You Could Believe in Nothing Page 4

  Derek’s ear was drawn to the Newfoundland music piping from the kitchen, a recurring accordion tune over a manic drumbeat. Nev Connolly’s was an unseemly place for this conversation. The grey tint of the windows made it impossible to tell the colour of the sky or the time of day. Derek’s mother, with her instinct for propriety and presentation, would not have stood for it.

  “I gave it up when accounting was contracted out,” said Lou. “But now they’re going back, looking at the last ten years. Maybe even further. It’s a bit of money.”

  “You’ve seen a lawyer?”

  “Gerry Joseph, a couple of times. He’s fully up to speed. He’s seen Ivany’s people.”

  “So they know about the…about where the money went?”

  “They only know for sure about missing receipts. But word gets out there, you know.”

  Derek told himself that infidelity was an open secret in his family. There’s nothing new here. This is known territory.

  “Can they take you to court?” he asked.

  “They’ve said as much. That would mean something turning up in the papers, probably.”

  “Does Mom know?”

  A shake of the head.

  “That can’t…” Derek fumbled. “She’s got to.”

  “Next few days. It’s all just coming down, Derek.”

  They sipped coffee, gone cold.

  “You know your mother and I, some tough times over the years, eh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Things are good now.”

  Derek watched the waitress work the keypad of her cellphone.

  “This was years ago, Derek. Back then, all kinds of young fellas on the road, it’s hard to imagine now. Do you want to talk to Gerry Joseph about it, about where it stands?”

  “No.”

  Lou Langdon glanced at his watch and turned over the check. There was an audible wheeze in his breath.

  “I guess that’s it, then.”

  Across the room, at the only other occupied table, a woman kept up a trickle of happy noises as two disgusting little boys smeared ketchup everywhere and left bits of food on their chins. She was a domestic bedrock, nondescript in khaki pants and a T-shirt. He wanted to tell her. My father pays for sex. Go to a hotel with him right now. He will pay you.

  “Tell me something.” Derek picked through his change for a suitable tip.

  “Mmm?”

  “Did you pick out that song today? The one about Bobby Hull?”

  “No. That would be Patti. She produces all the sponsored segments. Young woman from Bonavista.”

  “Because you used to tell me about the hockey game you saw in Detroit. And you saw Bobby Hull play.”

  “Yes indeed. Him and Gordie Howe both. But Bobby was the man. He’d lift you out of your seat every time.”

  “It was the year you got married, right?”

  “Around then, yes.” Lou pulled a fat wallet from his back pocket, searched through it. “We went down to the States to bring your brother home. So it would be 1965.” He pulled out a credit card and tapped it on the table.

  “But Curtis didn’t want to come home. He wanted to stay there and live with buddy. His dad.”

  His father lifted his chin and closed his eyes for a moment, and Derek saw himself in the gesture. They didn’t look much alike. Derek had his mother’s long limbs and burnt auburn hair. As a boy, he had once asked his mother if this was his real dad. He doesn’t look like other dads, Derek said. Other dads don’t matter, she replied.

  “I don’t know that Curtis ever knew what he wanted,” Lou said. “Even as a boy he was always back and forth on things. It wasn’t easy, God knows.”

  He fussed with his coat, left arm groping for its sleeve.

  “Game seven of the playoffs,” he said. “By God, it was, too. When you saw Bobby Hull wind up with that puck”—a shake of the head and a smile—“He would take that puck and just go.” This was the story Derek knew, right down to the head shake and smile. But he had little patience for it today.

  The sun emerged as they lingered in the parking lot.

  “We might have stayed down there, you know,” said Lou. “Plenty of work in the States.” He tilted his face to the sky, hitting all the familiar notes, restoring his spirits. “It was a different time, for sure. By the time we got home, I remember ‘Satisfaction’ was a big hit, on the radio everywhere. For a man like me, working in radio, you could see how quickly everything was changing.”

  He gripped Derek by the bicep and said, “I’ll keep you up to speed,” then got in his Toyota hatchback, waited for a break in traffic, and turned up Kenmount Road towards his station. Derek looked back at the diner. Behind the darkened window the waitress had resumed her shift, wiping down the table and pocketing the change Derek had left. The woman with the kids drank from a mug and watched the street, oblivious to her boys for a moment.

