I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (19 page)

Meaning that all of a sudden, and for the first time, tough guys are being put out of work. The ones lucky enough to
have
jobs have begun to fight only one another, night in and out, to contest their right to exist. Traditionalists would have you believe that this is the enforcer’s just deserts for fracturing old-time hockey’s unified nature. As the game is now, though, the enforcer also happens to be the last guy left embodying it.

Let’s picture him in a locker room before a game in the minors. He punches into the hard sickle of his left hand, testing the give in his taped wrist. Now—and here especially, in New Haven’s clammy dungeon of a rink—his body feels frangible. Flash-fossilized. Let’s have him spool another half roll around his wrist.

On his and the other plywood benches, teammates touch elbows to knees and hike socks, adjust shin guards. An eighteen-year-old Albertan, so pale and thin that he appears to be both flesh and light, says, “Colder than a well digger’s ass in here, eh? Just as soon start a brawl in warm-ups so as not to catch cold.” Let’s have our guy think, Bust a bone in your hand and it will never heal right.

He doesn’t look up from his tape, which he’s wrapping now
around either side of his right thumb, aligning his knuckles. Our guy should like to say that it’s them he does it for, personally, his brothers. After all, they’re minor league lifers, just like him. Just like him, they have mouths like tied balloons, puckered and toothless, and running tallies of scar tissue all over. Just like him, they’ll never do better than seven hundred dollars a week playing ice hockey. They’re just like him, except for the Albertan kid. If he can be kept alive long enough to learn how to skate with his head up, he’ll be on his way to the Show.

Our guy should like to say that he’s happy to intercede for them, but he can’t. Long Island is his eighth professional club, and his third in five years. This is a job, same as it ever was. Shit, I’ve had fights with three guys in this locker room, he’ll think. No hard feelings.

He remembers what precipitated them. Dutchie there braked hard in front of my goalie, sprayed ice chips into his eyes, an absolute fucking no-no. Gomer got worked up and said some unfortunate things about Rusty’s wife. The Métis by the coffee urn, he was just tweaking out before a face-off, talking gibberish, making me uncomfortable. So, away we went.

His memory is elephantine. It must be; it’s part of the job. He accounts for discrepancy. Every cheap shot, each subtle disrespect, any advantage unfairly taken—these have to be balanced out. This game or the next.

Take New Haven’s Jackie Leclair. He clipped the Albertan kid in the face at the end of their last meeting; now, our guy has to demand satisfaction. Everyone knows it. “Don’t you go get mellow on us,” his teammates say with their eyes when they glance at him. “No, I haven’t forgot,” he says with his. “Do it to him,” they conclude, as always, lowering their heads to their gear, “or we’ll find someone who will.”

Our guy’s near done taking close care of his hands. They’re
the guarantors of his self-sufficiency, the guns of a gun-for-hire. He butts them together and is satisfied with the distant crackle of pain in his bones. Because of all the chipped and poorly mended metacarpals in his right, he imagines the worst-case scenario, the one that would spell the end, where he tags some numbskull but has his skin split open like a trash bag with broken china in it.

He forces this thought to the bottom of his mind, stands, taps gloves with his teammates, and tinks down the concrete runway to the rink.
The smell’s what you fall in love with, damp and raw, like a box of fresh nails.
New Haven is warming up. Their wild shots are barking against the glass. The couple thousand in attendance are already half in the bag. Our guy can hear every word they call to him, up until his right skate touches ice. Then, he is as keen as a bird dog in a field.

A cold, gnatty drizzle was riding in on the wind when I returned to Brophy’s farmhouse. He lived here with four elderly women, three of whom were seated with us at the lunch table. The last one couldn’t join, but the pneumatic gulping of her oxygen machine lent her a ghostly presence.

Brophy was next to me, eating a ham sandwich. He had a ruddy, swollen face that looked as though it had continued to annex space long after exceeding its bones’ infrastructure. He chewed while glaring at the woman across from him.

“She says she wants the death penalty, but she doesn’t want it,” this woman was saying, referring to the latest development in the sensational trial of Jodi Arias, who had just been convicted of murdering her ex-boyfriend.

“It certainly wasn’t self-defense,” another added, dragging iceberg lettuce around her plate with her fork. Brophy turned and centered her in his good right eye, rime blue. His left one
was half-closed and askance. It looked like the last digit in a broken odometer.

