by Gare Joyce
I’VE NEVER been a good sleeper. Guys in the league generally play, eat, chase skirts, and sleep, that being in ascending order. They can nod off on command, like a volunteer drawn up to the stage by a hypnotist. A snap of the fingers and they’re out like a light. I’ve seen guys grab a quick zees on a ten-minute bus ride from the team hotel to the arena. Guys might be able to play without skate laces but not without an afternoon nap.
I have no idea how they do it. In the bus leagues I couldn’t sleep on overnight rides. On red-eyes there’s only one light on in the cabin and I’m sitting there hoping in vain that a historical bio will help me nod off. I know guys in the league who’ve struggled every once in a while but eventually straighten it out in a day or two. I’m a disaster when it comes to sleep. I guess it’s some rogue gene that prevents me from ever getting my circadian rhythms back in beat. Some people have vivid memories of great views they’ve seen in their travels. Me, I bring back indelible images of smoke detectors and sprinklers on the ceilings above the hotel room beds.
Three pints brought me down only so far after the old-timers game and the ninety-minute drive back to Toronto. I knew there was no point going straight to bed. I knew there’d be a couple of messages on the phone but they would have to wait. Nothing I’d hear would help me sleep any better. I went to my laptop and opened my sked for games to scout over the last weeks of March.
Given my GM’s interest in Mays, it seemed incumbent on me to book a couple of extra viewings of the wunderkind when he made it back from an injured shoulder, preferably not back in Peterpatch. Nothing against the town, mind you, just that I prefer to see a player of interest on the road, where his team won’t have last change so he’ll face a tougher matchup. In that situation you’re more likely to see best on best—any coach, Red Hanratty included, will want his best against some poor, hopelessly overmatched sixteen-year-old. And I prefer to see a player of interest in back-to-back games, even in the third game in three nights, situations that are a physical challenge. It’s a good measure of their toughness, physically and psychologically.
I checked Peterborough’s next ten games and saw three dates that worked for me—the first was the coming weekend, a Saturday-afternoon tilt in Oshawa (nice rivalry game on the heels of Ottawa in P’boro Friday night). The other two I logged in, but to tell you the truth I can’t remember what they were. I didn’t go to them the way things panned out. Things went sideways with my plans.
My phone rang. Hunts. It was 3 A.M., but our last text exchange had been about half an hour before.
He never bothered with the Hi-how-are-yous. When he called you it was always like he’d been sitting beside you for four hours on the team bus. Short and disgruntled.
“I know it’s late but I knew you’d be up and even if you weren’t I’m your boss.”
“That’s yes, yes, and yes,” I said. It didn’t register. Like so much of my side in our conversations. But the GM knew me well enough not to slow down to parse it.
“So what happened?”
“How far do you want me to go back? To the big bang theory?”
“Asshole. What happened tonight?”
“I was the youngest guy on the ice and I’m hurting worse than any of them right now. I’m ready to upgrade to Tylenol 3.”
“Not you, asshole. What the fuck happened with Red Hanratty?”
“You got me.”
Pause. I heard guys shouting in the background and then realized it was the chatter of his car radio. Hunts always listened to the hockey station on satellite radio on the drive home.
Then my memory kicked in to the bulletin on the scroll.
“I guess they took him to hospital.”
“They just said Red Hanratty died.”
I gave my head a shake. Cobwebs off.
“Who is ‘they’?”
“The HockeyCentre guys. Didn’t say the cause. It’s already out there on Twitter.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I’m not shitting you. You didn’t know?”
“I just left after the game. Drove home.”
“Makes me wonder what else you miss in your reports.” He paused, like he was waiting for the rimshot.
“What’s the big shock. He’s seventy-something …”
I continued in the present tense because this didn’t sound like a done deal. It might have been a bad rumour in a business rife with them.
“… and his diet has been fortified by cigars, kegs of beer, and ten thousand bags from Rotten Ronnie’s after-game dining. It’s a miracle he was breathing, never mind coaching.”
