by Andrew Pyper
One offence we frequently committed was a "hot box" before morning attendance. This involved me, Ben and Randy cramming ourselves into the two-door Ford that Carl's dad left behind, rolling the windows up and sharing a joint Randy would produce from the baggie he kept hidden in the lining of his Sorels. With the four of us inhaling and passing and coughing, the cabin of Carl's sedan soon became thick with smoke, the air moist and opaque as a sauna. A hot box offered the most efficient use of a single joint, a technique that "seals in all the grassy goodness," as Randy said in his Price Is Right voice. When we were done, we would open the doors and stand around in an unsteady circle, watching the plumes escape the car's confines, rise through the pine boughs and into the sky above like a signal to another, faraway tribe.
So while I know what Randy has in mind when he waves me over and makes a toking gesture obvious enough to show he doesn't really care who knows, there's something subdued in his expression, worried quarter moons of darkness under his eyes that tell me there's more going on in Carl's Ford than a bunch of guys getting high before chemistry.
"We're having a meeting," Randy says as we make our way through the rows of cars. "Ben has something he wants to say."
"Is this more bullshit about what he said he saw?"
"He wants us all together first."
"But you've guessed."
Randy pauses at the car, his fingers slipping under the passenger-side door handle. "I've just got a feeling I'd rather be stoned when I hear it, that's all," he says.
We pile in. Carl behind the wheel, Ben hugging the glovebox to let me and Randy slip into the back.
"Ready?" Randy asks.
"Ready," Carl answers, clicking the power window buttons, making sure we're sealed in.
As Randy pulls the baggie out of his boot, Ben shifts around in the front seat, taking each of us in, one at a time. A kind of silent roll call that would be funny if attempted by anyone else. But laughing is out of the question. It intensifies the one sound to concentrate on: Randy, who clinks his Zippo open and sucks the joint to life.
"We have to go in," Ben says.
None of us say anything. It's as though Ben had not uttered the sentence we'd all just heard. Or perhaps we were trying to pretend it was a sentence that didn't properly belong to the moment, a glitch in the soundtrack.
Then he says it again.
"We have to go into the house."
"What house?"
"Nice try, Randy," Carl says.
Randy shrugs, passing up to Carl while waving a hand to sweep the smoke that escapes his nostrils back into his mouth.
"I don't see why we have to do anything," I say. "It's not our issue."
"You're right. It's not an issue," Ben says. "It's a human being."
"You're saying Heather's still in there? You saw something new last night?"
"I watched. Stayed up till dawn watching," Ben says. "But no. I didn't see anything."
"So how do you know she's in there?"
"I'm saying she might be. And if she is, she needs help. Our help."
Randy rubs the elbow of his shirt over the window, clearing a circle from the condensation. He stares out at a group of girls in designer jeans climbing the hill toward school, their backsides swaying with each step, before they disappear behind the returning mist of his breath.
"Here's the thing I don't get," Randy says. "What does this have to do with us? Maybe you, Ben. But I wasn't the one up in your room spooking myself shitless. I didn't see a thing. So where do I come into it? Where does anyone but you come into it?"
Ben nods. "You didn't see what I saw. But now you know what I saw. Which amounts to the same thing."
"It does?" Randy says. "Yeah, I guess it does."
"No, it doesn't," I say, taking the joint Randy offers me. "We're not involved. And that's how it should stay.
We go into that house and if—and this is a big mother of an if—if something's happened in—"
"Don't bogart that thing," Carl warns. I take a perfunctory haul and pass it on.
"What I'm saying is that if we go in there and find something bad, we're part of it. We're implicated, or whatever."
"Implicated," Carl says. "Very good, Trev."
He waves the joint by Ben. Ben only rarely partakes on these smoky mornings, so he surprises us by expertly nabbing it before it's out of reach. A quick hit and his eyes turn glassy, the whites bleached clear.
"She's missing," Ben says. "And we have a piece of information nobody else has. It's a question not of whether it would be right to act on it, but of how wrong it would be if we didn't."
"Fine," I say, exhaling a blue cloud against the windshield. "You've established that as far as you're concerned, you are duty bound to do something. So go tell the police about it."
"As if they're going to listen to me."
"Why wouldn't they? You're a witness."
"Not really. Not in a court-of-law way."
"So if the pigs aren't going to take you seriously," Carl says, pinching the roach, "why should we?"
Ben turns all the way around to look at us in the back seat. His face shrouded in curls of smoke.
"You're my friends," he says.
And that was it. Our undoing, as the Coles Notes described what followed from the dumb decisions of kings and princes in the Shakespeare we never read.
Why? We were good guys. Unquestioned loyalty. A soldier's duty. This is what the coach, our fathers, every hero we'd ever watched on the Vogue's screen had taught us. It was certainly the highest compliment in a dressing room, as in "Carl was a good guy out there tonight when he put that fucker on a stretcher for spearing Trev." Standing up for the fellow wearing the same uniform as you, even if it made little sense, even if it meant getting hurt. This is how it was supposed to go in hockey games, anyway, and in war movies, and in the lessons handed down from our baffled, misled fathers.
