When She's Gone

When She’s Gone Steven Erikson © Steven Erikson 2004 The game got in our blood when the Selkirk Settlers first showed up at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Not hard to figure out why. They were farmers one and all and given land along the rivers, each allotment the precise dimensions of a hockey rink. Come winter the whole world froze up and there was nothing to do but skate and whack at frozen rubber discs with hickory sticks. Those first leagues were vicious. There were two major ones, the Northwest League and the Hudson's Bay League. Serious rivals and it all came to a head when Louis Riel, left-wing for the Voyageurs, jumped leagues and signed with the Métis Traders right there at the corner of Portage and Main, posing with a buffalo hide signing bonus. The whole territory went up in flames–the Riel Rebellion–culminating in the slaughter of nineteen Selkirk fans. Redcoats came from the east and refereed the mob that strung Riel up and hung him until dead. The Northwest League got merged into the Hudson's Bay League shortly afterward and a troubled peace came to the land. It was the first slapshot fired in anger, but it wouldn't be the last. The game We sold our soul. No point in complaining, no point in blaming anyone else, not the Yanks, not anyone else. We've done it ourselves and if you were a Yank you'd be saying the same thing. If your country was Italy, France or Belgium, if the city you called home was in England or Scotland or Wales, you're saying the same thing I'm saying right now, at least you'd be if you were thinking about what I'm thinking about. Being Canadian I'm thinking hockey, I'm thinking the breath of ice and the hammer of the puck against the boards. But you could be thinking rugby, the muscle and pumping blood and the flow and ebb of human will. You could be thinking baseball and the expectation and tension and explosions of power that change the universe in an instant. Or soccer, a field of players trying to find the right pattern, turning motion into music with agony in your calf muscles at every near miss. And I know you're all saying the same as me. What the hell happened? The arena Jack always called it a temple, with ten thousand pagans on the seats, the ritual going on there on the ice below and the portrait of Queen Elizabeth, the distant goddess, looking down on the whole thing and by the third period the air's gone grey with cigarette smoke like a thousand torches burning low and the Queen's look has turned sly. A temple. Our temple. The 'Export A' scoreboard and time clock hung suspended from the girdered ceiling directly above centre ice. It showed us the news of the cosmos, every detail precisely clicking away. Like an angel sometimes, other times like a damned demon. It was an altar in the air, unreachable and runnelled with divination and a secret energy coursed down to the players and back up for as long as it was lit with numbers. Down below sweat on brows misted into blood and rose up, soaking into that altar and we cursed and prayed in the same breath, living and dying moment by moment. It floated implacable, the hand of God. We sat in our seats. Row on row, ten thousand watchers making their own sound like hornets in a nest about to be kicked. Thrumming to the taut ticking of that clock overhead, to the mystery patterns of men on skates, ancient heart of the game thumping a single beat that turned the temple into its own chambered world. The wall Jack says sport and religion are the same thing. He says the game – whatever the game – is the contest between humans and nature, the laws of the universe struggled against, sometimes matched and when matched everyone gasps a breath as if to take perfection inside, down into the lungs, as if for that moment the universe has shown itself, every pattern realized, every dream possible. Down into the lungs. Jack also says that's why the scoreboard is a giant cigarette ad. 'Export A' cigarettes, and there's more ads along the walls, ads everywhere, and before the rules were changed the walkways beyond the portals filled with spectators between periods, all lighting up like maniacs. It wasn't until we played against the Plains Cree one winter that I realized the connection between tobacco and religion, but I'll tell that story when it's time to tell it. Sport and religion are the same thing. The contest between humans and nature. Life and death, quantum mechanics, the Big Bang, evolution. Jack can go on and on like that. I sit and watch and study his face, that half-smile that makes women melt, not knowing if he's bullshitting me or showing his truth and maybe sometimes they're both one and the same which is probably why the women can‟t resist. Bullshit or truth? I wonder about it all the time. I'm wondering about it right now, sitting here on this mounded ridge of Scottish grass with the old ditch down below and the effigy's shadow crawling over us like it was a secret we weren't supposed to see. There's clouds scudding overhead, rolling land on all sides and sheep and hedgerows but summer's on its way out and tonight we'll be sitting here as frosted as the grass. The effigy. It was a joke, it started out as a joke, for me at least. But with Jack you can never be sure since most of my brother's jokes are dead serious. So I'd laughed at first, but not anymore. It stands over us, squat and wide like some arctic samurai, a suit of plastic, leather and cloth armour, the equipment pretty much new but the damned thing looks a thousand years old, raised up out of some rock-lined earthen pit where priests once cut hearts out of babies. We'd rigged up our stupid walking sticks, the ones we'd bought for no special reason from that farmer outside Edinburgh our second day over here, rigged them up along with a five foot length of pipe we'd found in the ditch. The pipe stood straight, the walking sticks made an X and we used hockey tape to join all three together where they crossed. Just having fun, emptying out my hockey bag, all my goaltending stuff: the huge leather knee pads, the nylon-covered plastic plates that protected the chest, the clacking shoulder pads, all straps and plastic and cloth down to the elbow and wrist, the blocker glove, its leather- covered fibreglass board bent into playing shape, and the trapper, broken in and polished from countless hard rubber pucks. And my mask, fifteen hundred dollars worth of wire and fibreglass and straps and neck-shield and air-brushed paint turning the whole thing into the snarling face of a dragon. Hockey tape, bungie cords and laces all went into hanging that equipment onto its frame. The effigy. We'd made ourselves an empty goaltender out of my equipment. It was that part that had begun bothering me. The family Jack got the brains. He got the talent, too. He had perfection in his blood. He had the looks, the half-smile and the charm and he could play the game like magic. But love is like a rhythm in the veins and in his heart there pumped something different. It's what none of us realized for so long there, especially the women fighting to get a hand on his flagpole. The smile was only half and most of Jack lived in the other half. But how he could play, and he did it in the worst years, the years when you stepped onto the ice and if you were any good at all some thick-skulled shithead hunted you down and beat the crap out of you. Those were bad years for hockey, when the Broad Street Bullies ruled the NHL and fists took care of anybody with skill, the years when twelve-year-olds drove elbows into your face just to see the blood spray. It's called beating love out of the game. Maybe that's what happened to Jack, but I'm not so sure anymore. He wasn't small, he could throw his shoulder into a check and leave a guy plastered like lumpy paint on the boards. But that wasn't the game for him. He lived for collecting the puck behind his own net, sprinting, weaving and flowing like magic down through the entire other team and planting the puck into the top corner, making it all look easy. Even so, you want to beat love of the game out of somebody, you start young, and you do it in coaching, in parents who want you to win no matter how it's done, and in grown-up professional players with bricks for brains. Jack played centre, meaning he was headhunted all the time and there wasn't any escape. I was the lucky one. A year younger, always dragging behind him like an afterthought, with none of the talent and none of the brains, I was the one who worked hard to get anywhere, and that anywhere was in goal.

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