Strangely enough, the more my father shuttered himself away, the more Louise ventured out. It was as if there was something in our house, something very precious and very valuable, that the two of them were responsible for guarding. Apparently they took shifts; Louise’s shift had lasted for the first decade or so of her life and it was time now for my father to take over the task.
At the age of 17, Louise was making the most of her newfound freedom. What she had lacked in popularity and social poise when she was younger she made up for as a teen. She was in grade 12, her last year of high school, and she was one of the most well-liked and romantically pursued girls in school. Whereas before she had been completely incapable of conversation, she was now well respected and frequently sought after for advice. I unexpectedly found myself in the position of being known not as Paul Woodward the grade 10 student, or Paul Woodward the hockey player, or even just plain Paul Woodward, but as what’s his name, Louise Woodward’s little brother.
It’s hard to say what finally prompted Louise to make the leap. It was a normal day and Finnie, Sarah and I were sitting at the kitchen table playing Monopoly or some other stupid board game in which none of us had any real interest. This wasn’t long after Finnie had decided to play hockey again. It was raining outside, not hard, but hard enough to make us want to stay inside and Louise had been down in the basement by herself all afternoon doing whatever it was she did down there.
I was getting frustrated with Sarah, because she kept forgetting how to play the game. Finnie, by far the more patient of the two of us, and indeed one of the most patient people I have ever known, explained the rules to her again and again and again and still she would forget. Maybe she didn’t; maybe she just enjoyed listening to Finnie, I don’t know. Either way she was really annoying me, so I was just about to quit when Louise stomped up the stairs carrying a large cardboard box.
She plopped the box onto the table, upsetting our game and sending pieces careening onto the floor. “Here, Sarah, you can have this if you want,” she said.
“What is it?” Sarah asked, already clamouring to open the box.
“A bunch of useless junk.” Louise walked to the front door.
Finnie and I followed her, watching speechlessly as she put on her shoes and coat and opened the door.
“Where are you going?” I asked her.
“Outside, I guess.”
“It’s raining.”
“Yes, I can see that, Paul.”
“Do you want us to come?” Finnie asked.
“No, that’s okay. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do.”
Louise left and we went back into the kitchen. I thought the whole thing was a bit weird, but then I looked over at Finnie and saw that he was smiling. I asked him what he was smiling about.
“You’ll see,” he said.
Sarah was standing on the table wrestling with the lid of the box. Finnie laughed when he saw what was inside; I was shocked. Sarah was delighted; she had never been allowed to play with Louise’s toys before and as a result they were all in mint condition. Sarah had a tendency to be very hard on her belongings. She usually broke or wore out anything she was given within a matter of weeks, but Louise had kept the same stuff forever. I knew that if Louise had given her things to Sarah, then she had to be serious about abandoning them; she’d never get anything back in one piece.
Once freed, Louise was like a snowball rolling down a hill. It was only a matter of months before she had more friends than anyone I knew. She always had something to do, was always going somewhere. Finnie and I became nothing more than members of her ever-growing crowd.
In his own right, Finnie had also ascended to a position of social success. This was partly due to his last name, partly because he was genuinely a nice guy. He would go out of his way to help a friend and he never pushed anybody around. He could easily have been a bully; at 15 he was at least six inches taller than anyone else in our grade and he had girth as well as height. He had always been heavy-set, even overweight at times, but when he worked at it he commanded attention.
Finnie was one of those rare guys who, in junior high school, was realistically in a position to consider dating older girls. But Finnie rarely had girlfriends and seemed to be indifferent to the advances of girls regardless of their age or appearance.
I’m sure that a good deal of his appeal came from his prowess as a goaltender. Since the end of that awful season when Tom Kazakoff had been in net, Finnie had consistently been the best goalie in our league and every year more and more people came out to see our games, motivated by the prospect of seeing yet another stellar performance between the pipes by the one and only Finnie Walsh.
