The Guardians

us everyday sinners, you can just tell.

But I've come to learn that evil's primary talent is for disguise: not letting you hear the cloven hooves scratching on the welcome mat is how the devil gets invited inside. It's how he can become your friend.

I was thinking this, or something like this, when we puled over to the curb and asked the coach if he wanted a ride home, and he stopped to look into Carl's Ford.

At us.

Carl was at the wheel and Ben in the passenger seat, with me on my own in the back. We had been driving around, arguing over the costs of doing something versus nothing in discovering the truth of the coach's role in Heather Langham's death. That is, I was arguing with Carl and Ben, and they mostly ignored me, studying the houses we cruised by as though considering buying one.

'Where is the freckly fuck?' was al Carl would say every few minutes, referring to Randy, who wasn't home when we caled.

'We can't do anything without him,' I said. 'We have to be together on it.'

But Carl and Ben just kept looking at the houses. They made me feel like I was riding in a baby seat, watching the backs of their heads as though they were my parents.

'There he is,' Carl said. He took his foot off the gas and the Ford roled on, gently as a canoe after taking the paddles in.

'Who?'

Because they could both see the answer to this on the street ahead, they ignored me. It forced me to slide over between them and peer out the windshield.

The coach. Walking along the sidewalk with his back to us, a stiffening of his stride that suggested he'd heard a car slow behind him. This was his street. A street we had driven up more than any other over the last half-hour. Carl and Ben had been hoping to come across the coach making his way home. And now that they had, they drew even with him and puled over to the curb.

He stopped. I don't know if he knew who it was before he turned to see, but it seemed there was a half second's pause as he gathered himself.

'What's up, guys?' he asked, glancing up the street toward his house a half block on.

'Need a ride?' Carl asked.

The coach squinted. We knew where he lived. Why would he need a ride? So: this was an invitation. And not necessarily a complicated one. Boys on the team came to him al the time. They told him things, sought advice. There were always Guardians wanting to hang out with him, asking if he needed a ride.

'You think I'm that out of shape?' he said.

'We're just driving around. Kiling time before practice.'

'You want something to eat? My wife makes this baked spaghetti thing that's not half bad. I'l be eating it the rest of the week if I don't get some help.'

'Thanks.' Carl glanced around the car at Ben, back at me. 'We're not too hungry, I guess.'

The coach stood there. Unmoving except for his breath leaking out in feathery plumes.

'How about it?' Ben asked.

'I've got some time,' the coach said, puling back the sleeve of his coat to show the watch on his wrist, though he didn't look at its face. 'A little spin? Why not?'

Less than two hours before we had driven up to the coach on his walk home, we'd had another hot box meeting in the school's parking lot. It's hard to recal who said what, or the positions we started out defending (I think I changed my mind half a dozen times during each circling of Randy's joint). What was agreed on by al was that something had to be done. We alone knew Miss Langham was murdered, the where and how it was done. Maybe, if this was all we knew, we would have found a way to justify trying to forget about it. But the thing was this: along with the where and how she was kiled, we now felt sure we knew the who.

Why not go to the police? A good question. As good today as the afternoon we asked it in Carl's Ford, coughing it out through the blue haze. Why not? There were some halfway reasonable answers to this, and we voiced them at the time:

The police would never accept our slim evidence of Ben's nighttime sighting.

We had found and moved and bled on and buried her body, which meant the odds were greater that we had done it than anyone else.

Pointing a finger the coach's way too early would only alow for his escape.

But the real reason was one none of us spoke aloud.

This was our test. Heather Langham's memory had been adopted as our responsibility.

It was Ben who was the last to speak. Last, because he used words almost as powerful as his reminder of friendship that had led us into a haunted house. Words that have, in different contexts, ushered soldiers onto kiling fields.

'We need to find the truth,' he said. 'We have to. For Heather. For justice.'

Truth. Justice. These were the opened doors through which we saw a way to save Heather Langham in death as we had longed to save her in life.

We talked about hockey at first. Or the coach did, repeating the ways we would have to exploit the weak links on Seaforth's defence. He sat next to me in the back but spoke directly to the window, as if rehearsing a speech. He reminded me of a dog who didn't like cars: sitting straight and stil, but every muscle tense as he waited for the machine to stop and the doors to open so he could leap out.