Another pause. That’s the GM’s business-conversation style. I kept going. “Maybe it was something that they knew was coming. Maybe that’s why they had that game, knowing he had some health deal …”
“Hold on, gotta take this.”
Since he landed the corner office in L.A. we’ve never had a conversation that wasn’t interrupted by an incoming call, a message from the field, whatever. I heard my refrigerator gurgle. That’s not good, I thought.
A minute later he came back on the line.
“You might have to rethink, sleuth,” he said.
“How’s that?” I said.
“The natural causes thing. They found him on the asphalt beside his car in the parking lot. Supposedly beaten up. Likewise the team doctor. Dead as doornails, too. That doesn’t exactly sound like some health deal, Sherlock.”
Key word, I thought: supposedly. I had nothing to say at this point. Hadn’t really processed this. I should have seen where the conversation was going.
“Look, if Hanratty is dead, this is gonna be a big deal and every team in the league will be sending somebody to the funeral to represent them …”
Yeah, I know the drill. I didn’t get it at first but it’s a professional courtesy that guys in the game notice. If you want your team to get respect, you have to show it sometimes. If you’re a GM or an AGM of a team, you don’t want to do business with another outfit that is a herd of asses. No, you want to do business with guys who are good citizens of the game. I did a mental inventory of the L.A. staff and none of us had played for Hanratty. About half our staff came up in the Western league— our Prairie GM looking after his own. In fact, my small connection to Hanratty was more direct than anyone else’s.
“… I’m up to my asshole in alligators out here and I’m not sure the owner would want me missing one of our games. I gotta get you to go to the funeral.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I had no great enthusiasm and didn’t bother pretending. I have to drive an hour and a half each way so that I could mourn a guy who didn’t even recognize me. But I have to admit that my antennae were twitching: Who would have iced the Grand Old Man of the Game?
8
* * *
A stick is all sharp edges. A skate creases your flesh and you’re at the hospital getting 137 stitches. (The skates that Spike sharpens in Peterborough are sharper than the one that left a seam in his grill thirty years ago.) Hockey has a lot of things but there’s a surfeit of blunt objects. And a blunt object is what the Peterborough police said brought about Hanratty’s demise. A blunt object that added a part to the then-living legend’s trademark brushcut. The same blunt object that the perp used to open up the old doctor’s scalp right down to the medulla oblongata. The blunt object being a cinder block that provided a low stool for the jockey-sized maintenance man on smoke breaks. These tidbits I picked up at the funeral home a couple of days after the grisly fact. Not what I pumped out of anybody, just what I picked up while I was being politely ignored and while Grant Tomlin rubbed shoulders with league executives who to a man knew that he was a complete fraud. Effin’ ghoul. Oh well, his preoccupation with dredging up rumours for his trade-deadline show spared me another of his “Shadow?” routines.
I panned the room, looking for my fellow C-listers. I made a beeline for the cheapest suit I recognized: Double J, Jackie Jameson, a Florida scout who grew up in Peterborough and played
one season for Hanratty, the only season he played in major junior. Short but squarely built, Double J had been a legend in lacrosse, his main game back in his day. He became a pretty good scout, a decent judge of talent, and, more importantly, an excellent cultivator of useful friendships. This last skill has enabled him to stay employed for almost twenty years. Every time there was a front-office housecleaning, he had a marker he was able to call in.
Double J was not above stating the obvious just to fill the silence.
“This is unbelievable,” he said.
“At best,” I said.
“If his wife were still alive it would be enough to kill her.” Double J worked a variation on a line he heard so long ago that he couldn’t remember the source.
“What do they know about what happened?” I asked. I presumed not a hell of a lot or it would be all over the news. It wasn’t.
