I nudge the ancient scribe. “Well?”
Blue Hermann produces a puff of stale air and shrugs his shoulders. He almost rattles, that’s how frail and brittle he is. Blue doesn’t know what to say. Duane Killebrew has produced in Blue Hermann of the Planet a loss for words!
The lad is a Wizard.
Lonny Chandrian tells me that the people from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation want to do a wee small interview with me. This means the hockey game ended about twelve minutes earlier than it should have. I tell Lonny it’s all right with me. I used to give interviews all the time when I was director of hockey operations.
I get led down a hallway. Bright light is spilling out of a doorway up ahead. This is where they got the teevee studio set up. I get put in a chair, someone clips a little microphone to my lapel. A voice asks me to count to ten. I do so. The voice says thankee. I say don’t mention it.
There’s a young charlie in the chair beside me. He’s smoking a cigarette and looking at a clipboard. I’m transfixed by this fellow’s hair, every single strand in place.
The young man puts down his clipboard and turns to me. “Hello, Mr. Leary.”
“Hey.” I nod.
“It’s Ben. Ben Jimson.”
“Benny Jimson who was one of the worst defensemen who ever played the game?”
“Yeah!”
“You got a job on the television now?”
“That’s right. Color and postgame.” This fellow grins at me.
I snap my fingers. “Hey, now. Ben Jimson didn’t have no full set of chompers.”
The young man spits out teeth into the palm of his hand.
“That’s a bit better. Now ruffle that Toni Home Perm of yours.”
Benny pulls his fingers across the grain of his perfect hair. It hackles like the back of an old and stupid hound.
“Ben!” I slap him across the knee. “How you been, Benny-boy?”
“And camera.” A finger appears out of nowhere and points at the pair of us. Ben Jimson stuffs his teeth back into his mouth and shakes his head. The hair realigns itself. “We are here,” he tells the home viewers, “with one of the all-time great hockey legends, Percival ‘King’ Leary. How are you tonight, King?”
“Right as rain.”
“Did you enjoy tonight’s game?”
“I enjoyed it tremendously, Benny. I never seen the likes of that boy Killebrew, except—” I remember a round rink in the middle of winter and the dead of night, five shadows moving on it, but the teevee audience wouldn’t be interested.
Jimson just asked me a question. I got no idea what it was. I interrupt. “Did you see Duane-o do the St. Louis Whirlygig, Benny-boy? That was one of my moves. I thought it was dead and forgotten, but Killebrew executed it flawlessly in the third period.”
“When was this, King?”
“When he potted the go-ahead. There was a defender there and Duane got around him by means of the wondrous St. Louis Whirlygig.”
“When he …” Jimson wrinkles his brow. He still has a boyish aspect, except he has more wrinkles than when he played for me. “Oh! You mean when he did the Nureyev.”
“How’s that again?”
“When he jumped up and twirled around the defenseman?”
“The unspeakably beautific St. Louis Whirlygig.”
“The Nureyev.”
“What is a Nureyev?”
“You know. The ballet dancer.”
“Benny-boy, you’re making no sense. Seems like you’re no better a teevee man than you were a shinny player.”
“Have you never heard of Rudolf Nureyev?”
“Who’s he play for?”
“He’s a ballet dancer!”
“A ballet dancer.”
“So, when Killebrew jumps up in the air and spins around—”
“The St. Louis Whirlygig.”
“—we call it the Nureyev.”
“I see.”
“King, I was wondering how you feel about the recent controversy concerning Manny ‘The Wizard’ Oz?”
“The man’s been dead since ’thirty-seven, Ben. You telling me he’s still managing to get into trouble?”
“Well, there’s been an official protest over the fact that he has not been put into the new Canadian Sports Hall of Fame.”
“Manfred isn’t in the Sports Hall of Fame?”
“No, sir.”
“I didn’t know.” I shrug my shoulders, shake my head. “That explains why Blue keeps losing his goat.”
“Sir?”
“I just assumed Manny was in there.”
“You feel he deserves to be?”
