The Uninvited Guest

by John Degen

  The

  Uninvited Guest

  A Novel

  John Degen

  NIGHTWOOD EDITIONS

  Copyright © John Degen, 2006

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, info@accesscopyright.ca.

  Though certain names and details in this book are historically accurate, the characters in this novel are the product of fancy; any resemblance, in whole or in part, to any person, living or dead, is unintentional.

  Nightwood Editions

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  Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0

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  Edited by Silas White

  Cover photo: Katie West, www.katiewest.ca

  Author photo by Julia Colyar

  Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts and the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council, for its publishing activities.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Degen, John

  The uninvited guest / John Degen.

  ISBN 978-0-88971-216-4 (paper)

  ISBN 978-0-88971-269-0 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8557.E368U58 2006 C813'.6 C2006-901488-4

  for all the Nicolaes

  He holds him with his skinny hand,

  ‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.

  ‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’

  Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

  He holds him with his glittering eye—

  The Wedding-Guest stood still,

  And listens like a three years’ child:

  The Mariner hath his will.

  The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:

  He cannot choose but hear;

  And thus spake on that ancient man,

  The bright-eyed Mariner.

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

  “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

  When you are playing for the national championship, it’s not a matter of life or death. It’s more important than that.

  —Duffy Daugherty, coach of Michigan State University’s football team between 1954 and 1972. As a player at Syracuse University in 1938, Daugherty broke his neck on the field, and played the rest of the season wearing a protective collar.

  In Montreal, on a summer evening, a young man named Tony sits with a dead man named Stan in a room growing slowly darker as the day finishes itself outside the windows. The air of the city is breezy and warm, inviting. The room is clean and decorated so as not to offend. It contains several chairs, a small couch, some tables for flowers, and a casket on a skirted, wheeled trolley. There is a distant hiss of air conditioning.

  Tony is waiting to be asked to leave. He knows Stan. He’s worked with him for a number of years, has drunk beer by his side on bar stools in this very city.

  Tony wonders about his duty to stay in the room with the corpse of his friend. He’d like to ask someone what he should do. He’d like to ask Stan, since Stan always seemed to know what to do in these situations, always had a reasonable plan for getting the job done. There is a driver waiting outside, and there is the question of storage. There is no one to ask. The funeral director had told Tony he could wait in this room, but he isn’t sure if that means he must wait in this room. He waits for the funeral director to return and tell him to leave.

  “Stan,” Tony says, surprising himself. “Stan, what should I do here? You’re dead, after all, and I haven’t eaten anything all day. I’m tired Stan, and we have a long drive ahead of us tomorrow.”

  The dead man says nothing.

  “It doesn’t feel right leaving you here like this, Stan,” Tony continues, feeling again the weight of the situation, the solitude of being someone in charge of a dead man.

  “If you were alive, you know, we’d make a night of it—any way you’d like. We could do the bars if you wanted, or just play cards in the room. But this is a whole different situation now. I’ve got to call the League, Stan. I’ve got to report that I have you stored away safely, and the Cup, you know. They’ll want to know.”

  He takes a turn around the room. Through the window he watches the taxis on Ontario Street. It’s a Thursday evening, and all the cabs contain young people, people Tony’s age dressed for the clubs and no doubt smelling nice. He catches a face in each cab going by, a smiling, laughing face, a face telling the story of the evening to come. There are ivies on the windowsill. He sees now they are not plastic as he’d assumed, but real and climbing in behind the heavy curtains and up the latticed panes. All living things want out of this room, Tony thinks.

  “I think everyone out there is going to get laid tonight, Stan. I think they’re all on their way.”

  A small table by the door holds the guest book with his solitary name inscribed on the top line of the first page. There had been no need to sign it. He’d seen the weary look of impatience on the funeral director’s face as he scratched his name on the page. No one else would visit, and tomorrow Stan would be on his way back to Toronto to be buried alone in a plot paid for by the League. Still, Tony had seen the empty book on his way in. He’d stopped and signed it with the pen on the chain. Now, in the table’s one drawer he finds four identical guest books, all empty, and nine new pens waiting to be attached to chains. He signs each book on the top line of the first page and returns them to their hiding place in the drawer.

  “I wish I was getting laid tonight, Stan,” Tony says. “Tonight especially. Something about being here with you makes a man want to be with a woman. No offence.”

  Something will have to be decided soon. He knows the driver is becoming impatient outside. He’s sure the funeral director is somewhere in the building, waiting for him to leave, perhaps even watching him pace the room on some hidden camera. Tony knows at some point soon he will have to leave this room, leave Stan to wait out the first night of his death alone. “Stan, did I ever tell you the story of my middle name? You know the middle name is the one that contains the secrets. Did I ever tell you about mine? Probably. Let me tell you again.”

