Heroes (17 page)

“If you don't like it, why do you drink it then?” Bayle said. “I promised Gloria I would until I started to feel better.” “Gloria's not here. I won't tell.”

“Are you going to make the Goddamn tea or do I have to get up and do it myself?”

Bayle made the Goddamn tea.

Living up to his pledge to check in on Davidson didn't, in the beginning, entail much more than Bayle resoaking the older man's tea bag every half hour or so and managing to watch along with him the same brain-pickling, late-sixties television sitcoms on the only channel the black-and-white was capable of pulling in (“The Brady Bunch,” “My Three Sons,” “Petticoat Junction”). Only when Davidson began to throw up repeatedly and violently at a little after nine o'clock, disturbing specks of blood red blood flecking the bubbling pools of watery disgorge, did Bayle feel like he was doing anything but keeping the more-than-usually cranky Davidson company for a few aimless hours.

After the vomiting had stopped Davidson agreed to lay down for the evening and let Bayle stick around for a couple of hours just to see if things remained stable. Bayle even went so far as to suggest that a trip to the hospital might not be a bad idea, but Davidson wouldn't even discuss it. Bayle didn't press the point. While Davidson in the bathroom readied himself for bed, Bayle in the kitchen steeped one last mug of hot bedside tea without being able to shake the stubborn image of his cancer-recovering father just as television-bewitched as Davidson had been before the vomiting had finally forced off the black-and-white. Bayle ended up soaking the bag for so long and making the cup of tea so strong that he had to pour it down the drain and put the kettle on again and begin all over.

Cancer was cancer and never to be slighted. But except for experiencing an understandable degree of anxiety over having
to learn how to live with the partial incontinence and impotence, the dreaded “Double Is” of successful prostate removal, Bayle's father fresh from the hospital seemed fine, at worst simply irritated at not being absolutely one hundred percent while the Leafs made their first real run at the Stanley Cup in fifteen years. Although it was mid-April and there were exams to take and papers to get done, Bayle came home from the city every chance he could, every night that he'd sit and watch the playoffs with his dad in the livingroom the Leafs that much closer to a classic all-Canadian showdown with Montreal in the finals.

Even with a three-inch plastic catheter inserted inside his penis and a urine bag taped to his thigh, Bayle's father had never seemed to his son more alive. Grabbing hold of what he dismissively refered to as his “piss sack” whenever he lurched to his slippered feet to celebrate another Leaf goal by Andreychuk or Gilmour or another game-saving stop by Felix “The Cat” Potvin, from where Bayle was sitting on the other end of the couch his old man resembled nothing so much as some battle-scarred soldier heroically cheering his blue and white comrades on, oblivious to the pain in his body and the nasty looking purple incision just above his belly button that the doctor had made for the backup catheter. Naturally he was worn down a little by the operation and with less energy than he would have liked, but with undersized, overmatched, but unrelenting Captain Dougie Gilmour leading the way, the Leafs mowed down the Red Wings, the Blues, and then took a three games to two lead on the Kings in the Western Conference Final, one step away from winning the right to go to war for the Holy Grail of hockey, Lord Stanley's Cup.

“Can you believe that the last time we won that thing was '67?” he'd ask Bayle nearly every time his son came to visit and the Leafs were playing. “'67! Christ, that's longer than you've been alive, Peter! Think of it! Think of that!”

Bayle knew his old man was going to be all right the night the Leafs finally went down to Gretzky and Los Angeles in the seventh and deciding game. Two hours later his father still
refused to admit defeat. They were sitting side by side in lawn chairs in the darkness of the backyard, a Labatts Blue Light in each man's hand, the only sound besides the occasional bark of a neighbourhood dog the odd mosquito-slap of an unprotected bare arm.

