Heroes Read Online Free PDF Page B

article was going to be the easy part.
    If genuinely confounded as to the reason why, Bayle nonetheless knew that something in his life was seriously amiss, it being simply too large a leap in lifestyle from committed young thinker to getting-older-all-the-time idler — thinking, more than one booze-bruised night, whether he himself should be committed — to explain away his change in character as something like the mere sowing of a few late-twenty-something oats. Until recently, work, and particularly his study of Empiricus, had never been anything less than Bayle’s chief reason for getting up each day; holidays, for example, never a period of reduced-load hollow ritualizing and increased socializing, but always a time of increased production, an opportunity to do more of all he ever really wanted to do.
    But now Bayle was up to double-digits when it came to the number of times he’d given his advisor, Smith, a definite date when he would finally defend his thesis as best as he apathetically could and get on with getting on with his career and spreading the wise word of Empiricus and all that the old Greek sceptically did not stand for. Bayle more than once wondered why he just couldn’t be sensible about the whole thing like he knew his old man would have.
    For thirty-two years Walter Bayle put in his forty hours a week at Ontario Hydro because it paid the bills. End of story. What he lived for, though, were his Maple Leafs, Bayle’s father’s love of Toronto’s home-town team making its way into nearly every life lesson the old man sent Bayle’s way.
    â€œSee, a family is lot like a hockey team, Peter,” he’d tell thirteen-year-old Bayle sent home from school early with a black eye and a note for his parents. “Everyone in the family has to look out for the other guy and make sure they’re doing okay. So when those older boys at school were giving Patty a hard time and calling her names because she wouldn’t talk to them, then it’s your job to make sure that your teammate — your sister — is all right. You understand?”
    Bayle scratched his head. “So you mean you’re not mad at me?”
    â€œMad at you, hell,” his father said, tearing the teacher’s note in two, “I’m proud of you, son. What do you say we round up your mum and Patty and see what’s the flavour of the month down at Baskin-Robbins?”
    Maybe because just as soon as he could crawl onto his father’s knee to watch the Leafs on T.V. Bayle was a devoted hockey fan too, he never shared Patty’s irritation at their father’s exclamation to their mother at the conclusion of every Friday night’s meatloaf supper, “Well, it’s Miller Time, Ann, and ’Hockey Night in Canada’ is twenty-four hours away and counting and I think the Leafs are going to get lucky this weekend.” That Miller beer wasn’t sold in Canada for the majority of the years Bayle and his sister were subject to their father’s week-ending mantra only infuriated Patty further. Bayle tried in vain to convince her that maybe she didn’t understand their father because she wasn’t a Maple Leaf fan herself. Patty replied in rare, brother-bashing form that although Bayle was in university now and her older brother, he still had the very real capacity to be a real idiot sometimes.
    â€œHe works hard,” Bayle said. “Just because he’s not a twelfth-century mystic doesn’t mean that what he does isn’t important.”
    â€œDo you ever hear what I say? Do you? I told you,
I
could care less what he did just as long as
he
cared about it. There are peasant women in Guatemala who work with their hands for months — for months — to make one piece of —”
    â€œThere you go again.”
    â€œThere I go again what?”
    â€œGuatemalan peasants. Christ, Patty, why does everything have to be so romantic