  The ache in Derek’s hips—potentially arthritic, according to Nicole—reached through the buttocks and seized his hamstrings. He had to keep moving. It would all release when he was back at the rink and warm and skating and breathing. Derek had once told Nicole how good it was to be out of breath at hockey, with the sweat down his sides and pushing out his temples. “Like in aerobics,” she’d said, sitting up in the bed. “There’s sex on some level, you know? Working the body. Aware of it all over the room.” Her hands rose and fluttered about her head.

  That was long ago, back when they were giddy just to be in the same bed. He hated the memory of it. He had made a fool of himself with Nikki, romanticizing his life, mystifying himself. A better woman would not have let him get away with it.

  Derek’s story of Lou and Elizabeth began on a train. They faced each other across the broad window of a spacious compartment, the prosperous green of rural America rushing between them. They dressed as they did in the wedding photo, in lightweight fibres that fell easy around their limbs. The green fields gave way to rail yards and smoke-stained brick, then the rear view of tenement buildings, with housewives framed in kitchen windows or sitting on fire escapes, dangling cigarettes, their hair gathered into kerchiefs. A few of them turned ivory faces to watch the train. The couple disembarked at a station urgent with arrivals and departures, porters struggling with trunks, taxicabs lining the curb. Somewhere in the distance a midtown hotel waited, and Curtis, and the arena where Bobby Hull and the heroes of old towered over the ice.

  John Ogilvie waited for them as well. A slight man, with a gaunt face and a cloth cap pulled low to obscure the eyes and hide his disgrace. Ragged cuffs trailed under his heels. He feared meeting the woman he had shamed, and knew he would have to give her the boy.

  Derek opened the car door and sat with his feet on the pavement, needing the ground like a kid stepping off a carnival ride.

  THREE

  The sun shone down on Mullock Street, but almost nobody came out to greet it. There was only Phil Ennis at his front door, smoking and spitting on the sidewalk. Nicole used to call him Jesus, on account of his flowing chestnut hair and bushy beard. “Jesus lives,” she would say, watching from the front window as Phil appeared, eyes blinking. There were no front lawns on the block. Every house was flush with the sidewalk, inviting a close watch among neighbours.

  Derek pulled into the curb and nodded from the car. Phil acknowledged him with a flick of ash. He would own the house when his mother died, and eventually die there himself. By then he ought to have a son of his own, smoking on the front step and waiting to take over. But Derek had never seen him with a woman.

  Seen from the street, with the blinds raised and the darkened living room exposed, Derek’s apartment looked vacant. He could see through to the back window, and across the fence to the back of the green house on William Street. He wanted to sit at the computer and watch the bit of jumpy video he had found a few days ago, an Asian woman narrating her way thro
ugh a hand job, tugging and cooing and murmuring gorgeous foreign words. But he couldn’t go in there now, shivered at the thought of the morning chill that would still permeate the place, unrelieved by the burgeoning sun.

  He sat in the car, undecided, engine idling, and pulled the cellphone from his pocket.

  “Ring, you fucker.”

  It didn’t. So he found Nicole’s new number on speed dial. The move to Ottawa had been convenient, because she could stay with Margot until she found a place of her own. Margot and Nicole had been roommates over on Leslie Street, sharing a large drafty house for several years. Margot was rail-thin and nervous, with sad brown eyes, and her hands were always in motion, gathering and twisting fistfuls of brown hair. She rarely said a word, and Derek was taken aback the morning she made a brazen pass at him. It was a fretful attempt, lacking any erotic charge. But when she cornered him—he could still feel the moist hand pressing his chest—Derek had been the helpless one. Margot unnerved him. He didn’t know what he might say if she picked up the phone.

  No answer. Derek wondered whether he would have told Nikki about his father. Perhaps now was not the time. He could already feel his nerve faltering, the cold-hearted urge to flee the entire mess. Fucking family.