“Manfred was—” I feel quite odd. “You see, Benny, I am King of the Ice. But Manfred could have been King, except … I never thought that they wouldn’t even vote him into the Sports Hall of Fame. I never thought he’d come out of it with nothing.”
“It’s presumed to be because of his lifestyle.”
“How’s that? Because of the booze?”
“Yes.”
I nod, lace my hands together and play a little Here’s the church, here’s the steeple.
“But I take it you are in favor of the induction of Clay Clinton?”
“I suppose. He gave me one hell of a whack to the bollockers when we were boys.”
“His main contribution to Canadian sports was this building, and the glory teams of the fifties and sixties.”
“The glory teams were my doing, for Jesus’ sake. I was director of hockey operations. Clay was too busy with those young fillies he used to squire about.”
“So you don’t feel he belongs there.”
“Don’t be stuffing words down my gullet, Jimson. Clinton did a lot for hockey. But Manfred … He danced like flute music. He was big as a mountain, but he moved like the wind. And tough? Lordy Lord. Him and Lalonde collided and made a sound like thunder. The arena quivered and the ice cracked. Pandemonium. The world was naught but chaos and ruination. The air turned heavy with power and fury. The—”
“That’s all we have time for. Good night, King.”
The lights go down.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE RINK THAT THE BROTHERS of St. Alban the Martyr built was round. Hockey rinks are curved in the corners, as you likely know, but basically they should be squared. Our rink was a circle.
One night, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t usually have that problem (I do nowadays, in my dotage—I have actually snoozed for periods of seven seconds and been wide awake for the rest of the night) but that evening, there in the reformatory, I was restless. There was a full moon, and it filled the window across from my cot, and for some strange reason I could make out all the mountains and craters. The moon was a strange color, too, a silver like a nickel had been flipped into the sky.
Then I heard the sounds, the soft windy sweeping of hockey sticks across ice. At first I thought I was dreaming, but then I recalled that I never did dream to speak of. I moved across to the window, soft on my feet so as not to wake the other delinquents. The moon was so bright that I do believe I squinted up my eyes. I have never seen it like that since.
I could see the rink, and I could see the shadows moving on it. The monks were playing a little midnight shinny. It quickened my heart. I threw on some clothes and flew outside.
There were five of them. I watched from a distance at first. I couldn’t understand what sort of game they were playing. The action would move erratically within the circle, and sometimes the five would split so that three men would rush two, or four would rush one, and then sometimes the five of them would move in cahoots, the idea seeming to be to achieve a certain prettiness of passing. Then a man would break from the pack, and another man would chase him around the circle, and as quick as that happened they’d rejoin the three in the center. There were no goal nets on the ice. Just five men, a puck, and a lot of moonlight. They played in silence. I moved closer.
Simon the Ugly was the easiest to pick out, because he was the biggest. He was dancin
g, jumping into the air, and sometimes I could see his monstrous frame silhouetted against the trout silver moon. Theodore the Slender cut a shadow so fine that it was hard to pick out, but I could tell him from the quick, precise movements of his twiggy arms as he took a shot. And Andrew the Fireplug, it was he who was likeliest to make a break for the boards, to drift like gunsmoke around them. I watched him scoot off with the puck, and then I watched a man slip up easily behind Andrew and relieve him of the rubber. That was Isaiah the Blind. I could scarcely credit it. Playing goaler is one thing—I mean, at least Isaiah was standing still between the pipes, and you could always convince yourself that he was simply the luckiest son of a bee ever—but here he was skating around like a madman, stealing pucks, passing and receiving, and the moonlight was sitting on his dead eyes like it does on the still surface of a lake. I crouched down behind the boards. Brother Isaiah had an aerial maneuver that made the Whirlygig look like tumbling down a flight of stairs, he had dekes and fakes that would have baffled God! Whatever the hell game they were playing—and I never did come close to figuring it—Brother Isaiah was the best. In fact, Brother Isaiah was the best I’ve ever seen, bar none. That includes me, Duane Killebrew, and the fifth man out on that moon-washed rink, Manny Oz.
