The Code (25 page)

In the panel talk during intermission, the main topic of conversation was a hit on Broadhurst, the Boston captain. Hoskins, New York's knuckle-dragger, had given him the flying elbow and rightly got five and a game. The Irregulars winced when they saw it happen. My father shook his head. Larry strained at his collar. Broadhurst was knocked out of his senses and out of the game and, from the looks of it, from the rest of the playoffs if Boston was going to survive this night.

I've been there on both ends of that elbow. It really doesn't merit analysis. It is what it is. Broadhurst was doing what he does, playing his game, getting a little too comfortable or reckless or both with the stakes so high. Hoskins was doing what he does, playing his game, right up to the line marking acceptable behaviour and occasionally, if need be, just on the dark side of that line.

It was done. There wasn't anything more you could say about the play. That didn't stop Grant Tomlin from weighing in with a dissertation that might have gone all night if it weren't for commercials and the puck drop for the third period.

“What you just saw there was a breach of The Code,” Tomlin shouted at a host sitting only an arm's length away and whose glasses doubled as a spittle shield. “Given the level of these players' ability and size, each of them could take out an opponent on every shift if they were so inclined. But they play by The Code. They know that when they step on the ice, they're
in against guys just like them who understand what this game is about and respect their teammates and the guys on the other side just as much. When you don't demonstrate that respect, when you don't play the game the way it's supposed to be played, you've violated The Code.”

He went on and with every next word took a step farther from the truth of the matter.

The Code is a nice notion, one that gets thrown around by reporters and talking heads. It sells a narrative of honour and nobility. Those guys in the seats and in front of the screens buy it. They lap it up. These are their knights, in shoulder pads and shin pads, not shining armour; with sticks, not lances; all in the service of coaches, not kings.

The Code is a notion as bogus as any campaign ever cooked up by an advertising agency and twice as effective for drumming up business. Nobody takes an oath, one hand over his heart, other hand raised, vowing to uphold the game's values and traditions. Every player on the ice signs a contract to play the game and there's not a line in it about respect.

The game is no different from life outside the boards. What players do on the ice is regulated only by conscience, and conscience is the sum of experience in large part, necessity in some part, and intelligence when any is in stock. Most will do their best. A few will do whatever it takes. Broadhurst was doing his best. Hoskins was doing whatever it was going to take, at least to the best of his limited judgment.

There's nothing understood between those on one side of the ice and those on the other. There's the knowledge that Broadhurst is going to do what he's going to do seventeen out of twenty shifts in a game. There's the possibility that in six minutes of Hoskins's ice time he might slash a player across the arm hard enough to break it or, as he did with Broadhurst, leave
a star on his back at centre ice, eyes open but the arena as dark as an unlit closet in Carlsbad Caverns. Broadhurst has his own Code, Hoskins a very different one.

“What a steaming pile of crap,” Sarge said at the end of Tomlin's soliloquy.

Sarge got it. As it is in hockey, so it is in life. Sarge had his Code. He mostly coloured by the numbers and inside the lines. Others on the force stretched and bent and ignored the rules, worse than Hoskins ever did.

I'm not like Sarge. Somewhere in an old file in our team's office you can find proof of it. Back when I was in my first season in L.A., management brought in a sports psychologist to do testing. Another steaming pile of crap, but no matter. One of the tests involved a big sheet of numbers, running up to 200. They were jumbled, out of order, and in different typefaces and colours. Some were sideways. I got dizzy just looking at them. The psychologist gave us a few minutes and told us to circle numbers in order, going up from 1, and said that a good score was in the high 40s or so. He told us that we couldn't skip a number or he'd have to void tests and register them as failures. I got to 23 but was stuck on 24. I spent about five seconds and then said to hell with it. I could see 25 and so I circled it and just kept going. I thought that if I had trouble finding 24, the guy marking the tests might too and he'd probably just want to see the highest number I got to. I ended up getting to 47. At the bottom of the page I wrote my name and wrote down “Total: 47!” just to make his job easy.

