The Guardians

He looked terribly afraid.

Isn't he pretty? Go on. Give him a kiss.

'You have to go,' the coach said, his voice raw from laughter. Laughter, I could see now, he'd been forced to perform.

'Not without you,' Carl said.

'You'l die if you stay.'

'Nobody's dying here.'

'Too late.' The coach showed his teeth again in that not-smile of his.

'Come with us,' I said.

'I can't leave now.'

'Why?'

'If you're here long enough—if you listen—he won't let you.'

'There's nobody here but us. It's just an empty house.'

'No such thing as an empty house.'

That's when the coach raised the gun. It had been in his hand the whole time, but it hung so loose, aimed at nothing but the dust bunnies at his feet, that we hadn't noticed it. He brought it level to his waist. Aimed it at us.

'He told me to hurt you,' he said.

The coach stuck the index finger of his left hand in his ear, as though blocking out the sound of a passing siren. And with his right hand he raised the revolver.

Screwed the end of its barrel into the other ear.

'But I'm not listening anymore.'

Carl started toward him first. And though I couldn't see his regret, his wish to fix what he'd been a part in breaking, his already enveloping grief, I knew that it was in Carl as much as it was in me, and that the coach saw it in both of us. Because, right at the end, he was his real self again. Not the boy's taiking dummy, but our guardian.

Fighting off the voice so loud in his head we could hear it too— Wait! Not yet! You don't want to be alone in here, do you? Don't you want to keep your boys close? —to push the revolver's barrel a half-inch deeper into his skul and pul the trigger.

[13]

At first, what is even stranger than seeing that it is Carl descending the stairs of the Thurman house and passing between us is the way he simply turns the bolt lock on the front door, puls it open and steps out onto the porch.

'I never knew you could open that thing,' Randy says. 'I never knew you could just walk out.'

Tracey tried to, I think. But the house wouldn't let her. From the threshold we peer out over a front lawn carpeted in leaves midway through their transformation from brittle yelows and oranges to black custard. And Carl squishing his boot prints into them as he walks to the sidewalk, where he faces us. Slips his hands into the pockets of his jeans and shudders at the night's chil.

'You faggots coming or not?' he says.

We folow him, equaling his brisk pace but not quite catching up. He stops at the railway tracks that cross Caledonia and starts left, crunching over the gravel that aprons the long, steel tongues. It is as it was before: Carl leading us into some nighttime adventure, a bit of badness we trusted him to guide us through, even if we knew it was not entirely safe. Driving too fast in his dad's LTD II with the headlights off Vandalism. Trespassing. Smoking homegrown possibly sprayed, he said, with angel dust or PCP or acid, evil- sounding supplements whose potential harms we had no clue of but did not ask about before inhaling.

In fact this was one of the places, hidden within the web of metal struts that buttress the tracks over our heads, the traffic of Erie Street passing in a tidal wash thirty feet below, where we would gather to smoke or pass one of Randy's father's Hustlers between ourselves. (I have just now the memory of a twelve- year-old Ben studying one of the centrefolds and, pointing at the complicated mechanics of the model's upturned hips, asking, 'Does the pee come out there, or there, or there?'

and none of us certain of the answer.) What's different is that, unlike then, it is now something of a struggle— and not only for me—to crabwalk up the cement slope of the trestle and into the weeds that have pushed through the cracks. By the time the three of us have found positions where there is limited risk of our sliding down onto the pavement below, we are panting like dogs.

'I hope your feelings won't be hurt,' Carl says eventualy, 'if I say that you both look like hel.'

'Funny thing to say. Coming from you,' Randy says.

'But I'm the junkie, remember? I'm not even supposed to be alive.'

'That's your excuse?'

'That and the fact I've gone three days without a shower.'

'So we smeled.'

If I didn't know better, I'd say Carl was the actor among us, not Randy. Of course Carl would be up for different parts: the mob hitman, the craggy roughneck, the retired boxer looking for one last bout to redeem himself There is the aura of brutal experience about Carl that would be useful to the camera. He is lean too, his face puled back over hard cheekbones and chin. The years, however harsh, have left him with a mournful handsomeness.