Heroes Read online

  “This is the first time I’ve heard of any of this,” Bayle said.

  “Well, now you have.”

  Bayle shook his head. “Patty, you can’t just decide to become a painter. I mean ... you just can’t.” Patty looked away, looked back out the window. “Besides,” Bayle said, “I don’t even know if that place is an art store.”

  “Oh, it’s an art store, all right,” Patty said, bouncing up from her seat. She held out her hand.

  Bayle placed his hand hesitantly in hers; suddenly tuned in to what she wanted and tried to pull it away.

  “Oh, no,” he said, “no way.”

  “C’mon, Peter, it’ll only take two minutes.”

  “No way, N-O, no.”

  “Just two minutes, that’s all I’m asking. We’ve been up all this time anyway, what are two minutes more?”

  “Two minutes more are two minutes more than we should be awake and not at home asleep.”

  Patty hadn’t let go of his hand. She grabbed on to his forearm and wrist and slowly pulled him to his feet.

  Face to face inches apart on the floor of the busy restaurant, waitresses gliding by like ghosts in white support shoes sentenced to carry bacon-and-egg-laden plates throughout breakfasts of eternity, Bayle suddenly saw his eight-year-old sister laughing with her hand over her mouth and asking him for the last bite of his Snickers bar, all that was left of her own chocolate treat a crumpled brown wrapping paper lying discarded under the stands at the hockey arena.

  “Please, Peter?”

  “No more pretty-pleases?” he asked.

  “I thought you said I’d already used all my pretty-pleases up for today.”

  “New rule,” Bayle said. “From now on, just as many pretty-pleases as Patty Bayle wants.”

  12

  BAYLE CHANGED his mind about stepping out; took the boy at the front desk Ron’s advice and decided to try a place nearby called Larry’s that didn’t have much to recommend itself other than you didn’t need to own a car to get there.

  The walk from The Range to the bar was short, no more than ten minutes, but Bayle’s t-shirt was soaked through by the humid night by the time he got there. He opened the bar door and stepped inside, the air-conditioned cool of the room momentarily stunning him, though not unpleasantly.

  A fuzzy big-screen television, fifteen-cent chicken wings, and waitresses who smiled so hard you feared they might hurt themselves provided the unexpected environment for an altogether dimmed room full of middle-aged, middle-class, sour-faced white males. Larry’s aroused slight interest only in that it was, in the context of Bayle’s barroom experience, something of an anomaly: in sum, a thoroughly debauched sports bar. Nearly midnight now, the all-sports cable station soundlessly replayed a monster truck pull taped earlier that evening from somewhere in Idaho. No one paid much attention to the screen, but Bayle sensed that its absence would have been quickly noted. The tables of men kept the two waitresses working the room running, the sort of drinking going on throughout clearly not of the merely recreational sort. Bayle could feel the room’s angry heat.

  Fuck it, he thought, eyes on him as he moved from the door to the bar. I need a drink.

  The room musicless and the sound on the television muted, a steady babbling and occasional sharp shout nonetheless made it necessary for Bayle to lean forward with forearms on the bar when ordering his drink. The bored looking bartender seemed to be the only one in the place who didn’t have something to say.

  “C.C., straight up,” Bayle said.

  Tongue stuck deep in his cheek, the bartender shook his head.

  “Canadian Club, no ice,” Bayle, louder, repeated.

  “I heard you the first time. Never heard of it, and we don’t got it.”

  “Give him some of the bird,” a voice farther down the bar said. “Put it on my tab.” Bayle turned to see Davidson taking a sip from his glass sitting by himself at the other end of the bar.

  Bayle took the Wild Turkey the bartender sat down in front of him and, not knowing what else to do, awkwardly raised it in Davidson’s direction. Ignoring the gesture but looking at Bayle now, “Sure wasn’t ’Hockey Night in Canada’ out there tonight, was it?”

  “A little slow,” Bayle replied, “but not bad.” The bourbon tasted good; different from regular whiskey, almost sweet in its sting, but good. He took another, deeper sip.

