by Jack Falla
Five
If there’s reincarnation the Mad Hatter is coming back as a weasel.
Lynne Abbott, Knower of All Things, broke the story. In a box on page 1 of the Boston Post Monday sports section, Lynne wrote that she’d “learned from multiple sources with direct knowledge of the trade that the Bruins and Rangers will today announce a deal bringing New York’s seldom-used fourth-line center Gaston Deveau, 30, and two third-round draft picks to Boston in exchange for Bruins forward Brendan Fitzmorris, 21.” Lynne also pointed out that in trading Brendan, Madison Hattigan was unloading about $1 million in annual salary while assuming only the league-minimum $475,000 on Gaston’s contract.
“Un-fucking-believable,” Cam said when I picked him up for the drive to practice. “The Mad Hatter saves Gabe Vogel $525,000 in payroll, probably pockets a $52,500 rake-off for himself, and we lose a good young prospect. We could’ve had Gaston for two minor leaguers. Tops.”
We arrived at the Garden to find Lynne leaning against the wall in the corridor outside our dressing room. “You don’t want to go in there yet,” she said, nodding toward the dressing room, from which we heard muffled shouts coming through the cinder-block wall. I couldn’t make out every word but “salary-dumping parsimonious motherfucker” came through pretty clear.
“Brendan hasn’t been this mad since his girlfriend used the parental controls to block the Spice Channel on his cable,” Lynne said.
Just then the Mad Hatter came storming out of the room, pausing to stab a bony finger at Cam’s chest and shout, “You’re captain. You wanted Deveau. You talk to Brendan. And you goddamn well better be right about Deveau!”
“Probably rushing off to look up ‘parsimonious,’” I said as Hattigan scurried away.
Cam went into the dressing room and I stayed outside for a few minutes, ostensibly to talk to Lynne but really because I never know what to say to a guy who’s been traded. There are maybe a dozen guys in the league who have no-trade clauses in their contracts. The rest of us have to sweat it out every season. Being traded isn’t just disruptive, it’s humiliating. I’ve seen more than a few guys cry when they’re told they’ve been traded.
When I finally went into the dressing room Cam and Brendan were sitting together. I heard Cam say, “You’re right. There are twenty great guys here. But you know what? There are twenty great guys on the Rangers, too.”
Brendan nodded and buried his face in a towel, his anger giving way to sorrow and resignation. Then he wiped his face, threw the towel in the laundry cart, and started packing his equipment bag. By the time he finished, most of the guys were in the room and Brendan went around shaking everyone’s hand and saying good-bye. It was a classy way to go out. When he came to me he said, “Watch out for Broadway Brendan, JP.” Then he asked me if Lynne Abbott was around. I said she was still outside in the corridor. I shook his hand and wished him luck in New York. But not against us.
“What’d Brendan want?” I asked Lynne a few minutes later as I clomped out to practice.
“Remember that stunt he pulled with his penis in the dressing room last season?” she said. “He wanted to apologize again. He said the first time he apologized only because Cam made him. But this time he really meant it.”
“You believe him?”
“Yeah. Guys change, JP. People grow up.”
“Not hockey players.”
“Even hockey players,” she said. “It just takes you longer.”
* * *
I was stretching before practice when Kevin Quigley asked me if I’d help him deliver the sticks we’d promised Nan O’Brien, the social worker from Catholic Charities. Except Quigley never actually asks for anything. What he said was, “Hey, peckah-head, we got to get those sticks ovah to Nan O’Brien today because we go to Ottawa tomorrow and she needs them for her fund-raisah.”
I asked him why he needed me, seeing as how he was the one with the SUV. “Her office is in Government Centah and you cahn’t pahk there,” Quig said. “I figure we can carry them over in two stick bags. It’s only a few blocks.”
Kev got everyone to give him an autographed stick, then borrowed two stick bags from Les Sullivan, our equipment manager. Kevin and I each carried a bag through a cold rain to the Catholic Charities offices.
“You think she’s a free agent, JP?” Quig asked.
“She wasn’t wearing a ring when we met her on the plane,” I said.
“Maybe she’s just not married on the road. Like most of the guys in the league. How old you think she is?”
