Antonio Esposito Chiello, the keeper of the Cup, is sent to Romania in only his second full year on the job. It is a job passed on to him by death, a job he tries not to think about very much because he loves it too strongly to consider it real. Real, it might somehow go away. Other things, loved things, made real, had gone away. They always do.
In his new job, Tony practises a new way of working. He breathes; he looks around; he tries to interest himself in where he is and what there is to see and remember outside of the fact that he is there with the Cup. He refuses to think of the trophy as his responsibility, something to be taken care of. Instead, it is simply part of everything he sees and everywhere he goes. It is attached to his experience of everything, attached to him. For him, the trophy is just another arm.
Tony travels for three months every summer with three arms. He can lose sight of the Cup only as easily as he might lose sight of his own flesh. To leave it behind, he would first have to cut it away. It isn’t there to be watched and looked after; it is simply there, part of Tony wherever he goes. And he goes wherever the League tells him to go. He asks no questions and makes no suggestions or complaints. He has learned all this from his old friend Stan.
There had been thoughts of winning the Cup. Early thoughts, like those of everyone else he knew. Born in Toronto in 1965, Tony had, in a way, already won the Cup twice, but as a child he had no memory of the celebrations. He knew the significance of his middle name, and understood why it was there like that. He wondered sometimes, “Why name me after a Chicago goalie?” but it was clear that for Tony’s family being Italian was more important than being from either Toronto or Chicago. He remembered his father’s friends at the house on Saturday evenings. Beer spilled into orange shag carpet. His mother laughing at him when he skated toward her across the backyard.
He remembered feeling no pressure, as though the winning of the Cup was there for him in his future, unquestionably. It would be done, and the way it would be done was by simply living a life the way he was living it. Posters on the wall, a bed held off the ground by four hockey pucks, a slice of oozing honeycomb in his mouth for the drive to the arena.
Coaches and referees praised him for his speed. His parents smiled at him from three rows above the glass. He grew and waited for time to bring him what he deserved. In the summer, he swam at Riverdale Pool during the hot days and played ball hockey on Grandview Avenue into the evenings. Things happened in his family. His father changed jobs every once in a while. The family sat at the kitchen table and his father would explain what the new job was all about. Where it was, how long the drive would be, when he would be home in the evenings, what kind of free stuff he could get. Always it seemed to be a better job. His mother smiled and laughed and made them all drink wine in fancy red-stained glasses.
His sister married a Scottish boy from the neighbourhood. There were three days of flowers and large meals. His father took pictures of everybody in the backyard, by the fence, in front of the roses. Antonio danced with his sister and she lifted him off the ground, kissing him and calling him her little Tony Esposito, her little goalie. There was endless cake.
Sometimes, his parents would bring another child home from the hospital. Twice it was sisters and the last was a brother. All of their cribs were held off the ground by four hockey pucks.
“That way,” his father told Antonio, “the legs won’t dent the carpet.”
Twice a year, his father would take him to the game with tickets he got from someone at work. Antonio sat watching the players while his father walked from section to section, looking for better seats. Only once, he managed to sneak Antonio into the Golds. His father lifted him from the tunnel into the only available seat, beside a young woman and her date. He told Antonio to watch out for him across the ice, and then disappeared back into the tunnel. A little later, the girl tapped Antonio on the leg, smiled, and pointed out his father to him, across the ice in the Greys, waving both arms. When Toronto scored, the girl gripped Antonio’s leg with her long fingernails and bounced on her seat. Her breath smelled like vanilla ice cream. The crowd yelled “Espo seeeeeeeeto!”, taunting the goalie, cheering for Tony.
Late in the third period, a Chicago player was checked hard into the boards directly below Antonio’s seat. The girl beside him covered her face. The game stopped and all the players skated slowly in circles, looking over toward Antonio. A man in a jogging suit and black shoes came running across the ice from the benches. Two other skaters lifted the injured player to his feet. He leaned on the boards and breathed heavily. Blood ran in lines down his face, and he spat red onto the ice. He was crying. He looked huge, much bigger than players ever looked on television or from the Greys. All the players suddenly looked huge. The girl’s fingernails dug into his leg again.
