Heroes (22 page)

Weightless, careless, almost Bayleless, Bayle talked; talked right through the night with the faithfully heeding Warren stoned cosy in his immense red armchair the entire talking time; talked right through until morning with Warren still listening intently but standing in front of the bathroom mirror carefully shaving. Talked talked talked. Talked so much that the next day his tongue was literally sore.

And then, suddenly, Warren announced that he had to go to work.

“Of course you're welcome to hang around here for as long as you like,” Warren said. “But I'm afraid that if I'm going to make my nine o'clock counselling I'd better be moving along.” Warren's words, and the irrefutable fact that there he was, freshly showered, cleanly shaved, and utterly respectable-looking, standing at the door with briefcase in one hand and mug of steaming English Breakfast tea in the other, cleared Bayle's head of what little pleasing obliviousness remained from the effects of the nine-hour-old shot of morphine.

“You're leaving? Now?” Bayle said.

“Afraid so, yes. Mrs. Delong, nine sharp. And if the old girl
does
somehow manage to come to grips with the idea that Jesus Christ really doesn't have an opinion one way or another whether she and her husband sell the trailer home and move nearer to her sister-in-law in Salt Lake City, I'm sure there's some other faith-shaking issue that must be dealt with immediately.”

Bayle didn't laugh, move, or blink. Warren could smell the other man's fear at being left alone.

“Go home and get some sleep, Peter. Put your head down in a familiar place and you'll be as good as new. And don't worry about our little business here last night with Ron. Just think of it as a little walk on the wild side among friends, all right?”

Bayle attempted a smile, meekly nodded as confidently as he could.

“That's the spirit,” Warren said. Hands full, gesturing
with his head toward the locked apartment door, “I wonder, could you?”

Bayle unlocked the chain and opened the door, putting him on the inside and Warren on the other. Unshaven, exhausted, eyes equal parts terrified and unintentionally menacing, Bayle looked like a demented house-husband seeing his partner off for the day. The impression wasn't lost on Warren.

“Do you have any plans, Peter?”

Bayle squinted past him down the hallway. No one was coming or going.

“Do you?” Warren repeated. “Have any plans, I mean.”

Bayle fixed his attention back on Warren but didn't say anything.

Warren waited for an answer. After an uncomfortable while, “Get some sleep, Peter,” he said. “All you need is some sleep.”

They both knew it was a lie.

T
HE
R
ANGE
was the only place Bayle thought to go. He was on foot, and the majority of the town's other hotels and motels existed on the highway outskirts, but most of all he craved the illusion of familiarity and sanctuary that his former lodgings provided. That he knew it was an illusion didn't make it any less appealing.

Stiffly informed by Ron's aunt that check-in wasn't until noon — bleary-eyed and wrinkled Bayle no Triple-A traveller poster boy to begin with, the ugly yellow hypodermic bruise on his forearm and the neat little stack of faxes Mrs. Franklin had been receiving nearly every day over the last week from a certain Ms. Warriner in Toronto and the several phone calls asking after his whereabouts from a snotty-sounding fellow by the name of Smith no doubt not helping his case — Bayle took Jane's correspondence and the news of his delay to cleansheeted unconsciousness with exhausted resignation. He picked up his gear and slowly made for the front door.

“You can wait in the Breakfast Corral until your room is ready if you want,” Mrs. Franklin offered, studying Bayle from behind the front desk.

“Thank you,” he said.

“And there might be some coffee left over from this morning, you'll have to check for yourself. The donuts are all gone, though, I can tell you that much right now.”

“Thanks.”

Rarest of exchanges: he meant it; she could tell that he did.

“Isn't your work done here, Mr. Bayle? Shouldn't you be home by now?”

For a few seconds what, this morning, passed for thought; then: “I was. I am. I mean, I will.”

Mrs. Franklin silently nodded. “Go on in The Corral,” she said. “I think I might recall seeing a glazed donut from yesterday lying around somewhere in the kitchen. I'll bring it out if Ron hasn't managed to get to it first.”

Before she left, “Here,” she said, taking the lid off the container of candies sitting on the front desk, “try one of these. You can only get them mail order from Vermont.”

