by G B Joyce
“This was always a historically important project, but I think it’s even more important now given the unfortunate and premature passing of Martin Mars,” he said. He prattled on, affecting a patois that would have suited the dean of classics at an Ivy League school. It was all I could do to keep a straight face.
“He was a good friend, so I’ll do whatever I can to help,” I said. “How much had you talked to Wh—, uh, Marty?”
“We were very early on in the project …”
It was a fudge that crossed the line into a lie. He was representing this as an authorized work when, in fact, he solely initiated and owned it. This made me even more suspicious of everything he said.
He turned on his data recorder without asking if I minded and jumped right into questioning, as if he had a cab waiting and a meter running.
“Exactly what happened on that last goal?”
“What had Marty told you so far? Maybe I can fill in the blanks.”
His disappointment crashed like a porcelain cup on a hard tile floor.
“Well, let’s just talk about it through your eyes, shall we?” he said.
I barely stifled the urge to say We shan’t. “He walked out on you, didn’t he? He didn’t want to talk to you in the first place, did he?”
Gowan didn’t say anything. He didn’t look up from the screen. He did turn off his recorder. This was something he didn’t want preserved for posterity.
He was dispirited enough that I felt I had to give him a little hope. I had to promise him a quid pro quo, even if I wasn’t going to tell him why I needed his quid and didn’t intend to provide him with much quo.
“You recorded the conversation that you had with him, right?”
He nodded. Yes was stuck in his throat.
“I’ll help you if you give me the sound file or the transcript or both,” I said. “That’s my only condition. No, check that. It’s not my only condition. You have to give it to me now.”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “Not right now.”
“Sure you can,” I said. “Your data recorder is right there. If the interview is still on it, let’s put it on a memory stick. And any notes you have, you’re going to send them to me by email. I’ll wait with you until they’re in my inbox.”
He hesitated. I put some physical menace and truth behind it. It required no effort. It came from the heart.
“You’re not leaving without me getting it,” I said. “My friend’s death is under my skin. I might do something rash. I’ve been having a bad day. Days.”
I ended up buying a memory stick at the cash. Five minutes later my demands had been met. Gowan had the aspect of total defeat. A guy being stretchered off the ice might give a thumbs-up to let his teammates and the crowd know he’s okay. The Maverick Historian had the last grain of self-importance kicked out of him.
“Okay, how did your talk with Mars end?” I asked. I figured that something had to have set him off.
“It was out of the blue,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. It seemed pretty innocuous.”
Gowan opened the twenty-eight-minute sound file on his computer and fast-forwarded to the 27:30 mark. There was no hearing it above the music. I went over to one of the gamers and pulled the kid’s headphones off. His machine-gun fire in a virtual war zone came to a halt.
“There’s a peace treaty,” I told him. “I’ll be back in a minute and I’ll give you an autograph.”
I plugged in the headphones and turned up the volume. Gowan’s voice came through.
“Tell me about your brother. Was he a player? Did he have an impact on your career?”
Radio silence followed, then a door slamming, and then a click.
“What’s this about a brother?” I asked him, taking off the headphones. “Where did you get that from?”
He told me. I went back to his apartment so that he could show me and back it up.
25
Unsurprisingly, Stu Gowan was a bachelor. His one-bedroom apartment was just a couple of minutes from the coffee shop and dark when we arrived. He flipped on the light and the strewn blankets and pillows made it obvious that he slept on the couch. The bedroom he used as an office space and archive. The dust on his desk was as thick as ash at the foot of Mount St. Helens.
He went to the top drawer of a teeming metal cabinet and took a yellowing mimeographed program out of the file. He flipped through the program until he found the right page, one that had a deep crease and a stain from a coffee cup. The gloss had worn off the paper.
27
Martin Mars
Centre
5’4”
120 pounds
Birthdate: April 1, 1965
Birthplace: Biggar, SK
Hometown: Herbert, SK
Parents: Edgar and Winnie Mars
Quote: “Everything I learned about the game and everything else I learned from my brother.”
“What the hell is this?” I said.
“A program from the 1977 provincial peewee final,” he said, as if I should have known. “I know it’s just a mimeograph, but that’s part of its charm. Four boys in the final ended up playing major junior. Remarkable, isn’t it?”
“Exactly how the hell did you dig this up?”
His answer went back to his complete psychopathology. “I have the complete set dating back to 1970,” he said with a sense of misplaced pride.
Why was a question that I didn’t bother asking. If I had to guess, the Good Professor went to these tournaments in the hope that he would not only witness the arrival of a future pro star but also would have on hand proof of his attendance and maybe a collectible that could be auctioned online. I read about an auction of a bunch of cancelled cheques signed by Gordie Howe and bidding on a set of Bobby Hull’s false teeth.
“Were you there for the tournament?”
“Yup,” he said, and again he puffed his chest out, proud of what only he imagined was a coup.
“What do you know about Mars’s team?”
