The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  Five minutes from throwing it in park I sat at a stop light, doing my best not to nod off, when my BlackBerry pinged. It was a message from Intel-Sec. I deleted it without opening it. The BlackBerry pinged again. A message from Hunts. I put off opening the email until the morning but it ended up being what I’d assumed, a warning that our side of the operation was going to be up for line-by-line review at our organizational meetings at season’s end. With Grant Tomlin stroking out line by line, each one intended to loudly announce to our owner Tomlin’s indispensability.

  I had been so long on the road that I walked around my apartment as if it was a museum display of my former life. Mail piled up in my slot, the building’s dead letter office. Another way to annoy the super. I opened a letter from the boarding school and knew it was the schedule for tuition and expenses. For once I wasn’t too worried. I did a quick bit of math, but before I could get to the subtraction my attention was diverted by whatever it was that I had left in the bowl in the sink. The remains had fossilized. The price of running late to the airport. The price of staying up late the night before my flight out West.

  It was going to be a few days before I’d feel like I was all the way back. Then again, I only had a few days before I’d be heading out on the road again. Road Warriors, that’s what scouts call themselves. That’s how we think of ourselves. It’s either a joke or a lie. We’re on the road, sure, but we’re not warriors. We’re no more warriors than the World War II veterans pushed in their wheelchairs in a Remembrance Day parade. We were warriors, past tense. And when we were warriors no longer we piled out on the road, reminding ourselves of our places in the old wars. And when we see others in the trenches, we think we know what makes them tick, we think we know how they got there. Maybe that’s the lesser takeaway from my unenjoyable stay in Swift Current. We don’t really know the other guys in the room as well as we like to think we do. Not even close.

  Every other time I’ve headed out on the road for a long stretch, every time I’ve spent hours and even days talking to no one other than the receptionist at the front desk of the hotel or the waitress in the restaurant or the security guard at the arena, I’ve felt that I had to get reacquainted with my life. That I’d forgotten a little bit of it. I looked at the picture of Sarge and me at the Quebec peewee tournament. He had his arm around me and we both looked proud. I thought of all the hours he spent with me at the arena and everywhere else. I looked at the picture of my daughter on the mantel. She was staring out at me with her mask half pulled off, perched on top of her head, and I thought of all the games she played that I missed because I was watching some useless game somewhere else. I thought of the sacrifice, hers, involuntary.

  Whisper’s father never had a moment like that. Whisper might have had a chance to but he didn’t either.

  10

  “I think we need to step back,” Sandy said.

  She said “back” but it was way back. I wasn’t surprised. Things just weren’t that good. Maybe things had never been as good as I had thought. For sure I hadn’t thought that much about what it looked like through her eyes.

  She said, politely and not in as many words, that I loved my job more than I loved her. It wasn’t true. I could see how she would have got that wrong. She loved her job. She loved it so much that it wasn’t a job but rather work or even a service or calling. I hated my job in a lot of ways but I needed it more than I needed her. Not that no one lives on love alone, but it’s an exclusive club. I wished I had a chance to give it another try.

  Whisper and Mitzi had something that I’d never had with anybody. They had something that I had wanted when we went on our honeymoon and came back to Hollywood and heard cheers and signed autographs at the arena and in restaurants and even the supermarket. Whisper and Mitzi had something that I don’t think I wanted with Sandy or, if I did, that I didn’t want enough.

  “Stay in touch,” she said.

  I waited for her to say that I was a good man and she didn’t. She had me right.

  That night I was going to have a dream. It was going to last no more than a couple of terrible breaths. A woman was chasing me out of the black gloom and I didn’t want to look back, but I did and I couldn’t see her.

  I had one thing I had to do before I could properly set the stage for that sweat-drenched dream.

  11

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Nick poured me another double. He gave me a look as if he were sizing up a stranger for trouble. At some level I was looking for trouble, at another I was becoming a stranger.

  “I know I look like hell. I feel like hell. I just want to drink myself to sleep.”

