Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

"I said 'somebody.'"

"Who? Why would one of us do that?"

"Maybe it wasn't one of us."

Carl faced me. What I could read in the lips, suddenly gulping for his next mouthful of air, made it clear. He had seen something too.

Laughter. Coming from upstairs. The coach's, along with at least one other. Whinnying and cruel.

I can't remember if Carl started up the celar stairs first or if I did. But we were both running, clutching handfuls of the house's cold air and throwing it behind us.

The laughter was now impossibly loud, a chorus of false joy shrieking out from the cracks in the wals. Sound so dense it thickened the space we moved through, slowing us to the floating leaps of astronauts.

Carl rounded through the kitchen and down the main hal. The nylon of his parka squeaking through my fingers as I folowed a half-stride behind him. And then, in the next second, he was puling away. Because I made the mistake of glancing into the living room on the way past.

There was the boy. Standing behind a naked Heather Langham, his pants a coil of denim around his ankles.

The two of them framed by the tal side window, the fuckt stil there, Heather's fingers cutting lines around the letters. The boy slapping himself against her, oblivious to anything but his grip on her waist.

Then he spun his head around to face me. Except it wasn't the boy's face. It was mine.

"Trevor!"

Carl was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, looking at me quizzicaly, knowing I'd seen something.

I could have run past him, opened the front door (if it could be opened) and left Carl on his own to find out what the boy and the coach found so funny. There was no one left to save, after al. Whatever we'd done, and the reasons we'd first done it, didn't mean anything anymore.

Yet when Carl started up the stairs, I was right behind him. When I got to the landing, he was already halfway down the hal, led by the laughter that was coming from the one partly open door. The same doorway through which I'd seen the boy standing over a facedown female body on the bed.

Carl slowed. It wasn't cowardice that held me there, watching, but a command.

Carl's turn first .

He booted the door open.

Then a cowardly thought did enter my mind: I didn't need to know what Carl now knew. A second-hand report would be enough. And judging by the stricken look on Carl's face, what was to be seen belonged to a different level of awfulness altogether. It was the party the boy had invited us to.

But instead of doing what I meant to—turn around and start back down the stairs—I made my way along the halway to where Carl stood outside the boy's childhood bedroom.

Because that's what it was, wasn't it? A room that, in its past, had been caught in the uncomfortable in-between of smal-town sixteen, of the age and place I was myself.

"Carl?" My voice girlish in the empty halway.

He didn't answer, didn't move.

We're going to have quite a time .

The coach stood across the room, in the same place where the boy had stood over the body on the bed. In the dim light, his degradation was fuly visible: soiled pants, running nose, the beginnings of grey beard. And he was wearing lipstick. A smearing of rosy red extended beyond the lines of his thin lips, yet stil carefuly applied, a drawn mouth of female wantonness, al curves and pucker. It was the lipstick colour Heather wore—no, it was Heather's. Taken from her before she died, before the coach left her in the celar.

He looked terribly afraid.

Isn't he pretty? Go on. Give him a kiss .

"You have to go," the coach said, his voice raw from laughter. Laughter, I could see now, he'd been forced to perform.

"Not without you," Carl said.

"You'l die if you stay."

"Nobody's dying here."

"Too late." The coach showed his teeth again in that not-smile of his.

"Come with us," I said.

"I can't leave now."

"Why?"

"If you're here long enough—if you listen —he won't let you."

"There's nobody here but us. It's just an empty house."

"No such thing as an empty house."

That's when the coach raised the gun. It had been in his hand the whole time, but it hung so loose, aimed at nothing but the dust bunnies at his feet, that we hadn't noticed it. He brought it level to his waist. Aimed it at us.

"He told me to hurt you," he said.

The coach stuck the index finger of his left hand in his ear, as though blocking out the sound of a passing siren. And with his right hand he raised the revolver.

Screwed the end of its barrel into the other ear.

"But I'm not listening anymore."

Carl started toward him first. And though I couldn't see his regret, his wish to fix what he'd been a part in breaking, his already enveloping grief, I knew that it was in Carl as much as it was in me, and that the coach saw it in both of us. Because, right at the end, he was his real self again. Not the boy's taiking dummy, but our guardian.

Fighting off the voice so loud in his head we could hear it too— Wait! Not yet! You don't want to be alone in here, do you? Don't you want to keep your boys close? —to push the revolver's barrel a half-inch deeper into his skul and pul the trigger.

[13]

At first, what is even stranger than seeing that it is Carl descending the stairs of the Thurman house and passing between us is the way he simply turns the bolt lock on the front door, puls it open and steps out onto the porch.

"I never knew you could open that thing," Randy says. "I never knew you could just walk out."

Tracey tried to, I think. But the house wouldn't let her. From the threshold we peer out over a front lawn carpeted in leaves midway through their transformation from brittle yelows and oranges to black custard. And Carl squishing his boot prints into them as he walks to the sidewalk, where he faces us. Slips his hands into the pockets of his jeans and shudders at the night's chil.

"You faggots coming or not?" he says.

We folow him, equaling his brisk pace but not quite catching up. He stops at the railway tracks that cross Caledonia and starts left, crunching over the gravel that aprons the long, steel tongues. It is as it was before: Carl leading us into some nighttime adventure, a bit of badness we trusted him to guide us through, even if we knew it was not entirely safe. Driving too fast in his dad's LTD II with the headlights off Vandalism. Trespassing. Smoking homegrown possibly sprayed, he said, with angel dust or PCP or acid, evil-sounding supplements whose potential harms we had no clue of but did not ask about before inhaling.

In fact this was one of the places, hidden within the web of metal struts that buttress the tracks over our heads, the traffic of Erie Street passing in a tidal wash thirty feet below, where we would gather to smoke or pass one of Randy's father's Hustlers between ourselves. (I have just now the memory of a twelve- year-old Ben studying one of the centrefolds and, pointing at the complicated mechanics of the model's upturned hips, asking, "Does the pee come out there , or there , or there?"

and none of us certain of the answer.) What's different is that, unlike then, it is now something of a struggle—and not only for me—to crabwalk up the cement slope of the trestle and into the weeds that have pushed through the cracks. By the time the three of us have found positions where there is limited risk of our sliding down onto the pavement below, we are panting like dogs.

"I hope your feelings won't be hurt," Carl says eventualy, "if I say that you both look like hel."

"Funny thing to say. Coming from you," Randy says.