We were tied up in overtime.
Patty Boyle called for a time-out. The Paddies crowded around him at the bench.
Manfred looked at me and smiled that long crooked grin of his. “Let’s do it, Percy,” he said with a wink. “I’m getting hungry.”
I nodded, stuff stirring in my guts.
“Here,” said Manfred, and he stuck something in my gloved hand. It was his crucifix, the huge one. I noticed that Our Savior was not dying, He was stone dead. “Carry that,” said Manny.
“You figure that’s gonna help, do you?”
“You know what Brother Isaiah would say.”
Manny had an uncanny knack for remembering the blind monk’s drivel. I shrugged.
“Brother Isaiah would say, ‘It couldn’t hurt.’ ” Manfred winked again. “The Magic Stone, Percy.”
“The Magic Stone?”
“Percival!” shouted Clay from the stands. He was sitting in the front row, having used some of his Bytown timber baron connections to get the ticket. “Score a goal, my prince! We’re wasting valuable drinking time!”
“Go, you Lucky Number Seven!”
I dropped the crucifix inside my jersey. The metal felt cool and soothing on my belly.
We set up for the face-off. Newsy Lalonde was staring at me.
“Hey, newsboy,” said I, “don’t stand there. That’s where I mean to skate with the puck.”
“You are horsemeat, O’Toole.” Lalonde always affected to disremember my name, or maybe he really did, and he just used any Irish monicker that popped into whatever he was using for a mind.
“Come on, guys,” said Manfred, “let’s not fight.”
“Mind your own business, chief,” said Lalonde.
Manny crossed himself.
I crossed myself, too, and I touched the crucifix.
The rest is historical.
I heard Clay Clinton shout “Yes!” with all of his heart and soul. Clay had just won a lot of money—this was the start of what is commonly referred to as his “vast financial empire”— but his shout had a lot more to it than that. And I heard Manny cry, “Hey!”—that big delighted bellow of his. I realized that I’d scored, that we’d won the Stanley Cup. For that instant, we were three young men alone in the universe.
Of course the newshounds were barking in the dressing room. There must have been a hundred of them all shouting questions at me. One of them—and in my memory he looks a lot like the young Blue Hermann, although my memory may be playing a little trick on me—one of them demanded, “Little Leary! Who’s the better player, you or Manny?”
“Hard to say.” I shrugged.
“Come now,” the newspaperman urged me.
“Time will tell” was all I said.
And time did tell.
It told in 1937. It was New Year’s Day.
I’d woken early in the morning. Beside me Chloe slumbered deeply, because at midnight she’d tucked into the sweet sherry. We’d made a sort of love that approached wantonness, although I get the impression that nowadays it’s what people do immediately after they exchange names. I studied Chloe’s body as she slept. She’d lost a lot of weight, her dugs all but vanished, her rib cage plain as day. I got up, put on my gown, wandered into the living room. My knee still hurt like hell, even though a year had passed since the accident. The place was silent, the boys were out in the wintry sun, perhaps skating on the canal, Clifford spending most of his time dusting his keester, Clarence prancing about like a sissy. I switched on the radio. Hitler was up to more shit. Manny Oz had been found dead in his hotel room.
I took to the streets.
And everyone who passed me had the same greeting. “Happy New Year,” they said. “Happy New Year, King!”
NINETEEN
AS IT TURNS OUT, the Claire thing is a fellow. A most damn peculiar one, but a fellow all the same.
Claire Redford meets us in the train station, pushing through the crowd to get at us. He tells people, “Excuse me,” very politely and then rams the ball of his hand into their backs and shoves. With the other hand, Claire Redford waves at us, and being as the Claire thing is well over six foot, the waving hand seems like a bird flitting above everybody’s head.
The Claire thing has blond hair. Most of it is short, shorn up the back and sides, but there’s a long shock that dangles down, covering his face. The first thing Claire Redford does when he gets to us is grab this shock and shoot it back up onto his head. “Hey there, hi there, ho there!” he sings. The Claire thing has a diamond stuck into a front tooth. “You’re as welcome as can be!” Claire grabs Blue Hermann’s wrinkled claw and begins to pump. “So here is the famous King Leary!”
