Heroes

by Ray Robertson

  “Just let me know if there’s anything you need in the way of information about any of the players or the team. Because that’s my job: information.” Samson pulled a business card from the top drawer of his desk. “The powers-that-be will tell you different,” he said, handing over the card, “but I’m the one who makes things happen around here.”

  Right or left? Bayle stood alone outside Samson’s office, Karen Carpenter from somewhere above softly bewailing rainy days and Mondays. There’s a possible vocation, he thought. Bayle pictured himself as a muzak disc jockey programming Neil Diamond and orchestrated Beatles hits, pleasantly absent all day long in a thorazine and chamomile tea stupor. Form following substance, he reflected that the whole operation was probably entirely computerized.

  Coffee. Not Little Italy cappuccino, no, but from the glass-covered and office-partitioned hallway to his right a waft of heart-pumping java bristled Bayle’s nose. Yesterday at this time he was sitting at Bar Italia drinking his second cup of Toronto’s best cup of coffee and trying to decide whether panini or stracciatella would go better with Wednesday’s hangover. Yesterday at this time he was back in the city, back in Toronto, back home.

  Bayle loved Toronto like only someone who wasn’t born there can. To anyone who didn’t know better, he was from Toronto; to everyone else, begrudgingly Etobicoke born and bred. Etobicoke: a yearly swelling sea of pre-fabricated houses and citizens flooding to life after World War II with the influx of fertile war veterans and thousands of equally breeding-proficient Eastern European immigrants added to the Canadian mosaic mix, each camp believing unquestionably that you are born to be born, to work, to have children, to watch said children grow, to retire, to watch grandchildren grow, and to die. And, if blessed, your children and theirs after them the same.

  But from his first nearly delirious subway trip downtown at age six with his father to see the Leafs at Maple Leaf Gardens (“One more stop and this is it, Peter, The Gardens, and pretty soon all of Canada’s going to be watching us on T.V. tonight, son, because tonight we’re going to be on ’Hockey Night in Canada’”) to a moody teenager’s nosing through Harbord Street secondhand bookstores on dreary February afternoons (the wonderfully melancholy mustiness of two-dollar paperback classics and mint tea and oatmeal muffins filling up the shop) to, eventually, an actual dweller of the Big Smoke himself, every morning waking up knowing that the shooting anew of the movie of his life (with three million anonymous extras and plenty of hundred-year-old architecture as backdrop) was the privilege of anyone lucky enough to inhabit a real city, Toronto claimed Bayle as one of its own and Bayle it as his.

  But Wednesday, Bayle reminded himself, was yesterday, and yesterday was the day before today, today being the first day of the nine-day countdown toward Bayle-as-he-used-to-be.

  Right, then, he thought: See the suits first, save the players for later. Either way, he’d have to talk to them all anyway. Jane had insisted on lots of quotes.

  Steaming styrofoam cup of coffee from the secretary’s office in hand, Bayle tapped lightly on the door marked James Duceeder, General Manager. “Yeah, come on in,” the voice inside barked. A loud radio dominated the office. “Samson said who you were. Be with you in a minute.”

  Which reminds me of something I heard on the way in to work this morning, folks. What do you call one thousand civil servants on the bottom of the Arkansas River? Progress, folks, progress. We’ll be right back after these important messages from our sponsors. And remember, folks, if it’s not Wright, it’s not right.

  “Ahee hee hee. You ever listen to this guy?” Duceeder said, standing in the middle of his office, pointing with his thumb to the radio on top of his filing cabinet. “He just kills me, really.”

  “No, I haven’t. I’m actually not —”

  “That’s right, Samson did say you were from Canada, didn’t he.” Duceeder clicked off the radio and sat down on the front of his desk. “Well, you will if you hang around these parts long enough. Proud to say that every one of our games is on the same station Mr. Wright is on, WUUS, AM 590, the Voice of America’s Heartland. Have a seat.”

  Duceeder looked like he sounded; maybe more.

  “I don’t know how much Mr. Samson told you about the article that I’m writing, Mr. Duceeder, but what I’d like to —”

  “Jimmy D.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Jimmy D. My friends call me Jimmy D.”

