They didn’t play a full rink in the schoolyard. Because of a shortage of space and people, they played four to a side with one goalie. When the defending team got the ball, they had to clear it past a centre line, then bring it back toward the goal. This made it possible to play with fewer people and less running. Because I was younger and less skilful than the older kids, I was never picked for a team. I just stayed in front of the net, perpetually on defence, doing my best to protect Finnie. I ended up blocking a lot of shots myself, accidentally, and once I got hit so hard in the stomach that I actually threw up. As soon as I was finished retching my guts out, I got back out there though, because if Finnie wasn’t going to break, then neither was I. This was an attitude that would resurface time and time again as we grew up; without Finnie, I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to do half of the things I did.
There was no such thing as a penalty in these games. Kirby Walsh, the youngest of Finnie’s three older brothers, was by far the chippiest and meanest player of the group. His favourite trick was to come at you from behind, put his stick between your legs and then pull back, sending the blade into your crotch. He called this “harpooning the whale.” “Watch out for Ahab,” he’d cry just before yanking his stick back. Apparently he had read Moby Dick at the Portsmouth Boys’ School. I rather suspect, because of what happens to Ahab at the end and because of the type of boy that Kirby Walsh was, that he read only the first part of the book. Probably never got much past “Call me Ishmael.”
It did not take many harpoonings before I learned to be aware of more than what was directly in front of me. It was necessary to develop a sort of sixth sense. Watching out for Ahab was also useful in other areas of defensive play; I was able to anticipate plays before they unfolded and had a much better chance of breaking them up.
Gerry Walsh, older than Finnie and Kirby but younger than Patrick, was one of the best stickhandlers I would ever encounter. He was able to move the ball around on his stick with extraordinary precision and was the first person I ever played against who used his feet to manoeuvre the ball, dropping it back and kicking it up onto his stick at will. He played cheaply when he didn’t have the puck; although he never “harpooned the whale,” he was fond of using his elbows and wouldn’t hesitate to trip you from behind. Once, when I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, he hooked the hood with his stick and clotheslined me, which hurt like hell.
Jim Stockdale was a terrific passer, accurate to within inches. He couldn’t shoot though, and he couldn’t take a pass very well. He was easy to cover because you always knew exactly what he was going to do, but he was just so damn good with his passes that there was no stopping them. I won’t even get into Patrick Walsh’s slapshot; it just plain hurt.
One day, over Christmas holidays, just before the end of 1980, Finnie and I were playing in my driveway, not having been asked to play in the schoolyard. I took a shot, beat Finnie on the short side, winced, and looked up to see Joyce Sweeney standing beside me.
“Hey Joyce,” Finnie said.
“Hey guys. What’s up?”
“A little hockey. You want to watch?”
I almost choked. How did Finnie expect me to play with Joyce Sweeney, the hottest girl we knew, watching us? Besides, I imagined that if Frank Hawthorne found out we were talking to Joyce he’d kick the living crap out of us.
“No,” Joyce said. “I’d like to play, though.”
This was clearly not what Finnie had in mind, but I was so in awe of her that if she’d said she was going to cut out my small intestine and fly a kite from it I would have readily agreed. I went into the garage and got my old stick.
“Which way do you shoot?” I asked her.
“I don’t know.” She grabbed the stick and took an imaginary shot. “This feels about right.”
Joyce took the ball out of the net and shot it hard against the garage door. Finnie and I both cringed and I swear that I heard the sound of a tea cup being dropped out on the back deck. The ball rolled back to her and she turned and snapped a wrist shot past Finnie and into the net. Finnie didn’t even move.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said, poking his pads with her stick.
“Nothing,” he said. “I just wasn’t ready.”
Finnie hooked the ball out of the net with his stick and shovelled it over to her. She slammed a good, hard pass at me, which rolled off my stick and onto the snow-covered lawn. I realized that it had been a heck of a long time since anyone had passed to me. I got the ball off the lawn and sent it back to Joyce, who shot it and beat Finnie between the legs.
