by Jack Falla
“I wish I believed, if that’s any consolation to you.”
“It’s the percentage move,” Cam said. “It doesn’t cost anything to believe in God and heaven. If you’re right, you win big. If you’re wrong, you lose nothing, you’re just dead. But what if you don’t believe and you’re wrong? Then you’re fucked.”
I laughed. “Yeah, that’s it, Cam. It’s just one big casino game and you’ve figured how to beat the house. OK, but suppose there’s a heaven and we’re up there skating around and some of those goons from the Philadelphia Flyers show up. Then what?”
“I find it highly unlikely that any Philadelphia Flyer could enter the kingdom of heaven,” Cam said. “But if that happens, we do the same as always. Beat the crap out of them. If you want peace, fight for justice. Gotta have peace and justice in heaven.”
“Thank you, Monsignor Carter. And on that enlightened note I’m going to bed,” I said.
“Not till you tell me you’ll at least think about rejoining the human race this season,” he said. “Gotta get back on the horse.”
“How do you know I wasn’t on her last night? Three more seconds I win the bareback. Took the gold buckle in the calf roping,” I said.
“She likes that sort of thing?”
“What?”
“The roping?”
“Nah. I was kidding. I stayed home and watched the Sox.”
“You want Tamara and me to set up something in a couple of weeks? What about Elaine Neely?”
“The PR lady at Carter & Peabody?”
“Yeah. Smart. Single. Looker. About our age. Why not?”
“Corpspeak,” I said, going into my imitation of a corporate PR executive. “‘Strategic initiatives launched from a broad platform of technological innovation will allow C&P to achieve increasing synergistic advantages going forward.’ Jeez, I get horny when they talk like that.”
Cam ignored that. “What about Alison what’s-her-name? The chick who bought the house next to yours?”
“Alison Dufrayne? Had coffee with her when we ran into each other at a bookstore café. Neutral-zone trap. She talked for twenty-five minutes about window treatments and wall coverings. I couldn’t get the conversational puck out of my own end. It was like playing New Jersey.”
Cam kept pressing. “Hey, you know who’s in Boston now?” he said, then answered his own question: “Faith McNeil.”
“Faith from Vermont?” Faith and I had been friends in college. Her name got my attention.
“Ran into her at a golf tournament a couple of months ago. Divorced. No kids. Going back to grad school. Faith scored big when she and her husband started an Internet company in the nineties. She cashed out during the divorce and before the dot-com bubble broke.”
“She was always a winner,” I said. “You’re wearing me down, man. Tell you what. Let’s get through two-a-days and maybe you and Tam and I can do a foursome with Faith. Dinner maybe?”
Cam reached out and clinked his brandy snifter against my empty glass. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, putting down the snifter and cupping his hands to his mouth in an effort to sound like a stadium announcer, “back in the saddle and coming out of Chute Three, that calf-ropin’ bronco-bustin’ barebackin’ buckaroo from Boston—Jean Pierre SAVAAAAAARD.” Then he imitated a crowd cheering.
I went to bed.
* * *
I’d met Faith McNeil in my freshman year at Vermont, where Cam and I were on scholarships for hockey and Faith for basketball. Actually, Faith and I were on the full rides. Cam’s family was so well off that he gave back his scholarship so Coach Indinacci could sign Gaston Deveau, a speedy center. “That little frog is faster than a hooker at a truck stop,” Indinacci said of Deveau. Coach was never one to get overly technical. Deveau put up numbers that belonged on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and led us to the NCAAs three years running.
Faith was a well-proportioned six-foot forward with auburn hair she usually wore in a ponytail. She lived on our floor. She was a premed major and kind of a smart-mouth. Early in the year we’d passed each other in a Burlington restaurant on a Saturday night. We were with our dates. I waved. She nodded. The next day she was carrying a laundry basket down the dorm stairs just as I was coming up.
“Get much?” she said.
I really hadn’t (it was only September), so I laughed and said, “Close. Hit the post.”
“Keep shooting. One hundred percent of the shots you don’t take don’t go in,” she said, and laughed one of the deepest, throatiest laughs I’d ever heard. She was down another level of stairs before I yelled down the stairwell, “How about you?”
