Heroes (8 page)

“Nobody's,” Bayle said, pushing open the kitchen door. “Let's get going. We want to get downtown before Robarts closes.”

But the library did close without them, although not the Brunswick House. How Patty managed to talk him into taking her there Bayle wasn't sure, even less so after the untold glasses of soapy draft beer they'd downed before closing time. The “Brunny,” as it was affectionately known to the students at the university, was a nearly hundred-year-old U of T legend, an enormous German beerhall-styled bar with the historical plaque out front to prove it and the widely understood mission of providing the cheap alcohol and crowded seating conditions condusive to rampant flirting and a wide variety of undergraduate stupidities. Throw in an aging beer-hall diva given to drinking too much gin and groping the football players and whose piano sing-a-longs were not even hooted at affectionately anymore, just flat out ignored, and you had just the sort of place Patty would ordinarily have loathed.

But it was, Patty enthusiastically informed Bayle on the subway ride downtown, on the list of the “Must See and Do” places the U of T Student Association had mailed to her in their recruiting package over the summer, and she prettypleased Bayle into just one beer before they hit the library. Although Bayle said he doubted if whether or not she liked the Brunswick House would be a determining factor in where she spent the next four years of her academic life, he'd always been fairly hopeless in the face of his sister's rare but powerful pretty-pleases so they got off at the Spadina stop instead of St. George and had their hands stamped and beer spilt on them by a rowdy table of Cheezy-throwing Commerce students before they had a chance to exchange a word.

And when Patty ordered four more glasses of draft when Bayle was in the washroom, saying, when he returned to the table with a disapproving frown, “Have I told you I've had a less-than-wonderful summer? Sometimes a girl just has to let down her hair and relax, you know” (pulling away the piece of blue cloth that held her ponytail in place, bushels of greasy, blond hair falling and falling down as she did so, a mischievous smile peeking through the mass of unkempt hair covering her eyes), they were off and running. Where to, exactly, Bayle had no idea; and, what was worse, a strong suspicion his sister didn't either. Both of them running, though, this without question.

He tried to be patient. When Patty didn't immediately follow up her mini-confession with anything else about her summer-long gloom, Bayle kept ordering more beer while watching along with her with a kind of repulsed fascination the furious attempts everywhere they looked of four hundred increasingly fuzzy faces giving it everything they had toward making sure they didn't end up going home without an intoxicated stranger in tow or, at the very least, a hangover worth bragging about over breakfast. As the beer Bayle and his sister consumed and the hours they sat there began to add up, the room itself seemed to buzz louder and louder, to transform itself into a swarming drone of pure riotous sound.
They drank on, Bayle drinking and waiting, Patty drinking and saying nothing.

When they were finally spit out of the Brunswick House at two a.m. onto bar-emptying, suddenly-swarming Bloor Street, the cool night air produced entirely different effects in brother and sister. More than a little drowsy from all the alcohol, Bayle bought two veggie dogs for Patty and himself from a busy vendor strategically camped outside the Brunswick House doors to scoop up the hungry post-drinking crowd (Patty still swearing off all meat but for occasionally a little fish on Friday — Ecology Thing leftover fusing with recent Catholic Thing remnant). Bayle walked over to Patty talking to a group of frat boys milling around in front of the bar and handed her her veggie dog. He'd prepared it for her just the way she liked it: plain but for a deep double swipe of mustard squirted right down the middle.

Patty said thanks without even looking at him and carried right on with her spirited conversation, letting the weiner and bun hang limply by her side as if Bayle had handed her an old shoe he'd just found on the street. A cab crept its afterhours crawl in front of the bar and the frat boys quickly hailed it and piled in, waving and calling out Patty's name as they jammed in, promising to see her there.

Before Bayle could even ask:

“Guess where we're off to, bro?” Patty said, putting her arm in his, other hand still holding on to the now almost vertical, dribbling veggie dog.

