Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

We went to visit Paul Schantz in the Cedarfield Seniors

Home as part of a "community outreach" program the Guardians' board of directors thought up, the idea being that team players would go to visit kids with cancer or other fans who couldn't make the games, and someone from the Beacon would be there to take a picture for the next day's paper. It didn't turn out that way. In fact, Randy, Ben, Carl and I were the only ones to sign up.

According to the scrawled letter he sent the coach, Paul Schantz was a Guardian himself "during the war" (meaning the First World War, I figured out when I did the math). When we arrived, he'd been wheeled out to meet us wearing a team jersey so big he looked like a wrinkly dwarf inside of it. Then we pushed him to his room, too smal for the five of us. We wanted to leave after two minutes.

"You have any kids?" Carl attempted at one point.

Paul pinched his chin. "I'd say we had eighteen over the years." He was recovering from a stroke, so it was hard to know exactly what he said. Then he explained that he and his wife had been foster parents.

"You ever miss them?" Ben asked.

His face clouded over. "Al of them. Except one."

"A bad apple."

"There's bad. Then there's worth."

"Worth? Worth in what?"

"Worse. Worse ! " He fought to get this out, leaving his chin white with spit. "There's always something worse than you think. Closer than you think."

That was about it. One by one my friends excused themselves to visit the men's room and didn't come back. Until only I was left.

"It's been good to meet you, Mr. Schantz," I said, backing toward the door. "And I hope we can bring the cup home this year, just like—"

"There's some places you should never go."

It was a strange thing to say, if in fact he said it. But I remember the moment not for the words I thought I heard him mumble, but for the look on the old man's face.

A kind of insane clarity.

He was talking about the Thurman house. I couldn't say why I was so sure, other than the look of him. He'd been just this withered stranger, his legs painful- looking sticks on the footrests, yet now he was sitting forward, his eyes alive and searching.

Then he colapsed back into his wheelchair. I was wrong: he wasn't reading my mind. As I slipped out, I heard him mutter, "Sometimes I wet my back."

I bet, I thought as I made my way toward Ben, Randy and Carl, who stood waiting at the end of the hal. Doesn't mean I have to be there the next time you do.

But before I reached them, I heard the old man's words a different way.

Sometimes the dead come back .

I already mentioned that my father worked for the utilities commission. A union rep with his own office in the basement of Municipal Hal, back in the days when offices had ashtrays and a bottle of whisky in the bottom drawer and windowless doors that could lock shut. He didn't work too hard.

But he often brought stories home with him. Juicy stuff, as far as Grimshaw went. Battles between neighbours over the staking of property lines. The mayor owing five grand in parking tickets. Noise complaints against an apartment behind Roma Pizza, from which a woman's shrieking orgasms (or what my dad caled "the sounds of a cat in heat") awakened dozens in the night.

Because they shared a filing system, police gossip would also flow through the basement of Municipal Hal. Usualy, this side of my father's nightly news was sad more than thriling. Domestic knockabouts, drunk-driving charges, old people discovered a few days dead on their linoleum floors.

Yet that night, I could tel my father had a scoop when he took his place at the head of the kitchen table. Hands placed on either side of his dinner plate, staring down at what my mother had spooned out of the casserole dish with the sombre look of a judge reading a jury's verdict to himself before announcing it to the court.

"Langham," he said finaly. "She's a teacher of yours, right? The pretty one?"

"Music," I said.

"She wasn't at school today."

"No."

I watched him use his knife to buldoze food onto the back of his fork. Slip it into his mouth. Chew.

"What about her?" I asked once he'd swalowed.

"They're looking for her."

"They?"

"It'l be in the paper in the morning."

"She's not just sick or something?"

"That's what I'm hearing. The cops. Asking if anyone's seen her."

"The police think she's a missing person after one day? Don't they usualy wait seventy-two hours or something?"

"They've got information. Suspicions." My father raised his hands, palms out. A gesture to signal the limits of his insider's knowledge.

"Do they think she's al right?"

My father lowered his fork. Pretty. That's what his eyes said to me, man to man across the table. I don't blame you.

"My guess?" he said. "She found some fela and got the hel out of here. Struck me as a sensible sort of girl."

Then he told my mother this might be her best shepherd's pie ever.

After hockey practice that night, we gathered at Ben's house. Sitting on the mouldy pilows and atop the books that towered around his bed. And on it, cross-legged, was Ben himself. I remember he wasn't wearing shoes or socks. His feet oversized, patchy with hair. Nasty feet for such a slight, dream-prone boy.

I had told them earlier what my dad had said. We were lacing our skates in the dressing room, and I had to whisper to keep from being overheard by any of the other players. Once I finished, there wasn't a chance to hear their reactions, as the coach poked his head around the corner and told us to hustle out there, that holding on to the lead up our asses wasn't going to help us beat the Sugar Kings on the weekend. But even as he said this—in the same way he would have at any other evening practice—I thought his eyes lingered on us for a moment. An unreadable expression contained only in the look itself, as the rest of his face was kindly as usual. Yet in his eyes there was sadness, or distress, something he couldn't wholy contain. Or maybe something he wanted us to see. A feeling he shared. Was protecting us from.

Up in Ben's room, I learned that I wasn't the only one to have heard Heather Langham rumours. On the bus rides home from school, in our kitchens, whispered between our parents, we heard versions of a story—or pieces of a handful of stories—beginning to circulate around town.

First, there was Miss Langham running off with a student.

Nobody had seen Brad Wickenheiser today, had they? There was an absurd but persistent rumour that he'd done it with Mrs. Avery, the vice-principal, on a school trip to see Othello in Stratford. And he was in Heather's grade twelve music class. French horn. (French horny, as he caled it, idioticaly, to the girls on either side of him.) According to Randy's source, Brad Wickenheiser and Miss Langham were doing it right now out at the Swiss Cottage Motel on the edge of town. He was in love with her. But she was just in it for the sex with a young stud. I remember that phrase in particular: young stud. The way it made me uncomfortable, and a little jealous, like standing in the showers with the older boys after a game.

"Realy?" I asked when Randy was done with his breathless teling. "Really?"

"Bulshit," Carl said.

"It's what I heard."

"Carl's right," I said. "Brad Wickenheiser ? No way. He's a moron."

"She's not screwing his brain, Trev."

"Stil. I'm not buying it."

"Neither am I. And I'l tel you why," Carl said, jabbing a finger into Randy's chest. "It's bulshit because it's my bulshit. Told Andy Pucinik in gym. Born-again Jesus Saves wanker. I knew he'd like it."