Bayle thanked her again, took the mint, and did as he was told, went into the dining room. I have so rarely depended upon the kindness of strangers, he thought. Also thought: I will not cry. Not over the prospect of a stale donut, a bad cup of coffee, and a mint, I won't.

Recalling with unfortunately increasing clarity the tears
he hadn't managed to hold back the night before at Larry's, however — these, as well as the unbroken all-night rant he'd subjected Warren to; because of the morphine, though, thankfully foggy on the content of the tirade — Bayle retrieved from the pocket of his dirty white t-shirt the several pieces of folded fax paper Mrs. Franklin had handed over. They were just about what he had expected. The worst.

Beginning casually enough, concerned yet congenial, asking after his well-being and only as a worried P.S. about his delayed whereabouts, Jane's inquiries quickly passed from this, to the cooly professional, to the frostily litigious. The most recent, dated the day before, declared in her signature antiseptic prose style that this was Bayle's last warning, that if he didn't within the next twenty-four hours refund in full the twenty-five hundred dollars he'd bilked from the
Toronto Living
credit card he'd been entrusted with legal action would proceed. No mention was made of her new main squeeze, August.

The coffee urn, fingerprint-smudged and cold silver to the touch, dripped him a third of a styrofoam cup of equally cold coffee. Bayle brought the cup to his lips but his distorted image in the urn stopped its progress. Me or the machine? he thought. The question wasn't entirely academic.

“They were a little stale so I microwaved them.”

Mrs. Franklin held out a plate topped with two glazed donuts. Bayle put down the styrofoam cup and accepted the dish. “I put on a fresh pot of coffee that should be ready by the time you get settled in upstairs,” she said. “I hurried up the girl. Your room is ready when you are.”

He lugged everything up to the second floor and pushed open the unlocked door to his old room. Amazingly, it was exactly like he had left it. Why exactly he found this amazing he hadn't the faintest. Only it was. He laid down face-first on the freshly made bed and decided he'd never leave.

No post-morphine midday snoozing happening, however — sheep-counting, Gloria's-boombox-inspired Bach-humming, masturbating: each act discharged faithfully but without desired doze-inducing effect — a thought, an emotion, a feeling, okay,
an ache: Nice if Gloria were here. Could remind her about getting Davidson to take his medication. Might talk about how to get Harry his job back. Could get a hug.

He looked at the clock on the bedside table. Twelve thirty-one. Wouldn't be home, would be at the rink, might be home, probably not home — she's home. He pulled on his jeans, no shoes or socks, and put a quarter in the payphone by the ice machine at the end of the hall, just a little uncomfortable with the idea of calling Gloria up in the very same room he'd just spilt his seed in just a few minutes before with her very own face and body dancing before his eyes in all manner of glistening positions and angles.

Halfway through the third ring Bayle hung up, ramming the phone back into place. Bayle's hand, however, appeared to be stuck to the receiver. He stood there staring at his fist wrapped tight around the offending piece of black plastic and wondered why, even with nearly eight years of higher education to his credit, such a presumably simple thing as staying on the line until the other end answered seemed beyond him. The sound of an avalanche of ice cubes crashing into a plastic bucket turned his head.

A fellow Range resident, a pudgy middle-aged man in circus-clown-enormous brown leather slippers with furry white lining peeking out around the edges and droopy blue pyjamas dotted with glowing white dollar signs, was intent upon building a tower of ice in his little white bucket, every time he pushed the red PUSH HERE FOR ICE button the cubed mountain rising another quarter-inch higher, four or five wayward cubes sledding down the pile and onto the floor in the process.

“The missus just gotta have ice with her Diet Coke, all right then, she gonna get it. Oh, she gonna get her ice, all right, by God, yes, she gonna get it.” The man gave the button one last push and licked his lips with satisfaction while inspecting the teetering pyramid he'd managed to raise. “A.J. Simmons goes for ice, by God, yes, he gets ice. Period.” He strutted down the hallway without losing even one cube, the
swishing of his slippers on the carpet and the slight hum of the ice machine the third floor's only noise.

The sacrificed cubes scattered at the foot of the machine were already beginning to melt, their unsuccessful attempt at joining in with the happily bucketed others resulting in a steadily spreading pool of tap water tears of failed connection. Bayle thought he knew exactly how they felt.

