Searching for Terry Punchout

by Tyler Hellard

  The day of the cigarette incident I came home and both my mother and my father were in the living room. After he retired from playing, Dad moved back to Toronto and I’d only see him once or twice a year, when he’d blow into town for a few days, ostensibly to visit me, but also for a dose of hero worship. People in Pennington still loved him and would throw a town barbecue or a party at the curling club for his visits. I looked up to him, my dad the NHL star. Other kids were jealous; they had fisherman and truck driver and accountant dads. Every kid thinks his dad is a superhero, but mine kind of was.

  As I walked into our living room, my father grinned at me from the beat-up rocking chair in the corner. His hair was still dark then, almost black, and he wore a mustard-coloured sweater. My mother, sitting on the couch, stared out the window, keeping her eyes turned away from him.

  “Hey, Skinny,” my father said. He always called me Skinny, not Champ or Tiger or Kiddo. Skinny. Which I was, but still.

  I wanted to run over and jump into his arms, but I could tell something was off. My mother was the kind of angry you can feel in the air and I wasn’t sure if it was me or my father that was pissing her off.

  “Come here and give me a hug,” he said, sliding to the edge of the chair. I glanced at my mother, unsure, then slowly walked over and hugged my father. His arms wrapped around me and his hair, stiff with lanolin, felt like twigs against my cheek. “I’ve got some news. Good news. I’m moving here.”

  My mother’s face shot to us, her eyes wide and fiery in a way I’d never seen.

  “Oh, well, not here,” he said, gesturing to the small room we were sitting in. “Into town, a house over on Duke Street. You can come stay whenever you want.”

  I was ecstatic. Who wouldn’t have been? My father was coming home!

  That night, when mom put me to bed, I asked her why she was mad. I wasn’t under any illusions that my parents would get back together, but it seemed unfair of her to not want him around, especially since I wanted it so much.

  “It’s hard to explain,” she said, pulling my blanket up a little higher on my chest, then smoothing it out with her palm. My mother rarely spoke about my father. She never interfered with the relationship he and I had, limited as it was. She made sure there was a framed photo of him in my room, but she didn’t talk about him when he wasn’t around.

  “Do you hate Dad?”

  I was so afraid she’d say yes. I loved my father and wanted him to live here, but I was loyal to her first. If she really hated him, I’d have to take her side.

  “I get mad at him. Sometimes I get very mad at him, but it’s not the same thing as hate. It can be hard to tell the difference.”

  “Can’t you pretend to not be mad at him? Not all the time, just when you see him.” This seemed reasonable, in the way her asking me to pretend I was okay eating broccoli at my grandparents’ house was reasonable. Sometimes you just have to suck it up, right? She looked at me, smiling a little with her mouth, but not her eyes. They were sad as ever.

  “I’ll try.” She leaned over and kissed me on my forehead.

  As she turned the light off and walked out the door, I asked her the one question I’d been thinking about since the moment my father told me he was coming home.

  “Do you think Dad will coach my hockey team next year?”

  She stopped in the doorway but didn’t turn back. “Maybe. You’ll have to ask him. Now go to sleep.”

  •

  I’m sitting in a basement with a bunch of guys I grew up with: Paulie, Shitty, Mac, and Davey Arsehole. To them, I am just Macallister. None of these are the names our mothers gave us, but in our mothers’ defence, they didn’t know us very well when we were born.

  Paulie is Paulie because Paul always seemed too stiff and adult. He isn’t apostle material, or even Beatle material for that matter.

  Shitty is Jason MacDonald—the most common first-and-last-name combination among men aged twenty-five to thirty in Pennington. Of the four I grew up with, there’s Jay Corn Flakes, also known as Flakes, Flakey, or Flaker; Lefty, a left-handed goalie, which is only slightly more common than a unicorn in a small town where left-handed gear is hard to come by; Jason de Toof, named for his strange accent, an odd mix of Acadian father, Cape Breton mother, and harelip; and Shitty. Shitty’s dad, Doug MacDonald, got dubbed Dougie Two-Shits in his youth because of his propensity for one-upmanship. If you took one shit, good old Dougie would tell you about the time he shit twice. As Dougie Two-Shits’s son, Jason was called Shit Stain as early as in the womb. By the time he was twelve, Shit Stain had morphed into Shitty—a nickname for a nickname—to everyone except his teachers, who would often call on “Jason” and get no response. Going through life being called Shitty by an entire town has to mess you up at least a little.

