Читать книгу The Uninvited Guest - John Degen - Страница 9

Stan did not get back to his house until after seven the next morning, almost nine hours after the two seconds that changed everything. Unsmiling, black-suited League officials had hidden him away in the Toronto general manager’s office until well past midnight when all the newspapermen had finally given up and left the building to make their deadlines.

Among those in charge of running hockey, the incident remained unspoken of, something to be denied again and again, laughed off as ridiculous. Stan understood to keep his mouth shut while he was whisked away from the ice surface after the final whistle. A cluster of men hurried him through the inner corridors of the arena to the room furthest from inquiring eyes and ears. He knew better than anybody what had happened in the last few seconds of the game, and what it meant to the League. He knew all the details, and there wasn’t one he wished to share with anyone.

A black hat was shoved onto his head and knocked down over his eyes for the trip past the photographers’ bench. He was aware of several bright flashes and men calling out his name. He recognized the voices as those of reporters he’d said hello to in the hallways every other evening, but this evening he knew he was to pretend he didn’t hear them. With the hat over his eyes, Stan saw only his own feet on the floor, tripping up several flights of stairs and crossing thresholds here and there until they were finally directed to a chair beside a large oak table in the GM’s private meeting room. The door to the room banged shut against several more shouts and flashes and Stan was left in the relative quiet and darkness, two stern men in dark suits as his companions. Looking at the faces of the two men, Stan was aware he had lost his job, the greatest job he’d ever hoped to have. He made note of it in his head. The job was gone. When he closed his eyes, he saw his wife’s face.

Nearing 1:00 a.m. the League president came into the office and dismissed Stan’s two silent guards. He sat down across the table from Stan, took off his hat and laid it on the table in front of him. Stan could smell the sweat and Brylcreem coming from the older man’s perfectly combed hair. The president had been talking to reporters and getting his picture taken since the end of the game. Stan heard exhaustion in his breathing.

“Stan,” the president began with a sigh, and then veered off in another direction unwilling to get right to the point “. . . Stan, check that top drawer there in that desk. He’s got to have a bottle of something in there.”

Stan shuffled to the GM’s desk, pulled a half-full bottle of bourbon from the drawer and sat back down.

“Well don’t just look at it man, let’s have a drink.”

The bottle slid back and forth across the table several times.

“Stan,” the president made another start, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next week or next month or next year. I don’t know. But for tomorrow and the next day and certainly the next, someone else is the head timekeeper here in Toronto. We can’t have you in the booth, Stan.”

“My wife is sleeping with a man… another man, I mean.” Stan hadn’t exactly decided he wouldn’t talk about what he’d seen during those lost two seconds, but he’d certainly never planned to be talking about it at that moment, just as he was being eased out of his job by a half-drunk sixty-year-old businessman in a sweaty suit. He said the words and then took a longer-than-average pull on the whiskey bottle.

“Well, Stan, I don’t know what to say. That’s a punch in the gut, isn’t it?”

The president drummed his fingers on the tabletop and looked around the room uncomfortably. He had been expecting denials and apologies. These were things he was used to from his employees, and he knew how to muscle his way past them. But a confession like this; what was he supposed to do with this?

“Are you saying you did this on purpose, Stan?”

The bottle was empty when Stan spoke again. “It’s the kind of idea you like to toy with in your head, isn’t it? You like to think about what you’d do if you came home early one night and found… you know, like what happens in books. You like to think you’ll have something to say about it.”

“You’re shook up, Stan. Did you understand what I said earlier, about tomorrow?”

“I understood.”

“Where do you live, Stan? Let me give you a ride. I have a driver waiting downstairs.” The older man looked at his watch and started to mutter something about his wife waiting at home, but thought better of it. “You need to sleep this whole thing off.”

Stan directed the League driver to an address in Toronto’s far east end, where the streets finished themselves in wide sand beaches. He had an idea what he’d find at home and was in no hurry to get there. The car pulled up to the last house on the street.

“You live here?” the president asked with undisguised suspicion, peering past Stan to the large front lawn and flower borders of a lakefront mansion.

“We rent,” Stan said as he climbed out of the car.

“You rent what? The garage?” But Stan had slapped the black sedan’s roof twice and the driver began inching away from the curb.

“We’re not done talking, Stan,” the president shouted as the car picked up speed. “I want you in my office in a week.”

