Heroes Read online

  Bayle trailing right behind, Jefferson pushed the cart ahead of himself down the empty arena corridor. Slightly chilled, even in his jeans, suit jacket, and long-sleeve shirt underneath, it had been years — since he was a still-playing teenbopper — that Bayle had been in a hockey arena so early before a game. He couldn’t see it from where he was standing, but the muffled motor noise of the zamboni machine getting the ice ready for the Warriors’ practice echoed throughout the Bunton Center’s cement halls. He found the sound unexpectedly soothing.

  Until:

  “I told you that I’d tell you when they were sharp enough. You just keep sliding that blade, Lefty. When I’ve seen enough sparks, I’ll be sure to let you know.” Around the corner of the corridor an athletic-looking black woman about Bayle’s age covered almost entirely in a tight-fitting silver shining space-traveller costume closely watched a pair of white figure skates being sharpened by an elderly white man standing over a skate-sharpening machine, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “And I’ll tell you right now, Lefty, I don’t want to hear about how many other pairs of skates for the players that you’ve got to do by tonight. People come to see me do my thing just as much as they do theirs.” Under her left arm the woman carried what was obviously the headpiece of her uniform, a bucket-shaped silver helmet with painted-on scowl and punched-in air holes for nose and mouth. Leaning against the arena wall was an accompanying rifle-length plastic weapon of some sort.

  Following Jefferson inside their destination, another men’s washroom identical to the one they’d just left, “Is she with the team?” Bayle asked.

  “Yes, sir, she works here. That’s Gloria. She’s the Warrior.”

  6

  “C’MON, feel it.”

  “McDonald, what the fuck?”

  “He wants me to feel his wrist.”

  “Just feel it. Feel the difference.”

  “Dippy, I don’t want —”

  “Dippy, tell me why you want McDonald to feel your wrist. Wait, don’t answer that, I don’t want to know.”

  “Is it time yet?”

  “Dippy says he’s 5 percent bigger than last year from working out all summer.”

  “C’mon, Mac, you’re the only one who knows how big it was last year, feel it.”

  “Dippy, I’m naked, I don’t want to feel your goddamn wrist.”

  “Sounds like it didn’t bother you too much last year.”

  “We were arm wrestling, Robinson. And we were both drunk.”

  “That’s how it always starts. A little arm wrestling, a few beers, and before you know it —”

  “Hey, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Robinson.”

  “What time is it? Is the zamboni off yet?”

  “Just once, eh? Just tell me if you think it’s bigger, that’s all I’m asking.”

  “Calisse, feel that big sonofabitch’s wrist, will you? You two start to give me headache.”

  “You want him to shut up, you feel him, Trembley.”

  “He is your countryman, not mine, Monsieur Robinson. I say if Monsieur Dipper’s wrist is to be felt, it should be by one of his own, no?”

  “Trembley, can’t you lay off the politics at least until the regular season starts?”

  “Liberation, my friend, it knows no season. Didn’t they teach you that at that community college you almost graduate from?”

  “You make this stuff up as you go, Trembley, or has the Separatist movement issued a phrase book this year for all you Frogs travelling outside Quebec?”

  “Oh, there is a book, Monsieur Robinson, and your name, believe me, it is in it.”

  “Machine’s off!”

  “Shit.”

  “Really?”

  “Shit.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Let’s go!”

  “Pull my sweater down, will you?”

  “Hand me that tape”

  “Busted lace! Lefty?”

  “He’s already out there”

  “Damn. Who’s got a lace?”

  “Good skate, guys.”

  “Keep it loose out there, guys, stay loose.”

  “Tabnernac, what kind of fucking tape they buy us dis year? Made in fucking Disneyland, I bet.”

  “Let’s have a good one, boys, nice and easy out there.”

  “Let’s go, let’s go.”

  “Quick skate and Wichita tonight, gang.”

  “Everybody let’s go, let’s have a good one out there.”

  “Good skate, boys.”

  “Trembley, how come we’re always the last two out of the room?”

  “Monsieur Robinson, I do not know.”

  “Trembley?”

  “Oui?”

  “You ready to get this thing going tonight?”

