The Code by Gare Joyce Page A

Fan, and any working hockey man could seek sanctuary in the testosterone-charged backroom, where only the members of the Legion of Alpha-Male Rink Warriors and the affiliated Sisterhood of Deeply Invested Cougars dared tread. A half-dozen Peterborough junior alumni were there when I checked in. About as many scouts who, like me, would be their teams’ designated mourners. Among them was Anderson, who decided to put words to that smirk he’d directed at me at customs three days before.
    â€œShadow, you better file those expenses daily,” Anderson said. “You don’t know who’s going to be around to approve them. I hear Hunts is in trouble. Take a tip from me—I’ve never been fired before but I heard it from old guys who had. When they start talking about successors for your GM, go get all your dental work done and make a date to get new glasses.”
    â€œAndy, thing is, we’re going to be in the lottery by trade but you guys are in it the old-fashioned way,” I said. “You guys were mathematically eliminated before New Year’s.”
    If you had walked in at that point, you would never have guessed that I wrote my economic history essay on seventeenthcentury Dutch mercantilism. No, you would have presumed that the last paper I handed in was written in crayon. À la recherche du playgrounds perdu : None of us are exempt from reverting to such juvenilia and some, like Anderson, know nothing else.
    F-bombs were exchanged and there followed a giddy delight that made the room tingle, like everyone had forgotten to use Static Guard. I was embarrassed by my behaviour, less so when Anderson shoved me, even less so when he did it again, and not at all when he took a swing at me. And then he said it once more: “School’s out, eh. Isn’t it, Shadow? School’s out.”
    That’s as low as it is unoriginal. That’s always a go for me.
    â€œS CHOOL’S OUT .” It might seem like an innocuous saying to you and may be Alice Cooper’s greatest song. To me, however, those two words, ten letters and an apostrophe, push my button. Too many memories of better times and my worst.
    I was twenty-one when I met S, a tall, leggy blonde, in an L.A. club during training camp of my second season. She struck me as earnest and not very smart, but I found her more endearing than those calculating beauty queens who were preying on my teammates at our usual watering hole. Our first conversation was a strange one. She came up to me and just stared. “Hi, there,” I said. “I’m Brad. I play hockey.”
    She continued to stare. It was sort of amusing. I was young enough to think that my celebrity had hypnotized her.
    â€œCat got your tongue?” I asked her, trying to settle down the poor star-struck thing.
    She took a big swallow, a big windup for an autograph request, I figured.
    â€œFriend,” she said, “you got some set of wrists.”
    I wasn’t quite prepared for this type of dialogue, even though our reading list in English Lit 101 included Samuel Beckett.
    I could have traded non sequiturs with her all night but it was all easily explained. S grew up in Petaluma, California, site of the world wrist-wrestling championships. Her father was a former middleweight champion and a long-time referee. S could judge wrists at a glance more wisely than railbirds can rate thoroughbreds with hours of hard study of The Daily Racing Form . S had a formidable set of wrists too, though she was so cute you were likely to miss them. She waited tables forty hours a week, squeezed in acting classes and auditions.
    We dated. It was all kinds of fun. G, PG, and X.
    We shacked up. S could give up waiting tables. She took more acting classes and auditioned once or twice a week, but nothing came of it. I figured her future might be in arm wrestling.
    And we got married. Her father almost put me on the IR when he shook my hand.
    We were two days into