The beach was empty of people. Though the air was warm for early spring, it was well past midnight and even the boardwalk stragglers had wandered off home to bed. Stan found the waterline and sat down in the wet sand. He wanted to get calm and give the ringing in his ears a chance to subside. He wanted to run through things in his head and see if they still made sense, if the same conclusions could be drawn. To his right was the glow of the downtown, dominated by the steady red sign on top of the Royal York Hotel. On his left sat the squat, brooding darkness of a water filtration plant, unlit but clicking away in its gloom, preparing to help the city shower and get ready for another day.

The lake breathed a chilling mist in his face, and somewhere way out on the water a laker moaned in its engine, invisible, bypassing the city for some more industrial port further west. For a long time he thought of nothing. He stared out into the misty water and just breathed. For a while he slept like that, sitting up, wrapped in his coat.

When he found himself awake and thinking again, he was running over a familiar memory. He remembered how his mother used to force him to finish his meals as a child. He recalled the nightly standoff before a plate empty of everything but broccoli or green beans or some other vegetable he’d decided to hate for a while. He laughed quietly when he remembered these struggles, since they were so futile and unnecessary. He didn’t actually hate eating anything. He had an indifferent palate. Everything was just fine as long as it filled him, but there he was each evening, arms crossed, with his mother standing above him in a similar pose. A contest of patience. He wondered if she had enjoyed the game as well as he had.

He found himself standing, and then walking, his feet pulling him slowly toward home. There was no avoiding it. At some point, he would have to walk through the door and see that she had cleared out. At some point he’d have to admit to being alone. He might as well get on with it. He turned back toward land and crossed through a park to Queen Street. He turned west and walked the long quiet street leading downtown. At Woodbine, he stopped to wait out a light, though there were no cars on the road. He was beginning to feel tired. He was beginning to want his bed, no matter how empty, and suddenly he regretted the distance in front of him. The light turned green, but before he could move, he felt the strong grip of a man’s hand on his arm, stopping him, pulling him backwards.

“Take it,” the man said, his words full of spit and the stink of alcohol, “take it all, I don’t want it any more.”

The man had been slouched in a darkened doorway beside the intersection. Drunk and a little lost, he’d stopped in the doorway to relieve himself and had instead fallen asleep standing with his head against the bricks. Stan’s impatient shuffle at the light had woken him. There was a brick pattern of lines in his forehead.

“I thought it was the perfect deal, you know,” he said, crying a little as he used Stan for support, “but a man has to be a man. He just has to.”

The drunk clung to Stan’s coat, and Stan resisted the urge to push him off, certain they would both fall and not wanting to hear the sound of the man’s head hitting the sidewalk. The drunk was clinging with his left hand, a strong left hand, and pawing at Stan with his right. At first, Stan thought he might be being robbed, the man seemed so intent on Stan’s pocket, but then he realized the drunk was actually trying to give him money. The man’s right hand was tensed to grip a large wad of bills and he struggled with Stan’s coat, trying to get at the pocket so he could shove the cash inside.

“Say, what are you doing there, friend?” Stan said, wrestling the stronger man and knowing he’d surely lose. “I think you want to keep that for yourself. There looks to be an awful lot there.”

The man seemed surprised to hear another voice in the night and he stood up straight. Stan used the opportunity to push him backwards against the wall.

“I don’t need your money,” he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “I’m not a bum. I’m just going for a walk.”

The drunk looked Stan up and down and laughed a loud drunken laugh.

“Did you have a little fight with the beach then?” he said.

Stan saw for the first time the effect of his half-sleep on the beach. The lower half of his black coat was soaking wet and covered in grey sand and pebbles. He wasn’t a bum, but he sure looked like one.

“I fell asleep,” Stan said, flicking tentatively at his coat with his fingers.

“Lucky you,” the man said. “Got a cigarette?”

The two men stood at the corner of Queen and Woodbine, smoking. Stan kept his eyes on his companion, not relishing another dance with him, and wondered what would happen next.

“My wife is rich,” the man said, adding smoke to his spit-filled conversation. “She’s one of the richest women in the city. We live in a fucking mansion up there on the hill. Where the fuck am I?” He looked around to get his bearings. “Up that way.”

“Sounds nice,” Stan said.

“Sounds nice? Yes, it is nice. Nothing like being fucking rich, let me tell you. I did okay myself once. Boxing. I was a boxer—hard to tell, I know, what with my beautiful face and all, but I broke heads up and down the Great Lakes for ten years, and when I stopped boxing, I managed younger boxers. I made a fucking fortune.”

“Sounds like you have it all figured out.” Stan was enjoying his cigarette, enjoying the approach of morning, but getting more and more anxious for bed. He could feel exhaustion creeping up his legs from the cold sidewalk.