“No, I’m not,” Blue Hermann snarls, almost as if he’s insulted.
The tone of Blue’s voice startles Claire Redford. “You should do something about that throat,” he advises old Blue, shooting the blond hank backwards. He turns to Iain and says, “Am I right or am I whistling ‘Sweet Sue’? The throat demands medical attention.” Then Claire grabs my hand. “All hail!” he says. “All hail the King!”
“This is Iain,” I tell Claire. “He’s here in case anything should go wrong. Blue and I are likely to pop off anytime now.”
“Hiya.” Claire Redford looks at his watch. It’s an enormous thing and has tiny push buttons on the side. “Well, you people are all booked into the Oxford Hotel, that’s all taken care of. What say we go eat?” Claire grabs our traveling bags and flits away. “I have a cab waiting.” We follow. Claire would have us going at quite a clip, but Blue Hermann slows the whole herd down. The Claire thing circles around us like a buzzard. “How was the trip?”
“Leary had a nightmare,” gloats Blue, concentrating on working the tips of his canes across the marble floor of the train station.
“It was that weird ginger ale they gave me,” I explain. “Anyway, you’re a fine one to talk, Hermann. You have seven nightmares an hour.”
“Yeah, but I work for mine.”
“If you have trouble with nightmares,” Claire Redford says, “then you are probably sleeping with your head pointed in the wrong direction. All the forces in the world run up and down. North and south, you see, from the two poles. That’s straightforward, no? We’re talking grade three here. Now, if you lie down with the bonker aimed east or west, you interfere with these forces. Am I right or am I tap-dancing in zero gravity?”
“It makes a certain amount of sense,” I agree. “I could always play better in an arena that ran north-south.” Brother Isaiah, I remember, was a great one for going on about forces and suchlike.
And directions! For a man who didn’t know which way he was going, Isaiah was surely fond of directions. Here’s one of his coaching tips:
The little birds sang east, the little birds sang west,
and I smiled to think that God’s greatness
flowed around our incompleteness.
I’m startled to have remembered the blind monk’s doggerel so easily.
We have to go through a revolving door to leave the train station, but as much force as Blue’s scrawny self can muster isn’t quite enough to budge the contraption. Iain and Claire both try to spin it by hand, but Blue Hermann gets rattled about like a marble in a tin can, unable to keep up with his little wedge. The operation is slow and painstaking, Claire and Iain moving the door a few inches, Blue Hermann scurrying to center himself. I stand inside my own little piece-of-pie-shaped glass booth. In a while I get launched into the night.
Claire Redford leads us to a smoking taxicab and opens the rear door. He and Iain go into the loading procedure, stuffing Blue Hermann into the backseat. Then Iain puts his hands on my elbows and seats me. Iain gets in beside us, and the Claire thing jumps into the front.
“Chinese?” Claire asks.
“Sounds good,” says Iain.
Blue nods, and I allow that Chinese is all right, as far as food goes.
“The Conqueror,” Claire tells the cabbie, and we wheel out.
It’s ha
rd for me to imagine that this is the same town me and Manny came to to recruit ourselves all those many years ago. Everything is lights and loudness in the city. Many of the people are deranged. The psychiatric ward at the South Grouse Home got nothing on these sidewalks, that’s for sure.
Blue had some good years here. In the sixties he was the big sportswriter for the Toronto Daily Planet. Blue Hermann got some of his best diseases in Toronto. After Clay died I didn’t see hide nor hair of Blue until they wheeled him into my room at the nursing home. Some of the bars we pass are his old haunts, and Blue Hermann gazes at them sadly and lovingly. Every so often, he’ll heave a sigh.
Next thing I know, we’re in Chinatown. There’s nothing but Chinese people everywhere you look, and Chinese writing on all the signs.
The cab pulls over to the curb. Claire and Iain unload Blue Hermann. I climb out unassisted.
Old men drift by on the sidewalk, little half smiles on their faces, like they just heard a good one. Chinatown hasn’t changed much over the years. Same burnt-red ducks hanging by their feet in the windows. Same young moon-faced men scooping out noodles with paddles. Manfred loved Chinatown, you know, mostly, I expect, because it reminded him of home. It was just about as crowded and had the same general level of activity.
