Power Forward

by Sylvain Hotte

  No talking back. And I think Tom just might have obeyed him, and that Larry might have been able to get through to him. It was just possible that all he needed was an authority figure who stood taller than him, and could upend with a single judo throw the man in whom Tom had placed all his trust. But with Vincent still writhing on the floor in pain after crushing his weak and undersized hips beneath the weight of his top heavy mass, Larry had imprudently turned his back on the guy at the front desk. The thug, himself a martial arts enthusiast, had grabbed a pair of nunchucks from under the counter. He exploded into the air and delivered a violent kick between Larry’s shoulders, sending him to the floor. After a dozen nunchuck blows, Larry found himself being dragged across the gym carpet and tossed outside by a couple of brutes who outdid each other finishing him off. They left him there, unconscious, between two dumpsters on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Anges.

  “But I didn’t really lose consciousness,” he said, sitting on a chair in front of me, his face battered, one eye swollen under his blue shades, a bag of ice on his head. “I was faking.”

  He was faking… What a strategy. But one that had served him well. Because the toughs, afraid they had gone too far and worried about having a death on their consciences, had finally left him alone.

  I’d been asleep on the couch when he stumbled in somewhere around 11 p.m. As soon as I saw him, I leapt to my feet to give him a place to sit down. But he asked for a chair because his kidneys were hurting. He gingerly sat down, while I went to get some ice. A lot of good it did me to ask him questions; he could only moan in response. He sat there a long moment unable to speak, legs stretched out on the coffee table. Then he opened his eyes, as if it was all coming back to him.

  “I tried talking to Tommy, but it didn’t do any good.”

  That much was clear. Then he gave me a blow-by-blow account. He seemed proud of pretending to be close to death, throwing the guys who had beaten him into a bit of a panic. As if he had gotten the best of them.

  “Should we call the cops?”

  “The police?” he said. “What’s the use?”

  He didn’t like the police. In fact, he was afraid of them. What he hadn’t mentioned was that they’d paid him a visit, a couple of days before. His ex had called the police after seeing him watching his daughter, Melissa, in the schoolyard. Which was why his sister had blown her stack.

  Larry got up with a long sigh, his face twisted with pain, and shuffled off to his room. But before he did, he reached for the handset on the small end-table beside the couch. He held it to his ear, and then handed it to me.

  “There’s a message. You listen to it. I don’t have the heart to hear it. It’s probably Tommy’s mother threatening to sue me for harassing her kid.”

  As he disappeared into his room, I played back the recording and listened to the message. It had probably come in during the afternoon. I recognized Vincent’s disagreeable voice right away.

  “Hey, champ. Someone found your backpack in the locker room yesterday evening. You can come by anytime. It’s in my office.”

  The next day, I woke up in a bad mood. Another night spent tossing and turning, wondering how I was going to retrieve my backpack. After what I’d witnessed in the gym basement— that is, if Tommy had even mentioned seeing me —and with the beating Larry had taken, I figured I was less than welcome. If I showed up, I might even end up in a dumpster myself.

  Despite his wretched appearance and his aching body, Larry insisted on driving me to the Colisée. I could have grabbed a taxi, but he said he felt it was his responsibility. We drove in silence in his Jeep, stuck in traffic, blocked by some road pavers. Every time he stepped on the clutch to change gears, he leaned slightly to his left and clenched his teeth. When he left me off at the door, he asked if I minded if he skipped the workout. He wanted to go to the clinic to see a doctor. He thought he might have a broken rib. Not to worry I told him, everything was going to be okay.

  “You should call Nathalie. She’ll pick you up.”

  I declined, insisting that I’d figure something out.

  Even though my legs were wooden and my breath was shorter than usual, I did pretty well. My passes were sharp, right on the stick, my shots on the net, and even if I was a step slower than usual, I was pretty fluid on my skates.

  And that was how things stayed all week, until Thursday, the second-to-last day of rookie camp.

