You Could Believe in Nothing Read online

  Murph rolled two joints, lighting one to pass around, and sitting back to smoke the other. Kev Byrne stood over the beer tub, handing out bottles. Derek took one to drink in the car. “I gotta eat,” he said, and headed for the shower. He needed Burger King, or some such greasy shithole.

  The clear day had turned to night when he left the rink. The streets were wet with unseen mist. Pennywell Road was quiet. Derek didn’t see another car until he reached the intersection with Freshwater. The Saturday traffic was heading east, heading home. He imagined boots pulled from tired feet, pots coming to a boil, televisions stirring to life. He joined a short line at the drive-through, and the food came through the window in a crisp white bag. He turned on the radio, heard the synthetic fizz of an electric guitar.

  “I take whatever I want,” said Derek, repeating the first line of the song. There must have been a time when this music—his father’s music—delivered quite a punch. A time before it was drained of mystery. The mosaic of photos in Lou Langdon’s office told the story. The faces in those photos shone with a conviction only the young can muster. They had the world by the tail.

  Waiting at a stoplight on the parkway, Derek turned the dial in search of something more contemporary. He opened the bag so he could eat with one hand and drive with the other. If he kept going straight, instead of turning back into the city centre, he could make the ferry for the morning crossing to Nova Scotia. Driving without sleeping would have him in Nicole’s bed by Monday afternoon, kissing his way up her calves and thighs while she arched her back.

  He should have made her say it first. Gonorrhea. Derek couldn’t recall Nicole ever speaking the word, its jumble of guttural mouth sounds and final, shameful syllables—reee-ahh.

  On a hot morning last summer, while she slept upstairs, Derek had sat at her computer and tapped out a note. Then he left for work, driving into the August sun. Sweat leached through his waistband and darkened his shirt under the seat belt. He imagined the heat working down into his crotch, his insides spoiled. They had been together only a few months. Everything should have been new and fresh.

  Nicole:

  i stepped out of the shower and found green pus oozing from my cock. i’m calling dr. today. we have to talk.

  The note, his teeth-grinding need to leave her alone with those words, might have done them more harm than the infection or the mistrust or the all-too-appropriate fusty summer air that settled in the bedroom. That evening, as he brushed his teeth, she came into the bathroom and perched on the side of the tub.

  “I need you to know that this happened before us.” Tears ran down each side of her nose, though her voice remained steady. “I brought this with me. I need you to believe that.”

  She wiped her face and sat up straight.

  “There’s not much point in talking about shit like faith and belief, is there?” she said, and snorted, as if to laugh.

  There was a warning in the way Nikki turned her humiliation inward, a fierceness he had never seen before. Just weeks before they had huddled in the lantern light of the nylon tent, drinking wine and hearing the woods rustle around them as she explained the end of her last relationship. She had broken an engagement, severing ties with the man and a family that had practically adopted her. The poor bastard came pounding at her door, choked with tears. His sister left scorching messages on the phone. His mother waited outside work one afternoon and made a bad scene on the street. Nikki endured it all without ever explaining or justifying herself. “It was the only way,” she said. “I had to be ruthless.”

  The food was disgusting. He devoured it.

  At home he made coffee, took it upstairs, and dumped a heap of laundry from the chair to the bedroom floor. He pulled up to the computer, entered “bobby hull” game seven 1965 into Google, and skimmed the first few pages of results. His father’s music was impenetrable. That world was sealed off. Perhaps this was another way in.

  A magazine article from January of 1962 heralded Bobby Hull as the “golden future of his blazing sport” and the “idol of a new ice age.” Derek opened an MP3 labelled “The Golden Jet,” the same song his father had played on the radio a few hours before. A website identified as the “Blackhawks Fan-Attic” quoted without attribution from a biography:

  Bobby is pure, fundamental man, a twice-married, beer-drinking, regular guy complete with salty tongue, barroom ethic, and an eye for a turned calf. A perpetual youth, his brobdingnagian husk barely concealing a childlike soul.

