Heroes

Heroes

For Mara.

With thanks

to Marc Côté, Jan Geddes, Anne McDermid,
Tom Noyes, Miles Wilson, Michael Winter, and the
Ontario Arts Council.

a novel

Ray Robertson

Copyright © Ray Robertson 2000

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of
Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright
Licensing Agency.

Editor: Marc Côté

Design: Scott Reid

Printer: Transcontinental Printing Inc.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Robertosn, Ray, 1966-

Heroes

ISBN 0-88924-292-5

I. Title.

PS8585.03219H47 2000    C813'.54     COO-930044-9

PR9199.2.R62H47 2000

1   2   3   4   5         04   03   02   01   00

We acknowledge the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts,
the
Ontario Arts Council
and
the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program
(BPIDP) for our publishing program.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author
and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each others bodies.

James Wright
“Autumn Begins in Martin's Ferry, Ohio”

If you can't beat ‘em in the alley, you cant beat ‘em on the ice

Conn Smythe

Let's talk.
All right, I'll talk. I'll talk and you'll listen. You've done enough talking for a lifetime, anyway, and I guess I could use the practice. I've had one drink and I'm going to have another, but even if I have just one more after that I'm not going to get drunk. Dark wood panelling covering these walls; plenty of pistachios and smoked almonds
gratis
all along the length of this oak bar; every bent elbow in here covered in serious shades of sober grey tweed: this just isn't that kind of place.

But even if it was that kind of place I don't want to get drunk. What I want is to get a little bit tipsy and feel the wiggle of my toes in my socks in my shoes and breathe a deep afterwork breath and on the way home pick up a Vegetarian Deluxe Pizza from Papa Ciao's and eat my dinner in front of the game on television tonight. I'm a vegetarian now, you know. And no, all those lectures you used to lay on the old man and Mum and me every night at supper on the systematic mass slaughter of our fellow animal friends haven't finally managed to sink in after all these years. For me, it's just a health thing. I mean, talk to any scientist worth his test tubes and he'll tell you that too much animal flesh in your diet is like eating pure poison. So wipe that grin off your face, little sister, for me it's all about doing what just makes sense.

Anyway, the hockey game starts at 7:30 and I've got to stop off and pick up that pizza, but I've got some time. Maybe now's not when we ought to finally sit down and say all the things that should have gotten said already, but it looks like it's the best I can do. Tough luck for you, I guess, but I'm the only brother you're ever going to get. Too little or too late, we're stuck with each other, Patty. Me and you. Stuck.

So let's talk. And let me call me Bayle and you I'll call Patty. Because, to be honest, I'm just not ready for that naked “I” all by itself just yet. But then I was never even half as brave as you. I'm not even sure if I ever want to be.

But the game doesn't start for another couple of hours and it's nice and dark and quiet in here and at least we're finally really going to talk, so who knows? Maybe there's time yet for you to teach your big brother Peter a thing or two about being brave.

“SO I
cold-cocked the Gook sonofabitch right in the face. And that, young man, is the name of that tune.”

Bayle shot the remains of his one-and-a-quarter-ounce bag of unsalted peanuts and considered his options. Telling himself that demanding thirteen baby bottles of Canadian Club whiskey and shouting ancient Greek maxims at whoever attempted to interfere wasn't going to be one of them, he forced his attention back to the copy of Sextus Empiricus's
Outlines of Pyrrhonism
opened up on the tray in front of him. Only the feigned studying act seemed capable of slowing down his American aisle-side seatmate's steady flow of assorted tales of Yankee glory.

He was, he let Bayle know almost immediately upon boarding during the stopover in Cincinnati, an ex-air force man of twenty-three years, had served three and a half of those years proudly defending the Free World in Korea, had voted for Reagan twice and would have a third time if they would have let him, and guessed that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ it sure as hell should be good enough for the United States of America. The man also let Bayle know that he was fairly confident of an ETA in Tulsa, Oklahoma, of 1:35 p.m.

