As a Thief in the Night (3 page)

Olyvia Mignon was a different story altogether. The oldest of the three, she had fallen in love at age nineteen with a vineyard worker and as a result had split bitterly with her father. As a young violinist full of promise, and a bright, even gifted, student she had been accepted into several of the country's most prestigious music programs. However, after her mother's death her father had expected her to take on the family's maternal duties and put music aside. This he did with a stunning blindness, not only as to her questionable ability as a homemaker, but also failing to account for her inclination to rebel against the role; for Olyvia had a streak in her that in its lighter manifestations was a sort of playful rebelliousness, but that at its semi-regular peaks approached utter defiance—sometimes seemingly for its own sake—of anything attempting to fetter her intoxication with her own freedom and recklessness.  And so, at nineteen, in the face of her father's often raging disapproval, and believing she was deeply in love, she had played her last recital, Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major, and then disappeared on the ferry the next morning. She told herself she was running away for the sake of art, and for love, and that these were the things worth running away for. No one heard from her for three months. Then, on the night she was to elope, she had run off with another man, and into another of what would be many short-lived relationships. In fact, Olyvia had gone through a period of promiscuity in her twenties that had become something of a legend in Walpurgis, but she was hardly one to blush behind it, and instead wore it as a kind of badge of defiance and honesty around those that would turn their noses up at her.

That Olyvia was gifted was undeniable, but she was also, to this day, a stunningly beautiful woman. Now, at thirty-eight, streaks of gray had already appeared in her rich black hair—highlights that she either enjoyed on some level or did not care about. Her skin, perhaps her most remarkable feature, was soft and olive colored. Like her sister, she too was tall and often carried herself at her full height in such a way that gave one the impression that she had just ended an argument in which she had spoken her strongest convictions. Yet her movements were not rigid or unyielding; instead her body, particularly her hips and shoulders, moved with a sensuality that seemed to outline her defiant nature, as if her flesh and demeanor had melted into a cohesion of opposites that, thought of abstractly, could never have meshed, but that had, in her, found rhythm. She had full lips and brown eyes with slight wrinkles at their corners, the only visible mark of her reckless past. She had two tattoos, one of a vine that crept up her foot onto her thin ankle, and the other, the small image of a lion, on her stomach.

Since she had moved to Walpurgis she had worked as a costume director and designer at the University theatre company, and was, to the collective sigh of her sisters, currently having an affair with the director of the company's production of
The Master Builder
.

Girls chased the boys they liked around the schoolyard trying to kick them in the balls. Yet none of them chased him. He stood to the side, watching. Finally, he made his way into the fray. He purposely altered his course as he ran to cross the paths of the girls in hopes of catching their attention and becoming a target for their legs and feet. None followed him. Turning his head from side to side, he stepped to the edge of the circle, and then outside it.

The west wall of the school was made up of a series of cubbyholes that looked in through windows on the primary classrooms and down and out over a large field that had two small hills on its west and east sides. Danny Hadron and Chad Lambda were reading comic books in one of the cubbyholes. Posing nonchalance after his departure from the chase Ezra sat down beside Danny. Hadron, looking up from his Daredevil comic, nudged him: "Did you get in trouble?" he asked.

"Sort of, I guess," Ezra said without looking at him. "You?"

"Yeah. My mom said that I'm not allowed in my parents' room anymore, and if anything like that happens again, I'll get the wooden spoon. And no friends allowed over either."

"For how long?"

"She said infinitely or something. What did your aunt do?"

"She talked to me on the way home about sex and stuff and said that there's nothing wrong with those type of magazines as long as the women are treated respectfully. But she said I was going to be punished for invading your parents' privacy."

Hadron shrugged his shoulders. Then, remembering something, he smiled at Ezra.
  "There was one they didn't find... In my night table, remember? Under my car magazines."

Ezra looked to his side in disbelief: "Is it still there?"

"Nah, I gave it to Todd. I told him he could keep it at his house for a few days. But he had to promise to bring it back."

"You brought it to school?" Ezra asked in shock.

"Yeah. But I hid it in my bag until I gave it to him."

