Heroes Page 15

  When Bayle came stomping out of the trees near the second hole a little after nine, choirs of birds chirping away their Saturday morning salute, Donald did his best to try and look simply annoyed that a non-member was on the course until Bayle grabbed a driver out of Donald’s bag without stopping and kept on coming. When Bayle had to tell himself to stop hitting Donald or he might just kill him, he dropped the golf club to the ground and jogged back into the trees and then all the way home.

  Later, sitting at the kitchen table again, waiting for the police to show up at the front door and take him away, Bayle wondered whether, if he went to jail, he would remember today as the worst or the best day of his life. The police never came and Bayle never had to decide. Common sense to the contrary, pros and cons on both sides, it seemed.

  27

  “J UST GIVE me the damn thing back and I’11 go myself.”

  “I’ll go,” Bayle said. “I just don’t know why I can’t mail it on my way to work tomorrow.”

  “Because you aren’t going to work tomorrow morning — I am,” Davidson said.

  “So you’ve said.”

  “Yeah, and what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing, forget it. So mail it yourself tomorrow. It’ll get there the next day. What’s the hurry?”

  “Just give it back and I’ll go myself,” Davidson repeated.

  It was silly, selfish even, not to straightaway agree to do Davidson the simple favour when the old man had casually asked him to after dinner, but the thought of leaving the house and travelling the three or four blocks to hand-deliver the small, crudely gift-paper wrapped package left Bayle clammy on the outside and churning within. In the week that Bayle had stayed at Davidson’s — the road trip over now and the Warriors’ team bus due home any time — he’d never once ventured out after coming home from work.

  Where this sudden anxiousness came from he didn’t know, only that in the last week he hadn’t felt anything of this stomach-tightening sort. Being asked to drop off the package — “Just something for somebody you don’t know and that doesn’t have a damn thing to do with you other than you delivering it,” Davidson had told him — Bayle felt the same way he did every time he flew and the stewardess’s voice over the intercom calmly announced that it was now okay to take off your seatbelt. Hurling through the sky at five hundred miles an hour in two hundred tons of steel thirty thousand feet above the earth and now it’s suddenly okay to freely move about the cabin. Thanks for the invitation, Ms., but the seatbelt stays on.

  Still, he knew Davidson couldn’t go. The medication was helping and he wasn’t that bad off if he didn’t move around too much and got plenty of rest, but even just from the front door of the house to the truck and then to wherever he wanted Bayle to go through the evening’s still-considerable humidity and heat was simply out of the question. If the thing had to be dropped off tonight Bayle was going to have to be the one to do it. He took the house key off its hook by the back door.

  “If I’ve gotta go out in this muck the least you can do is tell me what it is I’m delivering’” Bayle said, holding up the package.

  For a few seconds Davidson seemed to consider whether or not he should answer Bayle’s question. Then, without expression, “My autograph book,” he said. “Nearly every hockey player worth his jockstrap over the last forty years is in there.” He took the cup of tea Bayle had made for him and slowly moved from the kitchen to the livingroom without another word.

  “And I guess I’m supposed to believe that this person you want me to give this to is actually expecting your, ah, autograph book?”

  Davidson eased into his chair in the other room with a soft, settling groan that sounded part-pain, part-relief. “Of course not,” he said, his left arm slowly rising, the remote control pointed as if in wrathful accusation at the unawakened television set. “It’s for his fourteenth birthday. And don’t give it to anybody but Billy, you understand? Nobody. And for Christsake, don’t be a damn fool and let the cat out of the bag about what it is, either.”

  The captain turned off the seatbelt sign and Bayle was free to roam around the plane. He stuck the key to Davidson’s place in his pocket and said he’d be right back.

  28

  BUT FOR the pair playing road hockey in the driveway, 66 Maple was like all the other houses along the street, each ranch-style residence outfitted with an attached garage, small yard, and tiny cement porch. Bayle parked and locked up Davidson’s truck and walked to the foot of 66’s driveway.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Is there a Billy that lives here? I’m sorry, I haven’t got a last name.”