But here's the thing we found out too late to make a difference: our fathers and movie heroes might have been wrong.
"When?" I asked.
"Tonight," Ben said.
* * *
[6]
In the city, churches are giving up. Dwindling congregations leaving their places of worship to be converted into condos, daycares or yoga studios. But judging from the streets Randy and I drive through in a cab on our way to St. Andrew's Presbyterian, the churches of Grimshaw are hanging on. Every third corner still has a gloomy limestone house of God in need of new windows and a Weedwhacker. To the faithful this might seem an encouraging indication of resilience, the heartland's refusal to let the devil go about his business unimpeded. But to me, there is something chilling in all the broken-down bastions of the divine, as though it will be here, and not in the indifferent, thrumming city, that the final wrestling of goods and evils will take place. And it won't be as showy as Revelation promised either: no beast rising from the sea, no serpent to tell seductive lies. When the reckoning takes place it will be quiet. And like all the bad done in Grimshaw, it will be known by many but spoken of by none.
Randy and I shuffle up the steps at St. Andrew's, flipping up collars against the cold drizzle. We're the last ones in, and while the nave is not large, the pews are no more than a sixth full. I suppose I was expecting more of a crowd, something along the lines of a high-school memorial assembly, as if Ben were the seventeen-year-old victim of a tragic accident and not a forty- year-old suicide.
As the minister plods through the program of murmured prayers and hymns, I try to identify some of the other mourners. There's Todd and Vince, as promised, along with a couple of other Guardians, a startlingly obese Chuck Hastings next to Brad Wickenheiser with home-dyed hair the colour of tar. Aside from Mrs. McAuliffe (a shrunken version of herself, inanimate and collapsed as a puppet after you pull out your hand), nobody looks particularly familiar. I search the rows for Carl. Though I know he's not here, I can't help feeling that if I look hard enough I'll find him.
The minister delivers the brief eulogy.
A sterile recitation of Ben's stalled resume: his "lifelong commitment" to his mother, his love of fantasy books and the "excitements of the imagination," the loss of his father. There is no reference to the surveillance he conducted from his attic roost, nor to the vacant house across the street he believed to be the devil's pied- à-terre in Grimshaw.
After the service, everyone files past Ben's mom, the old woman offering a hand to be clasped. Yet when Randy and I reach her, she blinks us into focus and touches our cheeks. I ask if I can come around to the house in the morning to look over Ben's legal papers or do whatever an executor is supposed to do.
"Come anytime, Trevor," she says, straightening my tie. "I'll make tea."
"I'll call first."
"If you like," she says, shrugging. "But I'll be there whether you call or not."
We take another cab down to the Old Grove. Ben's grave is next to his father's. The McAuliffe name engraved in stone at the head of both their places, their tombstones citing only their dates of birth and death, the latter events both at their own hands, whether counted as such on the official record or not. Even fewer have gathered for the burial than at the church, a clutch of shiverers shifting from foot to foot, the soft earth sucking at their shoes.
The minister is here again, though he does little more than run through a memorized "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" before they lower the casket into the ground.
"That's it," Randy says next to me, and when I turn to him I see quiet, clear-eyed tears that mix with the spitting rain so that, from the other side of the grave, he would appear merely in need of an umbrella. "That's it."
"It makes it real, I know. Seeing him go."
"Real? It's like I'm the one at the bottom of a hole. I can hardly breathe, man."
I guide Randy a few feet away to the shelter of a maple. The two of us stand there watching the others drift back toward their cars. Some look our way as they go, perhaps recognizing us from some prehistoric geography class or peewee hockey team. Only one looks not at us but at me.
My body remembers her before I do.
A woman my age wearing a lace-collared blouse and beneath it a skirt that displays the powerful legs I have always associated with fresh-air-and-fruit-pie farmers' wives. Almost certainly
a mom. Filling out her Sunday best with a few more pounds (welcome, to my eyes) than the day she bought it a couple of years back. A good-looking woman who belongs to a vintage I recognize (the same as mine), but not any particular person I know.
And yet, her eyes on me—friendly, but without invitation or promise—starts an immediate rush of desire. Not mere interest, either. Not any casual appraisal of a stranger's form, the kind of automatic sizing-up a man performs half a dozen times walking down a single city block. This has nothing to do with finding someone attractive. I smile uncertainly back at her and there it is: the almost forgotten clarity of lust. The only word for it. It is lust that races my breath into audible clicks, unlocks my knees and throws my hand out to Randy's shoulder to keep my balance.
"Is that Sarah?" I ask him. Randy looks over at the woman, her eyes now averted so that she stares into the dripping trees.
"I believe it is."
"Sarah. Good God."
"Look at you," Randy says. "All moony like it's grade nine all over again."
"It is," I say, and take a deep breath. "It is grade nine all over again."
I start over to her with my hand extended, but she doesn't take it, kissing me once on each cheek instead.
"They do it twice in the city, right?" she says.
"You've got all the bases covered."
She pulls back to take a full, evaluating look at me. "So this is how my first love has turned out."
