The Code

by Gare Joyce

  * * *

  Next stop: O’Murphy’s. As if Murphy’s wouldn’t have been Irish enough for a faux Irish bar. O’Murphy’s was a favourite haunt of scouts and former players who lived in Peterborough. It was just pricey enough to scare off Joe Fan, and any working hockey man could seek sanctuary in the testosterone-charged backroom, where only the members of the Legion of Alpha-Male Rink Warriors and the affiliated Sisterhood of Deeply Invested Cougars dared tread. A half-dozen Peterborough junior alumni were there when I checked in. About as many scouts who, like me, would be their teams’ designated mourners. Among them was Anderson, who decided to put words to that smirk he’d directed at me at customs three days before.

  “Shadow, you better file those expenses daily,” Anderson said. “You don’t know who’s going to be around to approve them. I hear Hunts is in trouble. Take a tip from me—I’ve never been fired before but I heard it from old guys who had. When they start talking about successors for your GM, go get all your dental work done and make a date to get new glasses.”

  “Andy, thing is, we’re going to be in the lottery by trade but you guys are in it the old-fashioned way,” I said. “You guys were mathematically eliminated before New Year’s.”

  If you had walked in at that point, you would never have guessed that I wrote my economic history essay on seventeenthcentury Dutch mercantilism. No, you would have presumed that the last paper I handed in was written in crayon. À la recherche du playgrounds perdu: None of us are exempt from reverting to such juvenilia and some, like Anderson, know nothing else.

  F-bombs were exchanged and there followed a giddy delight that made the room tingle, like everyone had forgotten to use Static Guard. I was embarrassed by my behaviour, less so when Anderson shoved me, even less so when he did it again, and not at all when he took a swing at me. And then he said it once more: “School’s out, eh. Isn’t it, Shadow? School’s out.”

  That’s as low as it is unoriginal. That’s always a go for me.

  “SCHOOL’S OUT.” It might seem like an innocuous saying to you and may be Alice Cooper’s greatest song. To me, however, those two words, ten letters and an apostrophe, push my button. Too many memories of better times and my worst.

  I was twenty-one when I met S, a tall, leggy blonde, in an L.A. club during training camp of my second season. She struck me as earnest and not very smart, but I found her more endearing than those calculating beauty queens who were preying on my teammates at our usual watering hole. Our first conversation was a strange one. She came up to me and just stared. “Hi, there,” I said. “I’m Brad. I play hockey.”

  She continued to stare. It was sort of amusing. I was young enough to think that my celebrity had hypnotized her.

  “Cat got your tongue?” I asked her, trying to settle down the poor star-struck thing.

  She took a big swallow, a big windup for an autograph request, I figured.

  “Friend,” she said, “you got some set of wrists.”

  I wasn’t quite prepared for this type of dialogue, even though our reading list in English Lit 101 included Samuel Beckett.

  I could have traded non sequiturs with her all night but it was all easily explained. S grew up in Petaluma, California, site of the world wrist-wrestling championships. Her father was a former middleweight champion and a long-time referee. S could judge wrists at a glance more wisely than railbirds can rate thoroughbreds with hours of hard study of The Daily Racing Form. S had a formidable set of wrists too, though she was so cute you were likely to miss them. She waited tables forty hours a week, squeezed in acting classes and auditions.

  We dated. It was all kinds of fun. G, PG, and X.

  We shacked up. S could give up waiting tables. She took more acting classes and auditioned once or twice a week, but nothing came of it. I figured her future might be in arm wrestling.

  And we got married. Her father almost put me on the IR when he shook my hand.

  We were two days into our honeymoon and she got word that she had landed a part on a Saturday-morning show, a regular gig playing the fifteen-year-old girl next door. She was twenty-one but could pass. On day three of our vacation in Hawaii we headed back to L.A. I guess I should have taken this as a sign of troubles to come. But a few weeks later when Episode 1 aired, there she was at the end of the opening sequence, shrieking what would become her trademark line: “School’s out.” Nothing in hockey had me as happy as I was for her at that time. For me the thrill wore off around the ten-thousandth time someone yelled “School’s out” at her when we’d be having a quiet dinner at an upscale restaurant, but she never tired of it.

