The Guardians by Andrew Pyper Read Free Book Online

nose.
        "Miss
Langham is unavailable at this time," she said.
        And
before we could ask anything else, she was tapping her baton and telling us to
open our sheet music to "The Maple Leaf Forever."
      
            
        Something
else was worth noting from later that afternoon. A good deed.
        We
went to visit Paul Schantz in the Cedarfield Seniors
        Home
as part of a "community outreach" program the Guardians' board of
directors thought up, the idea being that team players would go to visit kids
with cancer or other fans who couldn't make the games, and someone from the Beacon would be there to take a picture for the next day's paper. It didn't
turn out that way. In fact, Randy, Ben, Carl and I were the only ones to sign
up.
        According
to the scrawled letter he sent the coach, Paul Schantz was a Guardian himself
"during the war" (meaning the First World War, I figured out
when I did the math). When we arrived, he'd been wheeled out to meet us wearing
a team jersey so big he looked like a wrinkly dwarf inside of it. Then we
pushed him to his room, too small for the five of us. We wanted to leave after
two minutes.
        "You
have any kids?" Carl attempted at one point.
        Paul
pinched his chin. "I'd say we had eighteen over the years." He was
recovering from a stroke, so it was hard to know exactly what he said. Then he
explained that he and his wife had been foster parents.
        "You
ever miss them?" Ben asked.
        His
face clouded over. "All of them. Except one."
        "A
bad apple."
        "There's
bad. Then there's worth."
        "Worth?
Worth in what?"
         "Worse.
Worse ! " He fought to get this out, leaving his chin white with
spit. "There's always something worse than you think. Closer than you
think."
        That
was about it. One by one my friends excused themselves to visit the men's room
and didn't come back. Until only I was left.
        "It's
been good to meet you, Mr. Schantz," I said, backing toward the door.
"And I hope we can bring the cup home this year, just like—"
        "There's
some places you should never go."
        It was
a strange thing to say, if in fact he said it. But I remember the moment not
for the words I thought I heard him mumble, but for the look on the old man's
face. A kind of insane clarity.
        He
was talking about the Thurman house. I couldn't say why I was so sure, other
than the look of him. He'd been just this withered stranger, his legs painful-
looking sticks on the footrests, yet now he was sitting forward, his eyes alive
and searching.
        Then
he collapsed back into his wheelchair. I was wrong: he wasn't reading my mind.
As I slipped out, I heard him mutter, "Sometimes I wet my back."
         I
bet, I thought as I made my way toward Ben, Randy and Carl, who stood
waiting at the end of the hall. Doesn't mean I have to be there the next
time you do.
        But
before I reached them, I heard the old man's words a different way.
         Sometimes
the dead come back .
     
            
        I
already mentioned that my father worked for the utilities commission. A union rep
with his own office in the basement of Municipal Hall, back in the days when
offices had ashtrays and a bottle of whisky in the bottom drawer and windowless
doors that could lock shut. He didn't work too hard.
        But
he often brought stories home with him. Juicy stuff, as far as Grimshaw went.
Battles between neighbours over the staking of property lines. The mayor owing
five grand in parking tickets. Noise complaints against an apartment behind
Roma Pizza, from which a woman's shrieking orgasms (or what my dad called
"the sounds of a cat in heat") awakened dozens in the night.
        Because
they shared a filing system, police gossip would also flow through the basement
of Municipal Hall. Usually, this side of my father's nightly news was sad more
than thrilling. Domestic knockabouts, drunk-driving