TWENTY-NINE
WE ARE SITTING IN THE POTBELLY LOUNGE of the Toronto Gardens. There’s me and Blue here, the Claire thing and Iain, and we also have Lonny Chandrian. I’m recounting a bit of the personal history, telling them about the wild New York Amerks, but no one is paying much attention. Claire is sort of listening, but he find this sports stuff as interesting as wallpaper. Lonny Chandrian is looking consternated. Iain and Blue, those boys is boozing.
Then Duane Killebrew appears beside the table. He looks to have on three jackets, and they all seem to be four or five sizes too large, and are mostly comprised of buttons and zippers. He wears his hair the same as my wife, Chloe, did.
Lonny Chandrian is on his feet in a second. “Duane!” he explodes. “Please! Join us!”
“Thanks.” Duane jumps into the seat beside me.
His arrival has set the lounge buzzing. Over in the corner is a clutch of young girls, huddled together and staring Duane’s way. They are about fifteen years of age and they have not yet tamed their laughter. Duane Killebrew doesn’t seem to know they’re there. He orders a beer.
“You done good, boy,” I tell him.
Duane nods.
“This man is Blue Hermann. He was one of the finest sports-writers that ever worked. He chronicled the rise of the King. He’s seen them all, Duane, and he can tell you, you don’t got to take a backseat to nobody.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir.”
“Hi, Duane.” Blue Hermann, I’m sorry to say, has somewhat the same aspect as the schoolgirls. He lets loose with something alarmingly close to a giggle and shakes Killebrew’s hand.
“Have you met the Claire thing? Claire Redford, from the ginger ale people?”
“Oh, yes. We’ve talked on the phone. How’s it going?”
I swear to Jesus the Claire thing bats his eyelashes!
“That down there is Iain, from the home.”
Iain laboriously raises an arm and gives a little wave. “Harya!”
Lonny Chandrian says, “Boy, oh, boy, were you ever good. Mr. Leary has been saying how much he enjoyed it when you did the Nureyev.”
“I enjoyed it,” I put in, “but that there is a St. Louis Whirlygig.”
Duane considers something. “Not exactly.”
“Say what?”
“A St. Louis Whirlygig, you cross your legs and get the push from the right foot. In a Nureyev, you keep your foot back. You don’t get as much height, but it’s quicker.” Duane-o has been demonstrating all this out in the aisle, on a toned-down scale, of course.
“Technical niceties of no import!” I shout. “The point of a St. Louis Whirlygig is that it happens up in the air! How you get there don’t matter squat!”
Duane sits down and takes a sip of his newly arrived brew. “I have seven airborne maneuvers,” he tells me.
“I only had one,” I tell him. “Leaving the ground.”
One of the young girls comes over for an autograph. She’s got a color eight-by-ten of Duane. In the picture, he’s got no shirt on, and he’s got his thumbs in his belt loops, tugging down his jeans. Any more tugging and he’d be parading the pecnoster. Duane-o signs the photograph for the girl, and he’s very nice about it. He asks what her name is, that sort of thing. Manny used to do that, too, except he could be so plodding and painstaking with his penmanship that people were telling him, “Never mind what my name is, just write yours.” Part of the reason Manfred started calling his last name just Oz is that it cut down on autographing time by about forty percent.
Me and Duane get back to talking about hockey. I tell him about the greats and the near greats. I tell him of the time I pretzeled Howie Morenz, of the donnybrooks I had with Cleghorn and Eddie Shore. I point out some of my better scars. I got a three-incher on my calf, so I hike up my trouser leg and show it to him. Duane rolls up his pants, too. He’s got the one knee there, looks like nothing I ever seen. Inside it’s mostly plastic and metal. I wish they’d had that in my day, because that’s what ended my career, you know, a busted knee, and I wish to God they could have plugged it up with some metal and plastic and made it good as new.