  Flash forward a few years. We were a couple regularly featured on the front page of the rags they sell at supermarket checkout counters. It was a small sensation when S’s pregnancy was written into the show’s script. The tabs and Hollywood gossip shows couldn’t get enough of her. I was in the supporting role, the “rugged bohunk ice warrior,” her Knight in Shining Shoulder and Shin Pads. We were squarely in the middle of the B list, which is way up there for a hockey player in L.A. I was downgraded to a B-minus when I was traded out of L.A. to Montreal, but no matter.

  Flash forward two years after that. There she was on the cover of the tabs once again. Clubbing with the guy who played her boyfriend on the series that was soon to be cancelled. He had wrists like the junkie he was, but S was too stoned to notice. He was landing roles, the flavour of the month, and they were the It Couple, never mind that, in the eyes of the law and our team media guide, S and I were Mrs. and Mr. I was in Montreal with our infant daughter—thank God it was late-summer. S called her divorce lawyer, her agent, and her publicist, in what order I’m not really sure. I was calling on my sister to come up to Montreal to help me with Lanny when training camp started. The day the divorce was handed down, I went blind with all the camera flashes when I exited the L.A. courthouse. And that day S found out that she had landed the role of a mermaid in a superhero movie starring a neophyte actor who’d been an Olympic swimmer.

  A couple of years later, when the sequel was in production, they were the It Couple.

  I suppose if you’re underwater you can’t hear people shouting “School’s out” at you.

  THE SUMMER after my bantam season I started training with the martial-arts instructor who worked with cadets at the police academy. It wasn’t too useful in a hockey fight, but that wasn’t what I wanted out of it anyway. Karate was a pretty decent aerobic workout and good for improving my very limited flexibility. A roundhouse kick to the head is a thing of beauty, something like an end-to-end rush and a great deke and wired shot, a highlight-reel move.

  I wish I could say that I knocked out Anderson with a roundhouse to his thick skull, but such was not the case. No, I aimed low, a sweeping kick with my shin hitting his quad at forty-five degrees with downward force. This doesn’t sound like much and might not scare you, but the pain is instantaneous and the charley horse is good for a season. Anderson was one-legged after the kick and it was easy to take him to the mat. I sat on him and didn’t bother trying to punch him at first. I opted to choke, crossing the lapels of his blazer over his windpipe, like you would the heavy collar of a judo gi. I squeezed until all the air went out of him.

  “Is your fuckin’ insurance paid up? You want to know who was banging your wife on road trips? You think they’re going to enjoy spending your money? You …”

  I had only just started my interrogation when Lee tried to bail out his buddy and wrestle me off him. No third-man-in rule, no worries about suspensions and fines. Others put their drinks down and pretty soon it was a pie fight, like the third act of a Three Stooges short. Lee bounced a punch off my left temple and I realized that I was in this alone, like jumping into the other team’s bench to start a brawl. At that point I felt an immense and sudden pressure hit my back, driving me down so that I was face-to-reddening-face with Anderson and unmoving bodies were piled on top of me. It felt like the ceiling had dropped on us. In fact, an angel had descende
d from heaven to restore order and save me from an even uglier situation. I had to struggle to turn my head to see what had happened. There on top of the pile was an angel. Beef.

  Beef wasn’t the doorman. He was a busboy. The mammoth cherub was making the minimum wage and all he could eat, which made him, on an adjusted basis, one of the highest-paid citizens in Peterborough. He had jumped into the man-pile like he would have dropped on a fumble in the mud. With one splash he managed to wind five former pro jocks. He then stood up and started to peel everyone off. The doormen arrived at that point, but the fight had been knocked out of all of us.

  I tried to straighten myself out. I was winded and shaking. Lactic acid was surging through me like lava up the shaft of a long-dormant volcano that’s waking up. Arthur was molten.

