King Leary

by Paul Quarrington

  As if I care. While it’s true that I’m the honorary president of the Toronto Maple Leaves Hockey Club, it was an honor bestowed on me so that they could relieve me of my previous job, being the real president. I couldn’t tell you the names of more than about four players. I’m hardly sure who the coach is, being as they change him maybe twice a year. Actually, I tell a lie, the coach is a mook named Miles Renders, and I know that because he once came to the home in South Grouse to visit me. He wears spectacles and went to university. The man’s even written books. He gave me one—it was called something like Motivational Psychology in Professional Sports: An Overview. Don’t bother waiting for the motion picture.

  Iain gives Clifford a tiny whack on the back of the head. “Hey, Cliffy,” he demands, “have you been smoking?”

  “Sorry,” moans my son.

  “Cigarette me, dahling,” says Iain. Iain talks in different voices all the time. Don’t ask me why.

  Clifford chuckles, which the boy will do if presented with even a mouse-hole opportunity, and fetches out his pack. Iain lights up, inhales deeply, coughs a bit. Cliffy has one himself. He decides to enjoy it, he crosses his legs, he sets the smoke between his lips (which makes his right eye quiver), and blows a smoke ring toward the bathroom door. It’s lopsided.

  “You shouldn’t smoke!” I tell them all. “It robs your wind. I wouldn’t be Loof-weeda, windsong, if I’d smoked ciggies!”

  Blue Hermann gives me a raspberry, his apparatus making for a real bone chiller. “Did I ever tell you, Clifford,” he says, “exactly what Loof-weeda means?”

  “Hmmm?” Clifford is something like an old dog, if you want him to pay attention, beat him over the head with a shoe.

  “ ‘Windsong,’ ” says I. “Or, perhaps, ‘wind music’ ”

  Blue Hermann isn’t listening anymore. Something in the paper is making him mad, which has been happening quite a bit lately. “Hey, Iain,” says Clifford. “The Louses almost won last night.”

  “Ahh, yes!” Iain’s doing the old W. C. Fields. “The South Grouse Louses. A pitiful platoon of pusillanimous pissants.”

  “They almost won, though,” persists Cliffy. “They only got beaten by two points.”

  Iain nods at my son. “Hey, I’ll tell you what, boy,” he says, “they didn’t lose. They just plum ran out of time.” Iain is making like one of those fat football coaches in the locker room. The lad’s nice enough, but he’s damn peculiar, that’s my assessment. Once, just for an example, he marched into our room and aimed a little black box at Blue Hermann and myself. He waved it around and made a little beeping sound. Then he pretended to check readings or some such nonsense. “We’re safe, Captain,” said Iain. “No life-forms here.” He’s a strange-looking goomer, too. His hair is an eighth of an inch long. He’s got plenty of it, but it’s all an eighth of an inch long. Iain’s head has more of a nap than a hairdo. Iain wears silly spectacles, and it seems like he’s got thirty or forty pair, because he never wears the same silly spectacles two days in a row. He’s a handsome enough lad, his nose is straight and his eyes are bright blue, but then he kind of goes out of his way to unenhance the effect, what with the nappy hairdo and the silly specs. On his right forearm Iain has a tattoo of a bird. The bird is in flight and savage looking. It is no type of bird that I have ever seen.

  “Hey, Mr. Hermann,” says Clifford, “how did Duane Killebrew do last night?”

  Blue peruses the score columns and answers, “A goal and two assists.”

  “Lawdy, lawdy, lawdy!” says Iain. “Dat boy is shore a caution!”

  “Which brings his yearly total to—” Blue Hermann has to do some arithmeticking in his head, and his wrinkles realign themselves with concentration—“forty-nine goals, seventy-four assists. And that’s after sixty-one games.”

  “One year,” I announce, “I had forty-nine goals.” This is a bald-faced lie, but nobody’s paying any attention to me anyway.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” says Iain—he’s gone into a television announcer’s voice, all deep and golden throated;—“we are here with two legends of the sports world, Ed ‘Blue’ Hermann and Percy ‘King’ Leary.” Clifford is giggling. “We are here to discuss the rising young phenom, Duane Killebrew. Mr. Hermann.” Iain is holding a pretend microphone, and Blue twists around, sitting up (a move that exhausts him) so that he can stick his mottled puss closer to something that isn’t even there. “Mr. Hermann,” says Iain. “You’ve seen them all. The Orrs, the Hulls, the Richards, the Clancys, the Shores, the Howes. In your opinion, is Duane Killebrew the greatest to ever play the game?”

