a hockey team? He must’ve counted wrong, I thought, or my recollections were faulty. I closed my eyes and pictured him sitting across the dinner table while Mom cleared the dishes. I could clearly see him speak that phrase: “four fantastic years.” His past was easy enough to check. One of the boxes beneath the makeshift table at my feet contained the yearbooks and programs Coach had given me. I made a mental note to look through them later. Now I had to get to the Shoot-Out.
nine
The puck zipped past my left shoulder and grazed the left goalpost before smacking the mesh at the back of the net.
“Can’t see it, can’t stop it,” Teddy Boynton said as he sped past me. He spun on his skates and taunted me as he backed away: “But you’re expert at missing pucks, aren’t you, Carpie?” I’d heard that one a few times before.
The Starvation Lake Shoot-Out was nearly over. I’d faced more than a hundred wrist shots, snap shots, slap shots, backhanders, and dekes in a series of one-on-one showdowns. I’d stopped most of them. Thirty shooters had been eliminated. Now it came down, as it did most years, to Soupy Campbell versus Teddy Boynton. Each had three final shots. I’d stopped both of their first efforts. Teddy had just scored on his second, a slapper that caught me leaning to my right. I plucked my water bottle off the top of the net, flipped my mask up, and skated away from the net for a breather.
All afternoon, I’d been struggling not to think about Coach’s unsettling reappearance in my life. It was damned hard to do while standing in Blackburn Arena. When he’d arrived in Starvation Lake, the rink was just a sheet of ice protected by two thin steel walls and a roof that sagged under the weight of snowstorms. With the help of Francis Dufresne, Coach had gotten the town to replace the roof and close in the ends of the rink. He finagled new dressing rooms, showers, a scoreboard, bleachers. Each time he went before the town council, he brought along three or four River Rats. We stood at his side in our satin jackets as he made his pitches, our smiles polite, our hair combed neatly, our hands folded behind our backs, just as he had instructed.
“Today, Trap!” It was Soupy shouting from center ice, where he stood flipping a puck back and forth on his stick.
“Relax,” I said, as much to myself as to Soupy. I leaned my head back and doused my face with water. Above me in the steel rafters I glimpsed the faded blue-and-gold banners marking the Rats’ progress in the state playoffs, 1977 to 1981: regional finalist, regional finalist, state quarterfinalist, semifinalist, runner-up. I leveled my gaze and looked past Soupy to a banner that had hung at that end of the rink for as long as I could remember. It read: “To win the game is great, to play the game is greater, to love the game is the greatest.” I skated slowly back to my net, set the bottle down, and pulled my mask down over my face. Slapping the blade of my goalie stick once against each goalpost, I lowered myself into my semicrouch and yelled, “Bring it on.”
Soupy was what hockey players admiringly call a “dangler,” with hands that cradled the puck as if it were no heavier than a tennis ball. He could dangle it between his skates, behind his back, one-handed, backhanded, skating backward, on one knee. All the while the puck stuck to his stick like a nickname. He had a thousand moves that he’d practiced for hours in his basement or late at night on a patch of ice behind his garage. He liked to practice in the darkness, the darker the better, so he was forced to rely not on his eyes, but on simply feeling the puck on his stick blade with his amazingly sure hands. That way he’d never have to look down, he could always be scanning the ice for an opening or an open man, and he’d always be ready when an opposing defenseman was lining him up for a hit.
He’d worked on one particular move for most of a season. He’d gotten the idea when we were playing in a tournament in Detroit. One night in our hotel room, we picked up a Canadian TV station broadcasting indoor lacrosse. The players ran around on a shiny concrete floor resembling a hockey rink, flinging a ball from thin sticks fitted with webbed leather baskets. “Man,” Soupy said, “if you could cradle the puck like that, how cool would that be?”
After practices, while the rest of us undressed, he’d take a bucket of pucks and position himself behind a net. With a puck at his feet, he’d try in one motion to scoop it up, raise it shoulder high, step out to the side of the net, and then sling the puck, lacrosse style, into the upper corner of the goal. He quickly mastered the scooping part but had trouble keeping the puck on his stick as he sidestepped out from behind the goal. Some nights the rest of us would come out of the showers and stand on the bench teasing him. But he kept at it. Coach watched, too, but he didn’t say anything, at least not at first.
One afternoon I came out of the dressing room late and was nearly out the door to the parking lot when I heard the whang of something hitting a goalpost. I knew Soupy was the only one on the ice, so I dropped my gear and walked back to see. He was standing behind a net with his back to me. There were four or five pucks at his feet, and a couple in the face-off circle to the right of the goal. Six or seven others lay in the net. I watched silently as he snatched up a puck, took two quick steps to his left, and whipped his stick around until it clanged on the goalpost and the puck flew into the high corner of the net. “Holy shit,” I said. Soupy turned and grinned.
Coach spoke to Soupy about it for the first time before our next practice. Stickhandling drills were fine, Coach said, but he didn’t want to see any lacrosse shots during games. He called it “a fancy-ass fag move.”
Coach never used profanity around us, and he forbade us from using it. “Fag” and “faggot” were in a different category. Coach used them all the time to define for us what hockey was and wasn’t. Elbowing an opponent in the chin was hockey; kicking his skates out was a fag move. Scorers who could take a hit were hockey players; scorers who shied from the rough stuff were fags.
Soupy never tried the lacrosse shot again in practice. But one night he swore me to secrecy and told me he’d kept practicing it behind his garage.
“For what?” I said.
He shrugged. “Coach is a dickhead.”
“No, he’s not. Are you saving it up for something?”
He smiled to himself. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Maybe my ass.”
“Maybe I’m just a fag.”
Now Soupy shoved the puck out in front of him and took three long strides toward me. I eased out from the net to cut off the angle. He gathered up the puck and, as he swerved left, I followed.
On most goalies, Soupy liked to fake a shot that would make them drop to the ice, then he’d either snap the puck over one of their shoulders or cut hard, flip the puck to his backhand, and skate around them in a burst to the open side of the net. But as a stand-up goalie, I wasn’t as likely to drop. Soupy usually tried to beat me with a low shot to one of the corners, or he’d drive hard right at me and try to juke me to one side and slip the puck past me on the other.
He raised his stick high behind his left ear. I braced myself for the explosion of wood and rubber while staying on my toes in case this was just the first part of whatever Soupy had planned, the part meant to fool me. But he wasn’t trying to trick me. His stick whipped down and I heard the blade drive through the puck and saw it jump off the stick right at me. Not to my left or my right or even at my feet, where I might have left an opening, but right at me, chest high, the easiest of shots to stop. It hit me just above the sternum and I smothered it there with my catching glove.
Something was wrong. Soupy never hit goalies square in the chest.
I watched him as he snagged another puck and headed to center ice to take his final shot before Boynton took his. Teddy was laughing and yelling, “One more and it’s oh for three and a hundred smackers for me, baby. Looks like you’ll be emptying out your pop machine.”
They had once been friends, in our early years with the Rats. On the ice, they made a splendid pair. Soupy was the swift defenseman who set up plays with tape-to-tape passes and scored dramatic goals on end-to-end rushes. Teddy was the rough-and-tumble forward who mucked for pucks in the corners and scored his own scrappy goals on rebounds and deflections and scrums in front of the net. Teddy loved turning Soupy’s perfect passes into goals; Soupy loved how Teddy peeled opponents off the puck. They were pals off the ice, too, chasing the Sandy Cove girls and swiping beer from unlocked garages.
