The Guardians (9 page)

    We
had opened our minds to their darkest possibilities. There was no going back
from that. But such liberties came with obligations. Like the walls of the
Thurman house, we would have to try to keep the darkness inside.

    Grimshaw
Collegiate sits atop the highest hill within the town's limits, which isn't
saying much as hills go. A pocked mound of stone and thistles just steep enough
for toboggans to reach a speed that might coax a whoop out of six-year-olds.
Still, in a town free of topographic features worth mentioning, the cubist mess
of the school building—brick gym from the 1890s, colour- panelled '60s wing of
classrooms sticking out the rear, the cinder-block science department added on
the cheap—appeared with enhanced importance on its piebald throne, looking down
over the mud playing field, the river gurgling next to it, the parking lot
surrounded by trees that provided shade for the small crimes entertained within
students' cars.

    One
offence we frequently committed was a "hot box" before morning
attendance. This involved me, Ben and Randy cramming ourselves into the
two-door Ford that Carl's dad left behind, rolling the windows up and sharing a
joint Randy would produce from the baggie he kept hidden in the lining of his Sorels.
With the four of us inhaling and passing and coughing, the cabin of Carl's
sedan soon became thick with smoke, the air moist and opaque as a sauna. A hot
box offered the most efficient use of a single joint, a technique that
"seals in all the grassy goodness," as Randy said in his
Price Is
Right
voice. When we were done, we would open the doors and stand around in
an unsteady circle, watching the plumes escape the car's confines, rise through
the pine boughs and into the sky above like a signal to another, faraway tribe.

    So
while I know what Randy has in mind when he waves me over and makes a toking
gesture obvious enough to show he doesn't really care who knows, there's
something subdued in his expression, worried quarter moons of darkness under his
eyes that tell me there's more going on in Carl's Ford than a bunch of guys
getting high before chemistry.

    "We're
having a meeting," Randy says as we make our way through the rows of cars.
"Ben has something he wants to say."

    "Is
this more bullshit about what he said he saw?"

    "He
wants us all together first."

    "But
you've guessed."

    Randy
pauses at the car, his fingers slipping under the passenger-side door handle.
"I've just got a feeling I'd rather be stoned when I hear it, that's
all," he says.

    We
pile in. Carl behind the wheel, Ben hugging the glovebox to let me and Randy
slip into the back.

    "Ready?"
Randy asks.

    "Ready,"
Carl answers, clicking the power window buttons, making sure we're sealed in.

    As
Randy pulls the baggie out of his boot, Ben shifts around in the front seat,
taking each of us in, one at a time. A kind of silent roll call that would be
funny if attempted by anyone else. But laughing is out of the question. It
intensifies the one sound to concentrate on: Randy, who clinks his Zippo open
and sucks the joint to life.

    "We
have to go in," Ben says.

    None
of us say anything. It's as though Ben had not uttered the sentence we'd all
just heard. Or perhaps we were trying to pretend it was a sentence that didn't
properly belong to the moment, a glitch in the soundtrack.

    Then
he says it again.

    "We
have to go into the house."

    
"What
house?"

    "Nice
try, Randy," Carl says.

    Randy
shrugs, passing up to Carl while waving a hand to sweep the smoke that escapes
his nostrils back into his mouth.

    "I
don't see why we have to do anything," I say. "It's not our
issue."

    "You're
right. It's not an issue," Ben says. "It's a human being."

    "You're
saying Heather's still in there? You saw something new last night?"

    "I
watched. Stayed up till dawn watching," Ben says. "But no. I didn't
see anything."

    "So
how do you know she's in there?"

    "I'm
saying she might be. And if she is, she needs help. Our help."

    Randy
rubs the elbow of his shirt over the window, clearing a circle from the
condensation. He stares out at a group of girls in designer jeans climbing the
hill toward school, their backsides swaying with each step, before they
disappear behind the returning mist of his breath.

    "Here's
the thing I don't get," Randy says. "What does this have to do with
us? Maybe you, Ben. But I wasn't the one up in your room spooking myself
shitless. I didn't see a thing. So where do I come into it? Where does anyone
but you come into it?"

    Ben
nods. "You didn't see what I saw. But now you
know
what I saw.
Which amounts to the same thing."

    "It
does?" Randy says. "Yeah, I guess it does."

    "No,
it doesn't," I say, taking the joint Randy offers me. "We're
not
involved. And that's how it should stay.

    We go
into that house and if—and this is a big mother of an if—
if
something's
happened in—"

    "Don't
bogart that thing," Carl warns. I take a perfunctory haul and pass it on.

    "What
I'm saying is that if we go in there and find something bad, we're part of it.
We're implicated, or whatever."

    "Implicated,"
Carl says. "Very good, Trev."

    He
waves the joint by Ben. Ben only rarely partakes on these smoky mornings, so he
surprises us by expertly nabbing it before it's out of reach. A quick hit and
his eyes turn glassy, the whites bleached clear.

    "She's
missing," Ben says. "And we have a piece of information nobody else
has. It's a question not of whether it would be right to act on it, but of how
wrong it would be if we didn't."

    "Fine,"
I say, exhaling a blue cloud against the windshield. "You've established
that as far as you're concerned, you are duty bound to do something. So go tell
the police about it."