  “I believe I am, yes.”

  “Trembley?”

  “Oui?”

  “Who’s that guy in the suit jacket?”

  7

  A LITTLE before four Bayle called it a day. Having talked to more strangers in one afternoon than in five years of graduate school combined, he ached for an empty room and an endless echo of “No comment.” One of the chief attractions of the philosophical profession was that most of your colleagues were long dead. If you happened to find yourself bored or annoyed with a third-century Greek it was always nice to know you could just close the book on him. Living people were almost never as accommodating.

  A bag in each hand, with a lowered right shoulder Bayle pushed open the heavy front door of the arena, the rink’s manufactured chill melding with a warm, almost moist wind coming off of the enveloping flatland. He started across the car-speckled parking lot toward the empty aluminum busstop bench. Halfway across the blacktop a blue pick-up pulled up alongside.

  “You going into town?”

  “I think I am,” Bayle said. “Main’s in town, isn’t it?”

  “It’s in town. Get in. I’m going your way.”

  The owner of the truck kept one hand on the wheel, the other on a silver flask, and his eye on the road. He dressed like an old-time reporter in a black-and-white Gary Cooper movie: worn felt hat, rumpled grey suit, battered Oxfords. The truck was without air-conditioning and both windows were rolled all the way down to admit a warm breeze. The man’s collar was wet, his tie loosened, the top button of his white shirt undone. He noticed Bayle eye him sideways every time he took a drink.

  “If you don’t like the way the driver conducts his business I can let you off at the next bus stop.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Bayle protested, turning slightly in his seat, looking at the man fully for the first time. He was probably in his late-fifties but seemed at least ten years older. Booze, Bayle thought.

  “No,” he said, “that’s true. You didn’t.” He raised the flask to lip level, paused, then tucked the silver container between his legs. “Davidson,” he said, free hand offered over, eyes never leaving the highway.

  “Peter Bayle.”

  Davidson slowly shook his head a few times up and down, as if the solution to a problem he’d been hard pressed to answer had suddenly been supplied to him. He retrieved the flask and held it toward Bayle across the front seat.

  “A little early for me,” Bayle said, smiling good-naturedly. The too many cups of coffee he’d had at the arena had almost compensated for the drinks he’d consumed on the plane. Having to be back at the rink in less than four hours, he didn’t want to tip the balance again.

  “I thought it might be,” Davidson said. He snapped back the flask and resumed with his silent sipping and steering.

  Apart from confirming his identity as the Duceederenraging sportswriter from the local newspaper, Bayle’s intermittent attempts at luring Davidson into a discussion about his job covering the Warriors were met with throaty grunts and, when Bayle mentioned Duceeder, a sustained groan. By the time they hit the outskirts of town Bayle had conceded Davidson as a journalistic subject. Bayle turned his attention to the town now outside his window.r />
  The truck idled at a red light. Davidson rested his free hand on top of the steering wheel, the flask stuck in the glove compartment since they’d entered the town proper. They appeared to be in the middle of the business section of town— banks, insurance buildings, and other grey two-and-three-storey structures of unidentified but presumably similarly solemn purpose dominating the small-town U.S.A. scene. Except that it was a business day, Thursday, at five to four in the afternoon, and there wasn’t one person on the street. Bayle gave Davidson his address and asked if today was a local holiday.

  “If it is, nobody told me,” Davidson replied.

  “Then where is everybody?”

  “Malls,” Davidson said. “Like flies on shit, the outlet malls out on I-35. Welcome to middle America, son.”

  Just as it announced itself, Main appeared to be the town’s main street. Every fast food franchise Bayle had ever heard of and many that he hadn’t dotted the thick commercial smear, a couple of flag-whipping car dealerships and several boarded-up store fronts providing slight respite from the gleaming landscape. Bayle even managed to spot a few human beings inside some of the restaurants. Davidson lifted his left pinky off the steering wheel and pointed at a passing gas station.

  “Twenty years ago they started giving you a discount if you pumped your own gas. Self-service they called it. You pumped, you paid less. Now you don’t have a choice and they charge the full price anyway. You know why?”

