Starvation Lake (32 page)

But for all the good cheer and money flowing down Main Street, the tournament would not be a success unless the River Rats won it in front of our own fans, in our own rink, with all of Michigan’s hockey establishment watching. Coach knew that. And he thought—everyone in Starvation Lake thought—that we had a good chance to win. We’d lost just six of the fifty-seven games we’d played that year. Three Rats—Soupy, Teddy Boynton, and Jeff Champagne, the kid who’d been cut and then reinstated at that uneasy meeting after our first season—had been named to state All-Star teams. And we’d come so close the year before, only to lose to the Pipefitters in the semifinals.

“Remember what we said all those years ago?” Coach said to us. “We said we came together to achieve the ultimate goal. And what was that?”

“To win one game, Coach,” we answered in unison.

“Not all the games.
One
game. Now we’re going to play that game.” He lowered his stick. “We’re going to play it tomorrow in the quarterfinals. We’re going to play it again Friday in the semis. And on Saturday afternoon, we are going to win that one game, the state championship. Do I have that right, men?”

“Yes, sir,” we yelled.

He gazed up into the rafters. “Leo,” he called out. “Now.”

We all looked up and watched as Leo scuttled from banner to banner, undoing their fastenings. One by one they fluttered down to the ice. Coach gathered them up and carried them away.

   Naturally he had a plan for defeating each of our opponents. In the quarterfinals, we came out hitting against quick but small Fife Electric of Detroit and wore them down, scoring twice late to win 3–1. Soupy scored the winner. Against Copperstone Sporting Goods, we frustrated their two high-scoring centers by giving them the outside lanes while jamming up the front of our net. Soupy scored two goals in our 4–1 win. As we did in all of our games, we used the Rat Trap to clog the middle of the ice and make it hard for teams to break out of their own zone cleanly. Our opponents and their fans loathed the Rat Trap, just as our own parents and fans once had. Now, of course, our parents and fans loved the Rat Trap because it helped us win. As Coach was so fond of saying, “They don’t care how, just how many.”

We were to play the Pipefitters in the state final. They had dispatched their first two opponents with ease, 5–0 and 7–1. They were big and fast and intimidating in their goatees and sideburns and long hair hanging down over the numbers on their jerseys. Mostly they were good. To beat them we knew we would have to execute the Rat Trap to perfection and take advantage of whatever scoring opportunities we could muster. Even if we did all that, we would not win if we did not stop number 17, Billy Hooper.

College scouts had started watching Hooper when he was just thirteen. That year he scored 127 goals in eighty games for Paddock Pools. The Pipefitters lured him away by making his father an assistant coach. By the time he was sixteen, colleges were begging Hooper to enroll, and he was projected as a number-one draft pick in the Canadian junior leagues. But in an accident that summer, Hooper lost the sight in his left eye. As Pipefitter fans told it, Hooper pulled over on the Ford Freeway near Detroit to help a woman whose car had broken down. When he tried to jump-start her car, the battery exploded. His face was somehow spared severe burns, but the hot acid splashed his eye. Outside Pipefitter circles, another story circulated. It involved Southern Comfort, jumbo firecrackers, and a neighbor’s mailbox. Doctors told Billy Hooper his hockey career was over. But when the Pipefitters held tryouts that fall, he showed up wearing a black eye patch. He struggled at first. His impaired depth perception made it hard for him to feel how hard to shoot and pass. His coaches worried that his severely limited peripheral vision made him a target for crippling checks. Hooper played on. He removed his eye patch for games; his teammates took to calling him “Deadeye.” In a few months he was turning defensemen and goalies inside out again and, by season’s end, Billy Hooper was again one of the most talked-about players in Michigan. Still, nobody was talking anymore about college and the NHL. The scouts didn’t believe a one-eyed skater could make it at those levels. They stopped coming.

In the Pipefitters’ first two state tournament wins, Hooper was unstoppable, scoring five goals and assisting on four others. I saw him score on a wrist shot, a low slapshot, a deke, a high backhander. At one point, seemingly trapped behind the net, he caromed a goal in off a goaltender’s calf. On breakaways, I noticed, he especially liked to try to stare the goalie down and then head-fake him into flopping, whereupon Hooper would come to a near stop and calmly flip the puck over the fallen tender.

Coach noticed, too. After our semifinal win, he squeezed between Soupy and me on the bench in dressing room 3. “Tomorrow night, Gus, number seventeen,” he said. “Remember—you’re a stand-up goalie. I’ve seen you watching him. He’s got a lot of dipsy-doodles, eh? Every one’s designed to make you fall on your face so he can go high on you. Don’t take the bait, Gus. You’re not a flopper. Hold your ground.”

“I will.”

