Heroes Read online

  2

  BAYLE’S VIEW on the bus ride to the arena varied little. Storehouses, heavy machinery operations, dairy processing plants; two or three of each of these as the miles and the airport fell behind. But mostly fields. Alone at the back of the bus, in every direction he looked, mid-western American fields. Wheat usually, he supposed. But now, mid-October, just fields. No matter which way he looked, he couldn’t see where any of them ended.

  Then, rising out of the miles of empty farmland that surrounded it, the arena, grey and massive, an enormous concrete vegetable, suddenly all that was his consciousness. Nearer: HOCKEY TONIGHT! Closer still, on an unlit marquée suspended over the entrance to the rink:

  Warriors vs. Wichita 7:30 p.m.

  Tickets $8 Adults $6 Seniors/Youths

  Listen to WUUS, The Voice of America’s Heartland!

  Featuring the I.M. Wright Show Every Weekday From 2

  Until 5 PM

  Drinkless for over an hour now, the usual signs of sudden alcohol-cessation coming on strong (dry mouth, drowsiness, sharp hunger), neophyte reporter Bayle nonetheless decided he should at least try to take some notes — although of what, he wasn’t sure. He pulled a pen and small notepad out of the breast pocket of his suit jacket. The pen sported the slogan Safety is a Way of Life at Ontario Hydro, one of literally hundreds Bayle’s father had accumulated over his thirty-plus years on the job, all of them identically stamped.

  Writing instrument and paper at the ready, each held loosely in either hand, Bayle continued to watch the flat brown fields persist through the bus window. After a few impotent minutes he put both back in his pocket.

  Because he was the only passenger, the driver by-passed the bus stop where the highway met the concrete border of the adjacent parking lot and dropped Bayle off directly in front of the main arena entrance. Bayle thanked the man and stepped down from the bus, positive that even if worse came to worst he himself could never be a bus driver. Eight hours a day of nearly non-stop motion, and at the end of it, back to exactly where you started. Blue collar existentialism. A potbellied Sisyphus who doesn’t make change.

  From his wallet Bayle removed a slip of paper that contained in his own handwriting the gate number the public relations director of the Warriors had told him over the phone to look for. “Legible notes will make or break a good journalist,” Jane, his girlfriend and employer for the next week and a half, had told him.

  “I bend,” Bayle had replied. “Sceptics bend.”

  After a Jane-convened lunch a week before, after Bayle had suggested a rare quiet rendezvous at his place for later that night (for Bayle, a much needed just-say-no evening), Jane had promptly countered with another idea: nine days of Bayle alone in an American prairie state writing an article on the minor-league hockey boom in the mid-western and lower United States for the magazine she worked for.

  Bayle wasn’t a journalist, hated to travel, and, if still impossible to walk by a newspaper box without peeking through the smudged plastic pane to see how the Maple Leafs managed to do the night before, didn’t really demonstrate that much interest in hockey anymore, the death of his nearly fanatical Toronto Maple Leafs-loving father six years before the final step in Bayle’s gradually diminishing interest in the game. So of course Jane was pulling his leg about the trip. And just how leg-pulling unlike her, too.

  They were in her office in the Manulife Centre, the ant-scramble below that was midday Toronto Jane’s well-earned associate-editor’s view. Bayle slumped against the wall next to the curtainless window and waited for the punchline to Jane’s joke, wondering how to kill the remainder of the afternoon until she got off work at six. It was, of late, a not uncommon dilemma.

  “I think you should go away for awhile, Peter. Away from Toronto. Away from us.” Jane leaned back in her black leather swivel armchair, thumb to chin and forefinger to temple, as sure a sign to Bayle as any that, for whatever reason, she was serious about the trip.

  Whether negotiating the fee for a new graphic-design artist for Toronto Living or making a sexual advance toward Bayle, Jane was, when it came time to do business, all business. A few times she had even managed to combine the two activities, having Bayle go down on her while she haggled over the speaker phone with freelancers about their pay, the college radio station’s afternoon reggae program softly playing in the background, the non-musical Jane’s favourite furnishing of work-place nookie rhythmic cover. But that was strictly once upon a time. Bayle was hard pressed to remember their last shared act of even missionary kindness; actually, hard pressed to even remember the last time he’d been hard.