  Adding red wings blackhawks playoffs to the search string cut down on the results—a few hundred instead of forty thousand. But he ended up back at the Fan-Attic site, where every Blackhawks season was recounted in detail.

  It was Hull’s vendetta-like leadership that propelled his Hawks to victory in a cracker of a series. When the Red Wings set out to “test” his sore knee, Robert Marvin responded in kind. Larry Jeffrey felt the sting, sent off the ice on a stretcher. Doug Barkley reported to first aid with a bloody face, and Ted “Scarface” Lindsay took several mouthfuls of lumber.

  The accompanying box score placed game seven on April 15. Blackhawks 4, Red Wings 2. His father always specified that—game seven. So this must be it, thought Derek.

  Pride runs thick and resentful among the greats of the game, and the NHL’s supreme showman left his mark on this series with grim satisfaction rather than joy.

  Under the headline “Lament for a Dynasty,” an unnamed writer detailed the failures and disappointments of “the Blackhawks greatest generation.”

  Did the young Black Hawks ever shine so bright? Cruel destiny would see this team repeatedly fall short in its quest for another Stanley Cup. But with the passing of time, perhaps we can move beyond the bewildering disappointment of that decade, cease our laments for the fairy-tale ending that never was, and finally appreciate the fleeting glories. And what glory it was to witness the semifinal of ’65. To see Hull and company take charge with such astonishing ferocity, to see them vanquish the mighty Red Wings—in Detroit, no less—was mighty satisfying indeed.

  The accompanying pictures did not match the story or its elegiac tone. Hull and his mates, their bare heads atop creamy white jerseys, looked young and sure and handsome. Derek saw no signs of strife or disappointment.

  Eyes tired, he made his way downstairs, where he collapsed on the couch and pointed the clicker at the television. The fizzy euphoria of Feildian Gardens and his two big goals had dissolved. It seemed like a long time ago, beyond recollection.

  On one of the old movie channels a familiar-looking actor sat in a small, black-and-white kitchen, trying to talk to his wife. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, according to the on-screen guide. The man in the suit rode the train to work every day, and couldn’t stop thinking about the war. That was as much as Derek gleaned before falling into a solid, dreamless sleep.

  Derek beat a path through the sticky snow of British Square and tried a gloved fist against Leo Murphy’s screen door. The minivan was gone, and the only light came from a second-floor bathroom window. Sagging power lines creaked overhead. Derek rang the doorbell and cupped a hand over his brow to look through a dark crack in the living-room curtains.

  There was a squeaking of stairs, and the grey Ebenezer face appeared at the front-door window. The deadbolt released and the face disappeared. Derek let himself in and followed Murph into the kitchen.

  “It’s only nine,” said Murph.

  “I think everyone’s going down early,” said Derek. “I imagine they’re there by now.”

  Murph reached into sagging jockeys to rake his ass. “I got time for coffee then.”

  “No you don’t. Anybody home, Murph? Or did Deb leave you passed out?”

  “Her and the kids…fucked off…the mall or somewhere.” Each phrase prompted by another root at his rear.

  “Have you eaten?”

  More scratching, the arms this time. Some ki
nd of skin problem at work. “Shit weather,” said Murph, touching the window. His fingertips left prints in the condensation.

  Derek examined a child’s artwork tacked to the refrigerator. The bus was bright green, with exhaust plumes suggesting acceleration. A stick figure—a man, to judge from its briefcase and hat—chased after it. The man was rendered in pale, fading pink.

  “What’s that about?”

  Murph took a juice carton from the fridge and squinted. “Leah comes home from school with the wildest stuff.”

  An outpost at the east end of Water Street, Jo-Jo’s was well out of the St. John’s nightlife loop. Its real name was the All-Star Sports Café, but no one ever called it that. You wouldn’t find Jo-Jo’s unless you knew where to look, far from the cozy pubs and restaurants, farther still from the shrieking, blood-and-vomit-splashed delirium of George Street, wedged between an empty storefront and a marine supplies depot. There was a dim red light over the door and a backlit sign propped in the window, fitted with black letters:

  white Rus ians 2-4-1

  video loto

  Inside, a square, red-faced woman sat alone at a table, mumbling and laughing. Farther into the gloom, beyond the bar that ran the length of the room, three men in fleece jackets and ball caps sat motionless at the lotto machines. Derek and Murph found their teammates in the alcove to the left of the door, about a dozen of them at two wobbly tables.

