Heroes (2 page)

By Grade 11 Bayle's sister had successfully convinced their recently widowed mother that the cost of allowing her to complete her high-school years at a private, downtown Toronto Catholic school — and not at the nearby suburban Etobicoke public high school — was well worth it, both because of the superior education she would be receiving and because she likely wouldn't have to spend the majority of her free time fighting off the sometimes crude advances of her male classmates. Even by her first year of high school,
the hockey-playing, beer-guzzling Etobicoke boys never knew quite what to make of tall, brilliant, and undeniably beautiful Patty.

Of course, to Bayle — and Bayle alone — Patty had immediately revealed her true motive: the wonderfully sinful thrill of reading the Catholic Church's entire
index librorum prohibititorum
right under the nun's noses.

“But we're not Catholic,” Bayle had protested.

They were lying where they did whenever Patty really needed to talk, backs to the carpet on the floor of her bedroom, undergraduate university man Bayle making the trip back to Etobicoke because Patty had called him up the night before with “some really incredible news, Peter, I mean, really, really, incredible news.” Their heads were almost touching although neither was able to see the face of the other, only the plain white ceiling up above. A record of Gregorian chants, another recent enthusiasm, moaned from Patty's Simpson-Sears stereo.

“Just think,” Patty said, ignoring her brother's objection, “this time next year I'll be in the lavatory at Lorreto's smoking the day's first cigarette and cracking open
Our Lady of the Flowers.
Genet was on the list for years, you know.”

“Lavatory” was one of a handful of linguistic leftovers remaining from what their mother still called Patty's British Thing. This after, successively, the Kennedy Conspiracy Thing, the Punk Thing, and the Ecology Thing. A faded Union Jack and
The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling
lay cardboard-boxed and buried in the garage under their mother's broken sewing machine and Bayle's old hockey equipment, never spoken of between any of them.

“Look, Patty,” Bayle said, “I really don't want to be the one to spoil your party, but, uhm ....”

And he didn't. Not really. But he did. Almost always, Bayle did.

From the womb, it seemed, Bayle knew that two and two were four and couldn't ever forget it, as fine a disposition as any level-headed logician or any pisser on any number of
other people's parades of passion as could be asked for. But who really wants to be the one going around with a calculator reminding ten-year-old kids playing ball hockey in the frozen street all day that the odds of their growing up to be just like their hockey-playing heroes are just about as good as their being struck by lightning twice in the same afternoon? I mean, who? Who really wants to be that guy?

“But what?” Patty said. “But what, Peter?”

“I mean,” Bayle said, “I'm not an authority or anything, but the way I understand it there's this one little thing you've got to have to be considered a Catholic.”

“What little thing?”

“Well, God.”

He couldn't see them, but Bayle could hear his sister scratching away at the backs of her hands. Every one of Patty's new enthusiasms was born of a sudden burst of maniacal energy culminating in chafed red hands and wrists. Cortisone and — for brief periods, when it got bad enough — yellow dish gloves to discourage contact with the infected skin area helped, but only the inevitable loss of interest in whatever up to that point had absorbed her so entirely signalled the beginning of the healing process for his sister's rubbed-raw skin.

And like a lone teetotaller in a sweaty room full of raging drunks, like a voyeur standing around with his hands in his pockets at an orgy in full swing, when Patty was like this, at her scratching fervent worst, frankly she made Bayle just a little bit nervous. Might even have scared him a little. All right, she scared him. Scared the hell out of him. Bayle came to inherit a guilty relief at the sight of his melancholy sister's perfect white hands.

Patty didn't say anything. After a while, she got up to flip over the record, the monk's chanting eventually giving way to the snap, pop, and dull thud that announced that the needle had gone as far as it could go, that the music was over. Worse than the sound of the scratching, Bayle hated to hear his sister silent.

Patty flipped over the record. A hundred perfect voices of unshakeable devotion poured out of the cheap speakers.

“Sometimes'” she said, “I don't think you listen to me, Peter.”

