You Could Believe in Nothing Read online

  “Maybe we’re not regular,” said Nels Pittman.

  Allan hesitated.

  “Come on, guys,” said Brian. “It’s a chance to get on television.”

  There was murmured assent. Derek caught a weary, defeated glance from Gover.

  “Yeah,” said Kevin. “Abso-fuckin’-lutely.”

  Barry set up at the gate to the ice, and seventeen men on skates awaited their cue before lumbering past him. Derek sprinted three laps and shot a booming puck off the back boards before stopping to stretch, pleased with himself. Matt Dyer, the second goaltender, flopped beside him, spreading his legs in a V.

  “Let’s get it going,” someone shouted.

  “Can you guys keep skating?” asked Barry, who had moved to centre ice.

  “Twenty after eight,” said Gover, loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “Come on, Brian!”

  The goaltender skated to centre ice.

  “Okay, this stuff requires patience, obviously.”

  “Fuckin’ twenty after eight.”

  “Okay, listen. There’s lots of other games these guys could be at. I mean, there’s hockey games out there where they’ll be welcomed with open arms. So if we don’t want them here, let’s just say so now.”

  There was a shamed silence.

  “Guys, I just want to do honest stories, honest fuckin’ television.” Allan left the bench and shuffled to centre ice in his oxblood shoes. “Nobody’s here to fuck you. Okay? I just wanna capture the way it is. Okay? Who’s got a puck?”

  Derek took a seat at the bench. Kevin Byrne landed beside him.

  “Buddy’s a bit…”

  “A bit high strung.”

  “Why do you think he swears so much?”

  Byrne shrugged. “An odd stick.”

  They had to do an opening faceoff for the camera; did it four times before Barry was happy. On his first shift Derek sent a long pass to Byrne, and watched the camera follow it up the ice. As he left the ice someone scored.

  “Whoa, one sec,” said Allan. “Can you celebrate a bit? Raise your sticks and stuff?”

  Several sticks lifted, but the artifice of it set off laughter.

  “Pick up the fucking pace,” shouted Gover. “Bunch of old men!” He slumped on the bench next to Derek and slammed the door shut. “You see? See what I mean? The same fucking shit. Everything gets spoiled.” He sounded almost in tears.

  “Take it easy,” said Derek. “You can just skip the rest, if you like.”

  Gover looked away. He had to be thinking of his wife. Derek couldn’t recall the name.

  The shifts were too long, and Derek was stiff in the hips when he finally got back out. He stood still to make himself an easy target, and the puck came rolling around the boards for him. He flattened his stick to settle it and turned away from Murph.

  To the net.

  “Wait! Hang on!” called Allan.

  Derek’s skates made bitter cutting sounds. He sent the puck fluttering into Brian’s glove and scowled. He would rather have scored, but failure made for better theatre. Allan and Barry would surely intuit this.

  “Derek, Allan told us to wait,” said Brian, lifting his mask.

  “Fuck that,” said Gover, still on the bench. But the game was already over.

  It had been agreed to reserve the final fifteen minutes for “set pieces.” First Barry asked everyone to stand at the blue line and then sit at the bench, so he could get “cover shots.”

  “I need breakaways,” said Barry. “With a defenceman chasing, so it looks real.”

  They lined up for breakaways against Matt, until someone scored.

  Allan gathered several of them in a corner. Derek was in this group.

  “Give me some rough stuff. You ready, Bar?”

  “One sec,” said Barry, fiddling with his lens. They stood watching him. Derek’s feet were freezing.

  “Okay…Go!”

  Nels Pittman took the puck into the boards and the others met him there, noisily slamming the glass and butting each other like mountain goats. Nels lowered a shoulder and popped Derek in the chest. Turning awkwardly, his right leg planted, Derek felt a tickle at the base of his torso, then a faint tug at his right testicle.

  He returned to the bench and shoved a hand down his pants, pushing the cup aside and rubbing the space behind his scrotum. Across the ice he watched Gerry Whelan, showered and dressed, exit the building. Nearly undetected, as always.

