Tony arranged for Stan’s body to lie overnight at a funeral home on Ontario Street in downtown Montreal. He’d brought a casket with him from Toronto, and didn’t want everything left at the airport any longer than it had to be. The driver of the hearse, Fred, a thin man in a shiny black suit that looked two owners removed from the thrift shop, helped him place Stan in the casket and the two of them loaded it and the Cup into the back of the hearse. Fred took no special notice of the Cup, as though he had no idea what it meant. Tony booked lodging at the Sheraton downtown, one room for himself and the Cup, another for Fred.
Tony and Fred had come to know a great deal about each other on their afternoon drive to Montreal. In his early twenties, Fred played saxophone in a jazz combo and worked at the funeral home for steady money. He talked about Montreal the entire trip, about jazz clubs, gangsters and beautiful women. Fred had played a few gigs in the city the year before, and fallen in love with a woman who worked the bar in one of the clubs. Since they ended, he hadn’t been back, but he was ready to try his luck again. It was Tony’s first visit to Montreal. He’d worked for the League for five years, but had been steady at the office in Toronto.
“Well, if you’re interested in jazz, stick with me tonight,” Fred advised. “I know at least five places within three blocks of each other. They’ll all take your head off. Too bad they didn’t send us here next week ’cause then there’d be the festival and you wouldn’t be able to turn a corner without hearing jazz. If it’s women you’re looking for, just walk into any bar and open your eyes. There’s strip clubs like crazy on Sainte-Catherine’s, but they’re all pros, you know. It’s simple and hassle free, but not very warm, you know what I mean? You want to meet someone, Saint-Laurent is where the French girls hang out—and trust me, when you’re in Montreal, you want to meet a French girl. Break my fucking heart.”
“I’m not leaving the hotel tonight, Fred,” Tony replied. “I’ve got to watch the Cup.”
“What’s the Cup going to do?”
“Without me, I don’t know, that’s the problem. It’s my job to watch that Cup.”
“That’s some important cup then?”
Tony turned in his seat and looked at Fred. He’d already mentioned the Cup several times on the 401. They had carried it together in its black case from the security lock-up at Dorval and slid it in beside Stan’s casket. Now they were driving with it into downtown Montreal, the city that had won the Cup more than any other city, the city that by rights owned the Cup. If they were to stop on the side of the freeway and pull the Cup out of its case, they would cause a huge traffic jam with people pulling over to get a look at it. If the citizens of this city knew that tomorrow Tony would be taking the Cup out of Montreal and driving it to Toronto, they would blockade Highway 401.
The Cup meant more to more people in Montreal than any jazz club or beautiful bartender ever would, and yet here was a young man, of hockey-playing, hockey-watching age who had seemingly never even heard of it. It was absurd. Tony had played with a miniature replica of the Cup in his crib. He had won and lost that little plastic Cup over and over playing table hockey with his friends. Each year he had begun the playoffs with the plastic Cup in his hand, waiting for Toronto to win so he and his father could drink champagne from it like he’d been promised. And each year, he didn’t drink champagne from it. He had seen the real Cup at the Hall of Fame when he was ten, and again every year since then until the League hired him. Since that day, he knew exactly how many times, the actual number of times he had been allowed to touch the Cup. Helping Stan with his travel schedule, and getting him ready for almost every trip for the past three years, Tony had been asked to pick up the Cup seventy-four times.
Tonight had been seventy-five, and number one for Fred, though Fred wasn’t aware anything significant had occurred. Tony looked at Fred and wondered what it must be like to be unaware of this cup.
“Yes, it is an important cup. Valuable anyway.”
“Valuable? A trophy? How much could a trophy cost?”
“Well, Fred, think of it this way. You think we’ve been sent here to pick up poor old Stan, the guy in the back there, but if it weren’t for that cup beside him, old Stan would have ridden home in the belly of an airplane beside people’s pets and luggage. That cup is the only reason Stan is getting this great chauffeured ride back to Toronto. So, once something like this cup is more important than a person’s dignity, how much would you say that thing is worth?”
“That’s one fucking important cup, then.”
In his hotel room on the twenty-third floor of the Sheraton, Tony removed the Cup from its case and set it on the floor near the window. He liked jazz and he liked women. Before leaving for the evening, Fred had stopped by Tony’s room and marked out some likely hotspots on a tourist map.
