The Uninvited Guest

by John Degen

  “Now don’t go and get yourself lost on purpose,” Jim shouted from shore.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Janice, too softly almost for Stan to hear.

  They spoke in small clusters of words, not ever managing a full sentence on either leg of the trip. Janice said “a loon, there,” and Stan replied “watch, chop.” She wore a one- piece bathing suit cut squarish and low across the back. Stan watched her shoulder blades flex in and out with each stroke. As the paddle dug into the water, her suit would list away from the skin at her ribs and he would see the side of a breast, whiter than the rest of her.

  “You know,” Stan leans into Tony and drops his voice below the murmur of the party behind them, “even, what, over thirty years later I can remember the sight of that pretty young girl’s breast, just the side of it, coming into view over and over again while she paddled. It’s the kind of memory that makes a long train ride a bit more bearable.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Tony said.

  In the outfitter’s shop, they worked opposite sections, Stan gathering the necessaries plus a few snack treats (potato chips, licorice, marshmallows for the fire), and Janice browsing the spinning rack of paperbacks, touching each spine as they glided by.

  On the way back, they stayed close to the shore to avoid a building wind. It was less work in the shallows but made for a longer trip than the straight line across the lake they’d taken the day before.

  In one small bay, Janice asked to stop and there she slipped over the side of the canoe and swam in clear amber water. Stan stayed seated and watched her. He laid his paddle across the rails behind him, leaned back and smelled the forest. Janice made no noise when her head slipped under or emerged from the water. She swam like an otter, smiling to herself about the pleasure of it.

  They slipped back into their campsite around a jut of rocks and dwarfish trees.

  “Fish, there,” Janice said, and Stan looked on shore to see three small rock bass, red-eyed and lifeless beside a four-inch hunting blade jammed into the soil.

  “James has been killing things again,” she said.

  Past the fish was an emptiness, immediately unsettling, like there wasn’t still a tent just in the trees and gear all around; like it was just wind through underbrush. The yellow front flap of the tent breathed in and out, slowly and soundlessly. Stan watched the flap and, as they came ashore, he spotted a leg. Louise lay on her back, sleeping on the mattress of blankets and clothes spread across the tent floor. She snored lightly, and her hand lay limp across her chest. She was in her bikini. Her hair lay in wet ringlets on the pillow.

  “I could do the same,” said Janice, softly.

  Using a log as a tabletop, Stan cut the heads off each fish, sliced them from tail to throat and removed the stomach sacks. He scaled them with the back of the blade and wrapped the meat in the largest leaves he could find. Then he buried the three little packages in the firepit, beneath the ashy, grey coals.

  “There’s still enough heat there,” he said to no one. He covered the discarded scales, heads and tails with soil, thinking about bears.

  Jim walked back into camp twenty minutes later. He walked directly to Janice and flung his arms at her waist in an attacking hug.

  “I started out to get wood for the fire, but just kept going,” he said. “There’s people camping all around us, and it turns out we could have walked to this site if we wanted to. There’s a path that cuts through about two hundred yards that-a-way.”

  His face and arms showed scratches from the brush, and his shirt was stained with sweat.

  “I met some of our neighbours, but they didn’t meet me—if you know what I mean.”

  “Everything’s an espionage with James,” Janice laughed. She screeched as Jim picked her up and carried her into the lake.

  “And now, back to the underwater headquarters,” he screamed, falling forward so both of them slapped into the water, all arms and legs and gasping.

  “He’s unstoppable, that man,” Louise giggled.

  Stan’s young wife sat in the doorway of the tent, rubbing her fists against her temples, massaging herself awake. She looked at Stan and smiled tiredly.

  That night, the four friends ate warmed spaghetti straight from the cans. Jim laughed loudly all evening, and made them all laugh many more times. The next morning they packed up and made their way back to the city.

  “And I’ll be damned if I didn’t forget about those fish I put in the fire.” Stan tapped the coaster in front of him with his empty glass, indicating to the young woman behind the bar the spot where his next beer should go. “Those three little fish were killed for no reason at all.”

  “What ever became of Janice Barber?” Tony asked. “You know, after the ’51 series?”

  “Well, I guess if I knew that I might not be sitting here with you, my boy.”

  “And wouldn’t that be a shame?” Tony laughed.

  “Wouldn’t that be a goddamn shame.”

  Three

  Stan did not get back to his house until after seven the next morning, almost nine hours after the two seconds that changed everything. Unsmiling, black-suited League officials had hidden him away in the Toronto general manager’s office until well past midnight when all the newspapermen had finally given up and left the building to make their deadlines.

  Among those in charge of running hockey, the incident remained unspoken of, something to be denied again and again, laughed off as ridiculous. Stan understood to keep his mouth shut while he was whisked away from the ice surface after the final whistle. A cluster of men hurried him through the inner corridors of the arena to the room furthest from inquiring eyes and ears. He knew better than anybody what had happened in the last few seconds of the game, and what it meant to the League. He knew all the details, and there wasn’t one he wished to share with anyone.