  “This television shit,” said Steve Heneghan. “It’s just standing around, is all it is.”

  The buzzer sounded again, this time signalling the end of their hour. Derek stayed behind to move the nets for the Zamboni. He took a final lap, testing himself with long strides. There was the tug again. No pain, just a cinching of his right nut, like a spasm triggered by a doctor’s unexpected hand.

  Heneghan bent over in the corner, stick on his knees, making awful horking noises and releasing the results.

  “Spirited one out there tonight, boys,” said Wayne, sweeping balled-up tape onto a shovel and dumping it in the garbage bucket at the centre of the room. His custodial duties always seemed a slightly exaggerated performance.

  Allan and Brian huddled in a corner, almost whispering. Everyone else moved quickly and quietly.

  “Nobody else needs this room, right?” asked Brian.

  “She’s all yours.”

  “Appreciate it, Wayne. Help yourself to a beer.”

  “Ah, yes. There’s always beer.”

  Naked but for rubber sandals, Derek draped a towel at his waist and stole across the room, half-afraid that Barry might be waiting to catch him bare-assed. First to the showers, he flipped all taps full on and waited for hot water. The two showers were in a single, open stall with a low barrier to prevent flooding in the rest of the washroom.

  He lifted his hairy testicles. What a nonsensical, troublesome apparatus. The snarl of curls, the shapeless sack, the finger puppet with its preening head. He pulled the skin taut so the matching eggs were wrapped in slim ribbons of red and blue. Nothing appeared amiss or felt tender to his touch. The sperm ducts (which Derek had once mistaken for ominous lumps) curved behind and up the back. From his research on the web, Derek knew that bacterium gonococcus invaded these tubes. The body’s counterattack produced the gummy fluid he had discharged on that awful summer morning. Long after the antibiotics had done their job and gonococcus was vanquished, he felt vulnerable, reflexively reaching inside his robe or under the bed sheets to cradle his balls, shielding them. Nicole understood the new delicacy, and it became an unspoken wrinkle in their sexual ground rules.

  Before Derek knew Nicole, she and Margot had opened their house on Leslie Street to a man named John. Just a short-term arrangement for the expensive winter months, she later explained. Without meeting him, Derek understood the man. Correctly reading the household, John saw his chance to have a quick go at a pair of depressives. That Nikki and Margot understood this as well, Derek was certain, though they would never admit as much, even to themselves. For all their common sense, women seemed capable of a recklessness that men only played at.

  Preliminaries dutifully observed, the inevitable falling together likely took place on a dull Tuesday night or drunken, disappointed Friday. John would have worked in haste—a more deliberate seduction risked second thoughts on the part of the girl. Waking up the next morning, they might complete the episode with one final, drowsy romp before assuring each other that it had all been a terrible, though not unpleasant, mistake. As John turned his efforts to the next room, gonococcus flourished in Nicole’s canals and awaited its next opportunity for cross-pollination. This was Derek. He, Nicole, Margot, the evasive John, and God knows who else were forever linked in this daisy chain of indiscriminate rutting.

  “I was only with him once,” said Nicole.

&
nbsp; “He screwed Margot too, didn’t he.”

  “It was a mistake.” That’s all she would say.

  You had to hand it to John. He was in and out of the place in barely two months.

  The Mayo Clinic website warned of further horrors: possible inflammation of the anus, eyes, throat, and tonsils, depending on what you’d been sticking in your cavities. This raised several mortifying questions, but Derek didn’t ask them. He went to a doctor he had never seen before. Nicole opted to see Sarah at the family practice clinic.

  “Your sister?” Derek was incredulous. “Can’t we keep a little privacy here?”

  “She’d find out anyway, eventually,” said Nicole. “You could see her too, you know. She’s totally discreet.”

  “Fuck, no.”

  Derek adjusted the temperature and soaked his head. Pittman stepped under the second shower. Heneghan and Gover waited.

  “They’re setting up in the room, once we’re all dressed,” said Heneghan.

