King Leary

by Paul Quarrington

  So the two of us, Manfred and me, we walked from Bowmanville to Toronto. That took us three days, and they were pretty fine days. We’d sleep in farmers’ fields, we’d help ourselves to apples and such.

  Maybe I shouldn’t say this, considering what I became to the city, but I didn’t think much of Toronto the first time I saw her. Could be I was expecting too big a deal. At sixteen you think a city should be full of cowboys, bosomy ladies, Indians and scoundrels, carnivals and taverns, fistfights and love affairs, mooks with tattoos on their faces, women with garters above their knees—in short, the kind of place where Blue Hermann’s been living most of his life, wherever the hell that is. But Toronto looked as if it had been designed and built by a committee of Sunday-school teachers.

  Manfred, though, he was agape. He was all the time turning around and colliding with other pedestrians. Manny did a fair bit of damage to a couple of these unfortunates, not that he himself noticed.

  We find the recruiting place on Spadina Ave., and the two of us go in there. Damned if there ain’t a musical band set up in the corner playing these marches and things! The orchestra was made up of veterans of the Boer War, too old to fight but still gung-ho. Some of them were missing body parts, one of them had only half a face. A smart fellow might have thought twice about this army lark when he seen half a face stuck in a uniform, but I was just a ginger sprout.

  Manfred and I march up to the sergeant at his desk and tell him that we want to fight. The sergeant looks up and sees Manny, and he starts grinning. Then he sees me and ceases. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” I tell him.

  The sergeant gives me the once-over and remarks that I’m a small git, whereupon I tell him I’m scrappy as hell and all Irishter muscle and blood.

  Then he asks me if I have any experience with horses. “Yo,” says I, don’t ask me why, and that’s how I come to join the Canadian Mounted Rifles.

  They sent us to the Maritimes for training. It was kind of a perfunctory warfaring education. About all I remember is attacking straw men with our bayonets. After a couple of weeks of that, the superiors judged that we were ready. They took us down to the docks and put us on various ships. And while we sat there waiting, they handed out our Official Great War Stuff. They gave us each a Ross rifle. They gave us each a knife. Manfred laid each item aside as it was handed to him, without really looking at it. One of his hands was inside his shirt, touching the huge silver crucifix. Then they handed out the helmets. I got a regulation helmet, a green cloth affair. Manfred got one of the new kind, the kind they were experimenting with back there in WW I, a steel jobber. Manny put it on his knee, pinged it with his forefinger. It sounded like a bell.

  “Hey, Percy,” said Manfred. “My helmet is too small.”

  “You haven’t even tried it on, Manny.”

  “I can tell. Yours looks like the right size for me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So trade me.”

  They were calling for the Canadian Mounted Rifles. I handed Manfred my lid. He gave me the steel one. “I better go,” I told Manfred.

  “Yeah.”

  “See you later, Manny.”

  We shook hands in a very manly way, and pretended not to notice that the other guy was crying.

  They sent me to something called the Lille-Douai plain, along the border between France and Belgium. There a ridge shot out of the ground. It went up maybe two hundred feet, steep and more wooded than anything else in the neighborhood. I’ve seen more impressive ridges near Clifford’s cottage in the Muskokas. The only thing different about this ridge is that when we got there, right around the beginning of one-nine one-seven, there was a lot of Germans huddled on it. Us Canadians got stuck with the job of taking it away from them. That’s what your Battle of Vimy Ridge was all about.

  Every year, right around Remembrance Day, the blower will start hopping and somebody wants to know if I’ll come say a few words about my Great War experiences. I always affect to disremember them. It was a long time ago, I say.

  But I do remember the attack on Vimy. We waited for a few months, just digging in and planning, and it was Easter Sunday, April 8—I’d turned seventeen the week before—when we attacked.

  I was in the Eighth Brigade, which was made up of dismounted battalions from the Canadian Mounted Rifles. We formed the flank on the far right (kind of like a winger going up-ice along the boards) and it was our job to take out the Schwaben Tunnel.

  That morning was gray and drizzly. We waited. The only sound was men breathing. One or two said prayers. I can’t remember what I was thinking about. Likely not much. I’ve been more nervous before lots of hockey games.