  Over those three days, I battled Tommy as hard as I could. I kept my eye on him and gave him as little space as possible. And I seized every opportunity to make him look bad. When they put him out on my line, I’d zip him a wicked pass right on the money, but with enough on it that I knew he wouldn’t be able to handle it; stick-handling just wasn’t his strength. When he was lined up against me, I took a great deal of pleasure blowing past him on the left, knowing that he couldn’t pivot on that leg. Easy moves for me that really got under his skin. We exchanged a few hits, and even though he was too strong for me, a sense of rage would well up in me whenever I spotted him anywhere near me. I was developing quite a burn.

  “Hey, Jolly Green Giant. Take the right pills this morning?”

  He lost his head trying to tear mine off and I came out of the corner with the puck looking for the pass. It clicked every time. At wit’s end, he took it out on anybody he could find, serving up a dangerous cross-check that just about got him tossed. The coach took him aside for a talking to. Tommy, sweat dripping down, listened attentively, nervously nodding his head. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other like an animal set to pounce. After the tête-à-tête we all thought he’d step it down a notch. But no. He fought twice, inflicting some serious damage on a couple of guys who came after him after he taunted them.

  It was clear that if he wasn’t going to win a spot on the strength of his play, he’d win it on strength alone, even if it meant becoming a goon. Besides, everyone— coaches and players —now clearly saw him in that role. Some of the guys were scared enough to keep a healthy distance, even after practice, as if he was a grizzly in a cage.

  Partly, that made me feel better. Too bad for him. I continued to play my game. I was there to score goals and I was the best. I put five in the net including two on breakaways to lead my team to a 7-2 victory. There weren’t many people in the stands, but quite a few were yelling my name every time I touched the puck. And real training camp hadn’t even started yet. No doubt I’d be making the place explode this winter. A couple of good-looking blondes caught my eye.

  The coaches didn’t have much to say. Which seemed like a good sign. If they came up to me, it was to congratulate me or to give me some very specific technical advice: on how to position myself when we were practicing one of their game systems.

  “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?” asked Carl, the assistant. “If you quit your position too soon, all it takes is a quick turnover and you’re out of the game. Look for the pass, but stay closer to the blue line. Stay on your man, got it?”

  He was speaking to me, but all I could hear were the girls yelling my name.

  Tommy and a few others were being watched more closely. And obviously, that was also a good thing. If they had the coach’s eye, it was for good reasons. You could tell most of the rest of the guys knew they weren’t going to make it. I felt a slight tug at my heart when stick-handling around them as if they were orange cones. But I knew only too well that I had to be ruthless. For at the first opportunity, they’d be the same way towards me.

  Practice was over and I was coming out of the showers when I saw Tommy coming in from the rink. As usual, he’d been putting in overtime. He was all red, out of breath. He sat down on the bench in front of his locker. Then he doubled over, clutching his stomach. Carl and François were talking in a corner, and some other guys were still getting dressed. I approached him.

  “Is everything okay, Tom?”

  He looked up at me. It was the first time I noticed how yellow he looked. He took a deep breath, as though trying to stif
le his pain, then he shook his head left to right in a clear no.

  “Are you sure?”

  Once again he nodded his head to say he was all right.

  “Maybe you should see François.”

  And with that, he exploded, slamming the bench with his fist, and telling me to mind my own business.

  “Everything okay, guys?” asked François, with Carl at his side.

  I nodded that it was. We were just fooling around. Right, Tom? Right, he mumbled.

  I got dressed, leaving Tommy alone in his corner, and left, accompanied by the two guys from Abitibi. I was pretty sure one of them, Danny, was going to make the team. He was a tall, skinny defenceman who handled his position quite well. He read my fakes better than anybody else and forced me to pass the puck, preventing me from going to the net. When a forward sees a defenceman and already has it in his head that it’ll be hard to beat him, it gives the defence a distinct advantage in the game of momentum that we call hockey.

