Infinite Hockey

The overnight snap brought things to a sullen halt in the harbor, empty but for two neglected lobster boats that bobbed about listlessly on red rusty moorings. Sea smoke drifted across the lead-grey ocean surface, and billowing clouds of vapor spewed from the shiny steel chimney of the cannery on the far side of the channel, cloying the waterfront with sweet and acrid air.  A blue-black stain of ugly clouds appeared to be sucking up the ocean out beyond the archipelago, a promise of snow somewhere, but not here in Bairstow, where all about is a gray gelid stillness, and there's grim forbearance in the countenance of the idled shore-bound fishermen and their families. Bert, an elderly man, palsied and arthritic, paused on the stoop of the harborside General Store, and sucked of the smelling-salt air.  

These morning walks, lonely though there were, offered Bert a small glimpse of a life denied, perhaps in happenstance observed, or in gossip overheard, in the streets and yards, or in the General Store where his cousin Karen worked, and ignored him. There was so much unseen, so much unsaid, and unheard, the stuff of dreams and sorrows, always beyond his reach. With Karen he had once played in these streets, light of heart and full of hope, fifty years ago, when the winters were longer, the snowfall deeper, the rivers froze solid, the ocean too. Fifty years! The very thought made him shiver, not just from the cold.  

Bert held the door open for a large, important woman, Mabel Knight, who entered the store without acknowledging him. He crossed the shoreline road, proceeded to the bench at the end of the concrete pier, a cup of coffee warming his hand, and a fresh pack of smokes in his jacket pocket next to an old scuffed-up hockey puck. 

A small group of neighborhood children were truant from the middle school, or maybe it was a snow day; something in their manner worried Bert. They swaggered along, vaping, swearing. One of the boys, Fournier’s son, Zack, had a pretty girl stooped over awkwardly in a headlock. She was struggling, and Bert thought to intervene, but before he could act, the boy released her, she stood erect, hooked her arm around Zack’s, and laughed as if it was a good-time joke; Linda Larkin, barely a teen, cast a hostile, accusatory glare at Bert. The gang tramped off down the ramp to the floating dock, which wobbled erratically, threatening to spill a child into the frigid water.

Bert stood from the bench, leaned over the railing, and shouted out in a craggy voice, “You’d better get off the dock, it’s iced up and dangerous”. The children stopped playing and looked up at him quizzically, trying to figure out whether this was a voice that mattered to them. “Where are your parents?”

They judged him as the old man who lived in the decrepit little house on Leifer Lane; there were rumors and such.  “Leave us alone, creep” said Linda, looking to Zack for approval. “Yes, fuck off, you old letch”, scowled Zack in agreement, threatening him with bundled fists and a lewd gesture. The younger kids laughed, and Linda wrapped her arm around Zack’s, staking a claim. She tossed her head, like she was daring Bert on, but he backed off from the railing and sat down. He could hear the smaller kids laughing, jeering, and practicing their cussing.  

The storm door of the General Store squeaked open, and Mabel, the large important woman stepped out onto the stoop, and almost burst the seams of her dress owing to righteous good judgment, “What are you children doing out there on that dock”, she roared with a voice like a foghorn, “get off the dock right now!” she commanded, “and that includes you too, Zack Fournier!” Cowed, the children scampered up the ramp and dispersed into the small town. Mabel turned to face Bert, hands planted on hips, and cried out from across the road, “You should know better, old man, letting these kids mess around on the dock like that! Shame on you!”.

Bert shrunk deep into his jacket, and deeper into his shame. He reached for the hockey puck and squeezed so hard that his knuckle-joints ached. This woman had him dead to rights. The storm shutter slammed on its hinge.  

“Shame on you”, mimicked Zack, reappearing with Linda in tow from the direction of School Lane.

Shame clung to Bert like a curse, diminished him, isolated him, made his skin crawl when nobody was around.  Shame and regret were his constant companions for more than fifty years. The puck weighed heavy in his pocket.

+++

Being the oldest of the small gang, Mrs. Sorensen detained twelve-year-old Bert on the porch whilst the other four boys - Brent and Erik Sorensen, big Laird, and "Mercury" Eddy - bundled off ahead with hockey sticks and strap-on skates. “You are in charge. Do not get too close to the Beacon because the ice is thinner near the south shore”, she said, her pale blue eyes piercing through him, "do you understand?" Bert nodded with a precocious sincerity. She released him from her grasp, and he ran off after the other boys with a great sense of urgency; the precious puck was in his pocket, without which the "infinite hockey" game could not begin.

