Finnie Walsh (21 page)

Roger Walsh had been against the idea of Finnie working in the mill. In principle he agreed with Finnie, but he remembered what had happened to Bob Woodward and countless others and was reluctant to expose Finnie to such a dangerous environment. Finnie seemed to have a knack for being involved in bizarre accidents. Roger Walsh shuddered whenever he thought about the possibilities created when this tendency was combined with heavy machinery.

When not working in the mill, Finnie made use of his father’s satellite dish, watching as many hockey games as he could possibly fit into a day. Louise began to worry when he started yelling at the players on the screen, especially the goalies, but she didn’t say anything. It was her opinion that Finnie was just going through a period of adjustment, albeit a rather long one; he would return to normal once he had worked things out in his unique way.

Finnie’s weight gain was so gradual that people who saw Finnie every day hardly even noticed until one day they looked at him and saw that he weighed well over 275 pounds. This was a result of his inactivity; his job at the mill was not particularly physical and he did nothing in his free time that even remotely approached exercise. He also drank a lot more beer than he ever had before, enough to make Roger and Louise wonder if he was developing a drinking problem, although he rarely appeared to be drunk. The real problem was that there was no longer any discernible difference between a drunk Finnie and a sober Finnie. Day or night, drunk or sober, he was not himself, at least not the person we had once known.

I hadn’t seen that much of him over the past few years; the NHL season was 84 games long and ran from October until April or May, depending on how long we hung on in the playoffs, which
didn’t leave me with much free time for visiting friends and relatives. I called fairly often, though, so I knew that Finnie was in a rough spot. I just didn’t know what to do about it.

I wondered how long it would be before Louise left him. The Finnie she was with now was not the Finnie she had fallen in love with. He was not even a Finnie that people could really like. Louise never wavered, though. She was as true as ever and she was even suggesting, in her own subtle, languid way, that they get married. Finnie told her he’d think about it.

As for my parents, they were getting along just fine. I was able to send them money regularly, so my mother didn’t have to work much. This gave her more time to spend with Sarah, who was now a typical preteen girl. One exception was her performance at school; on a standardized aptitude test, she scored through the roof. At 12 Sarah was likely smarter than I will ever be. My father was beside himself with pride.

Pal continued to be successful in concealing his secret claw from my father, who had no idea that it existed, and the one-arm bandit was equally foiled. Whether this was because of the steps Pal took to hide the claw from the general public or because the one-arm bandit had given up I’m not sure, but the result was the same. Pal kept the same claw for nearly three and a half years.

The Stanley Cup final was the most gruelling hockey I have ever played. We lost the first three games of the series; going into the fourth game, we faced elimination. The mood in the dressing room was sombre; it looked like our streak was coming to an end. When we went onto the ice, however, things turned around. We won the next three games and forced a seventh and deciding game.

I decided to fly my parents and Louise out for the big night. I knew there was no way Sarah would come; she wouldn’t even
watch hockey on television. She hated it. That didn’t bother me; I understood her reasons.

I reserved seats for the rest of my family behind our goal. For the first and third periods, they would be able to get a bird’s-eye view of the action in our defensive end, which is where I spent the majority of my time. Of course, the teams switched sides after each intermission, so in the second period, and in overtime if it came to that, they would be in our offensive zone, where I rarely did my best work, but that couldn’t really be helped. They arrived the morning of the game, but Finnie had come instead of Louise. She stayed home to look after Sarah.

“Wheeze thought I would enjoy the game a lot more than she would,” Finnie said, grinning.

I felt like a jerk; I could easily have gotten four tickets. I had considered the idea, but had thought that Finnie wouldn’t have wanted to come. After all, he was the better player. He should have been there instead of me.

The coach had scheduled a light skate that afternoon and Finnie stayed and watched while my parents unpacked. Afterward, I drove him to the hotel. I couldn’t get over the difference in his physical appearance: he was grossly overweight, his hair was unkempt and he hadn’t shaved in days. No one would ever have believed that he used to be a professional athlete.

“You nervous?” he asked me.

“Yeah, a bit,” I said.

“You
should
be. In a couple of hours, you’re going to win the Stanley Cup.”

“Nothing’s decided yet.”

“Yes, it is. Your team will win. But I need you to do something.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I need you to score a goal.”

“What?”

“I need you to erase my goal. That’s what started it all.”

