Lorrie Griffin grabbed the boot, put it on his stick and began to run about the rink with it. It was a great victory for the Griffins.
I think that the worst thing Lorrie did that afternoon was not to steal the boot or refuse to give the boot back while Garth was chasing him about, slipping on his brown, well-tied, immaculately groomed, neat and clean shoe, but that he stood in the centre of the rink and began to wiggle.
No one can stand a victorious wiggler.
Garth was not the most popular boy in our group — but he did have the right to freedom of belief in Santa. I don’t think Darren said, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Or express it in quite those terms. I think he said, “Okay then — I’ll get a rock.”
People sometimes forget that “defending to the death” might mean putting someone else to death. Darren rushed over, hit the wiggler in the eye with his fist. All of this lasted about a minute.
Garth grabbed his boot, and we all trudged over the snowbank and down the path, with chunks of ice and stones flailing about us.
They knew Michael was trudging his way into their territory each Saturday. But they needed some kind of a plan. A kind of attack from the rear. A kind of worry on Michael’s part. A kind of — Tobias. They needed a Tobias. The weak link. The Achilles heel of Michael.
But they didn’t know this is what they needed until they saw Tobias dawdling behind Michael one Saturday. He kept getting farther behind, as Michael rushed door to door to get the paper delivered. Finally Tobias had fallen back and was out of sight.
Michael went back to get him. He was leaning by a pole, looking up and down the street. “You wait here — right by this pole — and don’t move — I’ll be back for you,” Michael said.
Michael turned, and then turning back gave Tobias a five-cent piece. “This is for yer help.”
Michael never intended to go home that way. And he had not forgotten why. No one was going to bother him while he was delivering the Star Weekly. They were only going to show their heads afterwards.
Today he had to go back. For Tobias. By the pole. Around the corner.
He saw the Griffins at their rink.
The Griffin rink was far smoother on one side than the other, and it sloped high at the left corner so that the ball or, at times, the puck was always taking off and being lost. The Griffins had given Michael the idea of using those railway ties, which were lying about the tracks. But it was Michael who had managed to get them before the Griffins.
The Griffin rink was hidden from the road, so you could only see the tops of the kid’s hats as you walked by, and now and then the grey ball hitting the top of an old aluminum shed and bouncing off into the shrubs.
You knew Lorrie Griffin by the long, green tassel on his cap, and you knew David Griffin by the yellow knob, like an eraser, over the butt of his stick.
Michael saw that stick with the yellow knob, the tasselled hat as he walked down. It was late in the day, and there was not a whisper from the hockey rink. Smoke peeled against the white sky. Everything was quiet. An old shattered goalie stick lay in the middle of the side lane, halfway up, deserted by someone.
And then the Griffins came out on the street. There may have been four or five of them.
As always, people who “double up on a friend,” to use Albert Camus’ expression, have a sense that they are not doing wrong because their purpose is more glorious than their method. Their action only fulfils this noble purpose.
The Griffins now thought they were very clever. They didn’t think at all that they were being deceitful. Michael was cut off from Tobias, and Tobias was patiently waiting for him.
Michael had now stolen their railway ties. Michael had kissed one of the bucktoothed Griffin girls at the movie. Michael had set up Lorrie.
It would be nice to say that he went through them all. But he could not do that. They had their hockey sticks, and gloves, and he was standing with his empty paper-sack.
Lorrie began to wiggle, swing his stick.
Michael began to back away.
They began to run after him, and he led them on a wild goose chase. But first he ran up the side lane to pick up the broken hockey stick. He turned and swung it as they came. And this cooled their enthusiasm just a little.
So there was a Mexican stand-off without Mexicans. And here they were — Michael on one side, backing up slowly towards the edge of the woods. The five Griffins trying to surround him. They all got in a huddle and whispered — Lorrie saying, “You go that way and I’ll come around by the shed, and you go over near the rink and come up over the —”
“Where?”
“Yous come up over the rink and come at him from that side and I’ll —”
As they whispered this, Michael stood watching them, his coat opened, his chest half bare, his pug nose like a boxer’s.
“Well are ya coming or what?” Michael said.
“We’re comin — we’re comin — just a minute or so — you wait.”
“I’ll wait.”
As they whispered, a lone car passed them by. Perhaps every one of us has experienced this, as an adult. We turn a corner on a neighbourhood street and see a stand-off between children. It is where the universal rules of bravery and deceit are being played out, forever and ever, again and again.
This was what was happening as Garth and his parents drove by just then in their spotlessly kept Ford Mercury.
Garth had given up swearing for Lent — but Garth had never swore in his life. Garth looked out the window at them. “Those are the boys there mommie — those are those boys there.”
His parents never knew that they sprayed snow over the shoes of the boy being sacrificed for their son’s beliefs. The Griffins stood to the side to let the car pass. And that gave Michael his chance to disappear into the woods.
The Griffins took off after him. They ran through the snow and bushes as it was growing dark. They chased him as if he were a fox amid hounds. He could hear their shouts to one side of him or the other. You picture a Johnny Reb in the wilderness campaign of 1864 cut off from his troops, and trying to get back across the shattered lines — while the Yanks just keep coming.