  Bayle was following the rising numbers on the building fronts, anxious not to miss his hotel. “Not really, no,” he said.

  “Because the average idiot in this country can’t remember anything farther back than his last crap, that’s why. Because now he can’t even imagine not pumping it.”

  The truck finally pulled up outside of where Bayle was staying, The Range, a two-storey, brown-shingled house of late-nineteenth century design with looping ropes in the shapes of lassos affixed as bucolic adornment to its front. Painted wooden horses grazed on the front lawn, a single frozen cowboy with a drooping moustache and an enormous ten-gallon hat swinging eternally a wooden lasso of his own over his head. Underneath the wood-burnt sign planted in the middle of the yard that announced the name of the lodging, a smaller shingle suspended by two silver chains declared:

  Welcome To The Range, Pardners!

  VISA, MASTERCARD, AMERICAN EXPRESS

  and LOCAL CHECKS ACCEPTED

  Beside this, another sign, this one identical to those that dotted the tiny lawn fronts of what seemed to be every other building on the street, announced THIS BUSINESS/HOME IS PROTECTED BY CDH PROTECTION SERVICES 24 HOURS A DAY 365 DAYS A YEAR. Protected from what? Bayle wondered. Cows?

  “Well, here you are,” Davidson said. “Home on the range.” It was the first time he’d smiled since Bayle entered the truck.

  Bayle got his bags out of the truck bed and stopped beside the driver’s side window. “I appreciate the ride,” he said. “But believe me, it’s not home.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Davidson replied. He shifted into drive and drove, leaving Bayle standing alone in the middle of the street.

  8

  BAYLE SIGNED in, paid for his entire stay in advance with the company credit card Jane had given him, and went right to his room. Mrs. Franklin, the proprietor, had been hospitable if reserved. A trim middle-aged woman with close-cropped hair and upscale cowgirl looks (smart jeans, silk vest, clearly expensive reptile-skin-of-some-sort cowboy boots), she noisily worked on a hard candy between her back molars and pointed out that he should let her or her nephew, Ron, who worked the evening shift at the front desk know immediately if there was anything they could do to make his stay at The Range in any way more pleasant. She made it sound like a threat.

  Bayle thanked her and headed up to his third-floor room, identified not by number but mid-western epithet. Bayle was staying in the Great Plains Room.

  She stopped him before he got halfway up the stairs. “I forgot to give you your complimentary copy of the Eagle,” she said, disappearing behind the counter. Bayle came back down. A copy of the American Constitution, a “Wright is Right-WUUS 590” bumper sticker, and a framed movie still of a youthful Ronald Reagan horseback with guns ablazing were appended to the wall over the desk. Mrs. Franklin caught Bayle’s eyes lingering over the photo. Joined him.

  “I suppose some people do prefer to remember Mr. Reagan in his Presidential clothes— suit, tie, and all the rest of it. And he certainly did cut a striking figure, don’t misunderstand me. But for me, even when he was serving the American people in the White House for all those years, he was still Ronnie of the West, always ready to do the right thing no matter how many of the bad guys had him surrounded. My nephew I mentioned earlier, Ron, my sister’s boy, he’s named after Mr. Reagan.” A sigh. “If only some of that can-do attitude were as easy to give.” She turned away from the picture.

  “Anyway, here’s your paper,” she said. “As of tomorrow morning you have to pay for your own. There’s a box out front by the door. If you need change ask at the desk.”

  Bayle took the paper, thanked her again, and went off in search of the Great Plains.

  Laying on the bed, Bayle put the newspaper down on his knees, rubbed his eyes, and read the headline again (WARRIORS TO LEAVE TOWN? Million Dollars in City-Ordered Renovations to Bunton Center Could Drive Team Out of Town Say Owners, Bunton Groceries). So that’s why Davidson is persona non grata around here, Bayle thought, reading on: it was his articles in the paper a few months back that put the city inspector onto the problems with the arena. The story went on to say that over one hundred full- and parttime local jobs would be lost city-wide if Bunton Groceries were to relocate the team.

