Indian Horse (16 page)

“Don’t sound so damn final. You can come back anytime.”

“All right.”

“All right.”

He stood beside the bus as we rolled out, one hand above his eyes to block out the sun, the other raised in a kind of salute. When the driver swung the bus out onto the main street, Virgil disappeared. I sat in my seat and stared at the floor. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. Instead, I watched the land. Watched it stream by in lakes, rivers, trees and huge upward thrusts of rock until I fell asleep.

37

Toronto was a
chimera, I thought as soon as I saw it. I’d learned about that monster in a book on mythology that I’d borrowed from the school library in Manitouwadge. The chimera was a fire-breathing beast with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail. I liked mythology. The stories reminded me of the stories my grandmother would tell around the fires late at night. Reading them made me feel good. I read a lot while I was with the Kellys. Books had been my safe place all the time I’d been in the school and they still represented security, and whatever corner I huddled in to read was a safe one to me. But Toronto was like the chimera—a gross combination of mismatched parts. It was a mad jumble of speed, noise, and people. It dried up my eyes, and I could taste soot and oil and gas all the time. There were trees, but none of the big pines or spruce or fir I was used to. There were no rocks. There was nothing wild. The one time that I stepped out late in the evening and surprised a raccoon in the trash pile we stared at each other in amazement. Him to see an Indian in that jumble of glass and steel and concrete, me to see a creature meant for hinterlands where the wind carried animal sign instead of rot and decay.

I was billeted with an old couple called the Sheehans. The Irish were a tribe too, I supposed, because it was Lanahan who’d made the arrangement. The Sheehans were hockey people. Patrick had played until a knee injury ended things when he was thirty-nine, and Elissa, his high school sweetheart, had also grown up with the game. They were Leaf fans, and their home was decorated with the memorabilia of adoration. The room they put me in had a Toronto Maple Leafs pennant on the wall, and a huge Leafs bedspread and foot mat. The hallways were lined with pictures of every player they had billeted who made it to the NHL.

They were good to me. Elissa cooked magnificent suppers, and the refrigerator was open territory at any time of day. Patrick was a voluble raconteur about all things hockey. He regaled me with stories about George Armstrong, Jim Neilson, and an up-and-coming Indian kid named Reggie Leach, who people said would set the record books afire.

“So there’s been a trail blazed for you, Saul. Native players aren’t unfamiliar in the NHL.”

We were just unfamiliar to the world
around
the NHL, I guess. When I showed up for rookie camp I was the only brown face in the room. Once the scrimmages began, none of the other players would call to me or send the puck my way. They weren’t rough or violent. They just ignored me. I skated around the perimeter of the play like I didn’t exist. But god, they were fast. They were all great skaters, and the precision with which they made plays was jaw-dropping. These were elite players culled from elite teams, so they were a joy to watch. I didn’t mind much being shunted out of the flow. It gave me time to read them.

The second day of practice we were split into red and blue squads. I got a red jersey and lined up at the bench to be given my line assignment. I nodded to my new linemates, though they didn’t return my greeting. This was the first skate where players would be cut, and there was a high tension in the air. The Marlboros had room for three rookies that year, and there were thirty of us at camp. Forwards came through the neutral zone like rockets. Defensemen made passes like they were shots on goal, hard and accurate as rifle shots. Goalies were limber and quick as cats. I was stunned by what I saw. I was on the right wing when our line hit the ice, and I skated back and forth marvelling at the speed and dexterity of the players. When we got back to the bench, my centre elbowed me hard in the ribs.

“Skate,” he hissed. “You make me look bad, I’ll punch your lights out.”

“All right,” I said. I pushed my helmet down hard on my head.

On the next shift I kept my word. I was borne up on the crackle of energy around me, and when I cut into the play the first time I felt fleeter and more nimble than I ever had. These were some of the best players from across the country. They made me work just to get clear. But the muscle Virgil had built onto me served me well. When the bigger players leaned on me I managed to push them off. When they tried to pin me along the boards, my legs were strong enough to skate out of the jam. The occasional slashes and cross-checks didn’t even register. These players were so fast, so disciplined, so precise that it made me reach deeper, fight harder, skate more deliberately. Finally, on my fifth shift, I took the puck from end to end. I circled the opposition net, spun in a loop-the-loop through the faceoff circle and wristed a pass onto the stick of our left-winger, who tapped it into the open net. I glided back to the bench and slumped down beside our centre and elbowed him lightly in the ribs.