Where was Michael going?
Well there was only one place he could go to. He was trying to make it down to the new King George Highway. At least there he would be closer to his own turf.
And he had to make sure he was far enough ahead of them that he could make his cut around them in the open field.
Night was coming on and there was the smell of metal and tar from the railway tracks.
The trouble was the Griffins were on his right and as soon as he stepped out they would see him. He stood up to his knees in the snow, leaning against an aspen, looking down over the silent side lane.
Every time he stopped walking, he could hear the crunching in the snow behind him. But now that had silenced too. Everything had become still — and the only example I can give is the one you feel when you are hunting deer. Everyone has hunted deer of course. Well then — think of the hour and a half between 4:10 and about 5:30. The woods suddenly, unmistakably and quite mysteriously stop. Its heart stills, no sound, no movement. There is an inevitable sadness to this hour. So still, so silent. It is the hour when the deer are beginning to move for the night. This then is what the woods were like. This is what it was like for Michael. He, too, would have to make a move.
Below him sat the Griffins’ rink. And snow began to fall, with the air still sharp and smelling of metal. Suddenly Michael began. The snow crunched again, and he made a dash across the open field that led down to Hawkenbury’s paddock. And of course the hounds were on him.
They came from both sides, and made a stab at getting him, throwing their hockey sticks in the air, that hurtled by him as he ran.
The lone mare in the paddock turned and the roar was on. Michael faced his adversaries with his broken stick, and picked up theirs to throw back at them. And turning aga
in, making it past the mare, who snorted and thrust ahead, he jumped the fence and was gone.
He got home after dark, his paper-bag torn and his face bleeding. He sat on the cot for a moment catching his breath, and then he asked his old Gram where Tobias was.
“Ain’t he with you?” she asked.
The room was dark. Across the lonely river the snow fell.
Michael went back out. He walked past the Foleys’ and turned again towards Skytown, past the old Shell garage and Hawkenbury’s friendless barn.
Tobias was leaning against the pole, sound asleep, waiting for his brother. The five cents he clutched in his small hand, like a pint of gold.
THIRTEEN
I HAVE TRAVELLED THE WORLD, after a fashion. I have looked for hockey scores amid the pictures of football heroes in U.S.A. Today, have read the thoughts on hockey by Sports Illustrated, and have watched hockey players in England do their skating sprints, from blueline to centre line and back again.
In the universities where a certain love of sports is often suspect, I have listened to the love of basketball and baseball replace my love over the years. Where the idea of an American basketball dream team of 1992 sent Canadian professors into a state of ecstacy — those same professors who often did not want to hear my complaints about the failure to promote our own dream team in Hockey.
We did not have it. And for years we could not manage it, and now our players are part of the melting pot. So Darryl Sittler’s son plays for Team U.S.A. Bobby Hull’s son, Brett, is an American. The melting pot has stirred us in.
The training grounds have shifted. There is something more collegiate about the players today — and those colleges are in the States. The state university programs have promoted their own hockey with a vengeance.
Most of the players I knew never got to university.
I travelled to Virginia and, at night listening to the sports broadcast, I hear, after the talk about football, baseball, basketball and tennis — I hear a Canadian voice, and I glance at the screen. Some youngster from way up in Canada who cannot give his dream away — holds onto it as you would a pint of gold, and has driven down in his second-hand car, with his hockey equipment in the back seat for a tryout, in this small unassuming city near the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“I’m just glad the coach has faith in me and is giving me a try.” He talks about being on the injured list, with a torn ligament all last year. That he got waylaid, failed to make the grade in some IHL team — but now he feels better. He has been skating with the team. He is about 25, and you know that everyone has given up on him, except himself. And I think again of Phillip Luff. Or perhaps Sean O’Sullivan. I don’t know.
There is always a place where Canadians go when they fail. It is to another place — somewhere. In Virginia maybe, or in the U.S. Midwest. I have seen them.
In 1977 they laced up their skates in an arena in Barcelona. My wife and I watched them on television in a bar in Denia.
The European clubs. The Scottish hockey league. For some the dreams refuse to go away.
They are damned — not unlike Sisyphus — to do what the gods have condemned them to. The boulder is heavy and like Sisyphus their only relief is, as Camus says, that their fate can be overcome by scorn. Scorn for all the tricks the world has played upon them.
The “What ifs?” might someday stop. Like they did finally for Phillip Luff and dozens of others. Somewhere in an arena in Europe, a friend of my youth, playing in a small league in Northern Italy, suddenly thinks that the “What ifs?” did not only pertain to himself. They pertained as well to all of those other children, hopeless in youth, who sometimes hung about the bakery for a piece of bread on those long ago winter days before they went to school. The “What ifs?” pertained to the Michaels as well.
And in a way, in perhaps the best way, the “What ifs?” can never end. For something you have lived for will die if they do.