“You were ready that time, Finnie.” She raised her stick in celebration.
Finnie shrugged. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. She was definitely a hell of a lot better than either of us. She wasn’t as mean as the kids from the schoolyard either. We played with her for about an hour, then she planted her stick in the snowbank and headed home.
“Thanks for the game, guys.”
“No problem, Joyce. You’re pretty good, you know,” Finnie said.
“It’s not a very hard game,” she said.
I was shocked; I thought it was plenty hard.
“You want to play again sometime?” Finnie asked.
“It’s nice to have someone to pass to,” I said truthfully.
“I don’t think so. It doesn’t much interest me, to tell you the truth.”
That was the first indication I’d ever had that there were people in the world who didn’t like hockey.
The summer of 1981 came quickly. Finnie and I graduated from Mrs. Sweeney’s third-grade class. For the next two months we were free to spend our time as we wished. Many changes were afoot, the most significant of which, the one that to this day strikes me as an omen of what was to come, occurred in my father.
Before the accident, my father was known as a steady, good-natured man who was not prone to bouts of inexplicable activity. Following the untimely departure of his arm, however, he began to act unpredictably, even eccentrically.
In early July, my father became very concerned with the state of the garage. He thought, perhaps with good cause, that the items in various boxes and on multiple shelves in some way threatened the family’s existence. He spent many hours on the back deck devising a plan intended to systematically eradicate this threat. It was made clear to Louise and me that he was not to be disturbed, even though he was making a great deal of noise, shouting and whooping and banging his fist on the arm of his chair to accentuate some particularly significant aspect of his scheme. Several days after he first announced his intention to save us from the garage, I returned home from the reservoir with Finnie and found the driveway littered with its former contents. I hesitantly ventured past the clutter.
My father had removed, without exception, every item from the garage. The shelves had been ripped out, leaving only three bare walls, a ceiling and a floor. He had then painted the entire room, from top to bottom, a glossy white. He was on the fifth coat when he looked up. He nodded, dipped his brush in a nearly empty can and continued.
The next day, he installed new shelves. Actually they looked more like cages than shelves. The walls of the cages were framed with 2 × 4s into squares about two feet wide and tall. The squares were enclosed by chicken wire and had doors that could be latched shut with a series of hooks. The wire was painted alternately red and black in a checkerboard pattern.
The day after that, my father took a total of 15 empty mayonnaise jars, cut out the bottoms of 14 of them and sealed them together with silicone, one on top of the other, until he had one very tall tube of glass. He cleaned off all the labels, put a spout in the bottom jar for drainage and attached a female hose end to the top jar. The tube was placed in the middle of the garage, reaching from the floor to the ceiling without more than two or three inches to spare. The hose was screwed into the top jar and the tube was filled with water.
I should mention that my father did all this with only one arm. He was extremely resour
ceful, his determination to complete the job overpowering his physical disability. My father had always been stubborn, but this was different. I was amazed and a little frightened.
Four days after he started fighting with the garage, my father spent the day in a pet store examining goldfish. After six hours, having bothered the store’s employees to no small degree, he purchased 25 goldfish. The fish were not gold, as their name suggests, but light blue, with enormous bulging eyes. Perched atop the stepladder, he stuffed them through the tiny gap and into the tube of mayonnaise jars, one by one. Their purpose, he announced, was to keep an eye, or 50, on the clutter.
It took him two more days to move everything back into the garage. Anything that could not be contained in one of the cages was discarded. Certain things, things that somehow offended my father, were also thrown away: the hedge-pruning shears, a gasoline canister, a large Phillips screwdriver and a life jacket. My father developed a classification system for the caged objects that, as far as I could see, was without logic. Anything related to cutting the lawn went into the bottom row of cages, but sharp objects were not placed next to each other. Old shoes were put into two separate cages: left shoes in one and right shoes in the other. The exception were shoes without laces. If a shoe did not have laces, such as sandals or gumboots or old slippers, then the left laceless shoe would be put in with the right laced shoes and the right lace-less shoe would go in with the left laced shoes. Of course, this exception had an exception. Where shoes with Velcro were concerned, the two shoes were Velcroed together and placed in with the raincoats. One would think that a one-armed man would have a lot more respect for the wonders of Velcro, but my father hated the stuff.
