by John Degen
“Why would I take it?” Stan said.
“It’s up to you,” the man sniffed at him. “Either you take it, or the lake takes it. I know one thing, I’m not going to take it any more.” The ex-boxer clamped his left hand on Stan’s shoulder and, squinting, guided his right hand to Stan’s coat pocket. The money slipped in like a smooth rock. He felt the weight of it immediately.
“Buy yourself something nice,” the man said, tripping backwards a little as he released Stan.
“And if anyone asks you, you never saw me tonight. I don’t want them dragging me out of the lake for her to look at. Just let me go. Maybe I’ll wash up in New York somewhere. Maybe I’ll go over the Falls.”
“The Falls go the other way,” Stan said.
The man stopped walking backwards and looked Stan in the face. He started laughing. They both started laughing.
She typed the note. Stan knew this was her way of being polite, so he didn’t have to look at her handwriting and become morbid about it. In books he’d read, the note had been the only thing left to remind the man of the woman, but this was not true for Stan. She’d left all her gardening utensils, including her prized stainless steel hand spade and the little mat she used to rest her knees on while weeding. Many of her books remained, the ones, he guessed, she never intended to read again. She had taken only one of her houseplants, the African violet. He’d suspected for years she had a special relationship with this plant and now he knew he’d been right. The ficus and the rubber tree stood where they’d always stood, though it looked like she’d dusted their leaves sometime in the last few days.
Otherwise, it had been a hasty leaving, he could tell, and with good reason. Recognizing what had happened, seeing that Stan had seen their hands laid casually one on the other, watching his face as he was dragged away from his timekeeper’s booth into a mob of suits and reporters, Louise knew the time she’d been anticipating had arrived. She had Jim accompany her in a taxi to the house on Saulter Street; they’d thrown her essentials into a couple of suitcases, grabbed the African violet and left. The note told Stan that she’d taken the car—they’d taken the car—but he knew without having to be told. They wouldn’t stay in the city. They would get away, far away, and for that they’d need a car.
Stan sat at the kitchen table. In front of him was his wife’s typewritten, unsigned goodbye, and beside it on the tabletop, a neatly stacked pile of twenty-dollar bills. He’d counted them three times, to be sure of things. There was nineteen hundred dollars in the stack. What man needs almost two thousand dollars to have a good time for one evening? What kind of life must that be? Stan didn’t worry that the drunk had jumped into the lake. He’d known drunks in his time. He’d listened to the remorse an evening full of whiskey can bring, and he knew it rarely prompted any serious action other than the kind of impulsive behaviour one generally lives to regret, like picking up a girl at the end of the night, finding yourself in an alleyway brawl, or giving away a pocketful of money because you feel sorry for how life’s treated you. He felt sure the man was right now sleeping himself into a hangover on a chesterfield in his wife’s luxurious mansion overlooking the lake. If he even noticed his missing allowance the next morning, he’d chalk it up to more bad luck and add it to his list of grievances against himself. Stan felt too sorry for himself to feel sorry for some poor drunk rich guy.
For the first time in years, Stan listened to a hockey game on the radio, at the local tavern up on Queen Street. He listened all the remaining games there, heard Toronto win the championship. When the final whistle blew, he pulled a small fistful of money from his jacket pocket and bought a round of drinks for everyone in the bar. He was grateful to the crowd in the bar. Stan’s picture had been in the paper for a week following the game that had lost him a job and a wife, but if anyone did recognize him, they said nothing about his two-second mistake. They let him drink and enjoy their enjoyment of the games. For hours after the final game, Stan walked through the crowds on the street, watched them bang their pots and blow their horns.