Bayle admitted that he wasn't sure what his own ETA was and tried to concentrate on the Empiricus with the explanation that he had to study for a big exam when he returned to Toronto. The man volunteered that Bayle looked a little old to still be in school. Bayle answered back a little defensively that he wasn't just in school, he was in graduate school, a Ph.D candidate in philosophy with a speciality in Greek Hellenism, specifically the works of the third-century sceptic Sextus Empiricus. The man looked at Bayle like he'd just confessed to never having eaten a Big Mac or wanted to go to Disneyland.

Therefore, he who suspends judgement about everything which is subject to opinion reaps a harvest of the most complete happiness.

Brain, as usual of late, encountering difficulty sticking to the page, Flying is a lot like whiskey, Bayle thought. Stop
right there; metaphors, no. No thank you, no. Always taking you places you don't want to be.

The window next to him viewless since he'd pulled down the plastic cover immediately upon locating his seat, the other passengers surrounding him the same for their assorted food-and-drink-shovelling-and-slurping, paperback-turning, U.S.A.
Todaying,
and laptop-punching, Bayle scanned the plane for possible diversion.

An elderly nun one seat ahead of him on the other side of the aisle absently fingered a small silver cross hanging from around her neck as she read from a worn, black Bible spread out on her lap. She lifted her head from the book from time to time to smile a soft smile at no one at all and everyone. For the official record, as far as Bayle was concerned, Christians were just Platonists with a bleeding cover boy, the very metaphysically mucky antithesis of the clean logical lines of hard sceptical indifference that world-wary Empiricus had laid down two centuries after the celebrated J.C.'s lifetime. Still, he couldn't help but envy the nun her slightly glazed state of happy labour.

Bayle closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat, not the first time in what felt like a very long time that a bad case of purpose-envy turned his thoughts toward immediate membership in that not-so-exclusive Canadian Club so often frequented by all those similarly anxious for two thick fingers of quick liquid meaning. Which is to say Bayle wanted a drink. Or two, or three. Or eight.

In the eighteen months since he'd passed his foreign language exams and written his period and subject tests all Bayle had to do was defend his dissertation and he was done, would have his doctorate. Bayle, however, on the brink of official sceptical citizenship, felt like nothing so much as a swaggering secret virgin frightened out of his false macho bluster by a seasoned hooker's impatient command to either make it happen or to put it back in his pants. Whatever else in the past year and a half he couldn't put his name to, this, without a doubt: the dreaded shrunken truth-table; to wit, fear, for some reason, of the philosophical finish line.

At the same time, power-drinking and resultant alcohol-assisted hi-jinks of varying degrees of self-depravation more nights a week than not at renowned Queen Street West dive Knott's Place, a practice that was doing absolutely nothing for his liver, his stalled interest in his work, or his relationship with his girlfriend of almost three years, Jane. Particularly vexing was Bayle's recent inclination for leaving late-night Empiricus and strong spirits-soaked messages on the answering machine of the early-to-bed and early-to-rise Jane, the former never failing to hang up when the latter managed to make it to the phone, Bayle — regardless of what Jane's call display might say to the contrary — never failing to deny afterward all knowledge of the calls.

None of which should have necessitated that he travel a thousand miles away from home to write an article on minor-league hockey in the American mid-west for
Toronto Living,
a monthly magazine catering to the interests of young Canadian professionals. Except that in Bayle's case, it did.

He opened his eyes to the warm smile of the nun, her pleasantly age-scarred face staying with him even after she'd moved herself stoop-shouldered down the aisle to the washroom at the back of the plane. Although Bayle and his sister, Patty, had been raised as good Canadian agnostics — “God is love,” Bayle's father had impatiently answered his pubescent son's between-periods theological awakening, eager to give his attention back to the Maple Leaf-Red Wing playoff game playing on the livingroom television — Patty had undergone what their mother referred to as her Catholic Thing.