The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  Whisper played four short shifts on my left wing in the third OT. He hadn’t even worked up a sweat and I felt like I was skating in sand. In the last minute of the third OT Edmonton got the puck by Hunts twice, but both times it rang off the post. The game was going to a fourth OT. I felt better than most and still felt like the game had taken years off my life.

  It was a hot day and night in L.A., and by overtime number four fog was hanging over the ice surface. We had been outshot 63 to 34. In the 138th minute we had a little pressure in Edmonton’s end, but it looked to have abated when Robertson, the league’s most fearsome punisher on the blueline, smoked Whisper, running him face-first into the boards. Robertson then skated to the front of the net and had his back turned to Whisper, who was slow getting to his knees and then his skates. He had blood pouring from his broken nose and the hit had probably knocked all the sound and light out of his world, but he still went to the front of the net. I drifted a shot from the top of the circle and it caromed off two sticks and a leg or two legs and a stick. Darryl Brown stopped that shot, kicking out a pad, but the rebound went right to Whisper, who had about four feet of net to bury it. Robertson turned too late. I saw the big thug looking skyward in despair as the bloodied Whisper skated by him toward me and jumped into my arms. The next day, sports sections across the continent ran an award-winning image of a crushed loser, Robertson, and his misshapen nemesis, Whisper, and a foundin, me.

  The rest of the team poured over the bench and piled on Whisper. We were a little more delicate with Hunts, whose twelve pounds of sweat had been soaked up by his pads over the course of the night. After he straightened his comb-over, Iron threw his hands up in the air, all but waving over the television cameras so he could stake his claim as author of the upset of upsets. But with cameras trained on the unbeloved scene-stealer and fans cheering, Martin Mars skated up to the bench, pointed to Iron threateningly, and broke his stick in half over the boards. Whisper picked up the pieces and headed straight for the dressing room.

  Mars was the first one off the ice and he changed without a word. He didn’t even bother with showering. He rushed like he had left his Benz running. He walked out of the dressing room with his skates and the remnants of his stick. That’s the last I ever saw of him. He walked out on the team. He gave no explanation. Maybe it would have turned out differently if I had said something when Iron was carving him. But nobody spoke up and Whisper wouldn’t or couldn’t defend himself.

  We went out in four straight against St. Louis in the next round. I watched our season end with my arm in a sling. It turned out that Martin Mars had scored the winning goal in Iron John’s final victory. That summer Iron had his cigarette boat out on Lake Rosseau, suffered a massive heart attack, and collapsed over the steering wheel. He was probably already dead when the boat, wide open, hit a well-buoyed slab of granite that jutted out of the water. The boat went airborne, did a lateral one-eighty, and landed top down on the water.

  I figured it would take all that and a stake through his heart to keep Iron down.

  7

  Chief drove up to the arena. The Crushed Can. I had heard about it for years but had never seen it until Hunts bumped me up into the amateur-scouting director’s job. I don’t know whose idea it was to put a concave aluminum roof on a half million cinderblocks but it wasn’t a professional architect’s. Once you got by that, though, it was a pretty cool barn. The scouts’ room down at ice level between the dressing rooms was the size of a broom closet and had just a couple of benches, uncomfortable but all occupied. Chief and I were standing outside it with our coffees, waiting for the teams to go out for their warm-ups, when my BlackBerry vibrated in my hand. It was Hunts on the line.

  “How may I direct your call?”

  Hunts took a deep breath. “Is there anything left in your mini-bar?” he asked.

  “I’m as sober as you are,” I said. Hunts was okay with talk about his sobriety.

  “Did you watch the Hogan kid?” he asked.

  “I’ve talked myself out of him and there’s nobody who’s going to talk me back into him,” I said. Letting go of a player you like is harder than letting go of a lot of things.

  “Where are you tonight?” “In Moose Jaw with Chief,” I said. “Just heard today that Whisper died.”

  “Martin Mars?”

  “Yeah, Chief told me. It was on the news.”

  “I figured he would be one of those guys who lived forever,” Hunts said. “Didn’t drink or smoke. No bad habits. Lived pretty clean. The only risk he took was dying of boredom.”

  Part of me wanted to say that the onset of chronic boredom saved Hunts’s life and career, but I decided against cracking wise for once. It was me who’d played the lead role in getting Hunts off the bottle, and it was Hunts who’d called me up cold when he had an open spot on his scouting staff.

  “Boredom might have been what did it,” I said. “He committed suicide. They found him in his Mercedes …”

  “Shit, the sauna.”

  “Yeah, the sauna. Except it wasn’t the heat that killed him.

  It was the hose he rigged up running from his exhaust into the window.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, we were talking to Gravy in Regina this afternoon,” I said. Gravy scouted the West for Jersey before retiring two summers ago. He still came out to every game in Regina to see old friends. “He said that Whisper moved back to Swift Current after he played in Germany for years. He had a number for him. I was gonna give Mitzi a call.”

  “Mitzi? He was still with her?” Hunts was amazed. Both he and I had been through marital meltdowns, him thrice, me just the painful and very public once.

