But I loved her best when she froze.
A few nights of the right weather, and I’m talking thirty below, teeth-aching and nose-falling-off-type weather, and the canal would grow about a foot of ice. Hard as marble, and just as smooth. Strong and true. It gives me the goose bumps just thinking about it. Lookee there, see how goose-bumped I am right now.
I can’t remember lacing on blades for the first time. Likewise with hockey. I’ve got no idea when I first heard of, saw, or played the game of hockey. Some years back, Clay Clinton and I were invited to one of those hockey schools for a seminar. It couldn’t have been that long back, come to think, because what we were discussing was something like The Development of Hockey in North America, which means we were trying to figure out a way of beating the Russians. So there was me there, and Clay (who was drunk much of the weekend, and occupied with the pursuit of somebody’s floozy wife), and this young coach from Minnesota.
And the lad from Minn. starts talking about the origins of hockey. He went on and on about soccer and lacrosse, English foot soldiers playing baggataway with the Indians, some Scandinavian entertainment called bandy. I bit my tongue, but the truth of the matter is, I never knew that hockey originated. I figured it was just always there, like the moon.
Now, there was three of us Leary lads, Francis, Lloyd, and myself, Percival. We all early on got reputations in our neighborhood as good hockey players. Even though I was the youngest and the smallest, I was rated the best. Little Leary, they called me, a puff of Irish wind.
So one day—and this I remember like yesterday, better even, because what the hell happened yesterday other than Blue Hermann tweaking Mrs. Ames’s enormous bub, eliciting a shriek that popped my eardrums—this strange young lad shows up at the canal.
The strangest thing about him was the way he was dressed, namely, a full-length fur coat with a matching little cap. We just wore sweaters, one for every five degrees she dropped below freezing, and on this particular day I had on maybe six. This boy in the fur coat and matching cap stood by the snowbanks and watched us for almost half an hour, not saying a word. I was pretending to ignore the lad, but really I was studying him. He was fat, but not the kind of fat that would get him called Fatty. Mostly what I noticed about him was his face, which was handsome as hell. The lad had gray eyes that seemed to have slivers of ice in them.
I decided to impress him, don’t ask me why. The next time I got the puck I danced down the canal like I was alone. Then I made like Cyclone Taylor. I still loved Taylor even though he had, the year previous, abandoned the Ottawa Senators for the loathsome Renfrew Millionaires. As you may know, Cyclone claimed that he could score a goal skating backwards, and he did this against the Senators, and that’s what I did myself, turning around and sailing past the pointmen, slapping the rubber with my heaviest backhand. The little boy standing between the two piles of snow that was the goal—who had been pretending to be Rat Westwick of the Silver Seven—just covered his head and let the puck fly by.
The boy in the fur coat seemed to nod a bit. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, one that had two fancy linked Cs sewn onto it, like this:
and he blew his nose like your great-aunt. He studied the snot for a bit, folded up the handkerchief, replaced it in his pocket, and called out, “I say! Mind if I join you chaps?”
We said, “Huh?” because we thought he was speaking a different language. All it was was a classy English accent, but we’d never heard the likes. So he asked again, and Lloyd understood, and he says okay to the fat boy.
I naturally assumed that the lad would want to be on my side, but he skated right over to the other team. He skated pretty good, too, turning around and sailing backwards, showing off, positioning himself in the defense.
We recommenced the game of shinny. It wasn’t too long before someone passed the puck over to Little Percy Leary. And I thought, all right, little fat boy in the fur coat and matching cap, maybe this will impress you. I took the puck and started downriver. I made it by everyone as though the world were standing still. The strange lad just kept backing up, watching me like a hawk watches a titmouse. Soon there was just him ’twixt me and the goal. He broadened out. I decided I’d get around him with one of my little tricks (I was born with tricks) flicking the puck between his legs and then hardstepping around him. I got the flick away and made my move. Then I fell down, filled with more pain than I’d ever known before.
I’d never paid my private parts any particular attention previous to that, other than noticing that in a warm bath they tingled in a nice enough way. Now I realized there was something special about them, that being that if someone whacked them with a hockey stick it could kill you. I was timbered as though two-handed by Sprague Cleghorn, that black-hearted lout. The strange little boy in the fur coat stood over me, saying things in his funny accent like, “Most dreadfully sorry, old bean! Are you all right?”