  “You want to send me away?” Bayle was having a difficult time processing this. He felt like a problem pre-teen being farmed out to summer camp. Running a puzzled hand through his hair, he absently touched the fresh bandage on his forehead, this the end result of last night’s closing-time scuffle between himself and another Knott’s Place patron over who would have the last play on the jukebox. In the morning Bayle had felt more foolish than hungover or injured. He never even listened to the jukebox. “Have things really been so bad?” he asked.

  “I’ve been patient, Peter, you can’t say I haven’t been that. But to be perfectly honest, this whole self-destructive bit is wearing a little bit thin. Actually, real thin. The drinking, the fighting, and now the little phone messages on my machine. It seems like every time I turn around you’ve regressed a couple years younger. I’m afraid that one day I’m going to find you ten years old and wanting me to drive you to hockey practice.”

  Bayle put his finger in the air to make a point. Realizing he didn’t have one, he let it fall back down. He did manage a thin, “What ‘little phone messages?’” but the remark didn’t seem to register. Bayle didn’t pursue the point.

  “As to why you seem so intent upon pissing away your chances of getting a good teaching job by not defending your dissertation and getting on with your life, I don’t know. I really don’t. Everytime I try to discuss it all you can say is that you guess you’ve been having a hard time concentrating on your work lately and that you guess you don’t know why. Frankly, I’m starting to believe you.”

  “So naturally you think the answer is for me to spend some time with a hockey team,” Bayle said. He was hoping that the obvious sarcasm in his voice would undercut her machine-gun logic. The artillery kept coming.

  “I don’t know what the answer is, Peter, but I’m getting the feeling that you aren’t getting any closer to finding out what it is, either. I think you need to reflect real hard on you and your career and whatever it is that’s got you so stuck in neutral. It’s really only a three or four day assignment at most, but let’s double that, let’s make it nine days. You haven’t been out of the city in years. Maybe the time and distance will help. It couldn’t hurt. Besides, none of my regular feature writers wants this story. I also know that your scholarship money is gone and that you owe your landlord two months and counting in back rent. Not to mention the five hundred I loaned you last month. Not that I can’t wait to get the money back until you get back on your feet again with your first teaching job. But you’re fully aware, I think, of my feelings about cash transactions of that sort between those intimately involved — the sooner it’s off the books, the better the relationship. The job pays $1500.”

  In spite of the fact that Bayle was dead broke, into his girlfriend, mother, and landlord for just over two thousand dollars, he wanted to demolish Jane’s argument, to count off just a few of the many things he could be more profitably doing with his time than hanging around a minor-league hockey team, to point out to her the utter absurdity of her even suggesting the idea.

  Instead:

  “You know all I’ve ever done for the magazine is a little proofreading and a few of those Around Toronto pieces,” he said. “And those things don’t even have a by-line. Who says you’d want to publish what I’d come up with?”

  Notwithstanding his predictably Ivory Tower disdain of Jane’s chosen profe
ssion, what he regularly referred to as “germalism,” Bayle had, over the past unoccupied year or so, periodically found employment at Jane’s magazine. The jobs he was given were easy — proofreading, line-editing, the occasional two-hundred-word tongue-in-check account of the annual auto show or this year’s dwindling Santa Claus Parade — the pay as decent as the work was utterly anonymous. Ideal employment for the out-of-work and sceptically uncommitted.

  “You’re a Canadian male between the ages of 7 and 84 so you obviously know the game” she said. “And in spite of too many years of intellectual masturbation at the university you’re still intelligent enough to do a decent enough job, I’m sure. The rest of it is just basic reporting etiquette.”

  Bayle looked down from the window at the everywhere car and pedestrian confusion. “Is this your business-like way of giving me an ultimatum about our relationship? Offer me an out-of-province assignment I can’t afford to turn down?”