  “Okay. Well, Jimmy D., I thought that I’d just drop by today and introduce myself and say that I hope that over the next week or so we can talk a little bit about you and the job you do with the Warriors. No big deal, just about the team, the league, and how a minor-league outfit like the Warriors operates down here.” Bayle surprised himself, sounding almost as he imagined a journalist should.

  “Yeah, Samson put something on my desk about your coming, but I don’t see how I can help you very much. I’m just an old hockey guy from way back. Coach Daley says to me he’s short an experienced defenceman and I make a trade for an experienced defenceman. I’m just a wheeler and dealer, I’m just a hockey guy. Not much I can really tell you beyond that.”

  Great, Bayle thought. My first interview and the G.M. pleads the fifth. He brought to mind Jane’s solution for dealing with what she called a journalist’s worst enemy, “the silent ones.” Simple, she had said. Just get them talking about everyone’s favourite subject.

  “Were you born in the Midwest, Jimmy D., or —”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m originally a Canuck like yourself. Different neck of the woods though, a fair bit farther west, Medicine Hat, in Alberta. Came down here in seventy-five? Seventy-six? Mid-seventies, anyway. Long enough to call it home even if I do miss the hunting they’ve got up there this time of year. But I guess you could say I’m pretty much Uncle Sam red, white, and blue all the way through now. Met my wife Carol down here.”

  Duceeder picked up the large gold-framed picture that dominated his desk and handed it to Bayle. “That’s the little lady right there with our son, Bill. The starting guard on his high school basketball team and a straight-A student two years running. He’ll be fourteen in a couple weeks.” Bayle smiled at the photograph then smiled some more wondering when it would be technically okay to politely set it back down.

  “Jimmy D.!” A middle-aged man’s bespectacled and virtually hairless head grinned itself around the door frame of Duceeder’s office.

  “Hey, you guys get in here for a minute, will you?” Duceeder shouted. He turned to Bayle. “Now here are a couple fellas who could really help you out with your story. Peter Bayle, I’d like you to meet Ted Able and Bob Munson, the radio play-by-play guys for the Warriors’ games. Ted, Bob, this is —”

  Able, the one whose bald head Bayle had first seen, grabbed Bayle’s hand and pumped it vigorously. “No need, Jimmy, we just ran into Samson. How you doing? Ted Able.”

  “So the glossies are suddenly interested in minor-league hockey now, are they? What’s the angle?” Munson, about the same age as Able but without glasses and with hair, stood with his hands on his hips, looking Bayle straight in the eye as he spoke. The sleeves of his suit jacket were pushed up almost to the elbow. Bayle suspected toupee right away.

  “Geez, Bob,” Able said, “ease up, will you? This guy’s big time. This isn’t Davidson from the Eagle.”

  At this, Duceeder’s face flooded red, a previously nearly imperceptible vein on his forehead instantly throbbing blue. “Damn it, I told you before not to mention that prick’s name in this office and I’ll be damned if —”

  “Easy now, Jimmy D., easy. I was just trying to point that it’s not likely that Petey here is biased in the same way as our old friend —”

  “Don’t!”

  “— our old friend at the Eagle is.” Able gave Bayle a friendly, conspiratorial look. “You’ve got to understand right from the get-go, Petey, that the beat writer for the Warriors is what we in the hockey media refer to as a left-winger.”

 
“Left-winger, shit,” Munson sputtered. “Cock-sucking belly-aching liberal scum-licking —”

  “You said a mouthful there, Bob,” Duceeder said. “You said a mouthful there.”

  “Easy now, you two,” Able said, “we’ve got company here, remember?” Able turned his attention back to Bayle. “Anyway, we’d be happy to chat with you anytime you like. You might even want to come up to the booth sometime and see how a couple of pros do it, right, Bobby?”

  “We’re late.”

  Able looked at his watch. “Geez, you’re right. Well, we’ll see you gentlemen at the opener tonight.”

  “You boys take care,” Duceeder said.

  Munson already out the door, Able called ahead to his partner, “Just a sec, Bob.” Able turned around in the doorway. “Hey, Jimmy D.,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Guess what you call one thousand civil servants on the bottom of the Arkansas River?”

