Heroes

by Ray Robertson

  Gloria gave him a long, sceptical look. Eventually she went to the cupboard for another glass. When she came back she topped off Bayle’s and then filled the other one halfway.

  “You wanna know who Dan Fenton is? All right then. I’ll tell you who Dan Fenton is.” She raised her glass within an inch of her mouth, involuntarily getting a whiff of the whiskey. Set it back down.

  “Harry wasn’t gonna go and die in some jungle in Vietnam just because Uncle Sam felt like kicking a little Communist ass, all right?” she said. “That was the one thing he knew for sure. That’s when he decided to make it on up to Canada, in the fall of ’68.”

  “Harry was a draft dodger?” Bayle said.

  Gloria stared at him.

  “Sorry,” Bayle said.

  She picked up her glass, this time taking a drink and holding it in her mouth for a couple of seconds with closed eyes before finally swallowing. Almost wincing, she braced herself and took another drink.

  “He knew his mother had a sister up in Alberta she didn’t talk to much because of the man she was married to, a wife-beater supposed to be, so that’s where he went. Didn’t know a soul until he got there, but she was glad to see her sister’s boy anyway because family’s family, right?”

  Bayle nodded.

  “Okay, so one of the reasons his aunt’s so glad to see Harry is because she’s divorced by now and she’s got a sixteen-year-old son by the name of James — Harry’s cousin. No more than a week or two around town and Harry’s already got himself a job writing at the local newspaper, a car, a nice little apartment downtown — all the things her son needs to see a man can do if he puts his mind to it and does more than drink beer and watch hockey on T.V. And everything’s okay for a long time. Harry’s not having to try and kill no Vietnamese and no Vietnamese trying to kill Harry, and his aunt’s son and his best friend, a boy by the name of Dan, Dan Fenton, they both practically worshipping Harry. They stop skipping classes at the high school, both of them get themselves part-time jobs at the local arena, even start wearing side burns just like Harry.” Gloria laughed. “You imagine that? Harry with sideburns? I’ve seen the pictures, I swear it’s true.” Bayle laughed too. They each sipped their drinks.

  “But this Dan Fenton, he gets into some trouble with a girl from the high school. And not only does he put the girl in a family way, but if that’s not bad enough, she’s a girl from the reservation nearby, and that’s something white boys from good families just aren’t supposed to do in Medicine Hat, Alberta, in 1968. Probably still not supposed to do. Doesn’t matter none that the two of them say they’re in love and wanting to keep the baby and wanting to get married and all the rest of it. Dan’s parents just aren’t gonna have their baby boy ruin his life because some squaw slut can’t keep her panties on. So they think they’re real smart and got things all figured out by convincing the girl to let them pay for an abortion in Calgary and getting her to agree to never see their son again. But what happens is the girl takes the five hundred dollars and runs off to Toronto to have the kid, and Dan, he joins the Canadian Armed Forces so that when the baby gets born he and the girl can get married and he’ll be an officer and a gentleman and they’ll all live happily ever after. And just before he enlists he gives Harry — Harry, mind you, not his friend James — all the money he’s got saved up from working at the rink and asks him to hold on to it for him and to give it to his girl if anything should happen to him. Of course Harry tells him to put it in the bank or just give it to the girl now since she could probably use it, even if it is just four or five hundred bucks, but Dan ... Dan, he watches too many war movies and he wants Harry to keep it for him. Practically begs him to. Forces him to. Harry finally says okay, he’ll do it, and thinks that’s the end of that. Except that Dan gets shipped over to Vietnam within twelve weeks and is home wearing a toe-tag in fourteen.”

  Bayle looked down into his drink, Gloria too.

  “After the funeral, Harry and his cousin try to get ahold of the girl as best they can, but the address they got isn’t hers no more and nobody down in Toronto has heard of a pregnant Indian girl from Medicine Hat. Harry, he doesn’t want this boy’s money, so he tries to give it to Dan’s parents. But they think he had something to do with Dan enlisting and dying over there so they say they don’t want any Goddamn guilt money from a Goddamn draft dodger and slam the door in his face. Harry does the only sensible thing he can think to do: throws the money in the bank and forgets about it.”

