Cementhead

“C’MON,” I SAY TO NUMBER 19, who put the late cross-check on Gord, our center. I say, “C’mon.” I skate over while Coach screams, and then my gloves are on the ice, and I’m begging Number 19 to throw down, too. The linesman has my shoulder, pulling me away, but I stay put. “C’mon,” I say. “C’mon, pussy. Throw down. Please throw down.”

After the game, me and Gord duck out past curfew to the Belleville Pub, and I drink eight beers to Gord’s five, ten to his six, twelve to his eight. Two puck bunnies sit with us, and Gord talks to the prettier one. The one who should be mine is watching him instead while he tells them how he’s chasing the record for single-season points. I want to tell my girl that she’s cute, but my tongue feels sore and swollen in my head, and I wonder when I bit it and didn’t notice.

Gord goes home with his girl. I wake up alone and sick. On the bus out of town, Coach tells everyone I’m fined for missing curfew. He saw me come in last night, wasted and puking in the garbage can by the motel office. He says nothing about Gord.

“Hey, Cementhead,” Craigie calls to me that night in Kingston Arena. “Watch out for Number 15. He’s a headhunter.”

Gord scores a first-period goal, and in his next shift, they tie him up behind the net. I skate over to help. My guts are still churning from last night, though, and I’m not watching out like Craigie told me. The stick butt comes from my blind side and catches me in the mouth, cuts my lip against my teeth. Number 15, the headhunter, works his stick like a pool cue, giving me another good one in the chest. There’s no whistle as I straighten up and spit blood.

I follow the headhunter around three or four times, circling. I can see where my spit blood turned the ice pink. Finally, I catch him in our goal crease. We butt heads before I haul him down and fall on him with my stick over his throat. I lean on the stick and grind a little until I feel that collarbone give — ka-pop. Number 15’s screaming. The Kingston fans are screaming, too. They look like animals under the lights, then, like twisted-faced monkeys. It’s the freaking Nature Channel behind the rinkside glass. They snarl and spit and howl while the ref leads me off. What’s wrong? I ask them with a look. Whatever is the matter, little monkeys?

Sitting in the penalty box, my head still hurting, I hear the voice again, just as I expected. It begins like a ringing in my ears, then turns into a close whisper that swallows the noise from the stands. I’m almost relieved to hear the voice now, not afraid anymore, like the first time it came, after I got clobbered in that home game against Stratford. I’d gone into the corner with my head down — stupid — and got boarded from behind. That was all she wrote. Good night, ladies. When they woke me with smelling salts and asked me my name and if I knew where I was, I didn’t tell anybody about the voice I heard. Later, they took me to the hospital for a cat scan, and I paced back and forth for hours in that dumb gown until a nurse told me to lie down and rest. But I didn’t tell anybody about the voice. How could I?

CINDY ISN’T A PUCK BUNNY or a rink rat. She doesn’t even like hockey. I met her at the Red Lobster, where she’s a hostess. She doesn’t follow Ontario Junior A or care how close Gord is to breaking the record. When I tell Cindy I’m leading the league in penalty minutes, she doesn’t even know what that means.

I start sneaking Cindy down to my basement room at night. I board with an old couple, the McQuibbans. Mr. McQuibban brags about me to his friends and brings them down to meet me, but I think Mrs. McQuibban is scared of me. I’m always polite and do my own dishes, but sometimes, when we’re alone together and I crack the ice-cube tray or clear my throat, she jumps. I try to stay downstairs as much as possible.

Cindy likes to touch the place where my teeth went through my lower lip back in Junior B. She feels it with her fingertips and sometimes asks about the other scars on my face and hands. I didn’t used to like all that. I had a girlfriend back in North Bay, in high school. We would fool around, but she never touched my scars the way Cindy does, because she knew I didn’t like it. And maybe I still don’t. But I let Cindy do it. I let her touch me however she wants, and I answer her questions.

The split eyebrow and the ding over my temple are from Junior B, too. The cheekbone is from a Peewee game where a stick blade chopped right through my mask. My left knuckles are from an Oshawa defenseman’s teeth and the infection I got, but the left wrist is nothing exciting, just fryer grease from a North Bay McDonald’s. The right wrist isn’t hockey, either. When I was eleven or twelve, I got it slammed in a car door. My mom was arguing with a boyfriend and didn’t see my hand. It wasn’t really her fault, but I’m not sure Uncle Sandy saw it that way. I remember how he didn’t speak when she told him, and while he drove me to the emergency room, he kept his arm tight around my shoulders and said nothing at all. Mom was too upset to take me in. She was afraid, too, that the nurses might recognize her from a few weeks before, when I’d needed stitches on the back of my head. That hadn’t really been her fault, either. Another boyfriend — his name was Archie or Arthur or something, and he was a full-blooded Mohawk — had pushed me into a picnic table. Mom broke up with him right away.