“Skate?” I asked. “Like that, you mean?”

He stared straight ahead.

38

I made the
team as a rookie, and I had a new weapon in my arsenal now. Trust. I trusted that these elite players would go to the right place, make the right moves, put themselves exactly where they needed to be. My passes were the solder that welded our attacks together. I loved the thrill of knowing that I’d sent someone into open ice, left them a gap in the defense, a lane that led to the mouth of the goal and that blinking red light. I scored when I could, but my passing game became electric. I made the Marlboros as a centre. A playmaker. A skater.

If hockey had been the only arena in which I was tested, I would have won in a rout. But it wasn’t. I was still the Indian kid from northern Ontario. During a press interview following the announcement that I had made the team, I mentioned learning the game in broken-down boots with horse turds for hockey pucks. That made me even more of an oddity. No matter what I did, I remained the outsider. My teammates never called me Chief, but they didn’t use my name either. They never called me anything but “thirteen.”

“Thirteen don’t talk much.”

“I heard they’re like that.”

Or, “Thirteen never smiles.”

“None of them do.”

They took my passes, though. They let me fry that ice with my speed and hurtle forward with the puck. They allowed me to carry the game sometimes, waiting until I flipped the rubber to them. But they came out of a system that culled elite kids from the pack and made them special. They’d grown up with hockey moms and dads driving them to practice through sleepy morning streets, coaches they’d known for years pushing them to excel, fans expecting big results from their gifted kids. These guys weren’t mean. They weren’t vicious. They were just indifferent, and that hurt a whole lot more. I’d leave the shelter of the game and walk the streets of the city in something close to desolation. I lived only for the whistle that started the game.

Every team we faced that season was cut from the same cloth as the Marlies. The players were fast, precise, unrelenting and creative. They were warriors. They played at such a tempo that all I had to do was close my eyes on the bench and the vision settled over me right away. I was a whirlwind in those first games, and nobody could miss that. But the press would not let me be. When I hit someone, it wasn’t just a bodycheck; I was counting coup. When I made a dash down the ice and brought the crowd to their feet, I was on a raid. If I inadvertently high-sticked someone during a tussle in the corner, I was taking scalps. When I did not react to getting a penalty, I was the stoic Indian. One reporter described how I looked flying across the opposition blue line with the puck on my stick: I was as bright-eyed as a painted warrior bearing down on a wagon train. This explosively fast, ordered game I was learning to play had set me on fire. I wanted to rise to new heights, be one of the glittering few. But they wouldn’t let me be just a hockey player. I always had to be the Indian.

The fans picked up on it. During one game they broke into a ridiculous war chant whenever I stepped onto the ice. At another, the announcer played a sound clip from a cheap western over the PA. When I scored, the ice was littered with plastic Indian dolls, and once someone threw horse turds on the ice in front of our bench. A cartoon in one of the papers showed me in a hockey helmet festooned with eagle feathers, holding a war lance instead of a hockey stick. The caption read, “Welcome the new Marlboro man.”

Soon, players on other teams were following suit. I was taunted endlessly. They called me Indian Whores, Horse Piss, Stolen Pony. Elbows and knees were constantly flying at me. I couldn’t play a shift that didn’t include some kind of cheap shot, threat or curse. And when I refused to retaliate, my teammates started leaving a space around me on the bench. I sat alone in that territory of emptiness, eight inches on either side of me announcing to everyone that I was different, that I was not welcome even among my own. Finally, it changed the game for me. If they wanted me to be a savage, that’s what I would give them.