“Late thirties. Maybe forty. Too old for you, Kev,” I said. Quig is twenty-seven. “Besides, she didn’t sound like she’s from Charlestown.” I’d never seen Quig with a woman over twenty-five and who wasn’t a member of his hometown parish, Holy Family. I think Kev holds the NHL record for dating women named Colleen or Bridget. Most of his girlfriends talk in that Greater Boston Irish-Catholic patois that even the best actors can’t imitate. The woman Quig was with at last year’s team Christmas party tried to tell me I’d played well against Ottawa the previous night. How that came out was: “You played wickud pissah against the Senatahs, JP.”
* * *
The name plate on the wall beside an open office door read: “Nancy O’Brien—Family Preservation Program.” Nancy was behind her desk when Quig and I walked in, dripping wet and carrying stick bags.
“Oh, thank you. This means so much to us,” she said, stepping out from behind her desk as Quig and I took the sticks out of the bags and propped them in a corner of her office. I have to say that Nancy O’Brien, LICSW, was looking good in a classic Mrs. Robinson sort of way. She still had the leghold trap holding back her hair but gone was the pantsuit she’d worn on the plane and in its place was a black chalk-stripe business suit, the skirt of which stopped about four inches above her knees. “If I had legs like hers I’d wear skirts, too,” I told Quig later. She still wasn’t wearing a diamond or a wedding ring.
Nancy told us the signed sticks would bring in thousands of dollars, most of which would go directly to her program. “If we don’t clear at least fifty thousand dollars on this dinner dance and auction I’m going to have to lay off a caseworker,” she said, adding a wry, “Merry Christmas.”
“So where do you want to have lunch?” Nan asked. Kevin hadn’t told me lunch was included in the deal, probably because, for me, it wasn’t.
“Union Oystah House is good with me,” Quig said. “JP cahn’t stay, though. We promised Sully we’d get the stick bags right back to him. He’s packing us up for Ottawa and Atlanta.”
I picked up the audible. “Yeah, I’ve got to take the bags back,” I said to Nan. “Besides, I told Cam I’d go to the airport with him to meet Gaston Deveau.” That wasn’t true. I was just trying to help Quig. Maybe pick up the assist if he nailed Nan O’Brien.
“I heard the guys in the office talking about that trade,” Nan said. “It must be awful to be owned by someone who can trade you away.”
“It’s not like we don’t get paid,” I said. But Nan was right.
I grabbed the empty stick bags and walked back to the Garden, stopping briefly in Quincy Market, where a store specializing in old photos had an eight-by-ten black-and-white studio publicity shot of the late actress Anne Bancroft as the aging seductress Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. I bought the photo and, a few minutes later, taped it to Kevin Quigley’s locker. The dressing room was quiet so I spent a couple of hours answering mail. I try to answer every letter except the ones from the wackos who never sign their name or give a return address. And who, I suspect, never in their wussy life set foot on a rink, field, court, or anyplace they wouldn’t enjoy safety and anonymity. “You can’t hide on the foul line,” Faith once said. You can’t hide in a goal crease or a batter’s box or a tennis court either, which is why I respect anyone who has the guts to play anything more than a video game.
* * *
It was about 4:30 and getting dark when I pulled Boss Scags into Faith’s driveway, surpri
sed to see her Lexus parked outside and the lights on in the garage. I entered the garage through the side door and found Faith placing strings of Christmas lights on the floor. “Testing them before I string them on the house,” she said.
“When you doing that?”
“This weekend.”
“I’ll help you do them now if you want. Rain’s letting up.”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Premature illumination,” she said.
* * *
Over dinner I told Faith about Quigley apparently taking a run at Nan O’Brien, who must be ten or twelve years older than he is.
“What’s Kevin like? He’s the only guy on the team I can’t figure out,” she said.
Next to Cam, I consider Quig my closest friend on the team, so it surprised me that I couldn’t tell Faith more than I did. Just that Kevin’s a local guy who played college hockey at Boston University and still lives in the parish he grew up in. The only time he ever goes anywhere is when we play a road game. Quig had a tough childhood. His father is a Boston cop, a gruff guy I’d met a few times. “Get too close to him and you could catch a bad cold,” Cam says of Quig’s dad. Once when Quig was drunk he told me his father used to slap him around a lot and that his mother was too mousy to do anything about it. The abuse ended when Kev was seventeen and hit back. Dropped his father with two punches—“a body shot and a head shot. We got along better after that,” Quig told me. Quigley was a linebacker in high school and still wears number 63, his old football number. But he knew he had a better future in hockey. Kevin’s a great guy to go to a ball game with and everyone on the team knows he’ll cover your back. And he might lead the NHL in charity work. But, aside from that, no one really understands him.