  The other guy, Yannick, was probably going to be cut. He hung a few steps behind us as we walked, silent; probably realizing that his beautiful dream of making it in juniors would be nothing but a dream for yet another year. He was nineteen. For sure, it must have been discouraging to watch a sixteen-year-old like myself totally in command on the ice while he had to struggle just to stay in the game. Competition, in all its forms, is a cold-hearted beast. But it can also be a real motivator. Like what I was facing in Tommy. Someone, somewhere, must have an idea of what he was doing, because never had I felt such a rage, such a desire to outdo myself. And it came from the desire to annihilate the other. Disturbing, but terribly effective.

  Yannick made a comment about two girls who were headed our way: short skirts, tank tops and bright loafers. Very sexy. I immediately recognized the two girls in the bleachers who had been hollering my name and, in my usual way— super cool, kind of embarrassed —I was about to move past them, my hands in my pockets, eyes to the ground, when one of them spoke to me with a great deal of familiarity.

  I looked up and immediately recognized her. But she had changed so much that I would have needed binoculars to have known it was her up in the stands. A flood of emotions welled up in me, I couldn’t say a word.

  “What’s the big deal? … It’s me, Jess!”

  It really was Jessie. Except that with her frizzy hair, short skirt and wearing a ton of makeup, I didn’t know how to react. I held out my arms. She leapt into my embrace and squeezed me tight.

  “Umm… Hi,” I said.

  “Umm… Umm… Umm. You’re still the same!” she exclaimed, laughing and pushing away from me with both hands.

  She was very pretty. And her friend, every bit as much. I had earned my teammates’ admiration for my on-ice exploits. But now they were burning with pure envy, and I had to laugh. Danny and Yannick hung back a few steps, waiting for me to make the introductions. They seemed just as intimidated as I was. And when time came for them to leave, I could tell how unhappy they were.

  Jessie’s friend was named Vicky. She was tall, slender, and seemed really laid-back. She stood with her shoulders relaxed, one hand on her hip, the other holding a pink leather handbag. The sun beat down on us in the Colisée’s huge parking lot.

  Jess took me by the arm.

  “I’m happy to see you,” she said.

  “Me, too,” I replied.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you in the paper! I told Vicky, ‘Hey, I know him! We’ve got to go see him.’”

  The far end of a dirt road on the Côte-Nord and Quebec City’s Limoilou district were worlds apart. And Jessie seemed to embrace both those disparate and contrasting worlds. I had known her as someone quiet and reserved. After all the craziness of the previous winter I had given up hope of ever seeing her again. In spite of her drinking, and the bitter taste that remained from our one and only kiss, I still had fond memories of her, even if they were a bit idealized. Now, I found her completely different, as if she had jumped straight out of a YouTube clip. A little too ordinary for my liking. But ever since I had arrived in town I had been bored out of my mind. Larry was pitiful and Tommy even more so. It seemed like Chloé was at the other end of the world. In fact, I didn’t have any friends and I spent most of my time, at least when I wasn’t working out, completely alone with nothing to do. The three previous evenings I had spent in the little five and a half on Rue du Roi had been the worst. After watching every hockey and street fighting video I could find on the Internet and then watching any old movie I could find on TV, I was ready to fall for somebody from back home.

  She seemed truly happy to see me. She was sincere, in any case. And perhaps, deep down, she was bored herself. She asked after just about everyone she knew, even Chloé.

  “She’s doing all right,” I reassured her.

  “Are you guys going out together? I heard it on the grapevine.”

  “A few times, over the summer. But it didn’t really click.”

  I had Jessie in my arms, but I couldn’t help discreetly glancing over at big tall Vicky, walking along on my left. She gave an extra little swing of her hips as she moved, constantly fiddling with her oversized sunglasses in their white plastic frames.

  We walked on until we came to an old grey rusted-over Tercel, waiting in a parking lot.

  “You want a ride? It’s her mother’s car.”

