Splinter: A Novel About Hockey, a Boy and a Bench

By Steven M. Buono

“Once upon an ice rink
At a time forever more far away,
In a ramshackle heaven we skate
Day after day after day”

Set in small town New England it’s the wild world of 1970’s hockey, with haunting echoes from a deeper past. That’s when 14-year-old Jerry at last makes his first top team. Only, Jerry swiftly finds that making it, doesn’t mean you’ve got it made.

It’s a journey through hurt and hope not made complete until after a reluctant coach, a would-be goon, and a not so friendly girlfriend combine, with an uncle, to bring out his best.

With coach Herman Harman’s “not now” frozen to the present, like the ice Jerry thinks he may only ever see from the bench, it takes his uncle’s unlikely pep talk, and his unlikelier girlfriend’s clarion call, to break him free.

“Burn bright!” says undercover mailman Uncle Bob.

“You’ve got to take it,” says pretend girlfriend, star dancer Nell.

Does he? Can, he?

Jerry finds his answer during a bumpy 1971-72 season skating his last year of youth hockey with the Riverview Voyageurs Bantam A.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookPartnership.com
• Release date: Jan 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783012787

Book preview

Splinter

Part I

Asleep

Once upon an ice rink

At a time forever more far away,

In a ramshackle heaven we skate

Day after day after day

Chapter 1: Rearview

Not now.

The coach’s refusal was solid. Cold. Just like the scuffed ice that Jerry was afraid he would only ever see from his perch on the bench.

When will I play in a game? Jerry thought.

Worst of all, the coach’s command was frozen in that closed trap of the present. The confined and rolling present. The present that stayed put, game-in, game-out. Morning, noon and restless night for the fourteen-year-old boy. The present that was always, not now.

Coach Harman didn’t have to shout. He barely used his voice, as he denied for the tenth time in ten games to let Jerry leap over the boards to take his would-be regular shift with the third line. The same line he practiced with starting at five-thirty most mornings, when the Riverview Voyageurs Bantam A hockey team tumbled, from dreams, to a dulled ultra-reality at the abandoned warehouse of a rink the boys called home.

They called it, That rotten rat’s nest, or simply, The Dump, but they did so with a warped affection. It showed in their eyes as an underlying glee. Proud? Of a home rink that was home to vermin? The boldest could be found scurrying across the ice before practice as knock-kneed Harman, with his two equally knock-kneed sons, pulled the nets into place. Proud? Not really. It was just that RIP Rink, as it had been commonly tagged for decades, was the sacred place where they had learned to scrape through their first skating strides, sweep sticks from back-to-front to fire their first pucks, and eventually, churn-up a tiny fury in their first shifts in uniform.

The sloped ceilings. The kinked, chicken-wire dividers above the boards behind the goal cages. Scattered, four-inch wide (in some places more) nature-chiseled gashes in the grimy, crumbling concrete block walls that welcomed in the cheery New England winters, as well as invited in slumming seagulls and confused circling pigeons… The kids’ parents just let the irony do the talking. On the occasion when it was required in conversation to call RIP Rink by name at all, grown-ups would level their eyes and breezily deliver the moniker the locals’ only artificial ice patch was christened with, when it first opened its doors, and ceiling — originating as an Outdoor Rink — in 1929: "The Riverview Ice Palace."

If this place is a palace then I’m friggin’ King Tut! Jerry’s ten-year-old Canadian second cousin Brad spat out in disbelief, when he was down to visit the family for the first time last Christmas and was taken off to RIP Rink for a jolly holiday skate.

Regularly visiting teams were equally tweaked. Out of town kids, from places with real rinks. Kids who skated in arenas of higher geometric hygiene. On rinks that were fitted with smoothly joined boards, complimented by shimmering Plexiglas and locker rooms — with clean and gleaming shower stalls, and hooks on the walls above the bench seats. Kids whose rink’s assembly did not resemble that of giant ramshackle backyard sheds, had their own alternate pet names for the dim, irregularly configured jazz-age palace also known as RIP Rink.

Ripe Stink, was one popular rhyming insult. A favorite with rival ten-to-twelve-year-olds. Further maturity preferred the abbreviated label, Rearview. Accent on the "Rear," which was the visiting Bantams and high school kids’ sneer of choice. Some of them just labeled it, inevitably, Butt-view. The variations on that theme were novel.

Part of a ritual inside chuckle for the out-of-towners was built into the fact that, for them, the best thing about playing at the Riverview Ice Palace, came when sticks, equipment bags and players were packed back into mostly low slung station wagons — this was 1971. The contest a ripe memory, Rearview Rink was reduced to the six inch confines of its nick-namesake; reflecting as a shifting oblong image in the family shuttle’s rearview mirror. Hey, that time again, one of them would say, relieved to be leaving, "wave bye-bye, Rearview’s in the rearview." Not that anyone could bring themselves to look. Not when the object of withdrawing from RIP Rink was to somehow, quickly, scrub the remaining traces of the experience from every nostril, never mind the eyes. The place left a peculiar scent that was hard to identify as one. Reproduced in a lab it might be a distilled amalgam, decomposed, of hot cocoa, bad after shave and bird droppings. With a spritz of B.O. tossed in to boot.

RIP’s most obvious acronym-echo, Rest In Peace, was not lost on the locals. Especially it was not lost on their visitors. It was sequestered as the home crowd’s taunt to those they were hosting. The three funereal initials were smeared in cartoon-gothic, Halloween store-display letters, painted on cardboard signs. The characters shining so white, the generic epitaph stood out like shark’s teeth against the chipped and pale, Korean War era decor of the building. Nineteen-fifty being the last time a new hockey photo was framed and hung in the lobby, the last time the entire place was slick with a new coat of paint.

When the older boys took to the ice, during the Riverview High School hockey games, partisans stood baying from tilting bleachers. Bleachers that by this season had reached rocking horse perfection, with no leg touching the ground at the same time as all of the others.

