All-Star Pride

by Sigmund Brouwer

  He waddled close to where I was sitting and looked down at me. “You’re Burnell, right?” He shook his head. “Don’t take no offense, kid. I can’t figure any of you out unless I got a program in my hand and you got numbers across your shoulders.”

  “I’m Burnell,” I said. I could smell strong cologne. It had to be real strong to get past the raunchy cigar in his hand.

  “Burnell. It’s what I figured.” He raised his voice for the rest of the guys. “I want more of you laying out hits like Burnell did to that kid last night. Hits look real good on television. And they don’t hurt your chances of winning none.”

  He took a couple more puffs. “That’s all I got to say for now.”

  He left us in a cloud of smoke. I reached for the blowtorch and twisted the valve to extend the flame. I was glad he had noticed me. I’d find out later that was a stupid thing to be glad about.

  chapter six

  I nearly killed myself attempting my first hit of the game. Henley had me so pumped and ready to perform that I was drooling at the prospect of a spectacular body check for the television cameras.

  It was halfway through my second shift on the ice. Their defenseman had taken the puck behind the Russian net. I was forechecking hard. So was Miles, my center.

  Miles raced down the right side of the ice, turning hard to spook the Russian defenseman out from behind the net. The Russian hesitated and looked for a safe outlet to dump the puck. He didn’t find one.

  With Miles charging in, the Russian started skating to the left side of the ice. It took him away from the safety of the net and squarely into my sights.

  He put the puck in his skates and tried covering up, pressing himself against the boards and waiting for the impact as I slammed him.

  Dead meat, I said to myself. Dad’s going to love seeing me crush this guy on television.

  The Russian knew I was coming at him, of course. Wouldn’t you hear a locomotive steaming in at full speed?

  Unfortunately, he made a move I’d never seen before. Just as my body screened him from the referee, he turned his stick at an angle—stick blade jammed into the boards at ice level, the top end of his stick pointing directly at my stomach.

  I couldn’t do a thing about it. My momentum carried all 250 pounds of me into the stick at full speed. Except it wasn’t a stick. It had become a spear. And I hit it so hard I knew I had just installed another belly button somewhere in the lower part of my back.

  I fell back and flopped like a fish in the bottom of a rowboat. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t scream. I wanted someone to slam me over the head with an oar to put me out of my misery.

  Roughly five years later, I was able to take my first breath. It took another five years for my second breath.

  One of the Russian’s hockey gloves had fallen from his hand as I’d spun his stick away from him. It lay on the ice, just out of my reach. I crawled over and scooped it toward me.

  I heard Russian protests. I ignored them. My stomach was about to give its opinion on what I’d just done to it.

  I brought his glove to my mouth. It wasn’t that I had anything against the Russian defenseman. He’d suckered me, and I deserved the punishment for my carelessness. No, it was the fact that I didn’t have the energy to pull my own gloves off. Nor the time. And I didn’t want the embarrassment of putting my last meal all over the ice in full view of the television cameras—and thousands of Russian fans.

  I found enough air for one more breath. Then I threw up into the Russian’s glove.

  They didn’t take me off the ice to our players’ bench. Instead, when I managed to stand and gasp out a lie that I was just fine, the referee and linesmen took me to the penalty box.

  They had decided throwing up in someone else’s glove deserved a two-minute penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct.

  The Russians scored during the power play and never looked back. Final score: 5–2 for the Russians.

  chapter seven

  My first surprise that night after the game was to discover Chandler Harris in my hotel room.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Where’s Nathan? I thought he was my roommate for the tour.”

  “You’re some kind of big, rookie. Boom, all those big hits. Even after woofing in that guy’s glove. Maybe you don’t score any goals, but you make it easier for the rest of us, even if we didn’t win tonight.”

  Harris was unloading a suitcase onto the bed across the room from mine. I didn’t like that. I also wanted to tell him he’d played a terrible game. If he’d hit the wide-open net on a few of the chances he’d had, we’d be one game closer to winning the series, one game closer to the money I could really use.