  “Setting up what?”

  “For an interview. Buddy needs more stuff.”

  “Fuck that,” said Gover.

  “What’s the problem, Shawn?”

  “What kind of shit was he getting on with before the game? And all we did was stand around out there. I didn’t even work up a sweat.” He stepped into the water and vigorously soaped his face. “I don’t know, man. Fuck them. They should pay for the ice. We didn’t even get a game in.”

  Brian appeared, a compact spider of a man without his armour.

  “I had no idea you guys were so concerned, so concerned about your public image. I wouldn’t be surprised if they bailed on the whole goddamn thing, the kind of cooperation they’ve been getting. Fuckin’ bitching and whining. You can’t fuck with TV like that.”

  “It wasn’t even a game.” Gover pointed an accusing finger at Brian, flecks of foam shooting from the tip. “That wasn’t a game. That wasn’t us.”

  “Jesus, Shawn,” said Derek. “It’s only an hour’s ice time.”

  “But it has to be fucking real. What are we doing here, if there’s no game? Waste of ten bucks.”

  “Is that what you’re worried about, Shawn? Your precious ten bucks?” Brian backed away, as if Gover might lash out. “I’ll give you your ten bucks back, if it means that much to you. But a few of us don’t mind being part of something. A few of us are willing to look at the bigger picture.”

  Gover turned and scrubbed his scalp. Brian’s voice echoed off the hard tile.

  “You want to take over this game? You try it, man. Keeping track of twenty hockey players, bitching and whining. People not bringing their money, and lugging three dozen beer down here every Friday.”

  Derek was out of the shower and dripping.

  “Brian?” he said. “My towel there? Behind you?”

  “Oh, sorry.” Brian stepped aside. They all fell silent, self-consciously naked.

  “Fuck this, man,” said Brian, wrapping a towel at his waist and turning for the door. “Fuck this.”

  “It’s bullshit, Shawn,” said Heneghan, water pouring over his head. “But you can’t fight the bullshit. You always lose.”

  A quiet had descended on the room as the men dressed. Brian pulled on sweat pants and moved about, arranging a circle of chairs.

  “Well,” said Nels Pittman. “I guess it’s time for us to play the good old hockey team.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Nels shrugged, retreating behind a cigarette and a grin. Brian’s face was pulled taut. He looked like a dog on the alert.

  “Surprised if they come back at all. There’s a million hockey games out there. A million hockey games where they won’t have to take this shit. You don’t fuck around with these guys.”

  Allan burst through the door, heaving a two-four of Canadian to the floor.

  “A few beers to fuel the witty repartee,” he announced.

  “Cold?”

  “Straight from the cooler.”

  All hands dove for the box.

  Brian and Kevin Byrne sat first. Murph looked around and took a chair without being asked. Heneghan filled the final seat after some coaxing from Allan.

  Derek was among several who stayed to watch. Gover was gone, but had left something prickly in the room.

  Allan pulled a chair into the heart of the circle, bringing his microphone within reach of everyone. The television lamp brought their faces into full view, rounded with the advance of middle age, chins and cheekbones receding.

  “I want to understand why this game has a fire like no other. Why does it grip you, deep down?”

  “What? That game tonight?”

  “Just shagging around.”

  “No,” said Allan. “I mean hockey. The game.” His hand drew an arc out and in, encompassing the game like a pastor. “What’s the essence? The secret?”

  Heneghan folded his arms. Kevin pushed his head forward, as if trying to sniff out the trail. The question was too grand, too big.

  “Why are we all here?” asked Allan finally.

  “Well, I don’t know about anyone else,” said Brian. “But I’m a kid at heart. I mean, we all been at it since we were kids.”

  “So there’s a real connection with boyhood, with the boy you were?”

  “Yeah. When I was a kid, hockey was everything.” Brian warmed to the topic, muscular shoulders relaxing under his black T-shirt. Like all the best rec hockey goalies, he was a small, hard man. “No job, no girlfriend, no problems. Just down to the rink with your buddies, and French fries at the canteen and your dad driving you home.”