The boys launched across the pack ice; the sun was shining in a clear blue sky, and it was so bright that Bert squinted hard to see his companions as they flew on ahead, fearlessly tripping on bumps and stumbling across fissures, and laughing as they fell and spun across the blue-white ice, bouncing up and racing off again with no particular plan, just to go as far and as fast as they dare, the puck flying back and forth, infinite hockey until exhausted. With a flick of the wrist Bert slapped the puck, and it shot like a bullet across the ice, to be hotly pursued by the other boys, but Bert hung back, a vague weighty feeling on his chest when he realized what he had done.  The puck bumped to a halt, out near the Beacon.

Agitated by the arrival of the boys, the ice cracked smartly along a hidden fault, calving a free-floating plate with the four boys standing upon it: Laird, Mercury and the Sorensen twins.  They laughed at their predicament, at first a hangover from the game, then they laughed with bravado as the gap widened, and then suddenly the laughter ceased as they sensed they might become stranded. Mercury's small face looked serious with resolve, “We’d better run for it!” he shouted, and the four boys skated like furies to bridge the gap before it got too wide.

“Stop!” shouted Bert, afraid that they might plunge into the gap, into the frazil, treacherous water, “Stop!”

The four boys skidded to an abrupt halt, spraying up ice chips. The gap widened, and they stood with their hands on their hips like old men, fascinated by the magnitude of the forces beneath their feet, enthralled as if witnessing the birth of a new continent. “Now what do we do?” said Laird. It was an interesting puzzle. The gap was now too wide to leap across. Mercury threw the puck across the chasm, “just in case”. Bert caught the rubber disc and slipped it into his pocket. 

The ice floe began to slowly rotate in the ocean current, and the stranded boys cautiously walked its circumference, close to the edge, as close to Bert as they could get, debating what to do next, but as they walked, the distance increased, and as they raised their voices, their alarm became contagious.

“I’m going to go get some help”, shouted Bert.

“Wait, don’t leave us, Bert!” pleaded Mercury, receding.

Bert stood still and watched as his marooned friends disappeared out into the bay on the spinning disk of ice, which seemed huge and substantial up close, but which looked neither big enough, nor stable enough to carry them to safety when set against the backdrop of the distant archipelago, beneath the stark, unsympathetic sky, and in the rougher water of the perilous bay. The boys were screaming, pleading, but their cries diminished into silence, and then they disappeared into a shimmering haze on the horizon, out in the open Atlantic.

+++

Bert was distracted by a commotion down at the waterfront. The children had reassembled on the dock, smoking cigarettes, throwing rocks and litter into the water.

“Stop that now”, shouted Bert, but they ignored him, laughed at him again. “You must stop, get off the dock or I will tell your mothers!” More rounds of laughter and someone said “Shame on you” in a cartoon voice.

Bert walked unsteadily down the hinged ramp to the floating dock were the children backed off from him, pretending fear. “Hold me back! Hold me back!”, shouted bully-boy Zack, leaning into the huddle of children, who giggled uncontrollably at this comedic act. But at the back of the group, squeezed of space, Zack’s girlfriend, Linda, tripped on a cleat, and toppled backwards into the water with a splash. The children laughed at the pantomime turned circus, but then fell silent when they saw that she was struggling in the murk, weighed down by her heavy clothing. Floundering, desperate, she slid beneath the water, her eyes wide in shock and horror.

Unthinking, Bert fumbled uselessly at his jacket zipper, but there was no time to waste, not this time. He pushed the children aside and plunged feet first into the water.

The elemental change was stunning, the chill a thousand needles pressed into his skin, the shock of which purged the breath from his lungs and momentarily paralyzed him in gleamless submarine suspense. He was disoriented and powerless, but there – ahead of him in the green gloom – the girl clawed uselessly in the liquid hell.

Finding traction in muddy sediment, Bert scrambled forward, he grasped Linda around the waist and hoist her toward shore, toward the outstretched and reaching hands up above. His lungs were screaming, his knotted heart about to burst, and in one last act of desperation, he heaved the flailing girl upwards, and with his final breath screamed “Jump!” into the turbid soup, and Linda emerged from the water like a breaching fish, where she was grabbed by the wrists and pulled to the safety of the floating dock.

“Jump!” shouted the Sorensen boys, sun glinting on the ice.

“Jump!” shouted Mercury and Laird in tuneful unison, which set them into fits of laughter.  

Bert leaped across the impossible gap, landing sideways on the ice floe, and he slid helplessly into the clump of boys, banging into their shins, knocking them over like bowling pins. They tumbled into a joyous heap on the ice, arms, legs, hockey sticks everywhere.  

Mercury, grinning like a fool, was the first to catch his breath, “Do you still have the puck?”, he gasped, urgent expectation in his wide eyes.

Bert removed the puck from his pocket, held it aloft like a prize, and the five boys cheered at their good fortune.