  “Where’s Nathan?” I asked again.

  Finished with his suitcase, Harris stood with his hands on his hips and took a long, slow look around the room.

  “This ain’t exactly a palace suite, is it, kid?”

  I also didn’t like being called rookie or kid. Harris was maybe nineteen years old. He’d been on this tour each of the previous two summers. Seventeen or not, I’d played my share of hockey too. This evening’s game had shown it. I didn’t have to put up with his attitude.

  “Where’s Nathan?”

  Chandler Harris sighed. He did it so loud and so long it was obviously a fake sigh. Another thing I didn’t like.

  He imitated me. “Where’s Nathan? Where’s Nathan?” Another sigh. “Burnell, is your brain so small it can only hold one thought at a time?”

  I started taking deep breaths to hold my temper.

  “Relax,” he said. “Save your muscle flexing for tomorrow’s game. Nathan and I got switched around by Henley. You want to go down the hall and argue with Henley?”

  I did not want to argue with Matthew Martin Henley.

  “Fine,” I said. “You and Nathan got switched by Henley. I’ll live with it. Good night.”

  I sat down on the bed, pulled off my shoes and let them fall on the floor.

  Chandler Harris grinned at me. I didn’t like his grin either. It was the grin of someone whose parents had a couple of thousand dollars to spare on braces to make the grin perfect. His grin, though, became a frown as he realized I was serious about going to sleep.

  “Just like that? Good night? You don’t want to talk about the game? Don’t want to talk about being a rookie hero on the tour? Don’t want to talk about what it’s like in Russia? Don’t want to ask any more questions about the money I gave you?”

  “It’s not my job to talk.”

  He laughed. “Around me it is. Boy, oh boy, rookie, I can see you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  If I told him I didn’t like being called rookie, he would probably make a point of calling me rookie as often as he could as a way to challenge me. When that happened, I would either have to fight him or let him get away with it. Fighting is stupid, so I smiled to keep him from knowing how much I didn’t like his name for me.

  “Good night,” I said. I did have a lot of questions about the five hundred dollars. But I can be stubborn. I was going to wait until he asked me to do whatever he was going to ask of me; then I’d tell him about the various places he could stuff his money.

  I was still sitting on the edge of the bed. I leaned over to peel my socks off. As I looked downward, pieces of paper floated onto the carpet between my feet. They were green pieces of paper. Twenty-dollar bills. I counted them without moving or picking them up. Twenty-five of them. Another five hundred dollars.

  “Still thinking of sleepy time?” Chandler’s voice had a rough edge to it, like he wanted to push me as far as he could.

  “Good night,” I said. I noticed, though, that I hadn’t taken either of my socks off. Five hundred dollars.

  “The money’s yours,” he said. “Plus the other money I gave you earlier. But you’ll have to put your shoes back on. That’s five hundred dollars per shoe.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I nibbled at the bait. “Just for putting my shoes on?”

  “A
nd for going for a little walk around the block with me.”

  “Sure,” I said sarcastically. “You’re doing it for exercise.”

  “Don’t worry about what I do,” he said. “All you need to do is walk with me. Nothing else.”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s already past the nine o’clock curfew. We’re supposed to stay in the hotel. Besides, you don’t speak Russian. I don’t speak Russian. It would be stupid to wander around Moscow.”

  I still hadn’t told him no, despite my earlier resolution. One thousand dollars was a lot of money.

  Chandler Harris laughed again. Somehow it wasn’t the kind of laugh that had anything to do with humor.

  “Like I said,” he told me, “you’ve got a lot to learn, rookie.”

  He looked at his own watch. “You pick up that money and fold it into your pocket. We’ve got less than a minute left.”

  “A minute left until what?”

  “No questions. All you need to do is walk with me,” he said. “Nothing else. Do you want the money or not?”

