King Leary

by Paul Quarrington

  THIRTY-TWO

  LONNY CHANDRIAN EXCUSES HIMSELF (executing a sort of half bow, a servile habit left over from his head usher days) and rushes off, telling us he’ll be right back.

  Iain comes down to my end of the table. If I touched that nappy head of his, I’m sure a spark about a foot long would leap up my arm.

  By the by, about five or ten minutes back, a fellow Iain knew came into the Potbelly Lounge. This mook may as well have had Fugitive from the Law tattooed across his forehead, that’s how furtive he was. This desperado sidewinded into the establishment, and he and Iain effected some business dealings. From where I sat, it looked mighty one-sided. Iain gave the mook most of his money and received a handful of white beans. I heard that story before. It’s up the beanstalk with the lad.

  “King, King, O mighty King,” Iain says—his blue eyes have a glaze like metal—“we’re going across the street to the Oxford. Yes, we’re embarking on a crawl. My God, I love a good crawl. Up and down the boulevards, searching in all the nooks and crannies. Boldly going where no man has gone before. Remember, we mustn’t interfere with any of the life-forms. No, no. Keep your golf shoes on, ladies and gentlemen, they are feeding the lizards alcohol!” Iain giggles and takes a pull at his bottle of beer. He shoves it rudely toward my wrinkled puss. “Care for a tug at the witch’s tit, my liege?”

  “A fine thing,” I tell him. “You’re supposed to be looking after me.”

  “I am, I am,” Iain says, “I’m looking after your spiritual self.”

  “I’m game,” croaks old Blue. “I’ll go on a pub crawl.”

  “Hey,” says Duane Killebrew, “tomorrow’s my day off. I got all night.”

  “Weary as I am,” says Claire, “I must look after my charges.”

  “This is excellent!” Iain screams. “Mobilization!”

  “I am agèd and infirm!” says I. “I shouldn’t be kept out past eight-thirty or nine. Here it is almost eleven.”

  “Oh, King mine,” says Iain, “what good is your health if you don’t live?” Iain presses his lips to my wrinkled brow.

  “You are drunk.”

  Iain slams his fist down on the tabletop, hard and quick. Then he quiets as quick as he maddened. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he calls out, “Mr. Ray Charles!” Iain closes his eyes and starts throwing his body sideways, back and forth. “ ‘It’s crying time again,’ ” he moans. “Everybody, sing along.”

  Lonny Chandrian reappears. “You know, Mr. Clinton …” Lonny always had a dopey way of saying that name, separating it in half and biting it off with his too-big front teeth, “Clinton.” “Mr. Clinton had a secret place down in the west wing.”

  “How do you know that?” I ask him.

  “Urp.” Lonny looks guilty. Mind you, I did ask him that question pretty churlishly. “When we rewired for the new scoreboard they had to install some generators and electrical equipment and …” Lonny shrugs. “We had to put the stuff somewhere, so one of the contractors said, well, it’s hollow back here, so we knocked down the wall, Mr. Leary.”

  Iain is still rocking sideways and singing. “You there! You in the three-piece with the woman who has enameled hair! Please, sing along!”

  “No dead bodies back there, I hope?” I ask Lonny.

  Lonny never does seem to realize that I’m making a joke. “No, sir. There wasn’t very much of anything. Just some old underwear and newspapers. A couple of empty champagne bottles. And this.” Chandrian reaches into his jacket pocket and extracts the big crucifix, the one Manfred handed to me so many years back. “I thought maybe you might want it, Mr. Leary.”

  Iain catches sight of the cross, covers his eyes, and screams at the top of his voice.

  Lonny hands the thing to me. It feels so heavy that for a second I’m certain it must be a different crucifix, but as I lay my fingertips to it, I’m filled with a familiar sensation. How in the world did Clay Bors Clinton get ahold of this thing? The only answer being, somewhere along the line he stole it from me. That wouldn’t be overly difficult, being as I never could recall what exactly I did with the thing. But why would Clay want it? That question hits me so hard that I have to say it aloud, like it’s been smacked out of my gut. “Why?”

  “What’s the matter, Leary?” asks Blue Hermann. “You got that old-time religion?”

