“Indeed?” Iain stares at the ancient newspaperman. “And tell me this, Mr. Hermann. With what do you intend to chew this steak?”
“I’m just going to suck on it for a while.”
“We go to a restaurant and eat gruel,” Iain tells us. “Then we go to the Toronto Gardens, where it’s King Leary Night!”
“Hooray!” says I. I can’t help myself.
“And then …” Iain looks all around and whispers. “We hit the streets.”
“What?!” roars Nurse Ames.
“Then we get some sleep,” Iain says. “Because the next day, Kinger-Binger has to make some commercials.”
“Friends,” says I (I’ve been going over this in my mind), “this is your old friend, King Leary, the high-muck-a-muck of hockey. I been asked to say a few words on behalf of the Canada Dry ginger ale bottlers. I been drinking the good old Canada Dry all my life. People ask me why.”
“Why?” asks Blue Hermann.
“Why?” asks Iain.
“Because it makes me pissed!”
“Hmph!” snorts Mrs. Ames.
“That’s right, folks, it makes me piss, cleans out the system.”
“Leary,” says Nurse Ames, “surely there is more to recommend this beverage than the fact that it works as some sort of diuretic.”
“Tastes good, too.”
Mrs. Ames gives us all a look that could crack nuts. “I don’t think this expedition should be permitted.”
Iain ignores her. “Mobilize, men! Let’s move out!”
Blue Hermann grabs his canes—he needs two thick industrial-strength jobs to keep himself upright—and he throws his hips back and forth, picking up steam, and finally he’s motoring through the doorway pretty good. Myself, I launch into the old Dublintown swagger, my legs wide apart and my feet landing heel first. I curl my free hand into a fist and swing it about. I hold my dragon-head walking stick up and out, poking at the air in front of me as if provoking attack. There’s very few gooms my age who could affect a passable Dublintown swagger, and I’m rightly proud.
Other inmates are lining the hallways, waving us good-bye. We’re a goddamn parade!
“Make way for the hockey legend!” Iain tells them. “Royalty coming through here!”
I tip my coal miner’s cap, I smile and wave. At least, I smile and wave until I see a pair of eyes, dumb idiot eyes stuck in a milk white face, eyes that don’t understand or feel anything. My breath fails me. Maybe I’m going to faint. I start to fall but there’s strong hands at my elbows.
“Steady on, my liege,” whispers Iain. “You go down now and we’re not going anywhere.” Iain holds me up, but he’s strong enough to hide it; it looks like he’s escorting me the way any young man would escort an old fart.
“I’m all right,” I tell him, but I don’t shake myself free.
Blue Hermann’s voice sounds like flat tires on a mud road. “King is going to meet Duane Killebrew!” This news is greeted by predictable ooo’s and aah’s. “It’s King Leary Night at the Toronto Gardens.”
“Give ’em hell, King!” someone tells me.
“Give ’em hell!”
Other people start nodding. They pick up the chant. “Give ’em hell, King! Give ’em hell!”
There’s a taxicab waiting, steam pouring from its exhaust into the bitter wintry air. It must be twenty-five, thirty below out here. My nose freezes shut. My eyes sting like someone has stuck his thumbs in them. The trick is to let the sun sit on you. I tilt my head back and let the sun slap my face a little. My jowls start to tingle.
It’s a bit of a stunt putting Blue Hermann into the backseat, on account of his legs don’t buckle. The cabbie and Iain have to hold Blue on either side and load him in like a torpedo. I wait on the pavement, puffing steam upwards, trying to thaw my nose hairs. Finally they got Blue packed. I take a step and my foot catches a slick patch of ice. Whooosh, and I think, here it comes, say good night, sister, but somehow I end up in Iain’s arms.
“King,” says the lad, and his voice is loaded with amazement, “you did the St. Louis Whirlygig!”
“Damn right!” I scream. “You don’t lose a move like that in a minute, you know! The monks showed me how to do it in one-nine one-five and I have just now executed it!” A couple of quick rusty wheezes come out of me.
“King,” says Iain, “you laughed!”
“Put me in the car, felthead,” I tell him. “We don’t want to miss the train.”
