by Jack Falla
I thanked her and said I heard she’d taken a hit herself what with the divorce.
“Not the same,” she said. “Pete and I made a choice. You and Lisa didn’t. Besides, he was in love with someone else. Anyway, it worked out OK”—she hesitated a half beat—“securitywise.” I’d been around Cam’s family long enough to know “security” was one of the upper-crust code words for serious wealth. Cam told me Faith cleared twenty mil when she sold her stock in the company she’d helped start.
It was here that I broke the first rule of goaltending—I committed myself too soon. “Maybe we could grab dinner some night and catch up,” I said as Cam entered the room with the drinks.
“I thought that’s what tonight’s for,” Faith said. “Grad school starts next week. And to tell you the truth, JP, I’m in a relationship. He’s a cardiologist at Mass General. Between my classes and his job we won’t get to spend much time together.” She took her gin and tonic from Cam and headed to the kitchen to see if she could help Tamara.
As Cam handed me my drink he let loose a long low whistle followed by the equally low rumble of an explosion. I knew what he meant. I’d just gone down like one of those Japanese fighter planes in the movie Midway, smoke and flame belching from the fuselage before it crashes into the Pacific.
Tam didn’t need help so Faith returned to the living room.
Scrambling to recover, I asked her where she was going to grad school.
“Boston University. First year.”
“Business school?” I asked.
“Med school,” she said. I almost spewed my drink. Here I was doing the same thing I’d been doing since I was eight years old—putting my body between pucks and their intended destinations—and here was Faith McNeil, who’d built a business, made about ten times as much money as I had, and was now on the road to being a doctor.
I can handle beautiful women. And I’m OK with beautiful and smart. But hit me with an alpha female—beautiful, smart, sophisticated, successful, stylish, and rich—and my self-confidence goes farther south than Enron. I spent most of dinner stickhandling asparagus tips around my plate.
When Tamara and Cam started clearing away dishes Faith turned to me and said, “I hear Cam’s been giving you a rough time.”
“Cam’s worried that I don’t date much, but to tell you the truth I don’t want to,” I said.
“You know what you need, Jean Pierre?”
I said I sure didn’t.
“A rehab start,” she said.
I laughed. A rehab start in baseball and sometimes in hockey happens when you’re coming off an injury and your team sends you to its minor-league affiliate to get in a game or two before you come back to the bigs. The only bad thing about a rehab start is sometimes they don’t recall you. They leave you in the minors.
“I know a lot of single women, JP. I can make sure you meet some of them. Dani, my personal shopper, would be perfect for you. She loves sports.”
Two weeks later Faith invited me to a private party at the Museum of Fine Arts and introduced me to Danica Purcell, a twenty-two-year-old looker who was lighter than a Macy’s Parade balloon and whom I started dating almost immediately. It was nice to go out for a change. And Dani wasn’t an alpha so I felt comfortable with her. Dani also liked sex almost as much as she liked her commissions from Saks and Bloomingdale’s. I went out with Dani for three months before she dumped me for an Italian designer. No matter. By then I was back in circulation. It’s not hard for a pro athlete to find agreeable women. Faith’s rehab strategy worked. Except for one thing. I never came back from the minors. It was as if I kept dating the same woman over and over—midtwenties, good-looking, good job, killer clothes. Puck fucks but with taste and style. It wasn’t their fault they weren’t Lisa.
I was thinking of Lisa as I drove Boss Scags onto the Bourne Bridge, the westernmost of the two suspension bridges over the Cape Cod Canal. Driving over the Bourne Bridge is like taking off in a plane. Your car climbs the steep roadway while the land around you falls away until you’re at the highest point of the bridge, the surging water of the canal below and the huge green scrub-pine expanse of Cape Cod stretched out before you. Twenty minutes after crossing the bridge I pulled the Ferrari up to Cam’s parents’ house. An hour later we were on the water over Horseshoe Shoals, which lies south of the Cape and north of Martha’s Vineyard. Cam let the boat drift and we worked tube-and-worm jigs, sending the weighted lures to the bottom and retrieving them fast. We hooked up on our first try. Bluefish don’t nibble. They hit hard and fight harder. Mine was ripping line off the reel. When I tightened the drag to slow him the line snapped. I turned to help Cam land his fish. I stuck the butt of my rod in one of the rod holders and put on a pair of gloves so I could grab the wire leader without cutting my hands. Cam worked his fish close to the stern and I reached over the transom, grabbed the leader, and pulled the bluefish into the boat. It was an eight-pounder. We threw him in a chest of ice. We always keep the first fish on the off chance we don’t catch another.
