Heroes (33 page)

“Why does an atheist keep a cross hanging up in his bathroom?”

Smith stood silent for a few seconds. “Is this some kind of joke?” he said. “What are you looking for, Bayle, a punchline? My question was sincere.”

“So was mine,” Bayle said.

Bayle pushed GROUND, waved to Smith a final goodbye, and the elevator doors closed tight.

Home, his mother had left his mail out for him on the kitchen table, two letters and a large manila envelope, quite a haul considering he hadn't told anyone where he was. The kitchen was oven-warm. Bayle guessed meatloaf.

Two of the items he couldn't even be bothered to open. The latest envelope from the offices of Johnson, Johnson, and Bailey went right into the garbage pail under the sink. The letter from the government he didn't even want to guess. The last, however, appeared to be an actual letter from an actual person, Bayle's name and the address of the U of T philosophy department printed in careful, childlike script, the word CANADA in blocks and underlined twice. He checked the postage and saw that it was postmarked Kansas City, KS, NEXT DAY DELIVERY, and had been forwarded to his mother's house by the school.

Dear Bayle,

Harry is dead. He died this morning. After you left he never got better like I thought he would. The doctors said Harry died of I forget the exact name but a hemmorage the main idea. All the other things that were wrong with him that they never figured out just got worse and helped make way for the hemmorage they said. The doctor says he couldn't have felt much and we all kind of saw it coming. My mother used to say the only thing a person can wish for in this life is to die in their sleep so I guess there is that

After they announced the team was moving and all the people that were going to lose their jobs it's like a cementary around here. Oh well not my problem anymore because I'm leaving for Macon, Georgia, as soon as the last game is over this Saturday night and I'm all done as the Warrior. A cousin whose got a
restaruant down there says 1 can help out until I get something somewhere else. Who knows? You wont believe this but they've got a hockey team down there now called the Macon Whoopi. Maybe I'll be their mascot next year. Ha ha.

I guess you wouldn't know but right after Duceeder got bail the case against him for the cocaine got thrown out because of something to do with the police and illegal entry or something else his lawyer cooked up and he got let off. Which means you and that peppermint tin you were so worried about is off the hook now. But Davidson did get fired by the team and him and his family moved away from town and that's better than nothing I guess. Samson in the Eagle said something about the Warriors being a family business and them having to keep up the team's image.

I wanted you to know about Harry and to let you know we are going to bury him four days from now on Saturday. Harry has some cousins and an aunt up in Alberta and I'm hoping by waiting they can get here. I guess I could have called your school to try and talk to you but I know you probably cant come all the way down here. But I thought I should send this letter because I know Harry would have wanted you to know. Harry liked you Bayle. He said you were all right. And Harry doesn't say that about too many people I bet you know that.

Take care of yourself and don't worry if you cant make it. But I thought you should know.

Yours truly,

Gloria

Bayle put the letter back in its envelope and then in the pocket of his workshirt. He called to his mother in the livingroom that he was going out for a walk.

“Make it a short walk,” she said. “That meatloaf is only about thirty minutes away from being ready.”

Like most Etobicoke homes, Bayle's parents' house wasn't so much a part of a neighbourhood where one could, as Bayle later learned to love to do in Toronto, walk for wonderfully distracted hours with an always-changing cityscape scrolling by, as it was simply one of several houses that formed a street which in turn formed part of a block. The schools where the children went; the variety stores where the adults bought their cigarettes and lottery tickets; the sports bars that had the satellite dishes: all meant getting on a bus or driving your car. Unless one wanted to walk the forty-minute walk along the busy road that all the traffic had to travel on in order to get to the stores and subway station in downtown Etobicoke, it wasn't possible to do anything
but
take a short walk up and down one's own street past all the identical houses or, maybe for a little variety, the virtually indistinguishable street two or three over. But there was the hydro-electrical field.

