The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  The scene on the ceiling of my room flashed ahead. It was a couple of days after the marathon game. Reporters were asking me about Martin Mars. I told them I didn’t know anything, which was true. They said that the GM was giving them the No Comment Treatment. Three days later he could keep up the embargo no longer. He was in front of the cameras and lights and microphones, saying that Martin Mars had left the team without notice and was under suspension. It was a distraction that our exhausted and beat-up team didn’t need.

  We had a team meeting before the start of the St. Louis series. “He didn’t figure in our plans, anyway,” Iron John said. I looked at my watch. It was ten forty-five. That was the minute when Iron lost the last team he’d ever coach.

  Reporters came to me every day, fishing for the scoop. They knew I was his roommate and should have known him better than anyone else on the team. They thought that I was giving them the slip. They figured I had talked to him. I hadn’t.

  I was excited, or at least fairly excited, by the win over Edmonton. Still, I had been in a bad mood that season. My contract negotiations had stalled the summer before and I had ended up in salary arbitration, where my agent screwed the pooch. He prepped a bad case, the team won the arb, and I was out a good 150 K. That’s peanuts by today’s standards but it was a good chunk twenty years back. I felt sick to my stomach coming out of the hearing. People said I shouldn’t have taken it so hard. After all, my wife at the time had just landed her first big television series and she was the bigger breadwinner. No matter, my pride took a shit-kicking. Gatorade tasted like Schweppes Bitter Lemon all season. I tried not to let on in the room, and I wasn’t anxious to get traded out of L.A. because of my other half’s ties to Hollywood.

  I took one reporter aside and told him to meet me in the parking lot. I told him what had happened in the dressing room before game six, Iron John carving Whisper like a Thanksgiving turkey. I told the reporter to do with it what he wanted so long as he didn’t out me as the source.

  The final scene that played out on the ceiling was a video clip that was on the sportscasts the next day.

  The media covering the team was all over Iron John’s ripping Martin Mars. Every question made Iron’s eyes bulge out. “Lies,” he said. “All lies.”

  That came from one of the best, gone but not mourned.

  1

  MONDAY

  I was back in California. And, yeah, I was with her. We were in the studio and she was on a set that didn’t change over her five seasons on the show. She was twenty-one years old and had been cast as a high school freshman when the series and our marriage debuted. Her role wound up outlasting her status as network TV’s It Girl and Whatever It Was We Had Vowed. In the dream it must have been around the third season. It was between takes and I had a front-row seat in the studio audience while she teased her hair and had her eyes lined with surgical precision by the makeup girl. She looked at me and said, You’re mine when school’s out. And, and, and, and a couple more ands, and it was all lost.

  I reached and fumbled and could hear it at a pillow-width distance.

  “This is your wake-up call.”

  I fought off the urge to fall back asleep and back in time. I don’t mind dreams but can do without hauntings. I reached for my laptop on the side table and went online before I rubbed my eyes clear. Google and four clicks found the name and phone number of the funeral home where my ex-teammate was in a deep sleep. I told the funeral director my story. I didn’t ask him to give me the number Chez Mars. He wouldn’t have given it up, anyway. I just asked him to pass on the message that I was going to come out to the visitation.

  I splashed some cold water on my face, force of habit, and went downstairs to breakfast only half-exhausted. I didn’t exactly blend in with the businessmen who were heading into meetings and conferences, but I didn’t care. I put in my order: eggs over, bacon and sausage, hash browns, brown toast, grapefruit juice, and a coffee. I needed a comprehensive meal in advance of the drive out.

  Chief called me when the plates landed in front of me. He was on his way.

  An hour after that we turned onto the Trans-Canada. “You’re sure you still want to go out there?” Chief asked. He was sure he didn’t want to and just as sure he had to.

  Time dragged on. I did a double take and then another. I was sure that those eighteen-wheelers were the same ones we had seen the night before, and I took some satisfaction in the thought that whatever hardships I might encounter in my workaday life it beat hauling loads up and down Highway 1. Most of the time, anyway.