“How’d you lose him?” Cam asked me as I rerigged my rod.
“Tightened the drag too much,” I said.
About a minute went by before Cam said: “Yeah, it’s like that with kids and players; Set the drag too loose and you can’t control ’em; set it too tight and you lose ’em. Got to set it just right.”
Hang around with Cam long enough and you’re going to hear a few things worth writing down.
As usual, we were on the porch shortly after sundown, and—also as usual—Cam had something to say.
“I think we’re down to our last shot, JP,” he said, pouring a couple of ounces of Cognac into two of his parents’ Austrian-made crystal snifters.
“Your dad has a lot more Cognac where this came from,” I said.
“I don’t mean the Cognac. I mean we’re getting old. Our team’s getting old. If we don’t win a Cup this year I don’t think we’re going to win one. Getting close to last call, mon ami,” he said.
“Cam, we’re thirty-one. You’ve got what? Two years left on your contract? I’ll probably get one more five-year deal. We’re still making it into the All-Star Game. We’ve got a few more kicks at the can.”
“I know, but I’m getting tired, JP. Tired of coaches telling me I have to be in my hotel room by midnight, of fighting guys I don’t dislike—and don’t think Lindsey isn’t starting to notice that—and having no-talent guys like the Mad Hatter telling me what to do all the time. Where to be and what time to be there.”
“At least you have a soft spot to land,” I said, sounding a little jealous, which I was. Trying to soften that, I told him that no matter what happened he’d had a hell of a run.
“The run’s not over, Jean Pierre,” he said. I didn’t say anything, because when Cam uses my full name instead of calling me JP it means there’s more coming. Sort of like when your parents called you by your first, middle, and last name. Nothing good ever happened after my mother or grandmother started a sentence with “Jean Pierre Lucien Savard…”
“The only thing left that I really want to do,” he said, “is get my name on the Stanley Cup.”
“You and six hundred and fifty other guys on thirty teams,” I said.
“Yeah, every team wants the Cup, but there are only five or six teams that are legitimate contenders.”
“Cup or no Cup, we’ve had great careers.”
“But winning a Cup defines a career. Not winning one also defines a career. The best thing about winning the Cup is that they engrave your name on it. It’s forever, JP. Winning the Cup is immortality.”
“At least that’s an immortality I can believe in,” I said. We raised our glasses and moved to clink them together. But I misjudged the distance. I hit Cam’s glass too hard, shattering my snifter and sending shards of glass and a dribble of Cognac onto the floor.
Two
It was raining as I drove to Cam’s house on Beacon Hill to pick him up for our preseason game against the Ne
w York Islanders at Boston Garden. The arena is the second Boston Garden. The original building closed in 1995 but everyone calls the new place the Garden, which in Boston they pronounce “GAH-den.” I live less than a mile from Cam in a condo on Marlborough Street, a place I bought after I sold the house Lisa and I owned.
In nice weather Cam and I walk to the rink. We go up the west side of Beacon Hill, then down the north side to the Garden. The north slope was Boston’s red-light district in Colonial days. Now when we walk past the statehouse on top of the hill Cam says, “The whores moved uptown.”
* * *
Lindsey—Cam and Tamara’s eight-year-old—answered the door. “Hi, Mr. Savard,” she said. “Daddy said he’d be down in a minute. I like your car.”
“Thanks, Lindsey. How you doing?”
“Fine. I hope you and Daddy win tonight.”
“Thanks.”
“And I hope you don’t let in any of those really long shots. Like remember against Montreal?” she said.
“Me, too,” I said.
“You remember that really, really, REALLY long one?”
“Hard to forget.”
“The one that just rolled along the ice?”