  One thousand dollars. I thought of my dad watching his tiny black-and-white television from the wheelchair he could never leave. I thought of my mom collecting eggs every day. She sold them in town at the garden markets where city people kept knocking her prices down until what she made barely covered the cost of the gasoline it took to get into town.

  One thousand dollars. I picked up the money and folded it into my back pocket. I’d go for the walk. Only for as long as I liked what was happening. If it turned out he expected me to do something illegal, I would definitely give it back to him then.

  I had barely laced up my shoes before there was a soft knock at our hotel room door.

  Chandler Harris grinned his perfect white grin. “What did I tell you? Just on time.”

  He opened the hotel door to let our visitor slip inside.

  “Hog,” he said, “maybe you and I can’t speak Russian, but she can.”

  I lifted my eyes to look into the face of Nadia. Nadia with raven black hair. Nadia our tour guide. Nadia, who had made it plain on the first day that she didn’t want anyone on the team leaving the hotel after nine o’clock.

  chapter eight

  Nadia no longer showed the wonderful wide, curving smile of a translator and tour guide. Instead, her face was pinched, as if she were angry. She wore a short leather jacket and blue jeans. Her hair was free and loose. She appeared much younger—and even prettier, if that was possible—than she did as a tour guide with a clipboard.

  I looked at Chandler to see if he was going to explain this. Chandler ignored me. He returned to his suitcase and took out a small package, which he tucked inside his shirt.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Nadia. Chandler jerked his thumb at me. “Gorilla here will be keeping us company.”

  Gorilla? That was far beyond calling me rookie or kid. I opened my mouth to tell him to apologize. I remembered the thousand dollars. I snapped my mouth shut.

  Nadia shrugged. From her, it was an expression of poetry. I reminded myself to keep reminding myself that beautiful girls did not look twice at a face like mine.

  Nadia opened the hotel room door and peeked down the hallway. Without looking back at us, she waved us forward. We followed her into the hallway and down to an exit door around the corner.

  She pushed the door open to show a narrow stairway, lit by a bare lightbulb dangling from a cord. We stayed behind her as she led us up the stairs. It smelled like cats had used every second step as a litterbox.

  She took us up three flights of stairs to another door that led to the roof. The door creaked open. After the cramped smelly stairway, the fresh night breeze seemed as sweet as air to a drowning man.

  The entire time she had said nothing to us. She had simply walked with her shoulders square and her body rigid. More of a march than a walk, except her feet had made no noise during the angry march.

  On the flat hotel roof, she remained silent. She led us across a mixture of gravel and tar to a waist-high ledge that ran along the edge of the hotel roof. It had rained earlier, and cars below on the busy streets splashed through a sheen of water on the pavement.

  I looked around carefully. If I had counted right, we were six stories off the ground. Three stories up from our third-floor hotel room. The stone building immediately next to this one was two stories taller.

  She pointed to a rickety fire escape stairway running down the outside of the other building.

  “We go across to there,” she said. “Then down and onto the street.”

  “No way,” Chandler protested. “I can’t jump that far. And there’s no place to land.”

  As much as I tended to want to disagree with Chandler on anything, this was one time he was right. The gap across was double the length of a bed. And I couldn’t see myself taking a running dive onto the fire escape on the outside of the other building.

  Nadia gave a scornful toss of her hair. “Fool,” she said, in a tone that made me glad it was Chandler, not me, she was talking to. “You think I am not prepared?”

  She stooped, reaching into the shadows cast by the small ledge. That’s when I noticed the ladder on the gravel and tar, laid flat along the edge of the roof.

  “Set this across,” she said.

  Chandler shook his head.

  I wasn’t eager myself. It was a six-story drop into a dark alley below. And whatever they planned to do next was something I knew we shouldn’t be doing. If I’d had any brains, I would have turned around and left.

  But I had a feeling Nadia didn’t want to be here either. After Chandler had called me a gorilla, I, too, had walked with square angry shoulders and lips pressed tight into silence. Maybe I was hoping something was forcing her to do whatever we were doing so that I could still think of her as sweet and innocent. Maybe I was hoping I could rescue her from whatever I wanted to believe was forcing her to do this.

