The Guardians (30 page)

    "We
have to let him go, Carl."

    "I
know."

    "And
last night, Ben and I were with him, and—"

    "Not
on the phone."

    "You
don't understand."

    "Fuck
you I don't."

    "I
saw something. There was—"

    He
hung up.

    Ten
minutes later we were walking over to the Thurman house together.

    Why
had I called Carl and only Carl? There was no choice, really. It could only
have been him puffing steam out his nose, telling me to shut up every time I
tried to explain what happened the night before, his eyes darting between the
houses on either side of us, alert to witnessing stares.

    It
was early enough that there was little traffic on the streets. Still, we
approached the house by way of the back lane and slipped through the break in
the fence.

    As
soon as we were through, we both stopped. The house looked different somehow,
though it took a moment to figure out how.

    "Did
you leave the door open last night?" Carl said.

    "No."

    "Did
Ben?"

    "I
was the last one out."

    Carl
started toward the back door. His gait— rolling shoulders and old warrior's
limp—suggested the weariness of a man charged with completing a serious task,
but been thwarted at every turn by his forced partnership with children.

    I
followed him in. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Carl was
already heading down the cellar stairs. Neither of us had brought flashlights,
thinking (if we thought of it at all) that the morning's sunlight would be
sufficient. But there were only two half-buried windows in the cellar. It was
barely enough for me to see Carl standing just a few feet from where I had
stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

    "Oh
fuck," he said.

    I
went forward to put my shoulder against his, peered into the near darkness
beyond.

    Emptiness.
No, not that. Not only that. The cords we'd used to tie the coach to the post
now a loose coil on the ground.

    "We'll
find him," I said.

    "He's
probably at the cop shop right now."

    "No.
They would have come for us already."

    "You
think he just went home and asked his wife to fry him some eggs and not to
worry about where he's been the last three days?"

    "I
don't think he ever planned to go home after this."

    "Right,
right,"
Carl said, his thoughts so rushed it seemed to be causing him
pain. "So why bother looking for him? We were going to let him go
anyway."

    "We
need to make sure he's okay."

    "Why
wouldn't he be?"

    "Because
he was in here alone."

    Carl
shuffled closer to the post. Bent to inspect the cords.

    "These
haven't been cut."

    "I
tied him."

    "You
sure?"

    "I
was here, Carl. You weren't."

    "Maybe
I should have been."

    He
stood. Put his hands in his pockets, took them out again.

    I
said, "I'm not arguing with you right now."

    "Is
there something you want to argue about?"

    "I'm
saying we should get out of here. Look for the coach. If we can find him, maybe
we can—"

    "How
are we going to find him, Trev? Put up posters? 'LOST—Half-Starved English
Teacher. Contents of Teenager's Piggy Bank Offered in Reward'?"

    "At
least I'm trying."

    "You
fucking should."

    "What's
that mean?"

    "Just
that the last time I was down here, the coach was tied to that post and my gun
was in the workbench drawer."

    Our
brains were running at the same speed. They must have been, because it took
both of us the same one second to turn to see the workbench drawer upside down
on the earth floor.

    We
both went for it. Carl got there first. Kicked the drawer instead of turning it
over with his hand, either to prevent leaving his fingerprints or because he
needed to kick
something
if not me.

    The
revolver was gone.

    "Shit,"
Carl said. "This is some seriously shitty shit."

    "He
wasn't even supposed to know it was there."

    "Unless
somebody showed him."

    "You're
blaming me for this too?"

    "I
said 'somebody.'"

    "Who?
Why would one of us do that?"

    "Maybe
it wasn't one of us."

    Carl
faced me. What I could read in the lips, suddenly gulping for his next mouthful
of air, made it clear. He had seen something too.

    Laughter.
Coming from upstairs. The coach's, along with at least one other. Whinnying and
cruel.

    I
can't remember if Carl started up the cellar stairs first or if I did. But we
were both running, clutching handfuls of the house's cold air and throwing it
behind us.

    The
laughter was now impossibly loud, a chorus of false joy shrieking out from the
cracks in the walls. Sound so dense it thickened the space we moved through,
slowing us to the floating leaps of astronauts.

    Carl
rounded through the kitchen and down the main hall. The nylon of his parka
squeaking through my fingers as I followed a half-stride behind him. And then,
in the next second, he was pulling away. Because I made the mistake of glancing
into the living room on the way past.

    There
was the boy. Standing behind a naked Heather Langham, his pants a coil of denim
around his ankles.

    The
two of them framed by the tall side window, the
fuckt
still there,
Heather's fingers cutting lines around the letters. The boy slapping himself
against her, oblivious to anything but his grip on her waist.

    Then
he spun his head around to face me. Except it wasn't the boy's face. It was
mine.