“Good.” He put his arm on my shoulder. “You coming tonight?”

Coach had invited us all to stay in his billets. He said it was important for the entire team to be together before its biggest game ever. Everyone was going—except me. My mother insisted that I stay with her, at home.

“I don’t think so, Coach,” I said. “My mother—you know.”

“Yes, I know. You ought to be there tonight. I’ll speak with your mom again.”

That was the night I called my mother a bitch.

   Soupy was quiet the next morning at our pregame skate-around. I sat down next to him in the dressing room as he struggled with his left skate.

“Have fun last night?” I said.

“Same old thing,” he said. He kicked his skate heel against the floor to force his foot all the way in.

“I hope you guys got some sleep.”

“I’ll get a nap before the game.”

“You OK?”

“Just nervous.”

We weren’t going to be playing for hours, but already my stomach was squirming like a bass on a fishing spear. Soupy never seemed to get nervous, though. He was always fooling around, throwing tape wads, telling jokes. He didn’t really look nervous now, either; he just wasn’t himself. Something wasn’t right.

Coach walked in. “Good morning,” he said. “Are we ready to win?”

“Yes, sir,” we all said, except for Soupy, who was preoccupied with his skates.

“Swanny?” Coach said.

Soupy didn’t look up. He plopped his helmet on his head, grabbed his stick, stood up, and brushed past Coach on his way out of the room. Coach silently watched him go. Teddy Boynton came in with his bag slung over a shoulder. Coach slapped him on the back. “Ready, Tiger?”

“Oh, yeah,” Teddy said.

I leaned over to Wilf, who was taping his stick blade. “What’s with Soup?”

“Hell if I know. Maybe he’s pissed about Teddy shadowing the one-eyed guy.”

“We’re shadowing Hooper?”

A “shadow” would stay with Billy Hooper wherever he went on the ice, in the hope of keeping him from getting the puck in the open. It was a difficult but potentially glorious job. A shadow had to be fast and disciplined and utterly selfless. For a player as quick and shifty as Hooper, I couldn’t imagine anyone but Soupy being the shadow.

“Don’t know for sure,” Wilf said. “But Coach had Teddy and Soup up at his house for a couple of hours last night, and when they got back, I thought I heard Teddy say something about it, but I was half asleep.”

“Man,” I said, “we never had a shadow before. Coach must think this Hooper is still hot shit.”

“Fuck Hooper,” Wilf said.

   Eight hours later, we were back in dressing room 3, dressed and waiting to go out on the ice for the state championship game.

I sat next to Soupy, staring at the shiny black tape I’d wound onto my waffle glove, Eggo. I was so afraid to play that I couldn’t wait to get out on the ice. That’s how goaltenders think. My belly would keep jumping around even after I got in the net and started roughing up the ice with my skates and whacking the goalposts with my stick. The butterflies would disappear only after the first shot on goal drove into me and I swatted it down or kicked it away or grabbed it in my catcher. If it hurt, even better.

The only sound in the dressing room was of stick blades being tapped nervously on the rubber-mat floor. Through the closed door we could hear the crowd’s rumble, and when the door swung open to let Coach in, we saw the throng in blue and gold squeezed in the space between the room and the rink, clapping and yelling. Leo slid in behind Coach. Coach threw the bolt on the door and stood before us in a jacket and tie, a gold River Rats stickpin in his lapel. His eyes scanned the room, falling briefly on each one of us. He clapped his hands together in front of him and held them there.

“Men,” he said. “Three things.”

He held up an index finger. “First, as always, the Rat Trap.”

He held up two fingers. “Second, the Fitter goalie’s got a good glove and two left feet. Make him use those feet. Shoot low and crash the net for rebounds.”

He held up three fingers. “Last, we’re going to shadow number seventeen. Teddy the Tiger’s our man.”

I looked at Soupy, who was sitting, as always, to my left. His eyes were on the floor. “Seventeen’s got some speed and a few moves,” Coach said, “but he doesn’t much like the rough stuff, does he, Tiger?”

“No, sir,” Teddy said.

“Truth is, he’s a little fag, isn’t he, Tiger?”

“He’s a one-eyed fag with a lot of fancy-ass fag moves,” Teddy said. He looked across the room at Soupy, the hint of a smirk on his lips. The others egged Teddy on, saying “Yeah, Teddy boy!” and “Do it!” and “Kill the little fag!” Soupy kept his eyes down. I elbowed him. We couldn’t win without Soupy.

“Soup,” I whispered. “You don’t want to be tied up covering Hooper. The guy’s got one fucking eye. Hell, the Fitters’ll probably have a shadow on
you.
”

He ignored me.

“What do you say, men?” Coach said. That was our signal. It was when Soupy usually clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Tonight, you’re a sponge…” Now he didn’t move. Everyone was up, crowding around Coach. I stood. “Soup?” I said. Still he did not move.

