Heroes (23 page)

“Gloria, who's Dan Fenton?” Bayle said, desperate to drag his mind out of the gutter of Gloria's body.

Still stroking Davidson's head, Gloria only looked up long enough to dismiss the name Duceeder had challenged Bayle to ask Davidson about by sharply answering, “Dan Fenton's nobody.”

A moment of silence later, “He really is still sick,” she said.

“Don't worry, the paramedics will be here soon.”

“What did the doctors say when I was gone? Tell me what they said, tell me exactly.”

“They didn't say much. Really. They thought it was just a virus or parasite in his system and that the medication should
take care of it. But he's been taking it for over a week now and he should've been better in a couple of days, four, tops. I guess they'll just have to run some more tests. I'm sure they'll find out what it is this time.”

Gloria stood up and began to pick up the pieces of broken glass off the bathroom floor. She worked slowly, like she was using the time to try and figure something out. Finally, “Harry doesn't need any more tests,” she said. “What Harry needs is to be able to talk to those players again.”

Bayle watched her carefully place each piece of jagged glass in the palm of her other hand.

“Look,” Bayle said. “I've been thinking a lot about this boycott business since you've been away — thought about it a lot, actually — and I'm all for trying to do everything we can to help figure out some way of getting Harry out of this mess. But we've got to face facts. What Harry needs right now is a long stay at the hospital and some serious tests done on his condition.”

“What Harry needs is his life back,” Gloria said.

“Well, that's what I'm talking about. And that's why he needs to go to the hospital.”

“That's why he needs to be back covering the team.” Gloria punctuated the sentence by dropping the shards of glass into the plastic garbage pail under the sink. The small thud stirred Davidson awake.

“G.?” he called out, eyes opening wide. Gloria kneeled back down over him, entwined her right hand with his. All three of them could hear the ambulance whining their way down the street. Davidson closed his eyes again.

“The time for tests is over, Bayle,” Gloria said. “The time for thinking about things too.” Bayle's eyes locked with hers. “You with me, or not?”

Bayle heard Gloria's breathing. Heard the ambulance's siren so loud now it might have been parked right inside the livingroom. Wrapping his fingers around Gloria's free hand, heard both of them, each thing, distinct; one.

W
OW.
T
HAT'S
,
like, a lot of powder. You'll have to give me a little time. I'll have to make some calls.”

“How much time?” Bayle said.

“Like, tomorrow, noon?” Ron said.

“Where?”

“Here's all right for me if it's okay with you.”

“See you at noon,” Bayle said. He pushed back his black sunglasses further up his nose. He'd never made it a practice to wear sunglasses indoors before, but now it seemed like the right sort of thing to do. Watching Ron leave the restaurant and get into a black BMW driven by another teenager, Drug dealers making their getaways in BMWs, Bayle thought: I've been watching the wrong television shows.

After paying Mrs. Franklin up front for another week at The Range Bayle had about half of the twenty-five hundred of
Toronto Living
money he'd started out with, about a thousand of which he'd need for the cocaine. That left him about two hundred dollars in walking-around money. After that was gone he'd just have to wait and see. The combination of knowing exactly what he had to do each day and not having a clue where he'd be a week from now put Bayle in a permanent state of lightheadedness and nervous excitation, a sort of drunken giddiness of action.

And they still hadn't figured out a way to plant the cocaine in Duceeder's house. Bayle had argued for the much simpler plan of just putting it in the G.M.'s filing cabinet at the arena, but Gloria had pointed out that because of all the traffic at the Bunton Center it would be far too easy for Duceeder to claim it was somebody else's.

“It's got to be at his place. That way there's nobody else he can point his finger at.”

“But how are we going to get into his house without him knowing?” Bayle said.

“Not we —
you
. Folks in that neighbourhood get a little jumpy when they see somebody of the non-white colour hanging around. I just show up there in my car and I've got half the Neighbourhood Watch dialing 911. It's got to be you that makes the stash.”