  “Yeah, that’s what Gravy said. He said that Mars came back from Germany and made some big money with a chain of gas stations and truck stops on the Trans-Canada.”

  Hunts hated to seem out of the loop. “I think I heard something about that,” he offered unconvincingly.

  “I’m gonna give the Widow Mars a call tomorrow,” I said. “There’d be so much going on right now. They only found him this morning, I guess. But I figure if I don’t call, no one else from the team will. Maybe no one in the league. Gravy said he had some sort of connection to minor hockey in Swift Current. Had something to do with the junior team. Not coaching or anything, but it would probably look bad if no one from L.A. offered condolences.”

  “Yeah,” Hunts said, not particularly moved. I’d taken any pressure off him to make a call. There wasn’t much, anyway. “We’ll have to do a moment of silence at our next home game and show the goal on the big screen …”

  “But not when he threatened the late, great Iron and he broke his stick.”

  “We’ll leave that out. I don’t think we’ll do anything else. He’s not quite up there enough that we’d wear black armbands or a patch with his number or name on it. Besides, it’s a suicide.”

  “Yeah, it’s a bit awkward, for sure.” I didn’t think that should have been a factor but I wasn’t about to contradict my boss.

  8

  In the first intermission I called Sandy. Like almost all of my teammates over the years, I had tried the Trophy-Wife Gambit and I had met with uniquely disastrous results. Only when we were surrounded by divorce lawyers and social workers did I realize that my ex was fine when she had a script to read but otherwise had nothing to say. Only then did I realize I had to be with a woman who could at least keep up with me in conversation about things that matter, affairs of state, the stuff of life, culture high and low. In Sandy I had found a woman who could run laps around me but kindly let me stay close enough to think I was almost her intellectual equal. She had launched her practice, child psychology, fifteen years before and, yes, I had met her when my daughter was struggling, normal teenage stuff compounded by tabloid stories of my ex, her mother, landing in and then busting out of rehab. Sandy had helped my daughter through it. I’ll always owe her for that. She said that she didn’t like to get involved with her patients’ f
athers, and why she made an exception for me is one thing I never asked her and never will. Probably couldn’t resist the challenge.

  Sandy had just wrapped up with patients, three kids whose parents were divorcing and going to separate penalty boxes while the offspring prepared to play short-handed the rest of their lives.

  I reminded her that I was going to be home Tuesday. She did her best to be enthused about my return. Our summer had been great, back when we rented a place in the Finger Lakes, when we went to Watkins Glen to catch a race, which was her idea, not mine. Those were good times, but we hadn’t seen much of each other since the season started. She knew that went with my job but she still resented the game. She didn’t have to be a clinical psychologist to recognize that hockey turns some people’s values inside out, upside down, and through the looking glass. But she was, and that just made her resent it even more.

  “I found out today a teammate died, guy named Martin Mars,” I said.

  “I never heard you talk about him,” she said.

  I hadn’t. It was of a piece with the ongoing negotiations since the season had started, Sandy’s unsolicited analysis of someone who didn’t think of himself as a patient, the guy holding my BlackBerry to my ear. She thought I was something less than a good boyfriend to her because I was a lot less than a good friend to one and all in my life. “Mr. Independent,” she called me. That was Her Term of Endearment. It was downhill from there. She said I had romanticized my Outsider Status so much that I couldn’t let anyone in. She said that she didn’t say any of this clinically and it wasn’t a complaint, but almost everything she said had a clinical ring and this thumbnail reading of me would have had to improve a lot just to become a complaint. She made jokes about it too often for them to be jokes and just often enough to be a warning.

  “Truth is stranger than fiction,” I said, trying not to seem too cold. “He was my roomie for a while. Not much of a player. If he’d scored as much as he snored he would have made five mil a season. He sounded like a car with a bad muffler and his jaw made this cracking sound like bones breaking.”

  “You should talk about noisy sleepers. How did he die?”

  “Suicide.”

  “Oh, how terrible for his family.”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna put in a call tomorrow. I’d go out there …”

  “You should. It’s what a friend would do.”

  The dreaded F-bomb again. She said friend like I was a kid in the spelling bee and had just asked the moderator to use the word in a sentence. She phoned in the prescription. I treated it like our connection had cut out at the most opportune moment.

  “I’d go but I’ve got to catch a game tomorrow,” I said. “Just my job. Nothing I can do about that.”

  Maybe she’d judge me harshly, again, but no one in the game would. We all know the etiquette, know what should be done, what has to be done. In this case, a call would have to suffice.

  “It’s a shame, especially how it happened. If only he could have had help. Suicide is an avoidable death.”

  Sandy was jumping way ahead. Then again, she was staking her professional claim. Suicide and lesser heartbreaks were either mostly mitigated or entirely avoidable with the help of a psychologist, and that was the bottom line on her shingle. “Well, I don’t know that he didn’t try to get help,” I said. “I hadn’t been in touch with him for a long time. No one had as far as I can tell.”

  “Maybe you should have been.”

  Again with the should-haves. “Maybe other guys were trying to connect with him,” I said. “I don’t know. People drift off by choice sometimes.”