Coach stuck out his right hand and we all reached in to touch it, glove on glove on glove. Coach got up on his toes and looked over our heads at Soupy. “Swanny?” he said. Soupy slowly stood without raising his eyes and placed a glove on my outstretched forearm. Coach watched. Then he looked at the rest of us and said, “One game.”

“One game!” we yelled. Everyone but Soupy.

   When one hockey team faces another that is clearly faster and more skilled, the job of the goalie on the lesser squad is to keep his team close until they catch a break that might shift the momentum in their favor. Keep your team within a goal, even two goals, and they play with the proper balance of patience and urgency needed to come back. Get behind by three and despair begins to take over. You start playing stupid. Then it’s over. In hockey there is no better match for superior speed and skill than a hot goalie.

I was never hotter than during the first two periods of that state title game.

The Pipefitters won the opening face-off and flung the puck hard into the corner to my left. While two Fitters gave chase, Soupy tried to rifle the puck around the boards behind the net. But one of the Fitters slapped it out of the air and the next thing I knew it had bounced out in front of me and onto the stick of Hooper, not fifteen feet away, all alone. His rising shot caught me on the left side of my neck, hitting me so hard that it popped my mask clear off my head. The puck deflected downward and pinged off the goalpost as I tumbled backward, grasping at the crossbar for balance, determined not to go down. The refs were whistling play dead, but Hooper skated up and deliberately banged into me. I saw his left eye up close, phlegmy and gray as the innards of a clam. He wanted me to see it. “Fuck off,” I said, pushing him away. He laughed and kicked my mask aside. Then Soupy and Teddy and Wilf and two other Fitters converged, shoving and swearing as the refs pulled us apart. When we’d separated and I leaned over to pick up my mask, Soupy turned to Boynton and punched him once, hard, in the chest, nearly toppling him right there in front of all the Pipefitters and the Rats and the fans standing three deep along the glass. “Where the fuck were you?” Soupy said, and I heard Hooper laughing again as Teddy turned and skated to his position. “Guys, what the hell?” I shouted. My neck was burning and my butterflies were gone.

For the next fourteen minutes, it seemed like the Pipefitters never left our zone. It was as if they had ten skaters to our five, as if there were an invisible wall at our blue line that kept the puck from going to the other end of the ice. I scuttled furiously back and forth between the goalposts, trying to stay square and upright between the puck and my net as the Fitters relentlessly circled, quick as bumblebees, the puck flashing from one Fitter’s stick to another, corner to slot to point to dot, behind me, in front of me, and back again and again and again. The shots came from everywhere, two and three at a time. I kicked them into the corners. I snatched them from the air. I deflected them off my shoulders, chest, Eggo, mask. Whenever I could, I gathered the puck into my chest or my glove to freeze it for a face-off so we could get fresh legs on the ice. The Rats were gasping for air.

Teddy got better at staying with Hooper, but it didn’t matter much because that just left their four players against our four, and almost all of theirs, skater for skater, were better. Part of our problem was Soupy. He was as good as any of the Fitters, even Hooper, but he wasn’t playing his game. He wasn’t controlling the puck and leading the charge out of our zone. He was hanging back. Coach Blackburn knew. I saw him glower when Soupy went to the bench. I saw Soupy ignore him.

With two minutes to go in the period, the Fitters’ enormous defenseman, the aptly named Wallman, stepped between Teddy and Hooper and suddenly Hooper was free. Someone got Hooper the puck and he faked out the last man, Zilchy, as if his skates were tied together. Now it was just Hooper and me. I slid forward to cut down the angle, hearing the crescendo roar of the crowd even as I heard Coach in my head: “Hold your ground.” Hooper dropped his left shoulder to fake a shot. I felt my right knee buckle. I slid to my left as Hooper dug his blades into the ice and cut in the same direction. In a flash the puck was on his backhand. It was just how I’d seen him deke the other goalies. Like them, I wanted to go down, my legs wanted to, my body wanted to. Hooper flicked the puck at my right shoulder. My knees were giving way, my butt was dropping, and momentum was taking me to my left, away from the puck, when I flung out my right hand, the one inside Eggo. As I fell to the ice, the puck just barely caught the edge of the waffle and skipped higher. I craned my neck to look back as I sprawled and saw the puck—or maybe I just heard it—clang off the crossbar and fly up and over the glass behind the net. Whistles shrieked. I jumped to my feet. I’d gotten away with a flop, a sloppy one at that. The crowd began to chant: “Gus! Gus! Gus!” Hooper spun on his skates and stopped, looking straight at me. Our eyes met. He grinned and winked his good eye. I looked away.