From the Novel Call It In the Air
The Mission
By: Gregory Light - Aug 06, 2026
(Ottawa 1962)
Two backyards from Gary’s house, Gary suddenly stopped and pressed himself back against the corner of a garden shed. He pulled Joey down beside him. 'Look,' he said, pointing to a second-storey window in the next yard. 'The light's still on.' It was the first light they had seen in their mission. 'We have to be careful here, Joey.'
Joey's voice vibrated with urgency. That’s the target,' he said.
'Are you sure?' Gary balked.
‘Yes, that’s it,' he continued, his breathing short and excited, his imagination pushing them further. ‘C'mon, the light is on. We can confirm it from the top of their garage.' And he set off across the lawn, ducking under a swing set and whipping around a crab apple tree. He flattened himself up against the garage wall to stay in the shadow. He was shocked as he watched Gary come scooting across the lawn behind him. The whole area was lit up like a sports field under floodlights. Gary careened up beside him, his lungs heaving.
'Did you see how bright it was out there, Joey? Anybody could have seen us. Maybe we should?'
'No! We have to do it. Give me a boost.' Joey pointed at the garage wall. Gary bent over next to a wheelbarrow and Joey stepped upon his back. From there he was able to reach the thick metal eyelet used to tie down one end of the clothesline. Clasping it firmly, he stretched his leg to the top of the window frame, gaining enough support to pull himself up and over the guttering and onto the roof.
Gary was right. The roof was bright. When he stood up, his shadow sliced fifty feet back across the grass, a dark laser beam blasting silently at the swing set and low shrubs.
'What can you see?' he asked Joey in a projected whisper.
'Nothing yet. The angle's bad.' Joey went down on his hands and knees, edging his way along the sloping crown of the garage roof. His knees and fingers scraped against the rough shingles, but the adrenalin was pumping so fast he didn't feel it. When he reached the house, a couple of feet from the window, Gary's head suddenly popped up above the guttering.
'There's a ladder here,' he whispered.
'Come up then, but you have to be quiet,' Joey said, rubbing his tingling hands together.
Safely on the roof, they flattened themselves against the wall of the house. They were hidden in a slim shadow. Above the sound of their lungs, they heard a low static sound.
'What's that?' Gary nudged Joey.
'Must be radioactivity.'
'We shouldn't be here.'
'We have to confirm the target,' Joey said. He slid numbly towards the window. It was open, a few inches up at the bottom. Through a crack between the curtains and the window frame, he could see more than half of the room. It looked unoccupied. The noise was coming from a television set that had been left on. The programming had ended. Just the test pattern remained. To Gary's horror, Joey began to open the window further.
'What are you doing?'
'I'm going in.' Joey's arm was shaking. His teeth were biting down on his lower lip, clamping it with the same concentration and anger burning the rest of his face.
'You're crazy,' Gary said, tugging at Joey's bathrobe. 'You'll get into trouble. The police will -.'
'Shush!!' Gary was alarmed at the determination he saw steaming off Joey's face. He had raised the window about six inches when the light changed. Joey's face froze in a blue, sparkling glow.
Someone had turned off the light. The only illumination came from the television. Gary gasped and threw himself tighter against the wall. He inched back as much as he dared to give Joey room beside him. But Joey didn't move. He couldn't. Once he had raised the window, it was part of him, a heavy weight pushing fiercely downwards on his fingers. He tried moving it a fraction, but it refused to stick. It came down half an inch with a shrill squeak, like chalk on a blackboard. Gary gulped and closed his eyes. Joey felt every nerve from his neck down through his arms, shut down.
'Is there anything else on?' It was a woman's voice. She had not reacted to the squeak. Gary opened his eyes and tried sending a message to Joey by contorting his face.
'Are you seriously interested in TV?' The second voice was male.
'Yeah, for atmosphere,' she answered warmly. 'It’s sexy.'
The second time she spoke, Joey recognized the voice. Miss Grant. He inched closer and craned his neck to get a better view through the gap in the curtains. For a moment, he couldn't see anyone, then a man surfaced above the back of the couch. He leaned forward, toward the television. He was short, wiry, and covered in hair; across his shoulders, on his back, down his legs, everywhere; all of it, apparently flowing out from his boxer shorts. He switched the television channel and Humphrey Bogart's face suddenly filled the screen. Casablanca. Joey's father had complained to Frederick earlier in the day about how late they had scheduled it.
'How's Bogart for a background?' the man had turned back and was asking the woman.
'I'd prefer him in the foreground,' she joked. It had to be Miss Grant. The tone was different than Joey remembered in class, but the voice was unmistakable. He turned back to Gary; "Miss Grant," he mouthed. Gary froze, responding with a petrified sequence of gestures, squelches and exaggerated mouth shapes which translated into, "Wh'iff theee kaachuss? Waddle wee doo?"
Joey leaned closer and whispered, 'What?' At the same time, the window slipped a fraction, sending out a low squeak which, to Gary, sounded equivalent to an atomic bomb. He shivered, a large tear sliding out of his right eye. Joey leaned back, acutely aware of the weight on his fingers. It was much heavier now. His scraped hands began to throb. 'I can't move,' he mouthed to Gary. Gary went blank.
When Joey looked back in the window, the woman had moved into view, crawling up next to the hairy man squatting by the TV set. Even in the blue glare of the television, Gary saw Joey's face blush. Miss Grant?
‘What is she doing there?’ Gary whispered.
She was stretching out on the carpet in front of the TV, naked except for a pair of panties and a bra.
'I'm not sure I want Bogie hanging over my shoulder,' the man said.