  “It’s the agenda,” said Brian. “They’ve got their own agenda and you don’t trust it.”

  “Agenda!” Heneghan pounded the table. “That’s exactly it, buddy. Exactly. Their agenda.”

  “That’s not it at all,” said Kev, but Heneghan silenced him with a wagging finger.

  “Because who says you got to be committed to your job and you got to have passion and all that? Because who benefits? Who gets the benefit? The committed man works his hole off and management gets the benefit.”

  Kev rocked in his seat. “It’s a two-way street,” he said. “They invested in you.” He jabbed a finger into the table several times. “They’re looking out for you if you’re disengaged.”

  “How about you, Julie? You disengaged?”

  “Wish I never got engaged,” the bartender replied, leaning between them to stick fingers in three bottles.

  “Where’s Jo-Jo?”

  “Down to the show bar, I imagine. Boys, bring your empties up to the bar when you’re done with them, would you? It’s just me here tonight.”

  Jo-Jo—a variation on his real name—was a perspiring Philippine in a starched white shirt and flannels. He flaunted the vigorous humility expected of immigrants, and ran the place with ascetic good cheer. The façade was brittle, as Derek had seen one evening when a pretty young woman had tumbled to the floor, her head bouncing off a chair with a dreadful thud, furniture and glass crashing behind her. “No more fucking beer!” screamed Jo-Jo, charging from behind the bar. “No more fucking beer! Fucking out!” He yanked at her arm, face exploding crimson, and had to be restrained before the incident turned much worse. Numb from drink, the woman touched her head and stupidly regarded the blood on her fingers, unembarrassed by the skirt twisted up around her waist.

  Never painting or replacing the dodgy toilets, keeping the curtains shut, and refusing to serve food, Jo-Jo profited from the bar’s defiantly unfashionable air. Gambling addicts were safe here, as were afternoon alcoholics with their crosswords. Men in overalls arrived at strange hours, smelling of oil and labour. Graduate students came slumming, along with bar staff, artsy types, working musicians, lawyers awaiting verdicts from the courthouse up the road, and the occasional crowd of office girls on the go since happy hour. The place was never full and never empty.

  Despite its name, the All-Star Sports Café was hardly a sports bar in the contemporary sense—no autographed photos, no wing night, no Super Bowl party, one television anchored over the cash. Jo-Jo hated sports. Except boxing.

  “Any hockey on tonight, Jo-Jo?”

  “No way, you guys! Hockey is boo-shit! Wayne Gretzky boo-shit!”

  “How about some baseball?”

  “Baseball boo-shit!”

  “Soccer?”

  “Soccer boo-shit! Fuck Brazil!”

  With a dramatic show of reluctance, he would reach overhead and find whatever game you wanted, watch for a few seconds, and turn away with a rueful shake of his head.

  A fight night was different. Then Jo-Jo seethed with energy, grunting and thrusting as his tiny body shadow-boxed the TV.

  “Watch this, boys! Two fucking guys, going at it! Bang-bang! Ugh-uh! That’s fucking sport!” His hairy forearms would snap out in quick jabs. “Fucking bang-bang! Hey? Fucking sport!”

  Lately, the man himself rarely showed. He was expanding, converting a boarded-up disco into Jo-Jo’s Show Bar. (His name, he said, had “currency.”) The front windows were painted with enormous, large-breasted women dangling bits of underwear from their fingers. The harbour was only a block away, and the silhouettes would ensure that all sailors docking for the night could find his peelers, regardless of language barrier.