  9

  Chief and I left the game with three minutes to go. Moose Jaw’s team wasn’t much—the best prospect was a sixteen-year-old, a six-foot-three defenceman as skinny as an exclamation mark. He wasn’t eligible until next year’s draft, but it was good to keep tabs on the prospects that far ahead. Even if Chief and I couldn’t count on having a job in L.A. after July 1 we had to be ready in case a job came up with another organization. Medicine Hat was not even as interesting. The Hat’s best prospect was shut down for the season with his second concussion. Chief cornered the Hat’s coach before the game. They were ex-teammates in junior. His buddy told him that the kid’s symptoms were still pretty bad. “Solitary confinement,” he told Chief. “The kid is locked in a dark room all day.” God bless him. I hoped he’d get better but I still wouldn’t want to invest seven figures in a Potential Casualty. My advice would be to get out of the game and get on with your life. Of course he wouldn’t take it.

  Bad news must have been metastasizing when Chief and I hit the highway back to Regina. It was a starless night, the roads were nasty, and the winds could blow your ride sideways. While Chief was weaving through a fleet of eighteen-wheelers, we formalized our plans to head out to Wilcox Monday, a late-afternoon game against the team from Yorkton. Wilcox is a hamlet of a hundred hardy souls about an hour due south of Regina. We’d give ourselves just over the minimum time. If we were in Wilcox early, there was just no place other than the rink to kill time and get out of the cold.

  I hit Seek on the radio. Against all odds I found a station, a five-thousand-watt outfit, that had Steve Earle on the playlist. If it had been his later, long-haired, subversive stuff, that would have been begging for a boycott by local businesses and listeners. But this was his early stuff, when he was still singing about Nashville staples: a kid left behind in a small town while his friends went off to school, a pump jockey counting out-of-state plates.

  Just when the chorus of “Someday” started, Chief’s BlackBerry vibrated. Chief grabbed it off the dashboard, checked the number of the incoming call and took no time to decide to answer it. The conversation was brief and to the point.

  “Shit,” he said. “Okay, thanks. Bye.”

  “What’s up? Family?”

  “No, it’s from Wilcox. The Notre Dame kid. He was scratched in Kindersley this afternoon.”

  “The shoulder?”

  “No, flu. Won’t be back ’til Friday night.”

  “Shit,” I reaffirmed. “He didn’t get a flu shot?”

  “His folks are Christian Scientists, that’s why he’s not playing major junior and wanting to go to college in the States. They figure he’ll be allowed …”

  Chief searched for words. I jumped in.

  “… the religious freedom to piss away his career.”

  I was less interested in the kid now than ever. I’m not looking for a player with issues or questions or problems, because they will end up being my issues or questions or problems. I’ve never had an interest in becoming a social worker.

  We had no reason to go to Wilcox Monday, the odds were against my being able to book an earlier flight back to Toronto, and Sandy’s should-haves were eating at me. I had no excuses. I’d fill her prescription. I’d swallow the bitter medicine.

  “You got anything going on tomorrow?” I asked Chief. “We should go out to Swift Current in the morning.”

  Chief didn’t have a problem with my shoulds. I was his friend but I was also his boss. There wasn’t much call for him to be there for Whisper and the widow. It wasn’t a consideration for them. It was a consideration for me. It’s a long drive out to Swift Current. It would feel a lot longer if I was going on my own.

  “It’s four hours each way,” he said, thinking I might be a weak-willed and soft-assed Easterner not up for what folks in Saskatchewan think of as a short commute.

  “Still,” I said. I figured that he needed a reminder and an incentive. “You can expense the mileage. We’ll split the drive.”

  He had already assumed that would be the case. “Your car?”

  “If I get a big rental bill plus a bunch of mileage claimed for the same dates here it’s going to look bad,” I said. “Let me drop this off at the airport. I’ll make it back to you some way.”

  10

  The usual: I couldn’t sleep. It happens on the road every night and at home most nights. Could a
half-hour nap at lunchtime mess me up that much?

  I was staring up at the ceiling like it was the Jumbotron. I was projecting the scene after Whisper scored that goal of all goals. He had his back to me and had just taken off his sweater. I put my hands on his shoulders and gave him a shake. “You fuckin’ showed him, Whisper,” I said.

  He didn’t turn around. He said nothing. He stripped off his pads.

  “We’re going to get rehydrated,” I said. “Come on out for once. It’s the night of your life.”

  No reaction. He put on his cheap suit and his one pair of dress shoes and then started to walk out of the dressing room with his skates and the shards of his stick. His MARS 8 sweater was at the bottom of the pile of equipment that he didn’t bother to hang up to dry.

  A reporter tried to ask him a question. “Get out of my way,” Whisper said, head down. He looked as mad as a guy sent down to the minors. The video clip showed up on sportscasts that night. So did Iron John, in full preen, announcing that he knew what this team had and had seen the epic victory coming.

  I thought of the newspaper the next day, the one column in the Times that started: After banging in a timely rebound and ending the longest game in franchise history, Martin Mars beat a hasty retreat like Cinderella grabbing the homebound train after midnight. The only difference was that Mars didn’t leave behind a glass slipper.