four or five goals, you had to keep thinking you could stop them all, or just like that there’d be seven or eight behind you, and Coach would pull you and you’d have to skate off the ice while everyone on your bench and the other team’s bench and in the stands watched with scorn or pity or both.
I sat down in the recliner with my favorite piece of gear, the blocking glove I wore on my right hand, the one that held my goalie stick. I unwrapped the shiny black electrical tape wound around the thumb. With its wide rectangular shield, the glove looked like a big waffle. I had considered it my lucky waffle-or, as Soupy nicknamed it, Eggo-since the day the dogs got to it.
I was thirteen then. I’d been watching television one afternoon-the Three Stooges, I think-when I heard growling from Mom’s laundry room, where my hockey stuff was airing out. I hurried in to find our two mutts, Fats and Blinky, in a snarling tug-of-war with the waffle. “Damn dogs!” I yelled. But it was my fault. I’d forgotten to close the laundry room door. I ripped the glove away and swung it halfheartedly at the dogs. As they scampered away, their toenails clicking on the linoleum, I noticed a tatter of leather jutting from Blinky’s mouth. My heart sank. I turned the waffle over. The thumb was gone.
We had a regional playoff game that night. I couldn’t play with a bare thumb sticking out of my glove. I cornered Blinky and traded her a dog biscuit for the thumb. Mom was out shopping, so I took the waffle and the chewed-off thumb next door. Darlene was doing geography homework at her kitchen table. “You’re such an idiot, Gus,” she said, but I could tell she was glad I’d brought my problem to her. We showed the glove to her mother, who worked part-time at a shoe repair and had once mended a tear in one of my leg pads. After inspecting the glove, she cast a disapproving look at me.
“This cost your mother a fortune, Gus.”
“Yes ma’am, Mrs. B.”
“And you need it by six?” She shook her head and handed the glove and thumb back to me. “I’m sorry. It’s euchre night, Darlene’s father will be home any minute, and I have dinner to get.”
I looked helplessly at Darlene. She grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled her into the hallway off the kitchen. I heard them whispering. When they returned, Darlene was smiling. “You children,” her mother said, snatching the glove back. “It might not be fixable, you know.”
I thanked Darlene at the door. “I just hope Daddy doesn’t mind pancakes for dinner,” she said. “It’s all I know how to make.”
I wore the glove that night. Just to be safe, I wrapped black electrical tape around the fresh leather stitching on the thumb. For some reason I liked the way it looked. Our opponents were a bunch of fast kids from Grand Rapids. But I had the shiny black tape. I stopped all but one of their forty-eight shots and we won, 3–1.
In the twenty-one years since, I’d replaced every piece of my goalie gear, except for Eggo. Before every game-I never missed once-I applied fresh tape to the stitching, always the shiny black stuff, wrapping it exactly as I had that night when I was thirteen. All the tape really held was my confidence.
It made no sense, of course, but superstitions are as much a part of hockey as elbows to the nose. We had to put our pads on a certain way, tape our sticks a certain way, line up the water bottles on the bench a certain way. Stevie Reneau had to take a cold shower right before games. Wilf had to puke, and kept a bottle of ipecac in his bag to induce if his butterflies weren’t going to do it. Zilchy refused to sit next to a goalie in the dressing room, nor would he speak a word until the opening face-off.
Soupy had more superstitions than a witch doctor. He had to sit directly to my left. I had to be sitting there when he sat down; he couldn’t sit first. No one could touch his equipment while he was dressing; if someone accidentally did, Soupy had to strip down and start all over again. Just before we went out to the ice, he had to reach around my head and smack me on the right shoulder and give me a last word of encouragement. “Tonight, you’re a brick wall,” he would tell me, or, “Tonight, you’re a giant sponge, sucking in everything and spitting it back out.” In his last couple of years with the Rats, he started wearing skates four sizes too small for his feet; he insisted he couldn’t skate his fastest unless his toes were jammed in so hard that they hurt. That was especially weird, I thought, but that was Soupy. Some nights he would sit for half an hour after the game massaging feeling back into his arches and toes. Even now, in his thirties, he kept wearing skates he could barely get on.
Coach Blackburn tolerated our rituals because they made us believe in ourselves, while insisting that he himself had never fallen for such silliness. We knew otherwise. Coach had his own little secret superstition. He always-always-stepped onto the ice with his left skate first. If he had to take a little hop and skip to stagger his stride before he stepped out, he did it so that his left blade hit the ice before his right. Soupy called him on it once before a practice, thinking it funny; Coach responded by announcing that this would be a no-puck practice. We never mentioned his superstition again.
Now I leaned back in the recliner with the retaped Eggo in my lap and closed my eyes, preparing for the Shoot-Out that would begin in an hour. I tried to picture the rink, how the overhead lamps would drape shadows along the sideboards, how the skaters would veer and feint as they bore down on me, how the puck would spin and flutter and rise and dip coming off of their sticks, how I would try to slow it down in my mind, try to make it look bigger.
The phone woke me.
“The snowmobile was Blackburn’s,” Joanie said. “Without a doubt.”
“I heard.”
“Yeah. Yesterday. From me.”
“You didn’t have the cops saying it, Joanie.”
“No, no signed confession. No fingerprints on the gun.”
“What are the cops saying now?”
“Haven’t been down there yet. But there was this fat guy at the diner-his name’s in my notes-and he had this whole theory about the coaches from Detroit supposedly hiring someone to kill Blackburn and dump him in Walleye.”
The locals always had had trouble accepting that Coach himself might’ve done something stupid. “That’d be news to Leo,” I said.
“The guy who was with Blackburn that night? I went to see him too. What a weirdo.”
I let that go. “The cops talked to him.”
“How do you know?”
“Bumped into him at the rink.”
“Uh-huh.” She was getting her back up again. “Look, this is my story: Big-shot coach dies and then the town that worships him finds out it might not have happened the way they thought. Bet you AP picks it up.”
She was right, but I didn’t want her to be. Part of me wanted to know what had happened. Part wanted to leave it all alone.
“Actually, Joanie, it’s the Pilot ’s story. And I’ve still got to live here.”
“You played for Blackburn, didn’t you?”
“A long time ago.”
She paused. Then she said, “Do you know anything about where he was before he came here?”
“A little.”
As a boy I’d sat for hours poring over yearbooks and game programs he’d given me from his years playing junior and minor league hockey in Canada, and his later years coaching teenagers there. At Sunday dinners, he regaled Mom and me with tales of coaching juniors in western Canada.
“OK,” Joanie said, “so the Pilot clips say he came here in seventy after four seasons coaching the St. Albert Saints in, um, Alberta. There’s a couple of quotes from Blackburn talking about his four years there. ‘Four fantastic years,’ he keeps saying. But all I can find is he coached the Saints for three years. Doesn’t look like he was even there in sixty-six. I called a newspaper up there and got a woman who put me onto this geezer who’s like the unofficial team historian. He told me Blackburn came in sixty-seven and left in seventy.”
“So?”
“Actually, ‘skedaddled’ is what the guy said. And the team was really good that year, like, they won some big championship. But Blackburn leaves? What’s up with that? I asked the guy, and he said it was ancient history and got off the phone.”
“Maybe the guy’s memory isn’t so good.”
“Maybe. But I gotta go. Later.”
It made no sense. Why would Coach lie about something so mundane as how many years he spent coaching