  A black hat was shoved onto his head and knocked down over his eyes for the trip past the photographers’ bench. He was aware of several bright flashes and men calling out his name. He recognized the voices as those of reporters he’d said hello to in the hallways every other evening, but this evening he knew he was to pretend he didn’t hear them. With the hat over his eyes, Stan saw only his own feet on the floor, tripping up several flights of stairs and crossing thresholds here and there until they were finally directed to a chair beside a large oak table in the GM’s private meeting room. The door to the room banged shut against several more shouts and flashes and Stan was left in the relative quiet and darkness, two stern men in dark suits as his companions. Looking at the faces of the two men, Stan was aware he had lost his job, the greatest job he’d ever hoped to have. He made note of it in his head. The job was gone. When he closed his eyes, he saw his wife’s face.

  Nearing 1:00 a.m. the League president came into the office and dismissed Stan’s two silent guards. He sat down across the table from Stan, took off his hat and laid it on the table in front of him. Stan could smell the sweat and Brylcreem coming from the older man’s perfectly combed hair. The president had been talking to reporters and getting his picture taken since the end of the game. Stan heard exhaustion in his breathing.

  “Stan,” the president began with a sigh, and then veered off in another direction unwilling to get right to the point “. . . Stan, check that top drawer there in that desk. He’s got to have a bottle of something in there.”

  Stan shuffled to the GM’s desk, pulled a half-full bottle of bourbon from the drawer and sat back down.

  “Well don’t just look at it man, let’s have a drink.”

  The bottle slid back and forth across the table several times.

  “Stan,” the president made another start, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next week or next month or next year. I don’t know. But for tomorrow and the next day and certainly the next, someone else is the head timekeeper here in Toronto. We can’t have you in the booth, Stan.”

  “My wife is sleeping with a man
… another man, I mean.” Stan hadn’t exactly decided he wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen during those lost two seconds, but he’d certainly never planned to be talking about it at that moment, just as he was being eased out of his job by a half-drunk sixty-year-old businessman in a sweaty suit. He said the words and then took a longer-than-average pull on the whiskey bottle.

  “Well, Stan, I don’t know what to say. That’s a punch in the gut, isn’t it?”

  The president drummed his fingers on the tabletop and looked around the room uncomfortably. He had been expecting denials and apologies. These were things he was used to from his employees, and he knew how to muscle his way past them. But a confession like this; what was he supposed to do with this?

  “Are you saying you did this on purpose, Stan?”

  The bottle was empty when Stan spoke again. “It’s the kind of idea you like to toy with in your head, isn’t it? You like to think about what you’d do if you came home early one night and found… you know, like what happens in books. You like to think you’ll have something to say about it.”

  “You’re shook up, Stan. Did you understand what I said earlier, about tomorrow?”

  “I understood.”

  “Where do you live, Stan? Let me give you a ride. I have a driver waiting downstairs.” The older man looked at his watch and started to mutter something about his wife waiting at home, but thought better of it. “You need to sleep this whole thing off.”

  Stan directed the League driver to an address in Toronto’s far east end, where the streets finished themselves in wide sand beaches. He had an idea what he’d find at home and was in no hurry to get there. The car pulled up to the last house on the street.

  “You live here?” the president asked with undisguised suspicion, peering past Stan to the large front lawn and flower borders of a lakefront mansion.

  “We rent,” Stan said as he climbed out of the car.

  “You rent what? The garage?” But Stan had slapped the black sedan’s roof twice and the driver began inching away from the curb.

  “We’re not done talking, Stan,” the president shouted as the car picked up speed. “I want you in my office in a week.”

  The beach was empty of people. Though the air was warm for early spring, it was well past midnight and even the boardwalk stragglers had wandered off home to bed. Stan found the waterline and sat down in the wet sand. He wanted to get calm and give the ringing in his ears a chance to subside. He wanted to run through things in his head and see if they still made sense, if the same conclusions could be drawn. To his right was the glow of the downtown, dominated by the steady red sign on top of the Royal York Hotel. On his left sat the squat, brooding darkness of a water filtration plant, unlit but clicking away in its gloom, preparing to help the city shower and get ready for another day.

  The lake breathed a chilling mist in his face, and somewhere way out on the water a laker moaned in its engine, invisible, bypassing the city for some more industrial port further west. For a long time he thought of nothing. He stared out into the misty water and just breathed. For a while he slept like that, sitting up, wrapped in his coat.

  When he found himself awake and thinking again, he was running over a familiar memory. He remembered how his mother used to force him to finish his meals as a child. He recalled the nightly standoff before a plate empty of everything but broccoli or green beans or some other vegetable he’d decided to hate for a while. He laughed quietly when he remembered these struggles, since they were so futile and unnecessary. He didn’t actually hate eating anything. He had an indifferent palate. Everything was just fine as long as it filled him, but there he was each evening, arms crossed, with his mother standing above him in a similar pose. A contest of patience. He wondered if she had enjoyed the game as well as he had.