  Jane’s instinctually analytical way of conducting her life had attracted Bayle before they’d even met, an ad in the back pages of NOW magazine advertising for “an extremely rational, career-first professional woman looking for good sex and occasional non-sexual fellowship with an equally rational, career-first professional man” if not exactly setting Bayle’s heart pitter-pattering, at least making a direct hit to his Empiricus-inspired ideal of disturbance-free companionship. Five dizzying weeks during the first year of his doctorate were as close as Bayle had ever come to letting the man-woman thing take over and tell his head what to do.

  Susan, a new student to the program like himself, could quote Descartes in the original, would make Bayle laugh and laugh with tales of her hopelessly small-town home town of Oxford, Mississippi, and had the sexiest damn southern honeyed voice Bayle had ever heard, in real life and in the movies both. And in the single-minded devotion she showed for Montaigne, her philosophical pet and intended speciality, she reminded Bayle a lot of Patty at her own frenzied focused best. But when Bayle found himself once too often out-and-out love-stoned in the stacks of Robarts Library, lost in a daze of springtime magnolia visions of the hundreds of freckles on Susan’s bare chest and shoulders and how the ivory whiteness of her skin was only all the more beautiful for them — this, instead of bearing down on the latest journal article dedicated to Empiricus in Scepticism Quarterly— thankfully he had had the foresight to do what he knew he had to do and nipped things in the bud. Sure it had hurt at first, but it was the right thing to do. Whenever he’d meet Susan’s eyes of inexplicable hurt in the hallways of the philosophy department afterward, he’d lower his own eyes and remind himself how he’d done the right thing.

  And if Bayle had grown to occasionally wonder of late what it would be like to share his life with a woman not quite so Jane-like, someone who didn’t insist that neither party under any circumstance employ the word “love” (as hopefully ambiguous and potentially troublesome an expression as has ever been known to humankind, she’d pointed out) or ever spend more than two consecutive nights together (familiarity unfortunately but undeniably breeding contempt, she’d noted), it was, Bayle concluded more than once, only because the grass is always greener. He told himself that, all things considered, the grass on his side of the fence tasted just fine and to can the romantic-love-as-panacea-to-all-that-ails-you crap. Jane fulfilled his needs and he her’s; it was really as simple as that. Chew your cud and don’t rock the pasture, Bayle.

  “Don’t get emotional about this, Peter,” Jane said. “At least I’m making a suggestion. That’s more than you’ve done for over a year now.”

  How bad had things gotten? He honestly found it difficult to tell. Intellectually speaking, he knew that the way up and the way down were always one and same, the whole thing depending, of course, on whether one was up or down. Which of course was simply Heraclitus’s way of saying that it was quite possible Bayle might have been so fucked up now for so long that it might have begun to feel like normal. Which really wasn’t much help. The pre-Socratics rarely were.

  “I’m giving you a chance, Peter,” she said. “Take the job.”

  Bayle didn’t answer. The pragmatist in him said to carefully weigh the pros and cons of the trip. The pragmatist in him, however, was little heeded these days, not since an occasional late night at the Graduate Student Union over a few shared pitchers had given way to routinely consuming large quantities of whiskey and exchanging blows over such timeless philosophical questions as whether “Feel Like Makin’ Love” or “Satisfaction (I Can’t Get No)” was the more fitting last-call jukebox selection at Knott’s Place.

  “All right,” Bayle said. “I’ll go.” The traffic lights down on Bay Street flashed green and all the little toy cars were suddenly on their way again.

  Who knows? he thought. The time alone and the distance away really couldn’t hurt. Also: necessity is the mother of invention. It might have been Sextus Empiricus or it might have been Ann Landers, Bayle at that moment really didn’t give a shit which, only hoped that a grain of truth existed in the cliche that said that there’s a grain of truth in every cliche. Nine days to become who I used to be: entire worlds have been created in less time.

  Besides, Bayle thought, it might be fun to watch some hockey again. Seemed like a lifetime since the last time he’d seen a good game up close.

