Heroes (5 page)

“Thank you,” Jefferson said. He pushed his cart right up to the stall and slowly got down on his knees inside. Kneeling directly in front of the toilet bowl, he reached behind himself,
eye level with the contents of his cart, and carefully selected a wire brush and container of cleaning fluid. He began squirting and scrubbing away.

“Do you follow hockey much, Roy?” Bayle asked, looking at the man's back as he spoke.

“Well, to tell you the truth, and I hope this don't spoil the writin' you doing none, but I got to admit that I ain't much of which you'd call a real big fan of the game, myself. They got what they call an Employees' Night here once a season and I been a couple times, brought the family down, you know. But if you want the honest to God truth, I have the hardest time just following that little puck around. Thing no bigger than a hamburger and you're supposed to keep track of it while all these big fellas be whippin' by, fallin' over each other?” Bayle laughed. Jefferson looked over his shoulder, grinned.

“Couldn't meet a nicer bunch of fellas than them hockey players, though,” Jefferson said. “No, sir. You know what they done every Christmas for the past three years? Give me a bottle of C.C. You know what C.C. is?”

“Canadian Club?” Bayle said, happy to know the answer to something for sure, even if something he knew he shouldn't have known about so well.

“That's right, Canadian Club, sippin' whiskey, from Canada. And expensive, too. Sure. That's good whiskey, that C.C.” Jefferson stood up from the toilet and surveyed his work. “Okay, we're about done in here. Let's move on down the hall.”

Bayle trailing right behind, Jefferson pushed the cart ahead of himself down the empty arena corridor. Slightly chilled, even in his jeans, suit jacket, and long-sleeve shirt underneath, it had been years — since he was a still-playing teenbopper — that Bayle had been in a hockey arena so early before a game. He couldn't see it from where he was standing, but the muffled motor noise of the zamboni machine getting the ice ready for the Warriors' practice echoed throughout the Bunton Center's cement halls. He found the sound unexpectedly soothing.

Until:

“I told you that I'd tell you when they were sharp enough. You just keep sliding that blade, Lefty. When I've seen enough sparks, I'll be sure to let you know.” Around the corner of the corridor an athletic-looking black woman about Bayle's age covered almost entirely in a tight-fitting silver shining space-traveller costume closely watched a pair of white figure skates being sharpened by an elderly white man standing over a skate-sharpening machine, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “And I'll tell you right now, Lefty, I don't want to hear about how many other pairs of skates for the players that you've got to do by tonight. People come to see me do my thing just as much as they do theirs.” Under her left arm the woman carried what was obviously the headpiece of her uniform, a bucket-shaped silver helmet with painted-on scowl and punched-in air holes for nose and mouth. Leaning against the arena wall was an accompanying rifle-length plastic weapon of some sort.

Following Jefferson inside their destination, another men's washroom identical to the one they'd just left, “Is she with the team?” Bayle asked.

“Yes, sir, she works here. That's Gloria. She's the Warrior.”

“C'
MON
,
feel it.”

“McDonald, what the fuck?”

“He wants me to feel his wrist.”

“Just feel it. Feel the difference.”

“Dippy, I don't want —”

“Dippy, tell me why you want McDonald to feel your wrist. Wait, don't answer that, I don't want to know.”

“Is
it time yet?”

“Dippy says he's 5 percent bigger than last year from working out all summer.”

“C'mon, Mac, you're the only one who knows how big it was last year, feel it.”

“Dippy, I'm naked, I don't want to feel your goddamn wrist.”

“Sounds like it didn't bother you too much last year.”

“We were arm wrestling, Robinson. And we were both drunk.”

“That's how it always starts. A little arm wrestling, a few beers, and before you know it —”

“Hey, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Robinson.”

“What time is it? Is the zamboni off yet?”

“Just once, eh? Just tell me if you think it's bigger, that's all I'm asking.”

“Calisse,
feel that big sonofabitch's wrist, will you? You two start to give me headache.”

“You want him to shut up, you feel him, Trembley.”

