The Guardians

The boy.

The house.

The last of these most of al because it alone is waiting for us. Ready to see us stand on the presumed safety of weed-cracked sidewalk as we had as schoolchildren, daring each other to see who could look longest through its windows without blinking or running away.

For twenty-four years this had been Ben's job. Now it would be ours.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 2

There were four of us.

Ben, Carl, Randy and me. Grimshaw Guardians al. Hockey players on the high-school squad that traveled the county's gravel roads to do battle against the vilainous Cougars of Milverton, cheating Rams of Listowel, cowardly Sugar Kings of Elmira. We were just sixteen years old the one and only season we played with the seniors, but we were decent enough—and the school smal enough—to make the team. The only boys among just-turned men.

Randy:

A featherweight winger looping skilfuly—if a little pointlessly—in front of the other team's net. It always seemed that he liked to skate more than score. Sometimes, Randy would forget that there were others playing against him. Kids who wished to see him fail, to crumple to his knees and never get up again. It was usualy a look of puzzled disappointment, not pain, that I would read on his face when he limped to the bench folowing these punishments.

Why? his eyes would ask as he took his place at the end of the bench, rubbing the charley horse out of his thigh.

Why would someone do that? I was just having fun.

Carl:

Short, but solid as an elm stump. Hair he left long so that it waved, black as a pirate flag, as he skated. Carl was the Guardians' unpredictable pugilist, a rarely played fourth-liner who would skate up to a kid who had nothing to do with the play at hand—and, often, against whom no grudge was held—and commence a windmiling of fists into the poor felow's face.

Who knew if Carl would have been the fighter he was without the dark eyes and drooping smile that conveyed unintended menace? How less inclined to serve up knuckle sandwiches—and, later, less susceptible to needle and pil—if his dad had been another kind of man, one who didn't leave and never return?

Sometime late in the third period of the first game of the Guardians' season there was a bench-clearing brawl. It was an away game against the Exeter Bobcats, a team whose only real talent was for medieval hand-to-hand combat. We knew things were about to get nasty when their coach started tapping the shoulders of players on his bench and pointing at us. Then, with a colective whoop, they stormed over the boards and set upon us, their fans sending a voley of scalding coffee cups over our heads.

I mention this because, in my experience, who you first go to help in a riot is as sure a test of true alegiance as any I know.

So who did I rush to that night to prevent a Bobcat from pounding his face into the ice? I went to Randy, because he was my friend. And because he was squealing for help.

' Trev! Carl! Ben!'

And al of us came.

Once we'd thrown Randy's attacker off him we were able to form a circle and hold our own. In fact, we ended up faring better than many of our older teammates, who left Exeter that night with split cheeks and teeth in their pockets.

On the bus ride home we, the youngest Guardians, were permitted to sit at the back, an acknowledgment of our success on the battlefield. I recal us looking at each other as we roled out of the parking lot, unable to hold the giddy smiles off our faces. Which started the laughing. We laughed three-quarters of an hour through a snowstorm, and though we expected someone to tel us to shut our mouths or they'd shut them for us at any second, they never did.

Ben:

Our Zen mascot of a backup goalie. Because Vince Sproule, our starter, was eighteen and the best stopper in the county, Ben almost never saw ice time, which was fine with him. His proper place was at the end of the bench anyway. Mask off, hands resting in his lap, offering contemplative nods as we came and went from our shifts, as though the blessings of a vow-of-silence monk.

Ben was the sort of gentle-featured, unpimpled kid (he made you think pretty before pushing the thought away) who would normaly have invited the torment of bulies, especialy on a team composed of boys old enough to coax actual beards from their chins. But they left Ben alone.

I think he was spared because he was so plainly odd. It was the authenticity of his strangeness that worked as a shield when, in another who was merely different, it would have attracted the worst kind of attention. They liked Ben for this. But they kept their distance from him because of it too.

Trevor (Me):

A junk-goal god. Something of a floater, admittedly. A dipsy-doodling centre known for his soft hands (hands that now have trouble pouring milk).

There was, at sixteen, the whisperings of scouts knowing who I was. Early in the season the coach had a talk with my parents, urging them to consider the benefits of a colege scholarship in the States. Who knows? Maybe Trev had a chance of going straight to pro.

Of course, this sort of thing was said about more than it ever happened to. Me included. Not that I wasn't good enough—we'l never know if I was or wasn't.