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 ]
I N 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 résumé: 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.
“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 ]
I N 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 résumé: 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.
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