“Just rolled along,” I said.
“I think I would have stopped that one,” Lindsey said, bending over and sweeping aside an imaginary puck with her imaginary stick.
“Probably would have,” I said.
“Maybe even Caitlin would have stopped it.”
“Caitlin’s only five,” I said.
“But she’s almost six and she’s in Learn-to-Skate.”
“Where is Caitlin?” I asked but Lindsey ignored the question.
“How did that puck ever get into the net?”
“Bad bounce,” I said.
“I hope you won’t let it happen again.”
I said I’d try not to.
“Hey, Linds, Mom wants to see you,” Cam said, bounding down the front stairs. “Bonjour, Jean Pierre. Comment ça va, eh?” That’s Cam’s way of needling me about my being the only French-Canadian player he knows who can’t speak French. I spoke French as a child but I lost the language when Mom and I moved to Maine. Lewiston is a partly Francophone city but I went to schools where they spoke English.
“So how’s it going with Julie the Account Exec?” Cam asked as he got in the car.
“You’re one behind. It’s Sheri the Equestrienne. She teaches at a riding academy in Weston.”
“A horsewoman? How’d you meet her?”
“The Ferrari,” I said. “Sheri saw me hand the keys to the valet at Sonsie. It was love at first sight.” Sonsie is a swank Newbury Street bar and restaurant where people go to be seen or just to say they’ve been there.
“So we’re into boots and riding crops, are we?” Cam said.
“She takes off the spurs. Too tough on the sheets.”
“She go to the whip much?”
“Only in the stretch,” I said. “She sure likes to be on top.”
“You OK with that?”
“Cam, Sheri the Equestrienne could ride a guy to a win in the Breeders’ Cup,” I said, nosing Boss Scags through the rain-slicked streets toward the Garden’s underground garage.
I could afford to be loose. Reginald “Rinky” Higgins, our backup goalie, was starting against the Islanders. Packy was saving me for our final two exhibition games. In the greatest preseason scheduling I’d seen in nine seasons, we were playing a Thursday-night game against the New York Rangers at their training camp at the University of Vermont in Burlington, and then two nights later we’d play Montreal in Quebec City, one of the greatest restaurant towns in North America. The best part was the itinerary. We’d fly to Burlington on Wednesday—the day before the game—so we’d get a free night on the town. After Thursday’s game we’d bus to Quebec, where we’d stay at the Château Frontenac, a castle on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River. We’d have Friday night to enjoy Quebec before we played the Canadiens on Saturday.
That schedule had to be Packy’s doing. The Mad Hatter usually arranges our itinerary so we play more back-to-back road games than any other team in the league. On a back-to-backer we charter out right after the first road game, check into our hotel at some ungodly hour of the morning, play the second game that night, and charter home after the game. It saves a few bucks on hotels and cuts down on the chance of a player hitting for the cycle—getting drunk, drugged, laid, and arrested. But it beats the hell out of you over the course of an eighty-two-game season. It also makes us feel like children.
* * *
We beat the Isles 3–2 Saturday night and Packy canceled Sunday’s practice so he, the assistant coaches, and Madison Hattigan could trim the roster from thirty players to twenty-five. I suppose that’s when the Mad Hatter surprised everyone by announcing he was adding a player. The player was Cole Danielson, a mouthy twenty-year-old punk who wore his orange-dyed hair in a mullet, stood a well-muscled six-three, 225, had the acne and nasty temper of a steroid user, and carried a reputation as being some kind of fistic hell for the Johnstown Chiefs of the East Coast Hockey League. The ECHL is two steps below the NHL, and the only reason a roided-up moron like Danielson was within a hundred miles of an NHL camp was to audition as a goon. Well, that and to help the Hatter put pressure on Kevin Quigley.
Quigley was in the last year of a three-year deal that paid him $575,000 a season, which is light money in this league. But Danielson—like dozens of other marginally talented hit men—would come even cheaper. And rumor has it that Hattigan gets to pocket 10 percent of the difference between the NHL salary cap and our team’s actual payroll, always a few million dollars under the cap. So Quigley is a guy forever on the bubble, only as good as his last fight.