  Gloria had finished her drink, Bayle only half. She lifted the bottle and poured nearly as much into his as she did into hers, bourbon quick to the brim of Bayle’s glass and spilling over the edges. Gloria didn’t notice. She wasn’t looking at Bayle anymore, only at her own drink. Bayle watched the pool of liquid on the formica table slowly tide his way.

  “Years go by and Harry moves away from Medicine Hat and gets a better job at a bigger paper in Edmonton. A nicer car, a nicer apartment, all of it. Lives his life. But when Carter, President Carter, when he makes it okay for everybody who was against the war and went north to go back, Harry decides it’s time to come home.”

  “But why?” Bayle said. “I mean, it sounds like things were going pretty well for him up in Canada.”

  “People go home, Bayle. Don’t need any reason. They just do.”

  Bayle nodded; took a sip and nodded again.

  “But Harry, he feels sorry for his cousin still stuck back there in Medicine Hat, his cousin James who’s done nothing with his life since Harry left except get his high school diploma and be a gopher for the junior hockey team. So Harry says he’ll take him along with him when he goes south. Help him get settled, try to use his sportswriting connections to get him work in the hockey business.” Gloria paused. “Harry takes Goddamn Duceeder along.”

  “Duceeder?” Bayle said. “You mean James as in James Duceeder? As in Harry and Duceeder are cousins?” Gloria didn’t hear him.

  “And then one day ....” She took a long swallow of bourbon — too long — and gagged slightly at trying to keep it down.

  Steadying herself, taking a deep breath, “And then one day,” she continued, “strung-out so bad I was almost hoping I’d get caught and somebody’d show me some mercy and put a cap between my eyes just to save me the trouble, I decide to car-jack Harry’s truck on a Friday afternoon on the hottest day in August anybody around here has ever seen. And Harry — I think he’s going for a piece when he reaches across to the glove box, right? So I put my blade right upside his kidney and tell him not to move unless he wants to feel seven inches of steel inside him — you know what Harry says to me when he pulls out his flask? ’You look like hell, woman. Have some of the bird.’ I didn’t know whether to stick him or laugh and have a drink.”

  “You didn’t knife him, though.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You took a drink?”

  “I took a drink.”

  “Did you laugh?”

  “I wasn’t quite ready for any laughing yet. But that flask of his passed back and forth between us until it was empty and we needed another bottle. And another bottle took us back to Harry’s place, and that one put me to sleep on his couch where I woke up a few hours later with a splitting headache and a note on the pillow from Harry saying he’d be back in a few hours, that he was gone to the rink to cover the hockey game, and for me to use the bathroom to get cleaned up and to help myself to whatever I wanted in the fridge. I can’t believe it. Broke and practically shivering for a fix by now, and here I am left all alone in the house. Except there isn’t anything to steal! Black-and-white T.V. from God knows when, got no stereo, no computer, no cash stashed around the place as far as I could see. I finally just took the rest of the bottle of Wild Turkey and cursed the old bastard’s name.”

  Forming a V with his hands on the tabletop, Bayle tried to stop the stream of spilt bourbon from his glass now threatening to run onto the floor. He turned back most of it, but some still managed to drip over the edge
and onto his jeans.

  “The next time I saw Harry I was lying on his front step at six o’clock the next morning with a serious case of withdrawal and holding on to an empty Wild Turkey bottle.”

  “What for?” Bayle said. “You knew he didn’t have any money.”

  “I ask myself that.”

  “And?”

  “And I suppose I’m still asking. And after Harry put me to bed and figures out he can’t keep me drunk forever, he calls around and gets the name of a place in Kansas City that’s supposed to have something like a ninety percent success rate with users. Except it costs twenty-one hundred dollars that Harry doesn’t got. So Harry, he tries to get the money everywhere he can, but —”

  “But wait, wait, hold on,” Bayle said. “Go back. Why? Why would Harry care enough about a complete stranger — somebody who only the day before might have knifed him — to bother and try to scrap together that kind of money? Don’t you ask yourself that one too?”