  Beef was standing next to me.

  “Mister,” he said, “you sure get in a lot of trouble for an accountant.”

  14

  * * *

  The next day’s big send-off had a surreal feel to it. The Hanratty family, the Peterborough owners, and the city council decided to stage a public memorial service at the arena. Poster-sized images of the Great Man Himself. A black-and-white shot of him in his unhelmeted playing days. Others captured him in a hundreddecibel plaid jacket swearing at a ref when he should have been reaming out his tailor.

  The team attended and moved about as a pack: Twenty-five teenagers with dress shirts and ties under their Peterborough sweaters wandered around like puppies that had lost their master. Yup, Billy Mays Jr. was at the centre of the gathering, alternately looking genuinely inconsolable and standing tall for teammates in shock.

  There was the junior league: Every Ontario team sent its coach or general manager and a player who wore a team sweater over his Sunday best. Then there was the league: An assortment of GMs, AGMs, and lesser lights in my category. Hunts would be forgiven for his nonattendance—it’s a lot to ask someone to get in from the West Coast, but still the Dallas GM, out of respect for his long-time franchise player, Eddie Talbot, made the trek. Also in attendance were, of course, all the Peterborough alums who were in the lineup for what turned out to be Ol’ Redhead’s last victory, which came four beers before his swift demise. It wasn’t just stars, though. There were a lot of strange faces too, guys who’d played only a couple of games for Hanratty—I figured they came out to keep up appearances, having spent their adult lives exaggerating their accomplishments in the Peterborough arena.

  Double J sat next to me in the section reserved for the league VIPs. “I hear I missed a hell of a night,” he said.

  “I’ve lived down worse. But not much worse.”

  “I guess you got nothing to lose.”

  I thought for a second that Double J was taking a shot at me.

  Like I had done nothing but lose since the end of my career and had nothing left. But then I figured he wouldn’t have been taking a dig at me. Not his way.

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “The Tomlin thing and everything.”

  “What about Tomlin?”

  “Talking with your owner there. Said the first guy he’d hire for his staff would be Andy as his chief scout or scouting director or whatever.”

  Gulp. I tried to avoid all tells.

  “Yeah, well what can you do?”

  “Except choke the life out of your future boss.”

  “Yeah. Is Andy’s contract up this summer or does he have another year left?”

  “He’s free and clear on July first.”

  Gulp again. Unbeknownst to me, this was already circulating—Tomlin not just coming in but whispering about a wish list of hires, Anderson being at the top of it. This was a lot farther along than I had been led to believe. Thousands came out to remember and mourn Red Hanratty and Doc, but maybe I could have reserved a table for six afterward to gather my friends for a mini-wake, a toast to the imminent passing of my first job in hockey after my playing days. Maybe a table for four would have sufficed. Maybe just a stool at a bar.

  THE MAYOR spoke. The commissioner of the Ontario league spoke. The team president spoke. Little Red spoke. (Imagine being almost fifty and still being called Little Red.) That’s a partial list of those who paid respects and dragged out their tributes, mostly for their own self-aggrandizement. I could go back to college with the premium meal plan and finish my degree if I had a buck for every old war story that was traded at the arena that day.

  The mayor, who had always counted on the Examiner running a photo of him shaking the Ol’ Redhead’s hand right before walking out to centre ice for a ceremonial faceoff during a campaign:

  “No one in Peterborough’s storied history has …”

  Stifled yawn. The mayor was a Small-Town Machiavelli who always and everywhere thought he ran the show. The Then Living Legend had the mayor in his pocket, somewhere between scissors to snip his cigars and a thirty-year-old ball of lint.

  The commissioner of the league who, to keep up appearances, smiled through gritted teeth whenever he and the Ol’ Redhead crossed paths in the arena:

  “No one in the Ontario league’s history has …”

  Big stretch and deep inhale. Unless it was July, the commish would have been only a few days removed from a phone call from Hanratty, usually about some minuscule point but not so small that the coach couldn’t stretch a profane tirade out into triple overtime. No one was ever more grateful than the commissioner for the advent of hands-free technology.

