LAST NIGHT, BLUE HERMANN TOOK SICK in a spectacular way. Blue smoked all his life, smoked too much and drank too much, and his insides are crumbly now as moldy cheese, and when he coughs he sprays them all over the walls. I don’t mind that. I’ve seen worse. I saw Bullet Broun get his throat cut open by a skate blade. His gullet gaped like another mouth. I saw Rene LeCroix stop a puck with his forehead—his left eye flew clear out of its socket and dangled near his chin. Blue Hermann is just coughing up little chunks of his bad life, and I’m unaffected. But then he starts talking. Blue Hermann scares the bejesus out of me when he starts talking like that, nonsensical I mean, and soon he’s screaming at the top of his lungs. I press the buzzer for the nurse and they come fill him full of dope.
I can’t sleep after that. I take out the book Clinton & Leary Fight the Dogstar People. The Dogstar People float around the universe, they leak into things, trees and water and clouds. I shut my eyes. I’m back in this dream I’ve been having, the dream of Manfred’s funeral. Manfred’s spirit leaks out of his stone gray body. Hallie cries, the tears spill onto her satin dress, the dress becomes soaked, and I can see her nakedness. Clay Clinton begins to laugh, and that sound is in my ears when I wake in the morning.
Blue Hermann is looking at me.
“You had a rough one last night,” I say to him.
Blue waves his nicotine-stained hand in the air. It’s a spotted, twisted, palsied claw, and it barely looks human. Blue waves it in the air and I know not to mention anything more about his attack. Hermann reaches for his secret stash of whiskey and takes a long pull from the flask. His wattles tremble. Usually I’ll have at him for that sort of thing, call him an alkie and whatnot, but today I just watch him out of the corner of my eye. The liquor seems to calm him somewhat. Blue lies down on his bed and folds his old hands neatly across his chest.
“Hey, Hermann,” says I, “why do you want to come with me to Toronto anyways?”
Blue grins. He has a nice smile, considering. You should have seen that smile when he was a young man in New York, New York. “The thing is, Leary,” Blue tells me, “Clay told me to look after you.” Hermann makes a sound like an old Buick sinking in quicksand, which is what he uses for a laugh. “He told me to look after your spiritual needs.” Blue turns away.
“It’s King Leary Night at the Gardens. That punk Killebrew is going to be there. We’re going to do the adverts together.”
“I want to see this new fucking Sports Hall of Infamy,” Blue suggests.
“Surely. Go take a gander at the one-nine one-nine lumber.”
“We could visit the graves,” he says in a near whisper.
“There’s too many,” I tell him. “We’d have to take a two-week excursion.”
“And we could go to a bar!” Hermann’s stony eyes acquire a sparkle.
“I don’t think Iain’s going to let you go to a bar.”
“Did Iain say he was coming?”
“He’s coming.”
“Well, if he does,” Blue tells me, “we lose him.”
“You would, too!”
Hermann chuckles. “I would, too.”
After a moment I say, “Iain says there’s to be no croaking in Toronto.”
We both nod, fair enough.
When I got off the plane in New York, New York, the first person I saw was Blue Hermann. He was standing on the tarmac, already scribbling in his little notebook. Blue had a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth, so his eyes were all squinty as the smoke drifted into them. (Those dangling cigarettes likely account for the way Blue’s aspect is these days, like that of a wax Chinaman that’s been left out in the sun.) Blue Hermann had a green fedora cocked on his head. A card stuck out of the headband. Blue Hermann gave me a little wink.
“Little Leary!” called out the newspaperman.
“You got him! Also known as Loof-weeda. That’s an Indian monicker meaning ‘windsong.’ ”
I was twenty-six years old, at the height of my career. I bounced down the airplane steps with a Dublintown swagger, swinging my dragon-head cane. I’d have whistled a tune, except that I could never get the knack of whistling. I tipped my miner’s cap to the stranger on the tarmac.
“Hermann from the Star,” he informed me.
“Percy from the river.”
“Let’s clear something up.”
“Let’s do that.”
“You and Clay Clinton are longtime friends, no?”
“Clay and I go back a ways.”
“Don’t you feel this sudden trade is something of a betrayal?”
“Clay’s got the Patriots to worry about. He got ten thousand smackers for this little puff of Irish wind, and that’s a fair bit. Anyone would have done it. Clay and I are still buddies.”
“Do you think your play will be affected by the absence of your linemate Manny Oz?”
“I’ll adjust.”
“You won’t miss him?”
“What do you mean, ‘miss him’?”
“Is he still drinking heavily?”
“Manny’s got the juice pretty much licked,” I lied. The juice was licking Manfred like an all-day lollipop. “How’s your wife, Chloe?”