One hundred screaming kids would reach a shared crescendo when their team, the Wildcats, got on the scoreboard. First in unison, then freestyle, the stands began to lurch.

The individual one hundred-fan-packed sections, all six of which were full-up for the big games, listed and swayed. Seating capacity, 70, Amalgamated Circus Grandstands Corp., circa 1920 was still quite visible on the blackened back middle legs of each section.

Scores and more of the cardboard R.I.P: (fill-in-the-blank-for-the-enemy-visiting-team) signs were held up at once. An uneven, far-too-happy, far too deep for its age, young, and maybe adult, male voice would careen through the cracks in the roof, bellowing: Hel-tah Skel-tah! The broadest of New England accents allowing for a full-throttle lion’s roar of the larynx. Hel-tah! Skel-ta-a-ah! A Riverview High goal, followed by the declamation, co-opted from the title of the, then, still not so old Fab Four’s harshest of tunes, was all it took. Tightly packed kids from runny-nosed eight-year-olds to draft aged ramblers leaned and shoved their collective weight in a dancing sway.

At last Sunday’s game, the Wildcats opened the scoring to take a 1-0 lead after only a minute of play. Helt-ah Skel-ta-a-ah! growled from the jaws of the adolescent basso profundo with the pimple speckled brow, and they were off.

A jostled little boy, no more than nine and lacking experienced sea legs, whose brothers were among the uniformed combatants on the other side of the boards, found his hot chocolate first drench and then stain to gray his woolen mittens. Like a mud rain, the spillage flecked the powder blue cap of the kid in front of him.

Three older girls stood shoulder-to-shoulder, feet planted on the top row of one section of stands. Facing front, hanging off the back and gripping the high railing through bright white gloves, they looked like they were doing a triple water ski run off the same line. Experienced — knees expertly giving, but bodies erect for the entire trip — their shocks of red, yellow and light brown hair waved out behind them.

The curly redheaded mane wore braces and glasses and opened her mouth wide enough to swallow an orange. Her chapped skin stretched, cracking the pale raspberry colored corners of her mouth as she let out a scary-movie scream, which scattered back to the rafters half a dozen intruding pigeons. Her two flanking friends laughed hysterically nearly losing their grip. Other heads and torsos hunched and reared, or wobbled, to stay atop RIP Rink’s bleachers bronco ride.

As if in a swell at sea the stands rolled back-and-forth, the legs striking the floor like a chain gang of Goliaths breaking boulders out on the backroad to Hell.

Mouths gaping, to laugh, to shout, the trip took less than a minute, with hearty screeches of, all together: Hel-tah Skel-tah!

Occasionally an innocent would catch an elbow smack on a soft spot. On Sunday it was a nose that was nailed, spilling a crimson gush over all in range.

Get a towel, somebody! one of the uninjured hollered. Towel nothin’, better get the meat wagon! another volunteered, bleachers in mid-quake. I’m all right, it’ll stop…won’t it? said the eleventh grade boy, who did not partake in sports, and was still the bloody recipient of the severest blow of the game. The bleacher section didn’t miss a rocking beat. The dingy red glow of the goal light switching on from behind the net was the faultless cue for the throaty call of the wild.

The pattern of the bleachers’ bucking movement reminded Jerry, who caught some of the Wildcats’ games with his best friend-teammate Charles, of the old toy top he had when he was five. How when it lost steam it veered uncertainly this way and that before tumbling over.

Upon the ultimate shouted prompt — preceded by the countdown of one-two-three-four — hundreds screamed as one that the Wildcats’ opponents were: Goin’ down fa-a-a-ahst! It seemed eerily prophetic of the crowd’s, perhaps, one-day fate as well, considering the age of the abused and creaking bleachers.

What do they put in the cocoa around here? the visiting coach muttered. It’s not in the hot chocolate…it’s in the water, followed his assistant’s low opinion.

It’s in the water, out-of-towners would say, had said for a century, like they were tossing out the answer to a fixed quiz no one ever failed, sometimes adding, mad hatters, and blinking both eyes out of sync.

Riverview, home to RIP Rink, was home to Riverview Hat Corp. earlier still, the town’s biggest employer until people stopped wearing hats. The defunct hat factory, in sight, and smell, of RIP Rink had spewed mercury laden smoke from its stacks every day of the year. Plus, it had flushed a similarly tainted toxic bilge into the waters Riverview was named for, for more years than for it not to have mattered.

Home was home and this was it for Jerry. The time and the place of his ever-living present that added up to the whole rest of the universe to him. Born, living and growing up in a small not so distinct town in a small New England state, which had its best hockey credentials coming by way of its close proximity to someplace else.

And what was happening at this time and in this place? Nothing’s happening, that’s what, was Jerry’s inner reply to the coach’s ritualistic denial of him taking his position on the third line of Riverview’s Bantam A.

Chapter 2: Getting to Be a Habit

Jerry’s Riverview Bantams were hosting Hapsworth, from two towns over. That was a change.

We haven’t played them yet, plus, they reek rotten, they’re 0-7, and nobody’s beaten us yet, thought Jerry. How cautious could Harman get. This time, I’ll play, Jerry concluded as the puck was dropped with a fresh 20:00 posted on the clock to start the first period. This being a home game, and the scoreboard the Palace variety, the numbers were formed by a vague configuration of one hundred and fifty little white lightbulbs. Seventy-eight worked. Jerry’s knowledge of this number, seventy-eight, was a bad omen for Jerry. It wasn’t the figure that scared him. He wasn’t afraid of thirteens or anything like that. His cat William was jet black. What bothered Jerry, is that from his bump-on-a-log spot, he was able to know the number.

Yep, still seventy-eight, thought Jerry, after his line mates, center Jackie Monahan and left winger Creepy Green hit the ice on Harman’s nod…along with, who was it this game? Oh right. John Martin, Jerry recognized. A defenseman, taking his, Jerry’s, supposed spot on right wing.