From his window, looking north toward the mountain, the city lay itself before him in a blanket of shimmering lights. A warm breeze came through the screen and with it, the sound of female laughter from the street below. Tony lay down on the bed and let his hand brush against the polished chrome nameplates. He read the name Lanny MacDonald. He ran his thumb along the word Calgary. He listened to the city that truly owned the Cup, and fell asleep touching it. Seventy-seven.
Tony had all the right scars in all the right places to be a professional hockey player. At seven, playing pickup at Riverdale Park he took a puck off his right cheekbone and crumpled to the ice in a classic pose, blood pouring from his face, pooling black-red beneath him. The emergency room doctor put thirteen stitches into him, joked about his black eye and told him to rub vitamin E oil into the wound once it closed, to decrease the scarring. His mother showed him how to squeeze the oil from vitamin capsules, and once the wound closed Tony diligently flushed one capsule each night, making sure none of the oil came anywhere near his scar.
Three years later at an opponent’s elbow, he lost a tooth he had only just grown and had to be fitted for a tiny upper plate. A white ravine ran through the black hairs of his left eyebrow, the result of a high stick at shinny. Another scar, on his upper lip, from too forceful a punch with a frozen glove when he was twelve, meant later in life he would never be able to wear a moustache as the whiskers would not fill in properly over the dead white tissue.
Tony played hockey in every season, as a kid rising rapidly through the levels of the organized sport in winter and captaining his own teams on the concrete rinks of summer. He surprised coach after coach by volunteering immediately to play defence. Every year Tony stood alone at the sideboards, the only defender until other failed forwards were assigned to join him. No one except Tony volunteered to play defence. As in all sports, the stars of the game are the front men, the goal-scorers, but Tony viewed defencemen as specialists, players who made it their business to be better than the front men, to stop the goal-scorers.
If not more glamorous, then certainly more noble, Tony’s Cup-winning dreams were low-scoring. He was the guy who lay down in front of a slapshot and took the puck in the ribs for the team. The guy who muscled superstars away from the net and absorbed all their anger and ambition. Protector of the goalie, owner of the blue line, Tony wanted every game to end 1-0 for his team, in overtime. For any other young player with Tony’s level of skill, choosing defence would have been a brilliant strategy for advancement. A young, talented kid who had already adopted the mature, team-playing mentality of a defensive specialist. A kid who didn’t need to have his goal-scorer ambitions beaten out of him by coaches, teammates and opponents unconvinced of what was being offered, this was someone welcome at the upper levels of the game. As Tony would have been, but for his size.
“You should have gone into wrestling,” was the parting consolation offered Tony when he was cut from his final team. All his skills and scars in place, Tony had simply not grown the extra four or five inches necessary to stay standing as a defensive specialist staring down forwards his own age. Coaches benched him because they feared he might get seriously injured, and they eventually cut him because they couldn’t stand watching his talents go to waste. He lifted weights to develop his legs and upper body, but in the end it was a matter of physics, height meaning leverage and leverage meaning dominance. In the end, the skinniest lightweight forward could lean down on Tony and take his feet out from underneath him. And with their longer legs, taking three strides to Tony’s five, opposing players beat Tony to the puck again and again.
By the time he was cut for good, he was mentally prepared for it, having suffered more than enough humiliation on the ice during games and in the locker room afterwards. To his surprise he was content to leave the physicality of the game behind, the actual playing of it against opponents so superior in size and speed. His regrets were not for the end of his playing, or in the humiliation of being bettered by players he outskilled by far, but in the lost potential for winning the Cup. He could always satisfy his desire to play the game at pickup and no-contact shinny games where size was not a factor and his timing and drive still made him a star. His ego could not suffer too much because he still was plainly better at the game than everyone he knew. But he would never win the Cup, not that cup, playing on concrete in July or at the Riverdale rink in mid-January.
On everyone’s advice, he took to coaching, assisting his former mentors in forming the next generation of players after his own. He found, even, that he could occasionally teach his passion for defence, and he could pass on much of his skill to the hardest workers, but it was too difficult for him to watch the latest crop of non-growers like himself drift away to the bench and then to nowhere while less talented, less hardworking giants plowed their way to the top. He had no advice to give on how to get bigger when your body refused to do so, on how to change your genetic makeup so it included a bit more northern European tree trunk.
He switched to coaching girls hockey with its reduced emphasis on hitting and intimidation and its focus on pure speed and skill. But girls have their own reasons for never getting their hands on the Cup. Not even his lankiest, most acrobatic girl goalie, more catlike and instinctual than any boy he’d ever seen between the pipes, not even she would ever drink champagne from the Cup. The unfairness of it overwhelmed him and he gave up the job of building kids’ impossible dreams for the amusement of others. He moved to the university leagues, coaching varsity girls’ teams, girls who played only for fun and dreamed of medical or law degrees instead of trophies.
