The Guardians (2 page)

    But
then, a few months ago, the acceptable irregularities of the body inched into
something less acceptable. Something
wrong.

    I
went to the doctor. Who sent me to another doctor. Who confirmed her diagnosis
after a conversation with a third doctor. And then, once the doctors had that
straightened out, all of them said there was next to nothing they could do,
wished me well and buggered off.

    What
I have, after all, is one of those inoperable, medically unsexy conditions. It
has all the worst qualities of the non-fatal disease: chronic, progressive,
cruelly erosive of one's "quality of life." It can go fast or slow.
What's certain is that it will get worse. I could name it now but I'm not in
the mood. I hate its falsely personal surnamed quality, the possessive aspect
of the capital
P.
And I hate the way it doesn't kill you. Until it does.

    I
spoke to a therapist about it. Once.

    She
was nice—
seemed
nice, though this may have been only performance, an
obligation included in her lawyer-like hourly fee— and was ready to see me
"all the way through what's coming." But I couldn't go back. I just
sat in her pleasant, fern-filled room and caught a whiff of the coconut
exfoliant she'd used that morning to scrub at the liver spots on her arms and
knew I would never return. She was the sort of woman in the sort of office
giving off the sort of scent designed to provoke confessions. I could have
trusted her. And trusting a stranger is against the rules.

    (There
was something else I didn't like. I didn't like how, when she asked if I had
entertained any suicidal thoughts since the diagnosis and I, after a blubbery
moment, admitted that I had, she offered nothing more than a businesslike smile
and a tidy check mark in her notepad.)

    One
useful suggestion came out of our meeting, nevertheless. For the purposes of
recording my thoughts so that they might be figured out later, she recommended
I keep a diary chronicling the progress of my disease. Not that she used that
word. Instead, she referred to the unstoppable damage being done to me as an
"experience," as if it were a trip to Paraguay or sex with twins. And
it wasn't a journal of sickness I was to keep, but a "Life Diary,"
her affirmative nods meant to show that I wasn't dying.
Yet.
That was
there too. Remember, Trevor: You're not quite dead
yet.

    "Your
Life Diary is more than a document of events," she explained. "It
can, for some of my clients, turn out to be your best friend."

    But I
already have best friends. And they don't live in my present life so much as in
the past. So that's what I've ended up writing down. A recollection of the
winter everything changed for us. A pocket-sized journal containing horrors
that surprised even me as I returned to them. And then, after the pen refused
to stand still in my hand, it has become a story I tell into a Dictaphone. My
voice. Sounding weaker than it does in my own ears, someone else's voice
altogether.

    I
call it my "Memory Diary."

    Randy
offered to call Carl, but we both knew I would do it. Informing a friend that
someone they've known all their life has died was more naturally a Trevor kind
of task. Randy would be the one to score dope for a bachelor party, or scratch
his key along the side of a Porsche because he took it personally, and hard,
that his own odds of ever owning one were fading fast. But I was definitely
better suited to be the bearer of bad tidings.

    I try
Carl at the last number I have for him, but the cracked voice that answers
tells me he hasn't lived there for a while. When I ask to have Carl call if he
stops by, there is a pause of what might be silent acceptance before the line
goes dead. Randy has a couple of earlier numbers, and I try those too, though
Carl's former roommates don't seem to know where he is now either (and refuse
to give me their own names when I ask).

    "Not
much more we can do," Randy says when I call him back. "The guy is
gone
, Trev."

    There
it is again:
Trev.
A name not addressed to me in over twenty years, and
then I get it twice within the last half-hour.

    I had
an idea, as soon as Randy told me Ben had died, that the past was about to
spend an unwelcome visit in my present. Going from Trevor to Trev is something
I don't like, but a nostalgic name change is going to be the least of it.
Because if I'm getting on a train for Grimshaw in the morning, it's all coming
back.

    Heather.

    The
coach.

    The
boy.

    The
house.

    The
last of these most of all because it alone is waiting for us. Ready to see us
stand on the presumed safety of weed-cracked sidewalk as we had as
schoolchildren, daring each other to see who could look longest through its
windows without blinking or running away.

    For
twenty-four years this had been Ben's job. Now it would be ours.

    There
were four of us.

    Ben, Carl,
Randy and me. Grimshaw Guardians all. Hockey players on the high-school squad
that travelled the county's gravel roads to do battle against the villainous
Cougars of Milverton, cheating Rams of Listowel, cowardly Sugar Kings of
Elmira. We were just sixteen years old the one and only season we played with
the seniors, but we were decent enough—and the school small enough—to make the
team. The only boys among just-turned men.

    
Randy
:

    A featherweight
winger looping skilfully—if a little pointlessly—in front of the other team's
net. It always seemed that he liked to skate more than score. Sometimes,

    Randy
would forget that there were others playing
against
him. Kids who wished
to see him fail, to crumple to his knees and never get up again. It was usually
a look of puzzled disappointment, not pain, that I would read on his face when
he limped to the bench following these punishments.

