The Puck Moved Easily
July 18, 2010, by Homme De Sept-Iles
excerpt from ongoing short story
The puck moved easily.
I’d read about Jean Béliveau, Bobby Hull, how they were on the ice. Bobby Orr. That whole farm guy myth. I knew from experience that up close, all the greats – well, even the averages – were much faster, were more skilled.
You can’t see the head fakes, for one. Not on TV. The eye fakes. The suggestions of movement that come from twitching equipment under a jersey.
On this ice, there was only Paul and the morning sun. And the puck made easy by Sherwood. I watched.
To stride on a large, frozen body like this one is to stride small. The lake opens away from the shore, widens and becomes the horizon. The sky rises like an ocean. Most of us preferred to skate facing the shore in some way. Not all that grey ice and sky.
That’s if you’re alone.
If we’re playing shinny, it’s easier. You can concentrate on the game.
If you grow up in the city or made your living from the town in some way, that’s how you skated on that lake. You didn’t face the everything and the nothing where the ice joins the sky. It’s bad enough to know you’re going to die (one day, just like everyone else) why dwell on it?
But Paul Ellis, the town’s big dream, skated to and fro and didn’t think which way the sky and shore might point.
I watched him ladle and turn. He was in his sixties now but he was the best player this town had ever seen.
That day was a summer moment in winter. The clouds were up but infrequent. The sky was bigger than usual.
The ice was an ugly, bright glaze. Saran wrap in the sun. I preferred the overcast and colder winter days. The ice looks whiter, the cold isn’t as pointy. I watched for as long as I could take the glare and then I left.
He was big, he was strong – he wore a checked flannel shirt – he reminded me of Paul Bunyan – or what I thought Paul Bunyan might or should look like. The shirt was blue.
I’d known Ellis a long time; grew up in the same town. Not that we were friends. It was a small town. Everyone knew him. He might have known my name. One of those “You Kevin?” “No, it’s Ken” kind of things. I wasn’t the important one, anyway.
He said some folks called him Ranger when he was growing up.
That was his team.
The formula for failure is many-fold. The recipe for success fills half an index-card. Nobility is boring. I knew all that. And maybe some part of that functioned as my lens – because it was the incompleteness of Paul Ellis’ story that appealed to me the most.
He was Marcus Dupree, the enigmatic physical phenom who never made out of his home state to play in the NFL. He was Michel Briere who died in a car crash just starting his career and had his number retired by the Pittsburgh Penguins. Or he was Todd Marinovich; the kid whose dad tied his right arm behind his back so the son could one day play leftie quarterback in the bigs.
He was none of these guys, really. I just wondered about him a lot and especially why he never punched his own ticket to play in the big show.
I don’t think he liked to lie. I think, maybe, he only lied when he had to like when someone’s life was at stake. Or maybe just someone’s feelings. People don’t really die around here. It’s just a figure of speech.
I think he was lying about the corn, about Nebraska. Really, who plays hockey in Nebraska?
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