  Then we hit.

  History books will tell you that it was the most perfectly timed barrage of the whole war, but that don’t say the half. Brother, it was like God slapped the world with the flat of His hand. The ridge started screaming. It exploded with bits of German uniform and German flesh. We waited three minutes, as per our orders, and then we moved forward. I was in the front line, a creeper. We went out in lumps, a little clutch of four or five men, isolated and, we hoped, harder to spot. Our lump got pegged right away, but just by rifle fire. We hit the muck. I just kept moving forward, bulldogging through the mud on all fours. The lad beside me got hit. He didn’t die right away. He lay there, breathing hard, and tried to pretend he was in a story in a CHUMS book. He thought about it for a long time, trying to think of something good to say. Finally all he could get out was, “To hell with this,” and he died pissed off. I kept moving forward. Another boy got pegged. I didn’t feel anything one way or another. I played a game in my head whereby God was handing out Major Penalties, and I thought that if I just stayed crawling on all fours through the muck and didn’t do anything wrong I’d be fine.

  We reached the tunnel so quickly that half the Fritzes were still in their underwear. It was then, while we were rounding up Germans, that I got shot. I got shot in the head, probably a ricochet off the wall, because the bullet just bounced off the steel helmet. It dropped me like a sack of bricks, and I had a doozy of a headache for two or three days, but it wasn’t that big a deal. In a few years the famous son of a bitch Sprague Cleghorn would two-hand my bean and split it open like a nut, and this bullet was nothing in comparison. Still, the doctors figured I’d done enough fighting.

  That was my war.

  When I turned seventy-five years old, they had a big do for me at the Toronto Gardens, as if turning seventy-five had required some great skill on my part.

  At the time I was living with my nephew Bernard, the son of my sister Bernice and her husband with the withered hand. Funnily enough, Bernard had a withered hand, and all three of his children have withered hands. One of these offspring has webbed feet to boot, and I understand that all three have married and I don’t care to know what my great-grandnephews look like.

  Anyway, because there was this do at the Gardens, Bernard goes out and rents me a tuxedo. I argued about wearing the monkey suit, but finally I was convinced to observe the solemnity of the occasion. So I took out my WW I decorations—two of them I’ve got—and I considered pinning them on my chest.

  I didn’t do that. I put the medals away, and now I can’t even remember where they are. Probably somewhere with the real hats they gave me, for scoring real hat tricks, which is three goals in a row all in the same period.

  ELEVEN

  I GOT BACK TO OTTAWA in the early summer of one-nine one-seven. I was thought of as something of a hero, and treated accordingly, although there was also a joke making the rounds that I was lucky to have been shot in the head or else I might have been hurt. Clay was away, attending military college in Kingston, so I didn’t see anything of him. Clay Clinton, by the way, turned eighteen a month or two before the Great War ended. He was made a noncommissioned officer, and he spent a few weeks bossing people around at a training camp in the prairies, safest spot on the globe. How he parlayed that into an illustrious service career is a ba
fflement to me. Manfred Armstrong Ozikean, I should tell you, eventually got turfed out of the forces on some charge of drunk and disorderly (and that’s going some when the army thinks you drink too much) but he still had a shoebox full of decorations tucked under his arm when he returned. Manny never said much about the decorations, or about the war. Then again, he was quiet on most subjects.

  Sometime in August, Pat Boyle came to visit me at home. He was the coach of the Ottawa Patriots of the newly formed National Hockey League. I was reading, at least looking at, a book, staring at a color glossy of St. George with his foot on the dragon’s head. The dragon’s tongue was sticking out and blood was everywhere. The lad George held his sword in the air and was shouting to the world that he’d offed the effing lizard. The storybook had belonged to my brother Lloyd—he owned a number of them—and we just the day before received word that Lloyd wasn’t coming home.