Not right now, Jerry, said Harman, as he held up his flat palm, like a friendly Indian chief in a funny black and white western movie he’d seen late Saturday night. Jerry thought, Yeah, How! all right. Like, how in the heck am I ever going to get this guy to put me out there?

Then Harman dropped his hand on to Jerry’s plastic-topped head, squinted and said an encouraging word: Later…

Harman’s later stayed locked-up in the future, too. Just as his not now remained riveted to the now. Jerry could not catch it. That, later, of Harman’s — it wafted over the bench like a doomed wind. It kept blowing straight at Jerry, all the way through nine straight games, and ahead, on into the Voyageurs’ in progress tenth match of the season.

The Voyageurs — the forlornly lost, north-of-the-border flavored team name, was given to them, like an ill fitting gift you did not dare return, by French Canadian born area real estate tycoon Yvon Bonnefant. He sponsored the team, had done since 1964, about the last time anyone had seen him at a Bantams game, or even at RIP Rink. Taciturn, and impish by equal measure, people tended to think his venture was a tax write-off, of some sort, but no one minded in the least. Bonnefant may have been terminally absent, but the boys’ ice was largely paid for, and new uniforms donned their backs each fall. So it was ‘Ce bon’ — also the name of his real estate firm — with Bonnefant all around.

The Voyageurs’ first line had scored just over one minute into the game for a 1-0 lead. Tommy Zlotti, the team’s tall, smooth, long-striding center fended off both of Hapworth’s defensemen with an outstretched arm, gliding like a high rising clipper ship into the slot before flipping the puck through the goalie’s legs with one hand. Firing as he fell, the opposing tandem’s mass of red and gray uniform meshed with Tommy’s Voyageurs white, yellow and black, for a tumbling kaleidoscopic blur of color. Twisted limbs, sticks and white plastic helmets, slid to a heaped halt an inch in front of the goalie’s pads.

The Hapsworth goalie had clutched his knees together a beat too late in an exaggerated reflex then froze on the spot, stick and glove still raised at the ready for the shot that never rose. Only the goalie’s head moved. Puck behind him he dropped his stare to the pileup in his crease.

Tommy rolled to his left covered in snow, freed himself from a defenseman’s lobster-like clutch and looked up instinctively at the hovering goalie. His white, overly oval plastic mask filled Tommy’s world view. A crescent of RIP Rink’s grubby, electric-gray fluorescent sheen projected from a dangling bulb positioned way over the goalie’s head. It gave him a faint halo. Tommy squinted and had an odd flash of last year’s total eclipse of the sun, visible in Riverview, cross his mind. Or was it the year before, he wondered, before rising from the deck.

Where’d you learn that? said the goalie. Flat. Not surprised, not even impressed, as if he was asking for the time and already knew it. His voice was resonant, like he had been coaxing a bad cold to occupy his nasal passages for about three months. His words vibrated through the dime sized mouth-hole in the mask. This goalie could have been a speaking tree for all the humanity revealed through his gear.

I don’t know, never done it before, Tommy said, garbling his words through a spongy, once ivory tinted, now yellowed mouth guard. He skated off, mane of black hair fluttering about his head; his helmet acting like a kitchen strainer to his thick, charred spaghetti-like locks.

Tommy and his two line mates stepped through the door to the bench and plopped themselves down in the middle, igniting a boy-buzz five-deep on either side of them.

Arm-and-hammer! Huh Tommy? shouted stout Charles Figg, enthused by his teammate’s one-handed scoring feat. Charles. Not Chuck, never ever Charlie — Charles was from Linwood, Riverview’s fancy sub-suburb. He had one little sister, one big, and one indoor swimming pool. Dad either drove a Porsche to work, or he was driven, in a long limo that shined brighter than a pair of spit polished black patent leathers. His house had twenty-two rooms. On road trips, Simon, his dad, and Giselle, his mom, along with little blond cherub, eight-year-old Grace in knitted skirts, coordinated to match her overcoats — Giselle was fur-bound the winter long — all set out in the deep blue vintage Bentley. The handsomely curved automotive didn’t have a trunk. Although you could pop the back open just as if the key thought it was producing one. The surprise, and a pleasant one for the other parents, a few in particular, came when instead of a space containing a spare tire, what was revealed in all its toxic and spirit raising glory was a foldout bar. In the deepest mahogany no less, carved in ornate swirls resembling a row of tulips on the lid. Flip open the lid, unlatch the front panel, swing it down, and bottles displayed, the bumper was your bartender.

Charles was an equally fast acting friend to his teammates. The first to slap you on the back, lighting up the broadest of smiles across the most pumpkin shaped of heads. His whole being was pumpkin shaped. Or maybe he was a snowman, anatomy-wise. One round ball on top of another larger round ball, with arms and legs attached. He was called Cannon Ball for this. Which stood for more than just his shape. He had the hardest slap shot on the team. He was popular with the crew, as were his parents with other parents. They loved that rumble seat.

Cannon Ball, whose overall pumpkiness didn’t stop with his shape — his hair was flaming orange-red — centered the second line, with Jack Steinman and Sonny Walsh. Neither wingers could skate very well, but they could slap the puck into the offensive zone from just over the red line as well as any flat metal table hockey figure ever manufactured. Twirl-clank and in it goes. The attack was on.

Defensemen weren’t overly eager to join either of them in the corners, along the boards, in front of or behind the net. When a defenseman found himself jumping into a corner with both Sonny and Jack’s four elbows up and mimicking engine’s pistons, said, sad defenseman would take special care the rest of the game. Some would even go out of their way to avoid Frank’n’Stein’s approach.

It was Sonny — real name Frank — even before Frank was registered on his birth certificate. Sonny it was, definitively, because he was the sixth offspring born to parents who had produced only females. At school, to the teachers who liked him, Sonny he was, just as Frank Walsh sat atop his report cards. Although most teachers he’d ever had stuck with the official Frank. To buddies, who knew both names, Sonny he stayed.

Except to Jack, who only played with him for the first time last year, and was soon sure he spelled it the other way — Sunny — instead.