I was progressing too, but as a defenceman I was the object of far less attention. People only notice defencemen when they screw up and, since I screwed up more rarely than the other defencemen on our team, I was noticed less by the fans. The opposing teams’ coaches and players knew about me, though; more than once I was marked for an especially brutal check, a spear, a slash or even challenged to a fight. Thanks to Gerry and Kirby Walsh, I was used to this kind of abuse and had ways of dealing with it. Finnie would get really mad when he saw players go after me and more than once he got tossed out of a game for charging a player who’d made me the victim of a dirty play. He wielded his stick like a scythe, terrifying offending players, though he never actually hit anyone. This only served to increase Finnie’s popularity with both sexes; nothing was as attractive as skill and unpredictability.
Even my father started coming to games on a regular basis. He bought one of those big foam hands, the ones with the index finger pointing straight up, and attached it to the stump of his missing arm. He thought it was hilarious, as did Sarah, but my mother and Louise thought it was morbid and more than a bit creepy. My father had been wearing it for a while when, during a game, Finnie made an absolutely spectacular save in the dying seconds of a tied game. The crowd was on their feet as the buzzer sounded, eagerly awaiting a period of overtime. As we skated toward the bench, I saw Finnie look into the stands and drop his glove, stick and blocker. My father was standing on his seat, cheering wildly, pointing his giant foam finger at Finnie.
It had been almost seven years since the accident and by then I had pretty much come to terms with any lingering feelings of guilt, but I could see by the look on Finnie’s face that he had not. I skated up to him and pushed him across the ice to the bench. By the time play resumed, he had managed to partially recover, but he was still shaken.
Finnie let in the first shot he faced, a slow floater high on his glove side, and we lost the game. No one said much to Finnie about it; what could they say? Finnie lost us the game, but without him it would have been lost long before that. He didn’t want to talk after the game and the next day he seemed to be back to normal, so I didn’t belabour the issue. Finnie appeared to have bounced back. Tom Kazakoff was very much relieved.
As far as I know, my father, usually very perceptive where such things were concerned, had no idea of the effect that he and his foam finger had on Finnie. By then he seemed to be pretty much oblivious to anything that wasn’t directly related to Mr. Palagopolis’ missing arms. Apparently this was to be his new hobby: the tracking down and recovery of Pal’s missing limbs. He bought a 1940s detective hat and wore it almost constantly, which irritated my mother, who thought he looked stupid. She was right, he did look kind of goofy, but my father ignored her pleas; he had more important things on his mind.
He made a large chart that chronicled the disappearance of all the claws, recording as much information as Pal could remember, and he noticed a pattern. Most of the claws went missing during school hours, when Mr. Palagopolis was working as a janitor. As a precaution against the loss of further arms, my father made Pal promise not to take his arm off at school. This would prove to be a nearly impossible task; he was constantly taking the arm off and putting it on, out of nervousness.
For some reason, Pal seemed older when he wasn’t we
aring his arm, but almost childlike when he was. When he strapped on his claw, it was almost as if he went back in time to the way he had been before the war. It had been over 40 years since Pal had lost his real arm; he should have adjusted to it by now. After all, he had been without his arm for almost twice as long as he had been with it.
To prevent the claw from being stolen when Pal wasn’t wearing it, my father drilled a hole in the plastic frame of the arm. He gave Pal my old bicycle lock so when Pal took off his arm, he could thread the lock through the hole and lock it to something solid. The only problem with this strategy was that Pal kept forgetting the combination, as did my father. I asked my father to write the combination down, but he refused, saying that the information was safer if it was committed to memory. He tried his best to remember the combination, but he never could, and neither could Pal.
Mr. Palagopolis’ workroom in the basement of the school was a jumble of mops and brooms and buckets and rags. It was really no wonder things had a way of going missing; for all we knew it could contain a piece of Amelia Earhart’s plane, Jimmy Hoffa’s body, even a Sasquatch or two. Therefore, when Pal excitedly telephoned my father one afternoon from the school and told him that his claw had been stolen again, my father asked him if he was absolutely sure.