  Nods of agreement from the others.

  “So is this about fathers and sons?” asked Allan. “Did he take you to the rink and stuff?”

  “Oh yes. Every Saturday morning, before daylight.”

  “Mom took me,” said Murph. “Dad wanted no part of it.”

  “My dad coached all-star,” said Kevin. “So I played for him for a year.”

  “That’s a great memory,” said Allan.

  “Second year I got cut. Too slow.”

  Allan consulted his notes.

  “But I learned my lesson,” said Kev. He turned to Heneghan as he spoke. “Dad told me, ‘If you ever back down out there, don’t bother showing up anymore. Because you’ll be backing down for the rest of your life.’ I took that lesson into business with me.”

  He thrust his head forward again and propped his hands on his hips. Kev was a long man with a trim waist, and he had a habit of leaning close to Heneghan when they talked, as if to contrast his lean entrepreneur’s body with that of the overfed, entitled union man.

  “Any of you guys ever live on the mainland?” asked Allan.

  “Three years in Ontario,” said Kev. “Slogging it out.”

  “Was it different playing hockey up there? Was there the same sense of comradeship? Because to me, I really sense the Newfoundland character in this group.”

  “Well,” said Kev, tilting his head from side to side. “Newfoundland and the Newfoundland character, okay. But you know, as a man who grew up in Newfoundland and who made his commitment to Newfoundland by opening his business, I mean, you have to be here and the commitment has to be here.”

  “I don’t know about the whole Newfoundland thing,” said Murph. It had been nearly an hour since the game, and his lids were heavy. “We all know there’s just as many pricks and cunts and assholes in Newfoundland as anywhere else. Sorry. You can edit that last bit, right?”

  “Well, I think that’s unfair,” said Kev. “I mean from the point of view of entrepreneurship and resourcefulness—”

  “You can’t deny, Kev, you can’t deny—” said Heneghan.

  “But from a hockey standpoint, I’ve just got to say—”

  “And I’m right down there on the
shop floor. That’s where, like, you got to be. Right down there.”

  They were sweating under the lights now, faces pink, everyone agitating to make a point. Derek could feel the heat of the lamps from across the room.

  Allan turned to Murph.

  “You were about to say. Sorry, you’re…”

  “Leo Murphy.”

  “Leo, you were going to say, from a hockey standpoint…”

  “Yeah, from a hockey, um, standpoint.” Murph rocked in his seat, a drop forming at the tip of his nose. “This is like a world you would invent if you were telling a story to your kids. Kids want an unreal world, because the world they walk around in isn’t enough. Unreal, but you need it to be more real than anything else.”

  Kev snorted a laugh.

  “You have to come through a lot of doors here, right?” said Murph. “You know how it is in a kid’s story. There’s always hidden doors and secret passages that take you somewhere weird. That’s what it’s like. You go through doors and move further from what’s real. There’s no natural world here. No earth, no sky. The ice isn’t real. That’s why a lot of people can’t relate to it.”

  “So it’s a kind of escape. Is that what you mean?”

  “No,” said Murph. “That’s not what I meant.”

  Allan waited for him to continue. But Murph only shrugged and took a long drink.

  “What do you think of professional sports, with all the big money?” Allan asked, turning from Murph to address the others. “Would you say that your game is more pure? More real, even?”

  “Yeah,” said Brian. “This is what hockey’s all about.”

  “When it comes to marketing and branding, there’s no doubt that sports is the ultimate,” said Kev.

  “They’ve convinced us all that there’s something there,” said Murph.

  Heneghan belched, setting off a tremble in his cheeks and down into his soft, stubbled jowls, gravity doing its work. A little tragedy, thought Derek. A little death.

  “It’s like beer commercials,” said Murph, holding up his bottle. “I see the girl on TV. I see her tits. She’s holding the beer. I go to the store and come home with a dozen.” He spread his hands out. “I’m not buying the beer. I’m buying the tits.”