The Uninvited Guest

by John Degen

  “Okay,” Tony said. “So, what am I supposed to do if a bunch of guys bigger than me couldn’t get it out of there?”

  “We’re opening the wall—no way around it. The League’s just going to have to cover the damage.”

  “The League? What about the dick who rammed it in there?”

  Stan waved his hand at the room.

  “Right. Go get his name. He was wearing a plaid jacket and a baseball cap with some farm logo on it.”

  Tony looked out over the crowd, a sweaty, smoking mob of plaid coats and green caps. A young guy stood near the bar smiling up at him, like he was watching his favourite show. He winked when Tony’s eyes crossed his.

  “Fine. We’re opening the wall. When?”

  “Right now. Let’s get the fucking thing out, and get out of this town.”

  “You want me to tear a wall apart in the middle of a party.”

  “Like they’d notice. Just get your goddamn tools. I’ll help where I can, but I’m too fucking old to swing a sledge.”

  It took the two men less than an hour to open a two-foot square hole beside the vent, digging back into the wood frame construction of the old building. The waitresses and bartender worked around them the entire time, after removing all the glass and bottles from the wall. Every swing of the hammer Tony took was followed by loud cheers from the crowd, and the jukebox played nonstop.

  Balanced on a ladder that Stan held, Tony crawled into the hole to his waist and cut away the side of the vent with a pair of heavy snips, taking care not to nick the side of the trophy. He chewed on a small steel flashlight and breathed dust. When he pulled back the vent it sliced into his finger, but he just kept working, not wanting to pull out and then have to crawl right back into that godawful spot. When the light hit the trophy, Tony read the name Maurice Richard. He slid his hand down the silver and felt past the pedestal bottom. Getting leverage, he gave a gentle pull, and the whole trophy moved to his pressure.

  “It’s loose,” he shouted, and felt Stan’s hands on his belt, pulling him back and supporting him while he gained his balance on the top of the ladder. Slowly, with Stan and the bartender below him bracing the trophy sides so it wouldn’t scrape against the sharp edges of the dismantled vent, Tony pulled at the bowl of the Cup from a position on the bar. They worked the trophy through the smoky air and placed it gently on the bar. The tavern exploded in cheering and the spraying of beer. One of the waitresses tossed Tony a bottle of beer and he drank long, washing down dust. He smiled down at Stan and made like he meant to pour some beer into the Cup in celebration.

  It was only then that he noticed a long dark red streak of blood, his own blood, running the length of the trophy, from the edge of the scalloped bowl to the pedestal. He looked down at his hand, from which more blood dripped steadily onto his shoe. He felt suddenly weak, and crouched onto a knee. Stan helped him off the bar, and wrapped his hand in a bar towel soaked in old beer.

  When Tony had his strength back, he and Stan each took a side of the trophy and worked their way through the front door and the crush of people in the street to the back lot of the tavern where Stan’s van was stashed. Tony watched over the Cup while Stan got the tool box, trophy case and his overnight stuff. They secured the trophy in its case and Stan climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “What are you doing?” Tony asked, still stunned from exhaustion and blood loss.

  “I’m not keeping this thing here another goddamn night. No telling what they’ll do to it next. I’ll give you a couple minutes to get to your car, but then I’m cutting out of here.”

  “What about the wall?”

  “Fuck the wall. I’m never gonna see the inside of that room again. I’m getting out of this town and if anyone gets in my way I’m knocking them down.”

  Tony drove behind Stan down the black highway, his hand throbbing. At the juncture with Highway 7, Stan pulled the van into an all-night truck stop. They loaded up on coffee, and Stan stood a long time beside the van, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

  “Can they do anything about the scratches?”

  “They’ll do something. They got silversmiths.”

  “You see that guy following us? He was on us for a hundred clicks before he turned around.”

  “Must’ve run out of beer.”

  “This kind of thing happen to you often?”

  Stan sighed and coughed. He lit another smoke. “It’s too bad,” he said. “I think tonight I was going to get more than just the show.”