The countryside around South Grouse is farmland, barren and empty in the winter. We pass a little pond, and the pups are out on her. They’ve cleared the snow away, the ice is silver blue. Most of the lads have on Ottawa jerseys (the shamrock doesn’t look like a shamrock these days) with the number double zero, which is what Killebrew wears. A few wear Toronto sweaters, a couple Montreal. I watch a lad score a goal, rolling the tennis ball slowly through another boy’s legs. The lad flips his stick over and pretends it’s a guitar. That’s something Duane Killebrew does. When I scored a goal I didn’t do anything, except maybe grit my teeth and say, “Yeah!” at whatever was out there.
On another part of the pond, all by herself, a young girl is figure skating. She does a turn in the air, a quick crisp thing. My wife, Chloe, could do that. Before she was set upon by disease my wife was quite the athlete. I wipe the fog off the window. I stare at the girl.
“Manfred could do some of that,” says Blue Hermann.
“Like Brother Simon the Ugly,” I say. “More like dancing than anything else. My boy Rance could skate all right, too, except he skated like a girl.”
“Manny could do it drunk,” Blue goes on. “Pissed out of his gourd. One time in New York, when he was with the Americans, me and Oz got pie-eyed. We could barely walk. But we snuck into an ice-skating rink somewhere, and Manny tied on some skates, and he hit the ice like a ballerina. One of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen, Manny skating like that. And he was shit-faced.”
“Manfred drank too much,” I mutter.
“And you didn’t exactly help, did you, Leary?”
“What do you mean by that, Hermann?”
“I used to drink too much,” announces Iain. “But not for a couple of years now. Not since I moved to South Grouse.” Iain takes a cigarette out of the pack and fires it up. This is the first time I seen him with his own smokes.
South Grouse doesn’t have much of a train station, just a little thing sitting on top of the hill, beside the tracks. It’s quite a trek in from the cab to the waiting room, treacherous with ice. We get inside and Blue Hermann bolts for the nearest red plastic bench, his canes sounding loudly on the winter-wet tiles. “Whoo-boy!” sighs Blue, like he’s been through the wringer. I imagine Blue has gone “Whoo-boy!” lots in his lifetime, but only in recent years has he gone “Whoo-boy!” on account of a cab ride.
Iain elbows me over to the bench, then says, “I’m going to go buy the tickets.” We’ve already got it arranged that I’ll pay him back when I get my ten thou for the adverts. Peculiar, isn’t it? When Jubal St. Amour paid ten thousand dollars for me, it was ballyhooed all across the nation. Now they’ll give that to an ancient mook for saying a few words about a soft drink.
“Uh-yeah.” There’s maybe fifteen other people in the waiting room. One is a mother with five kids, even though she looks to be about twenty-seven. The kids is racing around, staging a reenactment of some of history’s great catastrophes. The mother sits, calmly smoking a cigarette. Every so often she’ll say, “Knock it off, Jason!”
Iain comes back with three train tickets in his hand.
Then there’s nothing to do in the waiting room but wait, unless you happen to be Blue Hermann, in which case you can fall into a sort of sleep, your limbs twitching electrically, sweat beading on your brow and upper lip.
Iain reaches into his coat pocket and brings out a little paperback. He removes a marker, folds the cover back so that he can hold the book in one hand, and begins to read.
I got nothing to
do but remember.
Manfred Armstrong Ozikean hated trains. I think that’s kind of odd. I can understand hating to fly—I was never too keen on it myself, several thousand tons of heavy machinery whistling through the air—but being afraid of trains is a little peculiar. If we were traveling to a game—meaning that Manny couldn’t drink, although he did from time to time—then he’d sit in a seat, the curtains drawn, and thumb through a book. He was all the time trying to improve himself through various books. If we’d already played, and were on our way out of town, Manfred would bolt for the bar car as soon as the train made its first chunking sound. Manfred would buy drinks for everyone in the place. He’d play the accordian and lead his traveling companions in song. His favorite tune was “The Church in the Wildwood.” Manny could bellow this number for hours, the words becoming harder to make out as the booze dulled his brain. Sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night and notice that Manny was nowhere to be seen. I’d go to the bar car and find him facedown in a puddle of wetness, booze, and, I should imagine, more than a couple of tears.