After a long time I got my breath back, and after a longer time the pain eased enough for me to climb to my feet. Then I cocked my fist behind my head. He hit me first, of course, with a beautiful right hand that seemed to come from three miles away. He caught me square on the beak, and there was a gruesome crunching sound. I have never been considered a handsome man and this is mostly because my nose is bended and pugged. Popular mythology has it that my nose has been broken something like twenty-four times, but the truth of the matter is that it’s only been busted the once, when I was a sprout, and it was busted so thoroughly and convincingly that no subsequent damage could be done. I keep that a secret because the person who popped it was my dearest friend and lifelong companion, Clay Bors Clinton.
When Clay died, in 1967, four thousand people came by the Toronto Gardens to see his bloated body lying in state. I asked if I could go in alone, and the police held back the multitudes while I did that.
And I looked down upon Clay Clinton, and I said, “You bastard.”
Now sir, after an introduction like that, it probably seems strange that Clay and I became friends at all, let alone such bosom buddies that there is a whole series of books about us, Leary & Clinton and Their Various Fabulous Adventures. These books are for kids, you know, but I like them. I got a carton of them under the bed. Here’s one, published in one-nine five-one, my personal favorite, Leary & Clinton Visit the Dark Continent (which, by the by, is your Africa).
The King Cobra tightened around Clay Clinton’s muscular body. “Ah well,” Clay sighed musically, “I’m afraid I’ve about had it!”
“Don’t be so sure, Clay, me old son!” sang out Little Leary, his Irish blood at a boil. He swung down from the topmost branches at the end of a thick vine.
They keep writing Leary & Clinton books. The gormless Clifford brings them to me, when he makes his visits. They are getting stranger and stranger. I got one here, let me find it. Leary & Clinton Meet Michael Jackson. Who the hell is Mike Jackson? Whoever writes these books doesn’t seem to know that Clay is stone dead and I’m just a shriveled old mook who’s so scrawny I can’t keep up underwear. Here’s the latest in the series here, which Cliffy brought to me last weekend. (Have you ever met my gormless son Clifford, the fat, splay-footed boy of some sixty-odd years?) Here we are, Leary & Clinton Fight the Dogstar People.
The Sirian sandworm tightened around Clay Clinton’s muscular body. “Ah, well,” he sighed musically, “I’m afraid I’m done for!”
“Don’t be so sure!” sang out Little Leary, his Irish blood at a boil. Actually, his Irish blood came to a boil very quickly because of the low-gravity atmosphere on the planet Quarm.
Seems the Earth is at war with some creatures from the Dogstar Sirius. These Dogstar people, they’re pretty sneaky cookies. For one thing, they don’t have bodies, making it very hard to wage your conventional warfare. The Germans, now, they had bodies, which is what we blew apart (them doing the same to us), but these Dogstar People just float around in the air like so much cigar smoke.
Anyway, me and Clay beca
me fast friends.
Clay’s father was some sort of undersecretary to such-and-such, a Minister of This, That & the Other, and the Clinton family was pretty well off. Besides Clay and his father, there was Mrs. Clinton, who looked like a glass of milk, and his sister, Olivia. Olivia was in her teens, and I thought she was beautiful. Clay used to call her Horseface, and come to think of it, there was a resemblance.
Once we watched through a crack in the door as Olivia took a bath. I can remember it all. Not just Horseface bending over the tub, singing a little tune under her breath, I can remember the way the steam danced, the way the mirror was full of ghosts. Clay nudged me in the side and whispered, “What do you think of those bubbles, Percival my pet?”
One day after school the two of us laced on our skates and flew down to the canal. She was frozen hard and beautiful. The sunset lay across the river bright and heavy, like in one of those paintings so favored by Clifford’s wife, Janine (who has abandoned him), paintings done mostly with a garden trowel. Clay Clinton set out the rules. “We’re going to race, old fellow. We are going to race until we can’t race anymore, until one of us drops dead from exhaustion. All right?”