  “Aheh heh heh. That guy just kills me. Really.”

  4

  “FUCK SAMSON. Samson is irrelevant to me. I don’t hear his bells and whistles, you understand? I’ve got a sick power play and Wichita tonight and you want to know if you can talk to me for a couple of minutes. Forty-three percent of all hockey games are won on the special teams and we can’t score on our backup goalie in practice with a two-man advantage. And you want to know if you can maybe just have a few words with me. You want to talk to me, you talk to me about Wichita’s penalty-killing unit. You happen to know anything about the four-corner rotating box they’re using this year? You got any idea if they’re still committed to dumping and chasing or are they giving that quick little Russian they picked up over the summer the green light to make a play if he’s got it? You know if Unger is still taking all their deep face-offs? I didn’t think you so. We’re playing a team tonight that’s about ten times better than the one we beat four straight in last year’s playoffs and who would like nothing better than to come into the Bunton Center and kick our ass all over the place on opening night in front of our own fans. And you would like to have a few words. You want bells and whistles, you go talk to Mr. Samson. And while you’re there, you can tell Mr. Samson that Coach Daley is too busy trying to get his hockey team to the league championship to have any time left over for team autograph sessions, Warrior carwashes, or Meet the Fans Day. You tell Mr. Samson that Coach Daley doesn’t hear bells and whistles, you understand? And for Christsake, shut that door behind you.”

  Thus spake Coach Daley.

  Bayle closed the door behind him, mentally crossing sports reporter off his list of potential occupations.

  5

  WANDERING THE bowels of the arena, Bayle wondered who or what next. Except for Jane explaining to him some journalistic do’s and don’t’s and equipping him with a few folders full of articles on the hockey boom in the U.S., he was essentially on his own. And the article was going to be the easy part.

  If genuinely confounded as to the reason why, Bayle nonetheless knew that something in his life was seriously amiss, it being simply too large a leap in lifestyle from committed young thinker to getting-older-all-the-time idler — thinking, more than one booze-bruised night, whether he himself should be committed — to explain away his change in character as something like the mere sowing of a few late-twenty-something oats. Until recently, work, and particularly his study of Empiricus, had never been anything less than Bayle’s chief reason for getting up each day; holidays, for example, never a period of reduced-load hollow ritualizing and increased socializing, but always a time of increased production, an opportunity to do more of all he ever really wanted to do.

  But now Bayle was up to double-digits when it came to the number of times he’d given his advisor, Smith, a definite date when he would finally defend his thesis as best as he apathetically could and get on with getting on with his career and spreading the wise word of Empiricus and all that the old Greek sceptically did not stand for. Bayle more than once wondered why he just couldn’t be sensible about the whole thing like he knew his old man would have.

  For thirty-two years Walter Bayle put in his forty hours a week at Ontario Hydro because it paid the bills. End of story. What he lived for, though, were his Maple Leafs, Bayle’s father’s love of Toronto’s home-town team making its way into nearly every life lesson the old man sent Bayle’s way.

  “See, a family is lot like a hockey team, Peter,” he’d tell thirteen-year-old Bayle sent home from school early with a black eye and a note for his parents. “Everyone in the family has to look out for the other guy and make sure they’re doing okay. So when those older boys at school were giving Patty a hard time and calling her names because she wouldn’t talk to them, then it’s your job to make sure that your teammate — your sister — is all right. You understand?”

  Bayle scratched his head. “So you mean you’re not mad at me?”

  “Mad at you, hell,” his father said, tearing the teacher’s note in two, “I’m proud of you, son. What do you say we round up your mum and Patty and see what’s the flavour of the month down at Baskin-Robbins?”

  Maybe because just as soon as he could crawl onto his father’s knee to watch the Leafs on T.V. Bayle was a devoted hockey fan too, he never shared Patty’s irritation at their father’s exclamation to their mother at the conclusion of every Friday night’s meatloaf supper, “Well, it’s Miller Time, Ann, and ’Hockey Night in Canada’ is twenty-four hours away and counting and I think the Leafs are going to get lucky this weekend.” That Miller beer wasn’t sold in Canada for the majority of the years Bayle and his sister were subject to their father’s week-ending mantra only infuriated Patty further. Bayle tried in vain to convince her that maybe she didn’t understand their father because she wasn’t a Maple Leaf fan herself. Patty replied in rare, brother-bashing form that although Bayle was in university now and her older brother, he still had the very real capacity to be a real idiot sometimes.