There’s the whistle, carried on the ice-cold air.
Clay loved trains. Clinton would travel in nothing less than a stateroom, a full bar set up in the corner, a bimbo or two adorning the settees. He’d sit in there and scheme, which was Clay’s hobby. He would scheme even if there was nothing cooking, or do other people’s scheming on their behalf, or else just figure out the perfect bank robbery or murder, even if he had no intention of committing it.
The people are moving outside now, drawn by the train whistle.
Over there I see a couple not much younger than Blue and me. They hold hands and lean against each other, taking short painful steps and staring forward grimly. It’s nice to have company.
The train comes to a halt with a lot of screeching and scraping, as if the brakes just but barely caught. A door opens and a conductor pops open the door, throwing a yellow step box onto the ground. The crowd jostles, the old couple gets shuffled to the back of the pack. We would, too, except that if anyone budges old Blue Hermann he raises one of his heavy-duty walking sticks and shakes it threateningly. And mind you, I got the old dragon-head at the ready, a stick that could do more than a little damage. Old people should feel safer than they do, considering how heavily armed most of us are.
It takes Iain, the conductor, and two more redcaps to get Blue Hermann into the train. I have to hold his canes. They weigh about twenty pounds apiece. When my turn comes, I labor upwards without assistance. Well, perhaps there’s a hand on my elbow, but I don’t need it. Another conductor inside the train is asking, “Smoking or nonsmoking?” He takes a closer look at Hermann, who has a nicotine-stained face, and directs us to a section of seating without saying another word.
There’s a set of foursome seats at the end of the car, and we claim them. Iain brings up the rear with all the luggage, three traveling bags is all we have, and tosses them into the compartments above our heads. It would be nice to be able to toss traveling bags up into compartments. Iain’s got the train tickets sticking out of his mouth. He sits down and looks at Blue and myself. “How’s everybody feeling?”
“Tip-top,” says I.
“One hundred percent,” answers Blue.
“Jolly good show,” says Iain, and I startle, because Iain sounds exactly like Clay Clinton. I can tell that Blue noticed it, too. “Next stop, Toe-ronno!” calls Iain.
I’m bored.
Train travel was the worst thing about my professional hockey career. Bytown to Montreal, to Toronto, to Hamilton, to New York, Boston, Chicago, and Detroit. I wish I could fall asleep like Blue Hermann just did, even if he does appear to be suffering the torments of hell.
Iain reaches into a pocket (the coat he has on looks to have about forty-odd pockets, and Iain has made use of each and every) and produces a deck of Bicycle playing cards. He riffles them so that they puff air into my face. “A game of chance, your highness?”
“I can play gin,” I tell him, not letting on that I am by way of being a gin-playing genius.
“Gin it is.” Iain starts to waterfall the cards, then he does a single-hand cut. He appears to have played before.
There’s a little Formica table folded down between our seats. We raise and level it, and before long we’re playing gin rummy.
Every so often I’ll look up and watch through the windows. The forests are dead, drowned in snow. Starlings peck at the ground; otherwise, everything is as still as midnight.
FIFTEEN
MANFRED A. OZIKEAN RAISED UP A HAND—the knuckles bruised from that afternoon’s game against the Black Hawks—and poised it over his cards. The huge hand fluttered back and forth over the fan, sometimes darting in close for a possible pickup, always turning back. “My gracious,” Manny sighed, “what a predicky-doo.” Dainty talk from a man who that afternoon had situated Charlie Gardiner’s nose somewhere near his hairline.
“Play,” says I. I was one draw away from a lay-down, and I could fill it at either end of two straights or fill up my set of deuces. My little fingers had started to itch.
“A predicky-dicky-doo,” says Manfred. Manny raised that hand again. It took a run at a card, even grabbed the top corner like it really meant business. Then, after a second’s stillness, the hand retreated and began to beat on the tabletop.
“Manny,” I said.
Manny looked up. “Yo?”
“Play.”