  He found himself standing, and then walking, his feet pulling him slowly toward home. There was no avoiding it. At some point, he would have to walk through the door and see that she had cleared out. At some point he’d have to admit to being alone. He might as well get on with it. He turned back toward land and crossed through a park to Queen Street. He turned west and walked the long quiet street leading downtown. At Woodbine, he stopped to wait out a light, though there were no cars on the road. He was beginning to feel tired. He was beginning to want his bed, no matter how empty, and suddenly he regretted the distance in front of him. The light turned green, but before he could move, he felt the strong grip of a man’s hand on his arm, stopping him, pulling him backwards.

  “Take it,” the man said, his words full of spit and the stink of alcohol, “take it all, I don’t want it any more.”

  The man had been slouched in a darkened doorway beside the intersection. Drunk and a little lost, he’d stopped in the doorway to relieve himself and had instead fallen asleep standing with his head against the bricks. Stan’s impatient shuffle at the light had woken him. There was a brick pattern of lines in his forehead.

  “I thought it was the perfect deal, you know,” he said, crying a little as he used Stan for support, “but a man has to be a man. He just has to.”

  The drunk clung to Stan’s coat, and Stan resisted the urge to push him off, certain they would both fall and not wanting to hear the sound of the man’s head hitting the sidewalk. The drunk was clinging with his left hand, a strong left hand, and pawing at Stan with his right. At first, Stan thought he might be being robbed, the man seemed so intent on Stan’s pocket, but then he realized the drunk was actually trying to give him money. The man’s right hand was tensed to grip a large wad of bills and he struggled with Stan’s coat, trying to get at the pocket so he could shove the cash inside.

  “Say, what are you doing there, friend?” Stan said, wrestling the stronger man and knowing he’d surely lose. “I think you want to keep that for yourself. There looks to be an awful lot there.”

  The man seemed surprised to hear another voice in the night and he stood up straight. Stan used the opportunity to push him backwards against the wall.

  “I don’t need your money,” he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I’m not a bum. I’m just going for a walk.”

  The drunk looked Stan up and down and laughed a loud drunken laugh.

  “Did you have a little fight with the beach then?” he said.

  Stan saw for the first time the effect of his half-sleep on the beach. The lower half of his black coat was soaking wet and covered in grey sand and pebbles. He wasn’t a bum, but he sure looked like one.

  “I fell asleep,” Stan said, flicking tentatively at his coat with his fingers.

  “Lucky you,” the man said. “Got a cigarette?”

  The two men stood at the corner of Queen and Woodbine, smoking. Stan kept his eyes on his companion, not relishing another dance with him, and wondered what would happen next.

  “My wife is rich,” the man said, adding smoke to his spit-filled conversation. “She’s one of the richest women in the city. We live in a fucking mansion up there on the hill. Where the fuck am I?” He looked around to get his bearings. “Up that way.”

  “Sounds nice,” Stan said.

  “Sounds nice? Yes, it is nice. Nothing like being fucking rich, let me tell you. I did okay myself once. Boxing. I was a boxer—hard to tell, I know, what with my beautiful face and all, but I broke heads up and down the Great Lakes for ten years, and when I stopped boxing, I managed younger boxers. I made a fucking fortune.”

  “Sounds like you have it all figured out.” Stan was enjoying his cigarette, enjoying the approach of morning, but getting more and more anxious for bed. He could feel exhaustion creeping up his legs from the cold sidewalk.

  “That’s when I met her, my wife. She came to the fights one night on the arm of some other rich stiff, some art-loving prick who thought he knew something about everything. I saw them in the crowd and just hated the guy right away. I said to myself, I’m going to save that girl from herself. So, I went and took her way. We were married six weeks
later.”

  “You’re a man who knows what he wants,” Stan said.

  “She didn’t need me or my money. Her father made millions in steel out of Hamilton. She didn’t need anything I had to offer, but she wanted me, so we got married. Then those pricks fixed one of my boys and that was that. One prick little fighter takes one prick little fucking bribe and suddenly I’m giving all my money to lawyers.”

  “Mob?”

  Stan had heard all the stories. The mob had even taken a run at hockey. The word was it didn’t pan out for them, but who knew.

  “Mob is right. Everyone was mob. The commission was mob, the prick fighter was mob, the fucking press was mob as far as I know. All I know is they emptied me. And she said she didn’t care, she said that’s not why she married me anyway. Now, every night she gives me a handful of cash and sends me out of the house so I won’t get pissed up there and start breaking things. Now, I’m like a big dog she can’t handle any more. I still get the good food, but I’m in the kennel sure as fucking anything.”

  “There are worse things,” Stan says.

  “What the fuck do you know about it?” The man tried to raise his voice to a shout but lost heart halfway.

  “I know about it,” Stan said. “There are worse things than being pitied.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but not for me.” The man rubbed his forehead under his hat, his huge right hand still wrapped around a folded brick of cash. “Look, are you going to take this or not? I don’t have all night.”