Good nickname, Frankie, he told him after skating on his line for a game or two, Sunny: like something you’ve been left out in too long.

Jack had good cause to think so.

Sonny Walsh cracked the puck into the corner from just outside the blue line. It caromed off one of the many individual corruptions of symmetry that made up the shape of the rink’s jig-sawed boards. Boards, which did not…line up as they should. This particular protuberance was at a join in the boards next to the left face-off circle. Sonny had special knowledge of this little anomaly.

"You hit it right — the puck skips straight out in front of the net — no kidding," his big cousin had once told him. And Sonny took it to heart, trying to glance the puck off that abracadabra abscess in the boards at least once every game. And that was enough for Harman to bear down on the boy as soon as he sat back on the bench.

In the previous game, it was early in the second period, with the Voyageurs down by a goal, that Sonny decided to try the old eight-puck-in-the-side-pocket technique. Sonny whacked it on the go. The puck hit a chink in the boards, but not the chink. He was so surprised by the bounce it took that he missed the caroming rubber, when pointedly it seemed, it slid between his skates then carried all the way down the ice behind him.

When Sonny got to the bench Harman had him in his squinty sights.

Peering slit-eyed past his stub red nose, Harman inquired, "Walsh. Do you want another shift? Then he waved a single finger and drawled, Don’t pass to the wood, boy."

Sticks are made of wood, Walsh fired back with eyes charged, like he’d just discovered the meaning of E=mc2.

You know what I’m talking about, Walsh, Harman limply responded, turning away, wearily.

In the present game vs. Hapsworth, again, it was no cigar for Sonny. His cross-rink, angled dump-in missed the Magic Crack, as it was dubbed, dubiously, by no one who ever owned up to naming the rink’s disfigurements. Although the legend had it that it was old Harman — full name, front and back: Herman Harman, no less — who christened the Magic Crack back when he was young Harman, in high school. Some time back around the ice age, according to the kids, and at an even more remote age of the seismic shifting of the rink-side fault lines. Harman was supposed to have won the 1940-something-or-other state championship for the Wildcats, then going by the name of the Riverview Beavers, in overtime, with a fluke, clearing wrist shot from center ice. The blind shot spun out-of-control, veered off to the side, and smacked the famous jutting join to the left of the net, before rebounding like a wild electric current into the cage for the winning goal. Or so one vague kid-generated rumor went towards solving the lore of the boards.

"You’d think he’d want to talk about that," went the usual choked discussion of the whispered, questionable and to date not admitted Harman mythos. All any of the kids knew about his playing days, all he ever said about it was that he was a goalie. Which did not jive with the rarely mentioned — never really mentioned at all — story, now only a fractured abstraction of an untold tale. Harman never went on to play pro, or college hockey, so none of the kids really cared one way or the other whether, when or how, he may have scored some long forgotten high school goal.

"Yeah, if he did do it, said Tommy, in a recent powwow while a few of the boys waited outside for a ride following practice, shivering in the gnawing dawn air of late October. I could see him missing the net by a mile. That’s easy. But aiming for that stupid ding in the boards, the one Walsh likes to miss so much? And then scoring on it? From almost his own blue line? In overtime, to win the State Cup? Is that the story? Tommy gave his head a half-twist and shot a glance to the sun shyly forming over the horizon. Wise-up, guys."

I believe the Beavers part, though, he probably played with them, said Cannon Ball, baring his incisors and tossing up both his hands to his face, then pointing the index and middle finger of each mitt straight down from in front of his mouth. You know — those teeth.

Harman sported something of an overbite.

It’s like he points them at you when he chews you out for something, Cannon Ball continued, giggling and beginning to lightly bounce up and down on his toes. He chomped up and down with his improvised finger-tusks. Yeah, the Beavers part. That suits him.

Huh? Tommy said through clenched teeth, seeming to savor the mysterious flavor of a strand of his shoulder length mop. It looked like licorice. Tommy blankly rubbed his hands together against the cold. Oh, yeah. Beavers. Right, Tommy said through wet hair and tight teeth. Suddenly he spat out his own hair, brightening his bland expression into a stare as insistent as the rising sun. Nah, nah, nah, I take it back. I take it all back. He scanned his small audience. "He musta done it. Had to — fits him a lot better than Beavers, too."

What? Cannon Ball said, cocking his rotund-head to the side.

"Magic Crack! As in, Butt-view Ice Palace’s Majestic Mr. Butt-Crack, himself — The One, The Only — now ain’t that Harman to a tee?"

Walsh’s requisite carom attempt, coming on his first shift of this current game, missed the Magic Crack. Finding some other warped grain the puck smacked off the boards and fell flat dead. Hapsworth’s nearest defenseman studiously over skated it with Jack Steinman steaming right at him. Jack scooped the abandoned puck, fed Charles in front and Cannon Ball exploded a slapper from the slot for a 2-0 lead.

Jerry screamed with delight, raising both gloved hands, stick dangling from his right one. Beside him left and right the rest of the kids on the bench slapped sticks against the boards. It sounded like toy building block raindrops pelting a plywood roof.

Knock it — knock that off! Harman mimed, swiping his hand back, swatting the air at the boys, who slipped their harpoons back between their knees assuming the bench sitting at ease pose. A disposition Jerry now had down pat, to his chagrin. Still, Charles’s tally made him smile.

Two shifts — two goals — 2-0 — we’re flying! Jerry’s thoughts sped into fifth gear. The first nine wins that ushered in the season to turn the Voyageurs into an undefeated juggernaut, were not overly convincing. Most every game had been decided by one or two goals. And their first string goalie, Mark Flaherty (nicknamed, though never called, Mack Farty), had stood pretty much on his head to seal two of the victories. So this big splash of a 2-0 lead after, Jerry thought, What…2:20, 2:50? Jerry could count the bulbs on the clock and scoreboard, but no one, no matter how long they looked at it, could very often read the thing accurately. Oh…well…less than a few minutes anyway, Jerry calculated. And here we are, already ahead by two. It’s got to work out this game. I’m in, gotta be! His heart raced as Cannon Ball and crew cruised back to the bench, sticks in the air and chirping on high.