I nodded. Clay tended to overdramatize. I figured we’d race until he got hungry.
“Also, Percival, my prince,” Clay said, “all’s fair.” He pushed me into a snowbank and lit out.
I took out after Clay—I wasn’t angry, because being pushed into a snowbank wasn’t too bad compared to some of the things he did to me—and I went into the hardstep. Nowadays they got something called “powerskating.” I used to watch the Maple Leaves learn this. The coaches had slide projectors set up to show diagrams of leg muscles and such palaver, and it made me laugh because it was just hardstepping, which I been doing since I was born. Here’s what you do. You puff up your spirit till it won’t fit into your body anymore. You get your feet to dance across the icebelly of the world. You get empty except for life and the winter wind.
Then you’re going like hell.
I breezed by Clinton. He made a move to hip-check me, but Clay’s hip was a big chunky thing and it didn’t take much to jump out of the way. Clay couldn’t stop once that hip of his got him moving sideways. He fell down on the river. “I’ll get you for that, you scoundrel!” he hollered.
It didn’t take long before the city went away.
Clay beaned me in the back of the head with a snowball, one with a quarter inch of ice formed around it. I wondered how he’d managed to make a snowball in the middle of a race—you have to rub them for upwards of five minutes to achieve that glaze—and when I got hit by another in quick order I realized that he must have made the snowballs sometime previous. Clay likely made them the night before and stored them in the icebox, a process by which snowballs can become deadly.
I went weavy so Clinton couldn’t get a bead on me. A few more snowballs whistled by my ears, and one caught me on the fanny. That one hurt more than the two that got me on the head, which I suppose tells us something. Finally a few seconds went by without any snowballs, and I reasoned that he’d run out of ammo. I spun around and saw that I had a good thirty feet on him. “Drop dead from exhaustion, Clay!” I yelled. “I got you beat!”
The bastard had one behind his back. It came at me so fast that I’d swallowed the tooth before I realized what had happened.
When you lose a body part, even a tooth, it tends to slow you down. “Jesus H. Christ in heaven!” I screamed. I’d never screamed that before, I’d been saving it. When the old man bellowed out, “Jesus H. Christ in heaven!” my mother usually boxed him about the ears. Clinton skated by and give me a glance of some disdain. “And you call yourself a man.”
Well, of course I never had called myself a man. I was the first to admit that I was just a pup. Still, I resumed the hardstep.
Then the night came, as quick as a greengrocer closing up shop. It came so fast there was hardly time for the moon and stars to get there, and all we had was black.
“Clay!” I shouted. I was ahead of him again, but not by much. Clinton was red faced, full of grit. “We got to go back, Clay!”
“Leary, I’m ashamed of you! You’re afraid of the dark!”
That got me going. I never could stand it when Clay said he was ashamed of me.
I started thinking about this dropping dead from exhaustion business. I wondered if it was sudden or if there was some warning. I began to reflect on what difference Clay’s fat would make. On the one hand, he had more of himself to cart around. On the other, he was likely warmer, and his lard could serve as extra fuel. And while I was thinking about all that, the world broke apart.
I could get technical on you, and explain about sudden temperature drops and pressure cracks and suchlike, but the truth of the matter is, I don’t understand it all myself. Here’s how it looks. In an instant, the river breathes up a huge wall of ice, and the water from beneath explodes like a fountain gone berserk. I had enough speed to glide over the crack, which was about three feet across, and then I slammed into the ice on the other side and got thrown backwards. Clay had more time to react, so he tried to stop. I suppose he panicked, though, and dropped onto his hands and knees, and there’s no way you can stop in that position, so he didn’t. He slid into the water, where I already was.
And here’s what Clinton said, “Percival, old bean, I’m afraid we’re done like kippers!”
You see, Clay was already living in those damn adventure books. He just said that because he knew it was a good thing to say. That’s the way old Clay operated all of his life. Talk nice, fight like hell.