    Why?
his eyes would ask as he took his place at the end of the bench, rubbing the
charley horse out of his thigh.

    
Why
would someone do that? I was just having fun
.

    
Carl
:

    Short,
but solid as an elm stump. Hair he left long so that it waved, black as a
pirate flag, as he skated. Carl was the Guardians' unpredictable pugilist, a
rarely played fourth-liner who would skate up to a kid who had nothing to do
with the play at hand—and, often, against whom no grudge was held—and commence
a windmilling of fists into the poor fellow's face.

    Who knew
if Carl would have been the fighter he was without the dark eyes and drooping
smile that conveyed unintended menace? How less inclined to serve up knuckle
sandwiches—and, later, less susceptible to needle and pill—if his dad had been
another kind of man, one who didn't leave and never return?

    Sometime
late in the third period of the first game of the Guardians' season there was a
bench-clearing brawl. It was an away game against the Exeter Bobcats, a team
whose only real talent was for medieval hand-to-hand combat. We knew things
were about to get nasty when their coach started tapping the shoulders of
players on his bench and pointing at us. Then, with a collective whoop, they
stormed over the boards and set upon us, their fans sending a volley of
scalding coffee cups over our heads.

    I
mention this because, in my experience, who you first go to help in a riot is
as sure a test of true allegiance as any I know.

    So
who did I rush to that night to prevent a Bobcat from pounding his face into
the ice? I went to Randy, because he was my friend. And because he was
squealing for help.

    "
Trev!
Carl! Ben
!"

    And
all of us came.

    Once
we'd thrown Randy's attacker off him we were able to form a circle and hold our
own. In fact, we ended up faring better than many of our older teammates, who
left Exeter that night with split cheeks and teeth in their pockets.

    On
the bus ride home we, the youngest Guardians, were permitted to sit at the
back, an acknowledgment of our success on the battlefield. I recall us looking
at each other as we rolled out of the parking lot, unable to hold the giddy
smiles off our faces. Which started the laughing. We laughed three-quarters of
an hour through a snowstorm, and though we expected someone to tell us to shut
our mouths or they'd shut them for us at any second, they never did.

    
Ben
:

    Our
Zen mascot of a backup goalie. Because Vince Sproule, our starter, was eighteen
and the best stopper in the county, Ben almost never saw ice time, which was
fine with him. His proper place was at the end of the bench anyway. Mask off,
hands resting in his lap, offering contemplative nods as we came and went from
our shifts, as though the blessings of a vow-of-silence monk.

    Ben
was the sort of gentle-featured, unpimpled kid (he made you think
pretty
before pushing the thought away) who would normally have invited the torment of
bullies, especially on a team composed of boys old enough to coax actual beards
from their chins. But they left Ben alone.

    I think
he was spared because he was so plainly
odd.
It was the authenticity of
his strangeness that worked as a shield when, in another who was merely
different, it would have attracted the worst kind of attention. They liked Ben
for this. But they kept their distance from him because of it too.

    
Trevor
(Me)
:

    A
junk-goal god. Something of a floater, admittedly. A dipsy-doodling centre
known for his soft hands (hands that now have trouble pouring milk).

    There
was, at sixteen, the whisperings of scouts knowing who I was. Early in the
season the coach had a talk with my parents, urging them to consider the
benefits of a college scholarship in the States. Who knows? Maybe Trev had a
chance of going straight to pro.

    Of
course, this sort of thing was said about more than it ever happened to. Me
included. Not that I wasn't good enough—we'll never know if I was or wasn't.
Because after the abrupt end of my one and only season as a Guardian, I never
skated again.

    I had
known Randy since kindergarten, when I approached him and, offering to share my
Play-Doh, asked, "Do you want to be in my gang?" I remember that:
gang.
And even though I was alone, Randy accepted.

    Ben joined
us in early grade school, Carl a year later. That was grade three.

    My
father, not known for his wisdom (though he took runs at it on the nights he
hit the sauce harder than usual), once told me something that has proven
consistent with my experience: while a man can accumulate any number of
acquaintances over his life, his only true friends are the ones he makes in
youth.

    Yet
why Randy, Ben and Carl and no others? I could say it was the way we saw
ourselves in each other. The recognition of my own foolishness in Randy's
clowning, my imagination in Ben's trippy dreams, my rage in Carl's fisticuffs.
How we had a better chance of knowing who we were together than we ever would
have on our own.

    What
we shared made us friends. But here's the truth of the thing: our loyalty had
little to do with friendship. For that, you'd have to look elsewhere.

    You'd
have to look in the house.

    We
were in Ben's backyard, out behind his garden shed, the four of us passing
around a set of
Charlie's Angels
bubble-gum cards. I remember the hushed
intensity we brought to studying Farrah Fawcett. The wide Californian smile.
The astonishing nipples piercing their bikini veils.

    We
were eight years old.

    And
then there's Mrs. McAuliffe's voice, calling Ben inside.