  The teenaged shooter, hockey stick raised hip-high and ready to slap the tennis ball at his feet in the direction of the net at the other of the driveway, looked back over his shoulder without lowering his stick. The goalie untensed, rose from his ready crouch.

  “I’m Bill,” the boy said. He turned around to face Bayle. “I’m Bill Duceeder.”

  The boy wore the requisite three-sizes-too-big blue jeans and two-hundred-dollar running shoes, but topped the whole thing off with a beaming white t-shirt with PROPERTY OF THE WARRIORS stencilled across the front and an equally new-looking Warriors baseball cap with the bill pointed backwards, the very cool way it wasn’t intended to be worn. Bayle wondered how the paunchy-looking older guy outfitted in the goalie regalia managed to remain standing. Had to be ninety degrees out, he thought, and then with all that protective leather gear on top of everything else .... Ah, probably just like a million other fathers who would rather be anywhere else than sweating through their eyeballs and risking taking a tennis ball to the nuts, Bayle guessed; probably because his kid asked him to. Bayle smiled remembering his own old man going through the exact same torture for him in their driveway.

  “What do you want, Bayle?”

  Bayle immediately recognized the voice from behind the goalie mask. “Duceeder?” he said.

  The boy looked in confusion from Bayle to his father, then back at Bayle again. “I’m Bill Duceeder,” he repeated.

  Duceeder peeled off the white goalie mask and shovelled back onto his head the wet mat of hair temporarily sweatstuck to his forehead. He placed the catching glove, blocker, and goalie stick on top of the net. Fat goalie pads still attached to his legs, he waddled down the driveway’s blacktop toward Bayle like some kind of obscene penguin. “Go on inside, Bill, and pour us a couple iced teas before the game comes on, okay? I’ll be in in a minute. And see if you can talk your mother into cutting us some more of that birthday cake.”

  “But he said he’s looking for me, Dad.”

  “Go on inside, Bill.”

  “But Dad, he said —”

  “Now, Bill.”

  The boy gave Bayle a disappointed last look before turning around in the driveway and slowly walking toward the house, hockey stick disappointedly dragging along behind him. He hesitated at the front door, taking his time in taking off his hockey gloves and throwing his stick on the lawn, but eventually went inside.

  “What are you doing here, Bayle? And what do you mean by asking for Bill?”

  Pudgy and soaking, a sopping strand of displaced hair hanging over one eye, Duceeder almost looked like everything Bayle had made him out to be. But somehow the goalie pads and chest protector saved him, gave him even a certain paternal dignity. Bayle reminded himself who Duceeder was and why he’d come and handed over the package.

  “What’s this?” Duceeder said.

  “It’s for Billy. For Bill, I mean.”

  Duceeder considered the wrapped package. He looked back at Bayle. “He sent you over with this, didn’t he?”

  “Who?” Bayle said.

  Duceeder made a face. “You’re telling me that this isn’t from Davidson?”

  “I didn’t say that, I just... I mean, yeah, it’s from Harry. He hasn’t been feeling too well lately and he asked me if I could drop this off. But I didn’t know that Billy was Bill. I mean —”

  �
�You mean you didn’t know Bill was my son.”

  “Right.”

  “Right.” Duceeder bounced the thing up and down in his hand a few light times. He gave it a last look and then handed it back to Bayle. “Return to sender.”

  Bayle slowly took the package from Duceeder’s outstretched hand. Looked at it. Looked back at Duceeder.

  “Don’t make this a bigger deal than it has to be, all right?” Duceeder said.

  “Look,” Bayle said, “Harry said to give this to Bill. And if I told Harry I would, then I —”

  “Go home, Bayle. This hasn’t got anything to do with you. You did your job, you’re off the hook. Just tell Davidson that that jerk Duceeder wouldn’t let you make your birthday delivery, all right? That’s all he wants to hear anyway.” Duceeder turned around and bow-legged and goalie-padded moved away. He stopped halfway up the drive, seeming to contemplate whether or not to keep going. He turned around and faced Bayle again.