“Is it over yet?” she asked.
The player turned and skated across the ice toward his bench. The crowd stood and applauded. On the glass just below Antonio, a wide streak of blood leaked downward in thin lines. Below it, on the ledge at the top of the boards, a tooth flashed white in a puddle of red. It looked to be dug into the wood. Antonio put his hand on top of the girl’s fingers. She looked at him and touched his face.
“Are you okay, kiddo?” she said. Antonio nodded and threw up into her lap.
Tony’s stewardship of the Cup began as he’d expected it to. Stan had always described with ironic amazement the disrespect and debauchery with which hockey players treated the thing they worked and sweated and lost teeth for. Sure, it was all kissing and smiling on the night of the big win, but after that, the Cup was just another possession in a long line of possessions. Stan taught Tony that very few players ever really understood the value of what they had won, and so Tony took over Stan’s job with the same sense of protective disdain for all who treated the Cup poorly.
On the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with a crowd of press watching, a large seagull landed in the bowl of the Cup. It turned three quick circles, watching the people nearby and also looking out to sea, clicking its ringed yellow beak on the side of the bowl. There was laughter, and newspapers around the country picked up the wire photo, running it on the front page of their sports coverage. A determined, angry-looking bird nesting in the Cup. In the photo, there is an arm in dark suit material reaching for the bird, and the bird has pulled its head back behind its body, either trying to lean out of the way of the approaching arm or preparing to attack with its beak. The headline in USA Today ran, “New Jersey Resident Claims Cup as His Own.” Tony wondered how they had determined the bird was a male. After that trip, he bought himself Audubon bird guides for all the regions he thought he might have to visit in his job.
When the bird landed, Tony was himself looking out to sea. Off the New Jersey coast, a cruise ship pushed north through moderate seas. Heading for New York, Tony thought and chuckled to himself. All that morning, Tony was reflecting on the newness of everything on this side of the continent. New Jersey, New England, even old New York was once New Amsterdam. The thought was moving around in his head, trying to incorporate a name like Virginia, but then the seagull had landed and Tony had moved on it.
Tony walked with a limp that entire day. The night before, a boy helping him bring the Cup through the lobby of the Trump Hotel had run into Tony’s heel with the wheel of the dolly, opening the skin. Overnight, the wound had dried out and his ankle fused in a painful tightness. When he jumped forward to remove the bird, he felt the wound reopen.
Scott Marston, the Cup-winner from Atlantic City, threw up his breakfast ten minutes before the ceremony on the boardwalk. Behind a screen, Tony draped the Cup in its black velvet cover, noticing for the first time the number of birds that circled overhead. He wondered about bird feces. How one would remove them from black velvet. A scraper first, for sure, several passes with the light alcohol swab and then a good soft-brushing to straighten the grain. Marston had been with him for breakfast, and followed him onto the boardwalk, not wanting to see his family and friends until the ceremony. The morning sun and sea air had turned on him. Hungover from a night of rum and gambling with high school friends, Marston excused himself to one of the portable toilets beneath the boardwalk. As Tony made the final adjustments to the black velvet, he could hear Marston retching beneath him.
Tony watched the gull for a long time after it flew away. It had picked itself out of the Cup with a simple springing jump, like it had bounced. With its wings spread, the bird caught the perpetual ocean breeze and quickly drifted far beyond Tony’s grasp. It dropped low over the sand and let loose a stream of white shit that just missed a young girl walking with her father. Over the water, it mingled with the other birds, but Tony kept it in sight despite the crowded skies. Two small grey and white feathers clung to the inside wall of the trophy’s bowl. Tony pulled them away and heard a delicate static discharge like the distant ringing of tiny bells.