The Code by Gare Joyce Page A

sense.
    At the end of the service, I repaired to the scouts’ room, where someone in the team office had thoughtfully placed a few boxes of doughnuts and a couple of stone-cold pizzas to soak up the beer that was on ice in a garbage can in the corner. “Just the way the Ol’ Redhead would have wanted it … if they could take the battery out of the smoke alarm,” Double J noted upon entry.
    I braced the broadcast play-by-play guy for a bit of factfinding. Woody McMullin had been the Voice at Radio Free Peterborough since Year Two of King Red’s Reign over the bucolic principality. McMullin had career ambitions of bigger arenas and more dough beaten out of him long ago when he sent out tapes to Toronto stations and never got a reply. Understandably, because he had no gift for his chosen occupation—he managed to sing the game out of tune and out of rhythm and frequently couldn’t remember the lyrics. He did know hockey, though. He was an assistant coach with the best Peterborough triple-A bantam teams and maybe would have been the head coach and moved up the food chain if he didn’t have to spend all his weekends on the job and half of them on the road.
    â€œHow are the kids taking all this?” I asked as an icebreaker appropriate to the moment.
    â€œAbout how you’d expect. They don’t know what happened and what’s next. The ones that you’d expect are pretty messed up. Others hear from their parents that this is finally their chance to get to play …”
    Oh yeah, there was going to be some of that for sure. The Moulder of Men had been the Nemesis of Many Supposedly Stifled Stars, at least to the minds of their parents.
    â€œâ€¦ and for the Russian kid it’s a vacation,” Woody said.
    â€œSo long as the cheque clears, he gives you what he has to,” I told him.
    â€œYeah, I guess showing up to the service and the funeral isn’t in the deal they did with the KGB to get him over here. It wasn’t Red’s idea to bring Markov in. He was never big on Euros, y’know …”
    â€œShit, he never could figure out how Canada didn’t sweep eight games of the Summit Series.”Woody, who worked road games without a colour guy, was used to pausing only for commercials. “… and he didn’t like Markov even one little bit. The kid hadn’t even played a game and he was bitchin’ that he was promised an apartment and a car. He doesn’t score a goal in the first month but he’s always got his hand out, right in the dressing room, before the game. After the first bag skate the kid packed his bags. I guess he packed them again.”
    â€œHe’s quitting?”
    â€œWell he ain’t here. AWOL. Mays said he didn’t make it home after the old-timers game. Mays said Markov got a call on his cell during the game—Markov told him that it was his agent and he had to go and that he’d meet him back at the billet’s later.”
    â€œDoes the kid speak English or Mays Russian?”
    â€œMarkov’s English is pretty good. Found out fast that it’s hard to get laid and impossible to order drinks if you don’t speak the language.”
    â€œGeez, he’d be the first Russian to like to drink.”
    â€œYeah, they tried to track him down but the trail of empties and cigarette butts finally ran out. Maybe he thinks ‘Coach die, season over.’”
    It was all an interesting if not completely unexpected subtext. Mays’s outreach, like Markov was an exchange student, was pretty much for naught. It’s hard to get with the program if you don’t understand it and weren’t raised in the culture. I didn’t have any particular interest in Markov, a good skater but too selfish for me. I wanted to know about Mays’s game, his bout with mono, and especially his shoulder. Woody gave me the season-in-review, though with a mouthful of maple