  Julie was the only steady employee back at the Café, occasionally assisted by her husband, a six-weeks-on, six-weeks-off rig worker. She was beautiful, in a muscular sort of way, and flirtatious without brooking any nonsense. Derek had once asked how she came to work at Jo-Jo’s. “I got cunted out of the Friday shift on my last job,” said Julie, pulling blond hair back from her hard, pretty face. “I was senior staff, and I was supposed to get the Friday shift. But a new girl started banging the manager.”

  “After a few years you can’t kid yourself anymore,” said Heneghan. “This is my job. Every day. You got to live with that reality.”

  “It’s for everyone’s good,” said Kev. “I mean, like, a sense of accomplishment or whatever.”

  Derek pulled out his cell and called home. One message. Finally.

  “Hi, sweet thing. Shit, I wish you were there. I just made an offer on a condo. I didn’t want everything to happen so fast, but my agent said we had to lowball the guy right away because he had a heart attack and his business failed and his wife left him. That’s the way it is up here. Go for yourself and fuck the other guy.”

  She drew a deep, uneven breath, and Derek thought she might be finished.

  “I thought if we could talk about it, it would be okay. Oh, fuck. Anyway, that’s about it for now. I’m out with Margot tomorrow so I guess we’ll talk during the week.”

  He played it again and saved it, gratified by the tremble in her voice. That was Nicole. Forging ahead, scaring herself. She wasn’t likely to turn back.

  Brian began asking questions. They stood apart from the alcove, leaning against an old upright piano. Brian asked if Derek would follow Nicole to Ottawa, whether she had a job, whether he could get a job, if they knew the real estate market up there.

  “Louise told me the whole story. She says, ‘Your buddy Derek is going to have to follow that girl if he wants her.’ She says, ‘If he doesn’t go right away, that’s a bad sign.’ ”

  Derek hardly knew Brian’s wife, and irritably pictured Louise as fat-assed and pig-nosed.

  “Ever been to Ottawa?” asked Brian. “Fucking boring as shit.”

  The door opened and a thin woman walked in, carried on a breeze that lifted pages from the Harvey’s Oil calendar on the wall. She lifted a hand to rearrange her frizzy yellow hair, and placed a large red handbag on the bar in front of her. Rings curved under each eye, making dark hollows in her bloodless face.

  “How much are cigarettes?”

  “Nine sixty-five,” said Julie, using a spoon to fish a butt from the bottom of a glass.

  “That’s a dollar more than Tan-Tan Takeout,” said the woman, toying with the zipper of a dirty blue windbreaker.

  “Then go to Tan-Tan Takeout.”

  Derek shifted
to make room for the woman, and set his beer on the piano. It was a badly abused instrument, scarred and sticky, its white keys stained like bad teeth.

  The woman took a stick of lip balm from the handbag and applied it, wiping the corners of her mouth with a pinky. Then she slapped her palm on the bar. “Can I get a goddamn drink?” she said, loud enough to draw brief attention.

  “Not here you can’t,” said Julie, without looking up from the dishwasher. “Go on about your business, now.”

  “You think I’m one of those whores what hangs around Church Hill?” asked the woman, standing and leaning across the bar, her mouth quivering.

  “I’m not saying what you are either way. But you won’t get served here tonight.”

  The woman slumped and cast her eyes around the room and zipped the windbreaker up to her neck. Her face was young, but she had raw-boned hands with pointed knuckles, the hands of an old woman.

  “I got no smokes,” she said finally, with a sob.

  Julie took a package of cigarettes from behind the cash register, opened it, and handed over a pair. The woman lifted them to her face and examined them suspiciously. She turned and departed without another word.

  “She can’t be one of the whores,” said Brian. “No way.”

  Julie shrugged. “Never seen her before.”

  “How desperate would you have to be to stick it in something like that?”

  “Some men’ll stick it in anything,” said Julie. “I could probably put a hole in that wall and you fellas would pay to have a go at it.”

  “Man would be a fool to turn down a good hole in the wall.”

  Julie returned to the dishwasher.

  “We should be playing tomorrow, Brian,” said Heneghan, talking over Derek’s shoulder.