The Guardians

Nothing happening. I'm almost faling asleep—like a kind of double sleep, because it's a dream, right? And then, there's . . . something.'

'Something?'

'I don't even realy see it. I just notice that something is different. Something that's moving.'

'What was it?'

'I told you, I didn't realy see it.'

'The thing you didn't see. What'd it look like?'

'Like the shadow of a tree, maybe. But not.'

'So it had feet? This tree?'

'It wasn't a tree.'

'A person, then.'

'I guess.'

I looked to the door. I was more than ready for Miss Langham.

'I don't think it was alone,' Ben said.

'There were two people?'

'I got the idea it was holding on to someone.'

'And where'd it take them?'

'Round the side of the Thurman house. It was scary, Trev. Seriously.'

'Good thing it was just a dream.'

'I told you. I'm not sure it was.'

'What's wrong with you? You okay?'

'I... I think . . . you . . .'

'You look like you're going to puke.'

I remember puling my feet out from under his chair, just in case.

Ben took a deep breath. Swalowed. 'You need to hear the fucked-up part.'

'Okay.'

'Like I said, I couldn't realy see. But I could feel who it was. The person it was carrying into the house.'

'Into the house? I thought you said it just went round—'

'Good mor- ning!'

Not Heather. A buxom lady in support hose writing her name on the blackboard. We'd seen her before, doing the same thing at the front of our math, geography, history classes.

'Where's Miss Langham?' I asked without raising my hand. Then, after not getting an answer: 'Where's Heather?'

The supply teacher kept writing her name. In fact, she slowed down to buy the extra second required to come up with an answer to the question she knew was coming next. A question that came from Randy.

'Is she okay?'

The supply teacher put down her chalk. Thumbed her glasses back up the slippery bridge of her nose.

'Miss Langham is unavailable at this time,' she said.

And before we could ask anything else, she was tapping her baton and teling us to open our sheet music to 'The Maple Leaf Forever.'

Something else was worth noting from later that afternoon. A good deed.

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.