  It’s all of a sudden suffocating in the Potbelly Lounge. This was the favorite of Clay Clinton’s haunts. Many was the time I sat in here and waited for the man, often for hours on end. I fear he may walk in suddenly, just like he used to, wink at me with those steely gray eyes of his. “Percival, Percival, I’ve just porked the prettiest poppet!”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I tell the table. “Let’s go to the Oxford. Anywhere.” I’m putting on my overcoat. Iain doesn’t even realize that he is supposed to be helping me, on account of I am agèd and infirm.

  “All right, kiddies,” says the Claire thing, “I want everyone to join hands and follow me.”

  We hit the street. The Claire thing moves to the middle of Charlton and stops traffic like a cop. Our ragged parade slowly moves across. In the basement of the Oxford Hotel is a tavern for the riffraff. I been there before with Clay Bors Clinton. It’s called the Boiler Room, for two reasons: one, it actually is a boiler room, at any rate the ceiling runs thick with pipes and such, and two, the house speciality is boilermakers, whereby the bartender takes a shot glass full of whiskey and sinks it to the bottom of a big draft beer mug. It’s the kind of confection that appeals to those particularly bent on intoxication, and the Boiler Room has long had a reputation for being a rough-and-tumble kind of place.

  We walk down six steps, through the double doors, and the first thing I see, sitting in a corner with his mouth wrapped around a boilermaker, is the gormless boy Clifford.

  He’s all alone at a big table—a sight that weakens my knees for a moment—and I cross over to him. Clifford looks up and sets his mug on the table.

  “Poppa,” he says.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here?” Clifford’s hair is sprouting every which way, and he hasn’t shaved for a couple of days. The tiny whiskers are pushing through his chubby face all gray and white. “It’s King Leary Night at the Gardens! What was I supposed to do, stay away?” Clifford sees the people behind me and attempts a smile. It spreads out long and clumsy across his face. “Hey, hey, hey!” he says. “The King and his court. Mr. Hermann. Iain. Lonny Chandrian. Um, some tall guy. And, what the hell do you know, Duane fucking Killebrew! Hey, Duane-o!” shouts my son. “Sit down here and kill a brew!”

  “You been drinking, boy?”

  “Jesus Christ, Poppa,” sighs Clifford, “do you think I’m this big an arsehole all the time?”

  “This is my son Cliff,” I tell those who don’t know.

  “Have a seat,” instructs Clifford. “They make this drink here—it’s called a boilbreaker. It gets you gunned.”

  We sit down with Clifford. (All except for Iain, who races off to play pinball. He rams a waiter and sends boilermakers every which way.) The whole crowded bar is interested in our arrival, because of Killebrew, of course.

  Clifford orders a lot of those boilermakers, one for everybody at the table. I don’t drink mine, but the others down their drinks and the drunkenness level is upped by about twenty-five percent.

  “King Leary Night at the Gardens,” marvels my son Clifford.

  “They’ve had them before,” I remark. “It’s not like this is the first time I’ve been so honored.”

  “You know what else today is?” asks Clifford. “Rance’s birthday.”

  “Uh-yeah.” The big teevee screen over in the corner is showing highlights from the hockey game. I watch Killebrew execute the St. Louis Whirlygig. I get a feeling like someone is playing cat’s cradle with my innards. There’s me on the screen. Dropping the ceremonial puck. The camera zooms in for a close-up. I am a most unsightly man. The King waves to the multitudes. Now, they must be
hard up for news, they’re going all historical. They show old footage of the Gardens being erected. There’s me and Clay in a news clip. Clay is laughing. What in the world did that man find so damned amusing?

  “Want to know something funny?” asks Cliffy. He’s talking to the whole table, his voice as loud as a tomcat in a trashcan. “You know what they used to call me at work? For a nickname, like? Except I didn’t like it, and I asked them not to call me that, but they did anyway? They used to call me Prince. See, it’s funny. My dad is the King, so I must be the Prince.” Clifford shrugs and sips on his boilermaker. “I’m pretty fucking old and fat for a prince. Rance, now, Rance was a prince.”

  “Why the hell do you keep going on about Clarence? These nice people don’t want to hear about Clarence. Talk about hockey or shut up.”

  Iain returns, raises his boilermaker, and drains off about half of it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announces, “Mr. Lou Rawls!”

  “Talk hockey,” mutters Cliff. He nods at Killebrew. “Good game, Duane-o.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I never could play hockey. Too fat.”

  “You could have shed some poundage,” says I. “It’s no big deal, Clifford. Just don’t eat so much.”