Chad Lambda, smaller, mouse-like, never looked up. Lambda was always reading.
  Once, in the fifth grade, Mrs. Willins had been giving an algebra lesson and Ezra had seen his friend hiding his
Bruno and Boots
novel behind the heavy math textbook. Mrs. Willins noticed it at the same time, took the textbook she was teaching from in both hands, raised it above her head, and hurled it at Chad across three rows of students. Her weapon crashed into his text, the much more important book behind it, and finally into his fragile chest. Ezra watched, at first with shock, but then with the twisted pleasure children get from seeing their classmates get in trouble.

It was Monday, but on the Saturday just passed Ezra had spent the night at Danny Hadron's house. Recently, through some mischief, or by some whisper he had stolen, Danny had come to know where the materials that supplemented Mr. and Mrs. Hadron's sexual appetite were hidden.
  During the day he had let Ezra in on the secret, and a plan was formulated.

Well past midnight the two boys had sat with their ears against the wall that connected Danny's room with his parents'. When the long anticipated signal—Mr. Hadron's snoring—was finally heard, Danny snuck into his parents' room on hands and knees while Ezra waited in the darkened bedroom. Danny moved quietly to the night table that sat directly beside his parents' bed, gently lifted the top of the small silver leaf-shaped box, and had soon felt out and removed a small key from among its tangled silver and gold contents. It was for the filing cabinet.

He reappeared in the bedroom doorway with his arms full and a big grin on his face.  Dim light filtered in from the hall around his slightly stocky body. "Jackpot!" he whispered, and then threw everything in his arms onto the waterbed.

"What the hell...?" Ezra held up an oblong metallic object that shone in the dark.
 

Danny looked at it curiously. Piece by piece the two boys examined what was really a heroic pile of adult related material. It included six Hustler magazines, three Penthouse, five Swank, two boxes of condoms, three unmarked videotapes, two marked (Position Impossible, Sharon Fluid's Greatest Hits), one pair of handcuffs, lotion of a strange smell they were unable to identify, one black dildo, and...

"Hey," Danny playfully kicked Ezra down at the other end of the bed and held up the oblong metallic object beside the black dildo.

"Oh..." Ezra said quietly as the revelation came.
 

A smile broke across his friend's slightly pudgy face, which he held for a moment, and then fell face down on the bed in convulsive laughter. "Two!" Danny snorted. "Why would they need two?" And he collapsed again.

The early hours of the morning had been spent exploring the exotic contents of the Hadrons' filing cabinet. The boys hid underneath a sheet with a flashlight and passed magazines back and forth, turning the pictures to various angles and holding them at varying distances from their eyes in hopes of understanding what the pages revealed. 

"Read the articles!" Danny kept whispering. "Read the articles!"

When the sun finally began to melt the frost off the bedroom window, a decision had to be made. What would they do with their treasure? With confidence in the depth and intricacy of their cunning, they hid it all underneath the dresser, the edges of the magazines peeking out into plain view; but to their mutual surprise and terror, they awoke late the next morning to find it all missing.

On the way home Ezra had withered under the calm and understanding tone of Elsie's questions. He leaned against the car door as if trying to burrow himself into the small space between it and the seat. The car moved slowly past the country landscape and his eyes searched the firs that lined the roadside as if he were desperately looking for something to hide behind.
  His face burned under the light of the knowledge she now had of him, and he turned it away. He had been discovered. Surely, he thought, some punishment lurked around the corner for what he had done.

As fall eases the slow fire of its reds and oranges into the face of the Dominion of Canada, from sea to sea boys and men across the country take to her fields, universities, parking lots, schools, and stadiums and take up a game and a struggle grown great through the blood of great men. This is football, as it is played north of the 49
th
parallel. It was here, as Canada still lay under the colonial banner of the British Empire, that the first game was played at the University of Toronto. And then in 1879, almost two decades later, the dreamy long-sleeved young men of that rowing club named after Jason and his mighty Argonauts opened the ivy wrapped gates of their University to a team from Hamilton, a team formed out of the same spirit as the hardened steel that the men forge under her mighty smoke stacks. There, as athletes made contact with each other, as the ball moved for the first time in the hands of some wild young man, one of the greatest rivalries in sports was born. Do not believe in the lies and gloss sold through that great rotting vehicle of the American media monopoly. Do not allow your television screen, whose polluting gaze we have all grown so comfortable under, to anaesthetize you to the living heart that beats in Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, Hamilton, Toronto, and the other great Canadian cities where only three downs are counted. For here you will not find millions, nor luxury cars, nor four hour pre-game shows grown fat on advertising dollars, nor players grown corrupt and green eyed through the purchase of a lie constructed of their own bloated image. Here you will find men who live and die through the air. Throw on first down! They do not play to be loved, but for love. Here you will find men who work side by side with their brothers in the stands, and fans that know the players as men, not neon images.