A fighter is like a nuclear weapon—you don’t have to use it but you’d better have it. Or as Packy said when we signed Quig five years ago after we’d been pushed around by Philly in the playoffs, “We should’ve bought the dog before the house got robbed.”
Today’s tough guys have to be more than brawlers. They have to be able to play. Quig takes a regular shift on our second line.
* * *
There was no undercard that Monday at practice. We went right to the main event. I was skating around lazily before the coaches came on the ice when I saw Danielson come up behind Quigley and tap him on the left shoulder. “Hey, Quigley, just so ya know, I don’t start nothin’ I don’t finish,” Danielson said.
“You asking me to dance?” Quigley said real loud, so we all turned our attention to him. Quig slowed to a stop behind one of the goals and dropped his stick, helmet, and gloves on the ice, a silent invitation to Danielson to do the same. The rookie dropped his gloves and stick and then slowly—reluctantly, I thought—took off his helmet.
There was no sparring. Quigley, who’s at least four inches shorter than Danielson but built like a mailbox, bull-rushed the rookie, pushing him backward across the ice and slamming him into the doors to the Zamboni entrance. The unlocked doors swung open and Quigley and Danielson went rolling down the ramp and onto the concourse, where they toppled a pretzel kiosk, knocked over a stack of empty beer kegs, and flailed at each other—Quigley getting all the better of it—until they slammed against a large blue trash bin labeled “RECYCLABLES—INTERMINGLE.” The truck-sized garbage can overflowed with plastic bottles and aluminum cans. By now Quigley had committed an assortment of atrocities on an overmatched Danielson. The fight should’ve been over except that Kevin doesn’t fight like Cam. Cam fights for tactical reasons, to redress legitimate grievances and to right miscarriages of justice. Kevin fights to hurt people.
In an attempt at a grand finale, Quigley tried to throw Danielson into the recyclables bin, but the bin tipped over, spilling hundreds of cans and bottles onto the combatants. So Quigley grabbed Danielson by the shoulder pads and flung him into the now half-empty, sticky-wet, smelly container, emphatically ending pugilistic competition for the morning.
“Sorry abou
t the recyclables,” Kevin said to the three janitors surveying the wreckage they’d have to clean up. “He should go out with the regular trash. He’s not recyclable.”
By now Packy and the coaches were on the ice and everyone was gathered at the Zamboni entrance when Kevin returned.
“The hell was that all about?” Packy asked.
“Punk asked me to dance,” Quigley said.
“Good thing he didn’t ask you to fight,” Packy said.
Kevin Quigley went to get his skates sharpened. Cole Danielson went to Johnstown.
* * *
Wednesday morning we boarded the charter for Burlington at ten o’clock and I took my usual bulkhead window seat at the left front of the coach cabin. Cam sat beside me, which is unusual. He normally sits in the back.
“Saw Faith McNeil at my father’s office yesterday. We manage her investments,” he said. “She told me to say hi. And to ask if your rehab’s ever going to end.”
“About the same time she’s worked her way through the top half of the Forbes 400,” I said. I’d run into Faith at parties and charity events three or four times a year in the three years since our dinner at Cam and Tam’s. For the first two years Faith was always with that cardiologist Sherman Wolfe. Of course he’d prefer it if you and I and everyone on earth called him Doctor Wolfe, but I liked to call him Sherm because I knew it annoyed him and he couldn’t say anything about it without sounding like a jerk. Faith dumped him last year. “There was a quarterback controversy” was how she described it to me, adding, “Either I start or I don’t play.” Since then, whenever she and I met, she’d be introducing me to a CEO or a Wall Street heavyweight and I’d be introducing her to a Sheri the Equestrienne or a Missy Taylor the New England Patriots Dance Team Coordinator.
“Faith’s going to be at the Meet the Bruins deal next Tuesday,” Cam said. Meet the Bruins Night is our annual preseason dinner for premium seat holders and corporate sponsors. It’s a fund-raiser, with the proceeds—after the Mad Hatter deducts everything but the cost of air-conditioning—going to one of the Bruins’ favorite charities, the Greater Boston Boys and Girls Club, of which Faith and Tamara are trustees.