  “I know you think he’s Mr. Sincere and everything, but he’s full of shit, you know that? If you haven’t already found that out for yourself, you will soon enough, believe me.”

  Bayle knew this was where he was supposed to jump to Davidson’s defence. Duceeder continued.

  “Friend of the common man, right? Defender of the down and out. Writes a few articles in that rag of his and all of a sudden he’s Joe Public’s best buddy. The next time you see Mr. Martyr ask him about Dan Fenton. Ask him how much all his whining about piss-poor washrooms and old arena wiring at the Bunton Center did for Dan.”

  “C’mon, Dad! The Chiefs won the toss! They’re getting ready to receive!” From behind the screen of the aluminum front door, an enormous plate of chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream in each hand, Duceeder’s son had apparently gotten over the mystery of Bayle’s presence. “C’mon, hurry up!”

  “Who’s starting this week?” Duceeder asked.

  “Grbac,” Bill answered.

  “Oh, boy. Feast or famine with that guy. Well, let’s see what he’s got tonight.”

  Duceeder unlaced the goalie pads and threw them on the lawn beside his son’s discarded hockey gloves and stick. Taking one of the plates of cake and ice cream, father and son disappeared inside the house, closing the door behind them, leaving Bayle standing by himself in the driveway.

  29

  BAYLE DIDN’T see Gloria’s yellow Volkswagen parked out front of Davidson’s place until he almost slammed into it. In the interval it had taken him to return from Duceeder’s, the evening’s light had been replaced by a thickly damp, almost physical blackness, only occasionally punctured by an infrequent streetlight. Truck safely parked and recognizing Gloria’s car now, coming around the side of Davidson’s house, fishing in his pocket for the key to the backdoor, Bayle whistled; whistled how interesting it was that he’d never noticed until now just how well-lit Canadian streets were compared to those in the United States.

  Whistling done, house key out, quick swipe of sweat from his face on his arm accomplished, the graveyard that was who was on the other side of the door remained as terrifying as prewhistling before.

  The voyeur exposed.

  The spy spied.

  The peeper meets his prey.

  Bayle turned the key to the left and hoped it would break off in the lock.

  It didn’t. But his sudden appearance in the doorway did draw Davidson up from his chair at the kitchen table quicker than Bayle had ever seen him move, even before taking ill.

  “Look, Bayle!” he said. “Look who’s back!” Beaming at the younger man, Davidson kept thumb-pointing over his shoulder at Gloria sitting at the table (slack-limbed lovely long Gloria; loose grey sweat-shorts and black sleeveless t-shirt, flesh-bare legs crossed one over the other, much-much-skin-exposed sandled foot airborne happy tapping to tunes only to her ears heard: Gloria as Bayle had lustily nightly conjured her). “Look who’s back in town!” he said.

  Except for noting how many days it was before she was to return home, Davidson had barely even mentioned Gloria’s name over the last week; now he was like a squirming teenager whose only aim in life was to share the wonderful news of her arrival with the rest of the world. Bayle frankly found the whole display more than a little bit embarrassing. Bayle also saw that Gloria wasn’t wearing a bra.

  Davidson turned away from Bayle and stood before Gloria. He offered opened hands for her to hold in his and she took them and did, she and he eye-to-eye smiling. And smiling. Bayle thought he felt a little bit sick to his stomach.

  Without breaking eye contact with the blissful Davidson, “Gotta say I’m a little surprised to still find your face around these parts, Bayle,” Gloria said. “Thought you’d be handing out all those As, Bs, and Cs at — where’d you say you were going again? — Saint Something or Other College.”

  Bayle and Gloria hadn’t spoken since that first night on the road when she’d called home to ask after Davidson’s health, but Bayle had always assumed that Davidson, who’d talked to her on the phone almost every other evening, had told her he’d moved out of The Range and in with him. Why wouldn’t he have?

  “I guess Harry told you I’ve been kind of hanging around here since you left,” Bayle said. He still hadn’t met Gloria’s eyes. Not that that would have been easy if he’d wanted to. Davidson and Gloria’s hands were their own again, but their faces only mirrored that of the other.