“He is your countryman, not mine, Monsieur Robinson. I say if Monsieur Dipper's wrist is to be felt, it should be by one of his own, no?”

“Trembley, can't you lay off the politics at least until the regular season starts?”

“Liberation, my friend, it knows no season. Didn't they teach you that at that community college you almost graduate from?”

“You make this stuff up as you go, Trembley, or has the Separatist movement issued a phrase book this year for all you Frogs travelling outside Quebec?”

“Oh, there is a book, Monsieur Robinson, and your name, believe me, it is in it.”

“Machine's off!”

“Shit.”

“Really?”

“Shit.”

“Seriously?”

“Let's go!”

“Pull my sweater down, will you?”

“Hand me that tape”

“Busted lace! Lefty?”

“He's already out there”

“Damn. Who's got a lace?”

“Good skate, guys.”

“Keep it loose out there, guys, stay loose.”

“Tabnernac, what kind of fucking tape they buy us dis year? Made in fucking Disneyland, I bet.”

“Let's have a good one, boys, nice and easy out there.”

“Let's go, let's go.”

“Quick skate and Wichita tonight, gang.”

“Everybody let's go, let's have a good one out there.”

“Good skate, boys.”

“Trembley, how come we're always the last two out of the room?”

“Monsieur Robinson, I do not know.”

“Trembley?”

“Oui?”

“You ready to get this thing going tonight?”

“I believe I am, yes.”

“Trembley?”

“Oui?”

“Who's that guy in the suit jacket?”

A
LITTLE
before four Bayle called it a day. Having talked to more strangers in one afternoon than in five years of graduate school combined, he ached for an empty room and an endless echo of “No comment.” One of the chief attractions of the philosophical profession was that most of your colleagues were long dead. If you happened to find yourself bored or annoyed with a third-century Greek it was always nice to know you could just close the book on him. Living people were almost never as accommodating.

A bag in each hand, with a lowered right shoulder Bayle pushed open the heavy front door of the arena, the rink's manufactured chill melding with a warm, almost moist wind coming off of the enveloping flatland. He started across the car-speckled parking lot toward the empty aluminum busstop bench. Halfway across the blacktop a blue pick-up pulled up alongside.

“You going into town?”

“I think I am,” Bayle said. “Main's in town, isn't it?”

“It's in town. Get in. I'm going your way.”

The owner of the truck kept one hand on the wheel, the other on a silver flask, and his eye on the road. He dressed like an old-time reporter in a black-and-white Gary Cooper movie: worn felt hat, rumpled grey suit, battered Oxfords. The truck was without air-conditioning and both windows were rolled all the way down to admit a warm breeze. The man's collar was wet, his tie loosened, the top button of his white shirt undone. He noticed Bayle eye him sideways every time he took a drink.

“If you don't like the way the driver conducts his business I can let you off at the next bus stop.”

“I didn't say anything,” Bayle protested, turning slightly in his seat, looking at the man fully for the first time. He was probably in his late-fifties but seemed at least ten years older. Booze, Bayle thought.

“No,” he said, “that's true. You didn't.” He raised the flask to lip level, paused, then tucked the silver container between his legs. “Davidson,” he said, free hand offered over, eyes never leaving the highway.

“Peter Bayle.”

Davidson slowly shook his head a few times up and down, as if the solution to a problem he'd been hard pressed to answer had suddenly been supplied to him. He retrieved the flask and held it toward Bayle across the front seat.

“A little early for me,” Bayle said, smiling good-naturedly. The too many cups of coffee he'd had at the arena had almost compensated for the drinks he'd consumed on the plane.
Having to be back at the rink in less than four hours, he didn't want to tip the balance again.

“I thought it might be,” Davidson said. He snapped back the flask and resumed with his silent sipping and steering.

Apart from confirming his identity as the Duceederenraging sportswriter from the local newspaper, Bayle's intermittent attempts at luring Davidson into a discussion about his job covering the Warriors were met with throaty grunts and, when Bayle mentioned Duceeder, a sustained groan. By the time they hit the outskirts of town Bayle had conceded Davidson as a journalistic subject. Bayle turned his attention to the town now outside his window.

