TODAY’S THE DAY. We’re going to Toronto. Iain’s so het up that he’s got Mrs. Ames doing his bidding, and that old marm don’t do nothing nice for nobody.
“Dress them, Nurse Ames!” Iain shouts. “Dress them and dress them warmly! We’ll have no chilblains on these chilluns!” While Mrs. Ames bundles us into our winter gear, Iain takes to strutting up and down the room, turning sharp and precise at each end, kind of like Napoleon. “The train,” Iain says, “leaves at precisely sixteen hundred hours. That will place us in Toronto at eighteen-oh-seven. You boys will likely want to be fed then.”
Blue Hermann takes the opportunity to dig his fingers into Nurse Ames’s backside. He doesn’t really want to do it, but it’s required, given his reputation. “I want a steak!” Blue tells Iain.
“Indeed?” Iain stares at the ancient newspaperman. “And tell me this, Mr. Hermann. With what do you intend to chew this steak?”
“I’m just going to suck on it for a while.”
“We go to a restaurant and eat gruel,” Iain tells us. “Then we go to the Toronto Gardens, where it’s King Leary Night!”
“Hooray!” says I. I can’t help myself.
“And then …” Iain looks all around and whispers. “We hit the streets.”
“What?!” roars Nurse Ames.
“Then we get some sleep,” Iain says. “Because the next day, Kinger-Binger has to make some commercials.”
“Friends,” says I (I’ve been going over this in my mind), “this is your old friend, King Leary, the high-muck-a-muck of hockey. I been asked to say a few words on behalf of the Canada Dry ginger ale bottlers. I been drinking the good old Canada Dry all my life. People ask me why.”
“Why?” asks Blue Hermann.
“Why?” asks Iain.
“Because it makes me pissed!”
“Hmph!” snorts Mrs. Ames.
“That’s right, folks, it makes me piss, cleans out the system.”
“Leary,” says Nurse Ames, “surely there is more to recommend this beverage than the fact that it works as some sort of diuretic.”
“Tastes good, too.”
Mrs. Ames gives us all a look that could crack nuts. “I don’t think this expedition should be permitted.”
Iain ignores her. “Mobilize, men! Let’s move out!”
Blue Hermann grabs his canes—he needs two thick industrial-strength jobs to keep himself upright—and he throws his hips back and forth, picking up steam, and finally he’s motoring through the doorway pretty good. Myself, I launch into the old Dublintown swagger, my legs wide apart and my feet landing heel first. I curl my free hand into a fist and swing it about. I hold my dragon-head walking stick up and out, poking at the air in front of me as if provoking attack. There’s very few gooms my age who could affect a passable Dublintown swagger, and I’m rightly proud.
Other inmates are lining the hallways, waving us good-bye. We’re a goddamn parade!
“Make way for the hockey legend!” Iain tells them. “Royalty coming through here!”
I tip my coal miner’s cap, I smile and wave. At least, I smile and wave until I see a pair of eyes, dumb idiot eyes stuck in a milk white face, eyes that don’t understand or feel anything. My breath fails me. Maybe I’m going to faint. I start to fall but there’s strong hands at my elbows.
“Steady on, my liege,” whispers Iain. “You go down now and we’re not going anywhere.” Iain holds me up, but he’s strong enough to hide it; it looks like he’s escorting me the way any young man would escort an old fart.
“I’m all right,” I tell him, but I don’t shake myself free.
Blue Hermann’s voice sounds like flat tires on a mud road. “King is going to meet Duane Killebrew!” This news is greeted by predictable ooo’s and aah’s. “It’s King Leary Night at the Toronto Gardens.”
“Give ’em hell, King!” someone tells me.
“Give ’em hell!”
Other people start nodding. They pick up the chant. “Give ’em hell, King! Give ’em hell!”
There’s a taxicab waiting, steam pouring from its exhaust into the bitter wintry air. It must be twenty-five, thirty below out here. My nose freezes shut. My eyes sting like someone has stuck his thumbs in them. The trick is to let the sun sit on you. I tilt my head back and let the sun slap my face a little. My jowls start to tingle.
