Finnie Walsh (15 page)

Sadly this small victory was short-lived. One fine wintry February afternoon, Pal was feeling a bit under the weather. He decided to take a quick nap on the couch in the janitor’s room. Fearing both my father’s reprimand and an ambush from the claw, Pal locked it to the leg of the couch and settled in for a short rest. When he awoke, feeling much refreshed, the claw was gone. The lock was there, undisturbed, but there was no disputing the fact that the one-arm bandit had struck again.

My father was livid. He combed every inch of the room for clues, talked to people whom he thought might have seen something and questioned Pal over and over again. Pal’s response was always the same. “I went to sleep and I wake up and the claw is gone. How it happens I have no ideas. I am asleep.”

That night at supper my father was in a particularly foul mood. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “Why would anyone want someone else’s arm?”

“Maybe they need it,” Sarah chirped.

“For what?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe they just
think
they need it.”

“Could you make any less sense?” Louise asked.

“Probably,” Sarah said.

“Why does he keep getting the arms replaced? That’s what I don’t understand,” my mother said.

“Because if he didn’t the one-arm bandit would win,” I said.

“But he doesn’t even like them.”

“That’s not the point, Mary,” my father said. “Someone somewhere doesn’t want Pal to have those claws and if he stops replacing them, he admits that he’s been beaten. You can’t do that.”

“I don’t see why not. It’s just a piece of metal and plastic.”

“It’s a lot more than that. It’s his arm.”

To my father and others, the claw was more than an object. I think that every time the one-arm bandit struck, my father relived the trauma of losing his arm. A part of him believed that if he could track down the one-arm bandit, he might recover his own arm.

While my father wanted his arm back, Pal wanted his arm to stay away. He clung to the stubborn conviction that the claw was out to get him. Their search for the one-arm bandit was, in some bizarre way, parallelled by their attempts to heal themselves.

On August 9, 1988, the sport of hockey changed forever. Peter Pocklington, the owner of the Edmonton Oilers, traded Wayne Gretzky, Marty McSorley and Mike Krushelnyski to the Los Angeles Kings in exchange for Jimmy Carson, Martin Gelinas, three first-round draft picks and an estimated $20 million. He sold Wayne Gretzky, the Great One, the most talented hockey player in the history of the game. He sold him like a pair of shoes, a used car or a piece of furniture. I was shattered.

Even Finnie, who had never much liked Gretzky, was angered by the news. “It’s like the day the music died,” he said.

“What?” I wasn’t in the mood for one of Finnie’s riddles.

“You know, that song ‘American Pie.’ About the plane that went down with Buddy Holly and those other two guys on board and rock and roll was changed forever.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Why not?”

“Gretzky’s not dead.”

“Not
physically
, but he might as well be. He’ll never win the cup again. Not in Los Angeles. They don’t even have
ice
in Los Angeles.”

“Yes, they do.”

“No, they don’t. It doesn’t even get cold in the winter. It’s like a fucking tropical island.”

“They have ice in the arena.”

“That’s not the same thing. How can you love hockey if you’ve never played it? How can you play it if there’s no winter? If there’s no ice? How can you be a great hockey player in a place where people don’t love hockey?

“That’s not even the worst part of it,” he continued. “The worst part of it is that it doesn’t even matter
where
he plays, where anyone plays, anymore, not now. They’re just commodities. They may as well be impaled on rods and put onto a foosball table. There’s no magic anymore. You can’t own magic. And when you buy it or sell it, it disappears.”

“Players get traded all the time, Finnie.”

“Yeah, but players don’t get
sold
all the time. Not players like Gretzky. What’s the point of being as good as he is if you can still be bought and sold? Is it just about money?”

“So what if it is? Money makes the world go around.”

“No, it doesn’t. That can’t be what hockey’s about. Hockey is about Georges Vezina and Bill Barilko and Peter Stastny and people playing a game because it’s part of who they are.”

After the Gretzky trade, Finnie started to dislike the United States. It’s true that almost all Canadians share an inherent mistrust of their neighbours to the south and I think that in most cases it’s justified because, let’s face it, America is nearly always up to something. Finnie, however, was much more adamant about his anti-Americanism than the rest of us. He once remarked that the Gretzky trade was either the day the United States started to buy Canada, piece by piece, or the day it completed the purchase.

That summer Louise and Joyce graduated from high school. Joyce was planning to go to McGill in the fall, but Louise wasn’t planning anything. Her marks were good enough to get into any
university in the country, but she didn’t want to leave. She said that she would go eventually, when she felt she was ready, but until then she was staying in Portsmouth. She got a job as a cashier at the grocery store and my parents were more than pleased when she offered to pay her own expenses.

Although Louise was still the subject of a good deal of attention, she no longer went out on dates. She hadn’t since that night Jennifer Carlysle poked Frank Hawthorne’s eye out. She still went out with her friends, in groups, to parties, but she was a far cry from the Louise of days gone by. I was actually relieved; it’s very traumatic to have your sister go out with guys you know. Sometimes, though, an expression of agonizing sadness faded across Louise’s face and I wondered what could possibly be causing her so much trouble and why she didn’t do something about it.

It was hard to worry too much about Louise, who handled her problems quietly and independently, when there was Sarah, who handled hers loudly and required as much help as possible.

We were interrupted one lazy morning in late August by screams from Sarah’s bedroom. Both my mother and I came running and when we got to the hall Sarah nearly knocked us down, moving as fast as her little yellow legs would carry her.

“What in heaven’s name is going on?” my mother asked, grabbing Sarah by the arm to keep her from running away.

“We have to find Finnie,” she said, panting.

“He’s coming over in an hour or so,” I said.

“We have to find him,” she repeated.