We move along the street. It’s slow slogging. There’s Chinamen here who look to have ten or twenty years on me and Blue, but they putter along like they’re on wheels. I can’t muster much of a Dublintown swagger. I drift close to Iain and hope he might put his hand on my elbow. Iain, though, catches the toe of his boot in a crack on the sidewalk and pitches forward. He spins around, tries to regain his balance, and this he accomplishes, except in the process he barks his knee on a fire hydrant. “Whoopsy daisy,” he mutters quietly.
The Conqueror is down some steps. It’s been around for close to forty years. Clay enjoyed the food, and they used to have a little gambling den in the back. Maybe they still do. Clay would go there and lose a lot of money, because in his fat years, Clay seemed to lose the ability to gamble. Before that, you know, it was like the man could make dice roll on his fancy, it was like cards would come shooting out of the deck if they were the ones he needed. I seen him pull to an inside straight more often than not. I seen Clay Clinton ride a number on the roulette wheel well past the point of foolishness and win. Then, after the Toronto Gardens was built and the Maple Leaves were his and he was all alone in the world—except for me—Clay Clinton seemed to lose this knack. He’d get dealt three aces and lose to four trays. Not that Clay cared particularly. The man never did care overmuch.
Blue stands on the top step and peers down cautiously. Claire Redford steps over to him and says, “Allow me, Old Yeller.” The Claire thing scoops up Blue Hermann and cradles him babylike. “I hope you don’t mind,” says Claire.
“Naw,” Blue snarls.
“Good boy.” Claire fair skips down the stairs, sets Hermann on his feet, and pushes through the front door. “Table for four!” he bellows.
A little woman sitting behind a wooden desk scuttles off to find us one. The joint is packed.
Iain lights up a cigarette. For a fellow who doesn’t smoke much, he’s sure smoking a lot.
“A filthy habit,” Claire pronounces. “Isn’t it, your highness?”
“If you want to be an NHLer, eat yer veggies and don’t never smoke a cigarette.”
“I’m going to quit,” Iain tells us earnestly. “I quit for a couple of years, you know, and then—” Iain shrugs.
We follow the little woman through the tables. The Chinese people stare at us even as they stuff rice down their gullets. We sit at a round table. A waiter comes with a pot that’s full of hot green water. Another one comes and takes an order for drinks.
“Soda water, please,” says Claire.
“Scotch, double, straight up,” mutters Blue Hermann.
“Ginger ale,” says I.
“Good boy!” ejaculates the Claire thing.
“Um …” Iain is chewing his bottom lip.
“I come back.”
“No,” says Iain. “I’ll have the same as him.” Iain levels his forefinger at the wrinkled newspaperman.
The waiter scurries. The Claire thing scoops up the menu and looks at it. Half of it is in Chinese, half in a strange sort of English. The Claire thing tries to start a conversation about what various food we should have, but it doesn’t travel very far. Iain and Blue go dumb and wait on the little Chinaman with the drinks. I do my best to help, but food is food. I never did have a passion for it.
The drinks come. Mine is in a huge glass, but I can tell it’s fountain ginger ale and watered down besides. Fountain ginger ale has got nowhere near the kick of the bottled or canned stuff, and you can’t summon a healthy belch even after five or six big glasses.
Iain and Blue Hermann both have a couple of fingers’ worth of stuff in dirty juice glasses. Blue tosses his down as it hits the table and barks out a reorder before the waiter has taken more than two steps. Iain has a small sip. His face wrinkles painfully and then relaxes. “Cheers,” he mumbles.
“Same back at you, boy,” I answer.
Claire says, “If it’s all the same to you three, I’ll just order at will.”
There’s some glum nodding. The Claire thing doesn’t seem to realize that food ain’t a big issue at our table.
Iain takes a larger sip. I seen this before.
TWENTY
ONE SIP OF THE DEMON RUM—this is what the old mother used to say—is your first step toward the grave. My mother had a number of picture books that told tales of men and women whose love of liquor brought them first shame and infamy and finally death. My, how Death does love to get its hands on boozers. The last page of one of my mother’s booklets showed a man dressed in rags, sitting in the fires of perdition, the Devil standing over him, chortling. I shudder to think of that picture.