In the early summer, Stan received a letter with a Winnipeg postmark. This note was handwritten (she’d left her typewriter behind). She apologized for the abruptness of her departure and for the way in which Stan had to discover her relationship with Jim. She was sorry he had lost his job and she hoped he’d be all right. She did not explain how it had all happened, the affair, the destruction of their marriage. She didn’t have to. Since their wedding day, a hot day at City Hall, Stan had anticipated an ending much like this. He knew Louise was an ambitious woman, someone who longed to travel and see the world, someone who would not stay in one place for very long. He, on the other hand, would have been satisfied to spend the rest of his life as a timekeeper in Toronto, to see each year develop much the same as the last, with only the team’s performance through the playoffs from year to year determining any difference. He often wondered what it was about him that convinced her to marry him in the first place.
He was, he knew, boring, and while he didn’t mind being bored by himself, he couldn’t imagine anyone else standing for it. If he’d been a stepping stone for her, he was a willing one. Temporary or not, Stan had loved his marriage and adored Louise. He couldn’t bring himself to blame her for ending it. She had clearly given him more than he’d given her.
At the end of the letter, after wishing him well, Louise wrote that Stan could find his car at the corner of Main and Robert in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She was sorry to have taken it without asking, and sorry to not be able to return it, but she was certain it was safe and would remain where she’d left it until he could manage a trip up there to fetch it.
It was a five-hour bus ride to Penetang. Stan sat in a window seat beside an older woman who was going to visit her son in prison. Manslaughter, she said, over and over again. Stan told her he was visiting relatives. The bus left the station at Bay and Dundas in early orange light, picked its way through empty city streets and found countryside to the northwest. They sped past the tiny airport at Malton, a field and a windsock, and found the northern highway, number 27. Here the landscape was hills and trees, one farm bleeding into the next, and towns with curious names, each of them a brief stopping point for the bus—Kleinburg, Nobleton, Schomberg, Bond Head. Further north, near Barrie, Stan saw a sign for a town called Utopia.
The bus stopped for half an hour in Barrie to off-load some passengers and pick up others. Stan took the opportunity to stretch his legs. He walked along Dunlop Street past an artillery gun cemented to the sidewalk as a war memorial. Apparently, Barrie had sent more than fifty men to their deaths in two wars. So many for such a small town. Late morning light bounced off Lake Simcoe and shimmered between the shop windows on the street. Stan walked down to the water and gazed north, up the bay to where it widened and disappeared in distance. It looked so different from the lake he knew back in Toronto, so empty and wild. He imagined that people had stood in this spot for thousands of years and seen pretty much the same view. Trees and water and sunshine.
An hour and a half later, he was walking the streets of Penetang, looking out over a different bay on a different lake. He’d seen his car at the central intersection as the bus chugged past, and now he was trying to remember his way back to it. There wasn’t much to the town, so he didn’t worry about getting lost, but he had no other reason for being there, and an idea had begun to demand time in his mind. He wanted to get back to Barrie as quickly as possible.
The car was parked by the side of the road, across from a furniture store. There was no ticket on the windshield, and no sign it had been tampered with in any way. Only in a prison town, Stan thought. It was unlocked and the keys were as Louise had described them, under the passenger side of the front seat. There was a full tank of gas. Stan imagined Louise insisting on it and Jim begrudgingly paying for the fuel. How does one get to Winnipeg from Penetanguishene without a car, Stan wondered.
The car had been sitting in the sun all morning, the air inside
hot and stuffy. As he sat down on the driver’s side, Stan was overcome by the smell of his wife’s perfume. It was more than just the after-effect of her presence; it had been spilled into the upholstery somewhere on the back seat. He tried not to imagine how that had happened, and instead just opened all four windows before starting the car. He drove to the edge of town and found the highway south. In Barrie, he found Dunlop Street again and pulled to the curb beside the real estate office he’d walked past that morning. Shoreline Lots, the window said, Prime Wooded Property.
“Somebody’s been having fun in this car,” the salesman laughed out loud and waved his hand in front of his nose. “Smells like Paris, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.”
Stan was following the lakeshore roadway north out of town. Beside him sat Gino (Gene) Auden, sales agent for Simcoe Realty, specialist in vacation and cottage properties.
“My folks were the first Italian family in Barrie, so they say,” he boasted, shaking Stan’s hand in the office. “Changed all our names right away to try and fit in, but I like Gino, it’s more manly than Gene I think.”
