There's a Shark in My Hockey Pool (2 page)

But these were his dreams ... dreams which
the Western player opposite him couldn't see. While the Western
player could dream as well, they'd soon be just that -- visions and
faded cameo snapshots of a professional hockey career never
realized.

Marcotte's 6' 1" frame was earmarked with the
talent needed to make his dreams come true. To know the split
second the puck would leave the linesman's hand ... and time the
forward push of his stick to direct the disc through the opposing
center's legs. This particular face-off maneuver had a very high
success rate in his hockey "head games".

The ref's beefy fingers released the puck.
Sticks clashed. Marcotte's blade pushed the puck forward between
the other center's skates. Derek veered to his right and
sidestepped the Appaloosa center. Corralling the puck, he sped by
the nearest Western defenseman at the Guelph blue line. Legs
churning, heart pumping, Derek slammed it into overdrive, begging
his blades for more.

The other Western defenseman, Erskine, closed
in from the left side, appearing to have the angle on him. He was
ready to intercept Derek at the Western blueline. The roar of the
crowd provided Derek with the extra burst of speed he needed to
pass Erskine as they crossed center ice.

Erskine hooked at Marcotte's upper body,
desperately trying to find a nook or cranny into which he could
sink the stick's blade. But Marcotte was pulling away. Erskine
reared back and slashed Derek across the left knee with a vicious
two-hander that would've made Paul Bunyan proud.

Marcotte went down like he'd been shot,
clutching his knee in agony. He knew it was bad. He cringed, his
body contracting inward. Interior sirens rang with distress alarms
for parts south. Grimacing, he rolled over on the ice, eyes clamped
shut ... searching inward ... somewhere deep inside for solace ...
and relief from the pain.

His mind raced, recapping snippets scattered
about -- like pieces of what surely must be a shattered knee.
Marcotte tried to make heads or tails of the mess he suddenly found
himself. The little girl in that man's lap? Where was she? Damn.
Have to suck up the pain. Now she'll never go to another game.
Where's that friggin' team mascot? Why didn't he get in front of
that goddamn slash?

In the stands, Helen Dornhoefer jumped from
her seat. A nursing student, she'd met Derek in a freshman biology
class. When Derek showed up for class following the Pederson
collision with his arm in a sling, her interest in him hopscotched
madly between the chalked boxes marked "wild woman" and "wet
nurse". When his arm had healed, Derek was relieved to see her
dropping by less. He needed his stamina for the ice.

It was her haphazard interest in hockey and
him that at first drew him to her. The blondes and brunettes who
had thrown themselves at him ... he'd tossed back into the coed
pool. He didn't go to college to major in Non-Animalistic
Husbandry. Her aloofness gave Marcotte the space and time to
concentrate on hockey. She was only at today's game because a
girlfriend had a spare ticket and had asked her to go. Helen hadn't
struck out with Derek. Their relationship was an accident waiting
to happen.

Helen raced down the concrete steps. Taking
them two by two, she lost her balance for a second on some spilled
popcorn, but grabbed the railing one step further down and steadied
herself in a sticky patch of spilled pop. She surveyed the
situation on the ice as an emergency response crew member would in
planning a triage. With only one casualty, she calculated the
medical options available. First she had to find the quickest route
to him.

Two teammates helped Derek along the ice to
the door at the end of the rink. Helen yanked it open for them.
She'd jumped the last three rows of seats and their unsuspecting
occupants to reach the ice-level doors. She was oblivious to the
box of Cracker Snacks and beer cup she'd splattered off the
plexiglass in the process.

"Derek! Derek! Are you okay?"

Never let the patient know how bad it is. But
the optimism in her voice did little to mask her heart-pounding
concern. Dodging his eyes, she looked down at the ground. Her gaze
settled upon the injured knee. Besides not putting any weight on
it, something else wasn't right. His right sock had three red
stripes. But his left sock had four. The one at the top was a
little wider and at a bit of an angle when compared to the other
stripes. A gasp escaped her lips. The top stripe was becoming
wider. The blossoming red line was the scene of the crime of
Erskine's hatchet job. Fresh blood oozed through the heavy wool
along the crease carved by Erskine.

