The Book of Stanley Page 5

  On his first shift, he made a decent play in his own end, stealing the puck from a Kelowna forward and sending it up the ice onto some new kid’s stick in front of the red line. The new centre didn’t know what to do with the puck when he got it, of course, and in most circumstances that would have been frustrating for Kal. But not tonight. He understood the kid’s frustration afterward, sitting on the bench in a fume. Instead of ignoring the kid, Kal crashed his glove down on the boy’s shoulder pad and said, “Next time.”

  The kid looked up and said, “Real sweet pass.”

  Kal’s ex-wife Candace and their daughter Layla were in the stands, just above an advertisement on the boards for Home Depot. He waved but they weren’t looking. Suddenly, a memory of the night of Layla’s birth hit him. February 4, 2001. They were living in an apartment in Windsor when Candace’s labour pains kicked in. According to the book they had purchased about pregnancies, walking helped ease the baby down into the birth canal and often took the mother’s mind off the contractions. Between three and four in the morning, with a vicious wind howling off the Detroit River, they had shuffled up and down their dark block. Kal had been freezing but Candace couldn’t get cool enough. She had made him promise, between contractions, with her teeth clenched, that he would never leave her.

  On Kal’s next shift he glanced up at Candace and Layla after shooting the puck past the Kelowna blue line. At that moment, someone plowed into him and he went down. Ordinarily, Kal would stand up, throw off his gloves, and see what might happen. Instead, he took his position on the Kelowna side of the blue line while the man who hit him, a notorious meathead named Luciak, called him a pussy. Some men in the stands, sporting goatees and baseball caps, booed.

  You must change your life.

  When the puck was on the opposite boards, Kal took his eyes off it just long enough to glance up at Candace and Layla again. This time they were looking. Layla waved and a shiver of love and pride zipped up his spine. Instead of waving at his daughter, Kal nodded and turned his attention to the game just in time to see the puck slide past. A Kelowna forward was already three strides ahead of him, on a breakaway. He chased the forward, watched him score, and skated back to the bench in silence.

  “That was real pretty, Mack.” Dale Loont walked over and bent down, spoke quietly into the top of Kal’s helmet. “If you don’t want to play, walk. Just walk away.”

  TEN

  After the game, Kal was forced to wait until his teammates had left Prospera Place for the hotel bar. Dale Loont wanted to have a frank discussion about his performance on this road swing, but Kal was not interested in rebuttals. As Dale Loont spoke, Kal sat in his jeans and T-shirt, repeating the lines of Rilke to himself.

  “Do we understand each other?” said Dale Loont, at the end of their frank discussion.

  “Absolutely,” said Kal.

  Candace and Layla waited in the lobby of Prospera Place, near the bulletin board. When she spotted Kal, Layla ran to him. His daughter’s hair, as he hugged and kissed her, smelled of orange peel. She wore a black skirt and pink tights with black boots and an authentic-looking white fur jacket.

  A rich girl.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t win, Daddy.”

  “We didn’t deserve to win.”

  “You know I figure skate now?”

  Kal took Layla’s hand and they walked to the bulletin board where Candace stood, with that knowing look about her. In their last seven or eight phone conversations, Layla had mentioned the figure skating thing. “I didn’t know that. I think it’s plain terrific and I’m real proud.”

  Since Candace and Layla had moved away, Kal had come to understand that he was slowly becoming another one of his daughter’s relatives, another old man to charm. For now he was Daddy, but he knew that Layla referred to Elias Shymanski the same way. In time, Kal would only lose more and more of his daughter, particle by particle, until they became shy and strange around each other. Like all spurned fathers, he occasionally considered sneaking into Layla’s bedroom one night and spiriting her away to Guatemala City. But this was selfish thinking. Kal had nothing and, therefore, nothing to share. He wished, briefly, that he could drop to his knees and tell Layla about the lines of Rilke, and that she would understand and sympathize.

  It hurt Kal to see that Candace was obviously happy, more comfortable, and more hopeful without him. It hurt to remind himself that she was a noble beauty. Her fur jacket was most definitely authentic, as were the designer jeans and high-heeled boots.