  “I tried to, Poppa. Once I drank nothing except fruit juice for a whole frigging week! I gained a fucking pound!” Clifford laughs with little joy. “Rance could play hockey.”

  “He couldn’t skate right! I tried to show him, and he couldn’t do it. He pushed off with his hind leg, he didn’t move side to side. He skated like a girl, goddamn it.”

  Duane Killebrew says, “One time, my old man …” Duane-o shakes his head, a strange half smile on his face. “I’m playing peewee, right, and ever since I was like eight or nine I’ve been big news, and there’s newspapermen at all my games and shit, but my old man, he was never impressed. Like to him, I was nothing special.”

  “Please, everyone,” says Iain, “sing along.”

  “And this one game—I’m maybe eleven, playing two tiers above me, so all the other guys are fourteen—I scored fifteen goals. Fifteen fucking goals. That’s one every four minutes. The final score is fifteen-one. Right? And the old man gets all over my case, because he says I was dragging my ass when they scored their one lousy point. Jesus.” Killebrew hits his boilermaker.

  “Yeah!” explodes Clifford.

  “I said, fucking sing!”

  “I never did anything like that,” I mutter.

  “Maybe not,” Clifford admits, but then he sticks one of his short, fat fingers at me. “But you were never impressed, Pops. Like to you, we were nothing special.”

  Iain stands and waves a boilermaker in the air. “Leary, as your doctor, I suggest a drinky-poo. Tenderbar, bring the King, his majestic Leary-ness, a boilermaker!”

  “I don’t need a drink.” My skin has turned clammy. I think I might faint. “I need for everyone to stop talking damn foolishness!”

  “Ladies and gentlemen …”

  “Uh-oh,” says I.

  Clay Bors Clinton appears in the barroom. I can feel my heart rattling in my chest. Clay is grinning like he’s been exchanging jokes with the Almighty Creator. Clinton waves, calls out, “Hello, Percy, my precious! Long time no see!”

  I can only summon the smallest of smiles.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I REMEMBER THAT AFTERNOON AT THE FORREST, me and Little All Bright Peterson were playing gin. I was demolishing Little All Bright (Alvin, his right name was), because I was by way of being a gin-playing genius. He was no kind of a genius at all, Little All Bright, except for he was pretty good at luring women up to our hotel room and making me stand outside in the hallway for hours on end. Be that as it might be, on this particular day, early in the hockey-playing year, my second season with the loathsome Amerks—I’d been home for the summer, and impregnated Chloe with Rance—me and Little All Bright were simply playing cards.

  Speaking of Chloe, she was sorely afflicted with lumbago. Much of her time she spent in bed—her tiny fluttering heart usually keeping her there, anyway—gingerly propped up on pillows and sofa cushions. Impregnating her with Clarence was no easy matter, my friend. It was done amidst caterwauling and confusion. Sometimes I wonder if that had anything to do with the way Clarence turned out, a scuzzy pornographic type who seldom bathed.

  So Dummy Bakker came running into the room, intent on telling us something. Now, the funny thing here is that Dummy Bakker was a deaf-mute, and aside from waving his hands in the air to let us know something was up, he did little more than perplex us for the better part of five minutes. Dummy kept grabbing at his own throat as if to strangulate himself. Whatever he was trying to communicate had more to do with me than with Little All Bright, that’s as much as I could gather. Then White Wings O’Brien came into the room. He was ashen and shaking and crossing himself and looked like he needed extreme unction. “Sweet Mary, Mother of God,” he whimpered, cracked as per usual, “they’ve come to get me.”

  “What goes on around here?” I demanded.

  Then I heard a thud, the unmistakable sound of someone walking full tilt and oblivious into a wall.

  “Hold on here.” I turned to Dummy Bakker (I’d sooner talk to a deaf-mute than to the besotted White Wings). “Is there a bunch of monks out there?”

  Dummy was watching my mouth work, and when I said that word “monks” he clapped his hands together.

  I jumped up from the card table and flew to the hallway. I ran into Simon the Ugly and it was somewhat akin to hitting a brick wall. Except a brick wall didn’t catch you on the rebound and commence to squeeze the air out of you under the pretense of administering a joyful hug. “Percival!” said Simon the Ugly.

  “Look, Isaiah,” said Brother Andrew, who had become an even squatter fireplug since I’d last seen him, “it’s Percival.”

