Gordie Howe turned ponderous circles with the puck, waiting for a worthwhile option. “The old man,” Jim called him. Lou Langdon wouldn’t have taken much notice. The elder’s steady hand was easily dismissed by an ambitious young man with a TV show. Pestered by an inferior, Howe countered with a quick, vicious stick, and drifted to the penalty box without complaint, without so much as the flicker of an eye.
The game pressed on with little speed or hitting, a workmanlike struggle on an ice surface that resembled an overcast sky. Players swarmed to stifle every promising foray. Attackers either turned back or pressed hopelessly forward, the puck squirting loose from the mob like a tiny rodent.
Derek examined the periphery, where shapes settled into the good seats, folding overcoats. A corner faceoff brought into view a well-fed man with silver whiskers, a young blonde at his side. Derek guessed an industrialist on his second marriage, disappointed to find the dull domesticity of the first replicating. Like the players, the spectators were mostly featureless. Would he recognize his mother? Could Lou Butt be the man in the glasses? Or the fellow hunched in the aisle seat? This is why men used to meet the world in sober suits and Brylcreemed hair, thought Derek. The sameness of it. Whatever their failures or degradations, all could bleed into the calming embrace of regular fellows. There was not a single man who looked like he didn’t have his shit together.
Here at last was Bobby Hull, charging into traffic as if an explosion in his head had sent all synapses firing. Even in the grain of ancient film his head and face had a silvery glint, as if lit from within. His shot came without warning, a bruising puck off the goalie’s shoulder.
“He nearly put that one right through Crozier,” croaked Jim.
Gordie Howe responded with a goal that half the arena probably missed, a simple opportunist’s play at the front of the net. Derek rolled back the picture, watched the old man reproduce his precise flick of the stick with dreary efficiency.
“Let him loose like that, and you’d be a fool to expect good things,” growled Bill.
Celebrating fans heaved garbage down from the cheap seats, delaying the next faceoff. Jim and Bill fell silent. Howe sat on the boards, gazing at the ice and scratching his nose. He could have been a man waiting for a bus.
Derek’s phone erupted, showing Cynthia’s number on the call display.
He had to answer, because the family was newly drawn together, united. No accusations flung in faces or hot words hanging between them, beyond apology, never to be forgotten. Derek, Cynthia, and their mother had agreed that if Lou Langdon should appear in court, they would be there to hear his perfidy read into the public record. The solidarity felt brittle, like an alliance held in place by realpolitik, the bartering of diplomats. Each side held true reserves in abeyance.
But Cindy wasn’t calling about their father.
“Did Curtis copy you on his latest email?”
“I don’t know,” said Derek. “I haven’t checked since I got home from work.”
“Listen to this: ‘She’s more beautiful every day. I feel like I walked face first into a miracle.’ I mean, who does he think he’s talking to?”
“Who’s more beautiful every day?” asked Derek, walking into the kitchen and opening the door to face the cool of the freezer.
“This new woman he’s married.”
“I guess he likes her. That’s more than you can say for the last one. Does a bit of freezer burn smell mean you can’t eat it?”
“What is it?”
“Chicken fingers.”
“Throw them out. But Derek, listen to this bit. ‘I’ve put off fatherhood for too long. I’m finally taking the plunge.’ ” She shrieked with laughter. “Lana Maloney would have something to say about that.”
“If anyone knew where to find her,” said Derek. There was little doubt as to who was responsible when Lana disappeared from school, her pregnancy in its final weeks. But as far as Derek knew, Curtis had never been outed as the father. His parents never said anything. No fuming Maloneys ever showed up at their door. And in fairness to Curtis, who knew what the girl might have been up to?
Derek picked a Lean Cuisine box from the freezer and pulled away the side flap, sliding the tray into the microwave. Whole-wheat linguini with marinara sauce.
“How long were they together, Curtis and Lana?” He was happy to dwell on someone else’s fucked-up life for a change.
