Heroes Read online

  “Now what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, what with your girlfriend cutting you loose and all, maybe you were the one needing —”

  “What happened between my girlfriend and me’s got nothing —”

  “Maybe it’s got everything —”

  “People, people,” Davidson said, coming into the kitchen, holding up conciliatory hands. “What’s with all this ruckus? You’d think we weren’t all good friends here.” If anything, Davidson looked even better than he had before he’d left the room.

  Gloria leapt up from her chair and into Davidson’s arms.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Davidson said, talking to Gloria but looking over her shoulder at Bayle.

  “This is someone who’s glad to have her old Harry back,” she said, “that’s who.” Gloria nuzzled her head between Davidson’s shoulder and neck. Davidson grinned off into space.

  Bayle brushed by the clinging couple.

  “Just give me a couple of minutes to throw my stuff together and I’ll be out of your hair,” he said.

  Gloria gently broke free of Davidson’s embrace. Taking his hand in hers she followed after Bayle into the livingroom. “You don’t have to rush off just because I’m here, Bayle,” she said. “I expect I’ll be staying the night, but I don’t think Harry’s gonna be so mean as to make me sleep on the couch, are you, Harry?” She squeezed Davidson’s hand. Davidson just smiled. “Are you, Harry?” she said again, slight pressure of fingernails applied to the flesh of Davidson’s palm this time finally doing the trick.

  “Hell, no,” he said. “Bayle can stay here for as long as he likes. Damn couch is starting to show his imprint from sleeping on it for this long now, anyway.” Davidson chuckled at what he thought was a pretty good attempt at lightening the mood of the room. Gloria frowned, dropped his hand. Bayle continued piling his belongings onto the couch.

  “Look, it’s no big deal,” Bayle said, going to the closet and pulling out his suitcase. “I mean, I was planning on moving back into The Range sooner or later anyway. It’s closer to the Eagle and I can use the extra twenty minutes sleep in the morning.” He folded his few articles of clothing on top of the rest of his stuff in the bag and zipped it shut, surveyed the room for any forgotten items.

  “But today was your last day at the paper, Bayle,” Davidson said. “I’m starting back up tomorrow, remember?”

  Bayle looked down at his packed suitcase. “I guess you are ready to go back now, aren’t you?”

  “Like I said, fit as a fiddle,” Davidson answered, smiling widely, slapping hard his tiny pot belly twice for emphasis.

  “What are you gonna do, Bayle?” Gloria said.

  Bayle picked up his bag and laptop. “I don’t know,” he said. It wasn’t the kind of honesty any of them wanted to hear.

  Lowered heads; silence.

  “You need a ride, Bayle?” Gloria asked, looking up.

  “Christ, yes, of course the kid needs a ride,” Davidson joined in, the second head to lift. “It’s the least we can do for you for covering my ass down at the paper when I was on the sidelines. Kid did a damn good job, too, G., you should see his stuff. Solid. Real solid. Surprised the hell out of me, actually. Kid writes just like an old pro.”

  “No thanks,” Bayle said, completing the suite of raised eyes. “I think I’ll just walk for awhile. I’ll catch the bus when I get tired.”

  Gloria and Davidson stood looking at Bayle. Bayle stood in front of the door looking at his shoes. No one moved or spoke until Davidson put out his hand. “Okay then ...” he said.

  Bayle set down his suitcase and computer and shook the old man’s hand. He picked both items back up and turned around for the door.

  “Bayle?” Gloria said. Bayle turned around. “Your nose looks better,” she said.

  “My nose?”

  “I mean, it used to be sort of red. Now it’s ...

  Bayle smiled. “Right.” He touched his nose. “Clean living and good company,” he said. He winked at Davidson. Davidson winked back.

  “Thanks, Bayle,” Gloria said. “Thanks for taking care of my Harry so good.”

  “Sure,” Bayle said, “my pleasure.” He took a last look around the room. “My pleasure.”

  30

  SPRUCE, DAVIDSON’S street, down to Oakview; to the end of Oakview to where it turned into Evergreen; all the way down Evergreen as it met up with Main; Main for three quarters of an hour and still no end in sight. Bayle walked and walked but couldn’t seem to tire. Then he walked some more and still felt restless. Doubling back along Main Street, he moved in the direction of Kellog without ever once thinking of stopping in at Larry’s. Never thought about it, but that’s where he was going. Not a decision; a destination.

