The Uninvited Guest. John Degen
there was to win in hockey, and Stan and Tony, employees of the game, were being paid to keep track of the hoopla. It was rare for Tony to accompany Stan on one of his business trips. Usually he took care of things back at the office in Toronto while Stan was on the road, but Stan was getting old, had pulled something in his arm on a trip overseas and needed help with the lifting.
“You think you’re gonna see shit like that coming. You think something big enough to knock you right out of your life and into something new is going to make some noise on its way in. But it can happen like that. I tell myself it took two seconds to change my life, but that’s just what the clock showed. When she changed her mind, whenever that was, it probably happened in no time at all.”
They camped together once: Stan, his wife Louise, their friend James Cole and the woman James had been seeing for years, Janice Barber. They rented two canoes at an outfitter just inside Algonquin Park and set out across a wide, choppy lake for three days of tenting. Janice Barber always looked like she might go off and read a book at any moment. She paddled a canoe like the job might be washing dishes, like she intended to keep going until there weren’t any more dishes in the sink. When spoken to, about almost anything, she said things like, “Is that so?”, “I’m sure I didn’t know that,” and “Tell me more.” In this way, she was the perfect companion for James Cole who was most content being listened to. Stan and Louise laughed quietly at the one-sided conversation in the other canoe while the four of them paddled slowly toward their campsite.
Jim’s voice bounced off rock faces and came back at them from across the lake. Janice’s short replies were lost in a breeze. None of them camped very often, and Stan could not remember why any of them had thought it might be a good idea for a vacation, the four of them, in one large tent, between a vast, dumb forest and a sullen lake. Midway through the second day, they found they would not have enough food for both dinner that evening and breakfast the next day. Stan set himself to canoeing back to the out- fitter for cans of spaghetti. Just as he launched, Janice spoke her intention to join him. He sat, holding the canoe steady while she waded out and climbed aboard.
“Now don’t go and get yourself lost on purpose,” Jim shouted from shore.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Janice, too softly almost for Stan to hear.
They spoke in small clusters of words, not ever managing a full sentence on either leg of the trip. Janice said “a loon, there,” and Stan replied “watch, chop.” She wore a one- piece bathing suit cut squarish and low across the back. Stan watched her shoulder blades flex in and out with each stroke. As the paddle dug into the water, her suit would list away from the skin at her ribs and he would see the side of a breast, whiter than the rest of her.
“You know,” Stan leans into Tony and drops his voice below the murmur of the party behind them, “even, what, over thirty years later I can remember the sight of that pretty young girl’s breast, just the side of it, coming into view over and over again while she paddled. It’s the kind of memory that makes a long train ride a bit more bearable.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Tony said.
In the outfitter’s shop, they worked opposite sections, Stan gathering the necessaries plus a few snack treats (potato chips, licorice, marshmallows for the fire), and Janice browsing the spinning rack of paperbacks, touching each spine as they glided by.
On the way back, they stayed close to the shore to avoid a building wind. It was less work in the shallows but made for a longer trip than the straight line across the lake they’d taken the day before.
In one small bay, Janice asked to stop and there she slipped over the side of the canoe and swam in clear amber water. Stan stayed seated and watched her. He laid his paddle across the rails behind him, leaned back and smelled the forest. Janice made no noise when her head slipped under or emerged from the water. She swam like an otter, smiling to herself about the pleasure of it.
They slipped back into their campsite around a jut of rocks and dwarfish trees.
“Fish, there,” Janice said, and Stan looked on shore to see three small rock bass, red-eyed and lifeless beside a four-inch hunting blade jammed into the soil.
“James has been killing things again,” she said.
Past the fish was an emptiness, immediately unsettling, like there wasn’t still a tent just in the trees and gear all around; like it was just wind through underbrush. The yellow front flap of the tent breathed in and out, slowly and soundlessly. Stan watched the flap and, as they came ashore, he spotted a leg. Louise lay on her back, sleeping on the mattress of blankets and clothes spread across the tent floor. She snored lightly, and her hand lay limp across her chest. She was in her bikini. Her hair lay in wet ringlets on the pillow.
“I could do the same,” said Janice, softly.
Using a log as a tabletop, Stan cut the heads off each fish, sliced them from tail to throat and removed the stomach sacks. He scaled them with the back of the blade and wrapped the meat in the largest leaves he could find. Then he buried the three little packages in the firepit, beneath the ashy, grey coals.
“There’s still enough heat there,” he said to no one. He covered the discarded scales, heads and tails with soil, thinking about bears.
Jim walked back into camp twenty minutes later. He walked directly to Janice and flung his arms at her waist in an attacking hug.
“I started out to get wood for the fire, but just kept going,” he said. “There’s people camping all around us, and it turns out we could have walked to this site if we wanted to. There’s a path that cuts through about two hundred yards that-a-way.”
His face and arms showed scratches from the brush, and his shirt was stained with sweat.
“I met some of our neighbours, but they didn’t meet me—if you know what I mean.”
“Everything’s an espionage with James,” Janice laughed. She screeched as Jim picked her up and carried her into the lake.
“And now, back to the underwater headquarters,” he screamed, falling forward so both of them slapped into the water, all arms and legs and gasping.
“He’s unstoppable, that man,” Louise giggled.
Stan’s young wife sat in the doorway of the tent, rubbing her fists against her temples, massaging herself awake. She looked at Stan and smiled tiredly.
That night, the four friends ate warmed spaghetti straight from the cans. Jim laughed loudly all evening, and made them all laugh many more times. The next morning they packed up and made their way back to the city.
“And I’ll be damned if I didn’t forget about those fish I put in the fire.” Stan tapped the coaster in front of him with his empty glass, indicating to the young woman behind the bar the spot where his next beer should go. “Those three little fish were killed for no reason at all.”
“What ever became of Janice Barber?” Tony asked. “You know, after the ’51 series?”
“Well, I guess if I knew that I might not be sitting here with you, my boy.”
“And wouldn’t that be a shame?” Tony laughed.
“Wouldn’t that be a goddamn shame.”
Three
Stan did not get back to his house until after seven the next morning, almost nine hours after the two seconds that changed everything. Unsmiling, black-suited League officials had hidden him away in the Toronto general manager’s office until well past midnight when all the newspapermen had finally given up and left the building to make their deadlines.
Among those in charge of running hockey, the incident remained unspoken of, something to be denied again and again, laughed off as ridiculous. Stan understood to keep his mouth shut while he was whisked away from the ice surface after the final whistle. A cluster of men hurried him through the inner corridors of the arena to the room furthest from inquiring