His already-eaten own having only made him even sleepier, Bayle didn't want to go anywhere. Especially with three drunken brothers of Phi Beta Whatever with obvious lecherous designs on his kid sister. “Let's go home, Patty,” Bayle said. “If we hustle you can still make the subway back to Etobicoke. Let me carry your bag. I'll return your books for you tomorrow. You can check out those other books you wanted some other time.”

“Oh, Peter, it's a speakeasy and I've never been. Nothing special to a big college man like you, I'm sure, but think of
your poor innocent sister locked away in suburbia and so painfully naive in the ways of the world. Pretty please?”

“Sorry,” Bayle said, Patty's sugary plea surprisingly easily resisted through simple exhaustion. “Only one pretty please per every twenty-four hour period and you've already used up today's quota in getting us to waste our evening here. C'mon, pick up your bag and let's go,” he said, starting in the direction of the subway stop. “I might get to bed before three o'clock yet.”

Patty dropped her arm from his. Hurled the mustardemitting veggie dog off into the night and scattered the plastic bag full of library books into the street with a perfectly placed soccer kick mastered during her British Thing.

“I haven't been out of that
fucking
house in three
fucking
months and I'm going to an after-hours bar with you or without you,” she said. She shot up her hand for an approaching cab that immediately stopped.

“Are you coming or not?” she said, already in the back seat, hand on the inside door handle and ready to slam it shut, Bayle could tell, if he answered No.

By the idling taxi's headlights Bayle picked up each of the booted library books one at a time, handing them over in a neat pile to his sister when he finally got in beside her.

When they reached the Dundas Street address the frat boys had given her, Patty forgot the books in the backseat of the cab, Bayle luckily spotting and retrieving them when he got out to pay, reminding her as they headed for the Chinese restaurant that a negligent library record can haunt you your entire life. Patty said she'd try to keep that in mind.

After the special tea was ordered and produced — lukewarm beer in a small tin pot, two tiny white Chinese teacups to complete the Spartan service — and the fraternity boys summarily dismissed — “I'm sorry,” Patty had said, looking directly at the tallest and best-looking one, all three of them spotting and happily tramping over to her and Bayle's table, “you've obviously mistaken me for someone who would waste
her time talking to someone like you” — Bayle and his sister settled into pretty much a mirror of their Brunswick House routine, Bayle waiting for the dam to burst, Patty content, it seemed, to simply watch the river flow.

Much tepid beer under the bridge later, indeterminable hour somewhere between very late and very early, like Bayle's, Patty's teacup seemed a permanent part of her hand by now, even if for the last long while rarely to lips lifted. A cowboybooted and sideburned Queen Street hipster sitting with a tall black-haired beauty excepted, the customer constitution of the restaurant had changed several times over since Bayle and Patty sat down hours earlier, leaving brother and sister Bayle the sole teacup-tipping constants.

“God, drinking is stupid,” Patty said, pushing away her cup.

Bayle sat up in his seat, chair scraping. He forced his eyes painfully wide, Patty's words stirring him from what, before tonight/this morning, he would have thought virtually impossible, open-eyed sleep.

“I guess it makes sense, though, doesn't it?” she said. “Anything that makes you feel even the tiniest bit not bad for ten minutes now has just got to make you feel like absolute shit for ten times longer than that later.”

Bayle really didn't have any thoughts on the subject. Bayle was still trying to wake up. He blinked both eyes violently and repeatedly in an attempt to lubricate his eyeballsticking, dried-up contact lenses.

“Maybe we should eat,” Patty said. “That's supposed to help, right?”

“I was thinking vegetable fried rice and hot-and-sour soup about an hour ago,” Bayle said, “but figured the food would put us to sleep.”

“You mean put
you
to sleep.” Slight smile.

Bayle smiled back. “All right, so you got all the tenacity genes in the family,” he said.

Patty picked up her tea cup of warm beer again and sipped at it absently. “Yeah. Yeah, that's me all right,” she said. “Tenacious Patty. Yeah, that's me.”

