The Tournament

by Angelo Kontos

  He thought about Freddy “The Flash” Rozelli’s visit the other day and his offer to be assistant coach. Such a move would attract media attention, and Ken wondered if Helen told her windbag husband about Freddy coming to the rink. If she did, it would only be a matter of minutes before Corey burst through Ken’s door demanding that he accept Freddy’s offer.

  The team’s offence really was anemic, notwithstanding their six-goal outburst versus Ottawa, and Freddy truly was a prolific goal scorer. But could he coach? And under the circumstances, would it be more trouble than it was worth?

  Eddie Mark knocked on the door.

  “Hey, Coach. You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes, come in,” Ken said as he looked around his messy desk. He grabbed a small sticky note and held it out to Eddie, who studied it before giving Ken a puzzled look.

  “A schedule for a community centre?”

  “Yes,” Ken replied. “They have indoor soccer twice a week.”

  “You want me to…”

  “I want you to play soccer.”

  Eddie used to play indoor soccer all the time when he was in university, but not since then.

  “You want me to play soccer?” Eddie repeated.

  “I want you to play soccer,” Ken confirmed. “Now go get ready for practice.”

  “Yes, Coach.”

  31.

  Since returning home from Ottawa, Curtis noticed the mood in his house had been chillier than usual. He tried engaging his mother in conversation and she responded with one or two-word answers. The only exception occurred during the team’s day off, when she asked him if he had “dealt with” the restaurant issue yet.

  Curtis replied, “Not yet.”

  He had still not talked to Earl again. His plan was to offer to take a pay cut if they went back to their temporary arrangement until The Tournament was over. Curtis would volunteer to hand over his tips or something like that. He just had to appeal to Earl’s sense of opportunism and surely it could be worked out.

  Following the first practice since their big win, Curtis went back to his routine of working at the warehouse through the night. Since they were ahead of schedule with inventory there and since that supervisor was a good guy, Curtis was sent home early, and he welcomed the opportunity to catch a few hours of sleep in his own bed.

  He would go to see Earl again in the morning.

  After parking in the driveway and grabbing his hockey bag from the trunk, Curtis climbed the front steps and put his key in the door. When the lock didn’t turn, he pulled the key back out to make sure he had tried the correct one.

  Curtis tried the key again without success. He decided to go to the back of the house. He put his hockey bag down on the front porch and felt like someone was watching him. Curtis looked up and saw his mother staring down from her bedroom window upstairs.

  “Ma,” he called. “Something’s wrong with the door. Can you come down and open it?”

  His mother kept staring at him for a long time before shaking her head and stepping away from the window. At first, Curtis thought she was just annoyed at having to come downstairs. After a few minutes passed she had still not come, and he tried knocking loudly before stepping back onto his front lawn and looking up at the windows. He spotted her again.

  “I can’t open the door,” he called out.

  Curtis soon came to an ugly realization. He was locked out on purpose.

  “Ma!” he called out again from the front lawn while waving his arms. “What’s going on? Open the door!”

  Curtis’s mother shook her head again and stepped back from the window. She drew the small curtain shut.

  “Ma! Open the door!”

  He stepped up to the front door and banged on it again with one of his large, powerful fists. The impact rocked the front of the house and lights came on in neighbours’ homes.

  “Open the door!” Curtis shouted angrily. “Open it!”

  “What the hell is going on?” a voice yelled from a few doors down.

  Curtis kept pounding and soon put considerable dents in the door’s old wooden frame.

  “Ma! Open the door! My phone’s in there! Open it!”

  After half a dozen or so more blows, Curtis finally had to stop as the pain from his now-injured hand finally registered. The skin on his knuckles was split and covered in blood. He managed to move his fingers. Another punch or two and he might have broken his hand.

  Curtis heard the upstairs window open and looked up just in time to see his cellphone coming down right at him. He turned his face away and the phone hit him on one of his broad shoulders before landing on the lawn.

  His mother closed the window.

  Curtis put the phone in his pocket and picked up his hockey bag with his good hand. Completely dazed, he dumped the bag in the back of his car before driving away.

  32.

  In all the time that Alex had been by his mother’s side while she battled cancer, he avoided destructive comforts like drinking too much. Throughout his life and at least partly because of his father’s shady past, Alex avoided vices that could easily get someone in trouble, drugs and liquor among them. He was very disciplined, except for one night.

  A few days after his mother began losing her hair and becoming more ill, she and Alex met with her doctor at a downtown Toronto hospital and listened to the discouraging results of the latest tests. Her condition was worsening. The chemo was not working and radiation was not an option either, as the act of radiating her liver would shut the organ down completely.

  They should start thinking about final arrangements, Dr. Hanover said in a gentle tone. There was a nurse standing by the door to witness the conversation in case Alex blew up again, but he did not. Instead, he sat there with his mother and held her hand. They both just listened, and Alex thanked the doctor. His mother smiled weakly and held onto her son’s arm for balance as they left the office.