  “As a matter of fact, no, he didn’t.”

  “How come you didn’t tell Gloria I was staying here, Harry?” Bayle said. Davidson didn’t answer, apparently didn’t hear, just stood there staring at Gloria. “Harry?” Bayle repeated.

  “Hmm?”

  “Why didn’t you tell Gloria I was staying here with you?”

  “Didn’t I tell you Bayle was sleeping on the couch, G.?” Davidson softened his voice, though not enough that he could have intended Bayle not to hear. “Kid was between a rock and a hard place. Girlfriend back home gave him a Dear John letter over the phone and he really didn’t have anywhere else to turn. We got along fine though. No problemo.”

  No problemo? Davidson went to the sink counter to unplug the whistling kettle.

  “Why, that was real nice of you, Harry, real generous. Good to have friends in times of need like that.” Gloria cut her eyes Bayle’s way, but Bayle was looking hard at Davidson.

  “Did you take your medication tonight, Harry?” Bayle said, knowing he had. “You know that the doctor said it wasn’t going to work properly if you didn’t take it three times a day.”

  “What medication?” Gloria said. She uncrossed her legs and looked at Davidson’s back as he poured the boiling water from the kettle into her tea cup. “What medication, Harry? You didn’t say you were taking any medication on the phone.”

  “Harry’s not been well, Gloria. In fact —”

  “You mind, Bayle, I’m talking to Harry,” Gloria said. Arms crossed, eyes narrowed, waiting for Davidson’s answer, “Well?” she said.

  Davidson finished getting the tea ready and walked it over to the table. “It turns out I had some kind of virus, that’s all. But the doctor gave me an antibiotic for it and now I’m fit as a fiddle. Nothing to worry about.” He placed the cup of tea on the table in front of Gloria. “Can I get you some honey for your tea, G.? Maybe some toast? You sure you’re not hungry? You’ve had a long trip.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. Davidson shrugged his shoulders and smiled okay and began to energetically wipe down the countertop. Gloria spooned the tea around in her cup and kept a close eye on him as he finished up the job and wrung out the yellow dishcloth and hung it over the sink’s faucet.

  “Gotta make a pit stop but I’ll be right back,” he said, sprightly moving off down the hallway. Bayle and Gloria heard the bathroom door close.

  “Well, he sure looks better than before, you gotta admit that,” Gloria said.

  “It’s just because you’re here and he’s excited,” Bayle said.

  The sound of running water came fr
om the bathroom. The clock over the kitchen table ticked ticked ticked slow ticking seconds.

  Breaking the silence, “Look, you don’t know what he’s been like,” Bayle said. “I guess you didn’t know I’ve been working his assignments at the Eagle, either.”

  “No. I didn’t.” Gloria set down her cup of tea. “I thought you had your own job waiting for you back in Canada. How come now you’re working Harry’s?”

  This time Bayle did look in her direction, even if not exactly meeting her eyes.

  “I came to be working it because Harry was — I mean, is— too sick to do it himself. I was doing him a favour. Just like I was doing him a favour by staying here and cooking his meals and badgering him to take his medication and making his Goddamn lemon tea every night. Just like I thought I was doing you a favour, too. You seemed pretty keen on the idea of me hanging around here before you left town.”

  “I said I hoped you’d look in on him once in awhile, not take away the poor man’s job. It’s bad enough he can’t be covering the hockey team no more because of that sonofabitch Duceeder, but now I’ve gotta come home to find out you’ve been writing all his other stories too?” She picked up her cup but set it right back down.

  “He needed me, Gloria, you don’t understand, you weren’t here. You never saw him sitting in that chair in the other room like a T.V. zombie every night when I’d come home from work. You never saw what a chore it was just to try and get him to eat a little something at dinner every night just so his medication would work. You don’t know. I do. I was here.”

  “Well, those things don’t seem to be the way they are now, do they?” she said.

  Bayle didn’t know what to say, had seen the suddenly animated Davidson just as well as Gloria had.

  “Maybe it was you that needed someone,” Gloria said.