  “A little slow? Christ, I could’ve laced up and not looked out of place.”

  A slight smile cracked Bayle’s face. He took another drink and surveyed the room. Three baseball-capped and fullbearded men sitting at the table closest to the bar high-fived one another with a palm-reddening intensity and noisily called out for another round. Back home Bayle would have pegged them for civil servants in the Ontario Ministry of This or That out for a couple of rowdy beers and the game. Here they could be planning a lodge meeting or a bank job, he really couldn’t tell.

  Bayle always felt this way when he was in the States. Even as a kid when he and his dad would travel just across the border to Buffalo to see a game at the Auditorium, as soon as the border guard waved them through and his birth certificate was back in his wallet, suddenly everything seemed slightly dangerous, unpredictable, American. The lonely figure walking alone beside the darkening highway. The three black youths standing in front of the convenience store near the Aud. The whine of a police siren a few blocks away from the arena parking lot. Nothing he hadn’t seen or heard before, of course, but here, having crossed over to the other side, the American side, things that nerved menacing more than the plain sum of their seemingly ordinary parts. And then, always the same relief of coming back after the hockey game to see the Halloween-orange BREWER’S RETAIL sign a mile or so on the northern side of the border. The state-sanctioned distribution and sale of all alcoholic beverages. Canada. Home.

  “Interesting place,” Bayle called over to Davidson.

  Davidson gave a cursory turn of his head toward the rest of the bar behind him. “It’s cheap,” he replied, returning to his drink.

  “You’re standing in the server’s area, sir.” A wilting blonde waitress heroically grinning in spite of an overflowing tray of chicken bones and empty beer bottles and highball glasses waited for Bayle to move away from the bar, anxious to fill up anew. Bayle picked up his drink, scanned the seething room, hesitated.

  Finally: “So what the hell is all this doctor business?” Davidson said, giving Bayle the reason he needed to hug close to the shore of the bar. Bayle carried over his drink and sat down on the black vinyl stool next to Davidson’s.

  “Philosophy. I’m working on my doctorate in philosophy.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Davidson said, crushed ice clinking colliding with upper row of teeth as he finished off his drink. “You better let me get another one of these first.”

  Absolutely, Bayle thought.

  “You about ready?” Davidson asked, pointing to Bayle’s half empty glass.

  “Absolutely,” Bayle answered.

  Bayle the drinker: how? Swift and thorough, all or nothing. A two-beer buzz not in the least appealing (for the infinitesimal intoxicating action that occurs, better off staying straight and doing what can only get done clear-headed and quick), Bayle, when drinking, drank. On average, three one-and-a-halfounce shots of Canadian Club whiskey per hour, a bottle of any brand of beer regularly substituted for one of the shots from about the fourth hour of continuous drinking on.

  Bayle the drinker: why? Not to accentuate a good time, certainly (what could booze do, after all, to make better the already enlivening effect of a few hours of good hard work?). Nor to simply pass the time (too crude a solution to such an enduring human dilemma). And, most definitely, not to blot out a bad time (facile hedonism to think that five or six hours of hurried slurping could somehow cancel out the remainder of that day’s and the next’s accumulated uneasy minutes).

  So, again: why?

  Larry’s, one forty-three a.m., Bayle sitting perfectly upright on his bar
stool holding his fifth glass of bourbon. More precisely: Bayle sitting perfectly upright on his bar stool holding with slightly bloodied right handed knuckles his fifth glass of bourbon.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Davidson says, “that loudmouth you decked, he’s been asking for it for years. But that woman he was going on about: that really is his sister and she really is a crazy bitch, especially when she gets into the sauce. Not as bad as him, but still, pretty bad. And don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t exactly strike me as the violent type.”

  “Harry,” Bayle answers, “if I was a book and God was a book critic, the pretentious sonofabitch just might call me a flotsam on life’s jetsam. But do you know what, Harry? Do you know what? He just wouldn’t be reading between the lines. Because if He did, if He really, really did, He’d see I’m trying to get upstream on every page. On every fucking page.”

