by Gare Joyce
Never-say-die Hackenbush. The Ol’ Redhead had opened the trap door beneath Harley’s feet and he still talked about the franchise as if he were in the team photo.
I spelled it out for him.
“Everybody thinks that these kids should be back in junior for at least another year and almost nobody is ready to play pro at age eighteen,” I said. “Physically they’re not up for it. Almost all of them get banged up. But then again, everybody thinks that about everybody else’s draft pick. Every general manager thinks his player is the exception.”
Hackenbush got his money quote. Small talk ensued. He wanted to know about other kids on the Peterborough team who were draft eligible. I told him I had a limited interest in Markov, and that was true. I didn’t tell him that I thought L.A. was about the worst place for a player who was willing and eager to take pictures of his Johnson on his iPhone. He’d have his own spot on TMZ. And I told Hackenbush that I had a limited interest in the others, “limited” in its application here being none whatsoever.
I nudged our conversation over to the subject of Bones II. Hackenbush was a fan.
“If it weren’t for h-h-him, I-I-I wouldn’t be alive,” he said. “Howz that?”
“Stress. I got taken off the beat because the stress was killing me. My ticker was out of whack.”
I imagined that the cause and effect might be reversed. I imagined that it was the stress of being sentenced to the night desk that got to him. And I imagined that there was an intermediate causation as well. He was demoted, he hit the bottle, and every double made his heart skip a beat.
“I was coming to my six-month regular appointment with him and called his office, but they said he won’t be back in until next week. He’s been off for two weeks or so.”
I bade him farewell. It seemed screwy that Mays had an appointment with a doctor on holiday and Hackenbush could have been at death’s door and had to wait. I couldn’t wholly trust Hackenbush’s version of events. He could have muffed the timeline and the details the same way he’d mangled my quotes at the old-timers game. The same way he was going to mangle my quote about kids not being ready to play in the league at age eighteen. Then again, if there was something he wasn’t going to muff it would be a visit to his cardiologist that would sustain his life, such that it was.
37
* * *
I put in a call to Spike. I wanted to ask him about Markov. I looked at Duke Avildsen’s reports on him from mid-winter and Duke gave him pretty positive reviews. Spike confirmed that Markov had been nothing but a good citizen. “Better as the year went on,” Spike said.
We made small talk. Of course, our discussion went back to the murders. It had been the first topic of conversation in Peterborough for weeks. I told him that I’d seen a couple of detectives grilling Norm Pembleton.
“They’re barking up the wrong tree,” Spike said.
“How’s that?”
“They’re friends … they were friends. A couple of times when Pembleton was heading for a bad fall, in a bad, bad way, it was Red who stepped in and got him to dry out. It was Red who helped Norm get a couple of his jobs. All that other stuff was an act.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“It fooled everyone. Like Red used to say, ‘There’s no cowboys if there’s no Indians.’ Red was the good guy, Pembleton the black hat. And when their teams played, people came out just to see the guys behind the bench. Doesn’t happen often. But they did get together, real low profile. They didn’t want their players or reporters to know. It woulda ruined a good thing for them. Fact is, they were an awful lot alike.”
“What about the cheerleader they dated? Mrs. Red. Pembleton had to have a gripe about that …”
“Hah, Judy was a cheerleader, all upright and uptight. She’d been crazy about Pembleton but he liked his stuff fast and loose.”
I could see that. I could see him later regretting it. He couldn’t have held it against Hanratty that he had something that he’d passed up, someone he didn’t want to hurt.
38
* * *
I rolled around the bed. There was no sleeping. I was glad that Sandy wasn’t there. She wouldn’t have been able to sleep with me turning the light on and off, starting a book and putting it down, turning on the television in the bedroom. Chinatown was on. I needed someone to come up to me and say, “Forget about it, Shade, it’s hockey.” But there’d be no forgetting about it. My job was on the line. Our jobs were on the line. If we ended up making the wrong decision about our pick, the owner was going to kick all of us out to the curb. It looked like our pick would be Mays, but there were big holes in our background check on the kid, holes six feet deep where they’d lowered the Ol’ Redhead and Bones.