Phillip Luff could not let them end. For their ending would destroy his father, and his father could not allow them to end, for their ending would make his son ordinary, like everyone else.
Phillip tried out for team after team to go to the World Championship, the Olympics. He was always the last one cut, or nearly the last one cut. Or perhaps someone else was called up, just after he had made the cut, and they had to let him go. The coach told him he was one of the best players he had seen in a long while. He would secretly hope that Bunny Ahearne blacklist any Canadian player who even sniffed a National League bench, in order for him to have one more chance.
His father kept trying to figure things out, make contacts that were getting harder and harder to make. Until Phillip was playing somewhere in the Midwest, for two hundred dollars a week. And then he came home one day. Perhaps he can’t even bring himself to lace up a pair of skates anymore or watch a Canada Cup.
I’ve known other people like that. For years a man I knew said he could not watch a game because he knew too much about it. Not about what happened on the ice, but all the slow-burning acts of small betrayals that happened off that ice. He too had given it his all. He too had been cut, somewhere by someone.
The skates hang on the nails inside porch doors and are slowly forgotten. The children remember hearing that their father was once considered a good player — even better than good, no — he was a marvellous player. He could side-step a check in full stride, dish it out or take it — had a shot like a bullet, and most people were wary to mix it up with him.
And then something, somewhere along the line happened. Perhaps there was just nowhere else to go.
But don’t kid ourselves. Many of them went everywhere they could, did whatever they had to do with their dream. And somehow, even with doing all the right things, having the talent besides, some of them got left out of the lottery.
Like one of the players we watched in Barcelona. All of a sudden there he was, back in 1977 on that February afternoon. He took the puck into his own end ragging it, and then turned, like a young shark, and moved, and with a flick, you saw power and grace, and wisdom. He passed one player and then another, and then not having a shot he turned and began to rag the puck again skating backwards into the corner drawing the defence to him, and then passing to the centre man in the slot — wham, in the net — Le But!
He gave me that moment in Spain. Where did he go? And what has hockey finally given to him?
I was in Spain with my wife and son in 1995. We spent the winter there and played hockey on our patio. We would walk the beaches to collect bamboo sticks — ones that had knots at the bottom shaped like the blades of hockey sticks.
I was a pretty good hockey player by Spanish standards. I was able to flick a ball with my wrist shot over the villa and into our neighbour’s yard, until an old woman began to complain in German that I was hitting her windows. It felt like old times.
Sometimes in the afternoons Spanish kids, getting off the bus, would stop and watch us and we would dipsy-doodle for them, among the coloured stones and hedges and red blooming flowers, wind up for scintillating slapshots, try to speak like Danny Gallivan or Foster Hewitt out of the side of our mouths.
My five-year-old son was always Wayne “Grebsky.” I was everyone else. One time a Spanish kid sneaked into our yard and picked up my bamboo stick and tried to hit the ball. He finally whacked it against our wall, threw down the stick as if it was some kind of forbidden magician’s wand and ran away.
My son wore his Montreal Canadien sweater into town even at the height of the Spanish-Canadian turbot war. He was proud of that sweater, and we weren’t going to tell him not to wear it.
One afternoon a young Spanish woman who we knew and travelled with, had her friend bring us a hockey stick from Switzerland, with TEAM CANADA written on it. Because of the turbot war she wanted to show us how she felt about us.
Sometimes in the bars or walking through the quiet mid-afternoon streets, I would meet my country. Someone would walk by wearing a San Jose Sharks’ cap, or a Los Angeles Kings�
�� sweater with number 99 on it, a Pittsburgh Penguin sweater with Number 66.
It was a strange feeling. I suppose those Spanish kids, wearing those caps and sweaters, would never understand my mixed feelings. They were wearing my country and I could never claim that they were. I suppose my son was beginning to realize this although I did try to hide these feelings. Certain feelings of betrayal, of loss.
In Spain I read about the American hockey strike. In European papers when they spoke about the NHL they never mentioned Canada. They showed pictures of Mr. Bettman in his dapper suits, striding along a hallway. They spoke of the game in terms of New York and L.A.
I am not ten anymore, Quebec is on the verge of separating and my country is no longer mine. In Spain for the first time, I was desperately, proudly Canadian and yet didn’t know if I would have a country in a year or two.
My country had become a strange place to me — a place where they felt the need to make 60-second mini-heritage commercials for our television and our theatres. These mini-heritage commercials showed who we are — that we invented things claimed by others — basketball, Standard Time, the Superman Comic hero, who fought for justice and the American way. Someday they might promote our involvement in hockey this way as well.
Yet you remember, that in the splendid and dazzling snowstorms, lying on a couch, watching a game with your girlfriend, you could still tell, with one eye half closed and thinking of other things, all that was brilliant about a pass or a deke.
I was asked in Virginia four years ago why I did not leave my country, go to the States to write. “Your country is going to break up,” a gentleman said, not unkindly. “Quebec is going to go — you people on the Atlantic seaboard will be left to hang and dry — why don’t you come to the States?”
“Hockey,” I said.
Hockey Dreams Page 12