“All through high school,” said Cindy. “Longer than he ever managed to stick it out with anyone else. Do you know I used to spot her sometimes when we were living on Cairo Street? She never had a kid with her, but by then it wouldn’t be a kid anymore.”
The idea of Lana in middle age was beyond Derek. He could only see her perched on the front step of the house, a pimply faced girl in jeans so tight the stitching pulled apart at the inseams. It was the day his cousin Ella got married. Lana was waiting and smoking while Curtis battled his stepfather in the kitchen, their voices spilling through the screen door.
“…damn well…your mother’s sake…”
“…bullshit…really believe…what you want?”
“…respectful…at least think of…”
Derek could see himself there, playing with an ocean-blue sailboat, skimming it along the front lawn. Lana lit a smoke and picked her teeth. The lawn was verdant, a rolling ocean of grass, dandelion, and clover.
“You like girls yet?” Lana asked, acknowledging him finally.
“No,” said Derek.
She gave him a teasing, crooked grin.
Curtis won the fight that day. He wouldn’t go to the wedding. Or he refused to wear a shirt and tie, which was the same thing as refusing to go. Derek, his parents, and Cynthia climbed into the car and drove to the church in heated silence. They passed Curtis and Lana, striding down the sidewalk, his hand tucked into her back pocket.
Cousin Ella married a man who sold hardwood floors. Then everyone went to the Lion’s Club for a cold plate. Derek ate the ham, turkey, and tomato slices. He skipped the potato salad served in ice cream scoops of white and pink. He did what he could with the parfait, gone runny because the room was so warm. The bar was a rectangular hole cut into the wood panelling. Men approached it with a skip and a grin, and returned clutching wet glasses and beer bottles, three and four at a time. There were speeches he didn’t listen to, and obliging laughter.
When he saw boys he knew from school slipping away towards the back of the club, Derek agitated for his mother’s approving nod and joined them in the empty lot behind the fire escape.
“The forests of Ardennes,” said Kevin O’Rourke, with an elegant sweep of his arm. “The Battle of the Bulge.”
They ran screaming across the broken ground, scaling boulders and diving behind upturned tree stumps, shouting, shooting, and dying. They were at the age when play-acting would soon become difficult, and for Derek the trickle of self-consciousness had already begun. Unsure which side to take, he stayed at the margins, killing only when left with no choice. The battle was Kevin’s show. Casting himself as a Nazi tank commander, he slaughtered countless American prisoners before marking the German defeat with his own rapturous death, consumed by exploding shells.
Twilight sent them back indoors, where the banquet hall was changed. Dinner tables were pushed to the walls, and the overhead lights had dimmed to pools of red and blue. Music filled the room, louder than Derek had ever heard. Men threw off their jackets. Women danced barefoot and kissed men who weren’t their husbands. Derek watched a strange man in a bow tie light his mother’s cigarette. His father stood at one end of the bar with a tumbler in his hand, surrounded by other men in white shirt sleeves. “No goddamn way!” he said to the bartender, and tipped his head back in laughter.
“Come on,” said Colleen Coffey, pulling at Derek’s sleeve.
“I’m getting a Coke,” said Derek. But she ignored him or did
n’t hear, didn’t even look at him, just dragged him to a corner of the dance floor and threw her arms in the air, stepping dangerously close and backing away with a roll of her bare shoulders. Derek shuffled from side to side, gawking at her face and shoulders and the party lights splashing on her blue dress.
Then she started singing.
“At last, lover…at long last…”
Her eyes fixed on the distance, way beyond him. This was not the Colleen he knew from school, with her chubby arms and wiry hair and thick tights that wrinkled at the knees.
“Oh my lover…Please.”
It occurred to Derek that the girl might be completely unhinged. Colleen’s mother was dead, had died of cancer just the year before. Now here she was in some sort of rapture, singing to him and raising her hands above her head, white underarms exposed.
