by Jack Falla
We skated through a few passing drills and worked on the power play before Packy decided he wanted to finish practice with a twenty-minute scrimmage—first and third lines and defense pairings against second and fourth lines and defense pairings. That matched Cam, a right defenseman, against Quigley, the left wing on our second line. Normally our late-season scrimmages feature less contact than the Ladies Auxiliary Square Dance and Strawberry Festival, so I thought it was odd that when Quigley carried the puck into the corner to my right Cam unloaded on him. Splattered him into the boards. Play moved up ice before Quigley regained his feet and skated out of the zone.
“Can’t leave it there, Kev!” I yelled just in case he needed a reminder that a hit like Cam’s—even in practice, even from a friend—has to be repaid. The hockey checkbook has to balance. I was also thinking that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if we had what the writers call “a spirited scrimmage.” Sometimes that can jump-start a team or, in Kevin’s case, a player. But when Cam had the puck in the corner with Kevin coming in on the forecheck, Kev just tried to play the puck. He never bodychecked Cam. As Cam and Quig fought for the puck along the boards—working their sticks like a couple of kayakers—two other players moved in, creating a rugbylike scrum. Packy blew the whistle to restart play. As the scrum broke up Cam gave Kevin a face wash. That’s where a guy rubs the sweaty palm of his glove in your face. It’s not exactly a punch so refs rarely call it, but it’s annoying, and demeaning to the recipient. A face wash has been the preface to some memorable scraps. But Quig ducked away and started skating into position for the face-off. Cam skated after him and cross-checked him across the back of the shoulder pads. “What the fuck’s the mattah with you?” Quigley said, turning to face Cam.
Cam didn’t answer. Instead, holding his stick in both hands, he kept cross-checking Kevin. Once. Twice. Three times. Kev tried to spin away and head back toward the face-off circle but Cam kept after him.
“Let it go,” Packy said as Flipside reached out to grab Cam.
With that, Cam dropped his stick and gloves in hockey’s most inescapable challenge. For a moment Quigley stood there. “There’s no way out, Kev,” I heard Cam say. That’s when Quigley dropped his stick and gloves and two of the best heavyweights in the league began circling like a couple of boxers. Even the janitors in the stadium stopped sweeping and leaned on their brooms to watch. Cam, a left-handed puncher, used a right jab to keep Quig away, then landed two looping lefts to the right side of Quigley’s head, cutting his hand on Quig’s helmet with the second punch. I don’t know if it was the hits to his head or the sight of blood but Quigley went postal. He rushed Cam, grabbing him by the shoulder pads and hammering him against the glass, where Quig unleashed a flurry of punches to Cam’s midsection. When Cam doubled over, Quig threw a right uppercut that caught Cam in the face, sending him slumping to the ice, blood gushing from his nose and trickling from his mouth. If it had been a professional boxing match the ref or doctor would have stopped it. I guess all of us thought Kevin, the clear winner, would stop, which is why no one moved in the split second it took Quig to rip off Cam’s helmet. Cam’s bare head was propped up only by the boards. I couldn’t believe it when I saw Quig draw back his right arm for a kill shot. As Quig brought his fist down toward Cam’s unprotected temple I reacted the only way I could. I caught the punch. Stuck out my catch glove and grabbed Quig’s fist inches before it crashed into Cam’s head. It was the biggest save of my life.
Quig glared at me. For a second or two I thought he might come after me. Then Quig looked at Cam. Kev started to say something but whatever it was got choked off by the same kind of heaving sobs I’d heard when I walked into the wrong room at our Christmas party and found Quig crying on Nan O’Brien’s shoulder. It wasn’t even ordinary crying as much as an anguished twisted cry rising from the bottom of a personal hell. “Fucking liahs … fucking liahs … all of them,” Quig cried.
“That’s it, guys. Off the ice. Let’s go,” Packy said, breaking up the huddle around Quig. A few of the Black Aces went to the opposite end of the ice for some so-called extra practice (I think they mainly do that to try to impress the coaches) but Packy ordered them off the ice too. There was just Cam sitting against the boards and bleeding a river, Quigley doubled over on the ice, and me standing there not knowing what to do.