  He drove in the direction of downtown. Rooftops of the descending city sparkled in the noon sun. Front doors were open and children in windbreakers kicked at blackened snowbanks, shouting in triumph as ancient snow scattered into the street. Ronnie Bulgin’s era ended on a day much like this one, when two cases of beer disappeared during a charity game between the cops and the Flyers. Fingered by several eye witnesses, Ronnie confessed: Uh saw duh bar, un uh tuk’n. (“I saw the beer, and I took them.”) Such dumb honesty defused the scandal, but his reputation never recovered. By the time Derek finished high school, Ronnie was in a wheelchair, unable to mount the steps to the bleachers, his speech failing. He died sometime after, at what must have been a young age. Ronnie was static, frozen in the half-step of late adolescence.

  With an hour to kill, Derek ended up back at Feildian Gardens. Sheltered from the afternoon glare, the rink was dark and drowsy, its air rich with freshly cracked beers. Cool around the ankles, sticky on the face and back of the neck. Every rink had its own climate, its way of reflecting and exaggerating whatever was happening outside.

  A few men in ball caps stood at the glass, hemmed in by their lumpish hockey bags, hands deep in jacket pockets. One looked down to kick at unseen pebbles, another lifted his cap to scratch a thinning scalp. A game was underway. Derek didn’t recognize the teams. Leo Murphy was the only figure in the bleachers, sitting in the top row. Derek joined him. From there they could watch the clock tick down until it was time to get dressed.

  “I don’t think we can make the playoffs,” said Murph. His gaze floated, independent of his words, and he stank of dope. “Not even if we win. Sooley’s Insurance is the best team by far, so it doesn’t matter who else makes the playoffs. They got Blaise Hiscock.” He indicated with his chin, and Derek watched a broad, squat man bull through the defence for a great scoring chance. Then he slashed the goaltender on the back of the ankles. “Blaise is gonna kill somebody,” said Murph.

  “It’s not about the playoffs,” he continued. “You just have to skate and deal with the space in front of you. That’s what I told Deb when the twins were born. Don’t think. Just master the physical objects right in front of you.” He illustrated by miming a box with his arms.

  “Have you been home since this morning?” asked Derek. “Have you eaten?”

  Murph shook his head and looked to the roof, searching the rafters. “Don’t have the car.” His hair, prematurely grey for years, had nearly disappeared at the crown. He still wore it down to the shoulders, and with his long chin it made him a good candidate to play Ebenezer Scrooge.

  “Shouldn’t you be doing stuff on a day like this, Leo?” said Derek. “Working on the house or taking the kids somewhere?”

  “Ah, Jesus,” said Murph, smiling and shaking his head again.

  The game wasn’t much to look at, drifting end to end at a laboured pace. There were occasional bursts of urgency, when legs churned and faces came to life. Then the puck skittered out of reach and it was over. This was the over-forty division, after all. It was where they belonged now.

  “Are you going to Jo-Jo’s tonight?” asked Murph.

  “Jo-Jo’s? Who’s going?”

  “We’re all going. And I need someone to swing by the house and get me after supper. It’s easier to get away if someone’s at the door. Deb, I think she’s gonna rent movies, and…” Murph lifted his hands and turned them in graceful curves, as if his home life was abstract, beautiful but beyond comprehension. “It’s just easier,” he said finally.

  “Just don’t be asleep,” said Derek. Murph was liable to fall asleep anytime, especially if he was smoking weed all day. Derek had seen him nod off at the rink, skates laced, while they awaited the Zamboni’s final turn.

  Voices of male indignation echoed below. Blaise Hiscock was grappling with a taller, leaner opponent, trying to fit his arm around for a headlock, the two of them spilling to the ice.

  “Your friend might not make it to the championship game,” said Derek. “He’s going to get chucked out.”

  Murph shook his head. “Blaise is not a happy man.”

  When the game began, they were both disabled.

  Murph’s legs were untethered, swimming under him. He stood erect, eyes darting, confounded by options, feet trailing behind his intentions. On the bench he hung his head and unleashed belches rank with fresh-cut weed. Or maybe it was the foul air of the man himself, his innards decomposing. “Ah, Jesus,” he groaned. “Ah, fuck.” Sweat ran down his face and soaked the locks of hair curling from his helmet.

