The Book of Stanley (5 page)

 

NINE

D
uring the second intermission of a Saskatoon Soldiers game, Kal McIntyre learned to appreciate poetry. The Soldiers were in Kelowna and losing by three goals, which was their custom. Kal was on the toilet at the time, drinking from a Gatorade bottle filled with the cheapest rye whisky he could find, which was his custom. The bathroom door was open so Kal could hear Dale Loont, the coach, berating his teammates for lackadaisical forechecking and general sloppiness of character.

“Is there fire in you?” he said.

A few of the players, young guys, answered variously: Yeah. Oh yeah. Hell yeah.

“Come on, that ain't even kindlin'. I said, is there
fire
in you?”

More joined. “Yeah!”

“Are we a bunch of hick pussies like they say?”

“No!”

“Are we Soldiers?”

“Yeah!”

“Are we gonna do some killin' out there?”

“Yeah!”

“I'm talking about intestines on the ice! Pumpin' hearts!”

“Yeah!”

Dale Loont started quietly and worked louder with each syllable unto the final word. “Now, my boys, my men, are
we gonna shed some Kelowna blood out there in the third motherhumping period?”

In his twenty years of hockey, the rhetorical questions posed by overweight coaches in sweat-drenched locker rooms had constructed a cumulative feeling of nausea and dread in Kal. He leaned back on the cold porcelain of the white tank and read the messages etched into the grey paint on the bathroom door.

“Suck it!” commanded one, next to a crude drawing of the male sex organ. “Only homos play hockey,” noted another.

If Kal was going to shed some motherhumping blood out there–Dale Loont was born again and therefore unable to say
fuck
–a short nap was in order. Not that bloodshed would serve any purpose. There were only three games left before playoffs, and the Soldiers, a farm team for the Carolina Hurricanes, were eleven points out of contention.

As he closed his eyes, Kal noticed a third message, near the bottom of the bathroom door. It was different from the others. It had been written with a black Sharpie, by a careful hand.

 

…for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

–Rilke

On the toilet, Kal read these two lines again and again, and wondered when he had last looked at some poetry. High school, but even then. Had he looked? Had he allowed the words to do this–whatever
this
was–to him? Moments of
great insight happened on the ice from time to time, but they were so automatic and over so quickly there was no time to chew on them and wonder why they had come. This was different. It was curiously physical. Here in the locker room, in Kelowna, there was
no place
that did not see him. Over and over, he repeated the lines out loud. When he was ten and twelve, in the arenas of Thunder Bay, Kal had been the best young player anyone had ever seen. The more he'd played, the more powerful he'd felt. No, maybe not powerful. Something. Hot oatmeal and lightning, thrashing in his gut. And now, in the locker room, on the toilet, Kal reclaimed that feeling.

Kal did not believe in conversion experiences. Yet it seemed to him he was in the midst of one, hot and cold at the same time, happy and sad, hopeful and fearful. All that made him Kal–the past and present and the doleful future he could not deny–existed at once and rattled inside him. All of this was more exquisite and commanding than anything rye and yellow Gatorade could provide.

“Who you talking to?” It was Gordon Yang, the backup goalie and probably his last friend on the team.

Kal did not answer. He could not.

“Are you pissed?” Gordon Yang rapped on the cubicle door. “Wake up.”

No, they were not friends. Kal had no friends left, and it was his own fault. He continued to read the words, whispered them.

“Kal!”

He stopped reading. “Coming, sorry. Got a touch of the green apple quickstep.”

“Bullshit.” Gordon Yang punched the door. “Just get your ass out here. I'm sick of making excuses for you.”

Alone in the bathroom again, Kal looked down at his bottle of Gatorade. It seemed old and insincere all of a sudden, like a bottle of politics. He stood up, lifted the toilet seat, and poured the rye inside.

At the sink, Kal stared at himself in the broken mirror. Since the day he'd turned twenty, Kal had considered himself middle-aged. Four years later, there were wrinkles near his eyes and around his mouth when he smiled. He drank too much rye whisky and entertained dark and vengeful thoughts as he fell asleep at night. Yet in the afterglow of the words he had read on the back of the cubicle door, Kal rediscovered a sort of purity. He could only conclude that the third period of this game in Kelowna would be special, a new beginning. Kal–
that
Kal–had arrived.

On his first shift, he made a decent play in his own end, stealing the puck from a Kelowna forward and sending it up the ice onto some new kid's stick in front of the red line. The new centre didn't know what to do with the puck when he got it, of course, and in most circumstances that would have been frustrating for Kal. But not tonight. He understood the kid's frustration afterward, sitting on the bench in a fume. Instead of ignoring the kid, Kal crashed his glove down on the boy's shoulder pad and said, “Next time.”

The kid looked up and said, “Real sweet pass.”