  “Good game.”

  “Oh, it was not.”

  “Don’t mess with Kelowna.”

  Kal shook his head. “Never again.”

  Together they walked out of the arena and into the parking lot. It was a warm late-spring evening, with the scent of lilac in the breeze. Music played from one of only four trucks that remained on the lot, a pickup with a few men gathered around the open tailgate.

  “Can Daddy come over?”

  “I already told you, Layla. No.”

  Kal smiled. Elias Shymanski, the Ford-Mercury dealer who had stolen Candace from him two years previous, was under the impression that Kal was an explosively violent and vindictive man, keen to shiv him with an edged weapon. This was not so distant from the truth. A cordial dinner at a newish hotel restaurant was not in their future. “I’d behave myself.”

  Candace turned to Kal and faked a cough. A warning. If he said anything further, she would restrict phone calls and visits to punish him.

  The truck with the open tailgate was seven parking spots from Candace’s Expedition. There was a red cooler on the tailgate, and an aggressive hybrid of rock and rap music thumped and sawed from the cab. The young men spotted Kal’s hoodie, with the Saskatoon Soldiers logo on it, commented loudly, cackled, and walked over with their beers in hand.

  This was rare. Not that grown men would openly harass each other, but that he was alone. Players were encouraged to enter and leave arenas en masse, to prevent broken noses and bad publicity. In high school, or even a day ago, Kal would not have allowed the drunk men to approach un-challenged. It was always best to pummel the leader quickly and savagely to frighten the others. But the way Kal saw it, he had to change, and here was an opportunity.

  “The pride of Saskatchewan,” said the smallest of the three men, who had large ears and a tiny face that made Kal think of a gerbil. The gerbil in a jean jacket stopped several feet in front of Kal. “What’re you lookin’ at? You got a problem?” He tossed his full can of beer away and it landed on the pavement with a thud.

  Candace hurried to open the back door of the Expedition and lift Layla inside. It only took a minute to buckle her into the booster seat. “No,” said Kal, “stay. I want to talk to you.”

  “I don’t want Layla to see this.”

  “There’ll be nothing to see.” Kal turned to the men. “Thanks for your interest, fellas, but no, actually, I don’t have a problem. As for what I was looking at, I was just admiring the pickup truck and the heavy metal hip-hop thing you got going there. What’s the name of the band?”

  The men, who appeared to be about Kal’s age, turned to one another. All three had goatees.

  “And I want to thank you so much for coming out, for supporting minor league pro hockey. I know I’ll be going back to Saskatoon with my tail between my legs. Between my legs, fellas.”

  The gerbil bent down to tie his shoe. Then, in a flash, he stood up and tossed a handful of dirt and tiny pebbles in Kal’s face.

  Kal heard Candace say, behind him, “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

  The dust got in his eyes and the men were on him. Kal got low and grabbed a couple of legs, flipped one of the men on his back. But the other two continued to kick and punch, landing blows about Kal’s upper back, shoulders, arms, and ears. It ended when Candace stepped forward and bear-sprayed the attackers. They held their eyes and stomped and cussed so loudly that Kal was sure Layla would hear them through the doors of the SUV.

  �
��Fuck, I’m dying. I’m dying,” said the gerbil.

  “Call an ambulance!” said another.

  While Kal wiped himself off and allowed his ex-wife, her breath smelling of coffee and cinnamon, to examine cuts on his forehead and in his mouth, the drunks writhed on the pavement and wailed about blindness and retribution.

  “Goddamn you.” Candace smirked with affection and nostalgia and, Kal figured, a vast sense of relief that they were no longer married.

  Kal opened the back door of the Expedition to discover his daughter crying. Through her sobs, she asked why the men had attacked him. Since there wasn’t a satisfying answer to that question, Kal unhooked Layla from the seat, lifted her out, rocked her in his arms, and told her how big she was getting. Twice he had to spit the blood out of his mouth with as much daintiness as he could muster.

  “They hurt you!”

  “No, Layla. Daddy isn’t hurt. Those men couldn’t hurt Daddy.”

  Candace opened the driver’s-side door and tossed the bear spray inside. “That isn’t happening again.”