At the University of Toronto, he attended lectures in his off-hours and began to read widely, an experience so new to him it felt like travelling. He met, bedded, and was blissfully left by a visiting professor named Ewa Loest. He began to consider that there just might be something more than the winning of that particular cup involved in leading a fulfilling life. He began listening to baseball games and watching the birds in the trees around campus.
But his years in the hockey system in Toronto, and his skill with the stick had made him a lot of friends in the game. Through one of these friends, he was eventually offered a job with the League, in scheduling. It was a desk assignment plotting out the travel plans of all the boys who had managed to grow that extra four or five inches.
The next morning there was no answer from behind Fred’s door. Tony slapped at the wood with an open palm and shouted his name. It occurred to him there were very few alternatives to Fred’s hearse for moving both a body and a championship trophy back to Toronto. He could rent a minivan, but how would he get Stan inside it without all the casket-moving equipment hearses contain? He was relieved to find the young driver in the lobby restaurant. In the same clothes as the night before, the black silk suit and black cap of a hearse driver, Fred smelled of bar smoke and spilled wine. He was leaning heavily on one elbow and staring into a cup of black coffee. He smiled when Tony took the booth bench across from him. Though clearly exhausted, his eyes were shining.
“I don’t regret a minute of it,” he said. “Today, at around three, when we’re fighting traffic back in Scarborough, I’m gonna feel about as bad as a man can feel, but I still won’t regret it.”
“You saw the sun come up?”
“Like a great big eyeball, man. Like a fucking big eyeball looking at me and winking, saying ‘that’s right, man, that’s living.’ The sun? Man that was hours ago. You know what I’ve seen since the sun came up, man?”
“What have you seen?”
When the sun had first slipped through the window that morning, it hit the Cup like some druidic prophecy. There were shine demons dancing on every wall, the ceiling and the floor. Tony lay in bed for over an hour watching the shifting play of light, the inexplicable colours. When he went to shower, he dragged the Cup along the carpet and stood it outside the bathroom, where he could see it from the glass stall.
“Man, I left the last club at around 4:30. That was over there on Saint-Denis just before it heads up the mountain, right near where we left buddy yesterday. I come walking out of the club ready to hit the sack, you know, and right there across the road is this strip club, and it’s letting out too. Just the girls, no customers. I guess the customers got booted before that, so now it’s just the girls kissing the doorman goodnight, laughing and giggling to themselves. No longer on the hunt, you know? Man. You know what strippers do when they’re finished work at 4:30 in the morning?”
“Go to bed?”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? Not these girls. They get a look at me, and I guess it’s the hat sets them off. Pretty goofy hat when it comes right down to it. They’re all yelling and whistling to me across the street, and I’m pointing my finger at myself like Jerry Lewis, you know, like playing around all ‘who, me?’ and they’re loving it. Next thing I know I’m up in some park past Sherbrooke there, smoking hash with three strippers and watching them dance to the sunrise. You know, them girls, even with their clothes on, they’ve got the moves. And there I am, just lying on the grass in this beautiful warm morning, my head full of hash, and all this beauty in my eyes.”
“You still have your wallet?”
“No, I don’t still have my wallet, but as I said, I don’t regret a thing.”
“Still have the keys to the hearse?”
“Yes, I do. Them girls wouldn’t go near a hearse if you paid them. Very superstitious bunch, the erotic entertainment crowd.”
“Who would have guessed?”
“You think they took my wallet, but you’re wrong. These girls each make more in a night than you and I combined make in a week. What the fuck do they want my wallet for? I’d be more likely to steal from them.”
Tony ordered an omelette for himself, a bagel and cream cheese for Fred, and more coffee. They had to be at the funeral home for ten, and he wanted to hit the highway as soon as possible after that. There was another funeral home waiting for Stan in Toronto, and the Cup was expected to make a trip to Florida at the end of the week. The office had gone into a frenzy at the news of Stan’s death. There was no contingency in place, like everyone expected Stan to just keep doing his job forever.
The young driver straightened himself and leaned across the table, grabbing at Tony’s arm. Clearly, the story of his night would continue, with or without Tony’s co- operation.