Kal's ex-wife Candace and their daughter Layla were in the stands, just above an advertisement on the boards for Home Depot. He waved but they weren't looking. Suddenly, a memory of the night of Layla's birth hit him. February 4, 2001. They were living in an apartment in Windsor when Candace's labour pains kicked in. According to the book they had purchased about pregnancies, walking helped ease the baby down into the birth canal and often took the mother's
mind off the contractions. Between three and four in the morning, with a vicious wind howling off the Detroit River, they had shuffled up and down their dark block. Kal had been freezing but Candace couldn't get cool enough. She had made him promise, between contractions, with her teeth clenched, that he would never leave her.

On Kal's next shift he glanced up at Candace and Layla after shooting the puck past the Kelowna blue line. At that moment, someone plowed into him and he went down. Ordinarily, Kal would stand up, throw off his gloves, and see what might happen. Instead, he took his position on the Kelowna side of the blue line while the man who hit him, a notorious meathead named Luciak, called him a pussy. Some men in the stands, sporting goatees and baseball caps, booed.

You must change your life.

When the puck was on the opposite boards, Kal took his eyes off it just long enough to glance up at Candace and Layla again. This time they were looking. Layla waved and a shiver of love and pride zipped up his spine. Instead of waving at his daughter, Kal nodded and turned his attention to the game just in time to see the puck slide past. A Kelowna forward was already three strides ahead of him, on a breakaway. He chased the forward, watched him score, and skated back to the bench in silence.

“That was real pretty, Mack.” Dale Loont walked over and bent down, spoke quietly into the top of Kal's helmet. “If you don't want to play, walk. Just walk away.”

 

TEN

A
fter the game, Kal was forced to wait until his teammates had left Prospera Place for the hotel bar. Dale Loont wanted to have a frank discussion about his performance on this road swing, but Kal was not interested in rebuttals. As Dale Loont spoke, Kal sat in his jeans and T-shirt, repeating the lines of Rilke to himself.

“Do we understand each other?” said Dale Loont, at the end of their frank discussion.

“Absolutely,” said Kal.

Candace and Layla waited in the lobby of Prospera Place, near the bulletin board. When she spotted Kal, Layla ran to him. His daughter's hair, as he hugged and kissed her, smelled of orange peel. She wore a black skirt and pink tights with black boots and an authentic-looking white fur jacket.

A rich girl.

“I'm sorry you didn't win, Daddy.”

“We didn't deserve to win.”

“You know I figure skate now?”

Kal took Layla's hand and they walked to the bulletin board where Candace stood, with that knowing look about her. In their last seven or eight phone conversations, Layla had mentioned the figure skating thing. “I
didn't
know that. I think it's plain terrific and I'm real proud.”

Since Candace and Layla had moved away, Kal had come to understand that he was slowly becoming another one of his daughter's relatives, another old man to charm. For now
he was Daddy, but he knew that Layla referred to Elias Shymanski the same way. In time, Kal would only lose more and more of his daughter, particle by particle, until they became shy and strange around each other. Like all spurned fathers, he occasionally considered sneaking into Layla's bedroom one night and spiriting her away to Guatemala City. But this was selfish thinking. Kal had nothing and, therefore, nothing to share. He wished, briefly, that he could drop to his knees and tell Layla about the lines of Rilke, and that she would understand and sympathize.

It hurt Kal to see that Candace was obviously happy, more comfortable, and more hopeful without him. It hurt to remind himself that she was a noble beauty. Her fur jacket was most definitely authentic, as were the designer jeans and high-heeled boots.

“Good game.”

“Oh, it was not.”

“Don't mess with Kelowna.”

Kal shook his head. “Never again.”

Together they walked out of the arena and into the parking lot. It was a warm late-spring evening, with the scent of lilac in the breeze. Music played from one of only four trucks that remained on the lot, a pickup with a few men gathered around the open tailgate.

“Can Daddy come over?”

“I already told you, Layla. No.”

Kal smiled. Elias Shymanski, the Ford-Mercury dealer who had stolen Candace from him two years previous, was under the impression that Kal was an explosively violent and vindictive man, keen to shiv him with an edged weapon. This was not so distant from the truth. A cordial dinner at a newish hotel restaurant was not in their future. “I'd behave myself.”

Candace turned to Kal and faked a cough. A warning. If he said anything further, she would restrict phone calls and visits to punish him.

The truck with the open tailgate was seven parking spots from Candace's Expedition. There was a red cooler on the tailgate, and an aggressive hybrid of rock and rap music thumped and sawed from the cab. The young men spotted Kal's hoodie, with the Saskatoon Soldiers logo on it, commented loudly, cackled, and walked over with their beers in hand.

This was rare. Not that grown men would openly harass each other, but that he was alone. Players were encouraged to enter and leave arenas en masse, to prevent broken noses and bad publicity. In high school, or even a day ago, Kal would not have allowed the drunk men to approach un-challenged. It was always best to pummel the leader quickly and savagely to frighten the others. But the way Kal saw it, he had to change, and here was an opportunity.