  It was a little after nine and the room fairly throbbed. Heavy clouds of cigarette smoke and the surprisingly almost sweet stink of urine and male sweat saturated the air. The effect of the A/C unit was instantaneous and, to the purely physical degree it could be, rejuvenating. But the muffled fury of the men in the bar kept Bayle from feeling any less unsettled than he had been before he came in, cool air to be preferred over the hot and hummy variety, but, inevitably, weather only weather, not something capable of assisting in the answering of such suddenly pressing problems as: What now? Why? And just exactly where?

  In place of tackling these and other likewise questions Bayle pushed to the front of the bar, ordered a double Wild Turkey with a Budweiser chaser, and wrestled with that. He won the match easily, in fifty-seven seconds flat. He ordered another two-ounce opponent and pulled at his bottle of beer while waiting for his next victim.

  The bourbon ascended almost as quickly as it went down. Before he’d paid for and been served up his second drink thin waves of wellness coursed up his spine and settled into the top of his head. Finally he could breathe. Bayle sipped at his beer and was almost ready to begin asking himself why he felt like nothing so much as someone who, miraculously saved from a sinking ship, has just discovered that his beloved lifeboat has a slow leak. Or a quick leak. Anyway, sinking. Again.

  “I say, what’s a nice sceptic like you doing in a place like this?” The Reverend Charles Warren carried his usual straight vodka and just-as-usual unflappably affable expression (if with eyes, Bayle noticed, streaked a fatigued red, and with a runny nose).

  “That’s a damn good question, Chuck,” Bayle said, turning around from the bar. “A damn good question.” The sudden sting of embarrassment Bayle felt at having altogether forgotten his nearly two-week-old promise to get in touch with Warren was almost immediately eased by both Warren’s utterly warm way and Bayle’s simple joy at having someone to talk to.

  “And you would agree, of course,” Warren said, “that a good question is infinitely more valuable than even the most ostensibly satisfying answer.”

  “Of course,” Bayle said. Good old Chuck.

  “All right, then. Shall we get a table?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Table got, drinks drunk — and, in Bayle’s case but not Warren’s, got more and more of — Bayle, as the evening progressed, began to do most of the talking, Warren gradually slipping into a silent pattern of distracted listening and nervous nodding, more than once even accompanying these with an undisguisable yawn.

  And like a storm-formed, swift-moving current rushing and gushing for as long as it gets fed by something bigger than itself — twigs, leaves, and all sorts of other errant matter caught up in the surge of water going faster and faster than it ever has before — Bayle picked up the slack by torrenting on and on about Duceeder and, occasionally, for variation, C.A.C.A.W. and I.M. Wright. One table leg an inch shorter than the others, the small table between the two men rocked with each of Bayle’s table-whacking declarations of Duceeder’s Davidson-destroying heinousnous and the generally evil right-wing agenda lurking amidst them.

  At one point, after Warren had excused himself to make a phone call, it occurred to Bayle as he sat at the
table by himself with no one to lecture at that he was carrying on just like one of the religious nuts at the corner of Yonge and Dundas back in Toronto. All he needed were a few free pamphlets on how to go straight to heaven and a cheap tambourine to keep the beat. He jumped up from the table and with far too much enthusiasm asked the bartender who was winning the strong-man contest playing on the television set above the bar. The bartender responded by asking Bayle if he wanted another round. His own glass had just been refilled and Warren had barely touched his first, but Bayle without hesitation answered yes. When Warren returned and inquired over the unnecessary drinks, Bayle answered that he’d won a bet with the bartender.

  “What was the bet about?” Warren asked.

  “I don’t remember,” Bayle replied. “I never gamble.”