  On the way home, she asked if they could stop for ice cream. It had been recommended that she avoid dairy during treatment, but Alex was not about to refuse, and he took his mother to a local mall.

  For the next two hours, they sat on a bench in the mall together, licking ice cream cones. With a little prodding from Alex, his mother made snarky comments about what people were wearing:

  “Look at her…red skirt with red boots. That looks tacky.”

  “That man’s pants are too short. He’s probably not married.”

  Alex laughed and laughed and so did his mother, although her laugh was interrupted by a lot of coughing. Alex was sorry when they finished their cones and it came time to leave.

  The excursion left Alex’s mother exhausted, and she was grateful to crawl into bed after they arrived home. After a few hours, she was in a deep sleep. Alex sat on the couch in the living room and stared at the wall. It was not long before he noticed that one of his fists was clenched on top of his knee. He was tapping his right foot on the carpet at a furious pace.

  Diana.

  As mad and hurt as he was, Alex knew Diana had not really changed. Alex was not completely blind to the facts. He had not been present in their relationship for a long time. Diana had tried reasoning with him, but in the end she still got up and left.

  And was everything really fine before?

  Alex suspected that Diana had been keeping something from him, and he thought he knew what that was. He believed Diana was taking pills. She was always excusing herself to go to a bathroom, and Alex could tell that she often flushed a toilet to cover her tracks. The thing was, he never asked her. He never looked through her purses, which is where he imagined she kept the pills.

  As a young child, Alex remembered his father rifling through his mother’s purse looking for cash. Sometimes he would just dump all the contents of the purse onto a table and then walk away. Alex vividly recalled how disturbed his mother looked whenever he did this.

  Alex would never touch Diana’s purse without her permission. Ever.

  One day he forgot his
wallet at the college and needed money to take transit. Diana had just left for work and instead of looking through one of her thousand purses for loose change, Alex grabbed four or five of them and chased her up the street. He could hear coins jingling as he ran.

  “Why didn’t you just open one of them?” she asked.

  “I don’t do that,” Alex answered.

  Alex knew that Diana was jittery. She was high-functioning jittery, but jittery nonetheless. Ever since they met, Diana had a side to her that was unsettled and restless. She was so smart and so loving, but Alex could see that she lacked confidence in her own ability to just get through the day at times.

  He never judged her. He never pushed to find out. He loved and supported her, and he thought she felt the same, but then she left. She left.

  Alex looked at his mother’s liquor cabinet. For the first time since university, Alex decided that he was going to get wrecked.

  He opened the cabinet.

  A few cloudy hours later, Alex rang the doorbell to Diana’s parents’ home. He could not immediately recall how he got there, blinking and struggling to stay on his feet. He did not remember driving over. Had he walked?

  The front door opened, and Diana’s father came out dressed in his bathrobe. Alex could see Mrs. Cross walking up behind him while pulling her own robe on.

  “Diana’s not here, Alex,” Mr. Cross said sternly.

  “Can I come in?”

  Mr. Cross stepped onto the porch and pulled the door closed behind him.

  “No,” he replied. “You cannot.”

  Alex backed up a bit and lost his footing. He tumbled down the four or five steps to the pavement. Diana’s mother was now looking on through the living room window.

  He smiled at her as he slowly and unsteadily got back up.

  “You never thought I was good enough for her, did you?” Alex asked, his eyes glazed.

  “Who are you good enough for right now, Alex?” Mr. Cross replied.

  “Good point.”

  “You should go. And don’t do this again.”

  “YOU should figure out what’s wrong with her,” Alex said, “’cause something is…and it’s not me.”

  The front door opened, and Mrs. Cross stood there.

  “Come inside,” she told her husband.

  “You’re drunk,” Mr. Cross said to Alex. “Did you drive?”

  Alex looked back at the street and scratched his head.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then go.”

  “Okay,” he said, saluting Diana’s father. “Seeeeeee you later.”

  Alex stumbled down the short path to the street. He stopped and looked back.

  “You know, I may not be good enough for her,” he said. “But neither are you.”

  Diana’s mother and father watched him walk up the street and turn the corner. His car was there, and the driver-side door had been left open. The keys were still in the ignition.

  Alex blinked repeatedly to focus as he stumbled back into the driver’s seat. With a herculean effort, he managed to turn the keys and pull them out. He threw them down at his feet and shut the door. A few seconds later he was out cold, and he slept there into the morning.

  33.

  Following a few days off and another hard practice, it was time for the next game of the round robin. Toronto was back home at the Old Arena Gardens. Alex knew that amazing comebacks would not always be possible just because he and Mike got pissed off. They needed to start doing a lot of little things right or they would be toast in this tournament.

  Isaac, who returned and was fully dressed to play, stood up in the changeroom and apologized for going AWOL. For a guy who usually flashed a goofy grin and either made people laugh or got on their nerves, he looked solemn while he spoke.

  He told the guys that he knew his actions were unacceptable and he was sorry. He promised to be a better teammate because Alex, their captain, “is blackmailing my ass.” A few players laughed, and Alex smiled while taping the blade of his stick.