“Quick little piece, isn't she?” the grey-haired man beside Bayle said. Bayle's frantic attempt to get the passing stewardess's attention and, at the same time, not appear as absolutely intoxication-desperate as he suddenly was, resulted only in the sort of wide-eyed and full-toothed smile that is usually accompanied by a caption underneath asking Have Seen This Man? and advising the use of extreme caution. “Don't worry, though,” the man continued. “She'll be back this way sooner or later.”

Just then the nun returned from the bathroom looking just as beatific as before. Bayle wished she was a flying nun and that she would take a three-thousand-foot fucking leap out of his sight. No sister of mine. You're not my sister.

“See?” the man said. “Here she comes now. Sooner than later, too. The little honeys can run all day but they can't hide forever.”

Metaphysician heal thyself, Bayle thought. Look the little honey straight in the eye and tell her what you want. Need.

The stewardess stopped the cart in the aisle and rested her hands on slightly bent knees to better hear Bayle's question. Bayle looked up from his seat at the mascara and smile looking down at him and pointed out his heart's desire.

The woman told him how much his drink cost and Bayle paid her. The grey-haired man had another paper cup of complimentary coffee, took three packets of sugars and two containers of cream, two packages of free chocolate chip cookies, and six napkins. The woman asked Bayle if he himself might like some cookies for later. Bayle shook his head, no, said he didn't think so, no, so the woman gave him two more packages of peanuts and three additional napkins instead. Each in his own fashion, Bayle and his seatmate set
to work on their loaded-up trays.

Bayle pushed the silver button on his armrest and eased back in his seat, sipping at his drink. Before long, the older man's alternating long coffee slurps and quick, rabbit-mouthed cookie nibbles sent him reluctantly forward in his chair and back to Empiricus.

Leaning over the book, fresh sip of whiskey taken in and glass on its way trayward again, a single drop of Canadian Club escaped his mouth, rolled onto the topmost part of his bottom lip, held for a fraction of a second on the lower, and then splashed onto page four, a large liquid point of punctuation falling directly onto the middle section of Book 1, Chapter i:

We make no firm assertions that any of what we are about to say is exactly like we say it is, but we simply declare our position on each topic as it now appears to us, like a reporter.

Bayle watched the wet dot slowly soak its way through the page, the whiskey's brown gradually turning into the page's white.

A wet dot slowly soaking its way through the page, Bayle thought; the whiskey's brown gradually turning into the page's white. Period. Not a metaphor or symbol to be seen for as far as the eye can see. None.

B
AYLE'S
V
IEW
on the bus ride to the arena varied little. Storehouses, heavy machinery operations, dairy processing plants; two or three of each of these as the miles and the airport fell behind. But mostly fields. Alone at the back of the bus, in every direction he looked, mid-western American fields. Wheat usually, he supposed. But now, mid-October, just fields. No matter which way he looked, he couldn't see where any of them ended.

Then, rising out of the miles of empty farmland that surrounded it, the arena, grey and massive, an enormous concrete vegetable, suddenly all that was his consciousness. Nearer: HOCKEY TONIGHT! Closer still, on an unlit marquée suspended over the entrance to the rink:

Warriors vs. Wichita 7:30 p.m.
Tickets $8 Adults $6 Seniors/Youths
Listen to WUUS, The Voice of America's Heartland!
Featuring the I.M. Wright Show Every Weekday From 2
Until 5 PM

Drinkless for over an hour now, the usual signs of sudden alcohol-cessation coming on strong (dry mouth, drowsiness, sharp hunger), neophyte reporter Bayle nonetheless decided he should at least try to take some notes — although of what, he wasn't sure. He pulled a pen and small notepad out of the breast pocket of his suit jacket. The pen sported the slogan Safety is a Way of Life at Ontario Hydro, one of literally hundreds Bayle's father had accumulated over his thirty-plus years on the job, all of them identically stamped.

Writing instrument and paper at the ready, each held loosely in either hand, Bayle continued to watch the flat brown fields persist through the bus window. After a few impotent minutes he put both back in his pocket.