'Oh, leave it on. He won't bother us,' She replied, unhooking her bra. Her breasts were full, like rising dough. 'Besides, you look good in blue.' She shifted her body sideways so that it was in a straight line with his, then she slung her bra back over her head, stretched out her arms and clasped his shoulders, his back hair curling up through her fingers. 'Make love to me.'
Joey felt a low gurgling in the back of his throat. He didn't want to watch but he was unable to turn away from them. The man leaned over her body, rough and grizzled, like a mottled bear. He bent his head forward, suspended for a moment, kissing the same lips Joey remembered kissing weeks earlier, then he virtually collapsed on top of her. Joey gazed at them, transfixed, then his body tensed and he felt a surge of uncontrollable anger. What was she doing there? With him! With him!
The man's kissing disturbed Joey. It didn't appear as if it cared what it was kissing. He had never seen anyone kiss another person like that. Not even his parents. Every kiss he had given had been exactly that, something he gave. This man's kissing was taking, his mouth grasping, like a leech, starting with her mouth and then moving on, crossing and re-crossing her face. It left wet traces on her skin, like the snails he had thrown in the bushes after his father said he couldn't keep them. Eventually, the man slid his lips down along her neck to her breasts where his hand had been. The hand now crawled awkwardly down across Miss Grant’s stomach, sliding under her underwear and hiding, shivering, between her legs. She inhaled sharply, then a loud gasp which Gary, still perched outside the window, flat and shaking against the wall, echoed. He thought they had been discovered. Joey turned and scowled at him.
Gary was shocked at the anger on Joey's face. 'What's happening?' he whispered.
'They're doing it,' joey hissed.
Doing what, Gary wondered, moving towards the window to get a look at what had changed Joey's mood. He swung a few steps closer, holding his breath. He brought his head so close to Joey's, they were touching. Inside the room, he saw a familiar man taking Miss Grant's underwear off the end of her feet. From that angle, Gary never would have recognized her. She lay back, spread out like a little girl making an "angel" in the snow. Her eyes were closed, and her skin was dancing like snowflakes in the television images. Next to him, he could feel the trembling rage bubbling at Joey's temples.
'Are you sure it's Miss Grant?' Gary asked. ‘That’s my neighbour.’ Joey didn't answer. ‘We’ve delivered her newspaper lots of times.’
The woman whose identity Gary doubted brought her hand down against the man's thigh. She reached down and took his penis. The man fell forward onto her, his legs between hers, his pelvis rising towards her stomach.
'I ... I can't watch this,' Gary stammered urgently. He turned and started to make his way to the ladder. Suddenly, Joey swung around and grabbed Gary, his action letting the window drop at the same time.
'No! Don't go!' His first shout reinforced the shrill, strident crashing of the window banging on the sill. ‘The mission!!'.
'I'm getting out of here, Joey.' Gary whipped around and scrambled down the ladder.
In the room, the couple had staggered to their feet. The woman, who Joey now saw was not Miss Grant, had picked up a cushion in a futile attempt to cover her breasts and pubic area at the same time. And the man, he now confirmed was the target. Joey impulsively banged on the glass, his eyes furiously scanning the naked bodies. He reached into his pocket and took hold of the rock he had put there earlier. Down on the lawn, Gary was yelling at him. He leaned back as far as he could and threw the rock with all his strength. The moment it left his hand, he slipped backwards, falling off the corner of the garage back onto the lawn.
'Joey!!' Gary screamed
The rock smashed through the window and into the television. The set fell backward with a sharp crash, the picture tube exploding into hundreds of fragments of glass. With the explosive flash of light, Gary thought Joey had killed the couple. He helped Joey up from the grass and dragged him towards the hedge they had squeezed through earlier. At the swing set, Joey turned briefly and saw the two lovers looking through the battered shards of the window, frightened and dazed.
'Mission accomplished,' he said to Gary as they ducked into the darkness of the hedge.
The darkness. He was still safely tucked away in the darkness when he heard his father's voice the next morning.
'Joey. Wake up. I want to talk to you.'
Gary had said 'Best friends forever.'
'Joey,' his father's voice was close. Near the bed.
'I promise,' Joey replied. 'Forever. I promise.''
'Joey.' Slowly the voice found Joey and woke him. He opened his eyes and turned to his father. 'Joey, there’s been trouble. I want you to tell me what happened last night.' His father asked the question calmly, sitting down on the edge of Joey's bed. Joey was silent, picking up a blade of grass that was stuck to the sheet. He realized that his father wouldn't understand. He and Gary were one. And that afternoon in the cemetery, after the funeral, he would confirm it. ‘Gary’, he would begin, ‘I promise you that everything I do, everything I see or hear or feel … It will be yours too.’ And he would make the promise to last for at least ten years. Until they were both twenty-one. ‘I won't ever let you die, Gary,’ Joey would say, trying to hold back the pain coating his stomach and sweeping into his lungs. ‘You can be me’.
And Gary would agree.
And that is when his tears overwhelmed him. When he heard Gary speaking to him again. Far back across the wide field of grey and black gravestones, Sarah could see his young body shaking, both hands squeezed up over his face.
'Your grandmother saw you outside in your pyjamas last night,' his father continued, gently touching the red scratches on his son's hand.
'I don't want you to leave me, Joey,' Gary said. 'Promise me. Promise me you won’t let me die.’
'I promise,' Joey said.
When Sarah reached Joey, he had fallen on the short grass beside Gary's grave and was weeping soundlessly. She sat down by him and stroked his hair.
Joey's father took Joey's face carefully in his hand and turned it towards his own. 'I want you to tell me the truth about last night, Joey. I'll wait until after the funeral this afternoon, but you will have to tell me.
After a time, she and Joey stood up and quietly held one another. Then she brushed bits of grass from his face and clothing.
'He'll always be with you, Joey,'