Eventually Bayle slept. But the molar-rattling ring of the phone on the bedside endtable and its blinking red light flashing on and off would not go away. He picked up the receiver knowing this was a call he'd have to take eventually.

Except it wasn't the cold shower of Jane he'd braced himself for.

“Bayle can you come to Harry's right now?”

“Gloria? I just called — I mean, how'd you know I was here?”

“I mean
right now.”

“I'm on my way.”

Bayle walked, jogged, even flat-out ran two or three times in painful, pain-under-his-ribs spurts from bus stop to bus stop. He finally got picked up nearly a mile from The Range and had his hand on the cord hanging over his seat three blocks before they even got near Davidson's house. When he recognized the street he wanted and stepped down from the bus Gloria was waiting for him on the front lawn of Davidson's place. She didn't even give him chance to apologize for taking so long in getting there.

“Come on inside,” she said, grabbing Bayle's hand and pulling him around the side of the building. “Only be quiet though. He doesn't know yet I know what's going on.”

What was going on was nothing Bayle hadn't been witness to before: Davidson suffering from indisguisable vertigo, a face flushed from fever, even a few episodes of vomiting. But, unlike when it had just been him and the old man living in the house by themselves, this time Davidson all
morning long explaining away his repeatedly bumping into the furniture or knocking over his coffee cup as him simply being “all thumbs today, don't know where my head's at, G.,” and running the shower in the bathroom for five and ten minutes at a time to cover up the sounds of his occasional retching and fastidious cleaning up. Gloria and Bayle stood in the doorway to Davidson's apartment, just far enough inside to hear the shower working on the other side of the closed bathroom door down the hall.

“He's got to go to the hospital, there's no other way around it,” Bayle said. “Except for that first night I told you about, he's never puked up like you say he's been doing today. He's
sick,
Gloria.”

“You think I don't know that? Why do you think I called you?”

“Then tell him to get his ass in your car and let's go to the hospital.” The sound of the shower suddenly stopped. They lowered their voices, Gloria's becoming a fierce whisper.

“You know I can't do that. I can't just drag the man off like he's some kind of sick baby or something. I can't do that to him. I won't.”

“We don't know how sick he is, Gloria. He needs someone to have a look at him. And now, not later.”

“You keep saying that like I don't believe you or something. I know it, Goddammit. But he's got to be the one to say it's time to go, not me.”

“For Christsake, keep your voice down.”

“You're the one raising your voice, you keep your voice —”

The sound of shattering glass and the stomach-turning heavy
ummph
of human flesh hitting hardwood floor sent Bayle and Gloria scrambling down the hallway.

His useless legs were in the bathroom, most of the upper half of his prostrate body spilt over into the hall. The water glass lay thankfully broken in five clean pieces beside the sink and away from the fallen body. Davidson struggled to lift his head up off the wooden floor a few difficult inches, nostril blood rivering down slowly, some of it dribbling over his
upper lip and into his mouth and onto his teeth. His disoriented eyes pleaded he be paid attention to.

“Get out,” he said, voice hoarse, urgent. “Get out of here.
Now
.”

They heard him out before moving into action.

After making the call for the ambulance from the other room, Bayle returned with a glass of water and the pillows from the couch. Davidson's head in her lap, Gloria wiped his face clean with a wet washcloth and placed another cold rag on his forehead, over and over stroking the little hair on his head like a concerned mother would a feverish child. Davidson didn't attempt to protest his wellness anymore, simply lay there eyes-closed quiet and attended to.

“Here. Use these,” Bayle said, offering over the pillows.

Gloria removed her thigh from underneath Davidson and — Bayle holding up the old man's head — carefully arranged the pillows. They slowly lowered his head back down together. Each remained there kneeling, watching Davidson rest, Bayle involuntarily sneak-peeking at Gloria's so-close eyes, lips, neck, and jutting collarbone, the expanse of brown chest above her black V-neck slope of t-shirt. Their faces not more than a foot apart, Bayle had never been this near to her before. He worried whether she could hear his heart hammering away through his chest. Also worried what kind of man it is that lusts after his sick friend's girlfriend.