"Okay for a pegleg pirate," Derek said. "Okay
for Toulouse-Lautrec. Yeah, I'm okay."

He tried to crack a grin to show he was
already on the road to recovery. But the mere thought of laughing
-- or anything remotely related -- caused him to wince anew. Would
he skate again? Would he walk? Did anyone have the name of that
road to recovery?

The team trainer, Eddie "Zipper" Zorenson,
barreled past Helen, pushing her aside. Eddie was in his fifties
and when he wasn't refurbishing Model "A" cars, did a decent job
patching up Junior "A" players. Until recently. There was the Swift
Current incident where, in the final minute of a game, Zorenson was
sewing up a Speedy Creek player's split lip as quick as he could to
get the kid back in the game. Zorenson worked so fast he stitched
the poor kid's top and bottom lip together, halfway across the
mouth. They lost the game, but the player kept the rest of the team
loose on the bus trip home ... impersonating Jean Chretien. Swift
Current authorities canned Zipper and he'd be selling used cars if
it weren't for the kind hearted board of regents at Guelph.

"Let's go, boys," Zipper said. "His boots
have enough blood in'em."

Helen gritted her teeth. She couldn't do
anything now. The trainer had jurisdiction.

"I'll wait for you," she said to Derek. She
reached forward and touched his face. The brief caress brought back
warm memories of his last stay in sick bay with her. Every injury
carried with it a badge of honor. And it was women like Helen who
made wearing them so much easier.

The players whisked him away, down the
tunnel, past the dressing room to the headquarters of the
"Zipper".

... 4 ...

Sitting on the training table, Marcotte
played the game out in his head. He waited for the tap on the
shoulder that would send him over the boards -- a tap that would
never come. Derek looked around Zipper's room. Maybe they'd made a
wrong turn. There was nothing antiseptic about this place. The
yellowing porcelain sink was only a shade or two behind its urinal
brother down the hall. The two-foot-high mirror, a crystallized
speckle of its former self, had been hung by a maintenance man who
assumed most people entering the rink were five-foot-four.

A scale stood off to the side beside a small
wooden table. A box of ace bandages supported one of the table's
legs. The drawer in the table was minus one handle. A haphazard
assortment of opened boxes of gauze, plastic and glass containers
was strewn atop the table. This was the surgical side of garage
sales.

Zorenson looked over the x-rays of Derek's
damaged foot. The images were hot off the press from Guelph
General's x-ray lab next door. Zorenson would never be accused of
having a good poker face. A pair of anything would be better than
the hand Zipper was about to deal Marcotte.

"How bad is it, Zip?"

Zorenson pointed to the x-ray. Derek smirked.
Why did doctors always assume a patient could read an x-ray? When
people showed pictures of their summer vacation, did they pass
around the negatives?

"Your leg's gonna need all the steel from an
erector set. But you'll be a popular guy at airport metal
detectors."

Zipper had long since found laughter the best
medicine when it came to telling a patient how bad the injury was.
But he always tempered the situation by playing it straight up. He
wasn't about to keep the patient in the dark like some doctors, who
armed the wounded with only a thin veil of hope that never
completely masked the wracking nerves of anxiety.

Derek slipped into his own inner hell. The
capacity faithful would mourn his absence before turning their
attention to the next three-on-two break-out ... but Zipper was
hiding something. All too soon the trainer would paint the big
picture in slashing strokes. The muffled sounds of the game seeped
through the concrete walls. Derek's mental anguish gained on the
pain, still a searing fire down below. He'd fallen from this
amusement park ride. Until that moment it had been such a wonderful
trip. He could taste the NHL (Nathanael Hockey League). A pox on
the Zipper's next sentence.

"Sorry, son. Your hockey playing days are
over."

Awaking With the Enemy

... 1 ...

The hard, dark waters of Lake Ontario lapped
up against Toronto's bustling harbour front. February's chill froze
the exhaust of Lake Shore Boulevard's rush hour traffic as it
poured past Union Station and the Convention Centre. The jack sprat
CN Tower and fat lady SkyDome monitored the exiting masses.