    "Trevor!"

    Carl
was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, looking at me quizzically, knowing I'd
seen something.

    I
could have run past him, opened the front door (if it could be opened) and left
Carl on his own to find out what the boy and the coach found so funny. There
was no one left to save, after all. Whatever we'd done, and the reasons we'd
first done it, didn't mean anything anymore.

    Yet
when Carl started up the stairs, I was right behind him. When I got to the
landing, he was already halfway down the hall, led by the laughter that was
coming from the one partly open door. The same doorway through which I'd seen
the boy standing over a facedown female body on the bed.

    Carl
slowed. It wasn't cowardice that held me there, watching, but a command.

    
Carl's
turn first
.

    He booted
the door open.

    Then
a cowardly thought
did
enter my mind: I didn't need to know what Carl
now knew. A second-hand report would be enough. And judging by the stricken
look on Carl's face, what was to be seen belonged to a different level of awfulness
altogether. It was the party the boy had invited us to.

    But
instead of doing what I meant to—turn around and start back down the stairs—I
made my way along the hallway to where Carl stood outside the boy's childhood
bedroom.

    Because
that's what it was, wasn't it? A room that, in its past, had been caught in the
uncomfortable in-between of small-town sixteen, of the age and place I was
myself.

    "Carl?"
My voice girlish in the empty hallway.

    He
didn't answer, didn't move.

    We're
going to have quite a time
.

    The
coach stood across the room, in the same place where the boy had stood over the
body on the bed. In the dim light, his degradation was fully visible: soiled
pants, running nose, the beginnings of grey beard. And he was wearing lipstick.
A smearing of rosy red extended beyond the lines of his thin lips, yet still
carefully applied, a drawn mouth of female wantonness, all curves and pucker.
It was the lipstick colour Heather wore—no, it
was
Heather's. Taken from
her before she died, before the coach left her in the cellar.

    He
looked terribly afraid.

    
Isn't
he pretty? Go on. Give him a kiss
.

    "You
have to go," the coach said, his voice raw from laughter. Laughter, I
could see now, he'd been forced to perform.

    "Not
without you," Carl said.

    "You'll
die if you stay."

    "Nobody's
dying here."

    "Too
late." The coach showed his teeth again in that not-smile of his.

    "Come
with us," I said.

    "I
can't leave
now."

    "Why?"

    "If
you're here long enough—if you
listen
—he won't let you."

    "There's
nobody here but us. It's just an empty house."

    "No
such thing as an empty house."

    That's
when the coach raised the gun. It had been in his hand the whole time, but it
hung so loose, aimed at nothing but the dust bunnies at his feet, that we
hadn't noticed it. He brought it level to his waist. Aimed it at us.

    "He
told me to hurt you," he said.

    The
coach stuck the index finger of his left hand in his ear, as though blocking
out the sound of a passing siren. And with his right hand he raised the
revolver. Screwed the end of its barrel into the other ear.

    "But
I'm not listening anymore."

    Carl
started toward him first. And though I couldn't see his regret, his wish to fix
what he'd been a part in breaking, his already enveloping grief, I knew that it
was in Carl as much as it was in me, and that the coach saw it in both of us.
Because, right at the end, he was his real self again. Not the boy's taiking
dummy, but our guardian. Fighting off the voice so loud in his head we could
hear it too—
Wait! Not yet! You don't want to be alone in here, do you? Don't
you want to keep your boys close?
—to push the revolver's barrel a half-inch
deeper into his skull and pull the trigger.

    At
first, what is even stranger than seeing that it is Carl descending the stairs
of the Thurman house and passing between us is the way he simply turns the bolt
lock on the front door, pulls it open and steps out onto the porch.

    "I
never knew you could open that thing," Randy says. "I never knew you
could just walk out."

    
Tracey
tried to,
I think.
But the house wouldn't let her.
From the
threshold we peer out over a front lawn carpeted in leaves midway through their
transformation from brittle yellows and oranges to black custard. And Carl
squishing his boot prints into them as he walks to the sidewalk, where he faces
us. Slips his hands into the pockets of his jeans and shudders at the night's
chill.

    "You
faggots coming or not?" he says.

    We
follow him, equalling his brisk pace but not quite catching up. He stops at the
railway tracks that cross Caledonia and starts left, crunching over the gravel
that aprons the long, steel tongues. It is as it was before: Carl leading us
into some nighttime adventure, a bit of badness we trusted him to guide us
through, even if we knew it was not
entirely
safe. Driving too fast in
his dad's LTD II with the headlights off Vandalism. Trespassing. Smoking
homegrown possibly sprayed, he said, with angel dust or PCP or acid,
evil-sounding supplements whose potential harms we had no clue of but did not
ask about before inhaling.