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  Both glasses empty, Gloria and Bayle each went to pick up the bottle at the same time, fingertips brushing at point of bottle-gripping contact. Bayle instantly pulled back his hand. Gloria calmly poured out two more big ones, dripping the last of the bourbon into Bayle’s glass.

  “Sometimes, I do,” she said. “But mostly I’m just thankful. Harry saved my life. If it wasn’t for him eventually getting that twenty-one hundred dollars together, him remembering the five hundred and something of Dan Fenton’s he put in the bank way back in 1968 and that after doing some digging it turning out to be nearly two thousand — that, and driving me to Kansas City in his pickup truck with the heat turned on full blast with the windows shut tight in the middle of August, me shivering like it’s ten below zero and him doling me out codeine cough syrup every half hour to try and keep me from having a fit — I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now. Maybe not that night on his step, maybe not the night after that, but sometime, some night not too long after, I’d be dead. You reach out for help like I did and then someone comes along and gives you your life back like Harry did, you tend not to think too much about the why of it all so much as just the fact that it happened. The fact that it happened and, no matter how bad things get after that, how glad you are you’re here and not ... I don’t know ... wherever it is you are when you’re not. But maybe you’ve got to be lucky enough to be saved like I’ve been to know what I’m talking about. Or maybe save somebody else.” Gloria took a long drink from her glass. “Bayle?”

  Nothing.

  Placing her hand on Bayle’s knee, leaning across the table to better see what was the matter, “Bayle? What’s wrong?” Gloria said. “Bayle?”

  Bayle looked up from the Rorschach bourbon-blot on his pant leg. Saw Gloria’s fingers on his other knee, her leaning face, coming-close eyes, lips ....

  Six seconds later and both of them with water in their eyes, Gloria softly crying at the kitchen sink with her back turned to Bayle, the sting of her hard, loud slap reddening the entire left-hand side of his face and tearing his eyes.

  Gloria finally turned around from the counter. “Why did you want to go and do something like that?” she said. She wasn’t crying anymore, but some of the tears she had were running down her cheeks. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I thought you wanted me to,” Bayle said.

  “You guess you thought I wanted you to?” The drying tears were still there, but the vulnerability he’d never seen before and that just a moment previous had gone with them was suddenly now gone. Long gone.

  “And how the fuck do you figure that?” she said, crossing her arms. “You’re saying that I led you on, Bayle? Is that what you’re saying?

  “I guess not, no.”

  “No guessing about it.”

  “No.”

  “No is right. I’m with Harry, Bayle.”

  Bayle hung his head. “Yes.”

  “You think just because Harry’s sick and in the hospital and not here to see what’s going on that I’m gonna betray him? Betray him and me and everything we’ve got between us?”

  “No.”

  “No is right.”

  Head still down, Bayle picked up his glass of bourbon off the kitchen table. Set it back down. “But what has your having gotten clean have to do with Duceeder?”

  Incredulous, “Christ, Bayle, what — ? I think you better go home now. Right now.”

  “But I want to know.”

  “I think you should go home now, Bayle. Your story-time privledges have been revoked.”

  Bayle looked up. “I’ve go to know, Gloria,” he said, almost begging. “I’ve got to know how it all fits together.”

  “How all what fits together?”

  “I don’t know. Everything.”

  Gloria stared, hesitated; hesitated, but could see and hear Bayle’s desperation. She sat back down at the table and looked at him long. Took a drink from her glass and looked at him again and shook her head as if she didn’t quite believe what she was going to do. Took a deep breath and shook her head one last time. Finally spoke.

  “So I got clean, all right? And Harry, somehow he finds out that the one thing my mother did for me before I split for good was sign me up for figure-skating lessons when I was 13 because one day when she was good and high and vegging out in front of the T.V. she convinced herself that Dorothy Hamil was the most beautiful white woman she ever did see and that I might have a shot at being a real lady if only I learned to skate like little Miss Dorothy. So Harry talks to Duceeder and convinces him that what the team needs is a mascot to get the fans more into the game. And before too long I become the Warrior. Gloria the Warrior.”