“Who’s a liar, Kev?” I asked.
“All of them … my phony fucking parents … couldn’t tell me the truth … and my give-up mothah; loved me so much she gives me away … cop stepfathah beats me up about once a week till I coldcock him,” Quigley said, blowing his nose into his hand, then wiping it on his practice shirt. He looked over at Cam: “Jesus, Cam, I’m sorry—”
Cam cut him off. “Never mind the scrap. I started it. Tell me who lied about what.”
What came out in the next few minutes, as Quigley regained emotional control, was a story of rejection and deceit. Kevin Quigley was adopted and never told about it. He’d been given up at birth by his unmarried mother and adopted into a family that told him he was theirs.
“It’s typical old-time Irish,” Quig said. “Never talk about anything. Pretend everything’s OK. My own mothah puts me on waivahs and I have to find out twenty-three years latah from a social workah.”
“Now you have the chance to deal with it,” Cam said.
“Yeah. The truth will set you free. But it’ll beat the shit out of you before it does,” Quig said.
Quig started apologizing again for the fight when Leadfoot Larry Jankowski yelled at us: “Let’s go, guys, got to resurface. We got Sesame Street on Ice tonight.” Leadfoot Larry drives the Zamboni as though he thinks it’s a tank and he’s George Patton. Hockey players and Zamboni drivers are natural enemies. It was a Zamboni driver, not a psychiatrist, who invented the fifty-minute hour. When we were kids our team would pay for an hour of ice rental but at ten minutes before the hour the corner doors swung open and out would roar the Zamboni with the driver screaming, “You little bastids get off the ice. We got the high school on next.” That doesn’t happen in the NHL but we players still harbor simmering residual dislike for Zamboni drivers.
Leadfoot came straight up the boards, blipping the throttle as he drove right at the three of us. Quig and I could have skated out of the way but Cam, still bleeding, was using the dasher board to hoist himself to his feet as Leadfoot gunned the Zamboni toward him. Quigley went crazy again. Only this time he was the Kevin Quigley we’d known and trusted. Kev charged the Zamboni and hauled Leadfoot off of his perch. The machine stopped and stalled. But Quig was just getting started. He grabbed the flailing Leadfoot by the collar of his nylon jacket and the belt on his denim work pants. “Curling’s a great sport, Larry, you fucking arrogant moron. You like curling, Larry? Curling’s where you take this big dumbass stone and throw it down the ice.… Like this…,” said Quig, using two hands to send the skateless Jankowski skimming across the Garden ice and into the middle of the spoked B, our center-ice logo. “Stay there till we’re off the ice, Janko. Don’t go near this fuckin’ machine!” Quig shouted as he pulled the ignition key from the Zamboni and threw it into a corner of the rink from which a slip-sliding Jankowski would have to retrieve it.
Behind me, Cam was stifling a laugh. “Quig’s back,” he said.
“What was that all about?” Lynne Abbott said as I walked past her toward the dressing room.
“Plan B,” I said.
“Cam almost got killed out there. Nice save on that last punch,” Lynne said.
“Please don’t write that.”
“I won’t.”
* * *
Few subjects are off limits in a team’s locker room. Wives and kids maybe but that’s about it. Religion, politics, physical quirks are all fair game for teammates’ gibes. So it was no surprise that when Cam, Quig, and I pushed through the locker room door the first thing we heard was Flipside humming the theme song from Rocky and Taki making like a ring announcer. “And in this corner the
Brawling Brahmin from Beacon Hill … Cameron CAAAAR-terrr.”
“About time you hit someone, Kev, but it’s supposed to be the guys on the other team,” Jean-Baptiste said.
Cam shadowboxed his way into the trainer’s room to get stitched up. Quigley slumped in front of his locker exhausted but smiling.
* * *
I love Faith McNeil but you wouldn’t have known it in the weeks after her decision to take an internship in Burlington, Vermont. We’d stopped talking about it but our disagreement put a chilly distance between us. So did the team’s schedule. We ran our losing streak to four games in a 5–3 loss at Montreal, a game in which I played poorly at least partly because I was distracted by thoughts of whether or not my father was up in one of those luxury suites staring down at me. It was like that creepy feeling you get at a movie where a guy walks through the jungle and can’t see anyone but wonders how many unseen eyes are watching him.