“He’s a strange man,” was all Faith said.
* * *
We practiced Tuesday at the Garden before we flew to Ottawa. Our won-lost record was 13–12 entering December, still eight points behind first-place Montreal in the Northeast Division but only two behind second-place Ottawa. It was important that I play wickud pissah against the Senators because a win would tie us for second place.
I stopped at my condo to pick up a few things for the trip. By the time I got to the dressing room Kevin Quigley had already torn up the photo of Mrs. Robinson. But not before most of the guys saw it and figured out what was going on.
“Hey, Flipper, the answer is the Starland Vocal Band. What’s the question?” Taki asked Flipside Palmer.
“Who recorded ‘Afternoon Delight,’” said Flipside, adding, “Hey, Quig, ‘Afternoon Delight’ was a one-hit wonder, just so’s you know.”
“Kev, is it true women hit their sexual peak just before menopause?” Cam asked.
Quig did the smart thing, which was to turtle—take the hits and say nothing.
“So what’s the story on Nan O’Brien?” I asked Kevin after most of the guys had gone out on the ice and I was replacing a broken toe strap on my right leg pad while Kev taped a couple of extra sticks.
“Widow. One daughter. Kid’s in her second year at Holy Cross. Husband died about seven years ago. Stroke. She lives out in Framingham.”
“So is she a free agent?”
“Free and unrestricted, near as I can tell.”
“You find out her age?”
“Thirty-nine. Be forty in January.”
I didn’t ask Kev anything else, partly because he wasn’t in a particularly expansive mood but mainly because I had to go out and face a whole bunch of shots I didn’t feel like facing. So it surprised me that just as I was putting on my mask, Quig said, “She’s a nice person, JP. A kind person.”
He said it with un-Quigley-like sincerity and with a finality that told me our conversation was over. A kind person? That didn’t sound like the Kevin Quigley I’d known for five seasons.
Just as I was walking out to the ice who do I see running through the building—suitcase and equipmet bag in hand—but Gaston Deveau. I flipped up my mask so he could see it was me. “Bonjour, Gaston!” I yelled, genuinely happy to see my old college teammate.
“What is so bon about the jour, Jean Pierre? Boston traffic is worse than New York. I thought the cab would never get here from the airport.” We shook hands and I told him to hustle up. That Packy had already listed him in Brendan’s old slot at right wing.
“Tabernac … mon Dieu … I’m a center,” Gaston said, angry and disappointed he’d be playing out of position. I knew that tabernac and mon Dieu were strong French-Canadian profanities even though tabernac means “tabernacle” and mon Dieu means “my God.” While American profanity is usually sex-based—seems I hear “motherfucker” and “cocksucker” in our dressing room from time to time—French-Canadian profanities are religion-based. My grandmother—who wasn’t above the occassional “calice” when something went wrong in the kitchen—told me that for centuries the Church had such an iron hold on everyone’s life that to use a religious word in a profane way was more shocking than to use a sex word. Calice means Chalice.
* * *
The defense and I played well in Ottawa but it wasn’t enough. We lost 2–1 and Gaston on right wing wasn’t reminding anyone of Gordie Howe. On his first shift he carried down the right side—jersey flapping, full head of steam—but as he cut left at the top of the circle the defenseman put a hip into him and sent Gaston cartwheeling through the air, stick and gloves flying. The hit made it onto ESPN’s SportsCenter.
Gaston still has great wheels, and the twenty pounds he’s gained since college are all muscle. But he’s been a center since youth hockey, and working along the wall doesn’t allow him to create and exploit space. I can’t blame Packy for playing him there. We’ve got two great centers in Jean-Baptiste and Taki. So the only way Gaston plays center is if he drops to the third line—a checking line for us—or the fourth line. A martini gets more ice time than our fourth line.
We won 3–2 in Atlanta but Gaston didn’t figure in the scoring and had only one shot on goal. He told me on the flight back he was nervous: “I’m squeezing maple syrup out of the stick,” he said. I reminded him his sticks are made of compressed graphite.