“So then, I’m walking back along Sainte-Catherine’s there, way over in the east end, and I’ve got three different kisses to think about, still on my mouth, you know. I can still feel that last one. I think they were all trying to outdo each other, you know, and she wins. Ouch. And I’m walking along—this is just a couple hours ago now. There’s a few people on the street, the early workers, you know, picking up garbage and opening up the depanneurs, and it’s like the greatest morning of my life all of a sudden, you know, all zoned on the hash and the sun shining, and suddenly there’s this dog. It’s like this big German shepherd thing with a yellow bandana around its neck, and it’s limping around on the sidewalk in front of me, holding one of its front paws in the air. I can take a lot of things man. I mean, I move dead people around all day, right, but I can’t take seeing a hurt dog. Breaks my heart to see a hurt dog.”
During breakfast, the street outside the hotel, Boulevard René-Lévesque, filled with the morning rush, cars and buses and business people walking fast to their offices. Montreal’s second face, the desperate, struggling centre of commerce, came out to replace the cooler, more relaxed Montreal of the night.
“And it belongs to this street kid, this girl with hair dyed all purple and shaved up the back and sides. You know, you see them all downtown these days; they live in the empty lots. A lot of them keep dogs, for protection I guess, or maybe they just like dogs. She’s sitting off the sidewalk in this overgrown lot. I guess maybe that’s where she lives, just her and her dog among the rocks that used to be a building.”
“She took your wallet?”
Tony kept his involvement in the conversation minimal. The less he talked, the sooner it would be over. Stan had told him about this part of the job. “You’re not really supposed to be there, so everyone gets uncomfortable and starts telling you the story of their fucking lives. After a while, you figure out where it’s going, and you can try to nudge it there a bit faster.”
“She won my wallet. I wanted to give her some money so she could take her dog to a vet or something, or at least buy some food for the thing, and for herself—something, but you can never tell where that money’s going to go. I don’t usually care about that. What someone on the street does with the money I give them, that’s their own business, but there was a dog involved. I’m standing there, trying to tell her what to do with the ten bucks I just gave her and she’s just smiling up at me. She can probably smell the hash and booze coming off me so who am I to give lectures at that point? But she sees that I have more than ten bucks in my wallet. That’s when she offers to play me for the rest of my money.”
“Play you?”
“She’s got this plastic chessboard with her, keeps it set up all the time on one of the pieces of broken concrete. That’s her thing, right. They’ve all got a thing. Hers is she’ll play you chess for money. Jocelyn, that’s the name she gives me. You put however much money down that you want to risk and if Jocelyn wins, she keeps it.”
Fred looked out the window, took off his cap and scratched a shaky hand through his hair. The hair stood on end where the fingers left it.
“My guess is Jocelyn almost always wins,” he said.
The restaurant was filling with other travellers, groups of older Americans in town on a tour. They sat in the seats surrounding Fred and Tony, wearing comfortable clothing, staring at Fred in his rumpled black suit.
“I know a little bit about chess. My uncle taught me when I was just a kid and I got really good at it for a while there. Won a bunch of tournaments at school and travelled around a bit with it. But this girl, man, she was a monster. You know chess? It’s all about them four middle squares, right? Take control of them four middle squares and you’re on your way. But this chick, man, she didn’t give a shit about them four middle squares. She sees me setting up in the middle and she just laughs because she’s already kicking my ass somewhere else.”
“And you’re still stoned at this point?”
“I know, I know, I thought the same thing. The first game I lost—twenty bucks—I figured it was probably because of the hash. And I didn’t even mind losing the money because I wanted her dog to get to a vet. I was going to give her the money even if I won. I wanted her to feed the damn dog today, you know. So, I give my head a shake and play for all I’ve got left—another fifteen bucks.
“And this time I’m really watching, really paying attention to what it is she’s doing, but you know, it’s like she and I, we’re not even playing the same game. I’m playing chess and she’s playing this other game that makes chess look like tic-tac-toe. You know the best players in the world have entire games memorized, with thousands of variations to every move. If you make this move, say you bring out your bishop on the third move, that’s standard, they look into their big box of games in their head and say okay, bishop out on the third move is when I throw my knight into the middle. Then let’s say you try to mix it up a bit and bring out your queen. Unless it’s an absolutely stupid move, they’ve already anticipated it, and they have three possible moves at their disposal to pick from.
“For these people, chess is a room with a thousand doors, each door leading into another room with a thousand doors, and on and on. And they always know which door is best. In their minds, there is a red carpet on the floor of each room, leading directly to the best possible door to the next room. You and I step into these rooms, all we see are doors, but these people have a red carpet. It’s not really about being smarter than the other person. It’s some kind of extra sense, like mind reading. There’s this place out there, you know, in the air, where all the answers are, a place where the doors are marked with the red carpet, and if you can access that place, well there you are.