Jerry stood. Then he scooted down the bench to the open door with line mates Creepy Green and Jackie Monahan in front of him to his left. It was the third line’s turn to take the ice. Harman blocked the way partially and Creepy put a hand on the boards in front of him about to jump over to take his shift. The second line was clogging the doorway with their return.

No jumping! Harman barked. This time he did yell, not mime. No overly emphasized lip-sync to what ever he meant to say, which was his usual means of communicating, as if he were afraid if he actually spoke his feelings he would spend the whole game screaming his head off. He wasn’t the hollering kind, Harman, with his scrunched forehead and one long rust brown eyebrow. He didn’t even yell at refs, or his players, much. His life-giving, life-taking-away matter-of-fact manner of speaking, as if he were the brain surgeon and his players were the patient — awake at an inconvenient moment — was quite enough to settle the hash on his team. Plus, his fiercely certain blue ice cube eyes, when fixed on a kid, could wreck an evening’s sleep.

Those eyes. That voice. The latter a trickle of Arctic water and the former a freeze from deep space.

But everything else about him was sheer ice follies.

Skinny, knock-kneed, couldn’t skate worth a damn. Shouting was more of a nervous tick that would pop-up a few times a week, with no relation between the intensity or volume of his holler and the triggering event. Here, Harman was just communicating his aversion for kids jumping the boards on a line shift. But this particular line change, was different. Except that the difference was only from the way most every other line would change for the rest of the game — which would be springing over the boards on the fly. It was the similarity of things that sliced at Jerry’s spirit, not the difference.

Something different from the lead-up to the to-be-or-not-to-be first shift of the game for his so-called line? That’s what Jerry was wishing for. What was common to what had happened at the same point in each of the previous nine games, was precisely when Harman decided that jumping over the boards was bad form. It was on Jerry’s shift.

Charles, hey, glad you got one, said Harman, twisting around to face Cannon Ball, just lodged back on the bench, with Jerry, Monahan and Green all lined up for takeoff by the open door.

But— Herman Harman said, never one to offer ten cents without palming a nickel, "don’t wind up in the slot. It’s, stupid. Takes time. Take a wrist shot, okay Charles? The coach gave his man-Mona Lisa neither here nor there smile when he said: stupid."

Charles grinned up at Harman. He opened his mouth as if to say something, and didn’t. All Cannon Ball could think of was the image of the net billowing behind the beaten goaltender. It was his first goal of the year! He set off his skull like a maraca, nodding and fending off his elder critic, who turned away to face the ice. Squinting, always squinting, Harman reached out both arms and made circles in the air with his hands in a two-stroked, sort of winding-up movement.

Let’s go boys, don’t settle back! he said, third line’s out — center’s Monahan. Green, a-a-a-a-nd—

Jerry’s right skate blade scratched the ice and he felt a hot spitting spark inside the glazed unknown.

But then Harman jiggled his thumb in midair towards the line of players sitting behind him, and added, And, Martin, you go up on right wing for Jerry this go-round. Let’s go!

Jerry froze. He watched Martin shoot out over the boards. His throat felt thick and blocked. Anticipation instantly turned into a mist of dismay.

Jerry, shut the door, they can’t drop the puck with it open, Harman blurted. In a mannequin’s forever pose Jerry stood framed in the doorway.

Like waking from a foggy dream, then falling back to sleep only to be confronted with a lucid nightmare, Jerry took in his surroundings at a glance. The potbellied referee was standing upright, as he could, and holding the puck over his head. Waving it at him. Jerry thought of the main clown with Bozo hair who summoned all his fellow clowns from the center ring at the last circus he went to. The ref puffed his cheeks and his silver whistle shrieked right up to the ceiling, flushing a flailing black bird from an invisible nook. Two dark feathers floated but did not fall down. The players from both teams rose from their face-off crouches and were all looking at Jerry.

His breath felt hot, clouds of condensation hazed around his helmet. It was as if this humiliating moment had lit a fire somewhere deep inside him, vaporizing his spirit into a steam.

Jim Thompson, the team’s miniature back-up goalie, pushed past Jerry from his reserved spot at the left end of the bench, and using his glove and blocker hammered the door shut with a weighty thud.

Jerry, man, you’ve got to come in for a landing, I’m tellin’ ya, said Thompson, whose voice was squeaky as a mouse’s in keeping with his stature. He looked ten years old, and when he was in goal his head barely reached the crossbar. Wake up! You can get a penalty for that, Thompson went on, not scolding, delaying the game or something. Get with it, man.

Thompson slipped back to his nether region. Only a high wood frame laced with its chicken wire divider separated the second string goalie from the timekeepers area, his own raised, box-like land of limbo attached to the end of the bench. Here he would most likely sit the rest of the season. First stringer Farty was that good. Hence Mark’s noisome nickname prematurely falling into disuse with his still extremely adolescent peers. Only an injury to Flaherty would put Tiny Jim under the metal eaves, in what was for him, a soccer-sized goalie net. Jerry was now wondering if it would take mass casualties to entire forward lines of Voyageurs to gain him any ice time, this, his final year of Bantams. And who knows, maybe his last year of hockey, he thought. And if it was his last year, how would he know? Because it still had not even started.

Jerry found his feet, plodded in reverse two robot steps and slumped backwards onto the bench. His skates were no longer a part of him. They felt like shackles. He wondered aloud, "What’s wrong with me, anyway. But it wasn’t loud enough to elicit a response from Harman, standing two yards away. Nor was it as pathetic or as literal a plea as it would have been interpreted to be, had Harman caught it. It could have been at seven that very morning, when Jerry took in a carton of milk from the front step, as left by the delivery man — milkmen kept coming to Riverview well into the ’70s. He tore the seal and poured it onto his frosty flakes, only to have his tongue pinched by a distinctly tainted taste. Sour? For sure it was sour. On his third mouthful of cereal he knew it. I just opened it up…how could it go bad?" he moaned to the empty kitchen, mom and dad already headed off to work. His next-to-silent plea to Harman had the same tone. Only Charles, sitting next to Jerry, heard his whisper, lost on the deadened damp musk of the rink.