  The team president who, if Red were an Irish setter, would have been strictly the tail. Or maybe the dutiful walker who must pause on occasion, wait out the hound’s exertions, and then stoop and scoop:

  “No one in this organization has …”

  Toe tap and fidget. The team president, mocked as “His Presidency” by Hanratty, was a Reliable Rubber Stamp on all things to do with the team’s budget. He was well practised in paper shuffling so that, at board meetings, no one made it so far as the third-to-last page of the pile where he neatly hid a considerable honorarium for Little Red, who posed as a scout.

  And, yeah, down in the order, Little Red, who had such a tough act to follow that he long ago stopped trying to do anything but fog his rum-drenched breath with the extra-large handful of mints that he no longer had to ask the bartender for upon presentation of the bill. He was the image of his old man, with features that looked like they were sculpted out of mashed potatoes and two beet slices for cheeks:

  “No one …”

  He paused to bite his lip and compose himself. Almost believably.

  “… cared more about his players. He was my father and I was real lucky that way … to have a father like him. But he was a father to any young man who walked into his dressing room.”

  Smirk. Yeah, of all of the speeches, this was the richest, talking about the Hall of Famer as a quality parent when in fact Hanratty had left his kids with father figures who mostly mixed their drinks. When the reading of the will came around I’m sure Little Red would be on the edge of his seat when it came to the assignment of his father’s flask.

  I mention those four, but more than a dozen got up there to take lead positions on the grief parade. Less would have been more, I figure. The Eskimos had fewer words for snow than the speechifiers had in coming up with ways to say that Red was a credit to the game.

  You could have flooded the rink with tears shed by family, friends, team alums, kids who were on the team now. They hauled out a blown-up photo of the Ol’ Redhead standing behind the bench in some sort of checkered coat circa ’75. He was mid-holler, which is to say it could have been any time, any game. You would have thought that every call had gone against him. Maybe some thought it was inappropriate or undignified to show him this way. Me, I thought it was just about perfect, like he was bitching about this last call. He had been the master bully of refs but, no matter how hard he shouted from the grave, Hanratty was never going to be able to coax a makeup call out of the Big Referee in the Sky.

  When you bought a program at
the arena, you’d have a hard time finding Bones’s name. It appeared in a single line of type, below the names, numbers, and positions of the players, below Hanratty’s in bold type as head coach and general manager, below others ostensibly ahead of the team doctor in the organization’s pecking order. The bottom line read: Team doctor … Dr. Gabe McGarry. The last name to show up on a long roll of credits, at a point when everyone in the theatre has cleared out.

  In death, though, his role had to be writ larger, and in fact it was only fair. The Ol’ Redhead held Bones in greater esteem than anybody else involved with the team. He admired his expertise. The organizers of the affair were sensitive to this point and thus made sure to get a mention of Bones in all the speeches. They made sure to get Bones’s son up in the middle of the program, likely because they feared that the arena would clear out if they put him last.

  “Most don’t know it, but my father did all his work for the club on a volunteer basis. When he travelled with the team to championships he insisted on paying his own way. I really think that late in life the team kept him going. He cared about these players, more than wins or losses …”

  Bones II’s was a pretty touching speech. Bones II was Dr. Theodore McGarry, who’d played a few games but didn’t stick with the Peterborough juniors and wisely headed off to med school. With a gut spilling over his too-tight belt and shirt buttons ready to burst, he didn’t look like he’d ever been an athlete at all. His father had been a better player before quitting to study medicine, but Bones II became the better doctor. Bones II was regarded as one of the province’s top cardiologists, and he kept his hand in sports, consulting with the Olympics associations and the league and minor-hockey organizations.

  Bones II seemed shattered. Here was a guy who had to tell people that the odds of getting out alive were long. Here was a guy who had to tell people that they had no shot at beating it and that they should get their affairs in order. The bedside manner had gone out the window. He was pretty much Code Blue with grief. He soldiered on.