“Naw. He had no touch from outside and couldn’t drive the lane,” she said, laughing again.
I went to some of her games, she came to some of mine, and we had a few meals together, but we never really dated. I was a little afraid of Faith McNeil.
* * *
You wouldn’t think a WASP like Cam would go to a state school, but Cam’s grandfather and father were UVM grads, so it’s a family tradition. Also, it tends to make life in the classroom a little easier when three buildings, a library wing, a hockey rink, and two faculty chairs carry your family name.
Cam and I were roommates but that was Indinacci’s decision. I didn’t become friends with Cam until the third week of practice. Indinacci had recruited two good classes in a row, so a lot of freshmen and sophomores—including Cam and me—were pushing the juniors and seniors for jobs. There was a lot of bad feeling and I thought Indinacci was making it worse when he matched the freshmen and sophomores against the juniors and seniors in an intrasquad scrimmage that turned out to be bloodier than the Crimean War. We—the freshmen and sophs—were beating the upperclassmen pretty bad when Indinacci whistled a penalty against one of our guys, thus giving his vets a five-on-four power play. A power play was the only time senior Monti Andersen got on the ice. Andersen was huge. A Zamboni with legs. His job was to stand in front of the opposing goalie while his teammates blasted away. The first time, it worked. I got beaten by a shot I never saw. But Cam was on the ice for the vets’ next power play. That was the end of Monti Andersen’s hockey career. Andersen took up his usual stance just outside of my goal crease. I was hopping around trying to see through his legs or around him or anything when whooomp, he was gone. Just like that. What happened was that Cam came across the front of the net full bore and cleaned Monti Andersen’s clock. Steamrolled him in a move that was about four separate penalties—charging, cross-checking, interference, and intent to injure—and probably a couple of felonies to boot. Andersen fell awkwardly, dislocating his left shoulder. As the senior writhed on the ice Cam stood over him and said—loud enough for everyone to hear—“You can stand on Park Place, Monti, but you’ve got to pay the rent.”
After that I figured Cam might be a pretty good guy to be friends with.
Hockey is big at UVM and the team’s rabid following includes a small battalion of women known among students as “puck bunnies.” Players call them “puck fucks.” Screwing a puck fuck is about as hard as hitting an empty net. I did OK but I think Cam was on his way to setting a New England single-season freshman screwing record until March, when he met Tamara MacDonald, a freshman at St. Michael’s College in Winooski, a few miles from campus. Met her at the Slapshot, a downtown bar and restaurant that wasn’t too picky about matching your photo ID with the real you. We were at the bar waiting for a table when Cam spotted Tamara standing with a group of her friends. I think it was some kind of WASP attraction. Genetic programming. Tamara—which she pronounces Tam-AH-rah—is from Nantucket, Massachusetts, an island with more money than the United Arab Emirates. There was nothing overtly sexy about Tam. She looked like a page out of a Brooks Brothers catalog—light blue cashmere V-neck sweater and off-white chino pants. Not exactly the tight-jeans, bare-belly, push-up-bra look we’d more or less gotten used to.
“I know her from someplace,” Cam said.
“Been to any Republican inau
gural balls lately?” I asked, but by then Cam was walking toward Tamara and all of a sudden they were shaking hands and laughing and Cam was writing her phone number on a cocktail napkin.
“Wish you’d jump on loose pucks that fast,” I said when he got back.
“Nantucket Yacht Club dance a year ago,” Cam said. “My parents dragged me there. Her parents are members.”
After that it was the Cam & Tam Show all the way through college. They got married right after graduation and before Cam signed with Boston.
Cam, Tamara, and I did a lot of foursomes for dinner and concerts, but until I met Lisa I was always with someone different—a puck bunny or maybe a woman I met in class. I actually went to class, which is something a lot of hockey players don’t do. I majored in history for no reason other than that I can’t do math except for figuring my save percentage.
A couple of times in my first two years I went out with Faith McNeil but it was a kind of friendship thing where we were going to dinner with Cam’s parents and I knew from experience that an airhead wasn’t going to make the cut. Faith could hold her own even with a guy like Cam’s father, a likable, hard-drinking blowhard.
