TEN
Pucks boomed off of the rink boards as I pushed through the double-door entrance to the Starvation Lake Arena. It felt reassuring. There would be no talk of burglaries or murder there.
Through the lobby windows I saw Tex on the ice, bearing down on the goalie, Dougie Baker. Tex faked to his right, then dragged the puck the other way with the toe of his stick. Dougie slid with him. The puck hit a rut in the ice and rolled up on an edge. Tex tried to snap it between Dougie’s legs but got only half of the tumbling puck. It flip-flopped up and Dougie snatched it with his catching glove.
“Fucking bullshit,” Tex yelled. He turned hard, spun behind the net, wound up with his stick, and, as he came around the other side of the net, swung the shaft across the goalpost with an echoing crack. The broken-off blade went flying. Tex skated to the bench.
We really did have to talk with him.
Refrigerant stung my nostrils as I hustled across the black rubber-mat floors past the benches beneath the big gold-and-blue Home and Visitors signs. I had relished that whiff of chill since I was a boy and the town rink, about the same age as me, hadn’t yet been closed in on the ends.
My dad took me to my first River Rats game when I was five. By the second period, I had taken my hot chocolate and climbed down from the bleachers to stand along the glass behind the Rats’ goalie, a short kid with quick hands named Ronayne. I was fascinated by all the straps and buckles and laces that attached his leather and plastic armor to his arms and chest and legs and how it made him seem so much bigger than when I had seen him walking along Main Street.
I liked how he tossed his head around between face-offs, twisting his neck this way and that, his face inscrutable behind his molded white mask, the sweaty ends of his stringy hair flopping on the back of his jersey. It wasn’t long before I was strapping on the goalie pads and squatting, alone, between the goalposts.
Now I laced my goalie skates on in dressing room 3. I heard Coach Poppy blow two blasts on his whistle. The skate was nearly over. I shoved on hockey gloves, grabbed a stick, and clomped out to the ice.
The seventeen young River Rats were kneeling around Poppy at center ice in their blue-and-gold helmets, gloves, and sweats. High above their heads hung a faded banner declaring the Rats the runners-up in the 1981 Michigan state championship. My team. A team I wished had been forgotten, but was not.
“On your feet, buckets off,” Poppy said. I skated up and stood facing him from the other side of the players’ circle. The Rats doffed their helmets, hair stuck by sweat to their necks and foreheads. “Let’s have a moment of silence for Coach Carpenter. He lost a good friend who was a good friend to the River Rats.”
Tex and the other boys lowered their eyes. I saw stickers on the sides of their helmets bearing the initials PMB. I wondered if any had known Mrs. B. I wondered what they would have thought if they knew that, the morning after our loss in that state final so long ago, she’d come to our house with a plate of peanut butter cookies she must have gotten out of bed at dawn to make. I petulantly refused to eat. Later I felt sad that she had been so kind and I had turned her away. I walked next door and, while Darlene watched, I apologized to Mrs. B. She laughed and told me she was glad I hadn’t eaten those cookies because it wasn’t her best batch and she’d given one to the dog and thrown the rest away.
The team assembled around me now was poised to wipe out the memories of the team that had come so close but fallen short. These Rats were as quick and hungry as their namesakes and, to the delight of the fans, as nasty, too, certainly tougher and scrappier than any of the teams that had preceded them. For years, the mighty squads from Detroit-Little Caesars and Slasor Heating, Byrd Electric and Paddock Pools-had intimidated the Rats with their jutting elbows and chopping sticks. But these Rats weren’t afraid to meet a slash with a slash, a cross- check with a cross-check.
Best of all, it was Tex, their leading scorer, their most skilled player, who inspired their toughness, though not only with his heavy slap shot or his fast feet or his knack for finding the back of the opponents’ net with the puck. Unlike many a star player, Tex refused to let his teammates fight his battles.
Early that season, he’d scored two goals and an assist and the Rats were finishing a 5–2 win over Detroit’s Byrd Electric when a double-wide defenseman named Cranch, nicknamed “Crunch,” gave Tex a whack to the back of a knee. Tex collapsed and slid into the side of his own net. The crowd howled for a penalty, but no ref had seen. Cranch skated away with a smirk between his chapped-red cheeks. Tex struggled to a knee, then to both feet, and started wobbling down the ice after Cranch. “No, Tex,” Poppy screamed from the bench, and I joined him, yelling, “Come to the bench-now!”
Cranch was curling out of a corner with the puck, his head down, when Tex hit him. Tex’s hard plastic right shoulder pad drove into Cranch’s chin and snapped his head back so hard that his helmet flew off and cracked against the boards. Then Tex grabbed him by the collar of his jersey and flung him to the ice and pummeled his face with punch after punch, opening cuts that would require twenty-four stitches. Cranch was unconscious by the time the two refs and Poppy tore Tex off. Poppy appealed the three-game suspension ordered by the league, to no avail.
After that, the Rats were never the same, never again the talented but tame youngsters from up north who went into games against the downstate teams hoping merely to stay close and get a bounce or a ref’s call that would help them win late. The Rats began to play in the spirit of the logo they wore on their jerseys: a snarling, snaggle-toothed rodent wielding a hockey stick like a pitchfork.
The fans loved it, our players reveled in it, Poppy and I worried about it. Both of us knew there’s a thin line in hockey between playing tough and playing stupid. If the Rats got a reputation, deserved or not, as dirty players, opposing coaches would whisper to the refs, who would then look for the first chance to whistle us for a hook or an elbow. We didn’t have the depth on our bench or the kind of stand-on-his-head goalie to survive too many penalties.
Because Tex was our best player, we were in even deeper trouble when he went to the penalty box. Yet three times that season, he had taken major penalties of five minutes each because he’d let his temper get the best of him. With Tex sitting uselessly in the box and the Rats forced to play short-handed for long stretches, we had lost all three games.
Mic-Mac, the team we’d face in the state quarterfinal that night, was well aware of Tex’s weakness. They would keep a shadow on him, try to deny him the puck, shove a butt end in his ribs, or give him a face wash with a glove whenever the refs were looking elsewhere, hoping to get him riled, get him to take a penalty, at least get him thinking about something other than taking the puck to the Mic-Mac net.
“OK, gentlemen,” Poppy said. He wore a Rats sweat suit. His head, a tousle of thinning gray, was bare. “What’s the most important thing?”
“The puck,” the Rats answered in unison.
“That’s right-the puck. Because the best defense…”
“Is to have the puck on your stick.”
“If we have the puck, we cannot lose, am I right?”
“Yes sir, Coach.”
“And we move the puck to the open man because…”
“The puck has no lungs.”
“That’s right, the puck never gets tired.” He grabbed his whistle, blew another short blast. “Tex, hang around,” he said. “Everybody else, be back here no later than six-fifteen.”
The Rats scattered. Tex slipped a glove off and held his right hand in front of his face, frowning.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
He showed me the skin between his thumb and forefinger. “Blister,” he said. “On my shooting hand.”
“From breaking your stick in half?”
“Freaking digging.”
“At the camp?”
“Yeah. Bunch of bullshit. That Breck dude is a dick.”
“Whoa there, partner,” Poppy said. “Tape it up and forget it. You’re going to have a big game tonight.”
“Yeah.”
“The Mic-Macs are going to be all over you, trying to get you to do something stupid.”
“I won’t.”