There was no 24. I had thought the test was set up to rate the ability to process information, to check the wiring of the synapses. No, it was set up to sort out those who would take instruction, follow it to a T, and stop at 23 even if that meant failure. Those were one type of player. Those were Keepers of
The Code. I was the other type, the one who'd try to get away with something to get the desired result, the one who went from 23 to 25 with a sideways glance to see if the coast was clear.

The test was a waste of time. I could have told them that I'd do that in life and on the ice.

I'm my father's son in a lot of ways but not on this count. I was like Hoskins in many ways, but smarter, sneakier. I never once did something impulsive on the ice. I picked my spots. And I had no loyalties, no friendships. I would do to an ex-teammate and a friend exactly what I'd do to a total stranger—in fact, I might have even gone at it harder with guys I had run and drunk with, just because I feared that I might go soft and sentimental. Players and general managers and coaches used to say that I was “greasy,” which I took as the highest compliment. If you look at the names engraved on the cup, you'll find a lot of greasy guys. Greasy guys are great to play with but brutal to play against. “Greasy” is whatever it takes with a lot of liberties and lubrication. I still think of myself that way. I couldn't be greasier if I jumped in a deep fryer and started doing the backstroke.

It was just after midnight and I was waiting for Sandy down in the parking lot. She had asked me for a ride home that I knew would turn out to be a drink first and breakfast the next morning. Her car was on a hoist at the garage.

Sandy's office is downtown in a building that dates back to the turn of the last century and serves as a time capsule of old Toronto, as severe as the columns at the front door, as colourful as the light grey limestone walls. City Hall designated this four-storey cottage a historic landmark and protected it from development or renovation. It's like a pebble in the shoe of the skyscrapers that surround it, but the old building is fully updated, owing to the fact that it's home to one of Toronto's most prominent law firms.

At any time of day you need a digital passkey to get around anywhere. In a larger building you could go to the front desk and count on a security guard checking your credentials, giving you a long look, and then calling upstairs to have someone come down to buzz you through the various doors. No such luck after
hours with this building. Trying to get in would be like knocking on the door of a well-maintained crypt. There's video surveillance but it's off-site. There's no old-timer doing crosswords at a front desk.

There was no waiting outside the building either. Construction crews had gutted the main arteries to repair the streetcar tracks. Four lanes were down to two. No Parking and No Stopping signs lined every street in every direction for seven blocks in the downtown. I pulled up in a lot that was $4.50 for a half-hour all day and all night. It was an automated lot and you had to buy time at a machine with your credit card. I was staying in the Rusty Beemer, so I wasn't worried about any of the parking lot crew ticketing my car or having it towed. I didn't even mind waiting. With my job I had a lot to make up for. Small courtesies were a way to inch up to a break-even. I had called Sandy just as I pulled up into the lot down the street. The call went to voicemail. Messaged her. She replied quickly.
On the last page down in a minute.
She had a patient on the phone at this late hour. Someone in some sort of crisis.

If she could have told me, she would have told me that it was a player. If she could have told me, she would have told me that it was Mays. But she couldn't, of course. Matter of privilege and confidentiality. She could ask me and, a couple of days before, she did ask me what it was like to be a player and how I responded to stress. Stress on the ice and off. How others did too. I told her that some were dumb enough not to recognize a pressure situation and were probably better for it. I told her that others were smart enough to put themselves in the best possible position to succeed. And still others had all kinds of talent but melted like butter in a pan the first time the heat was turned up higher than room temperature. Some were nonchalant. Others conscientious. Me, I was in the middle of the pack, I guess.

She asked me if I knew any who were anxious. I told her there were lots of them. I played with two goaltenders who threw up before every game. I played with a tough guy in L.A. for about fifteen games, his entire career in the league, and on game day, as the hours leading up to the puck drop passed, he'd talk faster and faster, until in the ten minutes before we went out there, he was practically speaking in tongues. One guy I played with in Montreal, a centre with the security of a five-year deal, broke down like a little lost child when someone ripped off his shipment of sticks and he had to borrow mine. I saw the same thing at a lot of other stops with guys who were confidence distilled until something or someone disrupted their precious routines.