We were at a Burlington restaurant one night when Cam’s father—having slammed down three single-malt scotches before we’d even placed our orders—leaned back in his chair and said: “OK, boys, you can pick only one—money, power, or sex—what’s it going to be?”
I said sex to try to be funny. Cam said money because it’s what he thought his parents expected him to say.
“You guys are really dumb,” Faith said, staring at us and shaking her head. “Pick power, dummies. If you have power you get the other two.”
Of course that was the answer, and Cam’s dad laughed so loud we were getting stared at by people at the other tables until Cam’s mom said, “Shush, Cameron.” To tell you the truth I think Cam’s dad would’ve taken a run at Faith if he thought he could get away with it. But Cam’s mom, Diana, had grown up with a little money and she wasn’t one to sacrifice self-respect just to keep a country club membership. Cam told me that when he was about twelve his father “got caught with lipstick on his dick.” That indiscretion cost Cam’s dad a small chateau in France and some new Limoges china to replace the pieces Diana broke throwing them at him. “Got me with her goddamn out pitch—soup tureen, sidearm, pecker high,” Cam’s dad said to us one night a few years ago when Diana wasn’t around and he was drunk and recounting the incident and the stupid way he got caught. He’d taken his mistress to a Red Sox game and they sat in the first row behind the plate. Diana saw them on TV. “Wouldn’t have caught us if it wasn’t for the left-handed DH. You couldn’t see us behind all the right-handed hitters. I’ve always been against the goddamn DH rule.”
That affair ended interconference play for Cameron Carter Jr. Now he gets his kicks watching Cam and me play and betting on hockey, horses, and football.
Diana liked Faith. “That’s the kind of girl I like to see you with, JP,” she whispered to me one night at dinner after Faith had left the table to go to the ladies’ room. “Not these … these … well, these other women you go out…”
“The puck bunnies?” I said.
She laughed.
“Mrs. Carter, life is hard enough without unnecessary challenges.” I said.
She said I needed more confidence.
I said confidence was the forty saves I’d dropped on Minnesota in our 2–1 championship win at the Christmas Classic. “Hockey is hard. Women should be easy.”
After I left college I never saw or heard from Faith until Cam and Tamara invited her to dinner.
* * *
The Carters waited a week into training camp—the end of two-a-days—before they invited Faith and me to their house.
They should’ve scheduled it earlier because it fell two days after Cam fought Davey Canfield in training camp, so Cam’s face was still swollen. Canfield was a rookie left wing for our farm team in Providence. His first-year stats were three goals, seven assists, and 402 penalty minutes. Canfield is an enforcer, a guy whose best chance to make the NHL is as a fighter. You read a lot of stuff these days about the so-called new NHL and the alleged disappearance of fighting. Fighting isn’t as important as it used to be when there was at least one brawl per game, and that old line from Toronto Maple Leaf founder Conn Smythe pretty much said it all: “If you can’t beat them in the alley you can’t beat them on the ice.”
But even today the stat sheets show there’s at least one fight every three games. That works out to about thirty fights per season per team. You lose too many of those and other teams will begin running you out of the rink. Every contending team in the league carries at least one fighter. We carry two.
One of the unwritten rules of the Hockey Code is that heavyweights fight heavyweights, and another part of the Code says that the incumbent heavyweight has to give the newcomer a chance. This meant that sooner or later Cam or Kevin Quigley, our other tough guy, would have to drop the gloves with Davey.
Canfield was professional about it, I’ll give him that. We ran into him in the rink lobby before practice. The kid was only twenty but Cam and I were impressed by his approach. “Think we should go today, Cam?” he said.
“Let’s do it early,” Cam said. “Maybe Packy will throw us out and we’ll get the day off.”
We were scrimmaging five-on-five when Cam and Davey began jousting in front of my net. Play stopped when the gloves came off and Canfield began throwing bombs at Cam’s head. Landing them, too. Hit him on the left side of the head with three rights, the second of which knocked Cam’s helmet off. Cam staggered and almost went down—something that would’ve brought Davey one step closer to making our team and Cam one step closer to losing his job.