“That’s when I met her, my wife. She came to the fights one night on the arm of some other rich stiff, some art-loving prick who thought he knew something about everything. I saw them in the crowd and just hated the guy right away. I said to myself, I’m going to save that girl from herself. So, I went and took her way. We were married six weeks later.”

“You’re a man who knows what he wants,” Stan said.

“She didn’t need me or my money. Her father made millions in steel out of Hamilton. She didn’t need anything I had to offer, but she wanted me, so we got married. Then those pricks fixed one of my boys and that was that. One prick little fighter takes one prick little fucking bribe and suddenly I’m giving all my money to lawyers.”

“Mob?”

Stan had heard all the stories. The mob had even taken a run at hockey. The word was it didn’t pan out for them, but who knew.

“Mob is right. Everyone was mob. The commission was mob, the prick fighter was mob, the fucking press was mob as far as I know. All I know is they emptied me. And she said she didn’t care, she said that’s not why she married me anyway. Now, every night she gives me a handful of cash and sends me out of the house so I won’t get pissed up there and start breaking things. Now, I’m like a big dog she can’t handle any more. I still get the good food, but I’m in the kennel sure as fucking anything.”

“There are worse things,” Stan says.

“What the fuck do you know about it?” The man tried to raise his voice to a shout but lost heart halfway.

“I know about it,” Stan said. “There are worse things than being pitied.”

“Yeah, maybe, but not for me.” The man rubbed his forehead under his hat, his huge right hand still wrapped around a folded brick of cash. “Look, are you going to take this or not? I don’t have all night.”

“Why would I take it?” Stan said.

“It’s up to you,” the man sniffed at him. “Either you take it, or the lake takes it. I know one thing, I’m not going to take it any more.” The ex-boxer clamped his left hand on Stan’s shoulder and, squinting, guided his right hand to Stan’s coat pocket. The money slipped in like a smooth rock. He felt the weight of it immediately.

“Buy yourself something nice,” the man said, tripping backwards a little as he released Stan.

“And if anyone asks you, you never saw me tonight. I don’t want them dragging me out of the lake for her to look at. Just let me go. Maybe I’ll wash up in New York somewhere. Maybe I’ll go over the Falls.”

“The Falls go the other way,” Stan said.

The man stopped walking backwards and looked Stan in the face. He started laughing. They both started laughing.

She typed the note. Stan knew this was her way of being polite, so he didn’t have to look at her handwriting and become morbid about it. In books he’d read, the note had been the only thing left to remind the man of the woman, but this was not true for Stan. She’d left all her gardening utensils, including her prized stainless steel hand spade and the little mat she used to rest her knees on while weeding. Many of her books remained, the ones, he guessed, she never intended to read again. She had taken only one of her houseplants, the African violet. He’d suspected for years she had a special relationship with this plant and now he knew he’d been right. The ficus and the rubber tree stood where they’d always stood, though it looked like she’d dusted their leaves sometime in the last few days.

Otherwise, it had been a hasty leaving, he could tell, and with good reason. Recognizing what had happened, seeing that Stan had seen their hands laid casually one on the other, watching his face as he was dragged away from his timekeeper’s booth into a mob of suits and reporters, Louise knew the time she’d been anticipating had arrived. She had Jim accompany her in a taxi to the house on Saulter Street; they’d thrown her essentials into a couple of suitcases, grabbed the African violet and left. The note told Stan that she’d taken the car—they’d taken the car—but he knew without having to be told. They wouldn’t stay in the city. They would get away, far away, and for that they’d need a car.

Stan sat at the kitchen table. In front of him was his wife’s typewritten, unsigned goodbye, and beside it on the tabletop, a neatly stacked pile of twenty-dollar bills. He’d counted them three times, to be sure of things. There was nineteen hundred dollars in the stack. What man needs almost two thousand dollars to have a good time for one evening? What kind of life must that be? Stan didn’t worry that the drunk had jumped into the lake. He’d known drunks in his time. He’d listened to the remorse an evening full of whiskey can bring, and he knew it rarely prompted any serious action other than the kind of impulsive behaviour one generally lives to regret, like picking up a girl at the end of the night, finding yourself in an alleyway brawl, or giving away a pocketful of money because you feel sorry for how life’s treated you. He felt sure the man was right now sleeping himself into a hangover on a chesterfield in his wife’s luxurious mansion overlooking the lake. If he even noticed his missing allowance the next morning, he’d chalk it up to more bad luck and add it to his list of grievances against himself. Stan felt too sorry for himself to feel sorry for some poor drunk rich guy.

