The Guardians (8 page)

    And
through it all, we remember Ben. How his life was wasted on a pointless
obsession. And then his death, so preventable and yet unsurprising, even fated.
But we quickly shift away from the outcome of Ben McAuliffe's narrative to a
greatest hits of scenes from his youth, his dorky visions, his sleepy
goaltending. Soon Randy and I are laughing and coughing and laughing again,
which we're thankful for, seeing as it makes our anguished tears look to the
rest of the room like beer-fuelled hilarity.

    Some
time later I make my way to the men's room and see how busy the place has
gotten. The work crews kicking the mud off their boots, the girls-night-outers
squeezed into their finest denim. Even a clutch of suits tossing back a couple
of after-work quickies before heading home to the newer streets north of the
river.

    And
then two faces I recognize. Stepping out of the crowd and offering hands to
shake. A big fellow in a Canada Post parka first, followed by his stout,
patchily bearded friend.

    "Trev?
Holy shit! I was right. It's you!" the first one says, and claps me in a
bear hug.

    "Todd?"

    "Glad
to know the grey hair didn't throw you off too much."

    
"
Todd
Flanagan
?"

    "Last
name too. Nice work."

    "How's
Tina? You two still together?"

    
"Long
gone," Todd reports. "Tina was not a stick-around sort of girl."
Todd loops his arm around the bearded guy's neck. "Here's another test. Can
you recall the name of this walking sieve right here?"

    "Vince
Sproule," I announce, catching in the toothy grin a glimpse of the
eighteen-year-old he once was. "Grimshaw's greatest goalie ever."

    "He
was
quick, wasn't he?"

    "Not
so much these days," Vince says, pretending to snatch an oncoming puck out
of the air. "Three kids and too many Egg McMuffins can slow you down after
a while."

    Todd
and Vince were Guardians too, teammates on the high- school team. And though
they were only two years ahead of us at the time, they look a decade older than
we do now, bloated and shambling. But content too, I'd say. The added pounds
that come with snacks in front of the game-of-the-week and unrenewed gym
memberships.

    "A
terrible thing," Todd says, his hand on my shoulder. "About
Ben."

    "It
is."

    "Guess
you're here for the funeral."

    "Randy
too."

    "No
shit?"

    "He's
sitting over there. In the corner."

    Todd
and Vince squint over the heads of other patrons to find Randy waving back at us,
like a long-lost cousin at airport arrivals.

    "It's
a goddamn team reunion," Vince says.

    "Wish
it could have been for better reasons," Todd adds, and I'm moved by how
plainly he means it.

    "We're
going to miss him," I say.

    "Us
too," Todd says. "It's a funny thing. I probably saw him more than
anyone the past while."

    "You
visited?"

    "I'm
a mailman," Todd says, pointing to the Canada Post patch on the chest of
his jacket as though to offer proof. "Been delivering to Ben's
neighbourhood pretty much since I took the job. I'd wave up at him in that
window, Monday to Friday, before going up the steps to drop off the
bills."

    "Did
he ever come down? To talk?"

    "Not
a once."

    "Always
was an oddball," Vince Sproule says, shaking his head. "But then
there's a point when oddballs turn just sad. You know what I mean?"

    "I
do."

    "Never
much of a goalie, either," Todd says.

    "It's
a good thing we had you, Vince."

    "You
ever wonder how far we could have gone that year, Trev?" Todd asks.

    "I
don't really think about it."

    "It
was tragic. What happened. But maybe not just for, you know, those
involved.
You were a pretty good sniper yourself."

    "It
doesn't—"

    "Who
knows who would have noticed you. You could have—"

    "I
told you, I don't think about it. I do my best not to think about a lot of
things."

    "Sure.
I can understand that," Todd says, nodding as though at an insight into
his own condition he'd long been blind to.

    Then
something happens that delivers a sharp stab of jealousy: our waitress, the
pretty referee, walks up and gives Todd a kiss on the cheek.

    "Don't
you just love this guy?" she says before slipping back into the crowd, and
though it's just more waitress banter, it's obvious that she
does
love
him. Lucky Todd Flanagan. Tina Uxbridge might have fooled around on him a few
hundred times before dumping him. But if this referee is Todd's new girlfriend,
he's bounced back quite nicely.

    Todd
is grinning like a monkey. "You remember Tracey."

    "Tracey?"

    "She
was a lot smaller then."

    Then
I get it. The bundle of squawking joy Tina used to bring to the Guardians
games.

    "That's
your daughter?"

    "You
fancy-suit, big-city guys. They all as sharp as you?"

    "She
was just a baby."

    "Still
is."

    "Well,
I have to thank you, Todd. You've just made me feel incredibly old."

    "C'mon.
You didn't need me for that, did you?"

    I
carry on to the men's room, and when I return Todd and Vince have joined Randy
at our table, a fresh pitcher already between them. I suppose it's all the beer
that helps in creating the sense that the four of us still have so much in
common, when really all we talk about is how lousy the hockey got on TV after
they started giving "these Russian pretty boys five million to fake a
concussion every time the wind blows" (as Vince puts it), our women
troubles, the body's first betrayals that attend the lapsing of its forty- year
warranty.