So there was that. And Bayle still had to cover the Warriors
for the
Eagle
on a day-to-day basis now that the team was back home until either Davidson got better or Wilson found a permanent replacement. As a favour, Wilson promised to advertise for the position for a full week before he brought anybody in for an interview, but after that he'd have to start talking to people with the intention of actually hiring someone.

And every evening between six and eight p.m. Gloria and Bayle would sit on uncomfortable wooden chairs on opposite sides of Davidson's starched white hospital bed. Davidson usually sleeping — when he wasn't, groggy and sulky and generally uncommunicative, as if betrayed into sickness by his two healthy friends — it was here, the day after the ambulance delivered Davidson to his temporary new home, that Gloria carefully laid out to Bayle her plan for getting Davidson his job back.

“And your friend, the guy who's going to impersonate the cop —”

“Dwayne,” Gloria said.

“Right, Dwayne. He's just going to scare Duceeder enough for us to get what we want?”

“Soon as Duceeder calls off the boycott things go right back to like they was before. For everybody.”

“By why real cocaine? Why not baking soda? Davidson won't know the difference.”

“Because the only reason Dwayne's doing this is because he hates drugs like only an ex-junkie who's lost everything because of them and learned to tell about it can. He'll know the difference. I told him Davidson was a low-end dealer who's burned a couple friends of mine and we're trying to get back at him.”

“But what am I supposed to do with a quarter ounce of coke after everything's back to normal?”

“Don't worry about that. If this friend of yours don't want to buy it back — and I never knew one that didn't if he came out ahead in the end even just a little bit — I can get rid of it myself.”

“And nobody gets hurt, right?”

“Of course nobody gets hurt,” she said. “Nobody gets hurt and Harry gets to go back to his hockey beat and out of this damn hospital.”

Bayle felt less than convinced. A thousand dollars worth of cocaine. A break and entry. A false police arrest. It all seemed a little much, even for Harry's sake.

Through an opening in the white curtain set up around the sleeping Davidson's bed Bayle noticed the silver-haired man who shared with Davidson the small, starkly white room. About Davidson's age, maybe a few years older, one of the old man's eyes was open wide and unblinking at the ceiling, the other staying shut, hard and tight. He seemed neither awake nor asleep. His bony fingers were knotted in gnarled curls at his sides and his slightly opened mouth turned up at one corner just enough to promise imminent speech that never came. Bayle looked back at Gloria across Davidson's motionless body. A clear tube ran from one of the old man's nostrils to a large machine set up beside the bed for what purpose Bayle had absolutely no idea.

Looking up at Gloria, “Every time we'd make the trip to Maple Leaf Gardens my dad would leave the game kind of depressed,” Bayle said, “even if the Leafs won. He never said anything, but you could just tell. I never really understood why and I never asked. My old man and me, we just didn't talk about things like that, that just wasn't the way we operated. But just before he died, when he was in and out of it all the time, he told me that the Bunker, the place where the Leafs owner Harold Ballad and his buddy King Clancy used to sit every home game, never looked as good in person as it did on television.”

Gloria didn't say anything; didn't do or say anything that said to stop talking, though, either.

“But those old rinks,” Bayle said, “like the Forum in Montreal, like the Gardens ... sure they were falling apart and the seats were too small and you couldn't see the ice half as good as you can in the new arenas, but they were the best. Like shrines, you know? Like fucking churches. And if you
never had a chance to see Guy Lafleur, The Flower, racing down the right wing in one of them with that long blond mane of his flying in the breeze behind him, winding up for a slapshot pegged right for the upper left-hand corner, well, you just haven't lived. I'm sorry, but you just haven't.” Bayle paused. “And the old man? My dad? He should have remembered that kind of thing after he had his operation, that summer he was supposed to get better. That's the kind of thing I should have got him to remember. I didn't, I know that. But I should have.”

Gloria nodded, waited for more, but that was it. Sat there looking at Bayle looking at the elderly man in the other bed.

“I'll call my friend about the coke tonight,” Bayle said.

B
AYLE SAT
cross-legged on his bed at The Range, the palm-sized peppermint tin of cocaine in front of him unopened since point of noon-day purchase — “No charge for the lid,” Ron had said, handing it over under the table a few hours earlier at Fatty's, “one of my aunt's discards.”