“My brother-in-law works the desk downtown …”
I had heard this before. Because of that connection, Double J had the 100 Percent Real Juice when any of the Peterborough kids had scrapes with the local peace officers. This happened with alarming frequency, a fact that was tied to the very loose reins Hanratty had kept on his youthful charges, another reason for their love of the old coot.
“… and he says they’ve questioned pretty much everybody who was around that night and don’t have any real leads. Security got what they think was a car leaving the scene. Got the make of car, not the plates. A Caliber, I think.”
I hadn’t been contacted, but I figured the investigators would get around to me eventually—the last guy to call, just like the old-timers game’s organizers. “They didn’t question me and I was there … but I’m alibied up.”
“Shadow, you’ve got no history of violence.”
“I beat myself up but that’s about it.”
Double J stifled a laugh, as was appropriate. As soon as he composed himself he carried on. He looked over at those passing and pausing beside the open casket. The funeral home director buried his chin in his chest, not because he was moved, though. The Great Man’s teenage soldiers had walked in out of the freshly fallen snow and were tracking salt on the freshly shampooed carpet.
“Is he gonna be buried, cremated, or just stuffed and mounted in the Hall of Fame?” I asked Double J.
“I thought the boys in the backroom here did a real good job putting him presentable and everything.”
“Well, he probably wouldn’t look as good if it had come down after a loss.”
If this had spilled from the lips of someone in any other trade, Double J would have shot me a dirty look. With me, he just smirked. In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, irreverence is the stuff that keeps a scout sensible, if not sane. Besides, this had the ring of truth. The blackest thing in hockey was the Ol’ Redhead’s mood after a loss, and the players’ best worst stories would always feature a bus ride home after a loss on the road with not a word spoken for hours at a time. Hanratty didn’t allow music or even whispered conversation in the back of the bus while he and the assistants drained flasks in the front.
There are infinite variations on the story. Reagan has always related the account of the longest night of his life: the Peterborough bus getting held up at a border crossing after a loss in Michigan because a Slovak import, a decent defenceman, didn’t have his papers in order. According to Reagan, the bus idled in silence for five hours. The best worst story of all I take with a grain of salt: After a loss in Owen Sound, the Peterborough driver managed to take the bus into a ditch, and even with a crashing thud the players were as mute as the cheerleading squad at Gallaudet U.
My chest tingled. The BlackBerry was muted. I was gonna change the ring tone but I couldn’t find “Taps.”
It was Hunts shooting me a message.
Sit on Mays. If he’s back playing do the games. If not, just do the background.
Serendipity. The Local Hero was standing the length of a stick away from me. I knew that Hunts had liked him when he caught a couple of views of him in the early fall. He was thinking he’d still be on the board at number four or maybe number five in the June draft. And a pick in that slot or better would be ours if Columbus kept going sideways. By February before the draft, scouting staffs draw up their targets. You want to know enough about everyone but everything about anyone who’s in the mix where you’re likely to land in the draft order.
When Hunts said “sit” he was telling me to get the comprehensive workup on Mays. The Large Pitcher of Fresh Squeezed. A stretch of games, five or six. Something well beyond thumbnails of family. First rule of drafting is that you don’t draft a prospect—you draft the whole family. Sitting on a kid is in a lot of ways the best assignment you can hope for. You can get fooled on a single viewing—fooled into writing off a kid with talent, fooled into thinking a kid will show up for every game when really he’s there one game in five.
Interviews are pro forma. Likewise, comprehensive background checks. The previous administration in L.A. wasted a top-five pick by drafting a kid whose father was a complete grifter, a guy with a criminal record who somehow flew under the radar. Dad ended up with the son’s platinum card, and $175,000 in online gambling debts and hookers later, the kid didn’t know whether he was coming or going. He never made it through his second contract. Happens more than you’d expect, but it wouldn’t have happened if they’d known the father’s “issues.”
