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  Praise for PAUL QUARRINGTON

  “The large, broad pleasure in reading Quarrington comes from the fact that he’s such a good mechanic. Like the Saturday Evening Post storytellers of the mid-20th century … Quarrington knows his way so expertly around such a variety of everyday things—fishing-rods, hammers, CB radios, boats, cameras, nipples—and how each responds to both gentle and rough handling, that there’s a minimum of disbelief to suspend.”

  The Globe and Mail

  “What a relief … to turn to Paul Quarrington, a writer with the gift of invention, the ambition to create a larger world and populate it with unusual characters, the ability, as well as the need, to tell a story. These are rare and prized gifts.”

  Ottawa Citizen

  “Exceptionally inventive.… Quarrington has a ribald, animated prose style all his own.”

  The New York Times Book Review

  “Quarrington is a wild, original, thoroughly Canadian, surprisingly mature national treasure.”

  Edmonton Journal

  “No one gives humanity to life’s oddballs as well and as sensitively as Paul Quarrington.… But in [his] hands they’re just like the rest of us: anxious, jealous, loving, shy, and very, very human.”

  RODDY DOYLE

  “Let it be said that Quarrington’s language is a consistent source of pleasure. With each succeeding novel, his command of comic tone is refined and deepened, to the point where even the most outlandish scenes are described with pinpoint economy and deadpan irony.”

  The Gazette (Montreal)

  “Quarrington is that most uncommon of contemporary authors, a storyteller.… The fact that [his] many-headed sense of humour (jokey, satiric, physical) causes one to actually enjoy his books never undercuts his substantial thematic reach. As Nabokov was fond of saying, The only difference between comic and cosmic is the letter ‘s’.”

  Toronto Star

  Also by Paul Quarrington

  FICTION

  The Service

  Home Game

  The Life of Hope

  Whale Music

  Logan in Overtime

  Civilization

  Original Six—True Stories from Hockey’s Classic Era (ed.)

  The Spirit Cabinet

  Galveston

  The Ravine

  NON-FICTION

  Hometown Heroes

  Fishing with My Old Guy

  The Boy on the Back of the Turtle

  From the Far Side of the River

  PLAYS

  The Second

  The Invention of Poetry

  Checkout Time

  Dying Is Easy

  The Heart in a Bottle

  Copyright © 1987 by Paul Quarrington

  Reissued in paperback in 1994

  Anchor Canada edition 2007

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks

  Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication has been applied for

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67475-1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in Canada by Anchor Canada

  a division of Random House of Canada

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  Respectfully dedicated to the true King,

  Francis Michael Clancy,

  from whom I borrowed a nickname,

  a birthplace,

  and a bit of the blarney.

  A sad tale’s best for winter.

  I have one of sprites and goblins.

  –A Winter’s Tale

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  ONE

  I GET WOKEN UP by the telephone. I was having a dream, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was about. It had something to do with Manny, with Clay Bors Clinton, the son of a bee who was my dearest friend, but the telephone rings and the dream is gone. All I know is, I wake up with my guts burning, my hands shaking, and the damn blower hopping all over my bedside table. I snatch the thing up and bark out a hello before I’m even sure where I am.

  “King Leary?” asks a voice. I can’t tell whether it belongs to a man or a woman.

  “You got him.”

  “My name is Claire Redford.” I still don’t know whether it’s a man or a woman. I’ve known a few mooks by that name. In fact, considering hockey is such a manly thing, there’s a surprising number of Claires in it.

  “What can I do for you, Claire?”

  “Well, sir, I was reading a book recently, Hockey Legends of Days Gone By. By Clark Higham?”

  “Never read it, no.” Although I’ve looked at it. It’s got some dandy photographs. It’s got one of me airborne, executing the famous St. Louis Whirlygig, a maneuver of unspeakable beauty. It’s got a picture of me in my New York Americans’ uniform that was on a cigarette card back in the twenties. And it’s got the photograph you’ve no doubt all seen, the famous one of Clay pouring champagne over my head.

  “Well,” says this Claire thing, “the book mentions a very interesting fact about you.”

  I should think so. “I am the King of the Ice! I am the high-muck-a-muck hockey player! I have an Indian nickname, Loof-weeda, which means “windsong,” referring to the fact that I could skate faster than anyone else.”

  “And” this Claire says, cutting me off, “apparently you drink nothing stronger than ginger ale.”

  Now I get the scoop. This Claire person is from some antidrinking group, and they want that I should come say a few choice words antidrinking-wise. They want me to talk about Manny Oz, the Wizard, how he ended up, which I don’t got the stomach for. He was all alone in a hotel room in New York, New York, and that’s as much as I ca
re to know. So I ask this Claire thing on the telephone, I says, “True enough, but do you know why I drink ginger ale?”

