The Code (8 page)

“I know I never would have made the league if it hadn't been for Red,” said Bobby Reagan, the former Peterborough captain who played for three Cup winners in Detroit during his twenty-year career. “He made me a player and I was lucky enough that he coached me at the most important point in my development. Any young man who played for Red was lucky that way. Red got the most out of his teams, and he helped his players get the most out of themselves.”

Schmaltz. One: Bobby Reagan would have made the league and been an all-star and Hall of Famer if he'd been coached by Oprah. He was never, never, a marginal player. Two: He wasn't a
finished product at age sixteen when he landed in Peterborough. Hanratty was lucky to get him and smart enough not to screw him up. And that was true of all the pros who came out of the Peterborough program. Reagan was simply reinforcing the Myth of the Coaching Making the Player, the notion that attaching your son to the right coach for four years will make him (and you) a millionaire. I guess Reagan felt obliged to do the faithful son routine, honouring his former coach by repeating the sales pitch he gave hundreds of parents.

Mr. Hanratty recorded 1485 regular-season wins in leading Peterborough to seven Ontario league titles.

A matter of record. He had about six hundred more wins than Norm Pembleton, who started around the same time but did a couple of seasons in the pro bus leagues and four more on the sidelines out of work. Pembleton had been saddled with some dog teams, too.

“He was the heart and …”

It couldn't be …

“… soul of junior hockey,” says television and radio commentator Grant Tomlin. “I've known Red for twenty years and for him every day was a great day of hockey.”

So said a guy who never played a shift for Hanratty. Or, for that matter, against Peterborough in the Ontario league. Until Tomlin landed his television gig eight years ago, he'd never met him. Hanratty might as well have been the Red-Headed Stranger. Grant Tomlin didn't even play junior hockey. He
played in the NCAA, just like I did. He was an effing walk-on. He didn't even get a ride. I can't imagine why the Gelled Blowhard felt qualified to offer his opinion. Then again, I'm just a naïf on media matters. I'm sure he solicited the paper rather than vice versa. He'd call them on a daily basis, trying to get his name into print.

I lost my enthusiasm for this brief voyage through the Late Lamented Mentor's life five words into Tomlin's banal hearsay testimonial. Thankfully, at that very point my heart vibrated. Sandy calling.

Conceptually, Sandy thinks of my work as an adventure. Whenever she looks behind the curtain, though, she attaches quotation marks to “job.” Her best line: “When I was in school you could improve your mark 5 percent with perfect attendance, but with you guys 100 percent of it is just showing up.”

The vagaries of my working dodge were lost on her.

“Sugar,” she said, “are you really stuck in Peterborough? It would be one thing in April or May when the courses are open.”

She golfs. I don't. Not anymore. No fun for Arthur. Yeah, it's that bad. I drive the cart and tell her how beautiful her swing is.

“I guess you'll just have to relax and be treated like a queen and lose yourself in some fine dining,” I said.

“Sugar, it's small-town Ontario, not the south of France,” she said. “You'd be more believable pitching me on roughing it.”

“Okay, let's rough it.”

This well-practised routine continued for a couple of minutes, mostly for our own amusement and, I think, for an eavesdropping garbageman's. Eventually she acquiesced.

“Pack your bags and then pack mine,” I said.

That got her. “So it's legit,” she said. “You were really ambushed.”

I pushed the sympathy button. She has always been a sucker
for helping out and has thrown me a life preserver I don't know how many times. She probably figured I had ulterior motives. Close. I was still trying to figure them out. No matter. The road trip was on.

I checked into the Best Available Bunkhouse Offering Points. Staying in Peterborough would spare me three hours of driving, and the price of a room was about a wash with the mileage. I thought it was a more effective use of my time. Being on the ground in Peterpatch would give me a chance to small-talk my way to wisdom re Billy Mays Jr. Go around town. Go to the gym. A coffee here. A beer there. Watch a game in a sports bar. Act like just another fan. Mention that I was in town for the Hanratty funeral. If pushed, I could say that Hanratty was a friend of my father's. Next stop I could say that the old doctor used to snap on the rubber glove when my father walked into the office. I could have fun with that stuff and then mention Mays. There'd be no more than two degrees of separation in Peterborough. It would be more like squeezing tangerines than oranges, but squeeze enough of them and you'd still get a Pitcher of Real Juice.