My sitting on Mays was complicated by several factors. The least of them was the cancellation of Peterborough’s three upcoming games out of respect for the Dearly Departed Legend. More problematic: In an important stretch of the season, the Peterborough kids would be under the direction of a hopelessly overmatched old-timer, Hanratty’s long-time second banana. No assistant in hockey was asked to do less assisting than the unfortunately named Harold Bush. It was always Hanratty’s show, and he was widely considered the master of line matching and game management. Bush wouldn’t have had any problems if he’d just tried to do what Hanratty did in similar situations, but I’m not sure poor Harry was paying attention all those years, and he sure as hell wasn’t taking notes.
I didn’t anticipate this being much of an assignment. I guess I’m a Freudian at heart, thinking about character only when I suspect something is wrong. My intuition isn’t foolproof but it’s pretty solid, and it told me that Mays would be above reproach. Hunts isn’t a Freudian, though. He suspects everybody who might cost him a dime.
Double J saw me check the message. I shook my head.
“Hell of a time for Sandy to tell me to pick up milk and eggs on the way home,” I said. “So what’s on tap for you the next couple of weeks?”
“Same thing as you,” Double J said.
My dumb luck to be playing poker with another hustler. Yeah, everybody was going to be sitting on him.
9
* * *
The phone rang through to messaging. Sandy is one of those who don’t bother personalizing the greeting. In fact, she doesn’t even give her name. It’s just the automated recitation of her phone number. Making things impersonal is an occupational consideration. I tell her that, at some level, we’re in the same business: She works with troubled teens. The difference: She helps those who can’t help themselves, while I’m looking for those we’ll help ourselves to so that they might help our team down the line. Hers is a calling, mine a dodge. She sleeps more soundly than me but, then again, that’s true of most anybody, I guess.
I left a message that was succinct but not quite as offhand as it might seem at face value.
“Hey, my little chou chou, it’s me. I’m in Peterborough. Hunts wants me to sit on this kid up here …”
I pretended to stammer.
“… well, I thought if you wanted to, we could make a weekend of it …”
I was planning on using that gift certificate to the Falling Water Café and getting a receipt for the full amount for my expenses.
“… Hunts won’t mind if we got something plush lik
e the spa up here …”
I had to play this one up while seeming matter of fact. Hunts would mind if he knew the story, but if I’m ever called on it I’ll tell him that everything was booked up and the roads were bad. He’ll know I’m lying and he’ll let it go. I had already made a mental note: Ask for spa charges to be billed separately.
“… I gotta do some door knocking but there’s no game skedded …”
Cancelled out of respect, et cetera. That’s what team officials will say, but that’s not the whole story. The board of directors just didn’t have a clue what to do and had to buy time, because Red Hanratty was Hockey’s Longest-Running One-Man Show. Coach and general manager. He had no handpicked successor. No one he was grooming for the job. He just had a coterie of old cronies too intimidated to even say “yes”—they just bobbleheadedly nodded in agreement. Who could run the show? Who could even run a practice?
“… You could do a mud bath and get cucumbers over your eyes while I go to the rink and rattle some cages for a couple of hours …”
Okay, I was officially rambling. She’s smart. In fact, I figured it was better than even money that she was going to figure out an unstated motivation for this invitation to a weekend getaway in Peterborough: cover. With Sandy along for the ride, I had good reason to separate myself from other organizations’ scouts who’d landed in town. I didn’t want them to know what I was doing. It was bad enough that Double J made me.
“… Call me. I love you …”
I had already checked to make sure no scout was within earshot in the funeral home’s parking lot.
“… bye.”
I dialed Lanny. The call rang through to her voicemail. I left a message. I told her that I was sorry I missed her tournament in upstate New York. I told her I’d been in Europe, just in case she forgot. I don’t think she did. There would probably come a time when she would start to forget things like that or not care to know in the first place. She was old enough to roll her eyes when she overheard someone call me Shadow. It was her mother’s idea that she should go to the boarding school, not mine. It made her mother’s life easier and mine harder. I was going to be a shadow to her someday.