  “Sprague Cleghorn would have snapped the puppy in two!” I scream. “Eddie Shore would have made mincemeat out of him! I’ll tell you that for free and give you change!”

  Iain hushes me. “Mr. Hermann?”

  Blue Hermann licks his lips and clears his throat. “It might be a little early to make a claim of greatest. He is without doubt the finest player in the game today.”

  “And the game today is nothing like the game that was! You put your midge Killebrew against a fellow like—”

  “Like Manny Oz?” suggests Blue Hermann.

  “Like Uncle Manny?” echoes Clifford.

  “Like Manny Oz.” My voice buckles, and something like a sob squeaks out. I just saw the strangest thing. As I said Manfred’s name, there was a dark flash in the doorway, like someone poked his head in and out quick. It gave me a chill, and my throat choked up until it stung. I scuttle under the covers for warmth. “You put him beside Manny or any of the other old boys, and, sister, there’s no comparing.”

  “Manny Oz,” says Iain, filling in the make-believe audience, “the prodigiously talented young man whose love of the bottle brought him to an early end.”

  “Now interview Leary,” instructs Blue Hermann. “Interview him right now.”

  “Yeah! Give me a blast, because Blue don’t know what the hell he’s saying. He’s in a state of constant delirium on account of the dope you give him.”

  “Percival Leary. Little Leary. Loof-weeda. The high muck-a-muck of hockey.”

  “King of the Ice,” adds the gormless Cliffy, my son.

  “Tell me, King, in your opinion, is Duane Killebrew the greatest hockey player that ever lived?”

  “In my opinion, ix-nay, nope, take a piss up a rope.”

  “Then who is?”

  It takes about ten seconds before I can say it. “Me.”

  Naturally they start laughing, even my fat-assed boy.

  “Damn it, it’s true!” I holler. “And even if it isn’t, I resent not being an option! Who potted the winner in one-nine? The King! Who led the Amerks to the Stanley Cup finals in thirty-one? The King! Who coached the Patriots to a divisional title? The King! If I’m not the greatest player, I am still the King! The King of the Ice! The King of All the Hockey Players!”

  “Now, now,” says Iain, his voice soft, “let’s not start.”

  “I went toe-to-toe with Sprague Cleghorn. He couldn’t stop me. Eddie Shore wanted to be the King, but I held him off. We would go into the boards and the earth would shake!”

  I demonstrate, hurling myself against the wall. Iain jumps up, wrapping his arms around my waist. “Come on, Percy. Back to the real world, Percy. We don’t want to have to give you a shot.”

  “Let him go,” croaks Hermann. “He’s happier in never-never land.”

  “Maybe I didn’t score a lot of goals like Duane Killebrew, but I was too busy playing hockey to worry all the time about scoring goals.”

  “I’ll go get Mrs. Ames,” says Clifford.

  Iain is grunting and sweating. I suppose I am putting up something of a ruckus. A familiar laugh fills the room. The son of a bitch always liked to see me get into predicaments. “Clay!” I bellow. “Tell them, Clay! I was the best you ever seen, wasn’t I?”

  “You’re a prize, ducky, that’s for sure.”

  Only that ain’t Clay Bors Clinton, that’s Mrs. Ames. She’s got the hypo o
ut and is making sure there’s no air in it. This means I’ll be sleeping for a while, that heavy black sleep that don’t rest me at all.

  “Tell them, Clay! Tell them I’m the King of the Ice!”

  “Either you or Manny,” returns a voice.

  Mrs. Ames pulls down my pajama bottoms and lunges forward with a grunt. I feel a cold sting on my rump.

  I go down as heavy as I did when Sprague Cleghorn two-handed me over the crown in one-nine two-six.

  FOUR

  EVEN BEFORE IT CHANGED, Clay’s voice had a richness to it, and your ears were drawn toward the rhythms, the rises and the falls, the way Clinton always seemed on the edge of tumbling into laughter. That’s the sound I woke up to.

