The Guardians

competition.

There was nothing for most of them to do, but they stayed anyway. An only partly hidden excitement in the way they scuffed their shoes over the cracked sidewalk and rested their hands on their belts, knuckling the handles of holstered guns. It was a smal town. You didn't get this sort of thing too often. You didn't get it ever.

We stood together, watching. Unseen behind the curtains in the front room of the McAuliffe house across the way. Our noses grazing the diaphanous material that smeled of recently burned bacon and, deeper stil, a succession of dinners scooped out of the deep fryer. When the paramedics and bearded man in a suit who must have been the coroner finaly emerged from the house with the black bags laid out on gurneys—one, and then the smaler other—we held our breaths. A gulp of french fry, onion ring and chicken finger that, to this day, is the taste of loss.

We remember al this, though stil not everything.

And some of the things we remember may not have happened at al.

[1]

The cal comes in the middle of the night, as the worst sort do.

The phone so close I can read the numbers on its green- glowing face, see the swirled fingerprint I'd left on its message window. A simple matter of reaching and grabbing. Yet I lie stil. It is my motor-facility impairment (as one of my fussily unhelpful physicians cals it) that pins me for eighteen rings before I manage to hook the receiver onto my chest.

'I don't even know what time it is. But it's late, isn't it?'

A familiar voice, faintly slurred, helium-pitched between laughter and sobs. Randy Toler. A friend since high school—a time that even Randy, on the phone, cals 'a milion years ago.' And though it was only twenty-four years, his estimate feels more accurate.

As Randy apologizes for waking me, and blathers on about how strange he feels 'doing this,' I am trying to think of an understanding but firm way of saying no when he finaly gets around to asking for money. He has done it before, folowing the unfairly lost auditions, the furniture-stealing girlfriends, the vodka-smoothed rough patches of his past tough-luck decade. But in the end Randy surprises me when he takes a rattling, effortful breath and says, 'Ben's dead, Trev.'

Trev?

This is my first, not-quite-awake thought. Nobody's caled me that since high school, including Randy.

'How?'

'A rope,' Randy says. 'Rope?'

'Hanging. I mean, he hung himself. In his mom's house.'

'He never went outside. Where else could he have done it?'

'I'm saying he did it in his room. Up in the attic where he'd sit by the window, you know, watching.'

'Did his mom find him?'

'It was a kid walking by on the street. Looked up to see if that weird McAuliffe guy was in the window as usual, and saw him swinging there.'

I'm quiet for a while after this. We both are. But there is our breath being traded back and forth down the line. Reminders that we aren't alone in recaling the details of Ben's room, a place we'd spent a quarter of our youth wasting our time in. Of how it would have looked with the grown-up Ben in it, attached to the oak beam that ran the length of the ceiling.

'Maybe it's for the best,' Randy says finaly.

'Take that back.'

'I didn't—it's just—'

'Take that stupid bulshit back.' '

'Fine. Sorry.'

Randy has led the kind of life that has made him used to apologizing for saying the wrong thing, and the contrite tone he uses now is one I've heard after dozens of defaulted IOUs and nights spent sleeping on my sofa between stints in rented rooms. But then, in little more than a whisper, he says something else.

'You know it's sort of true, Trev.'

He's right. It is sort of true that with the news of Ben McAuliffe's suicide there came, among a hundred other reactions, a shameful twinge of relief.

Ben was a friend of mine. Of ours. A best friend, though I hadn't seen him in years, and spoke to him only slightly more often. It's because he stayed behind, I suppose. In Grimshaw, our hometown, from which al of us but Ben had escaped the first chance we had. Or maybe it's because he was sick. Mentaly il, as even he caled himself, though sarcasticaly, as if his mind was the last thing wrong with him. This would be over the phone, on the rare occasions I caled. (Each time I did his mother would answer, and when I told her it was me caling her voice would rise an octave in the false hope that a good chat with an old friend might lift the dark spel that had been cast on her son.) When we spoke, neither Ben nor I pretended we would ever see each other again. We might as wel have been separated by an ocean, or an even greater barrier, as impossible to cross as the chasm between planets, as death. I had made a promise to never go back to Grimshaw, and Ben could never leave it. A pair of traps we had set for ourselves.

Despite this, we were stil close. There was a love between us too. A sexless, stilborn love, yet just as fierce as the other kinds. The common but largely undocumented love between men who forged their friendship in late childhood.

But this wasn't the thing that bridged the long absence that lay between our adult lives. What connected Ben