"It’s not you, Jerry, Charles said into his friend’s ear. In a muted raspy voice, frantically nodding his balloon-like noggin once more, this time directed at Harman’s backside, he added, Jerry — it’s him."

Chapter 3: Sitting Still

The Voyageurs remained undefeated at 10-0. Jerry sat the bench the entire rest of the game.

Jerry, Tiny Jim, and Sonny — this time he’d done it for sure — all watched the team build up a 7-0 lead over two periods en route to a 9-1 win over Hapsworth, which was now clearly the worst team in the league at 0-8.

But it didn’t matter. Game in the bag or not, Jerry had a problem. And it was Herman Harman. Walsh’s squat in the dog house — "Les woof-woof’s motel," as Yvon Bonnefant once called it — would be short. Sonny would play from the first drop of the puck in the next game. And he would keep playing. That was unless he tried to score off the Magic Crack on his first shift. Hapworth’s single goal was scored on a breakaway which was sprung by a boomerang bounce, as Sonny tried one of his vain, lame attempts to carom the puck off the alleged miracle spot. Walsh was actually in the slot, high, halfway to the blue line with a clear shot at the net, when for the second time in the game he decided to go for it. He actually turned to face the boards, ignoring the Hapsworth net entirely, even offending the goalie who threw his hands in the air at the sight of it. Walsh wound up high over the back of his helmet and fired a booming slap shot. Harman squinted his eyes into surgical slits back at the bench.

Sonny may have indeed succeeded in hitting the Magic Crack. But the magic was all Hapworth’s. The puck ricocheted insultingly, skidding at a right angle straight up the boards, getting behind the hopelessly flat-footed pair of Riverview defensemen anchored on the points. It skimmed directly onto the stick of Hapworth’s centerman, who was hanging quietly alone at the red line. He went in on a breakaway and scored to break what would have been Flaherty’s first shutout in Bantam A.

"Walsh. What is it with you and the wood?" is all Flaherty managed to muster as a dumbfounded slap at Sonny after the game.

"How do you know it ain’t the rubber?" Walsh responded, shifting the blame to the puck itself. His thin face stretched to newly incongruent proportions as he spoke. Jerry could still see the corners of Walsh’s squeezed lips expanding like yanked taffy. The two ends of his smile seemed to vanish behind his ears. Jerry wondered if Walsh’s head might tilt then drop right off at the jaw when the sides of his gargantuan grin met at the back of his neck. Flaherty shook his head at choppy strokes, pulled off his jersey, and Walsh’s folded-in face was suddenly lost beneath it. Flaherty’s jersey draped over Sonny’s head like a coat on a wood banister. For the sake of a few expressly personal chuckles he let the wet garment hang right there for more than a minute.

Jerry pitched forward, grabbed the back of the driver’s seat and the image of Walsh blanketed in Flaherty’s jersey — that he recalled from twenty minutes earlier — was shot from the backseat of the car.

His mother gasped from the front bench seat and clutched the shoulder strap over her head with her right hand. Her painted fingernails caught the dull street lights, glinting. His father had kicked at the brake when the wagon slid over a patch of wet leaves, then strained to a halt.

The roadway interruption? A small black and brown, pork-chop legged pooch. It strayed further into the street five yards in front of the car’s front bumper, pissed sideways, then decided against crossing after all and disappeared back into an alley behind a pile of sodden leaves.

"Lucky I saw you, said Jerry’s dad in the direction of the barely missed mutt. Lukee!" He eased off the brake, pressed the gas and rolled down Route 9. They were five minutes from their front door.

Jerry! Are you alright? his mom called out. She turned to look back and saw Jerry on his knees on the floor of the second row of the wagon. Jerry’s train of thought was only distracted, though. Like the surprise-dog who caused the skid, his mind returned to the shadows of the recent hours. Walsh cloaked with Flaherty’s jersey. One more game on the bench and I’m going to start wearing my jersey over my head too, he thought.

Alright mom, I’m okay, he said, climbing back into his seat. He wasn’t, of course. But it had nothing to do with a jaywalking dog.

His mother darted a look over her shoulder at her Mr., leaned back, dropped her hand off the strap and resumed facing forward. Mr. shot Mrs. a look, straightened up and slipped back into the same half-there train of thought that allowed the animal to saunter out to urinate into the path of his headlights in the first place. "Harman…some nerve…sit my kid out, right out of every game? Ten of them! Put him on the team, never cut him, just put him on the team…but then, never even let him play?" The interruption did not interrupt his mind.

I thought you saw him. The dog, Jerry’s mom cut in. Jerry’s mom was patient and testy at once. Her penny colored, almond shaped eyes were something different than patient; switching to the dimensions of swelling walnuts with every sentence. You were looking right at him when he wandered into the road. I would have said something, but I saw you looking right at him too, dear. Didn’t you see him?

Jerry decided to cram Harman and his bench banishment straight out of his head with a blast of rock-in-pop radio. It never failed. Dad, the radio. Can we hear it? Jerry’s dad reached over to turn the knob with the reflexes of a goalie making a glove save.

Click.

And at once they all shined on, everyone, from floorboards to tobacco stained ceiling. Thanks dad, Jerry said. He leant back, felt the music, fiddled with a loose strand of tape hanging at the butt-end of his stick propped over the back seat.

Jerry’s mom hummed the rest of the way home. Dad puffed his wild west cigarette.

Chapter 4: Bob the Knob

Jerry pulled his two sticks from the car. Mom disappeared behind the open passageway leading from the garage to the back patio, leaving a swish of shuffled brown leaves behind her.