If she could have told me, she would have told me that she was asking all this because Billy Mays had sought her out after the grief counselling. He thought he was having anxiety attacks when his injury knocked him out of the lineup. Shortness of breath. Panic. Elevated heart rate. He even blacked out one time, out of the blue, and came to in a cold sweat. If she could have, she would have told me that Mays's dad told him that all of this would pass, just a phase, the mono thing, and saying anything about this to teams that were interviewing him would be the kiss of death. Said to not even tell his agent. But she couldn't tell me any of this. Matter of privilege and confidentiality.

I turned off the ignition of the Rusty Beemer and the rumble ceased. I put my head back on the rest and closed my eyes. If I had flown, I'd say it was jet lag, but his was fatigue from all the highway miles to Peterborough and back. I could see the front door of the building through one not-quite-closed eye. I heard nothing but my deep breath. Head tipping forward and then snapping straight up. I grabbed the wheel. Small bit of panic for me. I thought I had fallen asleep at the wheel on some sort of road trip.

Just at that moment I saw Sandy at the front door of her building. I looked down at my cell. Three missed calls. All hers. All in the last fifteen minutes. Somehow I had managed to turn the sound off. Some Explaining to Do. I opened my car door, but before I could set a foot on the pavement I saw a guy wearing a black track suit jump Sandy on the empty street. Someone who wasn't a cop's son would ask where the boys in blue are when you really need them. I broke out into a dead sprint, the car door swinging behind me. He wrestled her to the ground. I screamed a profanity and the guy looked up. I was close enough to see that he had a ski mask on. He took off. That made me relatively confident that he wasn't armed or any real physical threat in a mano-a-mano. Split-second intuitive call: I gave chase rather than attend to Sandy, who by my quick reckoning seemed roughed up but not life-threatened.

I have always hated running. Not that I wasn't good enough at it in short bursts. Just that I never worked at it, could never see it as exercise I wanted to do in workouts. My quads and glutes were designed for travel on the ice, not the sidewalk. And Arthur was an issue that made me completely disinclined to run. I made an exception here. I figured I had to catch him within a block or concede the race to this perp. Thankfully, if he had been a member of the high school track team he must have thrown a javelin. He ran down what had been a lane between two buildings a block away from Yonge Street. Bad move. Construction had turned it into a cul-de-sac.

I tackled him. A knife fell out of his hand when he went to break his fall. I aimed for the bull's eye, the point north of the mouth hole and south of the eye holes. Left hand. Blood gushed. I ripped off the ski mask.

Mays the Elder. He'd left his finishing kick at the Muskoka Triathlon.

I snapped his head again with a left hand. I must have been gassed by the sprint. I didn't quite knock him out. And he had one of those no-cartilage noses that just spreads rather than breaks, a design flaw his surgeon didn‘t consider. Even though he was thus physiologically equipped to have the shit kicked out of him, fear still registered. His grill was swelling up fast enough that his attempt to plea for mercy was a thick-tongued mumble. I held him up off the pavement with a handful of hair.

I considered my options. I was breathing hard.

I looked behind me. No one had seen the last leg of the chase.

I dragged him into a doorway where we couldn't be seen from the street.

I had reached for my cell but realized it was on the passenger seat of the Rusty Beemer. There was no calling 911 even if I wanted to.

And then I realized that I didn't want to.

The first epiphany took two deep breaths.

There was always a whiff of something wrong about the Mayses. To my mind, anyway. Nice kid, problem father. Q: Was he going to kill Sandy because she knows his kid has some sort of problem emotionally, some sort of anxiety deal? No. That's the sort of thing that a team and an agent and a player would work through, especially with a kid as talented as Billy Mays Jr. It wouldn't have been motive enough. I wasn't sure what the motive was just yet, but I knew it had to be bigger stakes than that. That he was going to try to put the chill on Sandy was all the evidence I needed that he was the guy who broke into Sandy's office and trashed it. You wouldn't have been able to get a conviction on that one in any court, but my standards don't rise as high as reasonable doubt.