At least the trip to Montreal let me catch my old college team on TV. They lost 3–2 to Maine but Rudy Evanston played well in goal. He had thirty saves and had stopped cheating to his stick side.
Rinky Higgins started in goal in Atlanta and picked up a shutout in a 3–0 win. Rinky also started at the Garden against Calgary, where he again played well and we won 3–2. The crowd was taking a liking to Rinky and cheering him the way they once cheered me when I was wresting the job away from a veteran. Rinky gave us our third win in a row with a thirty-eight-saver against the Rangers in New York. He played even better—forty-one saves, three on breakaways—in Toronto but we lost 2–1. That loss was probably the only reason Packy started me at home against Detroit. We won 2–1 but I heard a few boos on the one goal I gave up, a long slapper from center ice. It’s hard for me to understand booing. I don’t think I’ve booed anyone since I was a ten-year-old on a school field trip to Fenway Park. I booed a second baseman who’d booted a ground ball. But I did it only because the grown-ups around me were doing it. I think people who boo are mostly the same losers who yell at their kids at Little League and peewee games, mostly people who never played and have no idea what it’s like to be in the arena, to put themselves out there. I wonder how they’d like it if every time they made a mistake at work a red light went on and people booed.
Our home crowd’s biggest cheers were for Quigley. Kevin was hitting hard, clean, and often; nailing people to the boards, cartwheeling a couple of guys in open ice, and generally putting the sandpaper back in his game and ours. The result was that his line mates, Taki and Gaston, came out of scoring slumps that had coincided with Quigley’s temporary experiment with pacifism.
The win over the Red Wings was our third in four games and we were all feeling pretty good at practice the next day. The guys had more bounce and jump in their legs, and passes hit sticks with a clicking sharpness you don’t hear when we’re dragging ourselves through the motions. Shots came at me harder and arrived quicker than they had in several weeks and I felt good stopping them, almost as if I’d put my body on goaltending autopilot. I even stayed out a few extra minutes and took some shots from the Black Aces. When I arrived back in the dressing room, Jean-Baptiste told me, “Packy wants to see you.” I still had my pads on when I flopped into a folding metal chair in front of Packy Dodd’s desk.
“You’re not going to like this, JP, but I’m going to alternate you and Rinky. He starts tomorrow against Phoenix; you get the first game of the road trip at Buffalo.”
I was surprised and disappointed. But you don’t show that. Not to a coach. Not to anyone in management. Never let them know you’re hurt. “What’s the matter with the play-till-you-lose thing we’ve been doing lately?” I asked.
“Front office wants to see more of Reginald. See if he’s ready to help us in the postseason.”
I knew when Packy said “Reginald” and “front office” he was telling me that the Mad Hatter had ordered the change. Hattigan rarely calls anyone by his nickname.
“I guess the Hatter wants to see if Rinky’s ready to take the starter’s job for less money,” I said.
“It’s a business, JP,” Packy said, leaning back in his chair and pushing at his temples with the heels of his hands. “I know you have a contract coming up. We both know what’s going on here. But I’ve got to do this.”
What was going on was that the Mad Hatter was gaining more negotiating leverage on Denny Moran. How could a goalie who plays only every other game be worth north of $3 million? Besides devaluing me, Hattigan was also playing to a vocal and growing group of fans who were falling in love with Rinky. And out of love with me.
I went back into the dressing room and told Cam I had to talk to him.
“Stop by the house for lunch on your way home.”
* * *
I banged the polished brass knocker on Cam’s front door half expecting I’d summoned the ghost of Jacob Marley. But it was Tamara who answered. “Cam just called. He’ll be late. He forgot he had to pick up Caitlin at kindergarten,” she said. “You OK with a chicken salad sandwich?”
“Don’t let me cut into your day, Tamara. I’ll call Cam tonight.”
“You’re not cutting into anything. Besides, I want to talk to you.”
“The last person who wanted to talk to me told me I was losing half my job. And the person who talked to me before that told me she was going to Vermont.” I told Tamara about the new system of alternating Rinky and me.