  I opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was Manny Oz—Manfred Armstrong Ozikean, really, because it would be some years before he became Manny “The Wizard” Oz, the Witch Doctor. It gave me quite a start, I’ll say, seeing Manfred when I figured I was likely drowned and froze to death. Manfred’s hair was long and red and appeared to be made out of wool. His eyes were black and a little crossed. Manny’s nose was wide and flat, and fashioned so that his nostrils stared at you like another pair of eyes. Manfred saw that I was awake. His smile was vanished before I was certain that he had smiled at all.

  There never was a book Leary & Clinton Take a Tumble Through the Ice, but if there was it would probably feature Clay Clinton saying, “That was as tight as my Aunt Rose’s girdle!” because that’s what Clay actually said.

  The pair of us were naked and bundled in blankets, sitting on a short wooden bench. Clay had a cup of soup in his hand and Manfred handed one to me. “Soup,” said Manfred.

  “Luckily Manfred heard you shouting,” Clay explained, as if we were in one of those penny adventure magazines.

  We were in a shack not much bigger than the outhouse up at Clifford’s cottage in the Muskokas. Much of the space was taken up by a black potbellied stove. Our clothes lay upon it, steaming and hissing. The hut had a floor of ice, and in front of us a square had been taken out of it. Water lapped over the edges, an odd glowing green. When he wasn’t sneaking quick peaks at me and Clay-boy, Manfred hunkered over this hole in the world and stared down into it.

  “I heard shouting,” Manny whispered, talking more to the water than to us, “so I came and pulled you out.”

  “Thank you kindly,” I said, the old mother having taught me to be polite. “I’m Little Leary.”

  He said his full weird monicker: “Manfred Armstrong Ozikean.” His voice was so quiet you had to strain your ears to catch it.

  Even that short conversation embarrassed poor Manfred. He took a huge gang hook, something that looked like an anchor with six sharp spikes sticking out of it, and dropped it into the glowing water. He fed out line in long, smooth movements. When he’d set the gang hook on the bottom of the river Manfred let it be for a bit, occasionally jiggling the line in his hands. Then he started it back up again, looping rope with quick, sharp turns, and in no time the gang hook was dangling above the water.

  There were at least ten eels impaled on the thing, wriggling and squirming like a Blue Hermann nightmare. I could feel Clay stiffen up beside me. He was scared shitless.

  Manfred grinned at us, his teeth arranged a little haphazard. Apparently this was a good haul. Clay and I managed a return smile, wondering what this lunatic might do next. What he did was open a little door at the side of the hut and one by one pick the eels from the barbs and fling them out into the night. Then he tossed the gang hook back into the water. “Eels,” he informed us. “Do you want some?”

  We declined with all the manners we could muster.

  To avoid looking at the forthcoming eels (did you know that people actually eat those black wormy devils?), I took a gander around the hut. It was full of religious artifacts, twice as many as the old mother owned, and the mother was widely regarded as something of a crank. There was a painting of the Virgin Mary hanging up. There was a particularly grisly statue of Christ upon the Cross that took up almost one whole wall. The wound on Our Savior’s side was wide and gaping.

  Manfred wore a crucifix around his neck. It cut the gloom like the North Star. It was big, too, almost big enough to nail up a midget. Had Manfred been of normal stature, the crucifix would have stooped him over, maybe even broken him in half. But Manfred was six foot two, two-hundred-odd pounds, most of it muscle. When I first set eyes upon him, Manfred Armstrong Ozikean was thirteen years of age.

  After a time, Manny seemed to forget that we were there, or else he simply got used to us, because he started smiling (for no apparent reason) and laughing (ditto) and singing little songs under his breath. Mostly he sang hymns, and once or twice he broke into some strange stuff that I figure must have been Latin. He was raking in the eels like nobody’s business, which, in my opinion, is what eel harvesting should be. Manfred nodded toward our ice skates. “I like to skate,” he told us.

  “Do you play hockey?” we asked, the realization hitting Clay and me that with this boy around we likely wouldn’t lose another game for as long as we lived.

