The Guardians

The train slows as we approach the town limits. The hardened fields yield to weedy outskirts, the low-rent acres of half-hearted development: the trailer park, the go-kart track, the drive-in movie screen with 'See U Next Summer!' on the marquee (a promise that, by the vandalized look of things, has not been kept for a dozen years or more). Then the more permanent claims. Shaggy backyards crisscrossed with laundry lines. A school with paper witches taped to the windows. Dumpsters left open- mouthed, choking on black plastic.

Within a minute, we are roling into the old part of town at a walking pace. It gives us a chance to study the Inventory Blowout! offerings at what used to be Krazy Kevin's car lot, where Randy's dad worked, to catch a whiff of the fumes rising from the Erie Burger's exhaust. There is even a welcome party of sorts. Three kids smoking against the wal of the station, giving us the finger.

When the train stops I am alone in getting to my feet, hauling my bag off the rack and stepping down onto the platform. The cars already moving again, easing into the west end of town, where they wil pass the high school, the courthouse before speeding out onto the tobacco flats. Al places I'd rather view through double-paned glass. But now I'm here. The Grimshaw air. The midday moon staring down, bug-eyed and bored.

A gust blows a Big Gulp cup against my leg. Dust devils swirl over the platform, and within them, the laughing voice again.

Welcome home.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 4

Randy was Howdy Doody-freckled, knob-elbowed and goofy-haired, but girls liked him. It was hard to know precisely what charms he possessed that got him into perfumed back seats and onto darkened basement futons more frequently than the rest of us. The easy answer would be his 'sense of humour,' which was how most of the girls who came and went, unblamingly, through Randy's teens would have explained it. But I'm not so sure. Yes, Randy was funny. But he was more of a joke than a comedian. Someone to be next to and feel that here was a felow who needn't be taken seriously. I think this is what girls saw in Randy, and stil do. He made the idea of two people being with each other for a time so much simpler than it was with anyone else.

Take Carl, for instance. Girls liked him too. In his case, it was a combination of good looks and a reluctance to speak that was often mistaken for an air of mystery.

But Carl was restless. For him, female affection was something to gorge on, swiftly and roughly, then leave behind without clearing his plate. His habit was to break up with his girlfriends without teling them, refusing to return their cals or meet their eyes in the school halways. Unlike Randy, Carl made girls cry.

Ben, on the other hand, mostly did without. Not that there weren't sideways opportunities offered to him. Quieter girls, too studious or artsy to attract more aggressive attention. Instead, they made themselves available to Ben (in camouflaged ways), and he went about his business. And what was Ben's business? Living in his head. Reading dragon and time-travel novels. He wrote poetry. Stranger stil, he read poetry.

But what Ben did more than anything else was watch. Our backup goalie, folowing the play from the bench like a shoulder-padded Buddha. A silhouette in his attic bedroom, staring at the house across from his.

Of the four of us, I was the 'married man.' Funny to think how true this was at the time. And how, for the more than twenty years since I last saw Sarah Mulgrave, I've been about as far from married as a man can get.

The obvious explanation for this would be the Thurman house. It messed al of us up in different ways.

Addiction. Professional failure. Emotional amputations. For me, it was never being able to love—or be loved by—a woman again.

Personaly, I favour an even more sentimental explanation: Sarah was meant to be mine. And the wound I am to bear is to have had her taken from me.

Even today, I whisper 'Sarah Mulgrave' and she is with me. A wrinkled nose when she laughed. Hair the colour of a new penny. A mouth that articulated as much when listening as when speaking: sharply etched, blushed lips, amused creases at the corners. And green eyes. Lovely in their colour but lovelier in what they promised.

Sarah came to al the Guardians games, and though this earned her inclusion among the 'puck bunnies' who fawned over Carl and the older guys on the team, the fact is she had little interest in sports. She would never have shown up to sit at the top of the stands, clutching a hot chocolate beneath the maniacal, hockey- stick-munching beaver of the Akins Lumber bilboard, were it not to shout for number 12. Me.

Afterward, if my dad wasn't using the car, I would drive her home. The last of the wood-paneled Buick wagons. Hideous but handy. Because on those evenings we would take a spin out of town. Spook ourselves by switching the headlights off and flying over the night roads. Knowing that no harm could come to us because we were young—not children anymore, but stil immune to what grimly went by the name of the Real World. The car hurtling into darkness. A foreplay of screams.

We would slow only once we passed the 'Welcome to the Vilage of Harmony' sign. Park in an orchard of black walnut trees. The pulsing silence of a kiled engine.

It was often cold out. But the shared heat of our skin fought off the chil until we lay side by side, our breath visible exclamations against the windows. My dad would take measurements of the gas he left in the tank, so in heating the car, we had to weigh the risk of discovery against the fear of frostbite. The result was sporadic, short hits of warmth from the front vents. To avoid getting up and baring my ass to those who might drive by, I learned to turn the keys in the ignition with my toes.

Sarah's dad was friendly but strict. He liked me, and was even prepared to look the other way when his daughter was returned home an hour past curfew, her cheeks flushed, smeling faintly of cherry brandy. But the unspoken deal between us was that he was permitting these liberties on the condition that, sooner rather than later, I would propose to Sarah. He married Sarah's mom when they were both only a couple of years older than we were then. Teen weddings in Grimshaw were far from uncommon. Many kids knew what their professional lives were going to be by that time, the house they would one day inherit. What was the point in waiting?

It was a plan I was happy to entertain myself. I had no sense, as Carl and Randy had (and maybe Ben too, though who could tel?), that we were too young to judge who was right for us, that more sophisticated, realized women awaited us in our post-Grimshaw lives. There was nothing I could imagine wanting beyond Sarah anyway. I would marry her, just as her father wished. Why not? Sarah and I would look out for each other and let our lives, long and benign, wash over us.