us, stifling even the idea of speech. It's not that we've so
quickly run out of things to say, but that there's too much.

    Randy
turns to face me. "What are we going to do?" "In Grimshaw? At
three-thirty on a Thursday afternoon?" I shuffle over to Randy and deliver
a smart smack to the side of his face. "Let's get a drink."

    We were
sitting in music class on a Tuesday morning in early February, waiting for Miss
Langham to walk in and give us one of her let's-get-started smiles, when Ben
turned around in his chair to face me and whispered, "I had the most
fucked-up dream last night."

    There
was nothing unusual in this. Miss Langham was often a minute or two late for
us, her first class of the day. She had a gift for comic entrances. We never
laughed at Miss Langham, though. We were too busy fixing her quirks into our
memory: the sound of her footsteps scuffing hurriedly down the hall and—
slap!—
a
dropped textbook on the floor, followed by a Girl Scout cuss that we held our
breath in order to hear.

    
Butternuts!

    
Frick
!

    Then
her hand gripped on the doorframe, spinning her into the room. Her flushed
apology. The wisp of hair that had come loose and she now curled her lower lip
to blow out of her eyes. The later she was, the better we behaved.

    As
for Ben, he was always having dreams. Surreal, circular narratives he would begin
relating to me as we waited for Miss Langham, laying his flute on his lap and
leaning back, making sure we weren't being overheard, as though the latest clip
from his subconscious was something others were eager to monitor, to use.

    Ben's
dreams were a little strange. What was stranger was when he saw people who
weren't there:

    A man
with goat horns, standing at the top of his attic stairs.

    A boy
with one arm freshly cut off and waving wildly with the other, as though to a
departing ship, standing in Ben's backyard when he looked up while mowing the
lawn.

    An
old woman who might have been his grandmother if she hadn't died the year
before, looking out from his bedroom closet, red scars in place of eyes.

    On
this Tuesday, waiting for Miss Langham's arrival, what was a little out of the
ordinary wasn't Ben telling me he'd had another weird dream the night before,
but how he looked when he did. His skin showing tiny blue veins, as it did
after he'd sat, unplayed, for a couple of hours in a freezing-cold ice rink.

    "I'm
not even sure it
was
a dream," he said.

    "What
was it about?"

    "Me,
looking out my bedroom window. Everything like the way it is when I'm awake.
The one streetlight that works, the one that doesn't. The trees, the houses.
Nothing happening. I'm almost falling asleep—like a kind of
double
sleep, because it's a dream, right? And then, there's . . .
something."

    "Something?"

    "I
don't even really see it. I just notice that something is different. Something
that's
moving."

    "What
was it?"

    "I
told you, I didn't really see it."

    "The
thing you didn't see. What'd it look like?"

    "Like
the shadow of a tree, maybe. But not."

    "So
it had
feet?
This tree?"

    "It
wasn't a tree."

    "A
person, then."

    "I
guess."

    I
looked to the door. I was more than ready for Miss Langham.

    "I
don't think it was alone," Ben said.

    "There
were two people?"

    "I
got the idea it was holding on to someone."

    "And
where'd it take them?"

    "Round
the side of the Thurman house. It was scary, Trev. Seriously."

    "Good
thing it was just a dream."

    "I
told you. I'm not sure it was."

    "What's
wrong with you? You okay?"

    "I...
I think . . . you . . ."

    "You
look like you're going to puke."

    I remember
pulling my feet out from under his
chair
,
just in case.

    Ben
took a deep breath. Swallowed. "You need to hear the fucked-up part."

    "Okay."

    "Like
I said, I couldn't really see. But I could
feel
who it was. The person it
was carrying into the house."

    
"Into
the house? I thought you said it just went round—"

    
"Good
mor-
ning
!"

    Not
Heather. A buxom lady in support hose writing her name on the blackboard. We'd
seen her before, doing the same thing at the front of our math, geography,
history classes.

    "Where's
Miss Langham?" I asked without raising my hand. Then, after not getting an
answer: "Where's Heather?"

    The
supply teacher kept writing her name. In fact, she slowed down to buy the extra
second required to come up with an answer to the question she knew was coming
next. A question that came from Randy.

    "Is
she okay?"