Mind you, I didn’t relish the thought of becoming an ice lolly myself. But other than thrashing around and trying to grab a hold of the slick ice, there’s not a lot can be done in that situation. Oh, you can bellow, I suppose, but that makes you light-headed. That is, howsomever, what I done, bellowed, and after a while, I began to lose consciousness, and then I felt a hand on my arm, the strongest hand I have ever felt before or since, and I thought it was God Almighty picking me up for to set me down in Glory, and I let myself slip into the darkness.
THREE
HERE IS THE GORMLESS CLIFFORD, my child, stepping through the doorway. I can tell he’s been wandering the corridors for the past few minutes, trying to find my room. It’s been years he’s been doing it, but Clifford always has trouble finding my room.
His fat hand is smoking. Clifford is convinced it’s against the rules to smoke in my room. In point of fact, it ain’t, or at least, Blue Hermann has been pretty militant about his right to puff, and the nurses, doctors, and orderlies all turn a blind eye, but Clifford hides the butt in his pudgy palm and looks so furtive you’re convinced he just killed somebody.
“Hey, Poppa,” he says. “Hey, Mr. Hermann.”
“Hello, yourself,” I respond.
“How goes it?” asks Blue Hermann.
“I don’t feel very well,” Clifford mutters. “Did I ever tie on one last night.” With quite a length of strong rope, judging from the looks of him. There’s an ugly scab on his forehead; he has done battle with another wall.
Blue Hermann, veteran of more hangovers than any man more or less alive, advises Clifford to recommence boozing immediately. Cliff shakes his head and says, “I got to go easy on that stuff.”
You wonder how a boy can go from six to sixty and not change. Clifford’s only accomplishment has been the acquisition of a truly monumental belly. I’m sure it must rank in the top ten worldwide.
“Hey, Poppa,” says the gormless Clifford, “they almost won last night.”
“They” being the South Grouse Louses. I am in this South Grouse Nursing Home mostly because Clifford lives in South Grouse, Ontario. The name of the South Grouse Industrial League Hockey Team is the Bullets. But it has been some time—more than five years, in fact—since they won a game. This is a world’s record. You could look it up in your Guinness Book if you’ve half a mind to, “Longest losing streak in professional sports.” They s
et that mark a little over a year ago, and ever since then they’ve been topping themselves. The South Grouse Bullets tied a game last season, but they at one time had a four-point lead, so the townspeople count that for a half loss instead of a half win. Anyway, nobody calls them the Bullets anymore. They are the South Grouse Louses. Even the local rag calls them that: “Louses Lose to Listowel.”
But you know, the gormless Clifford is a big South Grouse Louse fan. His wife, Janine, too, may be even a bigger fan than Cliffy. She recently packed up and ran off with the equipment manager.
Clifford’s cigarette is now burning the tips of his curled-up fingers and he’s getting antsy. There’s an ashtray over by Blue Hermann’s bed, see, but Clifford can’t use it, because he thinks it’s a secret he’s smoking in the first place. So Clifford shifts from foot to foot and sets his face in a sickly smile. Then he has an inspiration—same one he has every visit—and says, “Let’s get some air in this place!” Clifford crosses over to the window, bangs it open, and flips out his little butt. Cliff takes a big breath of the fresh air as seven or eight resident ancients succumb to pneumonia.
“Close the window, Clifford,” Blue Hermann snarls.
“Sorry, Mr. Hermann!” Cliffy swings it shut, comes over to sit in the bedside chair. The belly swells near to me. I am in awe. And I find myself all of a sudden surprised, I think, where in the world did he come from? I’m scrawny, always have been, my wife, Chloe, never weighed more than eighty pounds her whole life, and here’s our offspring—two hundred and sixty pounds, six foot two. Clarence, now, was about my size. He had his mother’s face, like a bird that just got a whiff of something bad.
And then no one says anything for quite a time.
Iain comes in with pills me and Blue have to take, fruit juice, and a couple of dailies, one from New York, one from Toronto. I don’t bother with the newspapers, but Blue Hermann sets on them like a dog on a bone, ripping out the sports sections. He holds the paper in hands that shake so bad that he and it might as well be in different rooms. “They blew it,” he announces. “They” being the Toronto Maple Leaves. “Six-zip to a suckhole team like New England.” Hermann tsks his tongue, which echoes in his empty gobber like the night janitor mopping floors.
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