  Mac is Clint MacLean. I wish I’d been called Mac, though half the people in Pennington are McThis or MacThat and probably feel the same. Clint’s dad was an absolute giant of a man, appropriately called Big Mac. Though Clint did inherit his father’s size and thick mop of curls, he was Little Mac until the age of ten. That’s when Big Mac drowned in the St. Lawrence. After that, people stopped distinguishing and he was just Mac.

  Davey Arsehole is David Arsenault, my former downstairs neighbour and best friend. I always just called him Dave.

  Mine is a lazy nickname. I am Macallister, no bells or whistles or superfluous hard “E” sounds. It’s better than nothing. The kids who don’t play hockey don’t get nicknames; they’re just Steven or Peter or Michael. The nicknames cut in dressing rooms bleed into the rest of our lives. For all the romanticizing of hockey in this country, no one ever mentions that, in places like Pennington, it’s literally responsible for your identity.

  Mac looks like Paul Bunyan, big as ever, wearing a bushy beard and a red flannel shirt. He inherited this house from his dead father by way of his uncle, who moved into Pine Grove Manor last year with advanced dementia. “I found him shitting into the washing machine one night,” Mac says with a shrug.

  I get the impression that these guys come and go as they please here, treating Mac’s place like more of a clubhouse than a home. It’s a big house for one person. The basement is a holdover, frozen in time for as long as any of us have been alive. There’s wood panelling, orange shag, oversize brown sofa segments, and worn chairs made of teak and covered in oatmeal fabric. There’s a rotary phone on an end table. Mac’s TV, the only modern thing in the room, is an anachronism. The whole place smells stale—stale beer, stale cigarettes, stale ambition.

  These guys come here a couple times each week to drink and watch hockey. I’ve barely cracked my first can open when Mac disappears into a room behind the basement stairs and returns with a blowtorch, two scorched knives, and a funnel. I recognize these as the tools of obsessively efficient dope-smoking.

  Sure enough, Shitty fishes a loonie from his wallet, a wad of hash stuck to the Queen’s face. Is this still how it’s done? I’ll smoke a joint sometimes, but hash stuck to coins? Hot knives? I haven’t seen, much less done, this stuff since high school. I had always assumed it was only something you did until you were old enough to know better.

  Shitty pulls off small chunks of hash, balling each one up with his nicotine-stained fingers. I’m pretty sure his scuzzy Habs cap is the same one he wore in high school. He’s furrier now, with a clear aversion to shaving and haircuts, but otherwise is mostly pale skin and sinew. He lines up the balls of hash with military precision, his eyes never leaving the TV.

  “So, you’re out west?” he asks. Out west is the very specific term people on the East Coast apply to everything between Toronto and Japan.

  “Yeah. Calgary.”

  “Never been.” Shitty rolls off another ball of hash and places it at the end of the line. There’s a better-than-average chance he’s never been farther than Halifax. “Tail’s good there, I imagine.” This might be a question, or it might be a general stateme
nt; an opinion of Calgary developed from afar.

  “Hey, does Calgary have hookers?” Paulie asks.

  “Sure, I guess,” I say. “I don’t use them, but they’re there.”

  “Man, I wish we had hookers.”

  This cracks Mac up. “That’s about the only way you’d get fucked,” he says to Paulie.

  “I get fucked plenty, fuckhead,” Paulie snipes back. “It’d just be nice if it was easier, you know? A nice-looking piece and all it takes is twenty bucks without no hassle.”

  “Probably be good if she weren’t your cousin, too. That’d be a nice change for you,” Shitty chides.

  I explain to Paulie that Calgary hookers aren’t like movie hookers. They aren’t Julia Roberts in thigh-high vinyl boots, at least not the ones I’ve seen. “Twenty bucks’ll only get you a hand job in an alley.”

  Paulie scrunches up his face with disappointment. “Right in the alley? What if it’s January?”

  “Right in the alley. Even in January.”

  “Man, that’ll shrink your sac.”

  “Sounds like a good date to me,” says Mac.