He alone understood his system. Throughout the years that we lived in that house, no one else in my family was ever known to successfully find anything in that garage. Louise refused to even enter it and my mother went into it only under the most dire of circumstances. Whenever something was needed from the cages, my father had to be recruited to the task.
Finnie, who had a strange affinity with my father’s peculiarities, was the only other person who appreciated the garage’s hidden science. It took him a while, but if he stood there and thought about it hard enough, he could always find what he was looking for. When presented with the challenge, he would stand behind the mayonnaise jars and place both his hands on top of his head, interlocking his fingers and extending his elbows sideways. He would glare at the cages as if he was staring down a fierce dog. Eventually, usually after about 15 minutes, but sometimes longer, he would walk toward the cages and point at one. If it was one that was up high, he would scurry up the face of another cage to open it. Having found what he was looking for, he would remove the object, close the door and drop to the floor. It once took him two hours to locate a bicycle-tire pump, but he never opened more than one cage.
He couldn’t explain how he knew where things were. “It’s just a feeling,” he said. “It sort of all makes sense, if you just give it a chance.”
“How does it make sense?” I asked.
“I can’t explain it. It just does.”
Predicting the whereabouts of objects was not an uncommon occurrence for Finnie. When we played hockey, there were times when he moved to make a save before he could have known that the puck would be shot in that direction. I suppose it is possible that he somehow read the play, that it was just a lucky guess. I don’t think so, though.
He knew why Louise wouldn’t go into the garage, for example, although in hindsight I guess it was pretty obvious. My mother and I had assumed that it was because she was frustrated by not being able to find anything. Louise didn’t deal well with frustration. If something was giving her grief, she’d just walk away from it, forever, and find a way to live without it.
“It’s those fish,” he said when the subject came up.
When my father designed the fish habitat, or the fish tube, as Finnie called it, he intended to give the fish an unobstructed view of the cages. But he committed two critical errors. The first was making the tube tall and narrow. My father didn’t foresee that with such a small surface area at the top of the tube there would not be enough oxygen transferring into the water to keep the fish alive. As a result, all 25 of the fish were dead within two weeks. The second design flaw was that, since my father glued the bottom mayonnaise jar to the floor of the garage, there was no way to remove the dead fish. Every month my father would drain the water out through the spout in the bottom jar and put in 25 new fish. The new fish would eat the partially decayed bodies of their predecessors and then the cycle would repeat itself. My mother and I thought it was a little weird, but Finnie recognized that Louise made more of it than that. It horrified her.
That season, a young Wayne Gretzky scored 55 goals and had 109 assists for a league-leading 164 points. Peter Stastny had 39 goals and 70 assists, his point total of 109 far shy of Gretzky’s. It was Stastny’s rookie year, however, and he was rewarded for his efforts, winning the Calder trophy, presented to the league’s most valuable freshman player. It was a record number of points for a rookie.
Gretzky never won the Calder trophy because he had played for Indianapolis in the World Hockey Association before coming into the NHL and because the WHA was a professional league, he was not considered a rookie when he entered the NHL. In his first two years, however, he broke scoring and assist records held by Phil Esposito and Bobby Orr.
Despite Gretzky’s point totals, broken records and exciting play, Finnie remained unimpressed. “Too flashy,” he said.
“What about Stastny? He got a whole bunch of points and you still like him.”
“He has to work for his points.”
Where hard work was concerned, Finnie knew what he was talking about. His skills as a goalie were limited; he was slow and he still had a weak glove side. Stout, almost cherubic, Finnie was on the verge of being overweight; although his size helped him to fill up the net, it did little for his speed. He wore his goalie equipment nearly constantly, even though it must have been unbearably hot. By the middle of July, he had passed out from heat exhaustion twice, but it didn’t deter him. He knew that he needed to be fast and the only way he could do that was to lose some weight.