Gino Auden was a giant of a man, over six feet tall and easily more than 250 pounds. He kept his thinning hair shaved close to his head and sported a Clark Gable moustache on an otherwise perfectly groomed, perfectly round face. He had rings on four of his fingers, and his fingernails, Stan noticed, were perfectly manicured. He reminded Stan of many of the League higher-ups he’d met in his time. Men who took care of their appearance, who were certain of their power.
“I think you’re going to like what I have to show you,” Gino said, for the third time. “Cottage country is moving, you know. Muskoka’s all well and good for those rich Toronto types, but ordinary schlubs like you and me deserve a place to relax as well, am I right?”
He is right, Stan thought. He’d never imagined even wanting to own land in the country, let alone being able to afford it, but that morning the pictures in the office window on Dunlop Street had enticed him, and the prices were suddenly within reach. Gino directed Stan along a single- lane country road crowded in by trees. The road ran along a ridge above Kempenfelt Bay. Here and there, the water shone blue through a gap in the forest. They drove through Shanty Bay, a hamlet of a dozen or so houses and one small whitewashed church, and eventually turned down toward the lake on a dirt road rutted here and there with washouts from a recent downpour.
“There’s absolutely no development this far up yet,” Gino said, pointing out the open window to the thickly wooded land crowding the shoreline. “Only the old-timers, folks who’ve lived up here year-round for a century or so. And you want them types around in case anything goes wrong. It’s awfully quiet up here at night, and dark. Nice to know someone’s around even if they’re a mile away, am I right?”
Again, there was no arguing with Gino. By his own count, his practised patter had sold fifteen lots along this stretch of Simcoe shoreline in the last five months.
“Right here will do, sir.” Stan pulled the car to the edge of the road and stopped the engine.
“Are you ready for paradise?” Gino smiled at him from the passenger seat. He’d turned to face Stan and his body blocked the entire view from the passenger-side window.
The way down into the property from the road was a narrow cut through thick pines, untrimmed, their lower branches brushing the ground in wide skirts. Stan inhaled deeply the combined scents of evergreen and lake water. Squirrels leapt from tree to tree thirty feet above his head.
“That’s your fresh air you’re smelling, Stan.” Gino slapped him on the back and took the opportunity of contact to pull him by the arm past the last of the pines, his left arm opening wide, like a maître d’ showing off the prize table. What remained of the property was a deep grass meadow speckled with yellow dandelions and buttercups. Here and there, giant weeping willow trees bent their long soft branches to the earth around elephantine bodies. The land ended at large boulders falling away into the gently rolling waters of the lake.
“Christ Jesus,” Gino sighed, looking out across the water, “if every showing looked like this I’d have none of these lots left. You’ve hit it on a great day, I’ll say that.”
The property was 150 feet wide and ran from road to lake another 150 feet, forming a near-perfect square. There was a small, falling-down cabin near the lake, doubling as living shack and boathouse, though no boat was present.
“The owner built that cabin in Shanty Bay and floated it here just as you see it. Easier than hauling the materials. That hazy patch of land there,” Gino pointed directly across the lake, “is Georgina Island—Indian reservation, but don’t worry, they can’t get you all the way over here—and that close bit of land there just the other side of the bay is Big Bay Point. There’s a lighthouse at the very end. Kind of comforting to look at after dark. If you head down the bay there you get back to Barrie and directly to the other end of the lake there is Orillia. You’re about right in the middle. A prime spot if you ask me, but I’m just the salesman, what the hell do I know?”
Stan asked for a little time to himself, and walked back and forth across the shoreline, his shoreline he’d decided, while Gino smoked nervously back up by the car. Stan saw a family on this land. He saw continuance, and that was a lot better than anything he’d seen for himself back on Saulter Street. He could give himself no reason for the feeling; he was simply sure in his decision.
Back in the realty office on Dunlop Street, Stan signed all the papers and pulled the fifteen-hundred-dollar total from his jacket pocket.