The first woman said, “She snuck up behind him, cut his throat, shot him, and stabbed him—what—twenty-nine times?”

“They should just hang her,” a third woman concluded. She fingered a big wicker crucifix resting on her breastbone. “That’s what they do? Hang them, still?”

I accepted an oatmeal cookie. The grandmother nearest me asked what on earth I could be doing out here. I told her I’d come for Mr. Brophy; he’s a folk hero. She said she doesn’t know about all that. “Though John sure knows how to get under your skin when he wants to, boy.”

Brophy pawed across his mouth. Everyone stopped talking. “I once seen a long drop,” he said. “The head comes off like a champagne cork.” He crumpled his napkin, stood up with a little difficulty, and waved me into his bedroom.

He wanted to get away from the house nurse. “I wasn’t feeling well a little while ago, so she gave me one of those tests, where you got a letter here and then a letter down there,
there’s
a letter, who knows.” She took his driver’s license away.

“What would you be doing if you had it, your license?” I asked. He sat down heavily in a waffled corduroy recliner aimed at the door.

“I don’t know. Probably nothing. That’s not the point.” He did not put his feet up.

The only hints to his past life were on top of his dresser: three Brophy bobbleheads, all emphasizing his shock of pure white hair. Three lucite stalagmites, from the halls of fame of bush league shitburgs and naval towns. A black-and-white photo of him in his playing days, hip-checking a guy. (“Ass over teakettle! He got the worst of that one!”) And hanging above it all was a plaque from the double-A Wheeling Nailers, commemorating his thousandth win as a coach. “Put It in the Books!” it read.

An NHL playoff game between Detroit and Chicago was about to begin. I flipped on Brophy’s bedside TV and scooted over in a chair. The walls of his small cell were painted Peep-yellow. All else he had in there was a framed photo of a chocolate Lab, two twenty-pound dumbbells, snakeskin loafers, and one pill bottle, nonprescription.

The lowing wind sent feelers through the poorly sealed window. When the puck was dropped, Brophy squeezed the end of each armrest. His hands were to other men’s hands as puffed rice is to rice. A player onscreen picked his head up just in time to dodge a big hit, and Brophy went, “Whoa ho ho! He fuckin’ bailed himself out there!” Then, as though a tuning fork had tinged the right resonance and shaken something loose, he inundated me with stories of what his playing days were like.

Our guy’s on the bench.
Been
on the bench. He plays maybe eight minutes a night.
But look at the Albertan. Look at the time and space he’s given. It’s like public skating.
Without it, the kid wouldn’t be able to develop the team’s offense. His decisions would be rushed and his perception narrowed by anxiety; he’d play as though looking down a length of pipe. But instead he’s free to create—see how he both moves through and directs the action, like the open eye that pinions a hurricane?—because it’s understood that if he’s touched, there’ll be hell to pay.

So the kid doesn’t worry. But our guy does. The fighting for him started a couple of days before. He looked at the schedule and saw New Haven and knew he’d have to go with Leclair, who ate his lunch a month back when they last fought.
Anyone who does this work and says he isn’t scared is a liar.
Our guy tried going to the movies before tonight’s game, to distract himself, but he couldn’t follow along. He kept imagining Leclair, the
way he’d made these faux-scared faces while fighting. A brassy taste flooded his mouth then, something like a kissed ring.

Their last tilt had not been a good one. Our guy was at the end of a rare shift, gassed. Leclair knew this but challenged him anyway, violating one of the game’s implicit rules of conduct, known simply as “the code.” Our guy obliged, though, and Leclair surprised him by pulling to the left and throwing southpaw. Tagged him bad right off the bat, and our guy wondered,
Is this it? Is this when I become obsolete?

He was able to hang on. But Leclair had bloodied him, and then he’d done some pro-wrestling hamming for the crowd on his way to the penalty box.
Trotted like a dog just done pissing.

Now, sitting on the bench, it’s as though our guy is back in social studies, looking at the clock, knowing full well that the bully’s waiting for him by the monkey bars.