I tell Cindy all of this, and she listens as if I’m going to give her a pop quiz after. Then she kisses me, long and slow, and I’m glad I don’t have to talk anymore.

“WAKE UP, CIEMASKO! Mix it up out there!” Coach is 
yelling at me again. He always yells, says I don’t 
understand him unless he does. When I’m back on the bench, he says quieter, right in my ear, “Number 21’s got to know this is our house. Ring his fucking bell.”

I jump the boards to start my next shift. Number 21’s out, too — a big, freckled farm boy. I don’t see many guys bigger than me. He watches me, and I watch him, like at a party when you spot a girl and your eyes meet through the crowd. Number 21 and I have known all night that it’s on between us. It’s just a matter of when. Now I watch him over the face-off and ask him again with my eyes, and when the whistle blows, we drop gloves and circle each other. We both get in a few good ones before he pulls my jersey up over my head. Then I’m bound up, and, boy, he whales on me good. Later, in the box, my ears are full of a sound like a vacuum cleaner in an upstairs room. And I hear the voice again, too quiet for me to understand. Still, just hearing it makes me feel better. I close my eyes and listen.

In the dressing room after the game, I sit between Gord and Picker.

“Don’t worry, Cementhead,” Picker says. “You got some good shots in. We saw it. You bloodied him.” Gord tells me the same. It’s not true, but it’s nice of them to say.

“I heard that voice again in my head,” I say. Then I remember I haven’t told them about the other times.

“Damn, he’s punchy,” Gord says. “Fucking punchy. Poor Cementhead.” Gord laughs and slaps my shoulder pads.

I laugh, too. After we shower and dress, I follow Gord out to where the press is waiting for him. I stand by while they talk to him.

“To tell you the truth,” Gord says to Barry from the Chronicle, “the record and the draft are the last things on my mind. I’m playing one game at a time here. I’m just happy I can make a contribution each day. My main priority is getting us to the playoffs. There are a lot of guys working hard with me and looking out for me. Whatever happens this season, they deserve credit as much as me.”

When Gord’s done, they thank him, and we go out and get drunk.

EVENTUALLY, CINDY COMES to a home game. I still think 
maybe she shouldn’t. I’ve told her a few times she 
won’t like it, that she’ll be frightened if I have to scrap. And — I don’t tell her this part — it’s better if the guys don’t know that she’s with me. Not because I’m embarrassed. But once they know, there’ll be jokes and questions, mostly coming home on the bus at night, when everyone’s bored. They’ll expect me to joke, too, and I might get pissed off, which only makes it worse. They talk about girlfriends, not just pucks. Girlfriends are fair game. And then there’s the other stuff that goes on: videotapes and Polaroids and “closet cinema” and shit. It’s best if they don’t know about Cindy.

So Cindy’s in the stands today, but only I know about it. When I get a loose puck at the opponent’s blue line, I feel her up there watching. I know I shouldn’t, but I take a slap shot, and it flies way high, over the glass.

“What the hell!” Craigie is almost pissing himself, laughing. “Nice one, stone hands.”

“Jesus!” Coach is mad again. Always mad. “Pass, Cementhead!”

I only wanted one shot. That’s not so much to want. Later in the game, I rush on a power play and tuck in a rebound. It’s a bullshit goal, but it puts us one up. I ride my stick like a witch’s broom back to our end, goofing like Tiger Williams used to do when I was a kid and I’d stay up late and watch him on tv at Uncle Sandy’s. No one seems to see me, though. They’re all looking at Gord, who’s down in the corner, blood dribbling from his nose like it’s a faucet with a bad washer. Number 34 laid him out, I hear later, popped him while I was cherry-picking up front.

“Fucking Cementhead,” Coach says. “You should’ve been there to protect him. Do your goddamn job and let Gord score the goals.”

I GET THE HAIRCUT FIRST, after our Ottawa series, but Gord says 
it was his idea, that I got mine only after seeing his. Craigie could tell them. He was there when I asked the little Italian barber to buzz it all off except a piece on top, like a samurai. But people are going to believe it was Gord, anyway.

At least Cindy likes my haircut. She rubs her cheek on it and touches where the scars show through in back.

“Yeah, I’ve been knocked out a few times,” I tell her when she asks.

“That can’t be good for you,” she says quietly.

“I know. Too much of that and you gotta retire early, like Bret Lindros.”

Personal. Political. Provocative. Subscribe to The Sun and save 55%.

PRINT

E-MAIL

SHARE

WRITE TO THE EDITOR

SUBSCRIBE