I began to skate with the deliberate intention of shoving my skill up the noses of those who belittled me, made me feel ashamed of my skin. One night against the London Knights I made a no-look backhand pass through the legs of one player over the outstretched stick of another, right onto the stick of our right-winger. He scored on a clear-cut breakaway. As we were skating back to our bench the Knights centre slashed me behind the knees and I fell to the ice. There was no whistle. The crowd howled. My teammates even laughed. He was seated on the Knights bench by then and I skated over lazily. They all looked at me and made faces. I flipped my right glove off at the last second and drove my fist right into this face. I fought three of them before they hauled me off the ice. That was the end of any semblance of joy in the game for me. I became a fighter. If an opposing player directed any kind of remark toward me, I dropped the gloves and started swinging. Any questionable hit was sufficient excuse for a tilt, and my bodychecks were hard, vicious and vindictive. I was bitter. I wanted the game to lift me up. To make the world disappear as it always had. But as a Marlboro, I could never shake being the Indian. So I became a puck hog. Instead of making passes to my open teammates, I skated and whirled until I could make the shot myself. One night, after an end-to-end rush that resulted in a goal on a nifty change of direction at the goal mouth, I dropped to one knee at the other team’s blue line and mimed taking a shot at the net with a bow and arrow. It infuriated the crowd. The other team sent their biggest, toughest player after me on the next shift, and the fight that followed was titanic. I drew a game misconduct penalty and marched to the dressing room, bloodied but filled with a roaring pride.

“We didn’t bring you here for this, Saul,” the Marlies coach said to me in his office after the game. “We brought you here to be a player. Not some cheap goon.”

“Hey, I’m just giving them what they want,” I said.

“Who?”

“The crowd, the team. Don’t you read the papers? I’m the Rampaging Redskin.”

“That was an unfortunate bit of cheap writing. I’m sorry you had to go through that,” he said.

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m better suited to a tomahawk than a hockey stick.”

“You and I both know that’s not true.”

“I’m the Indian. That’s all they see.”

He started to bench me for long stretches in games. When I hit the ice I was effective. I scored twenty-three points in nine games. But the taunting from the stands continued, and I fumed and smoldered and racked up one hundred and twenty minutes in the penalty box. I caused the Marlies to play short-handed a lot of the time, and we lost seven of those games. Finally, they benched me completely. After one night of sitting in the stands, I packed my bag and got on a bus back to Manitouwadge.

39

There was a girl
I remember from St. Jerome’s. Her name was Rebecca Wolf and she arrived there with her younger sister. They were beautiful. When I saw them for the first time they were getting out of the car that had brought them to the school. I was raking grass, but I stopped what I was doing to watch them. Rebecca saw me looking and gave me a little smile.

Rebecca’s skin was clear and brown, and her eyes shone. She was tall for her age and slender, not gawky like other girls her age. I’d see her in chapel or walking through the hallways. I’d try to get her to notice me, but she almost never did.

Rebecca’s sister, Katherine, was small and timid. She was scared of the nuns, but when she tried to run to her older sister for comfort, they strapped her and locked her in a broom closet for hours at a time. Then they started putting her in the Iron Sister.

The last time they brought Katherine up from the basement, she was broken. She began to wet her bed at night, and the nuns beat her for that. They would haul her into the aisle and strap her. When Rebecca tried to protect her sister she earned a trip to the basement herself. And while she was down there, Katherine died. No one knew what happened. She went to bed and the other girls found her dead in the morning.

They didn’t bring Rebecca up from the Iron Sister for four days. When they told her she just looked at the faces of the nuns and didn’t react. Then she turned slowly, walked to the front entrance of the school, and stood at the top of the stairs and screamed. She tore at her hair and face. No one moved to help her, for fear of retaliation from the nuns. But her wailing and sobbing cut all of us kids to the quick.

I was in the barn alone the next evening, practicing my shooting on the linoleum. I was so intent on the mechanics of my wrist shot that I missed the first few notes. But those that followed made me raise my head and listen. A voice shimmered through the evening air, and I walked to the door of the barn to see where it came from. Rebecca was standing in the rough grass of the Indian yard, her palms raised to the sky, and she was singing in Ojibway. It was a mourning song. I could tell that from the feel of the syllables. Her agony was so pure, I felt my heart ripped out of me. I stood crying in that doorway, offering what prayers I could for the spirit of her sister.