“Detective Madison, please.”
A pause.
“Madison.”
We exchanged niceties by rote.
I stuttered out a thought that was instinctive rather than well founded. “Something has been bothering me about … well, ‘bothering’ isn’t the right word, but something occurred to me after talking to you and watching the security video.”
“What is it?”
“Just something about the people coming and going. It could be nothing. I don’t know. Could I maybe drop in and watch the video with you when I’m up in Peterborough this week?”
39
* * *
June was not quite upon us. It didn’t feel like hockey season. It might have if the Merry Widow’s air conditioning worked. I sat at barside in front of Nick’s most recently serviced flat screen. It was game night, game seven of the Eastern Conference final, and, as such occasions demand, Nick had the music off and the sound of the broadcast turned up high.
My father sat beside me. I’d like to think that he stood out from and above the mangy clientele, but, fact is, he’d made a career of blending in and getting along, just as the Irregulars had scratched out their bare existence by rising to the minimum standards of human decency or thereabouts.
Sarge had lost the coin flip with my mother. She wanted to watch some godawful show where celebrities dance ballroom style, utterly lacking talent for the task. Actually, Sarge threw the coin flip—she’d called heads and it landed tails when he tossed it. He put his act over. He wanted to get out. He wanted a chance to catch up with me now that my season on the road was over but for the draft. It wasn’t just my company he wanted, though.
The game was one thing to watch at home, another to share communally. Sarge wanted to be in the company of men, of fans who could name all those dancing their own dance on the ice, who could appreciate excellence. Larry, his German shepherd, retired from the canine division, was tied up out on the curb, looking through the window, not at his master but at the game.
In the panel talk during intermission, the main topic of conversation was a hit on Broadhurst, the Boston captain. Hoskins, New York’s knuckle-dragger, had given him the flying elbow and rightly got five and a game. The Irregulars winced when they saw it happen. My father shook his head. Larry strained at his collar. Broadhurst was knocked out of his senses and out of the game and, from the looks of it, from the rest of the playoffs if Boston was going to survive this night.
I’ve been there on both ends of that elbow. It really doesn’t merit analysis. It is what it is. Broadhurst was doing what he does, playing his game, getting a little too comfortable or reckless or both with the stakes so high. Hoskins was doing what he does, playing his game, right up to the line marking acceptable behaviour and occasionally, if need be, just on the dark side of that line.
It was done. There wasn’t anything more you could say about the play. That didn’t stop Grant Tomlin from weighing in with a dissertation that might have gone all night if it weren’t for commercials and the puck drop for the third period.
“What you just saw there was a breach of The Code,” Tomlin shouted at a host sitting only an arm’s length away and whose glasses doubled as a spittle shield. “Given the level of these players’ abil
ity and size, each of them could take out an opponent on every shift if they were so inclined. But they play by The Code. They know that when they step on the ice, they’re in against guys just like them who understand what this game is about and respect their teammates and the guys on the other side just as much. When you don’t demonstrate that respect, when you don’t play the game the way it’s supposed to be played, you’ve violated The Code.”
He went on and with every next word took a step farther from the truth of the matter.
The Code is a nice notion, one that gets thrown around by reporters and talking heads. It sells a narrative of honour and nobility. Those guys in the seats and in front of the screens buy it. They lap it up. These are their knights, in shoulder pads and shin pads, not shining armour; with sticks, not lances; all in the service of coaches, not kings.
The Code is a notion as bogus as any campaign ever cooked up by an advertising agency and twice as effective for drumming up business. Nobody takes an oath, one hand over his heart, other hand raised, vowing to uphold the game’s values and traditions. Every player on the ice signs a contract to play the game and there’s not a line in it about respect.