    The
supply teacher put down her chalk. Thumbed her glasses back up the slippery
bridge of her nose.

    "Miss
Langham is unavailable at this time," she said.

    And
before we could ask anything else, she was tapping her baton and telling us to
open our sheet music to "The Maple Leaf Forever."

    Something
else was worth noting from later that afternoon. A good deed.

    We
went to visit Paul Schantz in the Cedarfield Seniors

    Home
as part of a "community outreach" program the Guardians' board of
directors thought up, the idea being that team players would go to visit kids
with cancer or other fans who couldn't make the games, and someone from the
Beacon
would be there to take a picture for the next day's paper. It didn't
turn out that way. In fact, Randy, Ben, Carl and I were the only ones to sign
up.

    According
to the scrawled letter he sent the coach, Paul Schantz was a Guardian himself
"during the war" (meaning the
First
World War, I figured out
when I did the math). When we arrived, he'd been wheeled out to meet us wearing
a team jersey so big he looked like a wrinkly dwarf inside of it. Then we
pushed him to his room, too small for the five of us. We wanted to leave after
two minutes.

    "You
have any kids?" Carl attempted at one point.

    Paul
pinched his chin. "I'd say we had eighteen over the years." He was
recovering from a stroke, so it was hard to know exactly what he said. Then he
explained that he and his wife had been foster parents.

    "You
ever miss them?" Ben asked.

    His
face clouded over. "All of them. Except one."

    "A
bad apple."

    "There's
bad. Then there's worth."

    "Worth?
Worth in what?"

    
"Worse.
Worse
!
"
He fought to get this out, leaving his chin white with
spit. "There's always something worse than you think. Closer than you
think."

    That
was about it. One by one my friends excused themselves to visit the men's room
and didn't come back. Until only I was left.

    "It's
been good to meet you, Mr. Schantz," I said, backing toward the door.
"And I hope we can bring the cup home this year, just like—"

    "There's
some places you should never go."

    It was
a strange thing to say, if in fact he said it. But I remember the moment not
for the words I thought I heard him mumble, but for the look on the old man's
face. A kind of insane clarity.

    He
was talking about the Thurman house. I couldn't say why I was so sure, other
than the look of him. He'd been just this withered stranger, his legs painful-
looking sticks on the footrests, yet now he was sitting forward, his eyes alive
and searching.

    Then
he collapsed back into his wheelchair. I was wrong: he wasn't reading my mind.
As I slipped out, I heard him mutter, "Sometimes I wet my back."

    
I
bet,
I thought as I made my way toward Ben, Randy and Carl, who stood
waiting at the end of the hall.
Doesn't mean I have to be there the next
time you do.

    But
before I reached them, I heard the old man's words a different way.

    
Sometimes
the dead come back
.

    I
already mentioned that my father worked for the utilities commission. A union rep
with his own office in the basement of Municipal Hall, back in the days when
offices had ashtrays and a bottle of whisky in the bottom drawer and windowless
doors that could lock shut. He didn't work too hard.

    But
he often brought stories home with him. Juicy stuff, as far as Grimshaw went.
Battles between neighbours over the staking of property lines. The mayor owing
five grand in parking tickets. Noise complaints against an apartment behind
Roma Pizza, from which a woman's shrieking orgasms (or what my dad called
"the sounds of a cat in heat") awakened dozens in the night.

    Because
they shared a filing system, police gossip would also flow through the basement
of Municipal Hall. Usually, this side of my father's nightly news was sad more
than thrilling. Domestic knockabouts, drunk-driving charges, old people
discovered a few days dead on their linoleum floors.

    Yet
that night, I could tell my father had a scoop when he took his place at the
head of the kitchen table. Hands placed on either side of his dinner plate,
staring down at what my mother had spooned out of the casserole dish with the
sombre look of a judge reading a jury's verdict to himself before announcing it
to the court.

    "Langham,"
he said finally. "She's a teacher of yours, right? The pretty one?"

    "Music,"
I said.

    "She
wasn't at school today."

    "No."

    I
watched him use his knife to bulldoze food onto the back of his fork. Slip it
into his mouth. Chew.

    "What
about her?" I asked once he'd swallowed.

    "They're
looking for her."

    "They?"

    "It'll
be in the paper in the morning."