  “Okay.”

  “And Harry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “One more thing?”

  “Yeah?”

  “A family is like a hockey team. When one member is in trouble, it’s up to all the other members to help out. Especially if it’s your sister.”

  “Okay.”

  Bayle and Davidson drink from their drinks.

  “Hey, what time is last call around here?” Bayle asks.

  “I don’t think last call is an option for us tonight. That I keep this place in the black is the only reason we’re still sitting here.”

  Bayle and Davidson nurse their drinks.

  “How do you feel?” Davidson asks.

  “I feel ... I feel great!”

  “Just like the tiger, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Bayle answers, “just like the tiger!”

  Bayle, sipping, looks at his dried-blood-blotched knuckles over the top of his glass, smiles; over the top of his knuckles looks at a familiar but not-placed black female face coming his way.

  “In that case,” Davidson says, “grab your coat.”

  The woman, Gloria, arrives and sticks her scarf into her purse, leans over, and kisses Davidson full on the mouth. Davidson does the introductions.

  “Peter, Gloria. G., Peter.”

  Hello, hello.

  “You got everything, Bayle?” Davidson asks.

  “Yep.”

  “Any questions?”

  “Nope.”

  “All right, then. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  “Absolutely,” Bayle says.

  13

  “A LITTLE overcast for sunglasses, isn’t it?”

  The slumping figure at the back of the bus once again his only passenger, the bus driver was beginning to recognize Bayle’s face.

  “Not used to all this Big Sky country,” Bayle replied.

  “Montana is Big Sky country.”

  “What do you call the Midwest, then?”

  “Nothing. We don’t call it nothing.”

  It was nearly one in the afternoon. Davidson had dropped Bayle off at The Range sometime after four a.m., the conscientious nine-thirty wake-up call he had left with Ron before setting out for Larry’s the night before coming and going. Just like old times, he thought. He touched with his left hand the scabs beginning to harden on the knuckles of his right and grimaced, though not entirely from physical pain. Just like old times.

  The bus pulled up immediately adjacent to the arena’s front entranceway.

  “See you in a few hours?” Bayle said.

  “Where else am I going to be?” the driver answered.

  An hour later Bayle was coming out of the rink just as Davidson was going in. The awkwardness of encountering in sober daylight what was essentially a stranger who, only the inebriated night before, had been alcohol-established as a faithful confidante and lifetime comrade kept both men uhming and ahhing at the arena entrance. Although cloudy and only a little after two, it was already sticky and warm. And getting warmer. The partially opened door of a pickup truck belonging to a service man repairing a broken lamp in the arena parking lot emitted the I.M. Wright Show loud and clear.

  “Gotta get some quotes,” Davidson said.

  “Yeah, I just talked to them.”

  Look at it this way, folks. If the liberal rabble rousers at the Eagle manage to brainwash City Hall into forcing Bunton Groceries to spend a million dollars on so-called arena “improvements,” there are only two things they can do: move the team out of state, or raise ticket prices, prices at the concession stand, prices —

  “How’s the hand?”

  Oh, fine. Fine,” Bayle said.

  ....just another case where liberals in love with big government like to stick their noses in somebody else’s business and make it harder and harder for regular citizens like you and me to get our fair share of the American Dream.

  “Well, I better get in there before they’re all gone,” Davidson said.

  “Yeah, I gotta get going too.”

  “If you want to wait around for half an hour or so I can give you a lift home.”

  “That’s all right, the bus should be here any minute,” Bayle said.

  “Okay.”

  “But thanks anyway.”

  “Sure.”

  .... safeguard that Dream, folks, fight for it with your every drop of energy.

  “I’m usually at Larry’s by about ten if you feel like grabbing a drink later tonight.”

  “Thanks,” Bayle said, “but I really think I better try to take it easy from here on in. I mean, I’ve got a lot of work to do if I’m ever going to write this article.”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  Until tomorrow then, folks, I.M. Wright.

  “Sure.”