The old mother wasn’t alone in her thinking. During the Great War, prohibition seemed to work pretty good. I hardly even noticed, but there were people who could tell you that the crime rate dropped and worker productivity went up, so on and so forth, and it looked for a while like Ontario might stay dry for eternity. Then something happened, namely, they passed the Volstead Act in the U.S. of A. and America was all of a sudden dry as a bone. Certain people—the young Clay Bors Clinton among them—started a campaign to get the Ontario prohibition laws repealed, which they soon were. This enabled Clay to be about the business of his life, namely, getting filthy rich.
There was nothing illegal in what Clay did—at least, if there was, he never told me about it—and certainly the charge that Clay was a bootlegger is a false one. Jubal St. Amour, now, owner of the Amerks, that man was a bootlegger. Jubal started his career with an empty bathtub, some potatoes, and a lot of copper tubing. All Clay did was to take that money he won gambling on the one-nine one-nine cup series and open up a few taverns close to the American border in Ontario and Quebec. The Yankees would putter up and spend the day boozing. It could be that Clay sold a few bottles under the table, and I suppose it further could be that Clay sold the occasional truckload to some entrepreneurial types, but for the record, all Clay Clinton did was open seven or eight shanty groghouses, and that’s when he started raking in the dough.
In the meantime, Manny and I were playing hockey for the Ottawa Patriots. In the season after we won the cup, we sank to fifth place.
Manfred was all the time on and off the water wagon. One time he even went to a clinic to dry out, but they had some strange notion about “maintenance drinking,” and Manny was on a bender most of the three weeks he spent in there. Manfred went to the Oxford Group. They were church people, and their basic idea was this—you are a piece of dung, but God is willing to help. So they spent a long time convincing Manfred that he was a piece of dung, and it seemed like God Himself came around to this line of thinking, because He did precious little to help Manfred. It was after the Oxford Group that Manny really began to go on rager
s. He got himself arrested two or three times—drunk and disorderly, creating a public spectacle—and once he disappeared for four whole days, missing two games. The assistant general manager of the Patriots fined him one thousand dollars for that scam! And if that seems like an overly stiff and severe fine, that assistant general manager was C. B. Clinton.
How that was exactly, that Clay became the assistant general manager, has never been too clear. The G.M., Frank O’Connor, was a good friend of the Clinton clan, but that hardly seems reason enough to install a young brash mook like Clay as your assistant. But things worked out. In that first year Clay Clinton arranged a trade. Clay traded North Innes, the Patriot star goaler, for four young players, none of whom showed particular promise. It looked like a rum deal until North Innes died in ’twenty-five. In 1926 Clay Clinton was made the general manager of the Ottawa Patriots Hockey Club.
His first move was to trade me.
Now, before all that happened, I should point out, I got married. I married Chloe Elizabeth Millson in the summer of nineteen twenty-three. How this event transpired is still something of a mystery to me.
I liked Chloe well enough, I mean, she was pretty in a pinched sort of way and quite the athlete, an excellent skater and skier. In the summer, there was nothing she liked better than to go to the small lakes in the Gatineau and swim all day. Come to think, it was at one of these lakes that the true nature of our “understanding” reared its ugly head. The deal was, Chloe would have no compunction against stripping off and swimming in my sight all in the buff-bare—not an unpleasant sight, I’ll admit, Chloe being slight but muscled—and I in turn would join her in holy wedlock. Back in those days, that was the kind of deal you made.
We were wed in late August. I could likely remember the exact date if I put my mind to it. Some geese, worrywarts, were already heading for Florida.
The groom’s side of the affair didn’t amount to much. My mother, sister (with her boyfriend, a friendly young buck with withered fingers), and my brother Francis were there, naturally, and my friends Clay Bors Clinton and Manfred Armstrong Ozikean. Patty Boyle came to represent the Patriots. There were reporters from the two Bytown newspapers, because I was a celebrity. I wasn’t the King of the Ice back then, but I was making my move, brother, you can believe me on that account.
King Leary Page 11