“Hello, darling!” Gino yelled, drawing the attention of the two other salesmen in the room.
“Holy crap, man, if I’d known you were packing that much cash, I’d have hit you with a rock and dumped you in the lake.”
“I know you would have,” Stan said, and the two other salesmen laughed.
Four
The Cup went missing in the summer of 1952. It was gone for almost two months. No details of its disappearance or its whereabouts while it was gone have ever been publicly known. Stan Cooper, now the head custodian and cleaner at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, found the Cup at centre ice one morning when he happened to be the first person in the building. Training camp for the new season had just begun, and the ice had to be maintained every day even if the team spent the whole day in the gym. He threw the switch for the secondary lights, and there it was. The League had never reported it missing. The police had never been consulted. A private investigator worked for three weeks but was eventually fired after falling down drunk in the League president’s office while making a report. There were plans in the works to create a duplicate cup from photographs, and then one morning it just appeared at centre ice in Toronto.
Stan walked out across the centre line still carrying his coffee and doughnut in a paper bag. He had seen the Cup in this building many times. He had seen the Cup both won and lost in this building. He burned at the thought of seeing the Cup being won. He felt a wave of nauseating embarrassment about it, and then embarrassment about being embarrassed. He looked at his own face reflected in the perfect silver and thought about his wife.
He circled it, shuffling around the ice in his rubber-soled work shoes, watching the shine and reflection in the dim glow of the secondary lights. He reached out and pushed at it to see if it would move. His hand left a dull smudge on the silver. It was the only print he could see on the entire trophy. Whoever had left the Cup there had polished it before they left. Stan took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away his fingerprints.
He put the doughnut shop bag on the ice beside the Cup and jogged back across the rink to the timekeeper’s booth where he knew there was a phone. By the time he returned, his coffee had melted a circle of water around the bag, soaking the apple fritter inside. League officials arrived within the hour.
While he waited for them Stan stayed on the ice, drinking cold coffee, one hand on the Cup. He helped carry the trophy into a back office and watched
as it was authenticated. As they were putting it in the back of one of the official League cars, one of the men turned to Stan and said, “Well sir, I guess this makes up for that little fuck-up last year,” and then laughed, slapping Stan on the back with a gloved hand.
Stan and the Cup were driven out of the city on the same morning, bouncing down the Queen Elizabeth Highway in the back seat of a black sedan. By noon they were in Windsor, crossing the border, and at one that afternoon they were both presented to the owner of the Detroit hockey team.
There were four other men in the room, one of whom Stan recognized as Sid Abel, Detroit’s captain. Three months earlier, Abel had won the Cup, beating Montreal. He and his goalie Terry Sawchuk had been captured by a photographer hugging the Cup in the Detroit dressing room. The photo had been clipped from a Toronto paper and pinned in the lunchroom back in Toronto. Beneath it someone had written “In the arms of the enemy.” Stan looked at the photo every day for weeks. He didn’t agree with the inscription. Montreal was the enemy. By beating Montreal, Detroit had actually kept the Cup out of the arms of the enemy. When the Cup disappeared, so too did the photo and accompanying note.
Sid Abel shook Stan’s hand hard. He smiled down at him and grabbed his shoulder with muscular fingers.
“You’ve brought my baby back to me, Stan.”
“Yes sir,” Stan said.
Sid turned to the men who had driven Stan to Detroit.
“Look here,” he said, his tone turning angry, “everyone knows this is all Floyd’s fault. If Floyd hadn’t ended up face-first in the shitter when it was his turn to take the Cup, she never would have been nabbed. Floyd’s an ass, we all know that. An ass and a goddamn drunk. And don’t think we’re ever letting him near this thing again, even if he scores the goddamn winning goal next year. But you boys gotta do something about this. Make sure it doesn’t happen again. I mean, hockey players are going to get drunk at a party, you know what I mean? You can’t just hand this thing over and hope it goddamn makes it back in one piece.”