The Guardians (12 page)

    Randy
moaned. A childish, stomach-ache sound.

    "Shut
up," Carl told him.

    Randy
stood straight. I'd seen people in states of shock before, concussion cases
who'd gone head first into the boards left to wander the rink's hallways after
the game like zombies, unable to recall their phone number or the colour of
their eyes. But Randy's condition was different. He knew exactly who he was,
what was happening—he knew too much, and it was crushing him.

    "He
told me to touch her," he said. It was something less than a whisper.

    "Didn't
quite catch that," Carl said, and looked as though he was about to charge
at him.

    "He
told
me to," Randy said again.

    "No,
I didn't! Why would I do that? Tell you to drag her over the goddamned
floor?" Carl looked to us. "You think I'd be that stupid?"

    "Wait.
Wait,"
Ben said, stepping closer to Randy yet not too close, as though
to avoid contagion.
"Who
told you to?"

    Randy
raised his eyes. Met mine.

    "Nobody.
Nothing. I'm just—everything's fucked up, that's all."

    
"That's
true," Carl said, slapping his hands together. "Fucked up? Right on
the money there, Rando."

    We
fell into a collective silence. Remembering to breathe and little else.

    I was
the first to move. Even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I found
myself lowering to kneel beside Heather Langham's body. I'm not sure what drew
me closer to her, but it wasn't curiosity. The physical fact of her being dead
was something I could grasp only at the edges, fleetingly, before forcing my
thoughts to some smaller, more manageable detail, like the papery meeting of
her grey lips, or her eyes, the lids slightly parted as though caught in a
fight against sleep. Perhaps I needed confirmation that this was all as it
appeared to be: she
was
dead, there
wasn't
any walking away now.
Perhaps I was sorry that she had become a problem of ours, that everything that
made her so vibrantly human had left her in this sour- smelling cellar, and now
she was, for us, a logistical puzzle, a stain.

    Or
perhaps I had to see for myself how she had been murdered.

    Part
of her lay on a blanket. No, not a blanket: a canvas drop cloth of the kind
used by painters. The way it was smoothed out beneath her, buffering her from
the hard dirt, gave the impression of a makeshift bed. The cloth told a history
of a thousand mistakes: splashes of turquoise and yellow and off-whites fallen
from brushes or sloshed over the side of a kicked can. Now, as close as I was,
I could see the more recent colours. Randy's bright nosebleed. Beneath it, the
brown-red sprays and tracks emanating from the back of Heather Langham's skull.

    Only
then did I notice the screw. A fiercely bevelled four-inch screw that had been
pounded through a plank, sharp point up, which lay an arm's length from
Heather's splayed fingers. Nearly half of the wood's length had been
discoloured by blood. Maybe Heather had managed to pull it from the wound
herself and toss it to where it now rested. Maybe someone else dropped it after
seeing the job was done.

    I
leaned over. Bent so far across her body I had to brace myself on palms laid on
the floor on the other side of her. For a second, my finger was hooked on the
gold chain around her neck, pulling the heart-shaped locket she was wearing to
rest like an egg in the soft dimple at the base of her throat. I shook my hand
free and the chain made a small, watery sound as it settled over her skin. Then
I lowered my head to the floor to look at her face.

    Her
eyes weren't fully open as I would later dream them to be (the horrific clarity
of marbles, twinkly and blind), but they weren't closed either. The lids empurpled,
a colour of eyeshadow worn by only the sluttiest girls at school. The result
was an expression I initially confused with seductiveness. It made me think
that maybe this was Heather's twin, the one who liked to do all the naughty
stuff Heather would never do. But then I saw the teeth knocked out of her
mouth, the white, bloodless gums. The liquefied nose. I saw that she had been
alone as the life emptied out of her, and that this aloneness was a thing worse
than dying.

    A
hand came down on my shoulder. A touch that lifted me away from the particulars
of Heather Langham's body to look at her again from a standing height. Now,
from only the added distance of a few feet, she had lost the Heather-ness I
could still find in her face as I bent over her. She was merely lifeless again.
A sickening leftover of violence.

    The
hand left my shoulder. I turned to see it was Ben's.

    "Ideas,
gentlemen?"

    We
buried her. Right there in the cellar floor. Miss Langham, all future, being
rolled by the toes of our boots into the three-foot trench we managed to axe
and heave from the copper-smelling earth on which the Thurman house stood.

    It's
a struggle now to remember much of what must have been the hour or two we spent
at this task, other than the work itself: the selection of tools found in the
cellar's corners and hanging on its rusted hooks, the shifts of labour kept
short enough to maintain a near- frantic pace, the space's encroaching shadows
we held at bay with swings of the flashlight's beam. We did our best to keep
her body in the dark.

    We
stopped only twice. Once when Carl started to cry. The second time when Randy
ran upstairs.

    Carl's
tears were somehow more disturbing than the fear that Randy had rushed straight
to his dad to tell him the terrible things his friends where doing over at the
Thurman place. I suppose Randy's not being able to stick it out was the lesser
surprise of the two. In any case, once he was gone we continued to axe and dig,
waiting to hear the approach of sirens. Maybe fifteen minutes after he'd gone,
though, Randy made his way back into the circle of light to pick up a shovel
and take his place in the deepening trough.