“She’s good, mister. Why do you ask? That ain’t exactly hockey related.”
“Everything is hockey related. Do you agree?”
“I never thought about it.”
“Wait up a minute, Hermann from the Star.”
“You have a newborn baby?”
“Clifford.”
“Do you miss him?”
“I just got here.”
“Is Clay Clinton married?”
“Clay? No. He’s a confirmed bachelor.” He did get married later on, to Janey Millson, as you may know, but truth to be told, his marriage never affected his bachelor status.
All of a sudden this Hermann from the Star reaches inside his trench coat. He removes a pewter flask, unscrews the top—grinning all the while, staring at me, I didn’t know he was seeing me all in a blue haze—and he takes a long pull. Then he shoves the thing in my face. “Care for a tug at the witch’s tit?”
“No, thankee,” I said, adding, for the benefit of the newspaper readers, “I do not drink. I have only had one alcoholic beverage in my life, that being a single glass of champagne when the Paddies claimed the Stanley Cup six years ago.”
“And just when,” Blue Hermann demanded, “do you think you might have another?”
“When the New York Americans claim the goblet at the end of this season.”
Old Blue wrote that up in his column, and for a while it became quite a joke in New York City. All kinds of restaurants put bottles of champagne on ice, attaching little signs saying how it was reserved for Percival Leary on the cup-winning night. I received many letters, especially from ladies, telling me that I was welcome to have some champagne with them when the Amerks won. Mind you, that year the New York Americans were as pitiful an organization as one could care to see, the South Grouse Louses notwithstanding, so nothing ever came of that champagne lark.
The thing of it is, what gives me cause to wonder in these idle days, that single glass of champagne in one-nine one-nine was no big deal. I mean, it was fair bubbly, but weakly so, not like the throat-ripping gargles you could get from the good old Canada Dry. It tickled your throat like a puff of air. What the big deal on the champagne was, I never knew.
Clay Clinton loved the stuff. If Clay was eating a peanut butter sandwich, he’d want champagne with it. One time we went into some two-bit ramshackle groghouse—Manfred used to favor such establishments, even when, as in the case I’m recollecting, he was bone dry and off the juice—and Clay shouted, “Barkeep!”
The barkeep looked around, because he didn’t know that’s what he was.
“A bottle of the finest bubbly!” Clay never did lose his English accent, not in all his sixty-some years.
“Come again, mac?”
“Bubbly. The nectar of the gods. Pop off to the cellar and see what is nicely aged.”
Lord knows what such places have aging in the cellar, but it ain’t champagne. The bartender tilted his head like a quizzical dog.
“Champagne!” Clinton exploded at the top of his voice. “We want champagne!”
“Oh.” The bartender had heard of it. “Someone get married?”
“The Man-Freddy is getting married to the lovely Jane. Isn’t that so, Manfred?”
Manny blushed, which was right odd, given his complexion.
The bartender looked at Manfred, recognizing him. “I thought you didn’t drink no more.”
“Not me. But Clay likes champagne. If you don’t have any champagne, it’s all right. He’ll have some beer.”
“I will not have beer. Beer is swill for the hoi polloi. I want champagne.”
The bartender dried his hands on his apron, his eyes riveted on Manfred Ozikean. “I’ll see if maybe there isn’t a bottle somewhere.”
“Thank you, buddy,” said Manny, and the barkeep glowed.
“What’s the big deal here, Clay-boy?” I asked him. “What are we celebrating? All’s we need was whup the Wings. We been doing that all year.”
“With the victory tonight, our lovely Ottawa Lily Pads mathematically clinched first place.” I had no way of knowing whether that was true or not. It made scant difference to me. Numbers and mathematics got no place in the game of hockey, that’s the argument I got against that puppy Duane Killebrew. He’s out to smash all the numbers in the record book, as if numbers could defend themselves.
“Plus,” Clay went on, “I want to toast Manny and Jane.”
“Why?”
“They’re getting married.”
“We’ve known that for a couple of months now.”
“Shut up, Leary.” The words came sharp and fast, like a bee sting. I wasn’t even sure I’d heard right, but I shut up anyway.
Clay Clinton asked the publican for three glasses. He placed them in a row and filled them to the brim with golden bubbles. “Clay,” Manny whispered.
“One glass won’t kill you,” Clinton said. “There’s less alcohol in that glass than there is in a spoonful of cough medicine.”
“But I can’t,” Manfred said.
“Hell, Clay, if it means that much to you, I’ll have a gobful.” I went to grab a glass, but Clinton lashed out with his arm and sent all three flying. They smashed into the wall, covering the place with glass.
“Never mind,” said Clay Bors Clinton. “It was a stupid idea.”