  “Not here, though,” he said, sliding the rock glass across the bar. He was impatient to get to an all-night poker game in the dimly lit basement of a restaurant in Greektown.

  I was watching the last few minutes of a late game. Montreal was in L.A. Two of the teams I had played for back in the day. I saw a Montreal guy wearing my old number. Somehow it hadn’t been retired. Somehow he was making ten times the salary I’d made in my best year. Somehow I couldn’t imagine him ever sitting on this bar stool, but then again somehow I had never imagined myself doing that either.

  The camera flashed to Grant Tomlin up in the team box. He was sitting beside the owner and giving him a running commentary. Tomlin had done the same thing on broadcasts for years but now was doing it for an audience of one, the guy who signs his and my paycheques. All his melodrama had been entertaining enough on the air but it was completely counterproductive as a management style. And by counterproductive I mean a real threat to my paycheque, not his. He was good at telling you what happened six seconds ago but was just guessing about what was going to happen six months or six years from now. He said what he thought the owner wanted to hear to land his job, and he wanted Hunts and me and Chief and anyone else to follow his lead. He could kiss my ass before that would ever happen.

  I looked down the bar to take attendance at last call. I was as alone as a Black Ace in the press box. The only other patron was one of the Merry Widow’s Irregulars, an old guy whose name I didn’t know. He looked weary enough to lie down in a booth and use his coat as a pillow. He was drinking himself to a slow death only because he lacked the ambition and commitment to do it quickly. I would have bet his cousin in Swift Current drank at the Imperial.

  Nick tried to head off trouble, that being my thirst for another. He caught me up on the news, that being that he was thinking about giving cards a rest. “The other night at our game on the Danforth a game got out of control, two guys who own restaurants,” he said. “Hold’em. Basement of the Sparta. It went past cheques and cash and everything. One guy put his restaurant up and the other guy matched. Y’know Square Burger down the street? Guy lost it when he got rivered. Ace. How do you go home and tell your wife that? Thank fuckin’ God I didn’t have the cards and this joint wouldn’t be enough of a stake to cover their bet. Time to get out. A guy loses a restaurant on a card, it’s enough for a guy to pull a gun. Not worth it anymore.”

  He was talking to himself. He went on and I didn’t hear a word. He’d still go to the game.

  The BlackBerry rang. I looked at the call display. A number beginning with 312, the Saskatchewan area code. The caller ID: ATT GEN. The call rang six times through to voicemail. I waited. No message was left. I checked the call history: six calls from 312 ATT GEN that night. If it had been business, messages would have been left. None were. There would be more the next day, the day after that, and the rest of the week. I’d wait it out until they came less often and not at all and she’d be safely shackled in memory again. She’d hit redial with the faint hope that the thirtieth or thirty-first time might be different. I doubted that it would be, even a hundred and thirty-first, but I couldn’t say for sure. I haven’t seen the survey. You keep drilling down and you might hit a heart.

  I opened a fold in my wallet, just to make sure it was still there, fifth time, sixth t
ime that night, as if it was going to burn its way through the leather and the back pocket of my jeans. One day it would be gone, all gone, like everything else I ever squeezed out of the game, but for now it eased my worries about my job security beyond the summer and let me delete unopened emails from Intel-Sec at least until the fall, when Grant Tomlin might walk through our offices wielding a scythe. It was a cheque in the amount of a hundred thousand dollars from the estate of Martin Mars, issued by the lawyer, as laid out in Whisper’s last will and testament. Either he had miscalculated the interest on the five-hundred-dollar bet I had let him walk on or he had put more value in our friendship than I ever could have imagined, especially when I had sat there silently while Iron John trashed him. Maybe he had put it together that I had defended him and ratted out Iron to the reporter. Maybe he had hoped that I’d be there, that I’d go to a cold, hard place to find the cold, hard truth and set things right again. Maybe he counted on my conscience kicking in after being so little used back in my playing days. I lingered on the possibilities from the time that I raised the glass off the bar until the burn hit the back of my throat with awful certainty.