Hockey Dreams (15 page)

He tried to buy Stafford a hockey stick but Stafford said he had his own hockey stick. Then he began to tell secrets about Stafford. He telephoned his mother and said that Stafford liked
girls
and that Stafford smoked cigarettes. He also told us that Stafford had written a poem to Gordie Howe.

After every assault upon him Jimmy J. would come back and talk to him. He would say, “Okay, are we friends now — I won’t waste my time if you are not going to be my friend — friends for life or what?”

But Stafford did not want to be his friend. He played hockey with us again, and decided to improve his own backyard rink so he wouldn’t have to walk down Green Street Extension and by chance meet Jimmy J.

After school he would go out and push his father’s huge roller across his backyard. He wanted to relevel and flood the rink again.

One night Jimmy J. stood on the other side of the street, watching.
“Tits on a Bull
,” Jimmy J. yelled.
“Useless as tits on a bull — DIA-BET-IC
,” Jimmy J. yelled.
“DIABETIC.”

Stafford pushed his heavy cumbersome roller, as Jimmy J. stood on his tiptoes yelling and screaming at him.
“Insulin bag — insulin bag”

But Stafford did not respond.

Now and then as Jimmy J. yelled, Stafford would stop to inspect a dip or a slant, go into the house and come out with a bucket of water to slosh it over his rink.

“You’II have no rink like that — tits on a bull — ha ha ha — tits on a bull.”

Stafford would get on his knees and pat a part of the rink down, filling the holes with snow.

“Are you my friend or what — are you my friend or what!”

Stafford went into the house at dark and Jimmy J. loitered about the street for awhile and then made his way home.

The next night he was standing on the street watching the door, and waiting for Stafford to come out, when Michael came along. “Leave Stafford and my brother alone — ya nutbar.”

Jimmy J. picked up a chip of wood and put it on his shoulder and walked back and forth in front of Michael. “Knock this chip off,” Jimmy J. said.

Michael looked at him, came up with an uppercut and knocked him on his ass. The chip went flying.

Jimmy J. did not come back.

Years later I saw him, grey-haired and stooped, driving five or six kids about, all of them singing, listening to the top ten on the car radio.

I
DON’T HAVE ANY
copies of the Saturday
Star Weekly
, but for years it was the staple of homey Canadian living, with articles on everything from cooking to beaver dams.

It had an Ottawa or Toronto feel. That being said, it rested in various places in many shacks and shanties, and many houses too, across the country. I’ve seen it used to wrap salmon that my uncle brought down to us in the dark night. I’ve seen it in outhouses, and on the back shelf in garages. It was used to insulate porches, behind drywall, and it fluttered in the sleepy breezes on our car seats in July. It placed itself usually within the safe pedestrian bounds of common opinion, and rested upon its laurels as being the magazine that informed us in a never too dangerous way, about ourselves.

It showed the fashions. Had the glossy pictures.

Michael was subcontracted to deliver the
Star Weekly
on Saturday. He would pick the paper up from Darren in the morning and do the back road, Skytown and along the tracks.

This would earn him, maybe 50 cents, maybe a dollar. Darren would do King George Highway, down to Dunn’s barber shop. Michael had the longer route.

There was a reason for this subcontract on Saturday. Darren did not consider himself welcome anywhere near Skytown — not since the Christmas of 1960. That was when he gave one of the Griffin kids a black eye in a fight — by hitting him in the face with a rock in his hand.

I think Michael did the route every Saturday for about eight weeks. Paper boys have a large turnover. Who can blame them? Everything Michael did back then to earn money was, in actual fact, child labour. To have to share two cents on a paper, on a freezing cold Saturday in February was pretty much like delivering the mail for free.

To do it with the sense of gratitude Michael had, or a sense of wonder that Tobias had, that his big brother had a job, seems almost farcical now. But other jobs were just as stingy. The money kids earned was almost always negligible back then.

Once down past the creamery lane he was in unfamiliar territory — in foreign land. The farther down the road he went, the farther he would have to go to come back.

There was also the idea implicit in all of this of the
attitude
of the Skytowners. Friendly could become unfriendly real quick. The neighbourhood rink you passed on your way down could turn into a cauldron of recruits on your way up.

Ganging up on someone was always considered cowardly. Yet there was a certain reasoning, where the idea of ganging up on a person was not considered low or mean-spirited. If you were in someone else’s neighbourhood, if injury or insult was remembered, you were fair game.

Of course most of the time under those low winter skies this was benign, and no one bothered you. But there were fierce flare-ups into wars where twenty kids charged twenty kids with hockey sticks. Or when games on the neighbourhood rinks ended in a kind of pitched battle.

This particular incident didn’t start on a March Saturday in 1961 — it started near Christmas of 1960. Everyone was playing hockey, and we had all wandered down to Griffin’s rink to play. The Griffin boys began to tease the much-tormented Garth, and steal his rubber boot. This happened because of Garth’s belief in Santa Claus. Nor did he know what to do except to break down crying. And this made everyone on the Griffin side of the rink howl and laugh.

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 again, making it past the mare, who snorted and thrust ahead, he jumped the fence and was gone.