Power Forward

by Sylvain Hotte

  And, before the ice got covered with black plywood panels and a bunch of storage containers on wheels, I started skating with long, slow thrusts, hugging the boards.

  I circled the ice effortlessly, slowly, with my eyes closed. I’ve always loved skating with my eyes closed when I’m alone on the ice. I let my instincts take over and play with balancing my sense of the space with the strength and rhythm of my movements. I had to have total faith in my own abilities. You pay for it when it doesn’t work. But when it works, and your coordination is perfect, it’s great. I still hadn’t opened my eyes after three full laps. In my mind’s eye, I could clearly see the ice and the crowd. The Colisée was packed and cheering as one for a goal I had just drilled off the curve of my stick after a dramatic breakaway. I came quickly back to earth when I heard the door to the team bench close with a bang. I put on the brakes and opened my eyes. It was Tommy.

  True to himself and with his usual zeal, he had come alone to put in his after-practice workout. He jumped on the ice and upended a plastic tub with a blow from his stick, tumbling a dozen pucks onto the ice.

  He was decked out in full gear which, combined with a muscle mass out of the ordinary, made him look like a gladiator. I don’t know why, but I felt uneasy. Maybe because I only had on light cotton clothes and the ice suddenly seemed threatening. He gave three or four thrusts of his blades and then let himself glide for a long moment, leaning forward, his stick resting on his knees.

  All of a sudden, he exploded towards the pucks that had rolled into the middle of the faceoff circle. He jammed on the brakes, sending a cloud of snow into the air. Then, gathering all his momentum and with a cry of rage, he drilled a puck right at me. It struck the boards behind me with a mighty thwap that resonated throughout the Colisée. If I hadn’t lifted my leg at the very last moment, it would have hit me right on my knee.

  “Hey, you fucking idiot!” I cried. “Are you totally nuts?”

  He stood still and didn’t say a thing. I couldn’t make out his face through his visor, but I could imagine, or even feel, his dark look. He toyed with a puck in front of him.

  “Hey, you big schizoid!” I continued. “I’m talking to you!”

  And he was at it again, striking all three pucks with all his strength, which I dodged.

  There was no getting out of it. He was doing it on purpose. He was provoking me, and I wasn’t going to take it. I threw my gloves down and skated towards him, rolling up the sleeves of my sweatshirt. He threw down his own gloves and tore off his helmet. He backed up slowly, giving me the “come here” signal. He smiled nastily. His acne-covered face was red and dripping with sweat. Scary.

  “Come on, McKenzie, let’s go! Let’s go!”

  I went.

  I’d been well trained for the game of hockey. But I was completely useless at fighting. And for sure Tommy’s training program with his cousin from Baie-Comeau and Vincent included a number of the techniques used by goons. Tommy picked me up by my collar and sent two punches right into my face that I couldn’t counter. My knees gave out and I’d certainly have fallen if he, with his powerful arms, hadn’t held me up. I pathetically tried to hit back, but without success. Seeing that he was about to punch me in the face again, I ducked my head and took it right in the nuts. Unable to protect myself from the avalanche of blows that followed, I let myself fall to the ice.

  He had me by my neck and was rubbing my face into the ice.

  “What’s up, you big asshole?” I shouted angrily. “You didn’t have a good evaluation?”

  “I haven’t even had my evaluation!” he said, bringing his face close to mine. “They made me pee in a bottle. If my test is positive, they’re sending me home. And if that happens, McKenzie, you’d better watch out. Because I promise you that you’re going back to the Côte-Nord same as me. But in a coffin! Got it?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Got it?!” he shouted, this time.

  “Go fuck yourself, Tom! You’re a fucking moron!”

  Furious, he smacked my head three or four times against the ice before moving away, skating backwards. I looked up, blood dripping down my face. My eyebrow was cut and it was bleeding profusely. I just couldn’t believe that Larry would have said a word about all that to the coach. I knew I hadn’t told anyone what I’d seen in the basement of the gym.

