The Guardians

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 stil in there? You saw something new last night?'

'I watched. Stayed up til 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 hil 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 tel the police about it.'

'As if they're going to listen to me.'

'Why wouldn't they? You're a witness.'

'Not realy. 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 al 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 folowed 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 felow 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 stil 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 chiling in al the broken-down bastions of the divine, as though it wil be here, and not in the indifferent, thrumming city, that the final wrestling of goods and evils wil take place. And it won't be as showy as Revelation promised either: no beast rising from the sea, no serpent to tel seductive lies. When the reckoning takes place it wil be quiet. And like al the bad done in Grimshaw, it wil be known by many but spoken of by none.