Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

Benji. That was new too.

"We're just asking some questions," Ben said, less certain now.

"Okay. Here's an answer." He reached forward to tap Carl on the shoulder. "Pul over."

"Don't think so," Carl said.

"Give me a break! You hairless nut sacks think you're the fucking Hardy Boys or something?"

"No need to be insulting," Randy said.

"Insulting? This is insulting. Kidnapping is insulting. Being forced to waste an hour of my life with you pimply-faced cocksuckers is insulting."

"Just tel us where you were last Monday night."

"That, along with my whereabouts on any night for the last thirty-eight years, is none of your business."

"It's our business now," Ben said. "And it would have been Heather's too. But she can't speak for herself anymore, can she?"

The coach's brief show of anger slipped out of him with a sigh. Then he took a deep breath and inhaled something new. A taste that seemed to make him sick but that he swalowed anyway.

"I'm serious," he said. "You boys have to take me home now."

"You were with her that night, weren't you?"

"Stop the car, Carl."

"Tel us."

"Stop the car."

"Tel us the truth."

That's when the coach surprised us. Or surprised me, anyway, when he lifted his hand from his lap, curled the fingers into a white bal and drove it into my face.

A white flash of pain. The car swung hard, left to right and back again. Knees and elbows clashing as everyone seemed to be trying to trade seats al at once. A voice that may or may not have been my own shouting Sonofabitch! over and over.

Eventualy, Randy folded one of the coach's arms behind his back and I got hold of the other. Once settled, he faced me. Not with apology or accusation. He looked like he wanted nothing more than to knock the teeth he'd loosened clean out of my head.

"You know something?" Ben said. "I don't think any of us are making practice tonight."

Outside the Ford's windows Grimshaw floated by, dul and frostbitten. The few pedestrians scuffing over the sidewalks' skin of ice with heads down against the wind.

If they had raised their eyes to watch our car rumble past, how many years would it take them to guess that the conversation among its passengers concerned one of them pounding a four-inch screw into the back of Heather Langham's skul? Had they looked, could they even have seen the coach among his youngest players, shaking his head in denial?

I remember seeing the streetlights come on, and wondering why they bothered.

Ben asked most of the questions. Trying to lead the coach through a narrative of what happened the night Miss Langham died. Where did they meet? Had she been subdued somehow? Was it always the plan to kil her in the Thurman house? Had there been a plan at al, or, given the makeshift weapon involved, was it a spontaneous attack? If so, what brought it on?

Randy was the only other one to add a query of his own. Always the same one, asked through barely withheld tears. Why? The look on his face a contorted version of the one he wore when an opposing team's goon elbowed him into the glass. Why'd you do it?

The coach answered none of them. He merely reminded us of how far out of our hands the situation was. The trouble we'd be in if we took this any further.

Carl turned onto Caledonia Street. And there it was. Although we'd been circling the blocks around it for the past half-hour, we had yet to pass it. Now we eased by the Thurman house, slow as Heather Langham once did as she walked up the hil to the nurses' residence. It was dark by then. The blue light of televisions filing living rooms with ice water. Etchings of smoke rising from chimneys.

Al of these houses, the ones that sheltered microwaves announcing dinner with a beep, spousal debates, toddlers learning to use the potty while sitting in front of The A-Team —houses with life within them—looked inside at this hour. Everyone was home. There would be no going out again until morning, the February night left to seethe through the leafless boughs.

The Thurman house alone looked out. Looked at us.

The Ford slid around the next corner and started down the laneway that ran between the backyard fences between Caledonia and Church. Nothing to see by other than the headlights that, a few yards along, Carl extinguished. For a moment we drifted blind between the lopsided garages before stopping next to a wooden fence that leaned against a row of maples. On the other side, the dim line of the Thurman house's roof.

"What's going on here?" the coach asked.

Nobody answered. Maybe none of us knew.

After a time, Carl reached into his parka's inside pocket. This, along with the expectant, open-mouthed expression he wore, made me think he was about to pul out a Kleenex to capture a sneeze. But he didn't sneeze. And when his hand came out of his parka it held a gun.

His dad's. Al of us, including the coach, knew this without asking. It was Carl's dad's revolver, just as it was his car, his apartment, his cartons of cigarettes left in the crisper in the fridge. The gun was part of the inheritance he left to his son after being chased out of town by debts, warrants for arrest, demons of his own making found at the bottom of President's Sherry bottles. Now Carl pointed his father's departing gift at the coach's chest.

"You know something? I'm tired of you bulshitting us," he said, opening his door and gesturing for Ben to do the same. "I don't want to hear any more 'You know what trouble you're in?' You're the one in trouble. And just so there won't be any confusion later on"— Carl nodded at Ben, who produced a handheld tape recorder from his jacket pocket—"we'l make sure we know just who's doing the talking."

Ben and Carl opened their doors at the same time. They sat there, looking back at us, oblivious to the subzero air that swirled into the car.

The only one I could look at was Ben. His head fixed upon his slender neck but its features alive with half- blinks and flared sniffs. It was impossible to tel if he'd known about Carl's gun or was just going with it, his formerly zoned-out self replaced by this twitchy, miniature thug in a Maple Leafs tuque his mother had knitted for him.

We waited for Ben to speak. And when he did, he used the coach's signature cal before opening the dressing-room door. Words that, only days ago, ushered us out onto the ice to play a game.

"Shal we?"

[9]

Randy heard that Tracey Flanagan had failed to come home from work the night before from the waitress who brought him his scrambled eggs in the coffee shop of the Queen's Hotel earlier this morning. The waitress, apparently, is a neighbour of Todd's, and was among those he caled to ask if his daughter had been seen or heard on their street the night before. The police were already involved, she told Randy, treating the circumstances as suspicious on the grounds that Tracey was not one to stay out without letting her dad know her whereabouts. Volunteer search parties were being whipped together to spend the afternoon stomping through the Old Grove and sloshing around the edge of the Dale Marsh. Randy asked her why they chose those two places in particular. "Because they're just bad" was her answer.

"I forgot how smal a town this is," I tel Randy, the two of us now slumped at the McAuliffe dining table.

"Smal? It's like word got out through string tied between old soup cans. If this was Toronto, and your twenty-two-year-old didn't show up from a bar last night, they'd tel you to take a

Xanax and get in line."

"I'd worry too, if I were Todd."

Randy nods. "I guess she's about al the family he's got."

"And every cop in town knows him and Tracey. They're just puling out al the stops."