“Of course, Bob. You know your mess and I know my mess. My claw is snatched again,” answered Pal.
My father immediately put on his hat and went down to the school to investigate. He found Pal in the hallway trying to mop the floor.
“I tell you, I’ve just about had it,” Pal said. “I treat them right, am nice to them, and still they go away. I’ve just about had it for sure.”
My father asked Pal if he had remembered to lock up the claw, which he said he had.
“Well, how did it get away then?”
“I don’t know. The lock was open and my claw was gone. That’s all I know.”
Apparently, Pal had been in the workroom eating his lunch and when he’d finished he’d gone to use the washroom. Pal almost never took his claw into the washroom; he said that it was too nasty a thing to put near himself when he was so vulnerable. He was sure that he had locked it up. He’d been gone for 10 minutes, maybe 15, and when he’d gotten back the arm was gone.
Pal and my father weren’t the only ones who lost something that week, though. Sarah had found an old yellow life jacket in the box of stuff that Louise had given to her. She had worn it every day since then. It had a whistle attached to the front of it, a small plastic whistle, like a referee’s, and more often than not you could hear Sarah coming long before you saw her, its shrill cry announcing her imminent arrival.
There was something about that whistle; it seemed to have the ability to cut through every variety of background noise. It was almost supernatural, which is probably why Sarah liked it.
When it went missing, she was far more upset than I would have expected. Sarah lost things all the time, almost daily, yet nothing had ever upset her like this. Finnie and I were in the driveway, just about to leave for hockey practice, when she came running out the front door.
“It’s gone!” There were tears in her eyes.
“What’s gone?” I asked.
“My jacket.”
“The life jacket?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Well, where did you last have it?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I had it yesterday.”
Finnie, who was always more patient with five-year-old Sarah, put down his equipment bag and took charge of the situation. “Where could it be?” he asked her.
“I looked in my room and it’s not there. I looked in the kitchen and it’s not there. I looked in the yard and it’s not there and I looked in the basement and it’s not there.”
“Did you ask your dad if he’s seen it?”
“He’s busy with Mr. Pal today.”
They were obviously still in the midst of a far more important investigation.
“I’ll tell you what, Sarah. Paul and I have to go to hockey practice now, but we’ll come back right after and help you look for it.”
“No, no, no, no. I need it now.”
“Come on, Sarah. We’ll catch hell if we miss practice,” I said.
Her hands clenched into fists and she walked up to Finnie. I thought maybe she was going to hit him, but he bent down and she whispered something into his ear that I couldn’t hear. Finnie’s face instantly adopted a serious expression. Finnie nodded to her and turned to me. “We’re going to have to miss practice.” There was no point in arguing. Finnie and Sarah were, besides my father, the two most stubborn people I have ever known.
Finnie could get away with missing a practice here and there; he was our star player. The only person who would mind would be Tom Kazakoff and it was just a practice, so he would have had to play anyway. Besides, Coach Hunter was still with our team, having decided to follow the same group of boys through their childhood hockey years and then start at the bottom with a new group of kids. He believed that this particular method of coaching was more personally satisfying, partly because it allowed him to see the progress of the players he coached, partly because it meant that he wouldn’t have to learn a new set of names each year. Anyway, Coach Hunter remembered what had happened back in the 1985–86 season when he had benched Finnie and I was sure he didn’t want to go through that again, ever. So Finnie was safe.
I knew that I, however, would be punished. If a guy like me was allowed to miss a practice without consequence, then that meant anyone could. Team anarchy would ensue. That’s how I figured Coach Hunter would see things. He was preoccupied with preventing breakdown. He had seen it happen once and from what I gathered it wasn’t pretty.