    When
Carl started to cry, we tried our best to ignore it. Each of us had taken a
break at one point—me to throw up in the corner, Ben to sit on the ground with
his head between his knees—and we expected Carl to recover on his own as we
had. Instead, he got louder. Curled up with his back against a support post,
wailing. If it was anyone else, we probably would have stayed at it. But the
alien sound of Carl's grief sapped us of our strength, so that we could only
kneel around him, our hands on his elbows, the sides of his head, as though we
were holding him together.

    It
wasn't our fault
.

    This
would be our unspoken refrain for years to come. But how many accused have said
this and convinced none, not even themselves, of their innocence?

    We
couldn't have murdered Miss Langham. We loved her. Yet we knew intuitively that
love in such close proximity to violence made, in itself, a strong case for
culpability. In the crime stories picked up off the wire in
The Grimshaw
Beacon,
it was the ones who claimed to least wish harm upon a victim who
usually turned out to be the ones who'd done it.

    And
there was the evidence too. Randy's blood. Ben's mother, who might have seen us
slipping into the town's one forbidden place.

    We
may have discussed all this aloud at the time. But our decision was ultimately
based not on any sober deliberation. It was a reaction we were locked into from
the moment Randy's light found our music teacher's body in the darkness. Our
instinct to cover up, to hide, to pretend we were never there was instant and
inarguable. It was our first real summoning of the masculine talent for
non-disclosure. We were becoming men. Becoming gravediggers.

    He
assumes it was only a side effect of grief, a Parkinson's hallucination, some
aftertaste of Halloween graveyard imagery brought back from a tale told with a flashlight
under one of our chins thirty years ago. Whatever it was, Randy doesn't believe
I saw Carl. If I mentioned I also saw the boy from the Thurman house, a ghoul
who spoke directly to my thoughts (an observation I make a point of
not
making), he wouldn't have believed that either. If I'd told him about the boy,
he might now be taking me to be admitted to Grimshaw General's psych ward and
not walking through the town's streets, dusk falling around us like tiny
charcoal leaves.

    "Why
would he run?" Randy asks for the third time.

    "I
didn't get a chance to ask."

    "But
whoever you saw wasn't just avoiding you. He was, like,
gone."

    "Maybe
he didn't want to see us. Maybe he's sick and he doesn't want anyone to know.
Maybe he's not himself anymore."

    "Or
the law is after him."

    "There's
that too."

    Randy
carries on to the corner and rounds it. For a moment, it appears that he is
about to slip away into nothing just as Carl—or the boy—did.

    "Where
you going?" I call after him.

    "Where
do you think?" he shouts back from the other side of what was, at one
time, Brad Wickenheiser's hedgerow.

    "You
don't think Carl is—"

    "Not
there"
he says, not giving me the chance to say "Caledonia
Street" or "the Thurman place." "I'm going to Jake's."

    "I'll
get the first round."

    "And
an extra one for Ben."

    "That's
right," I say when Randy comes back to loop an arm over my shoulders.
"An extra glass for the watchman."

    "Ben
was part Irish, wasn't he?" Randy asks as we head into Jake's Pool 'n'
Sports, shaking the rain off our coats.

    "I
think his dad was. Or his grandfather. Or something."

    "It'll
do."

    "For
what?"

    "A
wake."

    Tracey
Flanagan is our waitress again. From across the room she gives us a comically
triumphant thumbs-up as we assume our positions at what is now "our
table," the two of us hopping atop the same stools as the night before.
She giggles at Randy, who mimes thirst, his tongue out and hands clutched to
his throat.

    "I
took the liberty," she says as she comes to us, pitcher in one hand, mugs
in the other.

    "I
believe we'll be requiring the assistance of Bushmills shots as well today,
Tracey," Randy says in a leprechaun accent.

    "I'm
sorry," Tracey says, with genuine sympathy. "Mr. McAuliffe was a
friend of all yours, right? On the Guardians?"

    "He
was a hockey friend of your dad's," I answer. "But to us, he was a
brother. Maybe even closer than that."

    Tracey
purses her lips, correctly reading that I'm not pulling her leg. I've just told
her something intimate, and she acknowledges the honour with an eyes-closed
nod.

    "I'll
get those whiskeys," she says.

    After
we toast Ben, the conversation moves to the topic of Sarah.

    "She
looked good," Randy observes. "Then again, she always looked good.
You see a ring on her finger?"

    "Like
a wedding ring? As if that would stop you."

    "We're
not talking about me."

    "I
don't remember."

    "Bullshit."

    "Okay,
she
wasn't."

    "It's
open season, then."

    "She's
not an elk, Randy."

    "I'm
just saying you're here, she's here. Old times' sake and all that. It's
sweet."

    "I'm
here because Ben died, not for some shag at the class- reunion weekend."

    "What?
You can't walk and chew gum at the same time?"

    The
bar is even busier tonight. A Leafs game on the flat- screens, an excuse to get
out of the house in the middle of the week for some draft and half-price Burn
Your Tongue Off! wings advertised on the paper pyramids on the tables.

    Among
the customers is Tracey's boyfriend. A good-looking, dark-haired kid who comes
in wearing a Domino's Pizza jacket to give her a full kiss on the lips. Here's
what you can see right away, as surely as you could see it when I kissed Sarah
Mulgrave outside the Grimshaw Arena on game nights: these two are in love. And
you can see that the Domino's kid knows how special a young woman Tracey
Flanagan is. That he is trying to figure a way to not blow it with her and go
all the way, out of Grimshaw and beyond. A whole life with Tracey. That's what
this kid wants, and is right to want.