  “He works hard,” Bayle said. “Just because he’s not a twelfth-century mystic doesn’t mean that what he does isn’t important.”

  “Do you ever hear what I say? Do you? I told you, I could care less what he did just as long as he cared about it. There are peasant women in Guatemala who work with their hands for months — for months — to make one piece of —”

  “There you go again.”

  “There I go again what?”

  “Guatemalan peasants. Christ, Patty, why does everything have to be so romantic with you?”

  “Maybe you’re not romantic enough.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe if you were a little less romantic you wouldn’t have to spend half your life wearing yellow —” Bayle stopped himself, but not soon enough. He somersaulted from hate to pity to self-loathing, all in the same regretful moment.

  Although they were in Patty’s bedroom she was the one to storm out. One of the two flung yellow rubber gloves reached its intended target, but Bayle wished it was only the start of several months of intense physical torture. On his back on the carpet he pulled the glove off his face, but didn’t rub away its sting. Bayle had made his sister cry.

  “No, sir, no problem at all, be glad to do it. It be okay if I sort of continues on my way here, though? I got sixteen restrooms to clean up before game-time tonight, and that ain’t even figuring in restocking the toilet paper and towels and such.”

  Janitors hadn’t made it onto the list of potential interviewees Jane had put together for him, but, coffee gone and bladder full and walking in on a working but willing subject, Bayle felt thankful for the opportunity for something to do. Situation normal, he thought: lost in space and stumbling around looking for the nearest men’s room.

  “How long have you been a custodian here, Mr....?” Names. Always get the name first. Jane had told him that.

  “LeRoi Jefferson if you’re writin’ it down, Roy if you’re just saying it. At the Bunton Center, you mean?” Bayle nodded. “Been head janitor here since ’89. Course, before the hockey team
came along I was just part-time, helping out whenever there’d be a truck show or rodeo, a music show now and then for the kids, a gun and knife show — lotsa gun and knife shows. And after working that assembly line at G.M. for all them years before they closed up shop in ’87, I don’t mind telling you it wasn’t easy making ends meet on part-time wages with six little ones at home. This here hockey team the best thing that ever happened to this old boy. Excuse me now, I got to get at that toilet where you’re standing.” Bayle quickly moved out of the doorway of one of the washroom’s stalls.

  “Thank you,” Jefferson said. He pushed his cart right up to the stall and slowly got down on his knees inside. Kneeling directly in front of the toilet bowl, he reached behind himself, eye level with the contents of his cart, and carefully selected a wire brush and container of cleaning fluid. He began squirting and scrubbing away.

  “Do you follow hockey much, Roy?” Bayle asked, looking at the man’s back as he spoke.

  “Well, to tell you the truth, and I hope this don’t spoil the writin’ you doing none, but I got to admit that I ain’t much of which you’d call a real big fan of the game, myself. They got what they call an Employees’ Night here once a season and I been a couple times, brought the family down, you know. But if you want the honest to God truth, I have the hardest time just following that little puck around. Thing no bigger than a hamburger and you’re supposed to keep track of it while all these big fellas be whippin’ by, fallin’ over each other?” Bayle laughed. Jefferson looked over his shoulder, grinned.

  “Couldn’t meet a nicer bunch of fellas than them hockey players, though,” Jefferson said. “No, sir. You know what they done every Christmas for the past three years? Give me a bottle of C.C. You know what C.C. is?”

  “Canadian Club?” Bayle said, happy to know the answer to something for sure, even if something he knew he shouldn’t have known about so well.

  “That’s right, Canadian Club, sippin’ whiskey, from Canada. And expensive, too. Sure. That’s good whiskey, that C.C.” Jefferson stood up from the toilet and surveyed his work. “Okay, we’re about done in here. Let’s move on down the hall.”