As it turned out, I was right about getting punished; at the next practice, I was made to skate from one end of the rink, stop, turn, skate to the other end of the rink, stop, turn and repeat the process for the full two hours. I didn’t really mind; I knew that I deserved it. I was a little surprised that Finnie was given the same punishment, though. Coach Hunter made him skate too, and in full equipment. In hindsight, I can see that he didn’t really have a choice. He had to punish me, and if he punished me and didn’t punish Finnie, for the same offence on the same day, then all hell would break loose. We skated until our legs were on fire and our lungs screamed for oxygen. I never regretted it, though.
Besides being yellow and wearing a life jacket whenever she left the house, Sarah was superstitious, placing great stock in dreams and hunches and omens. I don’t know where she got it from; my father was the exact opposite, although he was given to believing in things that were, to say the least, a little out there. My mother was about as sensible and practical as people come and I wasn’t any different. I took after our mother, I think, and Louise had more of our father in her. I don’t know where Sarah came from.
Sarah’s main source of otherworldly information emanated, from of all places, a lamp. She had always been fascinated by light and this source was her favourite. It was on the table beside her bed. The shade was made of bits of different-coloured glass, like stained glass but cheaper, and when you turned out all the other lights it cast a multicoloured pattern on the ceiling. The bolt that held the shade onto the top of the lamp was loose, so you could take the shade and spin it around, creating a sort of kaleidoscopic effect. Every night, before she turned the light out and went to bed, Sarah would give the lamp as hard a spin as her tiny yellow arm could muster and then she would lie back on her bed and search the ceiling for pictures. Ninety-nine percent of the time she saw nothing, but every once in a while there was something there, or so she thought. One of her predictions had already come true.
My mother and father had purchased tickets to a concert. When they were phoning for a babysitter several days before the event, Sarah told them not to bother because my mother would be sick that day. They didn’t really pay much attention; Sa
rah’s dislike of babysitters was well known. Sarah preferred Louise, but she had plans that night and I wasn’t considered old enough. I was 12 or 13 at the time, so I didn’t need a babysitter myself, but Sarah required so much attention that they didn’t want to leave me in charge of her.
When the day of the concert rolled around, my mother was too busy retching her insides out, the latest victim of a stomach flu, to care whether Sarah had been right or not. They hadn’t needed that babysitter, just as Sarah had predicted. Of course, it’s possible that it was all just a coincidence.
It didn’t take us long to find Sarah’s life jacket. It was sitting on the back porch, beside the pile of National Geographics. Sarah was beside herself with joy, immediately putting it on, zipping it up and running around the yard, blowing excitedly on the shrill whistle. The fact that it was several sizes too large didn’t bother her in the least; she knew that she would grow into it.
At first I was upset that we had missed practice for what appeared to be nothing more than Sarah’s forgetfulness. Then Finnie told me what she had whispered to him. She’d told Finnie that the lamp had conveyed a message: she would drown. That was why she wore the life jacket. Sarah, stubborn as she was, had found a way to cheat death. It never occurred to her to question the reliability of the lamp. She had a problem and, with the discovery of the life jacket, a solution.
Finnie made me promise not to tell anyone else about Sarah’s premonition. Finnie’s mother had drowned and I imagined that he had similar fears. Maybe he even had a life jacket or two of his own stowed away somewhere.
Meanwhile, Roger Walsh’s own fears were fast being realized. Of his four sons, Finnie was the only one not currently charged with some sort of offence and was whole of mind and body. Patrick Walsh, 23 years old, who had once so proudly announced his intention to enter the pornographic film industry, had apparently decided that gratuitous sex wasn’t enough, so he turned to drugs and booze. Roger sent him to Calgary to scout out a possible business deal, hoping that a little responsibility would force Pat to grow up. He liked Calgary a lot, or so he told Roger, and even though the business deal didn’t pan out, Patrick decided to move there and make a fresh start. In the middle of January he was found wandering naked through downtown Calgary, drunk or stoned or both. He lost three of his toes and the tips of his ears to frostbite. Upon investigation the police in Calgary discovered that Patrick had been dealing narcotics and charged him with a variety of criminal offences.
Finnie Walsh Page 9
