Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

Ben nods. "You didn't see what I saw. But now you know what I saw. Which amounts to the same thing."

"It does?" Randy says. "Yeah, I guess it does."

"No, it doesn't," I say, taking the joint Randy offers me. "We're not involved. And that's how it should stay.

We go into that house and if—and this is a big mother of an if— if something's happened in—"

"Don't bogart that thing," Carl warns. I take a perfunctory haul and pass it on.

"What I'm saying is that if we go in there and find something bad, we're part of it. We're implicated, or whatever."

"Implicated," Carl says. "Very good, Trev."

He waves the joint by Ben. Ben only rarely partakes on these smoky mornings, so he surprises us by expertly nabbing it before it's out of reach. A quick hit and his eyes turn glassy, the whites bleached clear.

"She's missing," Ben says. "And we have a piece of information nobody else has. It's a question not of whether it would be right to act on it, but of how wrong it would be if we didn't."

"Fine," I say, exhaling a blue cloud against the windshield. "You've established that as far as you're concerned, you are duty bound to do something. So go tel the police about it."

"As if they're going to listen to me."

"Why wouldn't they? You're a witness."

"Not realy. Not in a court-of-law way."

"So if the pigs aren't going to take you seriously," Carl says, pinching the roach, "why should we?"

Ben turns al the way around to look at us in the back seat. His face shrouded in curls of smoke.

"You're my friends," he says.

And that was it. Our undoing, as the Coles Notes described what folowed from the dumb decisions of kings and princes in the Shakespeare we never read.

Why? We were good guys. Unquestioned loyalty. A soldier's duty. This is what the coach, our fathers, every hero we'd ever watched on the Vogue's screen had taught us. It was certainly the highest compliment in a dressing room, as in "Carl was a good guy out there tonight when he put that fucker on a stretcher for spearing Trev." Standing up for the felow wearing the same uniform as you, even if it made little sense, even if it meant getting hurt. This is how it was supposed to go in hockey games, anyway, and in war movies, and in the lessons handed down from our baffled, misled fathers.

But here's the thing we found out too late to make a difference: our fathers and movie heroes might have been wrong.

"When?" I asked.

"Tonight," Ben said.

[6]

In the city, churches are giving up. Dwindling congregations leaving their places of worship to be converted into condos, daycares or yoga studios. But judging from the streets Randy and I drive through in a cab on our way to St. Andrew's Presbyterian, the churches of Grimshaw are hanging on. Every third corner stil has a gloomy limestone house of God in need of new windows and a Weedwhacker. To the faithful this might seem an encouraging indication of resilience, the heartland's refusal to let the devil go about his business unimpeded. But to me, there is something chiling in al the broken-down bastions of the divine, as though it wil be here, and not in the indifferent, thrumming city, that the final wrestling of goods and evils wil take place. And it won't be as showy as Revelation promised either: no beast rising from the sea, no serpent to tel seductive lies. When the reckoning takes place it wil be quiet. And like al the bad done in Grimshaw, it wil be known by many but spoken of by none.

Randy and I shuffle up the steps at St. Andrew's, flipping up colars against the cold drizzle. We're the last ones in, and while the nave is not large, the pews are no more than a sixth ful. I suppose I was expecting more of a crowd, something along the lines of a high-school memorial assembly, as if Ben were the seventeen-year-old victim of a tragic accident and not a forty- year-old suicide.

As the minister plods through the program of murmured prayers and hymns, I try to identify some of the other mourners. There's Todd and Vince, as promised, along with a couple of other Guardians, a startlingly obese Chuck Hastings next to Brad Wickenheiser with home-dyed hair the colour of tar. Aside from Mrs.

McAuliffe (a shrunken version of herself, inanimate and colapsed as a puppet after you pul out your hand), nobody looks particularly familiar. I search the rows for Carl. Though I know he's not here, I can't help feeling that if I look hard enough I'l find him.

The minister delivers the brief eulogy. A sterile recitation of Ben's staled resume: his "lifelong commitment" to his mother, his love of fantasy books and the

"excitements of the imagination," the loss of his father. There is no reference to the surveilance he conducted from his attic roost, nor to the vacant house across the street he believed to be the devil's pied- à-terre in Grimshaw.

After the service, everyone files past Ben's mom, the old woman offering a hand to be clasped. Yet when Randy and I reach her, she blinks us into focus and touches our cheeks. I ask if I can come around to the house in the morning to look over Ben's legal papers or do whatever an executor is supposed to do.

"Come anytime, Trevor," she says, straightening my tie. "I'l make tea."

"I'l cal first."

"If you like," she says, shrugging. "But I'l be there whether you cal or not."

We take another cab down to the Old Grove. Ben's grave is next to his father's. The McAuliffe name engraved in stone at the head of both their places, their tombstones citing only their dates of birth and death, the latter events both at their own hands, whether counted as such on the official record or not. Even fewer have gathered for the burial than at the church, a clutch of shiverers shifting from foot to foot, the soft earth sucking at their shoes.

The minister is here again, though he does little more than run through a memorized "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" before they lower the casket into the ground.

"That's it," Randy says next to me, and when I turn to him I see quiet, clear-eyed tears that mix with the spitting rain so that, from the other side of the grave, he would appear merely in need of an umbrela. "That's it."

"It makes it real, I know. Seeing him go."

"Real? It's like I'm the one at the bottom of a hole. I can hardly breathe , man."

I guide Randy a few feet away to the shelter of a maple. The two of us stand there watching the others drift back toward their cars. Some look our way as they go, perhaps recognizing us from some prehistoric geography class or peewee hockey team. Only one looks not at us but at me.

My body remembers her before I do.

A woman my age wearing a lace-colared blouse and beneath it a skirt that displays the powerful legs I have always associated with fresh-air-and-fruit-pie farmers'

wives. Almost certainly

a mom. Filing out her Sunday best with a few more pounds (welcome, to my eyes) than the day she bought it a couple of years back. A good-looking woman who belongs to a vintage I recognize (the same as mine), but not any particular person I know.

And yet, her eyes on me—friendly, but without invitation or promise—starts an immediate rush of desire. Not mere interest, either. Not any casual appraisal of a stranger's form, the kind of automatic sizing-up a man performs half a dozen times walking down a single city block. This has nothing to do with finding someone attractive. I smile uncertainly back at her and there it is: the almost forgotten clarity of lust. The only word for it. It is lust that races my breath into audible clicks, unlocks my knees and throws my hand out to Randy's shoulder to keep my balance.

"Is that Sarah?" I ask him. Randy looks over at the woman, her eyes now averted so that she stares into the dripping trees.