Cam, recovering, used his right hand to pull Davey in close and they waltzed around a little bit. I thought Cam was just hanging on. You could tell these guys were pros because there was no yapping. In hockey good fighters don’t talk a lot. “Why rattle before you strike?” as Cam puts it.
“Let ’em go,” said Packy, who didn’t want any of the players to break up the fight, something veterans are inclined to do when a teammate is losing.
Canfield threw a few harmless rights into Cam’s back before Cam reached into his bag of tricks. In a sudden shove with his right hand, Cam pushed Canfield away, thus setting him up for three hammering lefts, two to his face and one to his throat. Then Cam grabbed the bottom of Canfield’s hockey pants and tipped him over. When they fell to the ice both were bleeding but Cam was on top, the clear winner.
Canfield was a pro to the end. “Jeez, why didn’t somebody tell me he’s a lefty,” the kid said, picking up his gloves.
“The winnah and still champion,” said Kevin Quigley as he skated over to my net. Quigley is a local guy with a strong Boston accent, the kind where most Rs become Hs.
“Close, though,” I said. “Kid’s tough. Think you can take him?”
“Don’t think I’ll have to. The Mad Hattah will send him down,” said Quigley.
I looked up in the stands to my right, and sure enough, there was general manager Madison Hattigan—the Mad Hatter—sitting alone, cell phone pressed to his right ear, his dark cadaverous eyes on the ice, seeing everything.
Cam and Davey skated to the medical room for stitches. If you didn’t play hockey for a living you’d think there’d be some danger that a couple of guys who’d just tried to beat each other’s brains out might go at it again. But Cam and Davey are dispassionate professionals. Emotion didn’t enter into it. This was ritualized combat, something that goes on in all thirty NHL training camps. Not that the fights aren’t real. I laugh when fans say hockey fights are faked. I’m with Wayne Gretzky, who said, “If fights were faked I’d get in a lot more of them.”
Cam made it back for the last fifteen minutes of practice. I think he just wanted to send a message to the team and especially to the rookies. As Cam says: ‘The first rule of life, love, and hockey is
the same rule—you’ve got to play hurt.’”
Cam came into our dressing room after practice, dumped his gloves and helmet in his locker, then headed back out the door. I saw him take a right toward the rookies’ dressing room. He told me later he went there to talk to Canfield. “I told him it was a good scrap. If they send him down all he has to do is take care of business for a season or two and he’ll be in the Show. Maybe not here but somewhere. The kid can throw ’em.”
Quigley was right. The next morning the Mad Hatter shipped Davey to Providence, and later that season he traded him to Edmonton. Best break the kid ever got. He caught on with Edmonton and has been in the NHL ever since.
* * *
“Cameron Cabot Carter the Third, you look like someone hit you with a bag of shovels.” It was the deep rich voice of Faith McNeil coming from the foyer of Cam and Tam’s house. “JP here?” she asked.
“In the living room,” Cam said but by then I was off the couch and headed for the foyer. What awaited me there was Faith McNeil wearing the Montreal Canadiens power play—Saint Laurent, Chanel, Givenchy, Tourneau, and Vuitton. The ponytail was gone and in its place was a hairstyle best described as early Katharine Hepburn. She looked like what she’d become—an alpha female.
“Hey, Faith, all your sweats in the wash?” I said, trying to set the tone and get in a preemptive shot.
“Along with your game, JP. I heard about the intrasquad,” she said. Faith won that exchange. We’d had our Black-versus-Gold intrasquad game the night before and I’d given up five goals playing only a period and a half.
I went to shake hands with her—I hate social hugging and kissing, it’s insincere—but she grabbed my right hand and pulled me into a hug that included a head-on with the same breasts that used to make the block-lettered “VERMONT” on her game shirt look like a section of track for the Tilt-A-Whirl.
The Carters could afford as much household help as they wanted but they didn’t want any. They were getting the meal themselves, so Tamara excused herself and went back to the kitchen and Cam went with her to make a couple of gin and tonics for Faith and me. As soon as they were gone Faith turned serious. “I heard about Lisa. I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve had a tough time.”