  Bayle thought about the janitor he’d talked to that afternoon, Jefferson, and his six children, then the boy he’d seen in front of the arena earlier in the day, wondering what would happen to all of the Warriors apparel the kid had been wearing if the team decided to move. Row after row of unwanted Warrior t-shirts, sweatshirts, and baseball caps hung in second-hand-shop abandon before Bayle’s eyes, a sort of Platonic Form of uselessness weighing upon his mind. He shook the thought from his head and decided it was time to unpack.

  Except for the busily humming air-conditioning unit and light fixtures and electrical outlets, the room was meant to resemble a turn-of-the-century pioneer’s quarters. Bayle laid away his clothes in the mirrored oak dresser, put his dissertation, folders of hockey articles, and laptop computer on top of the heavy mahogany nightstand, and, the white porcelain chamber pot pushed underneath the bed, placed his air purifier on the level below and switched it to ON.

  Bayle owned three air purifiers, none of which he ever bothered to insert a filter into. One of the machines he kept at his place, one he left at Jane’s apartment for when he stayed the occasional night, and the third, what he called his “traveller,” a smaller unit, he left permanently in his suitcase for his rare trips away from home.

  Filterless, each supplied more than simple white noise to drown out nighttime urban honks and howling, however, the machine’s deafening quietude manufacturing a near-perfect auditory translation of the sort of peace of the intellect and emotions that Bayle from the beginning had sought out in studying philosophy. But even desire-denying Empiricus, he had to confess— as close as Bayle had ever gotten to finding in the written word eradication of emotional, moral, and metaphysical confusion — even Empiricus could not duplicate the depth of stillness of Being produced by the little machine’s uniform humming, the encompassing mist of droning certitude it provided never failing him for its soulsoothing effect.

  Bayle laid back down on the bed and let the murmur of the machine spill over him. Flat on his back, a handembroidered feather pillow placed gently over his face, the steady whir that now filled the room received dirty him like a filled-to-the-brim hot bath. Although he easily could have nodded off — the long flight of this morning, the drinks on the plane, the non-stop chatter of today, the day
’s unexpected heat and humidity — he resisted his closing eyelids so as to experience wholly one of his most favourite of feelings, impervious awakedness, Bayle’s own secular take on the Christian’s ideal state: in, but not of this world.

  From underneath the pillow Bayle peeked at his watch. Nearly four-thirty; three hours until face-off. Enough time to plug in his computer and input some of the notes he’d taken at the rink, maybe even have a look at a few of the files. Still deliberating, his eyes fell upon the discarded newspaper lying at his side on the bed, the story of the Warriors’ potentially devastating move staring up at him, the Warrior-outfitted teenager from that afternoon once again coming to mind. Bayle closed his eyes.

  On his back, on his side, on his stomach, on his other side, on his back again, Bayle could not get settled, the spell of the air purifier unable to plough him under. Later, sitting up on the edge of the bed, none the refreshed for his attempted hour of rest, That’s odd, he thought. That’s not like me.

  9

  WELL, GOOD evening, Mr. Bayle. Sit yourself down over here beside me. You can help fill out the buffer-zone between James here and Mr. Davidson when he arrives.”

  Fifteen tiers of seats above the ice surface, the Bunton Center press box wasn’t much more than a twenty-foot-long open-air linoleum counter at the south end of the rink. Several three-legged stools tucked neatly underneath, the counter itself was bare but for some ancient coffee-ring stains and Samson’s folded hands. Bayle would have preferred to be by himself buried somewhere high in the nosebleeds, but this was where Jane would have wanted him to be. He took the offered seat between Samson and Duceeder. Since that afternoon Duceeder had reasserted the part in his thinning hair and changed his coffee-stained tie.

  Hand-holding couples; overflowing families; even a few timid-looking solo supporters: all checked over their ticket stubs again and again, all walked up and down the cement steps of the arena trying to find their way. Although it had been years since Bayle had last been inside a hockey rink — with his father, to a Maple Leafs’ playoff game five months before the elder Bayle’s death, the hard-to-get post-season tickets a celebration of sorts of Bayle’s father’s seemingly successful post-op recovery from the cancer — the arena was just as he remembered an arena being a half hour before a game: lights low, the ice in shadow but still brilliant white, the air late-fall, early-morning fresh.