    "As
if they're going to listen to me."

    "Why
wouldn't they? You're a witness."

    "Not
really. Not in a court-of-law way."

    "So
if the pigs aren't going to take you seriously," Carl says, pinching the
roach, "why should we?"

    Ben turns
all the way around to look at us in the back seat. His face shrouded in curls
of smoke.

    "You're
my friends," he says.

    And
that was it. Our
undoing,
as the Coles Notes described what followed
from the dumb decisions of kings and princes in the Shakespeare we never read.

    Why?
We were good guys. Unquestioned loyalty. A soldier's duty. This is what the
coach, our fathers, every hero we'd ever watched on the Vogue's screen had
taught us. It was certainly the highest compliment in a dressing room, as in
"Carl was a good guy out there tonight when he put that fucker on a
stretcher for spearing Trev." Standing up for the fellow wearing the same
uniform as you, even if it made little sense, even if it meant getting hurt.
This is how it was supposed to go in hockey games, anyway, and in war movies,
and in the lessons handed down from our baffled, misled fathers.

    But
here's the thing we found out too late to make a difference: our fathers and
movie heroes might have been wrong.

    "When?"
I asked.

    "Tonight,"
Ben said.

    In the
city, churches are giving up. Dwindling congregations leaving their places of
worship to be converted into condos, daycares or yoga studios. But judging from
the streets Randy and I drive through in a cab on our way to St. Andrew's
Presbyterian, the churches of Grimshaw are hanging on. Every third corner still
has a gloomy limestone house of God in need of new windows and a Weedwhacker.
To the faithful this might seem an encouraging indication of resilience, the
heartland's refusal to let the devil go about his business unimpeded. But to
me, there is something chilling in all the broken-down bastions of the divine,
as though it will be here, and not in the indifferent, thrumming city, that the
final wrestling of goods and evils will take place. And it won't be as showy as
Revelation promised either: no beast rising from the sea, no serpent to tell
seductive lies. When the reckoning takes place it will be quiet. And like all
the bad done in Grimshaw, it will be known by many but spoken of by none.

    Randy
and I shuffle up the steps at St. Andrew's, flipping up collars against the
cold drizzle. We're the last ones in, and while the nave is not large, the pews
are no more than a sixth full. I suppose I was expecting more of a crowd,
something along the lines of a high-school memorial assembly, as if Ben were
the seventeen-year-old victim of a tragic accident and not a forty- year-old
suicide.

    As
the minister plods through the program of murmured prayers and hymns, I try to
identify some of the other mourners. There's Todd and Vince, as promised, along
with a couple of other Guardians, a startlingly obese Chuck Hastings next to
Brad Wickenheiser with home-dyed hair the colour of tar. Aside from Mrs.
McAuliffe (a shrunken version of herself, inanimate and collapsed as a puppet
after you pull out your hand), nobody looks particularly familiar. I search the
rows for Carl. Though I know he's not here, I can't help feeling that if I look
hard enough I'll find him.

    The
minister delivers the brief eulogy. A sterile recitation of Ben's stalled
resume: his "lifelong commitment" to his mother, his love of fantasy
books and the "excitements of the imagination," the loss of his
father. There is no reference to the surveillance he conducted from his attic
roost, nor to the vacant house across the street he believed to be the devil's
pied- à-terre
in Grimshaw.

    After
the service, everyone files past Ben's mom, the old woman offering a hand to be
clasped. Yet when Randy and I reach her, she blinks us into focus and touches
our cheeks. I ask if I can come around to the house in the morning to look over
Ben's legal papers or do whatever an executor is supposed to do.

    "Come
anytime, Trevor," she says, straightening my tie. "I'll make
tea."

    "I'll
call first."

    "If
you like," she says, shrugging. "But I'll be there whether you call
or not."

    We
take another cab down to the Old Grove. Ben's grave is next to his father's.
The McAuliffe name engraved in stone at the head of both their places, their tombstones
citing only their dates of birth and death, the latter events both at their own
hands, whether counted as such on the official record or not. Even fewer have
gathered for the burial than at the church, a clutch of shiverers shifting from
foot to foot, the soft earth sucking at their shoes.

    The
minister is here again, though he does little more than run through a memorized
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" before they lower the casket into the
ground.

    "That's
it," Randy says next to me, and when I turn to him I see quiet, clear-eyed
tears that mix with the spitting rain so that, from the other side of the
grave, he would appear merely in need of an umbrella. "That's
it."

    "It
makes it real, I know. Seeing him go."

    "Real?
It's like
I'm
the one at the bottom of a hole. I can hardly
breathe
,
man."

    I
guide Randy a few feet away to the shelter of a maple. The two of us stand
there watching the others drift back toward their cars. Some look our way as
they go, perhaps recognizing us from some prehistoric geography class or peewee
hockey team. Only one looks not at us but at me.

    My
body remembers her before I do.

    A
woman my age wearing a lace-collared blouse and beneath it a skirt that
displays the powerful legs I have always associated with
fresh-air-and-fruit-pie farmers' wives. Almost certainly

    a
mom. Filling out her Sunday best with a few more pounds (welcome, to my eyes)
than the day she bought it a couple of years back. A good-looking woman who
belongs to a vintage I recognize (the same as mine), but not any particular
person I know.