It’s a bit of a stunt putting Blue Hermann into the backseat, on account of his legs don’t buckle. The cabbie and Iain have to hold Blue on either side and load him in like a torpedo. I wait on the pavement, puffing steam upwards, trying to thaw my nose hairs. Finally they got Blue packed. I take a step and my foot catches a slick patch of ice. Whooosh, and I think, here it comes, say good night, sister, but somehow I end up in Iain’s arms.
“King,” says the lad, and his voice is loaded with amazement, “you did the St. Louis Whirlygig!”
“Damn right!” I scream. “You don’t lose a move like that in a minute, you know! The monks showed me how to do it in one-nine one-five and I have just now executed it!” A couple of quick rusty wheezes come out of me.
“King,” says Iain, “you laughed!”
“Put me in the car, felthead,” I tell him. “We don’t want to miss the train.”
The countryside around South Grouse is farmland, barren and empty in the winter. We pass a little pond, and the pups are out on her. They’ve cleared the snow away, the ice is silver blue. Most of the lads have on Ottawa jerseys (the shamrock doesn’t look like a shamrock these days) with the number double zero, which is what Killebrew wears. A few wear Toronto sweaters, a couple Montreal. I watch a lad score a goal, rolling the tennis ball slowly through another boy’s legs. The lad flips his stick over and pretends it’s a guitar. That’s something Duane Killebrew does. When I scored a goal I didn’t do anything, except maybe grit my teeth and say, “Yeah!” at whatever was out there.
On another part of the pond, all by herself, a young girl is figure skating. She does a turn in the air, a quick crisp thing. My wife, Chloe, could do that. Before she was set upon by disease my wife was quite the athlete. I wipe the fog off the window. I stare at the girl.
“Manfred could do some of that,” says Blue Hermann.
“Like Brother Simon the Ugly,” I say. “More like dancing than anything else. My boy Rance could skate all right, too, except he skated like a girl.”
“Manny could do it drunk,” Blue goes on. “Pissed out of his gourd. One time in New York, when he was with the Americans, me and Oz got pie-eyed. We could barely walk. But we snuck into an ice-skating rink somewhere, and Manny tied on some skates, and he hit the ice like a ballerina. One of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen, Manny skating like that. And he was shit-faced.”
“Manfred drank too much,” I mutter.
“And you didn’t exactly help, did you, Leary?”
“What do you mean by that, Hermann?”
“I used to drink too much,” announces Iain. “But not for a couple of years now. Not since I moved to South Grouse.” Iain takes a cigarette out of the pack and fires it up. This is the first time I seen him with his own smokes.
South Grouse doesn’t have much of a train station, just a little thing sitting on top of the hill, beside the tracks. It’s quite a trek in from the cab to the waiting room, treacherous with ice. We get inside and Blue Hermann bolts for the nearest red plastic bench, his canes sounding loudly on the winter-wet tiles. “Whoo-boy!” sighs Blue, like he’s been through the wringer. I imagine Blue has gone “Whoo-boy!” lots in his lifetime, but only in recent years has he gone “Whoo-boy!” on account of a cab ride.
Iain elbows me over to the bench, then says, “I’m going to go buy the tickets.” We’ve already got it arranged that I’ll pay him back when I get my ten thou for the adverts. Peculiar, isn’t it? When Jubal St. Amour paid ten thousand dollars for me, it was ballyhooed all across the nation. Now they’ll give that to an ancient mook for saying a few words about a soft drink.
“Uh-yeah.” There’s maybe fifteen other people in the waiting room. One is a mother with five kids, even though she looks to be about twenty-seven. The kids is racing around, staging a reenactment of some of history’s great catastrophes. The mother sits, calmly smoking a cigarette. Every so often she’ll say, “Knock it off, Jason!”
Iain comes back with three train tickets in his hand.
Then there’s nothing to do in the waiting room but wait, unless you happen to be Blue Hermann, in which case you can fall into a sort of sleep, your limbs twitching electrically, sweat beading on your brow and upper lip.