  Bayle smiled. Gloria almost too.

  “Yeah, I know, there’s the costume and all the rest of it, but believe me, it still beats working the late shift at Taco Bell five nights a week for five bucks an hour or dealing dope and every minute wondering whether you’ll live to see tomorrow night. And I always did like skating, you know? Sometimes, when it seems like it’s just me and the ice out there, speeding so fast and going round and round in big perfect circles, the air so fresh, so clean, not hearing a thing but the sounds of the ice giving way underneath my skates, it feels ... good. It just feels good. Even if that crackhead bitch was the one who got me started.

  “So anyway everything’s just hunky dory. Until one day a couple years back Harry comes home from covering the team three sheets to the wind at two in the afternoon and with a bee in his bonnet something awful. After enough jawing I get it out of him that the girl Dan Fenton had the baby with all those years ago, she’s living out in B.C. now and she’s gotten ahold of Duceeder that very morning after hearing about the money Dan set aside for her — don’t ask me how, probably Dan’s parents — and she’s wanting it and wanting it right now because her and Dan’s boy is twenty-something now and she’s wanting to help send him to — get ready for this, now — chef school, the boy’s big dream. But Harry doesn’t have the money anymore.”

  “Couldn’t he take out a loan or something?” Bayle said.

  Gloria sat down her drink. “Take out a two-thousand-dollar loan so he could hand it over to some complete stranger so she can pay the way for her boy so he can play at being a baker?”

  “I though you said he wanted to be a chef.”

  “Chef, baker, motherfucking hot dog vendor, have I been talking to myself all night here, Bayle? Harry used that money to save my life. Not to send me off to college or fix my car or get me a nose job. To save my life. Don’t you think that’s a little more important than some farmboy strapping on an apron?”

  “Of course it’s more important, it’s just that ....”

  “Just that what?” Gloria said.

  “Well, just that it really wasn’t Harry’s money to give away. I mean, technically speaking.”

  Gloria looked at Bayle and slowly shook her head. Picked up her drink. Looked at him one more time. Drank.

  “So what happened?
” Bayle said.

  Gloria looked up from her glass, the effect of the rare evening of drinking showing in her face. She picked up the glass and drained it. Spoke as if performing the last tiresome task of the day.

  “What happened next is real simple. Duceeder kept asking Harry for the money and Harry kept saying he didn’t know what the hell Duceeder was talking about, that he doesn’t even remember where he put that money. Until one day Duceeder somehow tracks down the bank and finds out that Harry withdrew all the money, with interest, the year before. Harry and Duceeder weren’t exactly on the best of terms by this point anyway — Duceeder had started getting in tight with Able and Munson and all the rest of that crew by then. And the only reason Harry even goes by Duceeder’s place anymore is to see his nephew Billy. But the thing with Dan’s widow just makes things worse. Then those articles came out that Harry wrote on the Bunton Center and then the rumours about the team moving started and, well, that only made it final. Duceeder forgets all about all the good Harry did for him over the years and all of a sudden Harry’s a no-good, trouble-making communist or something. And that’s just about all there is to tell.”

  Bayle picked up his glass but there wasn’t anything in it. Went for the bottle but it was empty too.

  “Of course, none of that bothers Harry none — the less he has to talk to Duceeder the better — but Duceeder all of a sudden doesn’t let him see Billy no more, and that does bother Harry some because Harry, he doesn’t have much family left, you see, and even though that boy’s not really his nephew, he treats him like he is. And from what Harry says, that boy, Billy, he’s all right. In spite of who his father is.”

  “I know,” Bayle said. “He’s a good kid.”

  “Harry tell you about him?”

  Bayle shook his head. “Tonight, after they arrested Duceeder, I tried to make sure he got home okay.”

  Gloria’s tired face brightened. “They took Duceeder away during the game? Right in front of his own son?”