  There’s more laughter all around, in the middle of which Shitty fires up the torch, dials it down to a steady blue flame, and props it between his feet on the floor. He holds the knives to the torch with his right hand and picks up the funnel with his left. The knives start glowing orange and his eyes stay glued to the TV. I consider how fast the shag carpet and wood panelling would go up if he tipped the torch or dropped a blade. As soon as the referee blows his whistle to stop the play, Shitty pops the narrow end of the funnel into his lips, takes a knife in each hand, touches one to a hash ball, which sticks, then crushes it between the blades. A puff of smoke instantly rises and disappears into the wide mouth of the funnel, nothing wasted. Like I said, efficient dope-smoking.

  Shitty passes the funnel, and one by one he turns hash into puffs of smoke for everyone in the room. It’s Dave that finally hands the funnel to me. I hesitate to take it from him.

  “What? City boys don’t smoke?” His eyes are still the darkest I’ve ever seen, almost black. He’s added about thirty pounds of muscle since I last saw him, and keeps a well-manicured goatee, though his hair has receded, leaving a lot of forehead. His T-shirt is tight on his biceps and he’s wearing too much cologne. But he’s still Dave, and if there’s such a thing as peer pressure for adults, I’m feeling it. As a kid, Dave was the instigator for my first cigarette, my first drink, my first fight, and more. Now here I am, a grown man, and Davey Arsehole is double-dog daring me with a simple look. And it works because some things never change.

  First, I launch into an emphatic coughing fit, and then, quicker than I’d have expected, my eyes get dry and heavy, my brain sluggish. I stare into the TV, hoping it’ll mask how stoned I am, but I can’t follow the game at all. I know the rules of hockey and I’ve watched thousands of games, but right now it’s moving too fast. I can’t make sense of what’s happening on the screen. When the Leafs score, Paulie and Shitty stand and yell, which startles me, then they start high-fiving around the room and, when it’s my turn, I miss Shitty’s hand entirely. I feel like a fraud, ashamed that I can’t keep up.

  Is someone talking to me? Someone is talking to me. It’s Paulie. Paulie is talking to me. Focus on his voice. Act casual.

  “Sorry? Pardon? What?” Smooth.

  “Flames games? Do you go to them? In Calgary?” Paulie punctuates his sentence with pauses, turning one question into three. It seems like a deliberate attempt to mess with me.

  “Yes. Well, no. Sometimes.” Ugh. Does he know I’m high? Isn’t he high? I feel like a monkey in a cage.

  Dave jumps in, stretching the concentration I can give this conversation to the absolute limit. “Don’t you have to go? Isn’t that your job or whatever?”

  Right. I suppose it is my job. Did I tell Paulie that? Did he tell everybody else? Wait, what’s the question? Think, think, think. Go back a step. Hockey. The Flames. I don’t cover the Flames, though. Shit, that’s his question. Answer him, dummy.

  “No!” I say with more enthusiasm than is warranted. “Not my beat.”

  To my right, Mac lights a cigarette. He has a spider tattoo that seems to be crawling out of his unkempt neck beard. What does it say about someone who gets a spider tattooed on their neck? They served time in prison? They don’t care about impressing potential future mothers-in-law? They eat kittens for breakfast?

  “You must get free tickets or something, though,” says Paulie. Are we still talking about this? I would really like to stare at Mac’s tattoo for a bit. It’s a terrible piece of work, faded in spots, lines too thick for any significant detail. But Mac’s neck, like the rest of him, is enormous, so the tattoo artist had a lot of canvas to work with. Maybe he’ll let me touch it.

  I look at Paulie though droopy eyelids and a haze of smoke and brain sludge. “Sure. Sometimes.” And then to Mac, “Did that hurt?”

  “Did what hurt?”

  “Your neck.”

  “Did my neck hurt?”

  “The thing. On your neck. The spider.” I’m pointing like an idiot, my finger an inch away from his head. I want to poke the tattoo.

  “Oh. No, not really.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Dunno. Seemed like a good enough idea at the time. I mostly forget it’s there.”

  When Mac inhales from his cigarette, his neck muscles tense and the spider twitches. The illusion freaks me out and I have to turn away.

  Paulie is watching me. “You okay, man?”