Iain reaches into his coat pocket and brings out a little paperback. He removes a marker, folds the cover back so that he can hold the book in one hand, and begins to read.
I got nothing to do but remember.
Manfred Armstrong Ozikean hated trains. I think that’s kind of odd. I can understand hating to fly—I was never too keen on it myself, several thousand tons of heavy machinery whistling through the air—but being afraid of trains is a little peculiar. If we were traveling to a game—meaning that Manny couldn’t drink, although he did from time to time—then he’d sit in a seat, the curtains drawn, and thumb through a book. He was all the time trying to improve himself through various books. If we’d already played, and were on our way out of town, Manfred would bolt for the bar car as soon as the train made its first chunking sound. Manfred would buy drinks for everyone in the place. He’d play the accordian and lead his traveling companions in song. His favorite tune was “The Church in the Wildwood.” Manny could bellow this number for hours, the words becoming harder to make out as the booze dulled his brain. Sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night and notice that Manny was nowhere to be seen. I’d go to the bar car and find him facedown in a puddle of wetness, booze, and, I should imagine, more than a couple of tears.
There’s the whistle, carried on the ice-cold air.
Clay loved trains. Clinton would travel in nothing less than a stateroom, a full bar set up in the corner, a bimbo or two adorning the settees. He’d sit in there and scheme, which was Clay’s hobby. He would scheme even if there was nothing cooking, or do other people’s scheming on their behalf, or else just figure out the perfect bank robbery or murder, even if he had no intention of committing it.
The people are moving outside now, drawn by the train whistle.
Over there I see a couple not much younger than Blue and me. They hold hands and lean against each other, taking short painful steps and staring forward grimly. It’s nice to have company.
The train comes to a halt with a lot of screeching and scraping, as if the brakes just but barely caught. A door opens and a conductor pops open the door, throwing a yellow step box onto the ground. The crowd jostles, the old couple gets shuffled to the back of the pack. We would, too, except that if anyone budges old Blue Hermann he raises one of his heavy-duty walking sticks and shakes it threateningly. And mind you, I got the old dragon-head at the ready, a stick that could do more than a little damage. Old people should feel safer than they do, considering how heavily armed most of us are.
It takes Iain, the conductor, and two more redcaps to get Blue Hermann into the train. I have to hold his canes. They weigh about twenty pounds apiece. When my turn comes, I labor upwards without assistance. Well, perhaps there’s a hand on my elbow, but I don’t need it. Another conductor inside the train is asking, “Smoking or nonsmoking?” He takes a closer look at Hermann, who has a nicotine-stained face, and directs us to a section of seating without saying another word.
There’s a set of foursome seats at the end of the car, and we claim them. Iain brings up the rear with all the luggage, three traveling bags is all we have, and tosses them into the compartments above our heads. It would be nice to be able to toss traveling bags up into compartments. Iain’s got the train tickets sticking out of his mouth. He sits down and looks at Blue and myself. “How’s everybody feeling?”
“Tip-top,” says I.
“One hundred percent,” answers Blue.
“Jolly good show,” says Iain, and I startle, because Iain sounds exactly like Clay Clinton. I can tell that Blue noticed it, too. “Next stop, Toe-ronno!” calls Iain.
I’m bored.
Train travel was the worst thing about my professional hockey career. Bytown to Montreal, to Toronto, to Hamilton, to New York, Boston, Chicago, and Detroit. I wish I could fall asleep like Blue Hermann just did, even if he does appear to be suffering the torments of hell.
Iain reaches into a pocket (the coat he has on looks to have about forty-odd pockets, and Iain has made use of each and every) and produces a deck of Bicycle playing cards. He riffles them so that they puff air into my face. “A game of chance, your highness?”
“I can play gin,” I tell him, not letting on that I am by way of being a gin-playing genius.
“Gin it is.” Iain starts to waterfall the cards, then he does a single-hand cut. He appears to have played before.
There’s a little Formica table folded down between our seats. We raise and level it, and before long we’re playing gin rummy.
Every so often I’ll look up and watch through the windows. The forests are dead, drowned in snow. Starlings peck at the ground; otherwise, everything is as still as midnight.