  “Why is that, sir?”

  “Because it makes me pissed!”

  This is gospel. I get drunk on ginger ale, Canada Dry. I drank it when it had a cork. I drank it when it came in a clear bottle with a little marble in the neck. I drank it in dark green bottles, with tin lids I learnt to open with my teeth. I drank it in cans (which I couldn’t open with my teeth) and I drank it in cans with pull tabs, and today I drink it in cans with holes in the top that I can’t muster the strength to push in. And it gets me tanked, don’t tell Nurse Ames. Always has. Makes me want to dance in the rafters. It got so I couldn’t drink the stuff before a game, or else I’d be giggling and couldn’t score a goal to save the old mother’s life.

  “Isn’t that fascinating!” exclaims this Claire thing on the other end of the blower. “Is that fascinating, or am I out in left field somewhere?” Well, now, he or she isn’t from no anti-boozing league, that’s for sure, because they like to slam down the phone when I say pissed. “I mean,” says the Claire thing, “this strikes me as a little strange.”

  It is a mite peculiar, I’ll grant, getting blasted on Canada Dry. But there’s people who get drunk on a lot stranger. My no-good son Clarence got drunk writing pornographic poetry. In a way, it’s more strange that some people (like my other son, gormless Clifford) would pick something so mundane and bilious as beer. No, ginger ale is the boy for me. It’s sweet and bubbly and makes your toenails curl. If you down a whole can, you can belch in a truly horrifying way, like a dragon about to eat a maiden.

  “Here’s the thing, King. I represent the bottlers of Canada’s best-selling ginger ale beverage. We are currently planning next year’s advertising campaign, and we’re looking at television spots with identifiable sports celebrities. I took the liberty of mentioning your name at a strategy meeting.”

  “Did you ever see those adverts I made back in the fifties? For Leprechaun Laundries—seven locations to serve you. ‘If it’s good enough for the King, it can’t be all bad.’ I did radio adverts, too. ‘Top of the day to you, Canada, and all my Newfie friends! Lads, when was the last time you told the missus that you loved her? Well, how’s about doing it today, with flowers? Yes, sirree, Knight’s Florists—’ ”

  Bastard cuts me short, I don’t care if maybe it is a woman. “Wonderful! You have experience.”

  Considering I was born in the year of Our Lord one-nine double zero, this seems a bit of an understatement. Anyway, I tell this Claire thing, “I can think of lots to say about the good old ginger ale. How’s this? ‘Hello, there! This is King Leary, Loof-weeda. You wonder where I get my pep and ginger? Why, from Canada Dry ginger ale, where the hell else?’ ”

  “We’ll have professional writers to supply that personal touch.”

  “Uh-yeah. Any money involved with this little scam?”

  “Certainly. You’d be paid a flat rate of ten thousand dollars.”

  “Who do I have to kill?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing. That sounds about right. When do we do it?”

  “Arrangements have to be made to get you to Toronto.”

  “Can’t we do it here in South Grouse?”

  “At the home?”

  I guess it wouldn’t make much of an advert. Friends, they’re dropping like flies around this joint, but listen, it’s not the fault of this stuff, Canada Dry.

  “So I’ll be in touch.”

  “You do that, Claire. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “And I must say it’s been a real pleasure. I’m not just banging a dream tambourine, I mean, it has been a real and true pleasure.”

  “Nice talking to you.” I’m half inclined to ask whether Claire is a man or a woman, but that’s not the kind of thing a person likes to be asked. Anyway, before I can, the Claire thing hangs up.

  Blue Hermann is grinning my way like a cat with a mouse in its maw. Blue can’t grin without spittle dribbling onto his chin. “How much?” he wants to know.

  “Hermann,” I tell him, “things has changed out there.”

  “How much?”

  “Sounded to me like he said ten thou.”

  Blue nods, lights up a cigarette. This is quite the stunt, given his palsied claws. He smokes Export dead ends, but what the hey, there’s not much point in switching over to low-tar filters at this stage of the game. Blue Hermann takes a puff, which provokes about ten minutes’ worth of intense hacking. He spits stuff into his bedpan, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and announces, “If you’re going to Toronto to make a commercial, I’m coming with you.”

  Blue has been my roomie for about seven months now. I’ve had nine or ten roomies since I first came to the South Grouse Nursing Home, and I’ve watched them pop one by one. That’s what you get for being healthy and fit all your life—more of it, and it gets damn dull. Blue Hermann, now, he don’t have that problem. In fact, I’m always amazed when I look over to his bed that he’s survived since I last looked over to his bed.