  Pat was a handsome young man. Most people remember him when his nose had blossomed like a gray ghost squash and his teeth had turned black. Mind you, it was at age sixty-eight that Pat got arrested for child molestation, the sort of thing that tends to stick in people’s minds more than coaching even such a legendary squad as the Ottawa Paddies. I don’t know if Pat did what some claimed he did, but it hardly mattered, given how he looked, like Death waiting for a bus. He got shipped to Penetang and there he died. But I’m remembering him in his thirties, when he was a good-looking young mick.

  So the old mother lets Boyle into the living room and he says, “What are you doing for the next seven months, Little Leary?”

  I say, “Playing hockey for the Patriots, if they’ll have me.”

  Patty says, “They’ll have you right enough, Little Leary. And they’ll pay you nine hundred and fifty dollars.”

  I jumped up from my chair and started pumping Pat Boyle’s hand. I said, “I just wanted to put the lid on that offer before you changed your mind.”

  If I had my life to live over again (no thankee very much) I suppose I’d do pretty much the same, except for I would cancel the three weeks I spent at my rookie training camp.

  I walked into the dressing room, strutting and puffed up like a prize gamecock. Most of the Patriots were older men (the younger ones either still serving in the Great War or dead), and I imagined they’d never seen the likes of me. I had my miner’s cap tilted at a jaunty angle. My ring was tossing sunshine like a wet dog tosses water. The dragon-head walking stick was bouncing around as if there was a marching band in back of me. “The name is Leary,” says I, tossing my gear into a locker. “Little Leary.”

  They didn’t say nothing.

  They grabbed me, stripped me naked, and shaved off my pubics.

  The other rookie showed up two days late, bleary-eyed and unshaven. He stumbled into the dressing room, clinging to one of the walls. With effort he managed to pull his mouth together in a smile. “Hello, Patriots!” he sang out, and that made him laugh. The laugh made him stumble backwards. “Hello, Patriots,” he repeated, almost a whisper. “Did you see what we did, Patriots? Can you believe what we did?” He struggled for purchase, getting a firmer grip on the wall. “My name is—” He hiccupped, a huge one that shook his throat. “My name is—” He looked up, bewildered almost, as if he’d forgotten.

  “Manfred,” I supplied.

  Manny saw me and grinned. “Hey, Percy,” he whispered, “you never told me you were a Patriot.”

  The goaler, North Innes, whipped out the straight razor. He grinned like a maniac, mostly because that’s what the man was. The other Patriots stood up and advanced on Manfred Ozikean. I don’t know what they could have been thinking. Timmy Finn tried to grab Manny’s arm and he got thrown clear across the room. Three fellows came all at once. Manny started to bellow. I heard the crack of a bone-break, and Sully Fotheringham, a defenseman, started whimpering. The whole of the team set on Manfred Ozikean. By the time Pat Boyle broke up the fight, three men were injured for the season. Manfred was asleep, dead drunk.

  Well, sir, that should have been the end of Manny’s hockey-playing career, except for the fact that he demolished the lineup so thoroughly that Coach Boyle had no choice but to have a look at him.

  The next day Manny showed up sober and quiet. He stepped onto the ice, skated the length of it, and fired a practice shot past North Innes. That’s about all it took for Manfred to make the team.

  For me, it was a different tale. They kept knocking me down. I kept getting up. My bony little arse was three different kinds of black. But I’d remember all that the monks had taught me—the Bulldog, the Whirlygig, the Inner-Eye Fling, and damned if I didn’t do all right. They couldn’t keep ahold of me, they couldn’t stop my shots. And what I couldn’t accomplish through the brothers’ teachings I accomplished through pure Irish blockheadedness. Yes, ma’am, I done all right.

  One time a reporter came from the Ottawa Gazetteer to ask about the new prospects. Pat Boyle says of Manfred, “The lad is a wizard.” Of course, that play The Wizard of Oz was big news back then, and that’s what started people calling Manfred just Oz, and that’s how come today he’s known mostly as Manny Oz, the Wizard.

  Of Percival Leary, Boyle said, “A leprechaun.”

  Fully three-quarters of the boys were Irishmen. Not counting me and Pat Boyle, there was maybe eight all totaled, Finn, Denneny, O’Casey, and O’Sullivan, and some others whose names I could remember if there was any great reason to. We were as green as grass is what I’m saying, so much so that we were nicknamed the Paddies and our jerseys bore a big shamrock for the team emblem.