“The Herbert Hatters … played in a tiny old rink ... a Quonset hut … ”
He carried on with the Requisite Nostalgia Clichés as if to a score from a tinkling piano and against a backdrop of a montage of old snapshots. I thought about more immediate concerns.
I looked down the Herbert lineup and came upon the coach’s name. “What about this guy, Lefty Boylen?”
“Great hockey man, career minor-hockey coach, dead, oh, I dunno, 1998, ’99 …”
I grabbed a pen off his desk. I wrote down the names of the Hatters. I didn’t bother with a couple of brothers named Smith, a player named Davis, and another named Miller. The hopes of tracking them down through directory information weren’t exactly remote, but I went straight to the more uncommon names: Zawatsky, Kudstra, Epping, and Tollesen. They’d be easier to find.
I bade Gowan adieu. I told him I’d be in touch. I didn’t fear him running off. The Good Professor wasn’t about to light out for new horizons. Not with an apartment overflowing with old programs and signed pictures and framed sweaters. Nothing could separate him from his treasure hoarded over a lifetime.
26
It was late, but I had leads and had to try a round of calls. I first tried Boylen in the provincial directory. It produced a couple of hits. Neither were related to the late coach.
I found a Zawatsky in Melville, about six hours from Herbert. When I called he had just made it home from a meeting of the town council. I told him about Mars’s death and said that I was trying to break the news to Whisper’s friends and family. I said I had no contact number or address for the brother.
“Honestly, we never had much to do with him,” Zawatsky said. “He had that throat thing. Could hardly speak a word. Strange kid, but he could really skate. I don’t remember him having a brother, but it was a long time ago. I remember his parents moved to Herbert that year or a year or two before. Otherwise, there’s not much I can tell you.”
The others I managed to track dow
n, four in all, knew nothing more than that.
The only place he had a brother was in that program. I tried to calculate the odds of the quote being attributed in error: probably no more than one in five, even for the amateur-hour volunteers who put the program together.
Mitzi said she knew only of the parents and never met them. Relatives weren’t discussed. I checked Mars in the Saskatchewan directory. Lots of Marshes and Marshalls. No Marses.
I had just about resigned myself to drilling another dry hole when my cell vibrated: C & B HODGES.
“I think I have good news,” Dr. Hodges said. He was a professional who favoured lowering the bar to heights he and events could comfortably clear. “I made a call to someone who shall remain nameless because he’s of little importance to you. He is of much importance to the interim coroner. And a full investigation will be undertaken belatedly. One can only hope that no potential evidence has been lost or compromised.”
He didn’t bother noting that Dr. Goto’s blood analysis was going to have them looking for a potential source of a lethal dose of a poison that might have been washed down by coffee. He also didn’t bother noting that an investigation that came as a result of pressure from Daulton’s boss’s boss would be done to the letter.
In the background I could hear Mrs. Hodges calling for him and he said he had to go.
“Thanks for this,” I said.
“Not at all, pleased to help,” he said and sounded wistful. He was going to take care of the personal obligation that had thrown his public service, with this brief exception, into total eclipse. The call he made upstairs, calling in a favour, might have been the last act of his professional career. Sort of like my last game and those of many others, I thought.
27
I went down to the bar in the Hotel Saskatchewan’s lobby. I needed and deserved a drink. Beers poured on my exhaustion would throw me into ten hours of rapid eye movement and a few episodes of reverie played out in my subconscious theatre. Such were my good intentions.
Tuesday night was a slow night for the bartender and the waiter. There were lots of empty rooms at the inn. Many of those occupied were reserved for members of the Anglican clergy who were gathering for a conference the next morning.
The stand-up had a small gathering. Two tanned businessmen from the Sun Belt were talking through their hats in a winnerless game of one-upmanship, every round producing a bigger boat, a pricier country club, and another thousand square feet to their McMansions’ floor plans. I would have given a C-note for an auctioneer’s gavel to bring the bidding to a close. I turned my back to them and focused on a threesome at the other side of the bar. At first glance I guessed that two young lions were leering at their cougar secretary, but the plot thickened on further review. She was a Woman of a Certain Age dressed too well to be on a secretary’s salary. Her face looked like it could have been carved out of Ivory soap and was framed by a couple of densely filled cubic feet of raven hair. She didn’t need to enforce any deference. She was in command. And the boys weren’t leering. They were sucking up and it had to be up because in her spiky heels she was all of six feet and more. They were the subordinates, she the Executive Dominatrix.
First take: I glanced. Second take: red light flashing. Third take: solid green. I stared. She caught me staring and didn’t mind. She stole looks back, like she was emailing me confirmation of a reservation. Not that it was going anywhere. Not that I had that in mind. She liked something she saw and I liked everything in my range of view. Innocent stuff, beat the hell out of a silent bar-side vigil.
My phone hummed and shifted on the bar toward me. It was Sandy. My conscience was on line two. I let them both ring through to voicemail.