Occasionally, when we were allowed to play with Finnie’s brothers and their friends in the schoolyard, we would see Joyce Sweeney. We had worried that, since we were no longer in her mother’s class, she would stop being nice to us, but she was the same as ever.
One day, we were invited to play in one of those brutal schoolyard games. Frank Hawthorne’s family had taken him on vacation, leaving a spot open in the net, but as usual Finnie refused to play unless I could too. The crowd consisted of the Walsh brothers, Jim Stockdale and Jordi Svenson, who was big and mean but played cleanly, more or less. A freckle-faced kid named Bruce Selby also joined in. We had never played with him before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect.
I was playing well that day. Patrick Walsh was teamed with Jim Stockdale and Bruce Selby. Stockdale could pass like nobody’s business and Pat’s shot was blistering. Selby turned out to be a decent all-round player, but he was a particularly good checker. There was no way to stop them.
The other team, which consisted of Kirby and Gerry Walsh and Jordi Svenson, was not particularly skilled in any area of the game. Gerry could stickhandle, sure, but with no one to pass to he was forced to take the shot himself most of the time and it was hard to beat Finnie on a clear shot. Jordi wasn’t bad, but he was slow and easy to cover. As usual, I was perpetually stuck on defence.
After 15 or 20 minutes, it became apparent that Kirby Walsh’s team was severely outmatched. Finnie suggested that we redo the teams, but Kirby wasn’t about to admit defeat and responded by cuffing him on the side of the head with his stick. Finnie tried to slash him, but Kirby was too quick. Finnie’s stick met empty space, the force of his swing spinning him around and causing him to fall to his knees. Gerry Walsh increased Finnie’s humiliation by firing the ball square
ly at Finnie’s rear end. It made a loud slap as it bounced off him and into the net.
The game resumed and after several minutes Kirby came in on net. I let the ball go by me and as Kirby passed on the left I bent low in the knees and put my hip into him, knocking him off his feet. He landed hard and got up slowly. I thought he was going to throttle me, but instead he sneered menacingly and pointed his stick in my direction, shaking his head.
Since being hit in the ass with the ball, Finnie had been playing brilliantly. It may have been the best game I ever saw him play. He was in place well before the shot, making saves that by all accounts he shouldn’t have been able to make. Even his glove was hot. Over the next hour, he let in only a couple of goals and not once did he allow Kirby or Gerry to score. His play inspired me to elevate my own game and together we all but shut down the offence of each team. I had completely forgotten that Kirby was out to get me.
Then it happened. Pat Walsh brought the ball into the zone. He passed it off to Selby, who went by Gerry Walsh and dished it to Jim Stockdale, positioned to the left of the net. If he’d shot it right away, he probably would have scored; Finnie, for once, was out of position and would never have gotten there in time. But instead of shooting, Stockdale, true to form, opted to pass. Somehow I got my stick out and intercepted it. I turned and looked for someone on the other team and saw Jordi Svenson. I fired the ball onto his stick and was moving back into position when I heard, behind me, Kirby Walsh’s fearsome words: “Watch out for Ahab!”
His stick shot into my groin. All I remember after that is pain; it’s possible that I blacked out. When I came to, I was curled up in the foetal position on the pavement. Gradually, I became aware of a scuffle going on around me. I looked up and saw Kirby and Finnie locked in combat. Kirby had a hold of Finnie’s jersey, but he couldn’t land a punch on Finnie, who was in prime form, dodging and striking like a mongoose. Whenever Kirby swung, Finnie would step or duck out of his way and reply with a shot to Kirby’s midsection. After evading one particularly brutal punch, Finnie tagged Kirby square in the kidney. Kirby went down, clutching his side. Finnie began to kick him, raining blows upon Kirby’s head. Kirby attempted to protect his face, but his efforts were futile.