  “I know, sweetheart. That dirty shoe-tying trick.”

  “Not your sweetheart any more, Kal.”

  He whispered into his daughter’s ear. “Just let Dad get a few things in order, change his life, and then he’ll come get you and Mom and we’ll all live somewhere nice and pretty together. With palm trees, probably. Right?”

  “Yeah,” Layla said, into his blood-splattered hoodie.

  “Time to go,” said Candace.

  “Not without Daddy!”

  “You got playschool tomorrow. You need a bath.”

  “No!”

  Candace yanked Kal away from the vehicle, buckled Layla in, and closed the door. The child screamed again.

  Candace sighed. “Thank you. Really. For a swell evening.”

  “Something happened to me tonight. I see things differently. And I want you and Layla to be a part of it.”

  “You just got in a fistfight, Kal.”

  “I’m changing my life.”

  “To what? You don’t know how to do anything else.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I do, really, it’s how. Anyway, it’s a feeling more than a plan.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Candace, I need you to help me change. And I can help you. We don’t want Layla growing up spoiled and fancy.”

  “You saying I’m doing a bad job?”

  “I’m saying we could be happy together, and Layla could be happy with us. I feel a big transformation coming on. See, there was this poem, this call to me.”

  “A poem. You, and a poem.”

  “I’m a new man.”

  “From the handbook of ex-husband clichés.”

  “No. Really.”

  “Kal, I think you should change. It’d be good for you. But you know it has nothing to do with me any more and very little to do with Layla, right?”

  Candace hugged him quickly, turned away, and stepped up into the driver’s seat, slamming the door with a thwock. Kal waved as she roared away, but the rear windows were too tinted to see if Layla waved back.

  The men were quieter now, in the nighttime parking lot. A part of Kal wanted to lay the boots, but another, more powerful part of him simply pitied the men before him, on their hands and knees, spitting and moaning. Kal bent over the gerbil.

  “That was real sick, what you did to me there. In front of my daughter.”

  “Blow me.”

  “What sort of men are you? You’re way too old for this sort of behaviour. Maybe you even have kids of your own.”

  Kal ambled down the sidewalk toward his hotel. The gerbil cussed again and called out, “Sorry, man.”

  ELEVEN

  The following night, in Saskatoon, Kal wondered about Hell. He was back in his apartment on Tenth Street at Dufferin, playing Halo 2, destroying the Covenant one by one in order to save mankind. Gordon Yang was over, and they were drinking beer and eating Old Dutch salt-and-vinegar.

  “There’s no Hell,” said Gordon, as he wasted a small pack of aliens near what appeared to be a pile of burning tires. “It was invented to stop people from being bad.”

  Kal nodded, but he wasn’t sure he agreed with Gordon. Usually, in these sorts of conversations, he would nod and hope it would be over soon so they could talk about hockey or maybe video games or women. Tonight he actually considered Hell, and decided he believed in it. Not the exotic one he’d learned about at Sacred Heart School, but a different sort of place, smelling of white toast and shoulder pads. Hell was playing hockey all your life, skating for seven years on the verge of the show, only to wake up one morning and realize you were slow, drunk, angry, and uneducated. To have a wife who divorced you because she thinks you have no future and a daughter who’s forgetting you more and more every day.

  “You barely touched your beer.”

  Not only was Kal suddenly bored with beer, he was bored with Halo 2. It was as though he had eaten a bad hot dog, only the rot was in his head instead of his stomach. In twenty years of video games, from the old Pong console hooked up to the black-and-white TV in his bedroom to the new Xbox, Kal had never been bored. Yet here he was, in his dark and smelly apartment off Broadway, stricken by the meaninglessness of what was possibly the greatest video game ever created.

  Earlier that evening, before Gordon Yang showed up with the beer and potato chips, Kal had staved off panic by fetching the small canvas bag of pornography from his bedroom closet. Even his favourite flick, Indiana Joan and the Black Hole of Mammoo, couldn’t cheer him up. It struck him, for the first time, that the girls of Indiana Joan and the Black Hole of Mammoo couldn’t possibly be having any real fun. Kal removed the disk from his DVD player, tossed it into his canvas bag of pornography, and dropped it all into the garbage chute. After listening to an Otis Redding disc, an emergency tactic, he began to weep. Then he dialed Candace’s number in Kelowna.