Dad swung open the back door of the wagon. It opened as always like a bank vault. Except, it had rusted creaking hinges that sang: RheeeEEEK! A perfectly apt sound to precede his hockey bag and to signal the last act of the ice time ritual: hanging up his equipment.

His equipment rack was simply a series of randomly arranged, various sized shiny silver garment hooks, spiced up with several ex-doorknobs. All were attached to the far wall of the garage. Jerry nibbled at the loose flap of tape still unraveling from the butt-end of his stick. He felt the urge to say, DAD CAN’T YOU DO SOMETHING ABOUT HARMAN! But, instead, he clenched the strand of tape hard between his short front teeth and tugged, trying to tear it off clean, while yanking the shaft of the stick in the opposite direction. It would not give.

Jerry— his dad said, as he slammed the back hatch door with his left hand, dropped the equipment bag in front of him with his right, then pivoted and pulled down the garage door with his left; like a juggler, all in a practiced series of seamless moves. Jerry looked up, semi-sticky white fiber still trailing from his mouth. Mom’s making sandwiches, dad continued, so…don’t fill up on snacks, okay? He winked and grimaced simultaneously and walked away.

Jerry’s hockey bag was really a heavy-duty, faded green-gray Post Office mail bag. It had a band of eight metal silver dollar sized rings at the top where he twined a common cord of rope to open and close it. His uncle, Bob, got it for him. A perk of his job. A neat gift for his nephew. "I do work for the government, Jerry, Bob would intone when no other grownup was looking; on his mostly Christmas season visits from way-way upstate New Hampshire where he lived alone. Bob liked to think he went on secret missions. But, sack on his back he just delivered letters door-to-door. Jerry was set straight on this when he was ten. Uncle Bob is just a very bored mailman, dear, he’s not James Bond, Jerry’s mom, Jill told him, thinks he’s the secret agent man for some reason." She sighed.

"Thinks he’s the man from U.N.C.L.E," Jerry’s dad, Rob, added, showing no expression at all, as at the kitchen table all three chewed their dinner, Jill swallowing first. It was the first day of winter 1967, Bob was due for his overnight stay in just four days.

Jerry, don’t let him tell you any different, alright? Jill carried on, amused despite herself, because he is just so full of it. Getting up from the table she dropped her hands on her son’s little drooped shoulders. Thus was Bob’s avuncular stock slashed by a controlling interest in the child’s eyes, the joke growing as he grew.

It’s what he wanted to be, it’s why he joined the Navy, said Rob in a thin gruel of fraternal defense, adding, too bad he never got off the boat.

He’s getting older now — too old for too much hope, Jerry, his mom said, pitching the bowl of Rob’s below-room-temperature fraternal stew down the sink, and then, all you’re left with are your dreams.

He’s got plenty of those, Rob said, all I know, I wouldn’t want to pop up in any of them. He mechanically shuddered. You’ll understand when you’re older, honey, Jerry’s mom uttered, stopping all conversation on the matter. Jerry thought he understood. Jerry thought that he was already there.

He also thought, what was so bad about having an oddball uncle, anyway? Wasn’t that kind of the natural state of things? Like the light-bulb sucking uncle from the creepy and kooky TV family? Like, so many jokes, about this or that weirdo uncle somebody had, living in the basement, or locked in the attic, or, just locked up? Except Jerry was always quick to recall how nobody he knew in real life had anything like any uncles like that. Nor had they delusional hermits for relations anything like Uncle Bob.

Bob wasn’t a mistake. Nothing so sad as that. Never a breath of it passed over his parents’ lips. Neither did they consider their second born a miracle, though they had stopped hoping to give Rob a brother or sister many years before the actual event occurred — the year each of them turned thirty-eight. Jerry’s dad, Rob, who came into the world in 1922, was a generation-bending twenty years born-too-late little brother Bob’s senior. Well warn phrase that it was, the first words spoken as unknown sounds into Bob’s baby ears were, never can tell. His father said them over the tiny Bob like a monk mouthing a little understood invocation as he held him, warmly, for the first time. Rocking his gurgling, big eyed and blanket wrapped child at St. Thomas Hospital on a frosty third of January morning in 1942, never can tell, became the family motto the day that ‘Bob’ was born.

But Uncle Bob’s real name was not Bob. His parents’ huge gap in between naming their children notwithstanding, they had not forgotten that they already had a boy named Robert. The name given to him without malice; given at birth to their second and last child; and written into the log of St. Thomas Hospital, completely above board, was Chester. It might as well have been Hester — indeed Fester — or Mud, though, for the way the baby in the family took to it. His parents tried to call him Chet, and thought it to be a fine name, as it was. As was Chester. Only, what was fine and nice in a name didn’t matter. The other kids — not all, hardly, but too many to allow him to just look the other way — rode Chester mercilessly when he first went to school, twisting his name into Chestnuts, Chesty, or worse. When he tried to go anonymously by the abbreviated, Chet, he was only further degraded: dubbed by the biggest bully in his class, as "Shit. Which he did not think really sounded anything like, or even rhymed, with Chet. This is when he decided to take matters into his own small hands. I want a real name, I want a name like everybody else, he announced one tear-streamed and otherwise golden, warm mid-October afternoon. I want a name just like Robbie’s got! demanded Chester. The boy would be bullied just so far in first grade. He’d have his own new name and that was that. Give me a name just like Robbie’s got!" he bubbled, gulping down muffled tears like a lemonade refreshment when he was through.

All right my boy, said his dad, with his mother looking on in agreement, canning pears over the picnic table and standing under a seventy-five-foot pine in the backyard. Mother, he said, grinning wickedly at his wife, it’s official, we’re changing Chester’s name over to…just as he asks for, a name just like his brother’s got. Father winked at mother, and she rolled the skin up, just so slightly, on the bridge of her nose, then dropped a sheared pear into a bowl.

"Son, you are now Bob. Bob Lache. You can forget Chester, bad idea."