My spirit was busted right along with my knee. The peculiar thing is—ironic, as Blue Hermann would have it—I didn’t break my knee on the ice. After all I’d been through playing-wise, the age of thirty-two found me hale and hearty, if a little uglier than I might have been otherwise. It was Christmas Day. I was sitting in the kitchen of the Sherwood apartment on St. Nicholas Street. I got up to go to the John, and quick as a wink I was pitched forward and my kneecap crushed up on the floor. I lay there filled with more pain than I’d ever known. I didn’t scream or yell, because Chloe was out with the children (tobogganing they were, they’d both gotten toboggans for presents), and there was no one around to hear me. And as I lay there, a little red fire truck rolled slowly in front of my eyes. I grabbed it and went to hurl it across the room. Something caught my eye. I didn’t even know he could write—he was only a five-year-old, and one I’d never heard speak more than seven words—but the tyke had taken a laundry pen and quite nicely printed his full name across the side of the fire truck. CLARENCE ARMSTRONG LEARY. I lost consciousness with the toy clutched in my hand.
Iain stands up. It is strenuous and newborn coltish, as if Iain had observed people standing up but had never attempted it his ownself. “I got to make a telephone call,” Iain tells us. “Transmogrification is starting. I have to phone my personal physician and have him arrest further development.”
“Oh, dear,” says the Claire thing. “This sounds serious.”
“It’s ugly,” admits Iain. All of a sudden Iain finds his legs, skipping and hopping, even spinning little pirouettes so that he doesn’t collide with tables. Except one of the pirouettes is a little late in coming, and Iain rams his hip up against a table corner. He knocks a drink into the lap of an overweight businessman. The businessman makes a lunge for Iain, but the boy’s already careening away.
It was my wife Chloe’s opinion that I never forgave Clarence, but he was a willful, headstrong, contrary lad. At the age of nine he was caught distributing filthy stories at his school! Can you imagine that, him becoming a pornographer so early in life? Clarence had run off the stories on a Gestetner and was selling them at a nickel a pop. I’m not saying the boy wasn’t enterprising. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was some blood relation to his godfather Clinton. He had no interest in sports, Clarence, except he liked to skate, but he skated like a girl! It is a most distasteful sight, a lad skating like a girlie, arms held up like seal flippers, the short sickly sweet strokes of the legs.
Clarence quit school at sixteen, insisting that he wanted to become a writer. Well, sir, I know the sort of life a writer leads. Wa
sn’t I a familiar of Blue Hermann’s, one of the finest newspapermen ever? Didn’t I see Blue drink, smoke, and work his way through the Dictionary of Medical Diseases all the way to the letter W? But Clarence—Rance as he called himself—was determined. During his late teens and early twenties he wrote a huge book, must have been four thousand pages, and of course no one would publish that. Then he became a beatnik and wrote peculiar poetry, and he had one long poem published and he was arrested and charged with obscenity! Can you imagine his mother’s grief? All right, I tell a lie, his mother seemed to think there was some merit in this poem thing, “The Stink of Grace.” But I am here to tell you that every four-letter word you ever heard was in there, and there was so much sex going on that it made me dizzy. I was a laughingstock down at the Gardens, you know. The trial was in the papers every day, and they always said, “Rance Leary, son of hockey great Percival Leary.” It was big news, because famous writers—pornographers too, if you want my opinion—came to testify on Clarence’s behalf. One of these mooks had even been awarded the Nobel Prize, some Swedish fellow who made six suicide attempts daily. He said “The Stink of Grace” was a beautiful work of art. Now have a tug on the other one so I don’t walk around in circles.
Clarence was acquitted, but I never spoke to him again. He racked up his sports coupe on a telephone pole in Vermont. I don’t know what business he had in Vermont, other than reckless drunk driving.
So I had plenty not to forgive Rance for, the least of which was leaving a toy fire truck lying around our St. Nicholas Street apartment. And, if you ask me, Chloe could never forgive Clifford for being a big gormless oaf, which is what he is. Chloe had high hopes for our offspring, based on what, I’ll never know, she went on and on about how they would be both athletic and artistic. Well, there you go, Chloe. Clifford played some high-school football, mostly because he was so big and fat. Clarence wrote smut, except for one time he wrote an episode for The Twilight Zone. That was pretty strange, but it was semirespectable. What happened in the show was, an old man and a young boy bickered for the whole half hour, and then at the end you find out that the two of them are stuck in some peculiar kind of time-warp affair, and they’re really both the same person.
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