For the first time in years, Stan listened to a hockey game on the radio, at the local tavern up on Queen Street. He listened all the remaining games there, heard Toronto win the championship. When the final whistle blew, he pulled a small fistful of money from his jacket pocket and bought a round of drinks for everyone in the bar. He was grateful to the crowd in the bar. Stan’s picture had been in the paper for a week following the game that had lost him a job and a wife, but if anyone did recognize him, they said nothing about his two-second mistake. They let him drink and enjoy their enjoyment of the games. For hours after the final game, Stan walked through the crowds on the street, watched them bang their pots and blow their horns.

In the early summer, Stan received a letter with a Winnipeg postmark. This note was handwritten (she’d left her typewriter behind). She apologized for the abruptness of her departure and for the way in which Stan had to discover her relationship with Jim. She was sorry he had lost his job and she hoped he’d be all right. She did not explain how it had all happened, the affair, the destruction of their marriage. She didn’t have to. Since their wedding day, a hot day at City Hall, Stan had anticipated an ending much like this. He knew Louise was an ambitious woman, someone who longed to travel and see the world, someone who would not stay in one place for very long. He, on the other hand, would have been satisfied to spend the rest of his life as a timekeeper in Toronto, to see each year develop much the same as the last, with only the team’s performance through the playoffs from year to year determining any difference. He often wondered what it was about him that convinced her to marry him in the first place.

He was, he knew, boring, and while he didn’t mind being bored by himself, he couldn’t imagine anyone else standing for it. If he’d been a stepping stone for her, he was a willing one. Temporary or not, Stan had loved his marriage and adored Louise. He couldn’t bring himself to blame her for ending it. She had clearly given him more than he’d given her.

At the end of the letter, after wishing him well, Louise wrote that Stan could find his car at the corner of Main and Robert in Penetanguishene, Ontario. She was sorry to have taken it without asking, and sorry to not be able to return it, but she was certain it was safe and would remain where she’d left it until he could manage a trip up there to fetch it.

It was a five-hour bus ride to Penetang. Stan sat in a window seat beside an older woman who was going to visit her son in prison. Manslaughter, she said, over and over again. Stan told her he was visiting relatives. The bus left the station at Bay and Dundas in early orange light, picked its way through empty city streets and found countryside to the northwest. They sped past the tiny airport at Malton, a field and a windsock, and found the northern highway, number 27. Here the landscape was hills and trees, one farm bleeding into the next, and towns with curious names, each of them a brief stopping point for the bus—Kleinburg, Nobleton, Schomberg, Bond Head. Further north, near Barrie, Stan saw a sign for a town called Utopia.

The bus stopped for half an hour in Barrie to off-load some passengers and pick up others. Stan took the opportunity to stretch his legs. He walked along Dunlop Street past an artillery gun cemented to the sidewalk as a war memorial. Apparently, Barrie had sent more than fifty men to their deaths in two wars. So many for such a small town. Late morning light bounced off Lake Simcoe and shimmered between the shop windows on the street. Stan walked down to the water and gazed north, up the bay to where it widened and disappeared in distance. It looked so different from the lake he knew back in Toronto, so empty and wild. He imagined that people had stood in this spot for thousands of years and seen pretty much the same view. Trees and water and sunshine.

An hour and a half later, he was walking the streets of Penetang, looking out over a different bay on a different lake. He’d seen his car at the central intersection as the bus chugged past, and now he was trying to remember his way back to it. There wasn’t much to the town, so he didn’t worry about getting lost, but he had no other reason for being there, and an idea had begun to demand time in his mind. He wanted to get back to Barrie as quickly as possible.

The car was parked by the side of the road, across from a furniture store. There was no ticket on the windshield, and no sign it had been tampered with in any way. Only in a prison town, Stan thought. It was unlocked and the keys were as Louise had described them, under the passenger side of the front seat. There was a full tank of gas. Stan imagined Louise insisting on it and Jim begrudgingly paying for the fuel. How does one get to Winnipeg from Penetanguishene without a car, Stan wondered.

The car had been sitting in the sun all morning, the air inside hot and stuffy. As he sat down on the driver’s side, Stan was overcome by the smell of his wife’s perfume. It was more than just the after-effect of her presence; it had been spilled into the upholstery somewhere on the back seat. He tried not to imagine how that had happened, and instead just opened all four windows before starting the car. He drove to the edge of town and found the highway south. In Barrie, he found Dunlop Street again and pulled to the curb beside the real estate office he’d walked past that morning. Shoreline Lots, the window said, Prime Wooded Property.

“Somebody’s been having fun in this car,” the salesman laughed out loud and waved his hand in front of his nose. “Smells like Paris, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.”