The game is no different from life outside the boards. What players do on the ice is regulated only by conscience, and conscience is the sum of experience in large part, necessity in some part, and intelligence when any is in stock. Most will do their best. A few will do whatever it takes. Broadhurst was doing his best. Hoskins was doing whatever it was going to take, at least to the best of his limited judgment.
There’s nothing understood between those on one side of the ice and those on the other. There’s the knowledge that Broadhurst is going to do what he’s going to do seventeen out of twenty shifts in a game. There’s the possibility that in six minutes of Hoskins’s ice time he might slash a player across the arm hard enough to break it or, as he did with Broadhurst, leave a star on his back at centre ice, eyes open but the arena as dark as an unlit closet in Carlsbad Caverns. Broadhurst has his own Code, Hoskins a very different one.
“What a steaming pile of crap,” Sarge said at the end of Tomlin’s soliloquy.
Sarge got it. As it is in hockey, so it is in life. Sarge had his Code. He mostly coloured by the numbers and inside the lines. Others on the force stretched and bent and ignored the rules, worse than Hoskins ever did.
I’m not like Sarge. Somewhere in an old file in our team’s office you can find proof of it. Back when I was in my first season in L.A., management brought in a sports psychologist to do testing. Another steaming pile of crap, but no matter. One of the tests involved a big sheet of numbers, running up to 200. They were jumbled, out of order, and in different typefaces and colours. Some were sideways. I got dizzy just looking at them. The psychologist gave us a few minutes and told us to circle numbers in order, going up from 1, and said that a good score was in the high 40s or so. He told us that we couldn’t skip a number or he’d have to void tests and register them as failures. I got to 23 but was stuck on 24. I spent about five seconds and then said to hell with it. I could see 25 and so I circled it and just kept going. I thought that if I had trouble finding 24, the guy marking the tests might too and he’d probably just want to see the highest number I got to. I ended up getting to 47. At the bottom of the page I wrote my name and wrote down “Total: 47!” just to make his job easy.
There was no 24. I had thought the test was set up to rate the ability to process information, to check the wiring of the synapses. No, it was set up to sort out those who would take instruction, follow it to a T, and stop at 23 even if that meant failure. Those were one type of player. Those were Keepers of The Code. I was the other type, the one who’d try to get away with something to get the desired result, the one who went from 23 to 25 with a sideways glance to see if the coast was clear.
The test was a waste of time. I could have told them that I’d do that in life and on the ice.
I’m my father’s son in a lot of ways but not on this count. I was like Hoskins in many ways, but smarter, sneakier. I never once did something impulsive on the ice. I picked my spots. And I had no loyalties, no friendships. I would do to an ex-teammate and a friend exactly what I’d do to a total stranger—in fact, I might have even gone at it harder with guys I had run and drunk with, just because I feared that I might go soft and sentimental. Players and general managers and coaches used to say that I was “greasy,” which I took as the highest compliment. If you look at the names engraved on the cup, you’ll find a lot of greasy guys. Greasy guys are great to play with but brutal to play against. “Greasy” is whatever it takes with a lot of liberties and lubrication. I still think of myself that way. I couldn’t be greasier if I jumped in a deep fryer and started doing the backstroke.
40
* * *
It was just after midnight and I was waiting for Sandy down in the parking lot. She had asked me for a ride home that I knew would turn out to be a drink first and breakfast the next morning. Her car was on a hoist at the garage.
Sandy’s office is downtown in a building that dates back to the turn of the last century and serves as a time capsule of old Toronto, as severe as the columns at the front door, as colourful as the light grey limestone walls. City Hall designated this four-storey cottage a historic landmark and protected it from development or renovation. It’s like a pebble in the shoe of the skyscrapers that surround it, but the old building is fully updated, owing to the fact that it’s home to one of Toronto’s most prominent law firms.
At any time of day you need a digital passkey to get around anywhere. In a larger building you could go to the front desk and count on a security guard checking your credentials, giving you a long look, and then calling upstairs to have someone come down to buzz you through the various doors. No such luck after hours with this building. Trying to get in would be like knocking on the door of a well-maintained crypt. There’s video surveillance but it’s off-site. There’s no old-timer doing crosswords at a front desk.