The truck idled at a red light. Davidson rested his free hand on top of the steering wheel, the flask stuck in the glove compartment since they'd entered the town proper. They appeared to be in the middle of the business section of town— banks, insurance buildings, and other grey two-and-three-storey structures of unidentified but presumably similarly solemn purpose dominating the small-town U.S.A. scene. Except that it was a business day, Thursday, at five to four in the afternoon, and there wasn't one person on the street. Bayle gave Davidson his address and asked if today was a local holiday.

“If it is, nobody told me,” Davidson replied.

“Then where is everybody?”

“Malls,” Davidson said. “Like flies on shit, the outlet malls out on I-35. Welcome to middle America, son.”

Just as it announced itself, Main appeared to be the town's main street. Every fast food franchise Bayle had ever heard of and many that he hadn't dotted the thick commercial smear, a couple of flag-whipping car dealerships and several boarded-up store fronts providing slight respite from the gleaming landscape. Bayle even managed to spot a few human beings inside some of the restaurants. Davidson lifted his left pinky off the steering wheel and pointed at a passing gas station.

“Twenty years ago they started giving you a discount if you pumped your own gas. Self-service they called it. You
pumped, you paid less. Now you don't have a choice and they charge the full price anyway. You know why?”

Bayle was following the rising numbers on the building fronts, anxious not to miss his hotel. “Not really, no,” he said.

“Because the average idiot in this country can't remember anything farther back than his last crap, that's why. Because now he can't even
imagine
not pumping it.”

The truck finally pulled up outside of where Bayle was staying, The Range, a two-storey, brown-shingled house of late-nineteenth century design with looping ropes in the shapes of lassos affixed as bucolic adornment to its front. Painted wooden horses grazed on the front lawn, a single frozen cowboy with a drooping moustache and an enormous ten-gallon hat swinging eternally a wooden lasso of his own over his head. Underneath the wood-burnt sign planted in the middle of the yard that announced the name of the lodging, a smaller shingle suspended by two silver chains declared:

Welcome To The Range, Pardners!
VISA, MASTERCARD, AMERICAN EXPRESS
and LOCAL CHECKS ACCEPTED

Beside this, another sign, this one identical to those that dotted the tiny lawn fronts of what seemed to be every other building on the street, announced THIS BUSINESS/HOME IS PROTECTED BY CDH PROTECTION SERVICES 24 HOURS A DAY 365 DAYS A YEAR. Protected from what? Bayle wondered. Cows?

“Well, here you are,” Davidson said. “Home on the range.” It was the first time he'd smiled since Bayle entered the truck.

Bayle got his bags out of the truck bed and stopped beside the driver's side window. “I appreciate the ride,” he said. “But believe me, it's not home.”

“That's what they all say,” Davidson replied. He shifted into drive and drove, leaving Bayle standing alone in the middle of the street.

B
AYLE SIGNED
in, paid for his entire stay in advance with the company credit card Jane had given him, and went right to his room. Mrs. Franklin, the proprietor, had been hospitable if reserved. A trim middle-aged woman with close-cropped hair and upscale cowgirl looks (smart jeans, silk vest, clearly expensive reptile-skin-of-some-sort cowboy boots), she noisily worked on a hard candy between her back molars and pointed out that he should let her or her nephew, Ron, who worked the evening shift at the front desk know immediately if there was anything they could do to make his stay at The Range in any way more pleasant. She made it sound like a threat.

Bayle thanked her and headed up to his third-floor room, identified not by number but mid-western epithet. Bayle was staying in the Great Plains Room.

She stopped him before he got halfway up the stairs. “I forgot to give you your complimentary copy of the
Eagle,”
she said, disappearing behind the counter. Bayle came back down. A copy of the American Constitution, a “Wright is Right-WUUS 590” bumper sticker, and a framed movie still of a youthful Ronald Reagan horseback with guns ablazing were appended to the wall over the desk. Mrs. Franklin caught Bayle's eyes lingering over the photo. Joined him.