One lapdog went to the sandbox. The other asked the bartender for the cheque so that he could make a big show of springing for their drinks. I took three small sideways steps along the bar, never raising my elbows off the stained oak, and leaned forward, fetching a napkin, as if I had come all that way for nothing else. She knew better. She seemed happy about it. She was.
“Do you come here often?” I asked.
“I’ve come here for years.”
“I always end up here too when I’m in town on business,” I said and told her what that business was. My explanation wasn’t self-important. It was more self-deprecating. I was the most casually dressed guy in the room, the staff included.
“You meet interesting people here,” she said.
“I have in the past.”
“So have I. Not as often as I’d have liked, though. I’m Donna.”
She didn’t come to the bar looking for me or anything like me. She came to the bar looking for a release from pressures at the office. As the roles assumed by her lapdogs suggested, it was her office, which turned out to be the office of the Attorney General for the Province of Saskatchewan. She was the number two there, runner-up to only the Member himself, who was usually preoccupied with debates and shouting and desk thumping and whispers behind the curtain over in the Legislature. Those who walked the red carpet on either side of the chamber knew her, but only as much as she needed them to know. They knew that, when the Member stood up and made his pronouncements in the Assembly, his words were her words, every speech and talking point. She didn’t say that directly to me or, I suppose, to anyone. She had risen up through the ranks of the AG and learned how to be discreet. If you couldn’t read between the lines, you didn’t deserve to know.
We talked a lot. One night wasted in the I and the holding pen at RCMP headquarters, the next well spent in an oak-lined bar with a beautiful, powerful woman who lacked only one thing you’d expect of someone like her: a big rock on the third finger of her left hand. No rock there at all. The space was conspicuously and promisingly vacant.
A couple of emptied glasses later, she looked over her shoulder distractedly at the reception desk across the lobby. Late-arriving Anglicans were lined up, heads bowed as if in prayer for upgrades. She didn’t turn her face back toward me. “You don’t remember, do you?” she said as if she was talking to no one at all, almost out of my earshot.
I must have looked puzzled. “I have a pretty good memory,” I said. My memory was cued again between “pretty” and “good” when Sandy called again and the BlackBerry shook. I powered off the phone and the pangs.
“Do you remember your first time?” she asked.
“If I told you about it I’d be more embarrassed than when I told you what I do for a living.” I left it at that.
She looked down at her drink and stirred it with her finger. “I feel the same way,” she said, rattling the ice cubes and more. “It was here. With you.”
IT CAME FLOODING BACK and the undertow was washing me out to sea.
The Donna I met when I was eighteen was freckled. Back then she was blond. But freckles fade away and blond hair will darken and hold dye as well as any other.
Back then she didn’t need to do a thing and relied on natural gifts. All these years later she took her appearance seriously, and it went a long way to make others take her seriously.
That night all those years ago I went down to the bar with a few other guys from the junior all-star team and was having a Canadian in a bottle. I learned about the better things later in life. She came in with some friends, obviously underage, the whole lot of them. They were turned away. I caught her eye and sent her a look that expressed my regrets. I told her I had a better place to go. Thought it took courage, years later relabelled it conceit. She smiled. My roomie on this trip was a big, dumb, talentless defenceman. He was a passenger who didn’t belong on our team, but at that moment the more pressing issue was that he didn’t belong in my hotel room. I told her to wait and ran upstairs. I took off my running shoe and my sock and put the sock over the doorknob, the universal sign of your roommate getting lucky.
It was her first time. It was my first time with her.
1
WEDNESDAY
We were the last in the bar. The old guy in the blac
k vest and bow tie was wiping and rewiping the century-old woodwork that our elbows were resting on. We weren’t delaying the inevitable. We were letting the pressure build.
There was nothing said when I signed the bill, when I dug out my room card, when we both stood up, when we both walked to the elevator, not even when the elevator doors shut and we started to rise up to the seventh floor. By that time she had reached up and wrapped her arms around my neck and her high heels were an inch off the floor. By that time I was imagining what I wanted to do with her first.
It was all a rush. I swung open the door and grabbed her arm just above the elbow, tight enough to bruise her. Thankfully, it was going to be cold enough to get away with long sleeves until July. She hit the king size like it was the landing pit and she had just won the Olympic high jump, back first, legs in the air, sighing ecstatically. I didn’t bother turning off the light I had left on. I was glad that I did because it was going to be beautiful to watch. We had kissed enough on the elevator, in my opinion and hers. I pulled her by the ankles so that her legs were hanging over the edge of the bed and I pulled hard on her panties, hard enough that they tore away like a Velcro strip. I buried my head in her Brazilian, between her tan lines. She had managed to get away to the Caribbean for a week and her bikini waxer could have offered a two-week guarantee without a worry of customer complaint. Her sighing became hard breathing and I could feel her muscles quivering. She grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me up. She was writhing under me trying to peel off her clothes and mine. And then all of a sudden she pushed me hard, both hands in the chest.