  Chief had rustled up his best threads. He was sitting bolt upright behind the wheel, making the noble effort not to crease his suit. I looked casual by comparison. I was travelling light. The two ties I own were hanging in the closet of my apartment. My suits were too—hadn’t worn one since the draft last June.

  We rolled past the hard stare of Mac the Moose and I struggled to stay awake. Nodding off would have been bad form as a passenger. And I didn’t want to drift off and land back in the studio.

  2

  Cruise control set at the speed limit plus ten. The heat on high.

  “No, you can ask why. Lots of people wanted to know back then. ‘Chief, you’re thirty, you can still play, you can still fight, so why’d you quit?’ I told my wife. I’ll tell you ’cause you’re good with this stuff. Thing is, day before I played, maybe two days before sometimes, I’d see the fight I was going to be in. The guy I was gonna fight. Sometimes waking up, sometimes going to bed, maybe even driving my car. Could be doing anything and all of a sudden I’d get this feeling down deep in my gut and I’d see the fight clear as spring water. Every punch he’d throw and I’d throw. And the fight would go down just like that. Mess used to say that my eyes spun like someone had pulled the handle of a slot machine, but I was just seeing something that I’d seen before. Anyway, at the end of that last season, one game to go, we’re out of the playoffs, and I saw the fight, right before the game. And I saw that I got hurt real bad. Stretchered and everything. So I went out there and I didn’t drop him when Wilson wanted to go. I just told him I can’t. Maybe he understood. I had a year left on my contract but I knew I was going to keep having that same thing happen over and over. It was good for me all those years, you know. And it probably saved me that last game. No going back after that.”

  A school bus slowing at an exit ramp. A kid in the back of the bus turning around to wave at strangers.

  “I don’t like Swift much. I have no idea why they call it Swift Current. It’s neither swift nor current.”

  A tractor-trailer spraying slush against the windshield. A tractor-trailer left behind.

  “You heard about the bus crash in Swift Current all those years back? Were you still in college when it happened?”

  An email soliciting Boston College alumni donations unopened on the screen of a BlackBerry. Another inviting players from the 1987 hockey team to a reunion also unopened.

  “Four died. Everyone out here knows the story. I played against that team. The one guy I had a fight with. A big tough kid. When he died he was caught underneath the bus. Another one of the kids was going to be a first-round pick, just sixteen but he had it all. Two of them were the leading scorers. One grew up right around the corner from the team. I guess they were playing cards in the back. A bunch of them were hurt bad too. Bus went off the road barely two minutes out of town, rickety old school bus that the town had paid for. Team was in its first year in the league. Right around New Year’s.”

  A gas station left behind. A half-full tank that could wait.

  “Our coach had us all go to the funeral. They had the ceremony in the arena. I didn’t have a suit but the good thing was they had us all wear our sweaters, same with the teams in the rest of the league who showed up. We were in seats down on the floor of the arena. I was sitting behind a guy from Saskatoon whose nose I’d broken a couple of weeks before. He gave me a dirty look but it wasn’t the time to do anything.”

 
Eyes on the road. A glance at the rear-view mirror with nothing in it except a dead-straight road disappearing into the horizon.

  “So many guys on that team ended up all messed up. Drinking, a lot of them. Drugs. They won a national championship a couple of years later with guys who’d been on the bus and everyone thought it was a great story, but they had a diddler as a coach. You know the guy. Went to jail years later. Messed with one kid on the team who made the league and he nearly went completely off the rails. There was just too much shit. People in Swift had to know something was going on. Half the league knew things weren’t right there. Someone should have stepped up.”

  On the north side of the shoulder, snow that had fallen since October perfectly preserved. A million sections of farmland promising an infinite white harvest.

  “You talk to people out there about it and all you get back is this blank look. It was awful stuff but people just don’t want to know. Sort of like you can put the secrets back in the bottle if you try hard enough.”