Because Cam, Gaston, and I make Boston the only NHL team with three alumni from the same college, Sports Illustrated decided it wanted a photo of us wearing Vermont game shirts and standing in front of the gold dome on the statehouse, on which the magazine planned to paint the Vermont logo. You can’t believe the clout SI has. I’d like to say the SI shoot is why we lost 4–1 to the Penguins that night, but why we lost is mainly because I sucked and let in two of the first five shots. Gaston had only one shot on goal and, worse, more turnovers than Sara Lee.
Sunday was also Rex Conway’s birthday. If we play a home game on a guy’s birthday we let that player pick out the music for pregame warm-up. But that doesn’t apply to Rex, because two years ago on his birthday he led off our warm-up set with a Christian-country song: “Backhand Me, Jesus, to the Top Shelf of Life.” You think skating around to that wasn’t embarrassing?
Packy started Rinky Higgins in goal on Tuesday when we beat Buffalo 4–2. Late in the game with the score 3–2 Rinky made a spectacular blocker save on a shot that looked like it had the top corner. He lost the rebound but he made a left pad stop on the second shot, then caught the puck as it popped in the air and held on for the face-off. I get mixed feelings watching something like that. On the one hand I want us to win. But I know if Rinky keeps playing like that my job will be in jeopardy.
Packy came back with me Thursday in Pittsburgh, where I got some revenge on the Penguins in a 4–3 win.
The Fitzmorris-for-Deveau trade continued to look like the most lopsided deal since the Louisiana Purchase. We lost 5–2 to the Flyers Wednesday night at the Garden and not only was Gaston pointless again but he was on the ice for three of the Flyers’ even-strength goals. He looked lost out there. Back when he played center his job in the defensive zone was to provide coverage in the high slot. But as a right wing
he’s supposed to cover the left point man. The score was 2–2 midway through the Flyers game when Gaston got confused and picked up Philly’s high forward in the slot. “My man. I got him,” JB yelled at Gaston, but it was too late. The winger on the half-wall slid the puck back to the open point man, who blasted a laser into our net, low stick side. That was the game winner.
It was no surprise that Gaston and I were seated next to each other on the bench Thursday when Rinky played in goal and we lost again, 3–2 to Atlanta. We also lost Taki for a few games because Atlanta defenseman Ulf Bjorke—a notorious cheap-shot artist—leg checked him. Kevin Quigley beat the snot out of Bjorke but the only thing we got from that was satisfaction and a five-minute penalty to Quig. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say “all,” because when I walked into the dressing room on Friday, Packy had changed the lines around and Gaston was centering our second line.
He also told us I’d start in goal against the Canadiens—“Got to have this one, JP,” he said. Later, Faith doubled the pressure by telling me I had to meet her parents at their house on Sunday, the day after the Montreal game. I’d met Faith’s parents ages ago when they’d visited her at college. But that was no biggie because back then Faith and I weren’t dating and now … well, you just never know how parents are going to feel about the guy who’s screwing their daughter.
* * *
The media went crazy with Saturday’s game. TV-8’s Alvin “Captain Baritone” Crouch called it “a statement win” and Lynne Abbott called it “the defining win of the season thus far.” What happened is that we hammered the Canadiens 5–0 in one of the fastest, most wide-open games we’ve played in years. I had twenty-nine saves for my fourth shutout; and finally—at last—Gaston scored. Then he scored again. And added an assist for second star of the night, as voted by the media. Away from the boards and free to create, Gaston was everything he’d been in college and in Europe—elusive, imaginative, free. He scored his first goal on a breakaway after he’d slipped the puck between Tim Harcourt’s skates and the second on a quick wrister from a face-off to the right of the Montreal net. Gaston could have had a third goal, I thought, but after drawing goalie Claude Rancourt to his knees Gaston slid the puck to Quig for an easy tap-in. The crowd went crazy. But Gaston’s best move came late in the game when a defenseman—who must have seen the TV highlight of the hit Gaston took against Philly—tried an open-ice hip check and caught nothing but air as Gaston danced around him, leaving him with his butt sticking out and looking ridiculous. It was an important move. Word gets around in this league and if guys think they can hit you they’re going to do it until you show them they can’t.