Ten minutes from Bayle's parents' house there was a large, overgrown field, almost a quarter acre of knee-high grass and weeds, out of which grew eleven hydro-electrical towers. Eleven mighty steel oaks with thick twisting cables connecting them all at their tops according to some unfathomable system of hydro-electrical science. No one, not even Bayle's Ontario Hydro-employed father, knew exactly how the towers did what they did, but everyone knew that the hydro towers were somehow responsible for keeping their part of Etobicoke pulsing alive. And everyone knew that you were supposed to stay away from them.

But for all the strong warnings Bayle and Patty and all the other children on the block were given as soon as they were old enough to understand the danger of playing near the towers, there wasn't anything like a ten-foot-high brick wall or a barbed wire fence to keep them out. Only a modest, five-foot high version with a rusty padlocked gate. It wasn't as good as having somewhere nice to walk to or anything to do like a nearby park or playground, but the high grass that hid them and the simple fact that they weren't supposed to be there made the hydro field a veritable place of rite of passage
for every child who grew up in its shadow. Bayle and Patty were no different.

Bayle was initiated into the secret, just-turned-teen joys of poring over somebody's father's copy of
Playboy
and smoking your first cigarette in the camouflage of the tall grass by a gang of local boys led up by a fat bossy older kid everyone called “Skipper.” And conscientious big brother that he was, Bayle did the same for his sister, although loner Patty's tastes ran more toward solitary afternoon Dunhills while working her way through a fat summer stack of paperback novels.

As far as Bayle and all the other kids knew, no one ever came even close to getting injured in the field. Many long summer afternoons, in fact, were spent lounging in the grass smoking and idly wondering how someone actually could get hurt. There were no hanging wires to touch. And the towers themselves weren't going to fall down on you. Everyone always agreed that the only way anyone could possibly harm themselves was by climbing up one of the flatsided smooth steel towers — not impossible, but a fairly impressive athletic feat all the same — and literally putting their hand against one of the exposed, curling electrical coils and waiting there suspended for a charge to come. And like anybody's going to do that. As if.

Inevitably, with the beckoning of high school, the summer shelter of the hydro field got left behind in a cherry Kool-Aid mist, right there along with Pixi-Sticks and hockey cards and Saturday night sleep-overs. Hanging out in somebody's car, sharing a case of beer at a house party, going downtown to Toronto — that's what a real Etobicoke teenager did. But never being one to do what was she was supposed to do, Patty never entirely quit the field. And even if her solo meditations there were occasionally compromised by a new generation of shrieking first-time smokers and porno-readers, Bayle always knew where to find his sister if she wasn't in her room listening to music or reading up on a recent enthusiasm.

The day after Bayle went out to his parents' house at his mother's insistence and Patty refused to see him, his mother
called him up again, this time in a panic because she hadn't seen Patty all day, didn't know where she was, couldn't find her anywhere. She'd found Patty's bedroom door wide open late that afternoon for the first time in over a week, but without a note or anything saying where she'd gone.

His mother had checked out all the places she might have been in Etobicoke — the local library branch, the little greasy spoon she sometimes liked to linger over a plate of fries at and read, the repertory movie theatre — but no, nothing. Had Patty called him? his mother wanted to know. Was there someplace in Toronto she might be that his mother should look? Should she call the police? And all this, his mother said, after Dr. McKay, their family doctor, had been good enough to agree and squeeze her into his busy schedule tomorrow morning to see if he could try and figure out what might be wrong with her.

“Don't go anywhere else or call anybody until I get there,” Bayle said.

Downtown, from the St. George subway stop, west, to the Royal York station. From there, usually no more than a fiveminute wait for a bus that took you to the stop closest to Bayle's parents' house. Or, the bus stop before, near the hydro field.

The grey steel towers looked like some giant child's tinker toy set in the soft yellow glow of the after-dinner setting sun. Bayle pulled the buzzer and stood up without knowing he was going to get off until he did.