  Old wooden hydro poles looking like crucifixes on the north side of Highway 1. A westbound train pulling a hundred boxcars like so much inescapable and freighted history on the south side.

  “You weren’t working for us yet, but a few years back there was one kid I really liked out with Swift, kid from a small town, not far from Hunts’s hometown. Word was he was drinking a lot. Hunts had me look into it. It was bad. Team was bad. Into all the bad places downtown by the railway tracks. The kid missed practices hungover. You can’t fix problems like that.”

  Wind blowing Chief’s Jeep around the road. The Jeep coughing indignantly when asked to pass a couple of senior citizens in a beat-up station wagon.

  “I meant to take it in for a tune-up the other day.”

  A sign warning for a bridge that ices. A cigar-sized index finger pointing to a rise in the road.

  “That’s the overpass that the team bus came off of going east. If there wasn’t any snow you’d be able to see right where the bus rolled over. I heard a scout say one time it looked like God was golfing and he left a divot. I think it’s more like a scar.”

  A train snaking its way east under traffic heading west. Snow evenly covering the town’s best-kept lawn, a cemetery, on the south side at the first exit.

  3

  I had only heard about that bus crash in passing. Back when it happened I was at BC and I read the Globe and the Times, but they had almost no hockey in them so I didn’t bother with the sports sections at all. When we pulled up to the funeral home’s parking lot it occurred to me that the victims of that crash would have been brought to this same place.

  Chief parked his Jeep in an empty lot framed by piles of plowed snow seven feet high. I had thought we were travelling to the edge of the world but now wondered if we were standing in the shallow end of the abyss beneath it. Snow and ice were hard-packed under our boots. It was a solemn occasion but still too cold for dress shoes.

  We were met at the front door by the only funeral-home staffer in the house. I told him that we were there for Martin Mars before I noticed that Whisper’s visitation was the only event on the board in the lobby. The guy’s grief was genuine. Whisper’s death had separated him from a day off.

  Mitzi Mars sat there alone with her husband, my ex-teammate lying in the casket, eyes closed, hands crossed, expression blank. Whisper was in a suit that looked never worn. He had stayed in pretty good shape. He probably wasn’t even ten pounds over his playing weight. Fat lot of good it did him.

  Mitzi had aged well. Yeah, the hair was still a sculptural and chemical miracle, but the face under it didn’t look like it belonged to a woman in her late forties. Maybe they had been drilling outside Swift Current and struck Oil of Olay.

  A funeral home in Swift Current is one place I have to admit I never expected to see Mitzi Mars, a girl Whisper had met one night in Vegas over the all-star break and married the next. He’d been on the wrong end of so many pranks that we thought he was trying to pull one on us when she came to practice with him after they got back. When it finally sank in that this was no joke, that the buxom broad with three storeys of bottle-blond hair was in fact Mrs. Mars, we tried to piece together her story. She went for skimpy outfits that Saran Wrapped her prodigious curves. Her skin was as pale as pancake mix, obviously the type of girl who was up at night and slept all day.

  Mars told us that she was a dancer. “In a show,” he whispered.

  “Peeler, call girl, and/or grifter,” read the collective thought bubble in the dressing room.

  “Jesus, Whisper, we should have had a bachelor party,” I said. “It’s just that we would have needed more than an hour’s notice.”

  We were sure that she was out to fleece him for all he was worth. She wouldn’t have been the first out to sucker a player, though if she had known the league and its salary structure, she would have aimed her sights higher than the Black Ace. We figured she’d stick around until the first or, if she was in for the long haul, the fifteenth. Just long enough for the gold digger to realize she’d struck a vein of pyrite. Instead, she stuck with him to what turned out to be the bitter end for him in L.A. She’d show up in the wives’ lounge and none of the other brides would even look at her. “She comes to the arena to watch games that her husband doesn’t play in?” my then-wife asked me. I told her it didn’t make sense to me either.