  Bayle wasn’t the only passenger this time; Jefferson, the janitor he’d spoken to for his article, managed to get the driver’s and Bayle’s attention (arms waving and lunch box flaying) an instant before the bus pulled away from its highway stop. On board, “Thanks a bunch for stopping,” he said, “the old Chevy decided she wasn’t going to go with me to work this morning.” He dropped his coins into the steel slot next to the driver and took a seat across the aisle from Bayle in the middle of the bus. Bayle returned Jefferson’s smile and cheerful good afternoon but gave his attention over to Davidson in the parking lot climbing into his truck, slamming the door shut, and speeding away. Couldn’t have talked to anybody that quickly, Bayle thought. Must have changed his mind about the quotes.

  The hours he’d spent as Davidson’s late-night guest a little more than twelve hours before played themselves out before Bayle’s still alcohol-fogged mind: the house-subdivided onebedroom apartment (hardwood-floored, military sparse, hospital clean); the several drinks he and Davidson had kitchen-table shared (Gloria — identified by now by Bayle as the helmethidden, smooth-skating silver Warrior mascot of that night’s game — sharing the table but not the bourbon, mostly silently keeping pace with cup after cup of hot lemon tea); the continuous Glen-Goulded Bach playing on the boombox sitting on the kitchen countertop; the twenty years of newspaperman anecdotes Davidson had perfected through what were probably just as many years of barroom rehearsal (Bayle laughing heartily throughout, Gloria still essentially silent but grinning deep at all the right places); Davidson’s sudden announcement that it was time to call it a night and dutiful putting away of the bottle in the cupboard; the ride back to Bayle’s hotel through the deserted back streets of the unfamiliar town.

  And later, back in his room at The Ranch on his back, blood sugar level falling, surety of spirit shrinking, energy of all sorts of just half an hour before ebbing: Bayle fitful for a place to go, a job to do, a thing to Be. None of these apparently in the offing, however: seven quarters in the pay phone at the end of the hall. Five rings later:

  “Hi, this is Jane. I cant come to the phone right now, but I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible if you leave your name and message after the beep.”

  The beep.

  “Therefore he who suspends judgement
about everything —”

  “Peter?”

  “Therefore, he who suspends judgement about everything which is subject to opinion reaps a harvest of the most complete happiness.”

  “Goddammit, Peter, you’re drunk.”

  “Complete happiness.”

  “Goddamn you and your Goddamn Greeks anyway, Peter. I can see you’ve really made a lot of progress —”

  “Complete happiness.”

  Click. Uhmmmmmmmmmmm ....

  Immutable Empiricus ring-ring remedy done, Bayle walked back to his room, brushed his teeth (twice), pissed (prolonged), and went to sleep.

  “He sure got a lot of nerve showing his face around these parts,” Jefferson said. Nodding for Bayle’s puzzled benefit in the direction of Davidson’s truck stopped at a red light in front of the bus, “Don’t matter to him none if we all lose our jobs if the Warriors got to leave town,” he said. “He gets his name in the newspaper all the same anyway. He gets his check every week.”

  “Roy, what the hell are you talking about?” Bayle’s adopted journalistic civility had dissipated in the wake of his hangover and the inevitable post-purpose psychical flatness that necessarily accompanied his every morning after. Bayle the next morning was no longer ennui impermeable or even ass-kicking Tony the Tiger; was, in fact, simply Bayle again. And all that that implied. And, worse, didn’t.

  “I’m talking about what you call a liberal rabble rouser, sir, that’s what I’m talking about. One of them big government lovers.”

  Making the radio connection, “Don’t tell me you listen to that crank,” Bayle said.

  “What you talking about, ’crank’?”

  “What’s-his-name, I don’t know, the radio guy, Wright.”

  “Mr. I.M. Wright?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Jefferson put his lunch box on top of his lap, sat up straight, and looked across the aisle and over Bayle’s head at the flying-by farmland. “I think it be a good idea if you be careful about who you be calling a crank,” he said. “Lots of people round here appreciate the job Mr. Wright does looking out for the interests of everyday folk like myself.”