And from time to time when it is asked: 'Will the league go bankrupt?' and 'Is the game lost?' know that those of us who have discovered it, who have lived by or through its honor and majesty, will not allow it to go under. No, we have seen, and we will not. We have seen Russ Jackson, Warren Moon, Ron Lancaster, and Doug Flutie move through the northern storms of November as great composers and generals. We have seen George Reed running between the tackles, under the prairie sky, and asked ourselves: Can he get up again? How does a man survive that? And time after time we watched as his will focused its strength on his own resurrection, and from under the hatred of opposing defenses, and the deep mud of Saskatchewan, he picked himself up. We shook our heads at his strength. We have seen Brian Kelly and Allen Pitts move in concert with the hidden rhythm of the open field and the bodies in motion across it. Their eyes have widened and their hands have opened as they left their feet in impossible crowds, and yet, and yet, there, there in the deep corners of the end zone, we have seen them make a claim: That, that there, screaming and twisting towards us in the air, is mine!
  We have learned that the ball has always belonged to them, that its deep possession took place in their mind long before it ever touched their hands. 

Twelve men stand as gate keepers and sentinels, and the significance of the number twelve cannot be doubted, for who was the thirteenth? Willie Pless, James "Quick" Parker, Harvie Wylie, Bobby Jurasin, Paul Bennett, and Mike O'Shea stand as a unified mighty bulwark against the churning legs and mighty Spartan phalanx of Ellison Kelly, Roger Aldag, Dan Ferrone, Uzooma Okeke, Dan Comiskey, Chris Walby, Al Wilson, Rod Connop and Pierre Vercheval. A phalanx? But where are their shields? And we who have seen will tell you that their shields beat in their chests, and that this is where the true impact is delivered from when great men make contact. Out of this great collision of opposing forces a third thing is born and rises up in an invisible mist above the playing field; it cannot be seen by either the players or the fans, but it is felt by both. It is the spirit of the Canadian game.

"Ezra, either go down hurt or stop your crying!" Paul Willins yelled through his muddy facemask. Ezra was crying, but not because he was hurt. He was crying because he was afraid, afraid of the eyes upon him, afraid of failure, and afraid of his own power.

"Okay, it's okay!" Mike Loft, a thirteen-year-old quarterback who already had the composure of a much more experienced athlete, put his hands on Ezra's shoulders in the huddle and looked at him steadily. "Convert attempt, on one. Convert attempt, on one. Got it?" He looked at the other boys. The cloud of his breath hovered in front of them.

It was Ezra's second year of football. The year before, they had thought of putting him at fullback but he had not understood the plays well enough. He spent the year playing guard and outside linebacker and by the third game of the season he had hit his stride. He was tall for his age, and though he was thin he had an instinctual feel for contact that cannot be taught, a combination of momentum, leverage and acceleration that a player either has or does not have.
  During this first season his uncle Gord was one of the assistant coaches and the defensive coordinator. "When we're at football I'm not your uncle anymore, I'm your coach and you'll be treated just like the other players. If anything, I'll be harder on you than the others. And don't call me Uncle Gord either!" "What should I call you then?" Ezra had asked. "Coach Joses, the same as the other kids." Joses was Gord's last name, the name Elsie had opted not to take when they got married. The head coach was a psychology professor at the University of Guelph and also a part time expert witness in some of the highest profile criminal cases in the country. The following year he moved up an age group and Gord took over as the head coach of Ezra's team.