  Many of that Ottawa Patriots team were pretty famous men. North Innes, for example, who was as good a goaler as there ever was, except for when I played with him he was fat, pushing thirty-five years of age. North liked to have a laugh, but he never laughed at anything that I thought was humorous. Shaving off people’s pubics was one of his favorite activities. He also liked to cut your clothes into ribbons while you were showering, or dump itching powder into your uniform just before a game. North Innes died a young man, eaten up by cancer.

  I made it through the training camp all in one piece, and then the regular season started. I rode the pines for seventeen games. It made me sick. I mean it. Sometimes I’d sit there wanting to throw up all over my skates. Lucky thing for me I never did eat too much, or that’s likely what would have happened. Now, why Pat Boyle was sitting me out is still a mystery, because it’s not like the Ottawa Patriots were tearing up the league. After seventeen games, our record was 4-11-2, which is piss poor, as you can see. And we’re talking a forty-game season here! Manfred was the only bright spot, averaging a goal a game. But as quick as Manny could score them, our defense would open up and North Innes could only do so much.

  Now, game eighteen was in Montreal, against the Maroons. I don’t have to tell you who was on that team. Sprague Cleghorn, that’s who. Sometimes I still have nightmares about Cleghorn. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the man, but if there ever was a black-hearted shark-minded bastard, Sprague was it. I mean, his brother Odie would as soon cut off your balls as say hello, and we used to call him “the nice one.”

  In Montreal that night, Sprague is mowing down the lineup. He’s just standing there chopping at us like we’re so much firewood. Well, sometime in the second period, Sprague takes out Dan O’Sullivan with a two-hander to the kneecaps. Say good night, sister! Boyle starts eyeballing the bench. Then he says, “Leary.”

  This is peachy. I’m a center or a rover, but Boyle’s putting me on the defense. Still, I’m not about to bellyache about it. I hop over the boards.

  About a minute after play starts, Sprague gets the puck and starts down the ice. Now, the man could skate, but none too sprightly, and it didn’t take me but a second or two before I’m right behind him. “Sprague!” says I, and naturally enough, he takes me for one of his teammates and drops the puck. I scoop it, tell him, “Thank you kindly, Spray-goo!” and I’m gone. Now was the time for everything I’d learnt from the Brot
hers of St. Alban the Martyr. I bulldogged, I hardstepped, I inner-eyed all the way. I blew that puck by the goaler! That was the best feeling I ever had in my life. Some of the Patriots skated over to congratulate me on my first NHLer. Then I heard a voice from behind me. “Hey, Percy!” I turn around, expecting a handshake, and the last thing I saw was Cleghorn’s fist sailing into my face.

  TWELVE

  LAST NIGHT, BLUE HERMANN TOOK SICK in a spectacular way. Blue smoked all his life, smoked too much and drank too much, and his insides are crumbly now as moldy cheese, and when he coughs he sprays them all over the walls. I don’t mind that. I’ve seen worse. I saw Bullet Broun get his throat cut open by a skate blade. His gullet gaped like another mouth. I saw Rene LeCroix stop a puck with his forehead—his left eye flew clear out of its socket and dangled near his chin. Blue Hermann is just coughing up little chunks of his bad life, and I’m unaffected. But then he starts talking. Blue Hermann scares the bejesus out of me when he starts talking like that, nonsensical I mean, and soon he’s screaming at the top of his lungs. I press the buzzer for the nurse and they come fill him full of dope.

  I can’t sleep after that. I take out the book Clinton & Leary Fight the Dogstar People. The Dogstar People float around the universe, they leak into things, trees and water and clouds. I shut my eyes. I’m back in this dream I’ve been having, the dream of Manfred’s funeral. Manfred’s spirit leaks out of his stone gray body. Hallie cries, the tears spill onto her satin dress, the dress becomes soaked, and I can see her nakedness. Clay Clinton begins to laugh, and that sound is in my ears when I wake in the morning.

  Blue Hermann is looking at me.

  “You had a rough one last night,” I say to him.