He hopped the fence of the field for the first time in years and worried he might rip his pants or worse. But the motion going over came right back to him. The field was only cut once each summer and was almost chest high now, mosquitos and little buzzing black things passing in front of Bayle's nose and eyes, circling around his head. He kept his eyes directly in front of him, on the grass and weeds falling underneath his steps. He kept his head down.

All he had to do was shut her eyes and gently close her mouth and it was Patty. He picked up the copy of Pascal's
Pensees
lying beside her and opened it up to its only paperclipped page and read the highlighted and starred line.

What must I do? I see nothing but obscurity on every side.

Bayle hurled the book as far as he could. Heard it disappear in the tall grass with a soft settling swoosh.

Later, after the chaos of his mother and the ambulance and the police and the gawking neighbours, in the middle of the night in his housecoat and slippers and armed with a flashlight and a bottle of Canadian Club, Bayle was determined to find the flung Pascal. He looked for hours, over and over swiping the beam of the flashlight through the grass and weeds of the field until he got so tired and drunk he had to sit down and take a rest. When he woke up near dawn in the dew-soaked field, every inch of his flesh exposed to the night and the mosquitos had turned into a red pulpy mess.

When Bayle's mother heard him come in the front door back from his walk she called out from the kitchen for him to wash up because it was almost time for dinner. Bayle answered back that he'd be there in a minute and not to set the table, he'd do it, but there was something else he had to do first.

Not much from the night of over three months before when he'd ended up on his mother's front step remained clear, but her shock at seeing him dragging Patty's Union Jack behind him through the door being almost as great as her distress over his disorderly and obviously ailing state Bayle remembered almost perfectly. Also, before peeling off his wet clothes and while his mother prepared a scalding hot tub and pot of tea, where he'd put the flag.

Bayle went upstairs to his old room and got down on his knees beside the bed. Eyes closed, he felt around on the carpeted floor until he had it. He pulled out the flag and opened his eyes, snapping it tight in front of him a few hard times to get rid of the dust and lint. He laid the flag down on the bed and carefully folded it. When he came back downstairs and his mother at the stove saw him and it coming
through the kitchen, she started to say something but didn't. Patty wasn't something Bayle and his mother talked about. Not because they'd forgotten about her. Not because they didn't care. Not because of anything except it just wasn't something Bayle and his mother did.

Bayle kissed his mother's forehead. “Don't set the table, Mum, I'll do it, I'll only be gone a minute,” he said and went out the back door.

He flipped on the light switch in the garage and the long florescent tubes slowly crackled to life. It seemed like the garage never changed, time and more cardboard boxes only making it more like itself.

A twenty year-old couch Bayle could still remember him and Patty as kids being so excited about trying out the day the big Sears delivery truck backed into their driveway. Four new snow tires his father had gotten a great deal on at Canadian Tire the spring before he got sick and didn't have a chance to use. The family's long-gone cat Freddy's kitty litter box and claw-ravaged scratching post. And cardboard boxes. Boxes and boxes and still more boxes. Bayle knew the one he wanted.

He set his mother's old sewing machine on the cement floor and opened up the mildewy box underneath. Patty's “British Thing” box. The six volume set of Kipling, bard of a long-gone empire upon whom the sun was every day closer and closer to setting. Her English bone china tea service with the missing saucer and the pot with the spout that never poured straight. A deflated soccer ball. Bayle gently placed the folded flag on top. He replaced the cardboard lid and put the sewing machine back and closed the garage door.

His mother was sitting at her place at the table with her hands folded in her lap staring off into space, steaming plates and pots already out, the table set for two.

“Mum, I told you I'd do that,” Bayle said. “It's about time you stopped waiting on me hand and foot around here.”

“I didn't know how long you'd be out there,” she said. Bayle sat down across from her.

“I wasn't gone that long was I, Mum?” he said.

“No, but....”

“No but nothing. I had something to do and now it's done and now I'm back.”