Then, louder — and as she went along, gaining enthusiasm for her subject, louder and louder still — “Yeah, Tenacious Patty,” she said. “That's it. I think I'll start up my own line of woman's wear. The Tenacious Patty Line. For the Truly Active Woman Intent on Getting Ahead in the World and Staying There. You know: severe, two-piece business suits of stylish armour with shoulders
out to here
just like a hockey player's with not an inch of mortal flesh showing and all styles available in the identical shade of grown-up grey. Five-inch black high heels that say, Yes, I've got legs up to my neck you'd just love to slobber all over, but I'm also the toughest negotiator you've ever had the misfortune of encountering, each pair furnished, it goes without saying, with a shining silver razor blade carefully concealed inside the left shoe for those extra-tough bargaining sessions. And brand new this season! Don't call it a purse! Don't call it your bag! It's the allpurpose Tenacious Patty Satchel! To the ignorant eye, it's true, just another flimsy lady's accessory, but to the happily initiated, everything you need and then some to keep healthy, wealthy, and wise out there in the cold, cold world of commerce. Snubnosed Barreta. Easy-to-access switchblade. Even a vial of hydrochloric acid for tossing in the faces of one and all who — no matter how hard you try; no matter how hard you try and try and try — just don't seem to get your point.”

Most of the restaurant was looking their way now. Patty looked up at her brother. Patty looked through her brother. Crazy — no other word for it — crooked smile and hot salt tears. Like being caught in the middle of a violent thunderstorm, Bayle thought, on the sunniest day of the year.

The situation clearly called for Bayle at his absolute worst, Bayle the emotional commiserator. He placed a tentative hand on his sister's trembling shoulder. Patted her there a few times softly. Smiled a hang-in-here smile. Awkwardly drew his hand away. Felt in his gut just as petrified as she looked. “Patty ....”

“Oh, let's just get out of here,” she said.

Bayle didn't know what to say so he got up and settled the
bill at the cash. When he came back from paying, their table was empty. An instant of panic. But then the guy in the cowboy boots and sideburns smiled and pointed outside at Patty sitting on the cement step of the restaurant embracing herself against the cool of dawn. Bayle smiled a relieved smile back at the man and said thanks as he walked past his table, forgetting Patty's library books stacked on the floor beneath her chair.

Bayle and his sister ate their breakfast specials in silence, the dust-caked white curtains hanging beside their window table useful at least in preventing too much of the ripening morning sun from spilling through. After the egg yolks had been mopped up and the coffee cups refilled twice over there really wasn't much left to do. All around them the restaurant hummed alive, the early Monday morning breakfast crowd with their freshly cracked newspapers and just-scrubbed faces infectious for their beautifully foolish excitement over the start of just another day, the start to just another week.

Bayle felt his stomach turn a joyful tumble at the thought of putting Patty on the subway and getting himself home to bed so that before too long he could get right back up and head off to the library and return to work on the final paper for his summer-school class. The seminar itself had been a disappointment, a fourteen-week snooze of a survey through “The Rationalists,” the paper topic he'd been assigned almost equally as boring. But the thought of showering and shaving with purpose and carefully packing up his bag with a clear mission in mind and hours and hours of uninterrupted quiet time ahead of him to accomplish it pushed back the weariness of the hour, the effect of the rare hangover, even Patty's long silences and troubling outbursts.

But really not so troubling. Because Patty was going to be all right, Bayle thought, picking up his coffee cup, draining it to its dregs. Hell, she
was
all right. Nearly nineteen years old and still living at home would put anybody on the road to
becoming unglued. But soon enough she'd be out of there, starting university herself, and when that happened ....

“Didn't we pass an art store on the way over here?” Patty said. She pulled open the curtain to one side and strained her neck left then right then right then left to find what she was searching for. She looked like somebody who was afraid they were being followed.

“An art store?” Bayle said. “You mean like a gallery?”

“No, that would be called a gallery, wouldn't it? I mean an art store, a store that sells canvases, paints, brushes — all the things that a person who wants to paint needs to have to — There! There it is!”

Her face almost pressed to the window, she kept rapping the end of her index finger against the glass. Bayle shielded his eyes as best he could from the sun and squinted to see what she was seeing.