  I said yes, and climbed into the back. It smelled like bubble gum and gas fumes. Vicky started the motor, which coughed and sputtered while Jess turned around in the front seat to continue our conversation. It seemed strange that since we had met at the Colisée exit, Vicky hadn’t spoken a word.

  “What are you doing this afternoon?” asked Jessie.

  “I’m going running.”

  “Running? Didn’t you just finish practice?”

  “Yes. But I run after.”

  “You athletes are nuts. Where do you run?”

  “Victoria Park. Then I take the path to Cartier-Brébeuf and circle across the river to Marie-de-l’Incarnation.”

  “Cartier-Brébeuf… The park in Limoilou? That’s near where we live. We were just headed over there to work on our tans.”

  Chapter 5

  Vicky could barely handle her mother’s car. At every stop sign and after every red light she popped the clutch and the old heap lurched forward. But now we were rolling, windows down, me slouched down in the back seat, eyes moving from Jess’s blond curls to Vicky’s long, bleached windblown hair. It was like floating on a cloud.

  Jessie kept twisting in her seat to offer me gum or a cigarette, which I naturally refused. The sun full in my face, I stared at the brightly dressed denizens of the Basse-Ville that crowded the sidewalks. Quebec City seemed to me to be the most beautiful town in the world. While the Côte-Nord, so far away, was becoming a distant memory. Riding through the woods in my quad, going fishing, the forests and the lakes, had become abstractions far from the happiness I was experiencing at that moment. Nothing else mattered.

  Jessie was looking me steadily in the eye. And I held her gaze, smiling nonchalantly. She was incredibly beautiful. She talked about everything under the sun, gesticulating this way and that. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, on account of the wind and the music. But I didn’t care. I was feeling fine.

  We whipped around the corner onto Rue du Roi, just about smacking into a cyclist and running over three pedestrians. Vicky seemed oblivious to everything, as though she owned the road, flicking the finger at anyone who dared say something about her driving.

  “Here,” I said, “right next to the park.”

  She simply looked at me in the rear-view mirror, without a word, finally bringing the old Tercel to a stop right at my door. This girl seemed incapable of speaking.

  I got out of the car and went into my apartment like a man on a mission. In my room, I grabbed a pair of black shorts, a white t-shirt and my running shoes. As I still hadn’t been able to get up the courage to retrieve my backpack from big
Vince’s office, I decided I’d borrow one of Larry’s. I rummaged through the mess scattered around his bed: pale blue sweats, dirty socks and some gross white underwear with skid marks… Yuck. All that unpleasant effort and still no pack. In the closet I found a backpack on the top shelf. I grabbed one of the straps and pulled it down. A pile of old towels hidden behind it tumbled to the floor. There was a dull thunk, as if something really heavy was inside the towels. As I picked it up I felt a very hard object through the fabric. Unrolling the towels, I found a gun.

  It was black, a revolver. The handle was made of hardwood and was missing a whole section; it wasn’t exactly new. The barrel was stubby. On it, you could still read the engraving: Smith and Wesson, .357 Magnum.

  I was stunned to find such a weapon hidden in his things, in the room right next to mine. What was he going to do with it? He had a troubled past, some run-ins with authorities that he dragged along behind him like a ball and chain. It was an unthinkable risk for a guy like him to be caught with a piece like that. And I didn’t even dare to think about the whole situation with his ex who forbade him to see his daughter. It was impossible for me to imagine he’d want to use it. Impossible.

  The kitchen door swung open and then slammed shut with a bang. Someone had come in. I couldn’t let Larry see me with the gun in my hand. Hurriedly, I rewrapped the weapon. I was still stretching as high as I could reach, arms fully extended in the closet, when I sensed someone nearby. Standing in the doorway, Nathalie was watching me, her arms folded over her chest. She had on her hiking boots and sported a khaki fisherman’s cap on her head.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I was looking for a backpack,” I said, pointing to the old backpack I had found. “I lost mine.”

  “Laurent isn’t with you?”