young wife sat in the doorway of the tent, rubbing her fists against her temples, massaging herself awake. She looked at Stan and smiled tiredly.
That night, the four friends ate warmed spaghetti straight from the cans. Jim laughed loudly all evening, and made them all laugh many more times. The next morning they packed up and made their way back to the city.
“And I’ll be damned if I didn’t forget about those fish I put in the fire.” Stan tapped the coaster in front of him with his empty glass, indicating to the young woman behind the bar the spot where his next beer should go. “Those three little fish were killed for no reason at all.”
“What ever became of Janice Barber?” Tony asked. “You know, after the ’51 series?”
“Well, I guess if I knew that I might not be sitting here with you, my boy.”
“And wouldn’t that be a shame?” Tony laughed.
“Wouldn’t that be a goddamn shame.”
Three
Stan did not get back to his house until after seven the next morning, almost nine hours after the two seconds that changed everything. Unsmiling, black-suited League officials had hidden him away in the Toronto general manager’s office until well past midnight when all the newspapermen had finally given up and left the building to make their deadlines.
Among those in charge of running hockey, the incident remained unspoken of, something to be denied again and again, laughed off as ridiculous. Stan understood to keep his mouth shut while he was whisked away from the ice surface after the final whistle. A cluster of men hurried him through the inner corridors of the arena to the room furthest from inquiring eyes and ears. He knew better than anybody what had happened in the last few seconds of the game, and what it meant to the League. He knew all the details, and there wasn’t one he wished to share with anyone.
A black hat was shoved onto his head and knocked down over his eyes for the trip past the photographers’ bench. He was aware of several bright flashes and men calling out his name. He recognized the voices as those of reporters he’d said hello to in the hallways every other evening, but this evening he knew he was to pretend he didn’t hear them. With the hat over his eyes, Stan saw only his own feet on the floor, tripping up several flights of stairs and crossing thresholds here and there until they were finally directed to a chair beside a large oak table in the GM’s private meeting room. The door to the room banged shut against several more shouts and flashes and Stan was left in the relative quiet and darkness, two stern men in dark suits as his companions. Looking at the faces of the two men, Stan was aware he had lost his job, the greatest job he’d ever hoped to have. He made note of it in his head. The job was gone. When he closed his eyes, he saw his wife’s face.
Nearing 1:00 a.m. the League president came into the office and dismissed Stan’s two silent guards. He sat down across the table from Stan, took off his hat and laid it on the table in front of him. Stan could smell the sweat and Brylcreem coming from the older man’s perfectly combed hair. The president had been talking to reporters and getting his picture taken since the end of the game. Stan heard exhaustion in his breathing.
“Stan,” the president began with a sigh, and then veered off in another direction unwilling to get right to the point “. . . Stan, check that top drawer there in that desk. He’s got to have a bottle of something in there.”
Stan shuffled to the GM’s desk, pulled a half-full bottle of bourbon from the drawer and sat back down.
“Well don’t just look at it man, let’s have a drink.”
The bottle slid back and forth across the table several times.
“Stan,” the president made another start, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next week or next month or next year. I don’t know. But for tomorrow and the next day and certainly the next, someone else is the head timekeeper here in Toronto. We can’t have you in the booth, Stan.”
“My wife is sleeping with a man… another man, I mean.” Stan hadn’t exactly decided he wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen during those lost two seconds, but he’d certainly never planned to be talking about it at that moment, just as he was being eased out of his job by a half-drunk sixty-year-old businessman in a sweaty suit. He said the words and then took a longer-than-average pull on the whiskey bottle.
“Well, Stan, I don’t know what to say. That’s a punch in the gut, isn’t it?”
The president drummed his fingers on the tabletop and looked around the room uncomfortably. He had been expecting denials and apologies. These were things he was used to from his employees, and he knew how to muscle his way past them. But a confession like this; what was he supposed to do with this?
“Are you saying you did this on purpose, Stan?”
The bottle was empty when Stan spoke again. “It’s the kind of idea you like to toy with in your head, isn’t it? You like to think about what you’d do if you came home early one night and found… you know, like what happens in books. You like to think you’ll have something to say about it.”
“You’re shook up, Stan. Did you understand what I said earlier, about tomorrow?”
“I understood.”
“Where do you live, Stan? Let me give you a ride. I have a driver waiting downstairs.” The older man looked at his watch and started to mutter something about his wife waiting at home, but thought better of it. “You need to sleep this whole thing off.”
Stan directed the League driver to an address in Toronto’s far east end, where the streets finished themselves in wide sand beaches. He had an idea what he’d find at home and was in no hurry to get there. The car pulled up to the last house on the street.
“You live here?” the president asked with undisguised suspicion, peering past Stan to the large front lawn and flower borders of a lakefront mansion.
“We rent,” Stan said as he climbed out of the car.
“You rent what? The garage?” But Stan had slapped the black sedan’s roof twice and the driver began inching away from the curb.
“We’re not done talking, Stan,” the president shouted as the car picked up speed. “I want you in my office in a week.”
The beach was empty of people. Though the air was warm for early spring, it was well past midnight and even the boardwalk stragglers had wandered off home to bed. Stan found the waterline and sat down in the wet sand. He wanted to get calm and give the ringing in his ears a chance to subside. He wanted to run through things in his head and see if they still made sense, if the same conclusions could be drawn. To his right was the glow of the downtown, dominated by the steady red sign on top of the Royal York Hotel. On his left sat the squat, brooding darkness of a water filtration plant, unlit but clicking away in its gloom, preparing to help the city shower and get ready for another day.
The lake breathed a chilling mist in his face, and somewhere way out on the water a laker moaned in its engine, invisible, bypassing the city for some more industrial port further west. For a long time he thought of nothing. He stared out into the misty water and just breathed. For a while he slept like that, sitting up, wrapped in his coat.
When he found himself awake and thinking again, he was running over a familiar memory.