  “Try not to pass it to him,” said Brian.

  Derek was tight, half-paralyzed from the waist down. But his body wouldn’t keep still when he sat to catch his breath. His legs bounced, and a muscle in the side of his face twitched, causing his left eye to flicker. In this half-aware state he could feel his mind letting go, drifting to the awful visions he had been trying to push away. A coastal motel. Eddies of snow race through the parking lot like little tornadoes, and the drone of highway traffic rises and falls in the distance. A faceless woman sucks on a post-coital cigarette, contemplates a thread of semen trailing down her thigh. The Atlantic gale whips against the window. Lou Langdon is curled in deep, remorseless sleep.

  Paired with Nels Pittman, Derek played two shifts without touching the puck. There was a hush in the air, so that every crack of the puck or turn of a skate echoed like footsteps in a church. When they skated out for a third shift, Nels called to him: “Wrong side.”

  Derek looked about, and found that he had taken the left side of the ice instead of the right. It was too late to switch back, so he shrugged and lifted his arms, gesturing a silent apology to Nels. The puck dropped and came directly to Derek. He could only shoot. Surely it hit a body along the way, but he got credit for the goal.

  “I can’t believe that went in,” he said. Nels laughed. The goalie couldn’t believe it either. The stream of curses from him gave Derek a rush of spiteful pleasure.

  The goal seemed to open up the game, as if everyone decided to stop thinking about what they were doing and just get on with it.

  Derek and his father shared a secret now. The women of the family knew nothing, and this frightened him. He could at least call Nicole and pour it all out to her. But he didn’t want to say the words. His father disgusted him, how he was able to sit at that fucking restaurant and say it all out loud. Put it in words. Eat cod tongues.

  It occurred to Derek that when he fantasized about Nikki, it was without words. Their sex was mercifully silent.

  Nels nudged his shoulder. “Change.”

  Climbing over the boards, Derek nearly missed the puck rolling straigh
t at him, discarded. A glorious strip of white ice opened up, so he took a few strides, and when he heard someone gaining on him threw a wrist shot at the net. It hit the knob of the goalie’s stick and dropped over the goal line like a lazy turd.

  Steve Heneghan whacked his helmet and said, “Nice goal!” with genuine enthusiasm.

  Derek giggled. Two goals was getting your ten bucks’ worth.

  Kev Byrne scored to make it 3-0, and the pace picked up. Derek watched and waited for every chance now, impatient on the bench. He pressed shamelessly for the hat trick, calling for passes, pinching in too deep, at one point crowding the goaltender to chop at a cheap rebound. The whistle sounded, the goalie lifted his mask and glared, taking a drink of water and spitting it, not at Derek, but in his direction. A geyser from beneath his sweaty mustache. What an asshole. Scoring two goals on this asshole made Derek’s heart sing.

  When it was over, they rushed for the beer. Helmets, jerseys, and shoulder pads were discarded, tumbling to the floor. They sat in their skates, drinking and shouting up and down the narrow room.

  “Beer tastes better now, boys.”

  “They were so pissed off, the way we kept scoring.”

  “Those guys were total assholes.”

  “What was buddy saying to you after the game, Brian? During the handshake.”

  “He said, ‘You beat us fair and square. But some of your guys were real assholes about it.’ Something like that.”

  “What a bunch of fucking assholes.”

  “Un-fucking-real.”

  “Wasn’t even a game till Derek got on his horse,” said Kev.

  Derek shrugged, drank half of his first beer in one long pull. He was thinking about his mother, about the earliest Saturday afternoons he could remember. She had taught him how to swim, holding his hips while he thrashed at the water. He remembered her white feet on the floor of the pool. But what he remembered best was sitting on the deck with a towel around his shoulders, watching her churning up and down her lane. She was a natural, compact swimmer, hips rolling with mechanical precision, legs pulling whirlpools in their wake. Her shoulders were thick, round and slick with water. As she surfaced to breathe, her face would flash briefly under the white bathing cap, mouth open, a pale creature of the water.