I had a loathsome little seven of clubs that was eager to sacrifice itself on the refuse heap. I knew that the next card would fill up my gin. A feeling in my bones. Manfred likely had a couple of pairs or else was saving only one suit, something he did now and again, confused about the rules of the game.
Outside our window was Chicago on a Saturday night. It howled. But Manfred hadn’t been drinking much since the beginning of the 1918–19 season (since he met Janey Millson, really), one of the main reasons that the Ottawa Paddies were currently tearing up the league. It was due to Manny and, I must say, Little Leary, a puff of Irish wind. I’d had a hat trick that afternoon against the Hawks, popping three straight goals all in the third frame. I was wearing the top hat in our hotel room, playing cards. If you could call what we were doing playing cards.
“Hey!” That blasted me and my seat almost two feet backwards. Manfred was grinning.
“Figured out a play, have we?”
“Gin.” Manfred’s hammy paw rearranged his cards quickly and laid them down on the table. I looked at them close—sometimes Manny left holes in the straights or confounded the suits—but this time he had it clean. I tossed down my cards and flipped him the quarter.
“Much obliged, Percival.” Manny polished the coin on his shirtfront and pocketed it with glee. The Patriots were paying him plenty, but the only money that seemed to mean anything to him was the quarter we exchanged over card games.
Manfred scooped up the duckets and began to waterfall them. Cards dribbled over the top, and before long some were boxed. “You want another crack at me, Percival?”
“Naw.” I flipped onto my bed, cradled the back of my head in my hands. The ceiling was cracked in more places than it wasn’t. I shoved the top hat forward so that I wouldn’t have the one light bulb burning into my eyeballs.
Manny flipped onto his bed, which could have been a serious mistake. The thing groaned and the room shook, but everything settled down. I counted two automobile accidents during the silence. Chicago sounded like a wounded animal.
“I miss Constance. Er, Janey.” I was receiving a blow-by-blow account of Manfred’s romance with Miss Millson, not that I’d requested it. We’d now arrived at a stage where Manny missed her every time he wasn’t with her. Being a hockey player, that was plenty. “Do you miss Chloe?” Manny asked me.
Chloe was Janey’s younger sister. She looked quite a bit like Jane, only she looked like she’d been salted and left out in the sun. Chloe’s face was pinched and set like stone. When she walked, her cheeks jiggled. The best
thing about her was her eyes, which were a very light blue. But, you know, eyes is eyes. If the big star is eyes, the show ain’t going to Broadway. I’d been seeing Chloe since the summer previous. According to her, we had an understanding, although I had no idea what it was. Anyway, to answer Manny’s query I produced a vague grunt that he could interpret however he wished.
Someone was screaming outside, drunken incoherencies, a foreign tongue.
At our Home Opener in Bytown that year, Janey Millson had single-handedly roused the crowd to near-riot pitch. She claimed a seat near the players’ bench, one of the prime viewing positions, but she spent the whole game with her back to the ice, hollering upwards into the stands. She made us Paddies feel like a whole different team; even North Innes said, “We got to get serious out there!” The Patriots were in first place by a handful of points.
The door to our hotel room flew open, and there stood Clay Bors Clinton.
“Asleep?!” he demanded. Clay was dressed in his army uniform, even though the Great War was some time finished. He was going to milk that baby for all it was worth. Clay was sporting a handlebar mustache. He was all the time experimenting with facial growth, but the beards and mustaches just seemed to interfere with his beauty. “It’s but nine o’clock on a Saturday night, and these two ponces are asleep!”
Manfred was off his bed in a second, scooping up Clay in a bear hug. I continued to lie there, although I did cock an eye at Clay and give him the old howdy-do.
Clinton sat on my bed. He regarded me archly.
“Is he exhausted, Freddy?”
“Could be maybe,” Manfred noted. “It was a tough game.”
“Did the Percival poppet play well, Freddy?”
“Three goals,” Manfred announced proudly.
“Well done, Percy, my pretty!” Clay Clinton slapped my belly. Then he stood, straightened the crease in his trousers, adjusted his collar and cap, and said, “Leave us leave.”
“I got shot in the head!” I piped up. “I got two decorations, Clay. I was at the Vimy Ridge.”
King Leary Page 9