The man was genuine, he knelt down beside Bob and held him by his shoulders. He poked him gingerly in his toothpick ribs and said, "Now don’t you go and try using ‘Robert’ when you want to be fancy, because that’ll only confuse people, and they’ll just think you’re your brother, got it? If it’s ‘Bob,’ then ‘Bob’ it shall be, okay son? ‘Robbie,’ that’s the other guy. And that’s official."

It wasn’t. His birth certificate stayed the same, and stood up till the day that he died. But from that moment forward, the boy and man was known only as Bob. Rob chuckled at first when he heard about it. Then, he did not give, what he considered to be an eccentric, though in the plainest way practical too, elemental switch another thought.

You mean, it’s like a nickname? he asked his parents when he was first told, back in town on a furlough from his Army posting in Germany. Rob stayed in the service for five years after the end of the Second World War, having enlisted in 1942. He did not see a lot of his much belated little brother until he left the Army and returned to Riverview for good when Bob was almost ten. He jumped right on board with the name change, though.

Better than being called ‘Chesty’ I guess, at school, Rob said, adding, kids these days, they can be pretty bad news. Pretty mean. But Chet — Bob — he’s sure learned his own mind, and real young. Rob rubbed at his temple, lifting his military cap, wondering if what he had just said made any sense at all. "Bob, though, that’s his choice. Well, swell, then, and frankly, I guess I’m honored."

Bob’s first grade teachers, and eventually his peers, played along. By the time he reached the second grade, Chester, was a memory nearly forgotten. Save for with a stubborn bully or two, who Bob took to taking pokes at on the occasions when his temper outweighed his courage. It required another year of surprise jabs from Bob, and for his part, the suffering of a bloody nose or fat lip along the way, and the simple passing of great blocks of child-weighed time, before his paper tiger tormentors dropped it. And then, it vanished from schoolyard and playground currency completely. Officialdom — banks, the tax people — had much longer memories. Bob’s checks to the IRS were signed, as ever: Chester.

Jerry’s mom had sewn the circle-and-spokes B decal insignia of his favorite team over the face of the black lettering on the side of the four-foot long, stiff canvas satchel, that read U.S. Mail. Most kids had duffel bags or real, zip-up light weight synthetic hockey bags that were beginning to become popular, with their favorite team’s logo and colors — black and yellow or nothing in Riverview — already designed on them. They were expensive.

Alone, still out in the garage, Jerry untied the rope at the top of his satchel-hockey bag, held it upside down and shook. Out spilled its confused contents.

Each piece of hockey equipment, in those days, could be and often was alternately soft enough to place under your head for a pillow, and tough, to the point of stopping a .22 caliber slug. Just don’t press your luck by plugging a shin pad, for instance, with a higher gauge. Don’t shoot it point blank with a puck, for that matter, in certain locations. Not while you had it on. Because the blow would have a fifty-fifty chance of striking the pillowy part. The shin pads had evolved from being a type of light brown shaded, thick leathery substance resembling Naugahyde, the material of the cheap mock-leather couch and recliner seat in the family’s half-finished basement, to mostly plastic sorts of shields.

But the plastic coating of the very early 1970s was to true protection what the potato chip was to a potato. Jerry was noticing that autumn, in his last year of Bantams (but only in practice, never in games, never in games, never…), that when a shot from one of the bigger kids struck him straight and full on the shin, well, he was noticing. The crack of the impact sounded like a tiger tamer’s whip. It felt like he was being hit by a rock, rather than a small, rubber anything. Later in the bathtub he’d raise a leg from the bubbles and notice a slightly purple, slightly blue raised spot the size of a thumbnail on his shin. Along with an unpleasant, tiny tug at the skin that he sensed around it.

Quilted off-white, highly absorbent material, black plastic cups at either side, with snaps and straps dangling from both ends… Looks like mom’s bra, thought Jerry, not too frequently, thankfully, as he reached up and hung the item, his shoulder pads, on a forked silver hook in the garage. His helmet hung by its chin strap over the lower clear glass doorknob; shin pads up on high, dangled from tandem, chipped bronze hooks; hockey pants drooped by elasticized white suspenders on the black doorknob; elbows together, for company side-by-side, were lodged on the bent but matching prong-like coat hooks off to the side of the chipboard equipment pallet. Jersey and socks were assigned the same faded brass knob.

Jerry’s jock strap and cup? As always. On the hook above the broken framed picture of the family’s iced athletic ideal, Uncle Bob.

Like hinting that he was some type of government spy, the ideal aspect of Bob’s athleticism was purely his own fantasy. The picture was of the undercover postman himself in his Peak State University Penguins uniform. Hair cropped to his scalp — shaped into a V at the front — it pointed at Jerry like an accusing index finger. Bent over, stick on the ice, mouth pursed in a serious curl, Bob’s eyes said: "Go on, I dare you to dare me." Not that Bob’s expression spewed venom or malice in any meter. But it was focused.

Bob was never benched like Jerry. But, nor did he ever actually play for the Penguins. The shot rimmed by the frame and pressed under slightly cracked glass, was taken in October of 1960, when Bob was a just arrived freshman, his forty goal Riverview High senior What A Guy season behind him. One week after posing for the picture Bob was busted for drinking and driving, one hundred and ten miles-per-hour, in his hopped-up painted black T-Bird. Uncle Bob predated one of the signature rock hits of the 1960s by an impressive, if perverse, margin. Born too late in some ways, he was years ahead of his time in this. Bob got his motor running and Bob got out on the highway. Only, foot plunging the accelerator to the floor, Bob was hurtling down that highway, the wrong way.

Granted it was 3:00 a.m., under the clearest of northern, full-moonlit nights, with only one other auto within twenty miles of the stunt. A stunt performed for the benefit of the three cowering Penguins senior captains. They had issued the cocky new hotshot guy with the challenge as a first step in a long initiation. And finding themselves captives of their own scheme, they were now holding on for dear life in the back seat.

Bobby boy — you win — you win! screamed one team leader straining against the NASA spaceflight simulator-type G-forces to peel himself from the red