First stop: the local gym, the House of Pain where the Peterborough juniors lift and where buff young puck bunnies and not a few cougars window shop. Ten-dollar guest pass with
receipt for wishful expense filing. I threw a couple of plates on a bar at the bench and asked a likely offensive tackle from the local high school team to spot for me. The kid was three bills, soft as a pillow, painfully red-headed, and speckled with freckles. Beef struck me as the type of jock who'd envy the local heroes and resent their trespassing on these two thousand square feet of rubber mats, what he would have considered holy ground and his rightful domain. And, of course, they would get the girls and Beef would be left behind. I tossed 225 like a salad—I didn't remotely need the spot. I just wanted to make sure that I had his attention and respect.

“Pretty good,” he said.

“You gotta be doing that with three plates,” I said with a straight face.

“Oh yeah, for sets,” he lied.

After the second set I mentioned that I was in town for the funeral and that I used to be Red Hanratty's accountant. With a teenager there'd be no follow-up to that line—he wasn't going to ask me for a business card. I told Beef that Hanratty used to send his stuff to our offices in Toronto but felt that he needed a CA closer to home. I kept going until I made sure he was fully tuning me out and would talk just to hear me shut up. A teenager is too easy to flim-flam this way. Pretty soon he was singing.

“They come in all the time … they're really loud. Shitheads. And they've got nothing. They're not that strong and they're not serious about it …”

The resentment flowed, as I'd fully expected. Message to self: Factor in Beef's animus with any intel he volunteered.

“… They walk around school like they own it …”

Perfect fit. Beef knew the whole story.

“They make trouble at all? I hear those kids get into all kinds of trouble.”

“There's always something going on. I know Christie, the guy who was captain last year, was banging the mother of the family he was staying with.”

Poor Beef. So young. I didn't have the heart to tell him that every team has at least one or that the truly ambitious managed the mother-daughter exactor.

“That's disgusting …”

Better to be sympathetic than didactic.

“… Bet the girls fall over the stars and everything for that … what's his name, the really good kid, shit, what's his name?”

“You mean Mays. He's in my history class …”

Bingo.

“… No, he's a good guy. He was always in here but I haven't seen him the last couple of days. He's real serious about things. He isn't bulky or anything but he's strong. If he was lifting or not, he'd be on the stationary bike, just sweatin' buckets …”

Beef went on to offer a testimonial that reinforced the stuff I'd read in the media. Billy Mays Jr. was an Eagle Scout who provided an example to the rabble. No problem with girls. No problem with kids at school. He got along with everybody. I started to get the idea that Beef might be a little less forthcoming about his classmate's foibles, so when I moved over to the incline bench, I tried tapping him about other kids on the Peterborough roster. He was only too willing to dish the dirt on them. First stop: no worse than a rave.

Next stop: Tim Hortons beside the arena. I could have sprung for a decent meal on the company, but I'd save that and the gift certificate for the Falling Water Café until Sandy arrived. Besides, the guys who work at the arena wouldn't know how to read the menu at any place offering near-haute cuisine. I figured they'd only have time to duck into Tim's for a coffee and a doughnut after doing a flood for the girls' figure-skating practice.

I'd prepared myself to be made by the Zamboni driver and a member of his pit crew, a guy who wore his maintenance all-browns like a team sweater—after all, I'd played in the old-timers game at the rink less than forty-eight hours before.

“Excuse me, but weren't you at the visitation today?” I asked. “Yeah, we were,” the Guy Who Turns Right for a Living said. “You a friend of the family?”

Not a clue that I was in the game or ever had been. I was wounded only slightly by the idea that my celebrity was even more fleeting than I'd imagined.