He never did make it through high school. He played major-junior hockey instead, spent his teens crisscrossing the Canadian prairie on thousand-mile bus rides. That first year, he was forced to ride in back, next to the piss hole.
This gap in the floorboard that screamed freezing air and reached for my overnight bag with yellow tentacles.
He was allowed to sit away from it once he had his first fight.

It went down like this: Coach had seen just about enough of our guy—a gangling punk with feet slow as Christmas—try and fail to be “Rocket” Richard out there. So one scrimmage the old bastard sends out someone to test him.
Kim Something,
our guy’s height. But whereas our guy would’ve had to put kettle bells in his pants pockets to come in at 175, Kim Something went 200, easy. He had a five o’clock shadow.

“Wanna go?” Kim Something asked.

This was all brand-new to our guy. He’d never been in a fight before. And not just a scrap during a hockey game—he’d never been in a fight, period. The world might not be ready
for the news, but our guy had been a prolific goal-scorer in his bantam and midget leagues.
Certainly nothing of Wayne Gretzky proportions. Hockey Night in Canada never came knocking on my old man’s door.
But he’d topped points columns. He’d been scouted for major-junior.

Yet here he was in practice in godforsaken Swift Current with a grown man in his face, shaking free of his gloves. Our guy just reacted.
I was too scared to be a coward.
He reached out with his left hand and grabbed Kim Something’s jersey. He looked at his right hand, and there it was, pistoning back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, as though a switch’d been flipped. Before he realized he was in a fight, it was over. Kim Something was down, holding in his face.
I knew right then I was in for it.

He’d have much rather just played hockey. Contributed with goals or assists.
It was beyond me why anyone would want to take themselves out of the game over a silly thing like a fight.
But he had a job on the team, and there were plenty of other guys lined up to fill the role if he didn’t. He made sure Coach never had to say to him, “Go and fix that sonofabitch.” He didn’t need to be told what he had to do to get on in the game. He went out and he fought when he knew it was warranted.

Was it demeaning? Even if it was, our guy refused to let shame stop him. The way he figured it, he couldn’t start to think he was a
thing
to them.
A thing draped in colors and paraded around, like some communist missile.
You start worrying that you’re just a goon, and then you find yourself trying to prove you don’t deserve that characterization.
You end up going from crusher to rusher to usher.
And, anyway, fighting made our guy a celebrity.
Crowd roars just as loud for a fight as they do a goal.

When he got his first professional contract at eighteen, it occurred to our guy that he could earn a living playing the game he loved. If he did his work, if he didn’t let a lot of irrelevance creep into his thinking, he could make a good life for himself
and a family. He could help people he wanted to help; he could have the freedom to make choices. And the price?
If the price was getting tenderized now and again, so be it. It’d’ve been nice to win those freedoms the way the kid did, but that wasn’t up to me.
He was just another guy whose one opportunity had come bound up with obligation, like the army ads say.

“The game now is easier to play,” Brophy said, eyes on the TV. “Everybody’s more skilled, and they skate better, sure, but that’s because they’re
allowed to.
Nobody hits anybody anymore. You can be any pretty princess you want when there’s nobody out there’ll take you to task.”

“How would Sidney Crosby do back in the Eastern League?” I asked.

“Who could fuckin’ say?” The wind and deathly metronome of the oxygen machine combined in eerie threnody. “Guys like him and Gretzky, though. Gretzky was such a little shit. A whiny little shit. When I coached against him, he goes—” Here Brophy rubbed limp-wristed hands against his eyes and said in an effeminate voice, “ ‘You guys don’t deserve to hit me. You guys can’t hit me.’

“We can’t hit you? Okay. Here’s a bucket to cry in.”

In his playing days, Brophy’s postgame ritual sometimes included nights spent on the bathroom tile, prone and puking. His off-season regimen was manufacturing hangars in Labrador and working high steel on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Opposing teams would sign guys away from their day jobs just to have them go after Brophy on the weekends. Amateur boxing champions, barroom heroes—he beat them so badly that some nights, the riot police had to be called into the arena. Some nights were worse: after one game in Connecticut, the apocrypha goes, a fan of the rival club climbed the rink’s fire
escape, peered through a window that looked into the locker room, saw Brophy in the shower, aimed a Saturday night special at him, and fired. The bullet ricocheted around the room before spinning to rest at Brophy’s dripping feet. Some say he laughed.