“Well, you can end that by outplaying him,” she said. Say this for Tamara MacDonald Carter. She may not know much about hockey but she has an instinct for the bottom line. “Come out to the kitchen. I want to know more about you and Faith. She told me she was taking the Vermont job.”
For someone who supposedly wanted to talk, Tamara did a lot of listening. I spent the next twenty minutes ranting about Faith moving to Burlington when she could have taken an internship in Boston “that’s only three freaking public transit stops from my condo.”
“I see your point, JP,” she said.
“Great. Call Faith and tell her. Not that anyone can change her mind.”
“I don’t want to change her mind. She’s doing what she believes is best for her…” Here Tam hesitated a fraction of a second searching for a word I thought would be “career.” But it came out “vocation.”
“What about my vocation?” I said.
“The question is what’s best for both of you. Faith could work as a doctor for thirty years. She should be where she believes she’s needed. And you two can be together most of that time. Cam says you’ll sign one more contract, then retire.”
“Probably.”
“And then what will you do?”
“I guess I won’t have to do anything.”
Tamara ignored that. “A wise old man—my grandpa MacDonald—told me the secret of happiness is work that you love to do and that’s good when it’s done. Faith can have that. And should have it.”
“And I should have less of her?”
“Yes. Temporarily.”
“Why?”
“Because less for you means more for her and more for her will mean more for both of you—eventually.”
“I was with you right up to ‘eventually.’”
We were interrupted by Caitlin Carter running into the kitchen. “Hi, Mr. Savard. Did you see Lindsey’s trophy?” Caitlin said as she brandished a small trophy, a metal statue of a goalie screwed onto a wooden stand. A brass plate on the stand read: “First-Team All-Star—Greater Boston Girls Hockey League.”
“No. I didn’t. And I haven’t seen you in a long time,” I said, picking up Caitlin under the arms. “Are you going to be a goalie too?”
“No. That’s no fun. I scored a goal on Lindsey.”
“You did. When?”
“Saturday. I shot a tennis ball into the fireplace.”
“Smelled great when it burned,” Tamara said.
“It wouldn’t have burned up if Lindsey saved it,” Caitlin said. “Put me down. I’m hungry. I want lunch.”
/>
“Caitlin, that’s no way to ask,” Tamara said.
“I want lunch PLEEEEEESE,” Caitlin said with mocking insincerity. “Mr. Savard, did you know Daddy had a fight with Mr. Quigley?… POW … BAM,” Caitlin said, thowing a left and a right into the air.
“That’s enough, Cait,” Cam said, lumbering into the kitchen and sitting down at the table.
“So what was the big confab with Packy about, JP?”
I told Cam that from now on Rinky and I would be alternating in goal and that I thought the move was ordered by the Mad Hatter.
“That’s his MO,” Cam said. “He risks screwing up team chemistry and losing a number one goalie to free agency for the sake of saving a few more dollars under the salary cap and then getting his kickback on what he saves. Makes me glad I’m getting out of the business.”
I said that with the playoffs a month away there probably wasn’t enough time for me to win back the job. Not unless Rinky had a total collapse, and that wasn’t going to happen the way we’d been playing lately. And I didn’t really want it to happen. Montreal goalie Claude Rancourt’s knee injury in the All-Star Game had put him out for the season. Without him the Canadiens had lost six of their last seven games. We were only four points behind them with nine games to play, and two of those games were with Montreal. We could still win the division and have home-ice advantage in the playoffs.
“So screw it. Don’t sign. Go free agency. You’ll have so many offers, Denny won’t be able to answer the phone fast enough,” Cam said.
“With Faith in Vermont I don’t want to play in any other city. A trade or free agency will put us farther apart.”
“The only way out is to play your butt off, JP. Make it impossible for Packy not to play you. Or for the Hatter to let you walk.”
“Yeah. The only way out is through. Been that way since I was seven years old.” I thanked Tamara for letting me rant about Faith’s decision. “What you said makes more sense than what anyone else has said,” I told Tam. “I’m beginning to think you’re right. I should look beyond the next game for once in my life.” I told Cam and Tamara that I had to get going. “Faith’s coming over for dinner and discussion number five thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven about what we’re going to do. Or not do.”