  Elias Shymanski answered in that phony high-class voice of his, and Kal paused. “Hello?” the man said again, as though he were auditioning for the role of James Bond. Since Kal had not remembered to block his number before dialing, the Ford-Mercury dealer who was having sex with the love of his life already knew who was on the phone. There was no point trying to prank the man. There was no point asking for Candace, as she would not speak to him. It was past Layla’s bedtime. “You must change your life,” said Kal.

  “What?” said Elias Shymanski, and Kal ended the call.

  Gordon Yang sensed Kal’s lack of interest in Halo 2 and dropped his controller on the chipped coffee table before them. “Let’s go to Vangelis, shoot some pool.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Let’s smoke a bowl.”

  “I don’t want to do that either, Gordon.”

  “What the fuck? So you got jumped in Kelowna, get over it.”

  “It’s not them.” Kal bit his top lip and turned his video game avatar in circles until the Covenant swarmed and destroyed him. “I’ve decided to change my life, that’s all, and once you decide a thing like that you can’t take it back. It’s a venom.”

  Gordon Yang turned from the television. For a moment or two longer than usual, he stared at Kal. He chewed at his thumbnail quizzically. Then he winked. “Change your life tomorrow, man. Tonight, we get retarded.”

  With some rhetorical flourishes, Gordon convinced Kal that only a night at the strippers would cheer him up. So they phoned a taxi.

  The driver, whose name was Abdelahi according to his tag, did not speak. He listened to soft drum music. Gordon made lewd invitations to groups of university girls out his open window. When the car arrived at Showgirls, Gordon paid the fare and slid out. As Kal followed him, Abdelahi turned and said, deeply and slowly, “Prepare yourself.”

  “What?”

  Abdelahi seemed confused. In a different voice, an accented voice, he said, “I said nothing, sir.”

  “Prepare myself for what?”

  After a pause, Abdelahi smiled.
His teeth were wonderfully white. “I do not understand, sir. Enjoy!”

  For an hour, Kal and Gordon sat at a table drinking very expensive Coke. Stringent liquor-control laws meant Showgirls could serve beer only in the adjacent bar, so most of the men shuffled in and out of the strip club. Gordon gave a standing ovation to Lana the Bulgarian Bombshell, the most beautiful woman ever seen in Plovdiv. “I want to go home now,” said Kal.

  “Absolutely not. I heard the next chick’s only got one leg.”

  “Gord, I can’t. Something weird’s happening to me and I can’t concentrate properly on strippers.”

  “Okay, wait. I got just the thing to cheer you up.” Gordon jogged over to the manager.

  It was clear what was happening here. Five minutes later, Kal was alone in what appeared to be a former accountant’s office. The fluorescent lights had been removed but there were two stand-up lamps, fitted with orange bulbs, one on either side of a red, faux-Persian rug. On the wall, framed photographs of nude and almost-nude women leaning artfully over motorcycles and Trans-Ams. The room smelled of cigarettes and perfume and cleaning solution. The small sign on the wall instructed Kal, in both of Canada’s official languages, to sit and stay in the padded lounge chair. If he stood up at any time during the performance, he would be forcibly removed and fined. Kal sat, inspected his fingernails and the cigarette burns in the chair arm, and wished, briefly, that he would fall asleep and not wake up for several years.

  With a quick knock, a tall Indian-seeming woman entered. Kal recognized her earlier, from the Kama Sutra and 1001 Arabian Nights performances.

  “Kal, I presume?” she said.

  “Yep. Hey, nice job earlier.”

  The woman wore tight black yoga sweatpants and a thin satin shirt. “Should we get started? Clock’s ticking.”

  “We might as well.”

  The woman unbuttoned her shirt. “You’re a professional hockey player?”

  “I am.”

  “The NHL?”

  “The AHL.”

  “You like it?”

  Kal answered the way he always answered. “It’s what I wanted ever since I was a kid.”