  Seven

  Tony arranged for Stan’s body to lie overnight at a funeral home on Ontario Street in downtown Montreal. He’d brought a casket with him from Toronto, and didn’t want everything left at the airport any longer than it had to be. The driver of the hearse, Fred, a thin man in a shiny black suit that looked two owners removed from the thrift shop, helped him place Stan in the casket and the two of them loaded it and the Cup into the back of the hearse. Fred took no special notice of the Cup, as though he had no idea what it meant. Tony booked lodging at the Sheraton downtown, one room for himself and the Cup, another for Fred.

  Tony and Fred had come to know a great deal about each other on their afternoon drive to Montreal. In his early twenties, Fred played saxophone in a jazz combo and worked at the funeral home for steady money. He talked about Montreal the entire trip, about jazz clubs, gangsters and beautiful women. Fred had played a few gigs in the city the year before, and fallen in love with a woman who worked the bar in one of the clubs. Since they ended, he hadn’t been back, but he was ready to try his luck again. It was Tony’s first visit to Montreal. He’d worked for the League for five years, but had been steady at the office in Toronto.

  “Well, if you’re interested in jazz, stick with me tonight,” Fred advised. “I know at least five places within three blocks of each other. They’ll all take your head off. Too bad they didn’t send us here next week ’cause then there’d be the festival and you wouldn’t be able to turn a corner without hearing jazz. If it’s women you’re looking for, just walk into any bar and open your eyes. There’s strip clubs like crazy on Sainte-Catherine’s, but they’re all pros, you know. It’s simple and hassle free, but not very warm, you know what I mean? You want to meet someone, Saint-Laurent is where the French girls hang out—and trust me, when you’re in Montreal, you want to meet a French girl. Break my fucking heart.”

  “I’m not leaving the hotel tonight, Fred,” Tony replied. “I’ve got to watch the Cup.”

  “What’s the Cup going to do?”

  “Without me, I don’t know, that’s the problem. It’s my job to watch that Cup.”

  “That’s some important cup then?”

  Tony turned in his seat and looked at Fred. He’d already mentioned the Cup several times on the 401. They had carried it together in its black case from the security lock-up at Dorval and slid it in beside Stan’s casket. Now they were driving with it into downtown Montreal, the city that had won the Cup more than any other city, the city that by rights owned the Cup. If they were to stop on the side of the freeway and pull the Cup out of its case, they would cause a huge traffic jam with people pulling over to get a look at it. If the citizens of this city knew that tomorrow Tony would be taking the Cup out of Montreal and driving it to Toronto, they would blockade Highway 401.

  The Cup meant more to more people in Montreal than any jazz club or beautiful bartender ever would, and yet here was a young man, of hockey-playing, hockey-watching age who had seemingly never even heard of it. It was absurd. Tony had played with a miniature replica of the Cup in his crib. He had won and lost that little plastic Cup over and over playing table hockey with his friends. Each year he had begun the playoffs with the plastic Cup in his hand, waiting for Toronto to win so he and his father could drink champagne from it like he’d been promised. And each year, he didn’t drink champagne from it. He had seen the real Cup at the Hall of Fame when he was ten, and again every year since then until the League hired him. Since that day
, he knew exactly how many times, the actual number of times he had been allowed to touch the Cup. Helping Stan with his travel schedule, and getting him ready for almost every trip for the past three years, Tony had been asked to pick up the Cup seventy-four times.

  Tonight had been seventy-five, and number one for Fred, though Fred wasn’t aware anything significant had occurred. Tony looked at Fred and wondered what it must be like to be unaware of this cup.

  “Yes, it is an important cup. Valuable anyway.”

  “Valuable? A trophy? How much could a trophy cost?”

  “Well, Fred, think of it this way. You think we’ve been sent here to pick up poor old Stan, the guy in the back there, but if it weren’t for that cup beside him, old Stan would have ridden home in the belly of an airplane beside people’s pets and luggage. That cup is the only reason Stan is getting this great chauffeured ride back to Toronto. So, once something like this cup is more important than a person’s dignity, how much would you say that thing is worth?”