“I had a brother who was drafted by Peterborough but didn't
end up playing here,” I said. “He didn't want to go away to play, and he was a low, low draft choice anyway.”

“Too bad,” the Broom Pusher said. “There's nothing in hockey like playing for Red Hanratty, God rest his soul.”

“Yeah, God rest his soul,” Lord Flood said.

I figured three-part harmony wasn't going to get me anywhere, so I tried to strike a different note.

“What's gonna happen now with these kids and the team?”

“They were a playoff team with Mays, but I suspect he's done for the year,” Mr. Maintenance said. “I mean, they're gonna have games cancelled, but I guess Mays's shoulder's a little worse than they originally thought.”

Bruised and sprained shoulder and out for the season with more than six weeks left? Red flag.

The Zamboni driver took this as a challenge to impress with the dirt he gleaned from being on the deep inside. “I guess the kid wants to come back and he could get clearance to play, but his agent is worried about him getting injured again.”

Okay, a lighter shade of red for that flag.

“I feel sorry for the kid,” the driver said. “He comes out to every practice with that injury, even though Red would have let him get away for a while and concentrate on school. He was getting on the bike and holding on with one hand until Red chased him off. Just tries to do everything right. He helps out the headcase that's his roommate like he's a little lost brother or somethin'. God knows why. I'm surprised Red didn't run that kid or at least put Mays with a more regular kid. Why?”

“We'll probably never know,” Arena Sweeper said.

“Well, Busher doesn't know … wouldn't know,” said Slow Oval Fellow. “What's he gonna do now? He had to ask Red the combination for his lock every day.”

At that point the arena workers were joined by the security guard who was working the parking lot the night the Ol' Redhead and Bones crushed their last beer cans. The guard wore thick glasses, not the type for the average near- or far-sighted Joe, but the ones with convex lenses that the near-blind need to make their way through the haze. The boys yelled his name and he turned his head, not to look at them but to hear better and figure out the general direction of their seats. He paid for a bowl of soup at the counter with what he thought was a twenty but was in fact a five-dollar bill. First he couldn't find the spoons on the counter. After he was handed a plastic one by the young girl who made his change, he sat down with us and couldn't find it on his tray. It was a white spoon sitting on a white napkin.

“How did it go?” the Zamboni driver asked.

I wasn't sure what “it” was. Then it was clear.

“They asked me a lot of questions. I told them what I knew.”

“Which was nothing,” Mr. Maintenance said.

“No, no, I told them that nobody came in the lot from outside.

The only people who were in that lot had to come from the arena. Nobody got by me. It's pretty closed off, right.”

“Someone could get by you if you were left to guard an open manhole,” the driver said.

“Naw, couldn't have. I told them that all the cars left the lot by 11:30 except for a white Caliber, which left at 11:45, and Red's old Cadillac, which didn't leave at all. I couldn't leave until Red's car was gone. I was there right up to when the police got there. Muzz, the night maintenance guy, went on break for a smoke and when he went out the back door he saw the bodies.”

“If you don't mind me asking …”

I was going to double back and, actually, it wouldn't have mattered to me if he did mind me asking.

“… how do you know it was a white Caliber?”

“In the first period I went around the lot, counted the cars, checked to make sure that they had their tickets on the dashboard. I counted the cars on the way out after the game. There were two left and then the Caliber went belting out of there. It was the only white car parked there that night.”

The boys didn't look up from their Timbits and the guard spilled soup on his shirt.

“They asked you if you got the licence plate number? Did you have it copied down on a slip when it came in?”

“He'd have been lucky to see a car, never mind the number. He couldn't have read the plate if you held it six inches from his nose.”

“Yeah, I just ask for passes. I don't ask for the licence plates 'cause I check the lot after. I don't want anybody to get towed unless they're by a fire exit or something.”

This repartee quickly lost its appeal. I bade farewell. In search of a Box of Jelly-Filled Deep Background, I came away with crumbs.