  “Sometimes I play hockey,” he admitted. “My Poppa Rivers showed me how to play. He used to play with the soldiers. But mostly I just like to skate. To go fast.” Manfred shrugged.

  “Is this where you live?” I asked, nodding at the tiny hut.

  Manfred laughed. He had a boomy laugh, and if you weren’t ready for it, it could make you jump a couple of inches. “No, I live over in the valley. This is just a fishing hut.”

  “Are you poor?” Clay wanted to know.

  Manfred reflected on this and then shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “I’m rich,” Clinton stated. “Little Leary is poor.”

  Manfred turned and looked at me. His dark eyes glowed with excitement. “Take some eels home for your family,” he told me, as if this put the lid on the poverty issue once and for all. “Boil them up and eat them.”

  “We’re not eel-poor,” I told him. “Just Black Irish poor. The old man has a job, though, working for the Eddy Match Company, so we’re not eel-poor.”

  “My father doesn’t have a job,” Manfred said, tossing the gang hook back through the hole in the world. “My father has no legs.”

  “Uh-yeah.” I nodded. “My old man’s got legs. Might not have any brains, but he’s sure as shooting got legs.”

  “Hey!” shouted Manfred Ozikean. When something occurred to him, Manny let you know by shouting “Hey” in a very loud voice. “I have a whitefish, too. Do you want a whitefish?” Before we could say anything, Manfred had squeezed himself out the little hut door. He came back a moment later with a frozen-stiff fish in his hands. It looked to go three pounds. “This is good,” Manfred said. “Take this home for your family.”

  Well, I’d be quite the hero if I fetched home a whitefish. I didn’t know that the Ozikean clan totaled maybe fifteen people, and that they were mostly dependent on Manfred for their grub. I thanked him and took it. Manfred spent a few minutes pressing Clay into taking home some eels. “Give them to the servants,” Manny suggested. Of course the Clintons had no servants, but Clay said nothing about that.

  The potbellied stove soon had our clothes dry enough that we could don them and venture into the winter’s night. Our teeth were chattering and it would be about a month before I got warm again, but at least I wasn’t dead, for which I have Manfred Armstrong Ozikean to thank.

  Clay told this story at Manfred’s funeral. Manny died in a hotel room in New York, New York. Some say he had a broken heart. I disbelieve in the notion of dying from a broken heart. At any rate, the man died, and Clay spoke at his funeral (attended by thirty people tops, mostly drunken Amerks) and he told this story of how the three of us met. He somehow contrived to make it sound like it was Clay Clinton who saved Manny “The Wizard” Oz.

  The Claire thing hails me on the blower. This is maybe two or three days later—I amn’t sure. We don’t put much stock in days here at the South Grouse. I w
as sleeping, I think I was having a dream, but it washes away as I pluck up the telephone. “Yo?” The room is pale blue. They oughtn’t to paint nursing-home rooms pale blue, because that’s the color I expect heaven to be. They ought to paint the rooms lime green or purple, so when you wake you know you’re still in the land of the living.

  “Kinger-Binger?”

  “Yes?” I take a glance sideways. Blue Hermann isn’t in his bed. I hope he hasn’t popped, I don’t really want to be left alone. I look over to the other side, though, and see that our bathroom door is shut. If I strain my ears I can hear a weary grunting.

  “Claire Redford ici.”

  “The ginger ale person,” I remember.

  This makes the Claire thing laugh, and that in turn makes me rip the blower away from my ear and hold it out at arm’s length. I give the Claire thing a few moments to calm down and then place the receiver back to my ear.

  “—have a go-ahead!” Claire is saying.

  “Go-ahead?”

  “We want you in Toronto in two weeks.” The Claire thing names some dates, Saturdays and Sundays, elevenses and twelfths.

  I grunt out “Uh-yeah” and pretend that it all means something to me.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Toronto’s a long ways from here. I’d have to spend the night there, and I’m on medication.”

  “You can practically see Toronto out your window!” says the Claire thing. “We’ll arrange for first-rate accommodation, and as for medication, well, my dear, who isn’t on some damn thing or another? I mean, this is why God gave us little pills! And—here’s the big surprise—Saturday night is going to be King Leary Night at the Toronto Gardens!”