  “I can see that it’s Percival!” shouted Brother Isaiah. This was a keen stunt as his milky blue bossed eyes weren’t even pointed in my direction. “He looks just jim dandy.”

  Theodore the Slender was apparently on a diet, and it was a few moments before I noticed he was there at all. Theodore was holding a hotel key, and he waved it in the air. “Let’s find our room,” he said. “We have plenty of time to talk to young Leary the arsonist.” (Brother Theodore never was one to let you forget your misdeeds.)

  “What’s your room number?” I asked.

  The thin man examined the key and read off, “Seven eighteen.”

  “Seven eighteen? They put you on this floor?”

  “Surely,” nodded Isaiah the Blind. “We asked for the floor with all the hockey players. We are, after all, hockey players.” Brother Isaiah grinned in a manner that, if it weren’t for his being a man of the cloth, I would be forced to describe as shit kicking.

  “Yeah, but …” I stammered.

  At this moment a door flew open and Voiceless Richie Reagan came out in pursuit of the big blonde bimbo who was in accordance with hotel policy. She barreled down the hallway in our direction. Most of us were able to scatter, but Brother Isaiah stood his ground in the middle of the corridor. The bimbo smacked into him and spun him like a top. Then Voiceless Richie hit from the other side and reversed him. Brother Isaiah the Blind was still grinning when he finally came to a stop.

  “Seems like a nice place,” he told us.

  Now, I don’t think it was any mere coincidence that those Brothers happened to be there that night, the night when Manny and I finally squared off against each other, jousting as it were, head-to-head. Mind you, I had played against Manny before, but only when he’d been on the bottle, and those nights Manny couldn’t usually muster much energy or ginger. We tended to avoid each other during those games, and if the script should call for us to bump into each other, we would do so with no particular enthusiasm. Manfred was appointed captain of the Paddies after Clay traded me, but Clinton was forced to relieve him of the big C after some drunken shenanigans. Manfred wasn’t even the Paddies’ best goal s
corer at that time. Some young mick named Bobiash was. That’s how sadly things had deteriorated, the Paddies were without a heart and their main man had the name of Bobiash. I don’t know what kind of name that is, but I know it ain’t Irish.

  One time we played up in Ottawa, and as I skated out onto the ice I heard a voice calling, “Go you Lucky Number Nine!” Janey was sitting front row, her feet up on the railing. She’d been drinking. Her skirt had ridden back and I could have seen her frillies except that my stomach buckled at the thought of looking. I toyed with the blade of my stick, scraping up bits of snow and ice. Janey had a purplish blue eye and she spun me some yarn about how she’d walked into a door. Manny whirled out of the dressing room like an autumn leaf. “Hey, Percy!” he called, a crippled smile on his face. Veins were bursting in his eyes.

  I sidled over to Kip Meaghen, one of our biggest defensemen. “If he comes down the boards,” I whispered, “take him out hard.”

  When Manny did come down he rode Meaghen into the boards so heavily that Kip concussed and didn’t wake up for three days.

  But Manfred’s game was gone. He couldn’t fancy-skate, he couldn’t pass, and every shot he took at the net just bounced pitifully off the goaler.

  I had no reason to believe that things would be different that night. I was surprised to see Patty Boyle put Manfred out for the opening face-off (the usual strategy was to hold the hung over Ozikean in reserve, awaiting moments of desperation), and there was something odd, boyish and teasing, in the smile that Manny gave me as I skated towards him.

  “Ho,” he said lowly.

  “Hey, Manny.” I hunkered myself down in the circle. I always had a unique style when taking face-offs, getting lower than most players. “How’s things?”

  “Good, Percy.” Manfred squared up, and the referee came to drop the puck.

  Well, I won the face-off, for all the good it did me. For some portion of a second I was in possession of the puck, then Manny applied the full force of his weight and almost sent me into the crowd. Ozikean started up the ice. That first rush, it was like everyone was too stunned to move. Manny fired on Shrimp Worthers, and the Shrimp just ducked. Ottawa had a one-naught lead, and Manny had an NHL record for the fastest goal, something like four and a half seconds. (Duane-o got that one last year, scoring in two-point-whatever seconds on an overly zealous French Canadian Catholic who was giving himself a few extra passes with the Holy Cross. Manfred himself used to do that, but he abandoned the procedure somewhere along the line.)