“Number one,” his father said, looking straight ahead into the inky night, the game still right there before his eyes, “Gretzky should have been kicked out of game six for that high stick on Gilmour. Whether he meant to do it or not is irrelevant. Just read the rule book, that's all I'm saying, just read the damn rule book. You use your stick and you draw blood and you're out of the game. Period. So let's just tell it like it is, all right? That's all I'm asking. Because anybody else does that and it's a five-minute major and an automatic ejection. But because it's Mr. Wayne Gretzky he only gets let off with a warning, it's really as simple as that.” His father swatted a mosquito dead on his arm and absently adjusted the urine bag on his thigh.

“Number two, if Gretzky gets tossed like he's supposed to, not only does he not score that winning goal in overtime, but the entire Kings team collapses when he gets kicked out. Los Angeles is basically a one-man show, Peter, you know that as well as I do. So without him they're finished, caput, game and series over, hello Les Canadiens and here comes Canada's real team in the blue and white with the leaf on the front to kick your sorry asses.”

Bayle's father took another sip of his beer. The alcohol was a definite post-op no-no, but given the post-game solemnity of the occasion and his basically problem-free recovery, well worth the risk of Bayle sneaking the two beers up from the downstairs fridge without his mother or sister's seeing. Bayle and his dad sucked at their cans in the dark like two nervy teenagers trying to cop a buzz without the parentals finding out. The beer tasted all the better for it.

“Losing like that, that isn't really losing,” his father said. “I'm sorry, but it's not. If you want to call it anything, call it forfeiting. What you saw out there tonight was a Leaf forfeit.
And I'll tell you another thing, Peter,” he said, Bayle able to make out the can of beer in the dark being pointed his way for emphasis, “I wouldn't put it past those American bastards in New York who are calling the shots in the NHL these days having something to do with this.”

“C'mon, dad,” Bayle said, laughing.

“You c'mon,” he said. “You think those pencil-heads weren't just dying to see Los Angeles in the Stanley Cup final? Think of the media coverage. Think of the T.V. markets they're going to get. Think of all that exposure. Now I'm not saying that
every
referee in the league is in the direct payment of those corporate whores down in New York, but that sonofabitch Kerry Fraser and a few of those linesmen, well ...”Bayle could hear the beer can being crunched in his father's fist.

Patty headed off to Quebec a couple of days later on a French immersion program she'd delayed until her father was safely out of the woods. Bayle himself wondered if it wasn't too late to squeeze into a summer class or two.

But as the summer of his recovery warmed on and the catheter was finally removed and a daily supply of Depends adult diapers took its place and a pretty young female nurse came by the house every day to clean and disifinfect the six-inch stapled-closed surgery wound, Bayle's father began to slowly, then rapidly, lose interest in his recuperation, the spirit of determined healing of April, May, and early June disappearing along with the end of the hockey playoffs and the onset of an unusually scorching Toronto summer.

Except for Bayle's mother's faithful but generally fruitless round-the-clock repeating aloud of the doctor's various instructions and warnings, the livingroom television was now the one chattering constant in the house, Bayle's father from morning until night horizontal on the couch in front of the tube, two months after the operation still not having graduated beyond his red housecoat and slippers. Previously his father had been only a hockey watcher with maybe a quick peek at the late-night news to check on the weather to
see if it looked liked rain the next work day. But now, just as long as it was on, whatever played on the television never appeared to matter — soap operas, sitcoms, game shows, afternoon talk shows, even previously insufferably boring baseball — Bayle's father's attention never seeming entirely focused on the program at hand anyway, never expressing preference for one network banality over that of another. His eyes, however, more and more lingered on the set, the shallow gaze never really leaving, only steadily fading with summer's increasing weeks and heat.

When Bayle's mother's badgering best couldn't get his father to commit to his exercises or to start thinking about when he wanted to go back to work or even to change out of his housecoat, she called Dr. McKay, who'd performed the operation. When he assured her that it wasn't unusual for some patients to experience slight depression during the recovery period, even after they've shown initial signs of doing well, his mother temporarily quit calling Bayle up every other day to report on his dad's gloomy condition. But Bayle knew something wasn't right.