There was no waiting outside the building either. Construction crews had gutted the main arteries to repair the streetcar tracks. Four lanes were down to two. No Parking and No Stopping signs lined every street in every direction for seven blocks in the downtown. I pulled up in a lot that was $4.50 for a half-hour all day and all night. It was an automated lot and you had to buy time at a machine with your credit card. I was staying in the Rusty Beemer, so I wasn’t worried about any of the parking lot crew ticketing my car or having it towed. I didn’t even mind waiting. With my job I had a lot to make up for. Small courtesies were a way to inch up to a break-even. I had called Sandy just as I pulled up into the lot down the street. The call went to voicemail. Messaged her. She replied quickly. On the last page down in a minute. She had a patient on the phone at this late hour. Someone in some sort of crisis.
If she could have told me, she would have told me that it was a player. If she could have told me, she would have told me that it was Mays. But she couldn’t, of course. Matter of privilege and confidentiality. She could ask me and, a couple of days before, she did ask me what it was like to be a player and how I responded to stress. Stress on the ice and off. How others did too. I told her that some were dumb enough not to recognize a pressure situation and were probably better for it. I told her that others were smart enough to put themselves in the best possible position to succeed. And still others had all kinds of talent but melted like butter in a pan the first time the heat was turned up higher than room temperature. Some were nonchalant. Others conscientious. Me, I was in the middle of the pack, I guess.
She asked me if I knew any who were anxious. I told her there were lots of them. I played with two goaltenders who threw up before every game. I played with a tough guy in L.A. for about fifteen games, his entire career in the league, and on game day, as the hours leading up to the puck drop passed, he’d talk faster and faster, until in the ten minutes before we went out there, he was practically speaking in tongues. One guy I played w
ith in Montreal, a centre with the security of a five-year deal, broke down like a little lost child when someone ripped off his shipment of sticks and he had to borrow mine. I saw the same thing at a lot of other stops with guys who were confidence distilled until something or someone disrupted their precious routines.
If she could have told me, she would have told me that she was asking all this because Billy Mays had sought her out after the grief counselling. He thought he was having anxiety attacks when his injury knocked him out of the lineup. Shortness of breath. Panic. Elevated heart rate. He even blacked out one time, out of the blue, and came to in a cold sweat. If she could have, she would have told me that Mays’s dad told him that all of this would pass, just a phase, the mono thing, and saying anything about this to teams that were interviewing him would be the kiss of death. Said to not even tell his agent. But she couldn’t tell me any of this. Matter of privilege and confidentiality.
I turned off the ignition of the Rusty Beemer and the rumble ceased. I put my head back on the rest and closed my eyes. If I had flown, I’d say it was jet lag, but his was fatigue from all the highway miles to Peterborough and back. I could see the front door of the building through one not-quite-closed eye. I heard nothing but my deep breath. Head tipping forward and then snapping straight up. I grabbed the wheel. Small bit of panic for me. I thought I had fallen asleep at the wheel on some sort of road trip.
Just at that moment I saw Sandy at the front door of her building. I looked down at my cell. Three missed calls. All hers. All in the last fifteen minutes. Somehow I had managed to turn the sound off. Some Explaining to Do. I opened my car door, but before I could set a foot on the pavement I saw a guy wearing a black track suit jump Sandy on the empty street. Someone who wasn’t a cop’s son would ask where the boys in blue are when you really need them. I broke out into a dead sprint, the car door swinging behind me. He wrestled her to the ground. I screamed a profanity and the guy looked up. I was close enough to see that he had a ski mask on. He took off. That made me relatively confident that he wasn’t armed or any real physical threat in a mano-a-mano. Split-second intuitive call: I gave chase rather than attend to Sandy, who by my quick reckoning seemed roughed up but not life-threatened.