Guelph was forty miles and eight years away
from the narrow three-story brownstone at 212 Sheppard Street.
Derek's marketing firm, May-Ja-Look, was stuffed away in an office
on the third floor of the building, whose tenants claim offered the
best views of Temperance. Only two blocks long, Temperance Street
was one of Hogtown's many short, intersecting thoroughfares. Its
west end abutted 212 Sheppard. May-Ja-Look was making barely enough
money to keep the water cooler running, let alone keep a bottle of
Pack o' Spaniels Tennessee whiskey in the filing cabinet.

Following the accident -- in between Helen's
constant pillow fluffing and chicken-noodle-soup-stuffing bedside
manner -- Derek's life hit a speed bump that didn't appear that big
at first. After scratching the NHL from his short list of career
options, he looked at what remained. Nothing. The career placement
radio ad had the smarmy voice promising, "I like working with
people." If he ever used that line in a job interview he promised
he'd shoot himself. It was around this time that Artie Hammond paid
him a visit.

They'd taken a couple of business classes
together at Guelph. Artie was the guy who always did the bonus
questions on homework but never raised his hand in class to prove
it. It was this inner drive of Artie's, fed page by page, that
Derek saw and admired. Artie's penchant for spread sheets and
bottom lines meant the object he fondled most frequently was a
computer keyboard. He was more familiar with software and hardware
than what was happening in his own underwear. So when Artie
propositioned Derek about starting up a marketing business in
Toronto, Derek's career option list blinked back on line.

Marcotte was a diehard Maple Leafs fan. On
Darryl Sittler's 10-point night, he could provide the time of each
goal. Unfortunately, May-Ja-Look's fortunes had run much the same
as the hockey team's play-off success. Business had trickled
through the door for most of the past eight years at a
bare-sustenance pace.

Derek sat at his desk, panning the pages of
the Hockey Bible. His office was small with one window. A
defenbachia guarded one corner. A framed Leroy Niemann-like hockey
print hung from one wall. Other pictures included autographed
glossies of Sittler and Dave Keon. For Torontonians, the two faces
linked two diametrically opposed decades. The clean-cut Keon's
Spartan determination of the '60s surrealized into Sittler's curly
locks and the disco-or-be-damned '70s. A shin-barking coffee table
stood between two fake-lizard leather lounge chairs. A stack of
trade magazines and news periodicals sat on one corner of Derek's
desk. On the other corner sat a mounted, plastic-encased hockey
card of a young Terry Sawchuk. Sawchuk's career added the 40's and
50's to the list of hockey heritage the room housed. Several
folders lay strewn about on the desktop in front of Derek.

There was a knock on the pane of the open
door and Artie poked his head into the office.

"Derek?"

Marcotte stayed immersed in a rumor about the
Leafs trading defenseman Dave Ellett and right winger Rob Pearson
to Calgary for the blue line blaster, Al MacInnis. The Toronto
sportswriting grapevine flourished year round, albeit yielding a
stock that was 90% sour.

"Yeah?"

"I've got good news ... and bad news."

Derek wearily closed the paper.

"Let's have the bad news," he said.

"The Rankin campaign? We didn't get it. They
liked Herculean's concept better. Said something about the waves
crashing against the shore giving them the imagery they
wanted."

Derek slammed his fist against the desk.
Sawchuk bounced, his grin quickly turning to a chuckle.

"Waves? Imagery? They're a goddamn hardware
store! We're up against God. That bastard, Erskine, can even give a
crescent wrench feelings!"

Marcotte grabbed the Hockey Bible and slowly
wrung it into a cylinder with both hands. It was an eerie equation
of emotional physics. As the diameter of the cylinder grew smaller,
Derek's anger increased.

Erskine. Everywhere he looked. Victor's
father had bankrolled his business. The old man didn't have the
clout to have his son skating in the NHL, but he'd turned
Marcotte's second career choice into a steeple chase. It seemed
with each Herculean obstacle Derek's and Artie's hands -- and feet
-- were tied. Every major advertising campaign that came over the
wire was snapped up by Erskine's outfit. The small jobs that
May-Ja-Look landed were bones deemed too small for the big hound.
May-Ja-Look was not turning heads with table scraps.