  Except for the clearly unimpressed head or two that would periodically turn the way of their corner table whenever Bayle would loudly preface Duceeder’s name with “that mother-fucking-fascist-bastard,” Bayle’s rare garrulousness almost seemed to suit Warren’s mood. Even in all his bourbon-fuelled franticness — made even more frantic by the simple fact he’d been almost entirely abstentious while staying at Davidson’s — Bayle could see that Warren was behaving less and less like himself, not so much tired as uneasy and detached, nervously distant. Bayle began to worry that he was boring Warren and would soon be left to his own devices and have to go home. Not having any home to go to, Bayle attempted to interest Warren in something other than the watch on his wrist he’d taken to looking at every few minutes.

  “Hey, you said you did your thesis on Aquinas, right?” Bayle said.

  “Aquinas ... yes.” By this point it seemed a tremendous effort of concentration on Warren’s part just to string together a complete sentence.

  “And I think I also remember you saying that you were pretty close to finishing it. How close? I mean, you ever think of dusting it off and finishing it up? No burning desire to be Dr. Warren?”

  “Dr. Warren ....” Warren consulted his watch again. Bayle started to slightly panic.

  “Well, speaking for myself,” he said, “I’ve always thought that Aquinas was never much more than watered-down Aristotle with a little Christian mumbo-jumbo thrown in to hide the influence.” Drink in hand, Bayle leaned back on two legs of his chair and smiled at the wide sweep of conversational expanse he’d cut.

  “Mumbo-jumbo ... yes ....” Warren looked at his watch and abruptly rose from his seat expressionless and stiff, like a departing spirit shooting straight up from the body of the deceased as depicted in one those pamphlets the Yonge Street proselytizers stick in your hand while waiting on a red light.

  “I say, Peter,” Warren said with great effort. “I say, Peter, it’s been grand, really, but I’ve really got to ....”

  Bayle stood up too.

  “C’mon, Chuck,” he said. “You’re not really going, are you? It can’t even be eleven o’clock yet. You know I was just joking around about the Aquinas. I mean, you’ve got to understand that I’ve got the greatest amount of respect for him, Anselm ... all the great thinkers of Mother Church. In fact, I’d be really curious to find out what your opinion is on how all this Death of God theology fits in with the medieval idea of....”

  Warren left Bayle talking to himself at the table.

  Bayle flung a handful of Toronto Living money at the bartender and caught up with Warren at the door.

  “My sister was a Catholic, you know,” Bayle said. “Did I ever tell you that? My sister Patty? She converted. She wasn’t born Catholic, but boy oh boy, when she converted to something, let me tell you, it meant something, it was the real thing. No in-between with my sister. My dad used to say, One thing about our Patty, when she sets her mind on something, by God, she does it with body and soul. The old man, he never really understood Patty. Mum not much either. But the old man ... the old man, he pretty much hit it right on the head right that time, though, yeah, that’s for sure, that was our Patty all right, yeah, the old man, he pretty much hit it on the head that time.”

  Warren gently attempted to peel Bayle’s white knuckles from the lapel of his black suit jacket. Smiled weakly.

  “Mum never really talked much about Patty after she’d been gone awhile. But not too long afterward I’d get these phone calls from her at the weirdest times — weird for my mother, anyway — at, like, one or two in the morning, and she’d ask me if I thought she hadn’t paid Patty enough attention when we were kids like Dad always did with me and my hockey and us both being Leafs fans. I’d tell her not to be silly and that of course she didn’t have anything to do with what Patty did. And I wouldn’t be just saying it to make her feel better, either. Because Patty always knew exactly what she was doing. She wasn’t perfect — who the hell is? You tell me, who the hell is? But she always knew what she was doing. That’s why she didn’t leave a note. She didn’t have to. What would be the point? Doing what she did, doing it the way she did it, she let everybody know exactly what she was thinking. I mean, I knew what she was thinking. I always knew what Patty was thinking.”

  Warren received the weeping man.

  “My place,” Warren said. “See someone there first and ... and then we can talk.” He put his arm around Bayle’s shoulder and guided him through the door of the bar. “Talk then all you want, Peter.”

  31

  WARREN TOOK care of himself as soon as he’d buzzed Ron up to his apartment and the syringes had made their way out of the deep pockets of the boy’s leather jacket.

  The effect of the morphine on Warren wasn’t as sudden as it was on Bayle, but within a few minutes of pulling the needle point out of his arm the Reverend had become his old amiable self again, listening with fixed attention as Bayle monologued on and on throughout the night, even asking for clarification at certain points or nodding in firm agreement or frank understanding at others. Only by showing little interest in verbally contributing anything of his own to the evening did the drug’s impact show itself.