  Tommy, laughing, shot a couple of pucks at me. Kneeling at centre ice, I couldn’t avoid them, and they hit me hard. They weren’t hard shots. It was just to taunt me. Any way you take it though, a frozen puck doesn’t feel very good.

  Curled up on the ice, I waited until he left before I lifted my head. When I left the rink, the technicians were coming in with plywood panels mounted on trolleys. They were building the stage for the show. They watched me go by without commenting, my face full of blood, as if they were seeing an apparition: a ghost from the old days when the Canadiens fought the Nordiques.

  I took a taxi home. I had a bandage covering my right eyebrow. The wound was neither serious nor deep. Still, a cut on the brow bone bleeds. When the taxi dropped me off, I saw Larry’s Jeep parked on the sidewalk in front of the park. All four flashers were blinking. The retractable roof was rolled back and I could see his bags in the back. He was ready to go and that was fine with me. I had had just about enough of him. But I was glad to catch him before he left. Because I had a few words to say to him.

  I walked into the apartment like a man on fire and made straight for his room. I found him sitting on his bed, one hand in his leather jacket. I immediately thought of the revolver and I stepped back into the doorway. He seemed relieved that it was me and pulled his hand from his jacket.

  There was a whiff of perfume in his room. His red hair was wet and combed to the side. Besides his leather jacket, he had on a pair of brand new jeans and white tennis shoes. He looked confused.

  “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at practice?”

  “No, Larry. Rookie camp’s over, remember? We had evaluations today.”

  “Did you make the team?”

  “You bet I made the team, what did you think?”

  “And Tom?”

  I could have punched him right in the mouth. I took a deep breath, but couldn’t even get a word out. I felt a presence to my left. I turned my head slightly and saw in the corner of the room, behind the old yellow armchair, a little girl watching me, her hands resting on the back of the chair.

  She had a full head of red hair that fell pell-mell over her shoulders. On her white sweater, a silver star pulled a multi-coloured rainbow in its wake. She froze. The way she was looking at me made me immediately uncomfortable. It wasn’t a look of fear or amazement; it was one of defiance. Her tiny steel-blue eyes looking straight through me, there was no doubt who she was. Larry’s daughter, Melissa.

  Incredulous, I raised my hands in front of me, shaking my head from left to right. As I was about to express my dismay, Larry lifted his index finger to silence me. The girl, who must have been about ten, darted toward him. She clung to his arm, never taking her accusatory eyes off me. Larry was also staring at me. But it was a tender look, like that of a wise man or a priest. He gently nodded his head as he would have done in the face of a great truth.

  “Love, McKenzie. Love! That’s all that counts. It’s stronger than anything. Stronger than justice, judges and all the inhuman machinery that governs our sick society. When nonsense takes over and we no longer know what to do, what to say, how to act, there’s one thing that should count, and that’s love. It’s the end point of all reason, McKenzie. The light at the end of the tunnel. Otherwise, there’s nothing left. And that’s unacceptable to any free man!”

  Larry spoke with calm conviction, reciting his speech as he would have done in the dressing room between the second and third periods of game seven in the playoffs. I tried as hard as I could to keep a cool head and not to get caught up in his psycho’s mumbo-jumbo. I had to find a way to pop this “bubble” which, carried by a powerful
wind, was leading him far from the reason he claimed as his guide.

  “Uh … listen, Larry, I understand what you’re trying to say. But your daughter. Did you think about her? Because it’s all about her, isn’t it?”

  And the answer came quickly. But it didn’t come from him. But rather from his daughter, who sat up on the bed and looked at me as would a cat that you were about to plunge into a cold bath, legs rigged, back arched, hair on end and claws extended.

  “I’m staying with my daddy!”

  It was as if her tiny cold and bloodshot eyes were about to overflow with repressed anger, about to explode. I was walking on eggshells with this little person. It was a look that I had come to know very well during my previous hockey seasons. It was scary Larry. Scary Larry who had fought in the Balkans and who had incessantly goaded me to push beyond my limits. The kind of look that makes you run barefoot on the sand and climb the dunes under a blazing sun.