I had to think for a second before I realized he was referring to the goals he had scored against our garage door. I also knew that he was asking the impossible. “Look, Finnie, even if I could score, which is not really my role on the team, it’s not going to change anything.”

“I know. It won’t change anything, but it will even things up. Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

“How?”

“There are a lot of things you know nothing about,” he snapped.

As we pulled up to the curb in front of the hotel and Finnie got out of the car, he smiled. “Remember Georges Vezina?” he said.

“Sure. He went out like a pro.”

“Yep. He sure did.” He shut the car door.

I was just about to pull into traffic when he knocked on the window. I leaned over and rolled it down.

He stuck his head inside. “I almost forgot to tell you. Someone stole Pal’s claw.”

“You knew about the claw?”

“Of course I did. So did your father. He was just pretending.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Your father or Pal?”

“Both, I guess.”

“They both took it fine.”

I pulled into traffic and was waiting at a light when I saw a beat-up, faded hockey card on the passenger seat. I picked it up; it was from the early 1930s. On the front was a balding man wearing a Montreal Canadiens sweater. He had a wide grin and bright eyes and he looked like the happiest man alive. His name was Howie Morenz. I wasn’t sure why Finnie had left this card behind or even if he had done it on purpose, but I put the card into my pocket.

I still had a couple of hours before I had to be at the arena, so I lay down on the bed and tried to focus my thoughts. I guess I dozed off.

It was the last time I ever had the dream and it was the clearest. As I skated past centre ice, the puck came to me and I accelerated, skating hard and fast. As I crossed the blue line, I suddenly had the feeling that something was about to hit me. I looked for someone to pass to, but there was no one open, so I shot the puck. I heard a noise that reminded me of Sarah. Something heavy and strong grabbed the back of my jersey and I fell to the ice. As I hit, I saw the puck go by the goalie, who seemed to have been unprepared for the shot. Then I heard my father’s voice reverberating in my head, “Bad, bad work, Mr. Starbuck.” As the players from the other team complained to the referee, I found that I couldn’t breathe; something was choking me. Then I saw Finnie. He was smiling. Everything went dark.

I woke up drenched in sweat. I was mad as hell. Who was Finnie to ask me to change my game, change the kind of player I was, the kind of person I was, on the day of the biggest game of my life? In the dream I was choking. In the dream I scored. But I would not change my game just because Finnie thought that it would right some sort of cosmic wrong. I died in the dream; that was, if anything, a clear sign that I should keep playing the defensive style of hockey that had gotten me into the NHL in the first place.

I knew that I did not love hockey the way Finnie did. It was just a game to me. Grown men making millions of dollars for playing a game. That’s what it was, plain and simple. All the Pelle
Lindberghs and Georges Vezinas and Bill Barilkos in the world had never changed that for me. Why should Finnie? I got out of bed and drove to the rink.

The locker room was a zoo. As I started to undress, my hand unconsciously reached into my pocket and removed the Howie Morenz card. I placed it on the shelf next to my helmet. I was putting on my gear when Terry Yim, our team trainer, came by to check on me. I had been hit hard in the previous game and Terry was concerned that I might have sustained a mild concussion, but I assured him that I hadn’t suffered any symptoms. He was about to leave when he saw the card up on the shelf. “Oh, wow. Where’d you get this?” he asked me.

“A friend gave it to me.”

“When I was a kid, Howie Morenz was my hero. The man who died for hockey.”

I was startled. I had never heard of Howie Morenz before. “The man who died for hockey?”

“Oh, sure. I guess he was a bit before your time. Morenz played for the Canadiens for 12 years, the greatest player of his generation. He was Canada’s Babe Ruth. When he was on the ice, he always looked like he was having the time of his life.”

I had to agree with that; the man on the card radiated pure, unadulterated joy.

“In 1934 they traded him. For the next two seasons, he played piss-poor and most people thought his career was over. Then he was traded back to Montreal. He started to play great again, until he broke his leg. Five weeks later he was dead.”

“From a broken leg?”

“Oh, no. He was in the hospital recovering from his broken leg when the doctors told him he’d never be able to play hockey again. It was too much. A couple of weeks later, his heart gave out.”

I was speechless. Why would Finnie have given
me
this card?

Terry rattled on, but I wasn’t really listening to what he was saying until I heard a name that made my ears tingle. “What?”

“I said that Morenz played with Georges Vezina.”