  One

  Late in the season of 1951, Stan Cooper kept time at the arena in Toronto. Seated behind glass at the centre line, he watched the game peripherally, seeing only the referee and linesmen. The sound of a whistle was electric to him, and he responded by flicking the switch to cut the clock. He worked the rhythms of a game, feeling for the next shrill sound. If the action went past three minutes uninterrupted he felt it in his chest as a growing tension. The puck skipped over the glass, a goalie covered up, exhausted wingers fell in the corners. Stan’s finger hummed in the half-second before the whistle. He prompted air from the lungs of three men in striped shirts. He willed everyone in the building to exhale and get ready for more.

  His job required a colour-blindness, an inability to discern between flying shapes moving in and around the officials. For Stan, it required that he did not read the sports sections of newspapers and that he respond with the same nervous laugh to every half-begun conversation about hockey. The things he could not ignore—the weight of crowd noise in response to a team’s relative success or failure, the length of his working season (longer in playoff years), the buzz of traffic around Yonge and Carlton streets on Fridays, Saturdays and some mid-week evenings—these things that revealed
the obvious to him, that his home team had a shot, that he might work the finals, he banished these things as best he could. Teams win championships, clocks tell time. Two separate and joined realities, but he had control over only one of them. He played time, and the game was his own. Black or white, binary, absolute. It ran or it stopped. He did not even watch the puck when it dropped for a faceoff. He watched the muscles of the official’s hand. It was the absence of a puck that set time moving again. A hand, suddenly empty.

  Moving home through traffic, down Church Street to Queen and then out across the Don River Valley into lower Riverdale, he did not actually know who had won. The density of the air in the building at the moment of the final whistle would have told him enough, but he prided himself on not knowing the score. The referee controlled the score, while he just changed the numbers and then forgot what they meant. The hockey he actually watched was at home on Saulter Street where the raised CN tracks slanted across the roadway, cutting his whole neighbourhood off from the long flat approach to Lake Ontario.

  In the impromptu cul-de-sac, kids came out nightly to run around passing and shooting old rubber balls. These games were untimed even by the sun, the shouts of children lasting well past any reasonable limitation imposed by darkness. On evenings he was home, Stan watched them from his front step, happily off the clock. And when it was obviously becoming too late to play, when mothers were starting to glance out windows, it was always “next goal wins.” Next goal wins, no matter the actual score—plunk that ball in the back of the net and it’s over. These kids didn’t care enough about their skills, didn’t feel their losses deeply enough to generate anything near the passion needed to get off the streets and onto skates in a professional arena. They were losers, and Stan loved watching losers play hockey. To him, it was the only pure form of the sport.

  Toronto won the 1951 championship over Montreal in five games. To win a series in five indicates, if not a rout, certainly a singular dominance, the losing team managing to scratch out but one win in the entire series. A five-game series is a worse embarrassment for the losing team than a four-game sweep, because the lack of a sweep indicates there were flaws in the winning team, there were weaknesses to be exploited but your team didn’t exploit them. You had them all figured out for one game, but then you forgot what you had learned. They didn’t win; you lost. The last game Stan Cooper ever worked as official timekeeper was the third game of the 1951 finals.

  The first two games of the series were played in Montreal, at the Forum on Sainte-Catherine Street. The Toronto team sickened all of Quebec with a surprise first-game victory. Montreal had beaten the powerful and favoured Detroit team four games to two in the semifinals, and was expected to win handily over an unfocused Toronto squad. But Toronto outworked and outhit their rivals, sending three players out of the game with injuries in the first period alone. That night, the visiting players were locked into their hotel by their head coach, Joe Primeau. They ate from room service and Primeau stood in the kitchen to watch it being prepared. A crowd of Montrealers gathered outside the hotel, shouting insults and burning blue and white sweaters in the streets.

  Montreal’s only win in that championship series came the next night. Stan didn’t listen to the away games. He avoided all mention of how the team was doing in preparation for the three games he was to work at the arena. But there was no shouting on Queen Street late that night. No banging of pots on the front porches of his neighbourhood. He knew they had lost game two and that the series was tied. He worked in his garden that night, planting peas and tomatoes, and building a scaffold of wooden stakes for his beans to climb. A few minutes past ten, he chased a raccoon from his back shed. The moon was full, or he might have stepped on his rake and clobbered himself. Inside the house, his wife talked on the telephone. He stopped occasionally and listened for words, hearing “blue” and “Penetang” and “bristles.”

  Game three cost Stan his job and a faith in things as they seem. Game three was fifty-nine minutes and fifty-seven seconds of business as usual for the clock-watcher and five seconds of timekeeping insanity. Game three was the end of Stan’s ten-year, childless marriage. The beginning of his irrational hatred for all things tartan. Game three finished Montreal at a spiritual level, broke their shins and left them shaking their heads and crying on the ice.