  I looked over at the casket and hated myself for thinking that he was scratched one last time.

  “Mitzi, I’m Brad Shade,” I said. “I’m so sorry for your loss. I don’t know if you remember me but …”

  “Brad, of course,” Mitzi said, dabbing tears with each word. “Thanks so much for coming. It would have meant a lot to Martin. He always talked about you. I know he was so happy for you when you won the Cup in Montreal. He always said that he wished he’d stayed in touch with you.”

  That rattled me. Maybe it was just because I was his roomie. Maybe it was because I was on the ice for his final shift in the league. Maybe it was because I had reached out to him after the game. Maybe he knew it had to be me who ratted out Iron John for being so brutal toward him. Maybe he resented me less than others. All those maybes and I didn’t have a good reason why he would have always talked about me.

  Mitzi’s voice had been sandpapered by hours of bawling. Her accent was fainter than I remembered. It was south, although of no specific place as far as I could tell. She had no particular pedigree to brag about. She never had a chance to be a deb or go to a good school, that was for sure.

  “This is Warren Bear,” I said and pointed back to Chief. “He played in the league back when Martin played. He came down with me from Regina.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chief said. “I didn’t know Martin ’cept to play against him.”

  Mitzi tried to recover her composure and catch her breath. “As you can see, Martin and I don’t have any family here,” she said. “We don’t have any family at all. And really we kept to ourselves. We used to joke that no couple had ever spent more time together. We were together just about every day and the odd night he was away on business he’d call, call once during the day and then again at night, and I could tell he wasn’t happy away from home. We had just celebrated our twentieth anniversary.”

  She collapsed into tears again. She bowed her head and raised her left hand to her brow. Her hands gave away her age more than anything else. The rock in her wedding ring was a healthy size, upgraded from what he had purchased on a Black Ace’s pay.

  A couple of painfully quiet minutes passed and a search party wouldn’t have come back with something to say. I felt a little guilty leaving it up to Mitzi to try to restart the conversation.

  “What have you done all these years, Brad? Martin always wondered.”

  Shit, what a perfect time and place to discuss what might have been and what was lost. I skipped by the worst of it: my failed marriage to a very modestly talented actress, my knee surgeries and the arthritis that came out of them, my agent’s acquitta
l for bilking my career earnings and those of others. I wasn’t about to do the Old Woe-Is-Me, though so many things still kept me up at night.

  “After my career was over I worked for an investigations agency in Toronto,” I said.

  She jumped in before I could flesh out the thumbnail profile.

  “Martin said that you had studied criminology in school and that your father was a police officer,” she said. “He played hockey too, right?”

  I knew that Whisper had answered the phone and taken messages when Sarge called my room a couple of times. How Whisper knew that I had majored in criminology at Boston College I did not know.

  “Yeah, I did that for four years and then Hunts … I don’t know if you remember him …”

  “The little goalie,” she said. “Yeah, he ended up with the general manager’s job in L.A. and hired me as a scout …”

  I had to change the subject. I couldn’t count on Chief to jump in. He’s a good man but not a smooth operator.

  “You stayed in Swift Current all these years?”

  “After we came back from Germany,” Mitzi said. She was going back to the good times. “When I met Martin, he said that he didn’t want to play in the league anymore. I didn’t even understand what that meant. He told me that he wanted to play in Europe. I liked that idea. It sounded like an adventure.”

  An adventure. Everyone on the team had her all wrong back when she met Whisper on a Friday night and married him on the Saturday. Leave it to him to find a babe in the woods in Las Vegas.

  “He made me a promise that we’d go. I think he regretted going to Germany at first, but we had five great years there. Martin’s parents ran the family business here. We never visited. They were very old and he had no brothers or sisters or relatives, but they had a good business adviser and their business really took off. Martin always said he wanted to play until his fortieth birthday, but we came back after his father died and his mother developed dementia. Martin knew the business really well. Worked in it since he was a kid.”