  Larry stroked his daughter’s head and kissed her on the forehead. She folded into her father’s hug without taking her eyes off me, as if responding to a supreme challenge to their moment of intimacy, as if she was telling me, “If you ever try to take me away from him, I’ll rip your heart out!”

  “Love, McKenzie,” he added, like a litany or a mantra which seemed to occupy his entire mind. “It’s only love that matters. From now on, nothing else interests me.”

  He stood up, taking her by the hand. They brushed past me and I stepped aside to let them pass.

  “Larry, I don’t think your plan’s going to work. The cops will be on your tail in no time.”

  “It doesn’t matter how it all turns out, McKenzie. What’s important is that my conscience is clear.”

  And they left, closing the door behind them, leaving me in the cold and lifeless living room.

  I should have let them go, and good riddance. What in the world was Larry thinking? That he would roll all the way to the Côte-Nord like some kind of desperado, in his Jeep with the police in hot pursuit, shooting at them with his revolver? It wouldn’t take the provincial police even an hour to catch up with him. There’s only one road home. And a Jeep with a lynx airbrushed on its hood is not exactly a stealth machine.

  I heard the engine start up outside. He gunned it a couple of times and put it in gear. The Jeep rolled slowly past the living room window. Impulsively, acting purely on instinct, I dashed out the door running at full tilt down Rue du Roi towards the 4 x 4 that had stopped for a light at the next intersection. Larry saw me coming in the rear-view mirror. He took off before the light turned green. Brakes squealed. He barely missed the mail truck that drove by in front of him, leaning on its horn, bringing him to a panic stop right in the middle of the street. There was a chorus of honking from drivers who were pissed off at such a clueless idiot. That gave me all the time I needed to grab hold of the roll bar and lift myself into the rear of the vehicle. I ended up in the back seat, between the bags.

  Larry, hemmed in on all sides, had no choice but to move forward to get out of his predicament. He drove slowly to the next red light, furious.

  “McKenzie, get out!”

  “No way, Larry. I’m not getting out. You’re doing something that’s wicked crazy, man.”

  “If you don’t get out right this minute, it’s going to get nasty.”

  He turned onto Boulevard Charest, which led to the Montmorency Expressway. If he could of, he would have stopped to put a judo move on me and toss me out of the Jeep. But there were police sirens screaming all over the city. And that made him extremely nervous. He’d have been nervous for less. He had no reason to think they weren’t coming after him. Melissa hadn’t returned to class after recess. They’d seen her father hanging around the schoolyard a few days earlier. But now the row of green lights that extended one after the other all the way to the on ramp were an opportunity he couldn’t afford to pass up. With better things to think about than me, he rammed the pedal to the floor and we took off at full speed, the powerful engine humming under the hood.

  Once on the highway towards Beauport Bay, he began to bawl me out.

  “First chance I get, Alex, I’m pulling over and you’re getting out.”

  “No way, Larry. You’ve totally lost it. We’re a team, remember? I’m not leaving you alone. You’re about to make the worst mistake of your whole life.”

  “The worst mistake of my whole life is to have wasted my time coaching you instead of being close to my daughter!”

  I wanted to tell him that it was out of love for him, my completely dysfunctional coach, that I was right there by his side. It was thanks to Larry, who had known me since I was in bantams, that I had come as far as I had. It was he who’d convinced my father, repeating it over and over that I had what it took to be one of the best. He’d had to push me not to quit, because I was incorrigibly lazy. And now, with my future in my own hands, I jump headlong into extended workouts that I really enjoy, and nobody has to tell me to do it. I owed him a lot. And if he had to go off the deep end, I was ready to go with him. That was probably an example of the kind of dead-end reasoning that he just talked about a little earlier.

  With the wind in my face, I yelled:

  “Do you know how to straighten out nonsense, Larry? Eh?”

  He glowered at me in the rear-view. I was pretty sure we’d be getting back to the subject at some later date, and when we did, he was going to thank me.