  Finding gate number A-l, Bayle waited in line behind a thin woman in tight blue jeans and too much makeup with what looked to be her son, a teenager in steel arm supports. The boy wore a baseball cap, wrist bands, and windbreaker all emblazoned with the logo of the local team, the Warriors. The woman looked Bayle up and down.

  “Office should be open any minute now,” she said.

  Bayle nodded. “Great, thanks.” He looked at his watch. Two o’clock. On time.

  The three quick drinks on the plane had been acknowledged by now for what they were: a mistake, but only a minor one, with no lasting repercussions except a little dry mouth. Bayle hated to fly and the drinks had seen him through. He checked his watch again. Not even two. Early, in fact. He pulled off his suit jacket and threw it over his shoulder, suddenly aware he’d packed all wrong for the trip. The radio had said it was 28 when he got up at a quarter to seven for his flight from Toronto, but it had to be at least eighty degrees now. Eighty degrees and humid as hell on October 19th. Toto, we’re not in Canada anymore.

  Suspended by his braces, the boy swung around and faced Bayle. “Are you a ppppplayer?”

  Bayle looked at the boy, then quickly to the woman for help.

  “He wants to know if you’re one of the Warriors.” She eyed him up and down again, smiled. “You’re big enough to be a player.”

  Louder this time, “Are you with the ttttteam?”

  Immediately, not wanting to hear the boy speak again, “No,” Bayle said, “I’m not. I’m not a player. Sorry.”

  “Oh,” the boy said, attention falling between his white high-top running shoes to a quarter-sized spot of mud on the cement walkway. He didn’t shift his body, still faced Bayle, eyes steady stuck on the clump of wet brown. The CLOSED sign in the ticket window flipped over to OPEN and the woman quickly approached the counter.

  “What’ve you got left behind the visitor’s bench?” she asked.

  “Row six all right?”

  “Yeah, that’s good. Two adults.” She took a twenty-dollar bill from her pocket and pushed it under the glass window toward the young girl behind the counter. “Hey, Paul,” she called to the boy. “Right behind the Wichita bench. Row six.”

  The boy slowly raised his head, eyes darting left and right in search of some place to call home. Eyes meeting Bayle’s, “Ggggget them,” he wailed. “Ggggget... Wwwwwichita!”

  The woman received her change, took the tickets, and she and her charge slowly moved away.

  Knowing he shouldn’t but doing so anyway, Bayle stared at the boy until from behind the counter he felt the eyes of the girl on him.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

&nb
sp; “Yeah, I ....” But he’d forgotten the question he was supposed to ask. All he could really do was stare.

  3

  “And where, Mr. Bayle, have they got you staying if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Dark brown suit; black dress shoes; no jewellery; hair cut short but not too short; medium height and build; no distinctive physical features, body mannerisms, or verbal idiosyncrasies: Samson, the Warriors’ director of public relations, appeared to Bayle’s eyes and ears so ordinary he almost wasn’t there, the perfect corporate citizen. His hands were folded neatly, as in prayer, on top of his desk, empty but for a small computer, fax, and phone.

  “A place called The Range, I think,” Bayle said. “I actually haven’t checked in yet. It’s a bed and breakfast over on ... I forget the name of the street. My editor, Ms. Warriner, she made the reservation.”

  “Main. The Range is on Main Street, right downtown. That should help you adjust a little bit to small-town life.”

  “I figure I’ll be pretty busy working.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Samson said, “I’m sure you will. And speaking of work, I’ve got a phone call to make and you should have a look around the arena before the boys hit the ice for their skate.” Bayle took this as his cue and rose from his chair on the other side of Samson’s desk. Samson remained seated, turning pages in a manila folder labelled, Bayle could see, with his own name and that of the magazine he was working for.

  “As far as things on my end go, Mr. Bayle, everything seems to be in order for your stay with us. Here you are.”

  Samson handed him a media pass with Peter Bayle-Journalist, Toronto Living, All Access, typed on it. It felt strange to Bayle to see his own name attached to that of a clearly defined profession. A life-long student, he had never really thought of himself as anything before.

  “Thanks for everything,” Bayle said, holding up the pass.