    Or
maybe I'm wrong in that. Maybe we
are
still friends, and I've just forgotten
what they are.

    Eventually,
Todd and Vince announce they have to go home and get some sleep. Todd has his
mail rounds in the morning and Vince has to replace the brakes on a minivan at
the garage he co-owns before they have to put on Sunday clothes for Ben's
funeral in the afternoon. Yet even then we stay on for one more pitcher to add
to the previous half-dozen or so, all served by Tracey Flanagan, Todd's baby
girl.

    When
we finally head out into the night, the air has cooled several degrees. I stand
with Randy on the sidewalk, deciding which way to go. Around us, the town has
been sharpened by the cold, the old storefronts grey and looming.

    The
two of us shake off a chill. It's the shared notion that for all the time we
were inside Jake's Pool 'n' Sports, in the deceptive warmth of light and
company, Grimshaw was waiting for us.

    I
think we were hoping to find it gone. Torn down to make way for a triplex, or
finally razed for safety reasons, leaving only an empty lot behind. We don't
entertain these possibilities aloud, in any case. Once we'd paid our tab at
Jake's, it was still only nine, and Randy wanted a cigarette, so I joined him
on a tipsy wander through the streets, taking the long way back to the Queen's.

    Neither
of us acknowledged it when we turned the corner onto Caledonia Street. We
started up the long slope toward the hospital, noting how remarkably little had
changed about the houses, the modest gardens, even the mailboxes lashed to the
streetlight poles to thwart kids from tipping them over. When the McAuliffe
house comes into view we automatically cross the street to be on the same side
it's on. We pause in front for a moment, gazing up at Ben's window.

    And
then, unstoppably, we turn to follow what was his line of sight for most of his
waking adult life.

    It's
still unoccupied, judging from the black, uncurtained windows, the wood trim
bristled with mildew, the knee-high seedlings dotting the yard. Nevertheless,
given the little care paid to it over the last thirty or more years, the
Thurman house looks reasonably solid, testimony to the stone foundation and
brick work of its builders over a century ago. Even the headless rooster still
tops the attic gable.

    "Why
don't they just tear it down?" I ask.

    "Can't.
It's privately owned."

    "How
do you know?"

    "Mrs.
McAuliffe told me. It's been handed down and handed down. The owners are
out-of-towners. Never even visit."

    "Why
not sell?"

    "Maybe
they're waiting for an upturn in the market."

    "In
the
Grimshaw
market?"

    "I
wonder if it misses him," Randy says, stubbing his cigarette out under the
heel of his shoe. "Ben must have been its only friend."

    "He
wasn't its friend," I say, sharper than I expected to.

    We
stay there a minute longer. Staring at the Thurman house from the far side of
Caledonia Street, a perspective we had returned to countless times in
sleep-spoiling dreams. Watching for what Ben had been watching for. A white
flash of motion. Opened eyes. A glint of teeth.

    I'm first
to start back to the hotel. The moon leading us on, peeping through the
branches.

    Randy
laughs. "Guess it knows we're here now."

    I do
my best to join him in it, if only to prevent the sound of his forced humour
from drifting unconvincingly in the night air. And to push away the thought
that we had already made mistakes. Coming back to Grimshaw. Pretending that we
could avoid certain topics if we simply told ourselves to. Most of all, the
mistake of letting it know we're here.

    We
had forgotten what Ben reminded himself of every day: the Thurman house never
allowed itself to be observed without a corresponding price.

    Every
time you looked into it, it looked into you.

    Most
days, I'd stop to pick up Sarah so the two of us could walk the rest of the way
to school together. It had become habit for me to knock at her side door on the
mornings I didn't have one of the Guardians' deadly pre-dawn practices, and for
her mom to offer me homemade waffles or bacon sandwiches, something that would
have been a Christmas treat in my house. I would decline at first, but I always
ended up snarfing down a second breakfast all the same as I waited for Sarah to
come downstairs. I liked these stolen minutes, the anticipation of Sarah's
face, me telling her mother something that made her laugh too loudly for a
woman so petite and religious. Sarah's father had already left for work. Now
that I think of it, maybe he'd planned it that way. Maybe he'd designed these
moments in the kitchen to say Nice, isn't it? Make an honest woman of my
daughter and all this could be yours.

    But
on the morning of the day after Ben told us he'd witnessed—or
felt,
or
dreamed
—the coach carrying Heather Langham into the Thurman house in the
middle of the night, I walked past Sarah's place without stopping. The world
that she and I inhabited together— the hand-holding walks, the drives out to
Harmony, the thrilled admissions of love beyond the football field's
endzone—had been soiled by the speculations of the night before. Not
irrevocably. Not yet. There was, on that February Wednesday, still a chance for
certain courses to be avoided.

    But
they wouldn't be. Even as I drifted by Sarah's house and realized she wasn't walking
next to me only after I stepped out onto the playing field's 40-yard line, I
could tell there would be choices coming my way. What they would involve I
couldn't guess. All that was clear was that Sarah would have to be shielded
from their outcomes.