“The pride of Saskatchewan,” said the smallest of the three men, who had large ears and a tiny face that made Kal think of a gerbil. The gerbil in a jean jacket stopped several feet in front of Kal. “What're you lookin' at? You got a problem?” He tossed his full can of beer away and it landed on the pavement with a thud.

Candace hurried to open the back door of the Expedition and lift Layla inside. It only took a minute to buckle her into the booster seat. “No,” said Kal, “stay. I want to talk to you.”

“I don't want Layla to see this.”

“There'll be nothing to see.” Kal turned to the men. “Thanks for your interest, fellas, but no, actually, I don't have a problem. As for what I was looking at, I was just admiring the pickup truck and the heavy metal hip-hop
thing you got going there. What's the name of the band?”

The men, who appeared to be about Kal's age, turned to one another. All three had goatees.

“And I want to thank you so much for coming out, for supporting minor league pro hockey. I know I'll be going back to Saskatoon with my tail between my legs. Between my legs, fellas.”

The gerbil bent down to tie his shoe. Then, in a flash, he stood up and tossed a handful of dirt and tiny pebbles in Kal's face.

Kal heard Candace say, behind him, “Oh, for Christ's sake.”

The dust got in his eyes and the men were on him. Kal got low and grabbed a couple of legs, flipped one of the men on his back. But the other two continued to kick and punch, landing blows about Kal's upper back, shoulders, arms, and ears. It ended when Candace stepped forward and bear-sprayed the attackers. They held their eyes and stomped and cussed so loudly that Kal was sure Layla would hear them through the doors of the
SUV
.

“Fuck, I'm dying. I'm dying,” said the gerbil.

“Call an ambulance!” said another.

While Kal wiped himself off and allowed his ex-wife, her breath smelling of coffee and cinnamon, to examine cuts on his forehead and in his mouth, the drunks writhed on the pavement and wailed about blindness and retribution.

“Goddamn you.” Candace smirked with affection and nostalgia and, Kal figured, a vast sense of relief that they were no longer married.

Kal opened the back door of the Expedition to discover his daughter crying. Through her sobs, she asked why the men
had attacked him. Since there wasn't a satisfying answer to that question, Kal unhooked Layla from the seat, lifted her out, rocked her in his arms, and told her how big she was getting. Twice he had to spit the blood out of his mouth with as much daintiness as he could muster.

“They hurt you!”

“No, Layla. Daddy isn't hurt. Those men couldn't hurt Daddy.”

Candace opened the driver's-side door and tossed the bear spray inside. “That isn't happening again.”

“I know, sweetheart. That dirty shoe-tying trick.”

“Not your sweetheart any more, Kal.”

He whispered into his daughter's ear. “Just let Dad get a few things in order, change his life, and then he'll come get you and Mom and we'll all live somewhere nice and pretty together. With palm trees, probably. Right?”

“Yeah,” Layla said, into his blood-splattered hoodie.

“Time to go,” said Candace.

“Not without Daddy!”

“You got playschool tomorrow. You need a bath.”

“No!”

Candace yanked Kal away from the vehicle, buckled Layla in, and closed the door. The child screamed again.

Candace sighed. “Thank you. Really. For a swell evening.”

“Something happened to me tonight. I see things differently. And I want you and Layla to be a part of it.”

“You just got in a fistfight, Kal.”

“I'm changing my life.”

“To what? You don't know how to do anything else.”

“It doesn't matter what I do, really, it's how. Anyway, it's a feeling more than a plan.”

“I don't get it.”

“Candace, I need you to help me change. And I can help you. We don't want Layla growing up spoiled and fancy.”

“You saying I'm doing a bad job?”

“I'm saying we could be happy together, and Layla could be happy with us. I feel a big transformation coming on. See, there was this poem, this call to me.”

“A poem. You, and a poem.”

“I'm a new man.”

“From the handbook of ex-husband clichés.”

“No. Really.”

“Kal, I think you should change. It'd be good for you. But you know it has nothing to do with me any more and very little to do with Layla, right?”

Candace hugged him quickly, turned away, and stepped up into the driver's seat, slamming the door with a
thwock
. Kal waved as she roared away, but the rear windows were too tinted to see if Layla waved back.

The men were quieter now, in the nighttime parking lot. A part of Kal wanted to lay the boots, but another, more powerful part of him simply pitied the men before him, on their hands and knees, spitting and moaning. Kal bent over the gerbil.

“That was real sick, what you did to me there. In front of my daughter.”

“Blow me.”

“What sort of men are you? You're way too old for this sort of behaviour. Maybe you even have kids of your own.”

Kal ambled down the sidewalk toward his hotel. The gerbil cussed again and called out, “Sorry, man.”