Without a break, the music shifted to a slow song. Colleen placed one of Derek’s hands on her hip and took the other in hers, draping an arm around his neck. She pulled at his hand, forcing him to step back with the opposite foot.
“Follow me,” she said. “Then just go with it.”
Derek realized with horror that she might feel the hot damp through the back of his shirt.
“Were you at that hockey game?” she asked, her face inches from his. “That game where they had all the fights?”
Shock and horror as a town rivalry turns ugly! was what they said on the CBC news. But everyone knew something was bound to happen during the senior league playoffs. At school they talked of little else. Finally, near the end of the third game, several players from Botwood vaulted into the bleachers to confront a pair of hecklers. The brawl erupted in all its glory, the crowd roared with murderous delight, the cops came, and the series was called off.
“We were there, me and my dad,” said Colleen. “I saw Stench Dooley smash the goalie’s face.”
Everyone said the goalie had a gap in his temple you could fit your thumb into and would breathe through one nostril the rest of his life. Derek liked how Colleen’s hair tickled his nose. But her hip was bony under his hand, and there was an animal shiftiness in it. He wasn’t sure he liked that. Over her shoulder, her father stood under a red exit light, a beer bottle in his hand. He wore a windbreaker over his shirt and tie instead of a proper suit jacket. Misfortune had found other families—Danny Gushue was a mongoloid, Helen McKenzie’s brother hung himself behind the basement stairs. But the tumour that consumed Mrs. Coffey was a local legend, a black starfish expanding under her skull and squeezing the life from her. The story lingered around Colleen and her father like a bad smell, as if they had brought cancer upon the town.
Colleen broke their clinch, dancing and twirling away from Derek. The music turned jazzy, with horns blaring as if sounding an emergency.
“Heaven,” she sang. “I’m in heaven.”
It was wrong to dance with this girl while her father stood alone, wanting to go home. It was even more wrong because the girl’s mother was dead, and wrong because Derek and Colleen ought not to acknowledge the link between their parents. During his winter estranged from the family, Lou Butt had sought out the widowed Mr. Coffey. They became steady companions, a pair of men who had lost women for entirely different reasons. Like everything else about that time, the friendship had since been struck from the record.
Derek looked down at his own arms and legs, considering the possibility that what happened to his body also happened to him. He watched Mr. Coffey set his beer bottle on a table and approach them, one hand raised to gain his daughter’s attention.
“Everyone knew that brawl would happen,” said Derek. St. Paul’s Arena was a low, flat building on the other side of the highway, on the edge of wilderness. A place of blood and snot and sweat, where a respectable town shed its inhibitions.
Did Colleen hear him? Her eyes were shut and her head tipped back. Her dead mother and solitary father, she wouldn’t acknowledge them, not while the music played and the blue dress glimmered. She rolled her head, opened her eyes, and smiled, raising her hands in what looked like a religious gesture.
No, she was telling him. This is not wrong, Derek. This is what you have to do.
Dinner was a starchy disappointment, the pasta knotted into dry lumps. He ate slowly, because every swallow made his testicle twitch. Derek could remember a time when he looked up to his brother. But on the day of that wedding, when he danced with Colleen, Curtis was already far away.
The telephone rang again. Shawn Gover.
“Are you watching that thing tonight?”
“Yes, absolutely.” Derek checked the clock on the cable box. Citywide at Six would be just underway. “We won’t be on for a while yet, not till after the news and weather. Are you going to watch?”
“Well,” said Gover. “If they all want to be on TV, it’s nothing to me. That’s what I told Brian. I’m fine with it.”
“Lots of people like a good fuck show,” said Derek. But this didn’t get the laugh he had hoped for. “Why are you so down on the whole TV thing, Shawn?”
“When Jenny died—It’ll be five years next week,” said Gover, and paused. “When she died it was on the news. I guess because it was so strange, the virus. They had pictures of her, and talked about her like they knew her. Made me sick. They even had her dad on, blubbering and crying. Fucking disgusting.”