  Or maybe it just made me feel good to do something that Chandler obviously feared. I lifted the ladder and swung it out until the far end rested on a platform of the other building’s fire escape stairway.

  “Go-ree-la,” she said to me in her thick Russian accent, “you will hold it strong for me?”

  I nodded. I hoped she thought Gorilla was just another regular English name, like Michael or Jeremy.

  Without hesitation, she climbed onto the ladder and began to crawl across. It was a long time for me to hold my breath, but she finally got to the fire escape.

  “I can’t do this,” Chandler said. “I hate heights.”

  So did I, but he wasn’t going to know it.

  “You must do this,” she called across. She was keeping her voice low. “We only have half an hour to the meeting.”

  “I can’t,” Chandler said. “I’ll go another way. I’ll take my chances getting caught downstairs in the hotel lobby.”

  “You are very small brained,” she told him. I enjoyed hearing someone else get accused of being dumb. “You know there will be those watching for you.”

  “It’s the heights! I can’t!”

  “Will you be able to walk with your knees broken?”

  Chandler thought about it and took a deep breath. “Hold the ladder good,” he told me.

  I did. I was tempted to shake it when he got to the middle, as punishment for calling me gorilla. But I knew he would have his turn to hold the ladder for me.

  He crossed and on the other side held the ladder for me. I made it across without plunging to my death on the pavement below.

  While the trip across did bother me some, I was more worried about other things. Who were the people Nadia and Chandler expected to be watching us? And who was Chandler so afraid of that he had forced himself to cross the ladder rather than risk getting his knees broken?

  chapter nine

  It seemed like the twilight zone. Beggarwomen on street corners wore mufflers across their faces and stuck out bony hands to plead for money. Greasy-haired children with dead faces sat on the
curbs of underpasses. Old men slept in doorways beneath strips of cardboard.

  We walked for what seemed like hours until we came to a part of Moscow with abandoned warehouses. A line of bikers, each in a leather jacket, passed us and roared toward the warehouses on ancient motorcycles with no mufflers. Bumper to bumper, cars blocked all the streets leading to the warehouses.

  “Black market,” Chandler said. His voice no longer carried the teasing cockiness of an all-star hockey player. He was tense, nervous.

  “Black market,” I repeated. I felt like a sheep among wolves. Already I regretted keeping the money in my back pocket. But with all the twisting, crooked streets, I had no idea how to get back to the hotel on my own.

  Chandler eased himself closer to me, walking in the shadow that my body cast as we moved from one dim streetlight to the next.

  “Black market. The place where you can buy anything if you have American dollars.”

  Nadia stayed slightly ahead of us. She had been silent the entire way.

  “Why are we here?” I asked.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Please just shut up and look big.”

  I can tell fear when I hear it. I almost felt sorry for him. I wondered what was in the package he had slipped beneath his shirt.

  There were large open squares of pavement among the warehouses. Squares of pavement filled with vans, tables, canvas tents—lit by kerosene lamps, which filled the air with trails of black smoke.

  It seemed like there were thousands of people among the vans and tables and canvas tents. Silent people. Hands jammed in their pockets as they surveyed the black-market goods and whispered offered prices.

  I saw cartons of cigarettes stacked like brick walls. Box after box of bottles of vodka. Sides of beef hung inside a butcher’s truck. Dresses on hangers filled a tent. A man unloaded DVD players and radios from the trunk of a black Mercedes. Gypsies wandered around with briefcases, opening them to show glittering gold watches to anyone interested.

  Chandler followed so close to me that I was afraid if I stopped, he’d run into me and break his nose. Nadia led us in a straight line through the eerie gray silence of the huge marketplace. She slowed and spoke briefly over her shoulder. “Look no one in the eye; speak to no one. If they know you are from America, you stand a good chance of being killed. They think all Americans are rich. And it is easier to rob a dead body than a body that can fight or run.”