Free The Uninvited Guest by John Degen Page A

toward the mountain, the city lay itself before him in a blanket of shimmering lights. A warm breeze came through the screen and with it, the sound of female laughter from the street below. Tony lay down on the bed and let his hand brush against the polished chrome nameplates. He read the name Lanny MacDonald. He ran his thumb along the word Calgary. He listened to the city that truly owned the Cup, and fell asleep touching it. Seventy-seven.
    Tony had all the right scars in all the right places to be a professional hockey player. At seven, playing pickup at Riverdale Park he took a puck off his right cheekbone and crumpled to the ice in a classic pose, blood pouring from his face, pooling black-red beneath him. The emergency room doctor put thirteen stitches into him, joked about his black eye and told him to rub vitamin E oil into the wound once it closed, to decrease the scarring. His mother showed him how to squeeze the oil from vitamin capsules, and once the wound closed Tony diligently flushed one capsule each night, making sure none of the oil came anywhere near his scar.
    Three years later at an opponent’s elbow, he lost a tooth he had only just grown and had to be fitted for a tiny upper plate. A white ravine ran through the black hairs of his left eyebrow, the result of a high stick at shinny. Another scar, on his upper lip, from too forceful a punch with a frozen glove when he was twelve, meant later in life he would never be able to wear a moustache as the whiskers would not fill in properly over the dead white tissue.
    Tony played hockey in every season, as a kid rising rapidly through the levels of the organized sport in winter and captaining his own teams on the concrete rinks of summer. He surprised coach after coach by volunteering immediately to play defence. Every year Tony stood alone at the sideboards, the only defender until other failed forwards were assigned to join him. No one except Tony volunteered to play defence. As in all sports, the stars of the game are the front men, the goal-scorers, but Tony viewed defencemen as specialists, players who made it their business to be better than the front men, to stop the goal-scorers.
    If not more glamorous, then certainly more noble, Tony’s Cup-winning dreams were low-scoring. He was the guy who lay down in front of a slapshot and took the puck in the ribs for the team. The guy who muscled superstars away from the net and absorbed all their anger and ambition. Protector of the goalie, owner of the blue line, Tony wanted every game to end 1-0 for his team, in overtime. For any other young player with Tony’s level of skill, choosing defence would have been a brilliant strategy for advancement. A young, talented kid who had already adopted the mature, team-playing mentality of a defensive specialist. A kid who didn’t need to have his goal-scorer ambitions beaten out of him by coaches, teammates and opponents unconvinced of what was being offered, this was someone welcome at the upper levels of the game. As Tony would have been, but for his size.
    â€œYou should have gone into wrestling,” was the parting consolation offered Tony when he was cut from his final team. All his skills and scars in place, Tony had simply not grown the extra four or five inches necessary to stay standing as a defensive specialist staring down forwards his own age. Coaches benched him because they feared he might get seriously injured, and they eventually cut him because they couldn’t stand watching his talents go to waste. He lifted weights to develop his legs and upper body, but in the end it was a matter of physics, height meaning leverage and leverage meaning dominance. In the end, the skinniest lightweight forward could lean down on Tony and take his feet out from underneath him. And with their longer legs, taking three strides to Tony’s five, opposing players beat Tony to the puck again and again.
    By the time he was cut for good, he was