  “Yes.” No. The world around me is a loud, fuzzy mess.

  “You look a little pale.”

  “Lightweight,” Dave mutters, smirking. Asshole.

  Everyone is looking at me. Everyone is smirking. Assholes.

  “Right baked, wha?” says Shitty, slapping my knee.

  I have been found out for the non-hash-smoking poseur I am. “Were we talking about the Flames?”

  They laugh and it helps. It all feels okay. We watch hockey for a while and it doesn’t matter that I can’t remember the beginning of each play by the time the end comes along. People talk, but I stop following the threads. I relax and try to enjoy my high.

  When the game ends, we end up standing around the kitchen drinking more beer. Kitchen drinking is another one of those East Coast idiosyncrasies I’d forgotten. Mac’s kitchen, like his basement, is a 1970s relic, with sea-foam-green cupboards and linoleum yellowed by time and spilled Kraft Dinner.

  The guys tell stories, and my head clears enough that I can keep up. I learn what they’ve been up to. Besides the house, Mac also inherited his uncle’s garage, where he specializes in salvaging Mustangs and Trans-Ams and other cars popular with young men in the eighties. Shitty is the janitor at West County Consolidated, the local elementary and junior high school, and lives with Danielle Morrison. Dave and Paulie are between jobs, Paulie because he is, by his own admission, “too fuckin’ lazy to bother,” Dave for reasons no one even hints at.

  And I learn what other people I used to know ended up doing with their lives. Many stayed put, or left for school, then came right back. Jon Green works at his dad’s car dealership. Chris MacKinnon is on town council, his older brother Todd is a constable with the local RCMP, and his younger brother Trevor sells hash to Shitty. Tara MacDonnell and Kent MacDonnell (no relation) got married and bought the local pizza place. Others really left. Justin “No Duh” McNeil is a lawyer in Halifax and Denny Murphy went overseas. Jason “Boner” Bonner plays in a band popular enough that I might have heard of them, but not so popular that anyone in the kitchen can remember what they’re called. Henry Hillier became a professional wrestler and, last anyone heard, was performing in Florida under the name Hillbilly Hank. A few guys went to Alberta for oil-patch jobs and turn up for visits every couple of years with scads of cash. Some got married, some had kids, at least two di
ed (brain aneurism and ATV accident), and a few, like me, just disappeared.

  Hearing all this is like my drive through downtown Pennington: simultaneously familiar and not. So-and-so is working here now. Such-and-such got a new truck. Lives were lived in my absence. This world kept spinning, even without me in it.

  Have these guys ever stood in this kitchen and talked about me? Seems unlikely. I want to jump in, take part, but there’s nothing I can contribute. I’ve been gone too long. I stay quiet until I hear the name Stephanie, which provides me with an opening.

  “Stephanie Smith? I saw her today.” I have their attention. I am now a living, breathing part of the conversation, and all eyes are on me. Don’t screw it up. “She’s still kind of a bitch, eh?” I have the world’s biggest, dumbest grin on my face.

  No one else smiles. In fact, they seem to be gawking at me.

  That’s when Dave punches me in the head.

  CHAPTER THREE

  There’s a deep purple bruise in my hairline near my right temple. It wasn’t much of a fight. Dave hit me, and I, being very far from sober and not accustomed to getting punched, quickly dropped to my hands and knees in pain and confusion. When I got up, Mac had his yeti paw on Dave’s chest to keep him back.

  On the way back to my motel, Paulie explained that Dave and Stephanie got married, but are currently separated and it’s not something Dave talks about. That said, she’s still his wife and he doesn’t take kindly to her being called names. Fair enough, though a warning would have been nice.

  As fate has it, Dave was also the last person who punched me. High school popularity is a bit like the stock market—some stocks go up, while others crap out. Dave was a blue-chipper. I was more like the account you dump fifty bucks into for your newborn’s college fund—not worthless, but entirely safe and unsexy and forgettable. I was Dave’s sidekick. It didn’t bug me that other people saw me that way, but when Dave acted like I was lucky he even bothered with me, it stung. It was as though I was a social obligation—someone he hung out with because he had to. I never called him on it. There are worse things than being on the fringe of popularity, like not being on the fringe of popularity.