“That stuff should be private,” said Derek. He was outraged on Gover’s behalf, and pleased with himself for avoiding Allan Marleau’s prying camera.
“Anyway, I know it’s not the same thing, so I’m fine with it,” said Gover. “I just don’t like being around those fuckers.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t watch it.”
“They better not use that shit Brian was getting on with. ‘Some guys drink too much. Some guys work with their hands.’ Can you believe it? Like everyone wants his life, wants to be some middle-management cunt in a bank.”
Derek didn’t mean to take sides. But he didn’t dispute this.
“When Jenny died, playing hockey got me through it, honest to God,” said Gover. “Because it’s always the same. The same fucking thing, every night. You wouldn’t believe how good that is.”
Derek had been watching the news more often, and saw that St. John’s didn’t fare so well on television; the receding snows left it battered and potholed and dripping with cold spring rain. Even the downtown streets looked sparse, as if most citizens had fled in advance of an occupying army. The northern sky curved over it all like a grey, gaping mouth.
A boy-girl team handled the anchor desk for Citywide at Six. Richard challenged the camera, spoiling for a fight. Pamela offered the freeze-dried smile of a woman determined to brazen her way through the party despite her husband’s appalling, ass-pawing drunkenness. The reporters, sent out into wet, blustery days, looked rumpled and sullen, like old downtown cats.
Allan was different, thinner and somehow impervious to the elements, with a knowing grin. Pamela indulged him, in her tight-assed fashion, but Richard offered only a smirk, as if to say, “This little shit, he’ll get his comeuppance soon enough.”
Derek joined Citywide in progress.
There was City Weather with Brianna, unsteadily propped on her matchstick legs. City Living followed, today featuring quick ’n’ easy desserts with Sammy the food guy.
“A dollop of hazelnut cream adds a touch of unexpected decadence to a simple brownie or blondie,” said Sammy.
“Murder on the waistline,” said Richard.
Then Allan was standing next to the anchor desk in a Leafs jersey, holding a hockey stick. Pamela raised a prim hand to suppress a smile.
“Now it’s time for our regular feature, City Perspectives with Allan Marleau. Allan always has a different look, a unique view on things, and life here. What have you got in store for us this week, Allan?”
“I’m going to tell you about a group
of men, Pamela. Just a bunch of regular guys. But they’ll give us a little glimpse of the unfiltered man.”
“Unfiltered! Okay. And you, you spent some time with them?”
Allan twirled the stick and set its tip on the floor. “No champions or heroes here. We’re talking average guys, how they stay young as time marches on.”
He delivered the line with conviction, and his brow crinkled with the great thoughts gathering over his little black glasses.
“Okay!” said Pamela, visibly exhaling, a white-knuckle grip on her ceremonial papers. “Your story is about all those, about all this and more! Let’s see it now.”
A slow fade revealed a hockey bag, shot in close-up, peeled apart and spilling its guts, and a clatter of familiar voices.
“Friday night at St. Bon’s Arena,” said Allan.
The camera drew back, its lamp flooding the room. Derek watched himself bend over his skates, the shocking white of his bald spot offered to the camera.
“The time-honoured rituals.”
Voices lost in the crackle of tape and Velcro, bodies obscured by nylon bulk and gleaming plastic.
A scene change positioned the camera outside, so that faces approached and filled the screen as each man stepped through the gate and onto the ice. Derek passed quickly, grinning like a fool. Kev Byrne behind him. Murph. Whelan.
“They’ve been coming here, drawn here for as long as most of them can remember.”
Steve Heneghan, a rosy cherub. Nels Pittman, with his dead-fish gaze behind thick glasses. Fattened by their armour and coloured in familiar patterns, they took on a shambling, bovine quality.
“Family men. Working men.”
Not all of them. Derek knew at least four who did not live with women, and among the rest, family arrangements shifted like tidewaters. Pittman had four sons by three women.
“Real Newfoundland men with real stories.”
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