"Must make you glad I wasn't your last."
"I don't know about that. This is Grimshaw. For women over thirty, men with a pulse who don't smack you around are objects of desire."
There is a whiff of divorce about her. The leeriness that comes from wondering if every kindness is a trick, coupled with the lonely's willingness to hear out even the most obvious lie to the end. She's tough. But it's a toughness that has been learned, a buffer against charm and premature hope.
"I'm sorry," she says, and for an absurd moment I think she's apologizing for our breaking up in grade twelve, before I realize she's speaking of Ben.
"Thank you. It's good that you're here."
She laughs. "I live three blocks from St. Andrew's. I'd say it's good that you're here."
"It's been a long time."
"Too bad it took something like this to bring you back."
"I loved the guy."
"I know you did. You all did."
"We went through ... we were best friends."
"I know."
She opens her arms and I step into them. My hands clasped around the strong trunk of her body, her hair a veil against the grey cold.
"You sure you're going to be okay?" she asks, pulling away sooner than I would like.
"I must look pretty wrecked."
"Just a little lost, that's all."
"Can I tell you something, Sarah? I am a little lost."
A pained smile works at the corners of her mouth. "It's strange. Hearing you say my name."
"I can say it again if you'd like."
"No, I'll remember just fine."
I'm doing it before I can stop myself, though I don't think there's much in me that wants me to stop digging in my wallet for my card.
"I have to help Ben's mom with some stuff," I say, clapping the card into Sarah's palm. "Are you in a position—that is, would you like to join me for dinner before I go? Lunch? A shot of tequila?"
Sarah looks down at my card as though it bears not a name and number but the false promise of a fortune cookie. We are paused like that—her reading and thinking, me watching her read and think—when I see the boy.
He is standing behind a tombstone at the crest of a rise maybe a couple of hundred yards away. An old maple sprouts from the hill's highest point, so that the boy is shaded from the day's already diminished light, leaving him an outline coloured in graphite. He stares at me in the fixed way of someone who has been staring for some time, and I have only now caught him at it.
"You can't be here," I whisper.
But I am, the boy whispers back.
"Trevor?" Sarah says, searching.
But I'm already starting up the rise toward him. A walk that loosens my knees into a wobbly jog. Clenched hands held in front of me as though prepared to wrap themselves around the boy's neck and start choking.
Trevor the Brave, the boy laughs.
My shoes skid out from under me on the wet sod, and for a second I pitch forward, knuckles punching off the ground to keep me up.
When I'm propped on my elbows and able to look again, the boy is gone.
I scramble up to the tombstone where he was standing. Search the descending slope on the other side for where he might be waiting for me. And instead of the boy, I find a man. Running into the scrub that borders the cemetery.
"Carl!"
I glance back to see Randy starting up the slope.
Behind him, her hand to her mouth, Sarah watches as though a parachute was failing to open. An unstoppable, fatal error taking place before her eyes.
* * *
MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 7
The Thurman house was no different in its construction than any of the other squat, no-nonsense residences it shared Caledonia Street with, two rows of Ontario red-brick built at the last century's turn for the town's first doctors, solicitors and engineers. So why did it stand out for us? What made it the one and only haunted house in Grimshaw for our generation? Its emptiness was part of the answer. Houses can be in poor repair, ugly and overgrown, but this makes them merely sad, not the imagined domicile of phantoms. Vacancy is an unnatural state for a still-habitable home, a sign of disease or threat, like a pretty girl standing alone at a dance.
But it hadn't always bee
n empty. This—knowing that real people had once occupied its cold and barren rooms—was what lent the place its sinister aura. This, and the implication that they had left. There was something wrong about a house people chose not to live in. Or something wrong about the last people who did.
Not that I recall thinking any of this as we made our way onto the Thurman property that night. All I was thinking wasn't a thought at all but a physical aversion that had to be fought off with each step, along with a murmur in my head that would have said, if it could speak aloud, something like Turn back. Or It's wrong that you're here. Or You are about to step from the world you know into one you don't want to know.
In short, I was afraid.
I think all of us wanted to stop, to sidle no farther along the thorny hedgerow that shielded us from the pale streetlight, the wan half moon. If one of us had said, "I think we should go," or merely turned and headed back toward the street, I believe the rest would have followed. But none of us said or did anything other than proceed along the side of the house, inching closer to the two tall windows set too close together like crossed eyes. Both fogged with dust, through which someone on the inside had long ago dragged a finger to spell fuckt against the glass.
I'm not sure we discussed the best way to get in. I suppose each of us assumed there would be a window left open or gaping cellar doors that would make it obvious. We never thought to try the front door.
"This is where he went," Ben whispered, and the sound of his voice reminded us how long we had gone without saying anything. From the time we gathered at Carl's apartment and made the three-block walk to stand opposite the McAuliffe house, looking into its warm interiors from which we had so often safely peered out at the Thurman place across the way, we had travelled in silence. It was a journey that required no more than ten minutes but felt much longer than that. The whole time all of us walking in a defeated pack, as though escaped prisoners who had decided freedom was too much work and were returning to our cells.
