The Guardians

'I don't realy think about it.'

'It was tragic. What happened. But maybe not just for, you know, those involved. You were a pretty good sniper yourself.'

'It doesn't—'

'Who knows who would have noticed you. You could have—'

'I told you, I don't think about it. I do my best not to think about a lot of things.'

'Sure. I can understand that,' Todd says, nodding as though at an insight into his own condition he'd long been blind to.

Then something happens that delivers a sharp stab of jealousy: our waitress, the pretty referee, walks up and gives Todd a kiss on the cheek.

'Don't you just love this guy?' she says before slipping back into the crowd, and though it's just more waitress banter, it's obvious that she does love him. Lucky Todd Flanagan. Tina Uxbridge might have fooled around on him a few hundred times before dumping him. But if this referee is Todd's new girlfriend, he's bounced back quite nicely.

Todd is grinning like a monkey. 'You remember Tracey.'

'Tracey?'

'She was a lot smaler then.'

Then I get it. The bundle of squawking joy Tina used to bring to the Guardians games.

'That's your daughter?'

'You fancy-suit, big-city guys. They al as sharp as you?'

'She was just a baby.'

'Stil is.'

'Wel, I have to thank you, Todd. You've just made me feel incredibly old.'

'C'mon. You didn't need me for that, did you?'

I carry on to the men's room, and when I return Todd and Vince have joined Randy at our table, a fresh pitcher already between them. I suppose it's al the beer that helps in creating the sense that the four of us stil have so much in common, when realy al we talk about is how lousy the hockey got on TV after they started giving

'these Russian pretty boys five milion to fake a concussion every time the wind blows' (as Vince puts it), our women troubles, the body's first betrayals that attend the lapsing of its forty- year warranty.

Or maybe I'm wrong in that. Maybe we are stil friends, and I've just forgotten what they are.

Eventualy, Todd and Vince announce they have to go home and get some sleep. Todd has his mail rounds in the morning and Vince has to replace the brakes on a minivan at the garage he co-owns before they have to put on Sunday clothes for Ben's funeral in the afternoon. Yet even then we stay on for one more pitcher to add to the previous half-dozen or so, al served by Tracey Flanagan, Todd's baby girl.

When we finaly head out into the night, the air has cooled several degrees. I stand with Randy on the sidewalk, deciding which way to go. Around us, the town has been sharpened by the cold, the old storefronts grey and looming.

The two of us shake off a chil. It's the shared notion that for al the time we were inside Jake's Pool 'n' Sports, in the deceptive warmth of light and company, Grimshaw was waiting for us.

I think we were hoping to find it gone. Torn down to make way for a triplex, or finaly razed for safety reasons, leaving only an empty lot behind. We don't entertain these possibilities aloud, in any case. Once we'd paid our tab at Jake's, it was stil only nine, and Randy wanted a cigarette, so I joined him on a tipsy wander through the streets, taking the long way back to the Queen's.

Neither of us acknowledged it when we turned the corner onto Caledonia Street. We started up the long slope toward the hospital, noting how remarkably little had changed about the houses, the modest gardens, even the mailboxes lashed to the streetlight poles to thwart kids from tipping them over. When the McAuliffe house comes into view we automaticaly cross the street to be on the same side it's on. We pause in front for a moment, gazing up at Ben's window.

And then, unstoppably, we turn to folow what was his line of sight for most of his waking adult life.

It's stil unoccupied, judging from the black, uncurtained windows, the wood trim bristled with mildew, the knee-high seedlings dotting the yard. Nevertheless, given the little care paid to it over the last thirty or more years, the Thurman house looks reasonably solid, testimony to the stone foundation and brick work of its builders over a century ago. Even the headless rooster stil tops the attic gable.

'Why don't they just tear it down?' I ask.

'Can't. It's privately owned.'

'How do you know?'

'Mrs. McAuliffe told me. It's been handed down and handed down. The owners are out-of-towners. Never even visit.'

'Why not sel?'

'Maybe they're waiting for an upturn in the market.'

'In the Grimshaw market?'

'I wonder if it misses him,' Randy says, stubbing his cigarette out under the heel of his shoe. 'Ben must have been its only friend.'