I telephoned Finnie’s house, but Finnie wasn’t there and Clarice didn’t know where he was. I then phoned Joyce’s house, but Joyce wasn’t home either. For the next three-quarters of an hour, Sarah wouldn’t talk to anyone; she just sat on the front steps waiting for Finnie to arrive. I waited outside with her, at my mother’s
request. Sarah was quite a high-spirited girl and scenes like this one were by no means unusual.

When Joyce’s beat-up Honda pulled into the driveway, Sarah sprang from the steps, blowing frantically on the whistle attached to her life jacket. The shrill noise startled Joyce, causing her, momentarily, to forget she was driving. She remembered in the nick of time, stopping inches from the garage door.

“Sarah!” I said sharply, also startled by that damn whistle.

She ignored me and ran up to the passenger door.

“What’s the matter, Sarah?” Finnie asked.

“Something bad is going to happen,” she said.

“What?”

“I don’t know. The lamp showed me your dad walking backward.”

“Walking backward?”

“Yes, I saw him walking backward in a circle. Something bad is going to happen.”

Joyce looked at me as if to ask if she was really seeing a little yellow seven-year-old girl in a life jacket standing in the driveway warning Finnie of impending doom. I shrugged. It was dangerous to dismiss Sarah out of hand; sometimes she was right.

Joyce and I followed Sarah and Finnie into the house. They went straight to the kitchen, where Finnie picked up the phone and called his father. Roger Walsh was at the sawmill, in a meeting with some raw-log suppliers. He was somewhat inconvenienced by Finnie’s call and was undoubtedly even more so when he discovered that his son was calling him to see if he was okay. He said that he was fine, as far as he knew.

Somehow Sarah’s fatalism had rubbed off on me; I could hear my father’s voice ringing in my ears, over and over, “Bad, bad work, Mr. Starbuck.”

“What’s the matter with you?” Finnie asked me.

“He knows I’m right,” Sarah said.

“You look pale,” Joyce said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” Finnie said.

“No, I don’t. There is nothing wrong with me. You talked to your dad, right, and he’s fine. It was nothing, Sarah. You were wrong,” I said.

Sarah shook her head. “I saw him walking backward.”

“So what? That doesn’t mean anything. People walk backward all the time.” I walked backward around the kitchen table. “Look at me, I’m walking backward. Is something going to happen to me?”

“No. It’s not the same.”

“Look, Paul, let’s just forget it, okay?” Finnie said, placing a hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah, sure. I’m sorry.”

Sarah stood looking at the floor, her shoulders slumped. “I saw him. I’m not lying.”

“I know. It’ll be
OK.”

Sarah, never one to stay mad for long, looked up and smiled. Finnie put his hand on her head and tousled her hair. “Hey Sarah, Joyce and Paul and I are going to go to the movies this afternoon. You want to come?”

Joyce and I simultaneously looked at Finnie; we’d made no plans to go to the movies. Finnie gave us a look that said we were going.

We piled into Joyce’s rusty car and set off to the theatre. Joyce and Finnie were in the front and Sarah and I were in the back. Everyone was uncomfortably quiet during the ride. I was still preoccupied with the voice in my head, Sarah was waiting for something bad to happen, Joyce was probably wondering how she had managed to get mixed up with us and God only knows what was going through Finnie’s mind.

About halfway through the picture, I looked over at Finnie. He was staring blankly at the screen and his hand, perched
awkwardly on the armrest, was shaking. Joyce quietly took his hand in hers and Finnie looked at her, his eyes wide with fear. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek and then pressed his head onto her shoulder, where it remained for the rest of the movie.

On the ride home we were assaulted by a barrage of questions from Sarah about the movie. She always did this. It’s not that she didn’t know what was going on; she did. She just wanted to make sure she was right about what she
thought
was going on, to see if anyone else had seen something she hadn’t. Normally I didn’t appreciate her interrogations; I saw movies and television as a kind of escape and thought that overanalyzing their content negated that effect. I also felt stupid much of the time, still do, because I can never remember the names of characters in, or plots of, books and movies, anything at all, for more than 10 or 15 minutes. If it’s real, I can remember it forever. It’s good, in a way, because it keeps my head from filling up with useless crap.

Finnie, on the other hand, never forgot the slightest detail. Sometimes I wondered if he actually knew the difference between fact and fiction. I think he
did
, but often chose to ignore it.

Finnie and Joyce answered Sarah’s questions the whole way home and even after they dropped us off, Sarah didn’t let up. I told her I was tired, which I was, so I went to my room to lie down. I fell asleep; I don’t know for how long. I awoke with a jolt when my door opened. My mother stood in the doorway.

“Paul, there’s someone on the phone for you.”

“Tell them I’ll call them back,” I said groggily.

“I think you should probably take it.”

I rushed to the phone.

“Paul?” Joyce’s voice came over the line.

“Joyce? What’s wrong?”

“Mr. Walsh is in the hospital. He had a stroke.”

“Is he okay?”

“I think so. He’ll live at least. The doctors aren’t saying much right now, but they think that it was a mild one.”

“That’s good,” I said, relieved.

“There’s more, though.”

“There is?”

“Yes.” Her voice was shaky, almost a whisper. “No one knew what was wrong with him at first. He had the stroke in his office, I guess. His secretary only realized something had happened when she saw what he was doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“She went into his office when he didn’t answer her on the intercom. He was pacing around his desk.”

“So?”

“He was walking backward, Paul. He could only walk backward.”

Across the kitchen Sarah stood very still, looking at me. I dropped the phone.

“I told you I saw it,” she said. Then she scuttled over to me and wrapped her tiny yellow arms around my leg.

We never discussed the accuracy of Sarah’s prediction. What was there to say about it really? Sarah knew things she shouldn’t. All we could do was try not to think about it too much.