Because he was the only passenger, the driver by-passed the bus stop where the highway met the concrete border of the adjacent parking lot and dropped Bayle off directly in front of the main arena entrance. Bayle thanked the man and stepped down from the bus, positive that even if worse came to worst he himself could never be a bus driver. Eight hours a day of nearly non-stop motion, and at the end of it, back to exactly where you started. Blue collar existentialism. A potbellied Sisyphus who doesn't make change.

From his wallet Bayle removed a slip of paper that contained in his own handwriting the gate number the public relations director of the Warriors had told him over the phone
to look for. “Legible notes will make or break a good journalist,” Jane, his girlfriend and employer for the next week and a half, had told him.

“I bend,” Bayle had replied. “Sceptics bend.”

After a Jane-convened lunch a week before, after Bayle had suggested a rare quiet rendezvous at his place for later that night (for Bayle, a much needed just-say-no evening), Jane had promptly countered with another idea: nine days of Bayle alone in an American prairie state writing an article on the minor-league hockey boom in the mid-western and lower United States for the magazine she worked for.

Bayle wasn't a journalist, hated to travel, and, if still impossible to walk by a newspaper box without peeking through the smudged plastic pane to see how the Maple Leafs managed to do the night before, didn't really demonstrate that much interest in hockey anymore, the death of his nearly fanatical Toronto Maple Leafs-loving father six years before the final step in Bayle's gradually diminishing interest in the game. So of course Jane was pulling his leg about the trip. And just how leg-pulling unlike her, too.

They were in her office in the Manulife Centre, the ant-scramble below that was midday Toronto Jane's well-earned associate-editor's view. Bayle slumped against the wall next to the curtainless window and waited for the punchline to Jane's joke, wondering how to kill the remainder of the afternoon until she got off work at six. It was, of late, a not uncommon dilemma.

“I think you should go away for awhile, Peter. Away from Toronto. Away from us.” Jane leaned back in her black leather swivel armchair, thumb to chin and forefinger to temple, as sure a sign to Bayle as any that, for whatever reason, she was serious about the trip.

Whether negotiating the fee for a new graphic-design artist for
Toronto Living
or making a sexual advance toward Bayle, Jane was, when it came time to do business, all business. A few times she had even managed to combine the two activities,
having Bayle go down on her while she haggled over the speaker phone with freelancers about their pay, the college radio station's afternoon reggae program softly playing in the background, the non-musical Jane's favourite furnishing of work-place nookie rhythmic cover. But that was strictly once upon a time. Bayle was hard pressed to remember their last shared act of even missionary kindness; actually, hard pressed to even remember the last time he'd been hard.

“You want to send me away?” Bayle was having a difficult time processing this. He felt like a problem pre-teen being farmed out to summer camp. Running a puzzled hand through his hair, he absently touched the fresh bandage on his forehead, this the end result of last night's closing-time scuffle between himself and another Knott's Place patron over who would have the last play on the jukebox. In the morning Bayle had felt more foolish than hungover or injured. He never even listened to the jukebox. “Have things really been so bad?” he asked.

“I've been patient, Peter, you can't say I haven't been that. But to be perfectly honest, this whole self-destructive bit is wearing a little bit thin. Actually, real thin. The drinking, the fighting, and now the little phone messages on my machine. It seems like every time I turn around you've regressed a couple years younger. I'm afraid that one day I'm going to find you ten years old and wanting me to drive you to hockey practice.”

Bayle put his finger in the air to make a point. Realizing he didn't have one, he let it fall back down. He did manage a thin, “What ‘little phone messages?'” but the remark didn't seem to register. Bayle didn't pursue the point.

“As to why you seem so intent upon pissing away your chances of getting a good teaching job by not defending your dissertation and getting on with your life, I don't know. I really don't. Everytime I try to discuss it all you can say is that you guess you've been having a hard time concentrating on your work lately and that you guess you don't know why. Frankly, I'm starting to believe you.”

“So naturally you think the answer is for me to spend some time with a hockey team,” Bayle said. He was hoping
that the obvious sarcasm in his voice would undercut her machine-gun logic. The artillery kept coming.