  When they first wheeled him in, he was doped up and passed out. I looked at his chart. EDMUND B. HERMANN. Meant nothing. His condition (I’ve gotten pretty handy at reading medical charts) was terminal, but so what, everyone around here is terminal, with the possible exception of yours truly.

  This Ed Hermann had:

  end stage liver disease, portal hypertension and ascites

  (drank too much);

  Esophogeal varices, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

  (drank and smoked, too);

  positive VDRL

  (drank and smoked and hanky-panked with loose women);

  ASHD

  (his ticker was about to go);

  Kersakoff’s psychosis

  (he made up stuff and believed it);

  Wernicke’s enesphalopathy

  (hot damn! you don’t see that every day);

  affecting optic nerves.

  That’s when it hit. “Bless my soul,” says I, even though no one else was in the room. (What are they going to do, lock me up?) “Why, this is Blue Hermann.”

  Then I pretended that whoever I was pretending to talk to had asked, “Who’s Blue Hermann?”

  “Newspaper man,” says I. “One of the best. He chronicled my career, Hermann did, and it’s likely I never would have been the King without him writing about my exploits. When I got traded to the Amerks, Blue had a job in New York, writing for the Star. When I went to Toronto with Clay, he gets hired on at the Daily Planet. Almost like he was following me around. And here he is again, except from the look of things, he’s going to get wherever we’re going next long before I do.”

  I would never have recognized him. When I first seen him, in New York City, he was young and mustachioed, and he always had a big, bubbly-bosomed blonde hanging on to his arm. Mind you, we was all very young back then. Now he looks like a bum, only I don’t say so to his face, and the reason he isn’t dead is that even the Grim Reaper has some pride.

  It was the drink that done him in. The reason he’s called Blue is that early on the booze ruint his eyes, and he sees everything blue. As if he had blue-colored eyeglasses on.

  Mind you, blue-colored eyes isn’t that big a price to pay. Consider what the booze done to Manny Oz. I myself have only had one alcoholic beverage in my life, that being a glass of champagne when the Ottawa Patriots won the Stanley Cup back in 1919.

  I scored the winner, you know. We were in overtime, in Montreal playing the Canadiens. What happened was, Cy Denneny took out Odie Cleghorn along the boards. Odie was one mean son of a bitch, but nowhere near as bad as his brother, Sprague. The puck pops out and I scoop her and go into the Bulldog. Then I see Newsy Lalonde coming at me. He was the King of the Ice before me, you know, and as nasty a piece of business as was ever turned out of Creation. Yes, sir, Newsy was intending to take me into the boards and probably into the Maritimes, that’s how fast he was comin
g. But then I hear, “Psst, Percy!” and I know Manny is behind me. So we pull a stunt we pulled when we was playing together on the Bowmanville Reformatory’s boys’ team. Brother Isaiah used to call the play the Magic Stone, but I called it the Doorstep. I drop the rubber between my legs, and put a little spin on it so that it stops almost dead, leaving it at Manfred’s doorstep, so to speak. I begin the double back, Manny comes up and collects the puck, and he takes the check for me. That’s the point of the play, you see. Manny and Lalonde collide. My Lord, Newsy had his elbows up, and he took apart Manny’s face with them. Manfred was fair handsome previous to that, you know, but ever afterwards his puss had an out-of-kilter aspect to it. Anyway, the rubber dribbles out from between their legs, and I’ve timed my circle perfect so that it tumbles onto my blade. Now there’s just a lone defender, namely Bert Corbeau. Well, I go into the Whirlygig, and I pretzel the mook! I twist him around so good that his socks end up on different feet. The goaler is Nap Minton, the Little Napoleon. He moves out of the net, and I notice for the first time that his eyes are two different colors, blue and green. I clear my mind, the way the monks showed me. I shoot the puck into silence. Then I hear Manny shout, “Hey!” and from the stands I hear Clay Bors Clinton say “Yes!” and I know that the puck is in the net.

  That’s how it was back in one-nine one-nine. A marked improvement over how things is now.

  TWO

  I WAS BORN AND RAISED in Ottawa, Ontario—Bytown, as we say. The Ottawa Canal was practically in our backyard, and the reason I say practically is that we didn’t really have a backyard. There was this little square thing that was full of bricks, because my father was always planning to build something. I never did learn what the Jesus he meant to build, but he certainly had the bricks for it.

  I thought the canal was a beautiful thing. I spent so much time beside the water that it seemed to the young me that the canal had moods. Sometimes it would be whitecapped and rough, and I wouldn’t think that the wind was up and blowing over a storm, I’d think the water was angry. Or sometimes it would be gentle, with little pieces of sunlight bouncing on it, and I knew that the canal was happy and that if I went swimming the water would play on my body.