Bayle would sit with his father in the livingroom like before but that was all that remained the same. When Bayle would try to encourage him to do some of his exercises or just get up and start moving around, his father would say he was too tired and flip the channel. When Bayle would ask if he wouldn't feel better if he changed out of his night clothes and got dressed, his dad would say no, he liked wearing his housecoat because you didn't notice the diaper. When Bayle said that that didn't matter, that that wasn't what was important, his father said, “When you're fifty-three years old and have to wear a baby diaper, then you can tell me what does and doesn't matter.” When Bayle asked if he wasn't getting sick of just sitting around the house all day and didn't he feel like going back to work, his dad said, “Do you think Fred or Billy or any of those other guys down there are going to want to pull the truck over everytime I piss myself?” Bayle said a lot of things, but his father always had an answer.

Eventually they settled into an uneasy truce and silently watched T.V. together whenever Bayle would come to visit. It was like when Patty was on the downside of one of her enthusiasms. All you could really do was wait it out and hope that whatever was next would come along sooner and not later. Bayle watched T.V. with his dad and waited.

Bayle began to dread making the trip out to the house just like he hated being around Patty whenever she was between obsessions and the slightest breeze could knock her over, the sappiest song on the radio set her off weeping, her standard answer to anything that was asked of her a listless “Whatever.” Bayle wished his father had had his operation in the middle of winter and had the Leafs to wake up to every day to help keep his mind off a future filled with not knowing whether a cold can of beer on a hot summer day after cutting the grass was going to soil his pants or whether or not he was ever going to be able to make love to his wife again. But all he had were summer reruns and the sound of the gasping livingroom air conditioner trying its best to keep up with the rising thermometer.

Soon Bayle started making up excuses why he couldn't come home to visit as much as he knew he should and began spending more and more time at the library putting in exhausting ten-, sometimes fourteen-hour days on his single summer course, more often than not barely having enough energy left over to call his mother to see how his dad was making out. By the end of blazing August, chest pains and problems arising from recuperating negligence that couldn't be treated at home demanded a short but critical stay in the hospital. Bayle's father never came home. He died in his bed at Toronto General two weeks later, eighteen days before the Maple Leafs opened training camp.

Bayle packed a gym bag and moved back home for the rest of the summer, but mostly stayed with his mother and sister at the hospital, they in two chairs on either side of his father's bed, Bayle in the bigger, softer chair in the corner of the room by the window where he'd try to concentrate on
the book in his lap. Although thinner, his father wasn't in much pain because of the drugs and usually slept. The few hours a day he was awake he was dozy and didn't say much, mostly just looked at the television, but now with the sound turned off.

Once though, near the end, when Bayle was sitting on the bed and holding his dad's hand, his father opened his eyes and, looking right at him, with perfect clarity said, “They were so close, Peter. How often do you get that close? The last time they won it all was in '67, you know. That's longer than you've been alive. Think of it. Just think of that.”

The official cause of death was explained to the family as basically heart failure. For months afterward Bayle explained it to himself and others that way too. But one bitterly cold Saturday night in November, back at his parents' house in Etobicoke helping his mother and sister move some of his father's clothes and shoes from the upstairs bedroom out to the garage, it suddenly occurred to Bayle that his father had simply given up.

Halfway through the livingroom on his way to the back door, three boxes full of shoes, socks, underwear, and work shirts piled high in his arms and up to his chin, Bayle stopped. “Hockey Night in Canada” was playing on the livingroom television to keep everyone company during their upstairs-to-outside trips, and Bayle stood in the middle of the room, staring at the game.

Hockey-indifferent Patty used to like to say that this room, and the hockey game that seemed to be ceaselessly playing in it, was “An empty place, as empty a place as any room with this much meaningless racket coming from it can be.” Now Bayle knew how wrong she'd been. Now — their father no longer squirming away on the edge of his easy chair yelling out for the Leafs to “Forecheck, boys, forecheck!” and for the referees to “Open up your Goddamn eyes, you idiots!” regardless of whether the room was family-full or empty but for him and Freddy, the family cat — the room really was empty.