  “That’s one fucking important cup, then.”

  In his hotel room on the twenty-third floor of the Sheraton, Tony removed the Cup from its case and set it on the floor near the window. He liked jazz and he liked women. Before leaving for the evening, Fred had stopped by Tony’s room and marked out some likely hotspots on a tourist map.

  From his window, looking north toward the mountain, the city lay itself before him in a blanket of shimmering lights. A warm breeze came through the screen and with it, the sound of female laughter from the street below. Tony lay down on the bed and let his hand brush against the polished chrome nameplates. He read the name Lanny MacDonald. He ran his thumb along the word Calgary. He listened to the city that truly owned the Cup, and fell asleep touching it. Seventy-seven.

  Tony had all the right scars in all the right places to be a professional hockey player. At seven, playing pickup at Riverdale Park he took a puck off his right cheekbone and crumpled to the ice in a classic pose, blood pouring from his face, pooling black-red beneath him. The emergency room doctor put thirteen stitches into him, joked about his black eye and told him to rub vitamin E oil into the wound once it closed, to decrease the scarring. His mother showed him how to squeeze the oil from vitamin capsules, and once the wound closed Tony diligently flushed one capsule each night, making sure none of the oil came anywhere near his scar.

  Three years later at an opponent’s elbow, he lost a tooth he had only just grown and had to be fitted for a tiny upper plate. A white ravine ran through the black hairs of his left eyebrow, the result of a high stick at shinny. Another scar, on his upper lip, from too forceful a punch with a frozen glove when he was twelve, meant later in life he would never be able to wear a moustache as the whiskers would not fill in properly over the dead white tissue.

  Tony played hockey in every season, as a kid rising rapidly through the levels of the organized sport in winter and captaining his own teams on the concrete rinks of summer. He surprised coach after coach by volunteering immediately to play defence. Every year Tony stood alone at the sideboards, the only defender until other failed forwards were assigned to join him. No one except Tony volunteered to play defence. As in all sports, the stars of the game are the front men, the goal-scorers, but Tony viewed defencemen as specialists, players who made it their business to be better than the front men, to stop the goal-scorers.

  If not more glamorous, then certainly more noble, Tony’s Cup-winning dreams were low-scoring. He was the guy who lay down in front of a slapshot and took the puck in the ribs for the team. The guy who muscled superstars away from the net and absorbed all their anger and ambition. Protector of the goalie, owner of the blue line, Tony wanted every game to end 1-0 for his team, in overtime. For any other young player with Tony’s level of skill, choosing defence would have been a brilliant strategy for advancement. A young, talented kid who had already adopted the mature, team-playing mentality of a defensive specialist. A kid who didn’t need to have his goal-scorer ambitions beaten out of him by coaches, teammates and opponents unconvinced of what was being offered, this was someone welcome at the upper levels of the game. As Tony would have been, but for his size.

  “You should have gone into wrestling,” was the parting consolation offered Tony when he was cut from his final team. All his skills and scars in place, Tony had simply not grown the extra four or five inches necessary to stay standing as a defensive specialist staring down forwards his own age. Coaches benched him because they feared he might get seriously injured, and they eventually cut him because they couldn’t stand watching his talents go to waste. He lifted weights to develop his legs and upper body, but in the end it was a matter of physics, height meaning leverage and leverage meaning dominance. In the end, the skinniest lightweight forward could lean down on Tony and take his feet out from underneath him. And with their longer legs, taking three strides to Tony’s five, opposing players beat Tony to the puck again and again.