“That’s what this chick was like. She’d make a move and then she’d sort of stare off into the street, looking after her dog, or just watching people go by until I made my move. And as soon as I made my move, you could see her seeing the right door. If you play the game to any competitive level, these are the people you eventually run into, the ones who let you know it’s time to sit down; you’ve reached the end of your winning streak and now it’s time to take your seat where you belong.”
“So she won the second game as well?”
“She didn’t win it. She owned it from beginning to end. These people don’t win, they just are. You just don’t expect to find one of them living on the street in Montreal, you know, begging food for their dog. Yeah, she took my fifteen bucks. Then she sees my wallet is empty and she gets this smile on her face, like she knows I’m a fighting fish and I’m not letting go of the hook. She smiles at me and says she’ll play me for the wallet itself, and everything in it. If she wins, I can cancel my credit cards, but I have to give her a day before I do it. She’s got it all figured out, so you know she’s done this shit before. She gets a day to throw as much on the card as she can and I don’t have to pay for it because I report it stolen. I just say I had my pocket picked and didn’t notice it for a long time and the card company forgives me all the charges that aren’t mine. They’re insured for just this kind of delayed reporting, so it’s all covered. Just a cost of doing business for those guys.
“And if I win, she says, I get whatever I want. I get all my money back, I get the dog if I want it; and if I want, I get her. She says she’ll come back to my room with me if I win, if that’s what I want. I’m still thinking of walking away, and she must know that because that’s when she pulls out the blindfold. She’s going to play the whole game without being able to see the board. I’m supposed to tell her my moves, and move her pieces for her when she decides on a move. This I’ve got to see, so I put my wallet down and she blindfolds herself. She plays the entire game looking only at a board in her head. She has to keep a picture of where every piece is on the board at all times. It’s not impossible, but I’ve never seen it before, so we play.”
“And that’s when she took your wallet.”
Fred gave Tony a weary look.
“Yeah, and that’s when that happened. You know, I might just have brought her back to my room if I’d won. I might just have done that, because right now I’m thinking I’m in love with that girl. She beat my ass blindfolded.”
Tony picked up the breakfast cheque, put it on the League’s expense. He brought the Cup down to the parking garage. Fred dozed in the driver’s seat while Tony loaded it into the back of the hearse. On Ontario Street, two guys from the funeral home loaded Stan for them. A block from the highway entrance on René-Lévesque, Tony had Fred pull over and took charge of the wheel himself.
“You know, you need a special licence to drive one of these things, man.”
“And right now, neither one of us could produce one. If we get pulled over, I’ll just show the cop the Cup.”
“That’s one all-powerful cup you got there, man.”
It was Tony’s turn to shoot a tired look.
“Fred, man, I have to say, I’m not buying this line you keep handing me where you have no idea what’s in that black case back there. I mean, we live in the same country, right? You’re younger than me, but what difference does that make? You’re telling me you’ve never heard of that trophy.”
“What’s your question? Have I heard of it, or do I care?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“I mean, do you know what the international cricket trophy looks like? The Ashes—it’s called the Ashes.”
“Absolutely not, but that wasn’t my point.”
“Because about a billion more people care about that thing than about your shiny little cup back there.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“No offence buddy, but get your head out of your ass. Hockey is a money game.”
“I can’t argue against that.”
“You know, when India plays Pakistan at cricket for the Ashes, people die. Did you know that?”
“I think I knew that.”
“With all due respect, who gives a crap about your cup?”
Fred smiled the smile he’d learned from tired strippers that morning, threw his cap on the floor and climbed over the seatback to lie down beside Stan.
Tony drove the limit on the 401, a six-hour trip, with Stan’s casket locked into the back, the Cup in its case on one side of him and Fred stretched out asleep on the other side. He stopped for gas in Brockville, coffee and a doughnut in Kingston. He was surprised to find a radio installed in the dashboard. It brought him a minor league baseball game from across the lake in New York somewhere, until it faded out in the crowded airwaves around Toronto. Somewhere, the Trojans were doing the unexpected and beating the Bulls by one run. Off the highway, on the crowded streets of Toronto, Tony woke Fred and let him drive the final few blocks to the funeral home where Stan would lie three days, visited by hockey players and League dignitaries, but no family or friends other than Tony, who showed up every day.