  When Bayle saw what was going on and insisted on having whatever it was that Chuck was having, Warren made only short protest before asking Ron if he would fix Bayle.

  “On your tab, Rev?” Ron said.

  Warren sat in his enormous red-leather reading chair, dwarfed by a long wall of philosophy and theology titles lining the length of the entire livingroom behind him.

  “My boy,” he said. “Do I look to you like the sort of man who invites another gentleman into his home and then asks him to outlay for his own refreshments?”

  “No sir, Rev.” Ron smiled agreeably at the ball of shrunken pale Bayle sweaty plopped sitting silent with downcast eyes on the couch beside him.

  “You can’t get morphine anymore, you know?” he said to Bayle. “I mean, you simply cannot get it. It’s like, stone age, right? The shit they used to geeze in the fifties. But I take care of the Rev. The way he talks when he’s high, man, it’s like ... he just murders me.” Ron tapped the toes of his Nike hightops non-stop as he spoke.

  “Entirely too much killing going on in this world, young man, so enough of that sort of talk, what? Let’s take good care of my friend here, shall we? Half the regular dosage, a quarter grain should do, I think.”

  Ron, after being immediately assured by Warren upon being let into the apartment that Bayle “was a trustworthy chap, not to worry,” had dropped his initial unease around the man he recognized as his aunt’s former lodger and hung around long enough to drink the can of Coke Warren always had on hand waiting for him in his refrigerator whenever Ron “was kind enough to make a housecall.”

  “Ron doesn’t do drugs,” Warren remarked to Bayle, the boy feeling up and down Bayle’s forearm in search of a good vein.

  “Oh, a nice fat juicy one,” Ron said, taking the syringe off the coffee table and without warning expertly sliding the needle in, Bayle’s blood filling up the hypo in equal proportion to the morphine going into Bayle.

  “Ron’s going to be a cable mogul, Peter,” Warr
en said. “He’s saving carefully and living clean so that one day he can make all us poor unhappy citizens purchase the ultimate drug from him instead of these mere pharmaceuticals. Isn’t that right, my boy?”

  Ron smiled and nodded. He pulled up the arm of his leather jacket and looked at the second hand on his Rolex, checking Bayle’s pulse.

  “Tell him your unoffical motto, my boy,” Warren said.

  “Television: the drug the whole family can enjoy.”

  “Wonderful,” Warren said. “Just wonderful. McLuhan couldn’t have said it better, lad.”

  “And the best part of it all,” Ron said, untying the bandanna from Bayle’s arm, “is that it’s all completely legal. No cops or gangs to fuck with your operation, and, like, it just makes sense. I mean, not every family’s got a drug addict in it, but you just name me one that hasn’t got a television.”

  Because he’d imagined that, like booze, the morphine would go straight to his head, when the drug first hit him in the back of his legs, Bayle almost laughed. Just my luck, Bayle thought. Or maybe he said it aloud. But when it started its steady spreading climb through his back and neck, muscles everywhere along the way seeming to separate from the bone like fine brown meat hanging from a perfect Christmas turkey leg, he knew the morphine was doing its job. The centre would not hold. And geez, was that ever just fine.

  Weightless, careless, almost Bayleless, Bayle talked; talked right through the night with the faithfully heeding Warren stoned cosy in his immense red armchair the entire talking time; talked right through until morning with Warren still listening intently but standing in front of the bathroom mirror carefully shaving. Talked talked talked. Talked so much that the next day his tongue was literally sore.

  And then, suddenly, Warren announced that he had to go to work.

  “Of course you’re welcome to hang around here for as long as you like,” Warren said. “But I’m afraid that if I’m going to make my nine o’clock counselling I’d better be moving along.” Warren’s words, and the irrefutable fact that there he was, freshly showered, cleanly shaved, and utterly respectable-looking, standing at the door with briefcase in one hand and mug of steaming English Breakfast tea in the other, cleared Bayle’s head of what little pleasing obliviousness remained from the effects of the nine-hour-old shot of morphine.