  By the time he was cut for good, he was mentally prepared for it, having suffered more than enough humiliation on the ice during games and in the locker room afterwards. To his surprise he was content to leave the physicality of the game behind, the actual playing of it against opponents so superior in size and speed. His regrets were not for the end of his playing, or in the humiliation of being bettered by players he outskilled by far, but in the lost potential for winning the Cup. He could always satisfy his desire to play the game at pickup and no-contact shinny games where size was not a factor and his timing and drive still made him a star. His ego could not suffer too much because he still was plainly better at the game than everyone he knew. But he would never win the Cup, not that cup, playing on concrete in July or at the Riverdale rink in mid-January.

  On everyone’s advice, he took to coaching, assisting his former mentors in forming the next generation of players after his own. He found, even, that he could occasionally teach his passion for defence, and he could pass on much of his skill to the hardest workers, but it was too difficult for him to watch the latest crop of non-growers like himself drift away to the bench and then to nowhere while less talented, less hardworking giants plowed their way to the top. He had no advice to give on how to get bigger when your body refused to do so, on how to change your genetic makeup so it included a bit more northern European tree trunk.

  He switched to coaching girls hockey with its reduced emphasis on hitting and intimidation and its focus on pure speed and skill. But girls have their own reasons for never getting their hands on the Cup. Not even his lankiest, most acrobatic girl goalie, more catlike and instinctual than any boy he’d ever seen between the pipes, not even she would ever drink champagne from the Cup. The unfairness of it overwhelmed him and he gave up the job of building kids’ impossible dreams for the amusement of others. He moved to the university leagues, coaching varsity girls’ teams, girls who played only for fun and dreamed of medical or law degrees instead of trophies.

  At the University of Toronto, he attended lectures in his off-hours and began to read widely, an experience so new to him it felt like travelling. He met, bedded, and was blissfully left by a visiting professor named Ewa Loest. He began to consider that there just might be something more than the winning of that particular cup involved in leading a fulfilling life. He began listening to baseball games and watching the birds in the trees around campus.

  But his years in the hockey system in Toronto, and his skill with the stick had made him a lot of friends in the game. Through one of these friends, he was eventually offered a job with the League, in scheduling. It was a desk assignment plotting out the travel plans of all the boys who had managed to grow that extra four or five inches.

  The next morning there was no answer from behind Fred’s door. Tony slapped at the wood with an open palm and shouted his name. It occurred to him there were very few alternatives to Fred’s hearse for moving both a body and a championship trophy back to Toronto. He could rent a minivan, but how would he get Stan inside i
t without all the casket-moving equipment hearses contain? He was relieved to find the young driver in the lobby restaurant. In the same clothes as the night before, the black silk suit and black cap of a hearse driver, Fred smelled of bar smoke and spilled wine. He was leaning heavily on one elbow and staring into a cup of black coffee. He smiled when Tony took the booth bench across from him. Though clearly exhausted, his eyes were shining.

  “I don’t regret a minute of it,” he said. “Today, at around three, when we’re fighting traffic back in Scarborough, I’m gonna feel about as bad as a man can feel, but I still won’t regret it.”

  “You saw the sun come up?”

  “Like a great big eyeball, man. Like a fucking big eyeball looking at me and winking, saying ‘that’s right, man, that’s living.’ The sun? Man that was hours ago. You know what I’ve seen since the sun came up, man?”

  “What have you seen?”

  When the sun had first slipped through the window that morning, it hit the Cup like some druidic prophecy. There were shine demons dancing on every wall, the ceiling and the floor. Tony lay in bed for over an hour watching the shifting play of light, the inexplicable colours. When he went to shower, he dragged the Cup along the carpet and stood it outside the bathroom, where he could see it from the glass stall.

  “Man, I left the last club at around 4:30. That was over there on Saint-Denis just before it heads up the mountain, right near where we left buddy yesterday. I come walking out of the club ready to hit the sack, you know, and right there across the road is this strip club, and it’s letting out too. Just the girls, no customers. I guess the customers got booted before that, so now it’s just the girls kissing the doorman goodnight, laughing and giggling to themselves. No longer on the hunt, you know? Man. You know what strippers do when they’re finished work at 4:30 in the morning?”