  The Jeep sped along the highway at over 160 km/hr. The St. Lawrence was on my right and the easternmost tip of Île d’Orléans came in and out of view through a light fog. Ahead, a ship lay at anchor. The brown waters of Beauport Bay were still. The sky was grey and heavy. Tiny droplets began falling. The roof was open and Larry cursed because he couldn’t afford to stop and close it. We were soaked in no time.

  And, far behind us, alongside the Daishowa mill, I saw the flashing lights of the police hot on our tail. When I mentioned it to Larry, he nodded nervously. He’d spotted them too. Maybe he was hoping to make it to Charlevoix, where, in his delirium, he might have been able to find a place to hide. But, there on Boulevard Sainte-Anne, between the river and the Côte-de-Beaupré, he was trapped.

  His grip on the steering wheel became less and less assured. And the Jeep, running at full speed, swerved dangerously out of its lane several times. Again and again he ran his hand through his hair, swivelling his head from left to right, chest scrunched up against the steering wheel as if he was looking for something.

  The little girl didn’t seem to be worried about anything much except me. She glared at me with an uncommon intensity typical of children. Something more animal than human. It seemed as though she had waited all her life to live this crazy cartoon where her father, the knight in shining armour, comes riding in to rescue her from all her troubles. She’d always known that the great hockey coach would one day come to find her. Well, that day had finally come. And I was the spanner in the works. The guy threatening to demolish the beautiful plans her father had dangled in front of her eyes.

  I would have liked to tell her that it was just a fantasy, that it wasn’t going to have a happy ending, that life didn’t work out that way. But it wouldn’t have done any good. And anyway, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There are looks that are so sincere, so uncompromising, that you can’t do anything but bow your head and keep your mouth shut. Little Melissa terrified me.

  The cop cars had narrowed the gap but weren’t coming too close, keeping a safe distance. There was a child in the car. Nobody wanted any injuries, not to mention any deaths. I figured it out: they were simply giving us escort until we were forced to pull over, one way or another.

  “How far can you go on a tank of gas?’ I asked.

  “Theoretically, I should be able to make it to Baie-Comeau.”

  “And then what?”

  About “then what” he had nothing to say. I wanted to ask if he was planning to fly across the Saguenay River, but there’d have been no point. It was starting to dawn o
n him that the game was over. He smiled half-heartedly, as if to tell Melissa that everything was going to be all right, but she wasn’t fooled. His eyes were full of love as he looked at her and I knew that however this ended, there was no way he’d ever let any harm come to her.

  A police helicopter had appeared over our heads, following us on the right. I was afraid for a moment that they’d open fire. But it turned out the guy I saw aiming something at us was just a cameraman. Larry kept a hand on his jacket as if feeling for the revolver through the leather. There was no way he could bring down the copter with one hand on the wheel.

  The helicopter flew over our heads two or three times, backfiring. We passed through the town of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré with no cars in front of us and no oncoming traffic. The entire road had been closed so that we could pass without incident while the pursuit continued. Uniformed officers on both sides of the road and in the parking spaces in front of the stores made updates on our progress into their walkie-talkies. We were obviously surrounded with no way out. Operation “Melissa, mon amour” was a dismal failure.

  “Bravo, Larry,” I said, giving him a few pats on the shoulder. “You succeeded.”

  “Umm, I don’t know,” he said, adjusting his smoky blue sunglasses on his nose. “I’ll probably make the papers. At least that’s something.”

  Coming at such a critical moment, his quick flash of humour led me to believe he was going to surrender and all we’d have to suffer would be a good scare. But that was a wrong read on “Crazy Larry.” The ending was going to have to be something spectacular. After discovering that the police had blocked the bridge over the Sainte-Anne River, he turned off to the right and started weaving through the maze of small residential streets, finally arriving at the road to Cap Tourmente.

  The rain was falling in sheets. We were soaked from head to toe. Even if we had managed to ditch some of the police cars on the gravel road, the helicopter kept us always in its sights. After driving down the dirt road to the wildlife reserve, Larry swung onto a trail that led right down to the shore of the mighty St. Lawrence.