He stayed like this for several minutes, just staring down at the thing, before finally picking the container up and placing it on one knee, running through for what felt like the first and thousandth time his plans for tomorrow night's combined break, entry, and drug planting.

Bayle knew that Duceeder's wife and son accompanied him to every home game, so he'd picked tomorrow night, during the first period of the Wichita game, for when he'd make his move. Making his task easier, he remembered noticing that Duceeder's place was one of the few houses on the G.M.'s block without a CDH security sign planted out front. He'd get in the house as inconspicuously as possible, stash the coke, and leave without notice. When he got to the rink by about the end of the first intermission his story would be that he'd slept through his alarm clock.

He'd also taken the precaution of purchasing from the 7-Eleven near The Range a pair of brown garden gloves so as to avoid leaving any prints at the scene, and had laid out for tomorrow night all the black clothes he owned to provide for optimum night-time cover. He had it all planned out and there really wasn't anything left to think about. But Bayle thought about it again and again anyway, wished today was tomorrow, wished that the whole thing was over and done with. Three sharp knuckle raps to his locked-and-chained door put an end to any more thinking or wishing.

Bayle pounced on the container of drugs, heart gorging up into his throat in the process. Head whipping from side to side, he combed the room for a place to hide the tin, three more measured knocks at the door coming and going. “Who is it?” he chirped as cheerily as possible, hoping to buy a few more seconds.

“Charles Warren. I say, Peter, are you all right in there?”

“Chuck,” Bayle said to himself. “It's only Chuck.” He crammed the tin underneath the pillows on the bed and unlocked the door and undid the chain.

“Chuck,” Bayle said. “It's just you.” Warren wasn't high, but he looked like hell anyway; in particular, melting face
tired and with a runny nose he continually wiped at with an ever-present hankie.

“Well, I wouldn't have put it quite like that, but, yes, it is me.”

Bayle stood in the doorway looking visibly relieved; smiled, said nothing.

Eventually, “Is it all right if I ...?” Warren said, wiping his nose, motioning toward the empty room behind Bayle.

“Oh, sure, come on in,” Bayle said, letting Warren through. “Sit over there in the chair. I'll sit on the bed. You're the first guest I've ever had in here so you get to sit in the chair. I'll just sit on the bed.”

“All right, then,” Warren said, watching Bayle closely. “I'll sit in the chair.”

Bayle moved from door to bed in a hurried, artificial stride of stiff casualness, leaning back against the bunched pillows when he got there. He sent another long, exaggerated grin Warren's way.

Warren attempted to smile back but the effort was too much. He leaned forward on his chair. “How are things, Peter? How have you been?”

“Fine, fine,” Bayle said; then, “Why? Does it seem like something's wrong to you? Not that I'd have any idea why you would. Think something's wrong, I mean. Because everything's just fine. Just hunky dory, in fact. Did you know I'm covering the Warriors for the
Eagle
now?”

“I believe I did hear something of the sort, yes.”

Bayle nodded and leaned back into the pillows. Warren cleared his throat and got to the point.

“I say, Peter, I was talking to young Ron this afternoon, and —”

“Listen, Chuck, you can say that it's none of my business and I'd understand completely, but you really should try to go easy on that morphine stuff, you know? I mean, I've tied a few on in my time, but I can't even
remember
most of that night at your place.”

Warren jumped at the opening. “No, no, you're quite
right to take an interest if you think a friend is in need of an encouraging word, Peter, you're quite right. In fact, the reason I dropped by here today was to offer you the same sort of advice in much the same spirit.”

“Me?” Bayle sat up from the pillows.

“Come, now, Peter. A quarter ounce of cocaine? Really. I understand that you're going through a bit of a rough stretch right now, what with the breakup with your girlfriend and your failed academic career — not to mention your unresolved feelings toward your sister. And God knows there's no crime in a fellow finding a little comfort from life's little difficulties from time to time. Goodness, look at me and my own —”