Stan was following the lakeshore roadway north out of town. Beside him sat Gino (Gene) Auden, sales agent for Simcoe Realty, specialist in vacation and cottage properties.

“My folks were the first Italian family in Barrie, so they say,” he boasted, shaking Stan’s hand in the office. “Changed all our names right away to try and fit in, but I like Gino, it’s more manly than Gene I think.”

Gino Auden was a giant of a man, over six feet tall and easily more than 250 pounds. He kept his thinning hair shaved close to his head and sported a Clark Gable moustache on an otherwise perfectly groomed, perfectly round face. He had rings on four of his fingers, and his fingernails, Stan noticed, were perfectly manicured. He reminded Stan of many of the League higher-ups he’d met in his time. Men who took care of their appearance, who were certain of their power.

“I think you’re going to like what I have to show you,” Gino said, for the third time. “Cottage country is moving, you know. Muskoka’s all well and good for those rich Toronto types, but ordinary schlubs like you and me deserve a place to relax as well, am I right?”

He is right, Stan thought. He’d never imagined even wanting to own land in the country, let alone being able to afford it, but that morning the pictures in the office window on Dunlop Street had enticed him, and the prices were suddenly within reach. Gino directed Stan along a single- lane country road crowded in by trees. The road ran along a ridge above Kempenfelt Bay. Here and there, the water shone blue through a gap in the forest. They drove through Shanty Bay, a hamlet of a dozen or so houses and one small whitewashed church, and eventually turned down toward the lake on a dirt road rutted here and there with washouts from a recent downpour.

“There’s absolutely no development this far up yet,” Gino said, pointing out the open window to the thickly wooded land crowding the shoreline. “Only the old-timers, folks who’ve lived up here year-round for a century or so. And you want them types around in case anything goes wrong. It’s awfully quiet up here at night, and dark. Nice to know someone’s around even if they’re a mile away, am I right?”

Again, there was no arguing with Gino. By his own count, his practised patter had sold fifteen lots along this stretch of Simcoe shoreline in the last five months.

“Right here will do, sir.” Stan pulled the car to the edge of the road and stopped the engine.

“Are you ready for paradise?” Gino smiled at him from the passenger seat. He’d turned to face Stan and his body blocked the entire view from the passenger-side window.

The way down into the property from the road was a narrow cut through thick pines, untrimmed, their lower branches brushing the ground in wide skirts. Stan inhaled deeply the combined scents of evergreen and lake water. Squirrels leapt from tree to tree thirty feet above his head.

“That’s your fresh air you’re smelling, Stan.” Gino slapped him on the back and took the opportunity of contact to pull him by the arm past the last of the pines, his left arm opening wide, like a maître d’ showing off the prize table. What remained of the property was a deep grass meadow speckled with yellow dandelions and buttercups. Here and there, giant weeping willow trees bent their long soft branches to the earth around elephantine bodies. The land ended at large boulders falling away into the gently rolling waters of the lake.

“Christ Jesus,” Gino sighed, looking out across the water, “if every showing looked like this I’d have none of these lots left. You’ve hit it on a great day, I’ll say that.”

The property was 150 feet wide and ran from road to lake another 150 feet, forming a near-perfect square. There was a small, falling-down cabin near the lake, doubling as living shack and boathouse, though no boat was present.

“The owner built that cabin in Shanty Bay and floated it here just as you see it. Easier than hauling the materials. That hazy patch of land there,” Gino pointed directly across the lake, “is Georgina Island—Indian reservation, but don’t worry, they can’t get you all the way over here—and that close bit of land there just the other side of the bay is Big Bay Point. There’s a lighthouse at the very end. Kind of comforting to look at after dark. If you head down the bay there you get back to Barrie and directly to the other end of the lake there is Orillia. You’re about right in the middle. A prime spot if you ask me, but I’m just the salesman, what the hell do I know?”

Stan asked for a little time to himself, and walked back and forth across the shoreline, his shoreline he’d decided, while Gino smoked nervously back up by the car. Stan saw a family on this land. He saw continuance, and that was a lot better than anything he’d seen for himself back on Saulter Street. He could give himself no reason for the feeling; he was simply sure in his decision.

Back in the realty office on Dunlop Street, Stan signed all the papers and pulled the fifteen-hundred-dollar total from his jacket pocket.

“Hello, darling!” Gino yelled, drawing the attention of the two other salesmen in the room.

“Holy crap, man, if I’d known you were packing that much cash, I’d have hit you with a rock and dumped you in the lake.”

“I know you would have,” Stan said, and the two other salesmen laughed.