  Before the team went out for the pre-game warmup, Alex stood in the centre of the room and looked at all his teammates.

  “Alright, let’s get it,” he said before lining up behind Matt by the door.

  “Let’s go!” another played called out.

  “Yeah!” yelled another. And on it went as more players joined in and Matt led the team out to the ice.

  While the national anthems played, Ken leaned in close to Eddie on the bench.

  “Did you go?” Ken asked.

  “Yes,” Eddie responded.

  Once the anthem was done and the players were lining up, Ken made a last-second change by calling Mike back to the bench and sending Eddie out to take the draw.

  No one was more surprised than Eddie.

  As the referee prepared to drop the puck, Eddie felt different about his approach, but was not immediately sure why. He saw the puck leave the ref’s hand and immediately tied up the opposing centre’s stick with his own. He swung his hip to the side and used his body to shield the puck as he and the other centre looked like they were having a waist-high sword battle. Eddie used his feet to kick the puck back right to Alex, winning the draw cleanly.

  Alex quickly dished it across the ice to his defence partner Barry and muttered to himself.

  “The soccer…Jesus, why didn’t I remember that?”

  A few minutes later, Eddie used a similar technique on another draw and kicked the puck to one of his defencemen again. After his opponents figured out that he was trying to do that, Eddie changed the direction of the kick so it hit another teammate on the wing. Soon it became apparent that he could accurately kick the puck in any direction he chose.

  As much as these actions annoyed the visiting team, there was nothing they could do about it. So long as the puck was not being kicked intentionally into their net, there was nothing illegal about what Eddie was doing.

  He won every draw that night and Alex and Barry hit every opposing player in sight. Moreover, Matt was flawless in the Toronto net. He recorded his first shutout. Mike scored a goal and had a pretty assist on another garbage goal from Curtis.

  The crowd, a little smaller than the first batch of home games, were on their feet by the end yelling and cheering. Toronto won the game 2–0. That was two wins in a row as well as their first win at home. Their record improved to 2–3–1.

  34.

  Inside a hot, spacious open air dining hall within a Caribbean beachside resort, Diana stood in a buffet line dressed in a bikini top and shorts. She also wore a large hat and sunglasses. She wished the line were moving at a quicker pace.

  It wasn’t just the heat that was making her sweat. Diana had quit taking her pills cold turkey. The last one she took was before leaving her parents’ house, just to make sure she could get through the travel. She flushed the rest of her supply down the toilet.

  It was just in the last twenty-four hours that Diana’s body began reacting to the absence of the strong anti-anxiety medication she had been taking for nearly twenty years. In addition to sweating, she was now getting headaches and feeling very fatigued.

  She’d expected this to happen, and when the withdrawal symptoms hit, Diana forced herself to drink several tall glasses of bottled water. She also slept a lot. Her room didn’t have air conditioning, but she kept it very dark, and a window was open which allowed a welcome breeze to wash over her every so often. The worst of the withdrawal symptoms was supposed to be over within a few days.

  Diana knew that she had to eat, and she forced herself to leave her room, grab a plate, and wait in that line to grab some food. One of the line cooks offered to put a piece of chicken on her plate as she walked by.

  “You okay, miss?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Just a little under the weather.”

  “Don’t drink the water,” he said. “Your body is not used to our water.”

  Before she could respond, Diana felt her mouth doing something weird and she suddenl
y had to get out of there. She put her plate down and covered her face with her hand.

  “I’ll come back in a while,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  The line cook watched her run off and looked puzzled.

  Diana grabbed a bunch of napkins on her way out and held them up to her mouth. When she made it back to her room, she saw that the napkins were covered in a foamy substance. Diana ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Her eyes widened as she realized that she was literally foaming at the mouth. She grabbed a towel and wiped at her face, but the foam kept coming and coming.

  Diana told herself to be calm. This would pass. She took off her clothes, sat in the bathtub and ran warm water for a bath.

  That seemed like a sensible choice.

  35.

  Curtis opened his eyes. He looked at his phone and saw that it was almost noon, which meant he had to get up and make his way to the Arena Gardens for the team’s afternoon skate before travelling to New York City for their next game.

  “I still can’t believe you did that,” a female voice said.

  His legs had fallen asleep below the knees from hanging over the edge of this unfamiliar couch, which was not big enough for his large body. As he sat up, Curtis felt blood rushing down his calves and into his feet.

  Curtis’ waitress friend Megan walked into her tiny living room with both hands wrapped around a coffee mug. She wore an oversized T-shirt and her long, unbrushed red hair spilled down around her shoulders. Curtis had slept on the couch without a shirt. He thought that through his bleary eyes he saw Megan checking out his chest.

  “I mean, he had it coming,” she continued as she sat down on a nearby recliner. “But I still can’t believe you did that.”

  “Thanks for letting me stay here,” Curtis said. “I really appreciate it.”

  At the restaurant the day before, the manager Earl had already been in a bad mood because two servers called in sick and they were facing the prospect of being shorthanded on a Thursday, which was typically one of their busier days.