  Montreal tied the score at two goals apiece at 19:27 of the final period. Before that goal, the air in the Gardens was sweetened with screaming voices and the discarded wrappings of thousands of ice cream sandwiches. At 19:25 the ice gleamed in that way that let Stan know he would be going home soon. Blue and white sweaters passed by him like darts while red sweaters drifted, collided, slammed into the glass. At 19:26 a stick blade hit the ice and shattered, sending both puck and wooden fragments toward the goal. At 19:27 the building lost its voice. The goalie had blocked the stick blade and let the puck slip under his arm. The red sweaters danced and Stan went through his time board checklist: minutes, seconds, home goals, visiting goals, period, penalty time. Minutes, seconds, home goals, visiting goals, period, penalty time.

  More whistles blew and the black and white sweaters raced into a corner to break up a fight. The game might go into overtime. It could be a long night. The raccoons might get to his young tomato plants. He ran through the checklist and glanced at his wife’s seat. He looked at the seats he had given to his wife and his friend James Cole. They were easy to spot because Jim was wearing his ridiculous yellow plaid cap.

  Stan had not looked from his scoreboard to the crowd in four years. He ran through the checklist. They were eating ice cream sandwiches, and smiling. His wife used her long nails to pull away the waxed paper from Jim’s disintegrating sandwich. Gold seats, on the aisle, for the two people he preferred among all people, save his mother who was no longer alive. He ran through the checklist and waited for the whistle, his finger on the switch. She laughed and wiped ice cream from the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin.

  At 19:57 a whistle blew and all the sweaters glided back to the Montreal end to restart after the puck had been iced. The sweaters moved slowly, tired, saving whatever was left for overtime. The building was loud again. People banged on the glass as the sweaters passed. They were angry for resolution. They wanted it over. Stan let his eyes rise to his wife, her hand on Jim’s right knee, her nails clutching at the blue and white checked trousers in nervous anticipation. The sweaters stopped moving, and Jim’s hand landed on top of hers, softly, like it knew how to be there.

  There was movement in the corner of his eye, a reflection on the far glass across the arena. Stan turned his head to the turmoil on the ice and at the same time pressed the button to start the clock, fully two seconds too late. At 19:59, the puck slipped across the line beneath a desperately outstretched glove and game three was over. The winning goal was scored one full second after the end of the third period.

  Even in the empty cave of the crowd’s celebration, Stan understood he was not the only one who knew. The result stood, with deep resentment and complaint from the Montreal bench. The next night, Stan watched game four from the retired player’s box high above the north seats. Bill Barilko’s heroics in game five carried the controversy of Stan’s two-second blunder out of the papers. The disappearance of the young defender during a fishing trip that summer buried it forever. The 1951 finals, which could easily have been known as the Stan Cooper finals, instead went to the body of Barilko, lost on the bottom of some northern lake.

  Two

  “You know that guy who gets knocked flat at the blue line because he’s looking at his skates instead of watching the forechecker—the guy who finds himself pleased to remember his own name about ten minutes later while the team doctor is stitching parts of his face? That was me.”

  Stan and Tony sat side by side at the bar of the Moose Lodge in Kingston, Ontario. Behind them, a party picked up steam. Some young man, a hero in this town, had won all there was to win in hockey, and Stan and Tony, employees of the game,
were being paid to keep track of the hoopla. It was rare for Tony to accompany Stan on one of his business trips. Usually he took care of things back at the office in Toronto while Stan was on the road, but Stan was getting old, had pulled something in his arm on a trip overseas and needed help with the lifting.

  “You think you’re gonna see shit like that coming. You think something big enough to knock you right out of your life and into something new is going to make some noise on its way in. But it can happen like that. I tell myself it took two seconds to change my life, but that’s just what the clock showed. When she changed her mind, whenever that was, it probably happened in no time at all.”

  They camped together once: Stan, his wife Louise, their friend James Cole and the woman James had been seeing for years, Janice Barber. They rented two canoes at an outfitter just inside Algonquin Park and set out across a wide, choppy lake for three days of tenting. Janice Barber always looked like she might go off and read a book at any moment. She paddled a canoe like the job might be washing dishes, like she intended to keep going until there weren’t any more dishes in the sink. When spoken to, about almost anything, she said things like, “Is that so?”, “I’m sure I didn’t know that,” and “Tell me more.” In this way, she was the perfect companion for James Cole who was most content being listened to. Stan and Louise laughed quietly at the one-sided conversation in the other canoe while the four of them paddled slowly toward their campsite.

  Jim’s voice bounced off rock faces and came back at them from across the lake. Janice’s short replies were lost in a breeze. None of them camped very often, and Stan could not remember why any of them had thought it might be a good idea for a vacation, the four of them, in one large tent, between a vast, dumb forest and a sullen lake. Midway through the second day, they found they would not have enough food for both dinner that evening and breakfast the next day. Stan set himself to canoeing back to the out- fitter for cans of spaghetti. Just as he launched, Janice spoke her intention to join him. He sat, holding the canoe steady while she waded out and climbed aboard.