Wingmen are a Girl's Best Friend: Laketown Hockey Read online

  Can a best friend break your heart?

  The answer is yes. Mine did.

  Leo the Lion broke my fucking heart.

  Two

  Leo

  The puck hit the boards so hard it sounded like a gunshot. I skated up the spectator side of the rink, two strides behind where I should’ve been to receive Gunnar’s pass. The guy had the hardest shot in the league and whenever I saw him wind up to do a clapper slap shot, I felt sorry for the goalie in its path.

  I caught up to the runaway puck and stickhandled it exactly twice before Coach blew the whistle.

  “Again,” he shouted.

  I was glad to be facing the score clock because I couldn’t contain my eye roll. The regular season was over. We were in the off-season between playoffs and summer camp, but someone forgot to give Coach the memo.

  Gunnar bumped my arm as he glided past me. “How about you actually try this time,” he growled.

  It took me a couple of backward steps to recover from Gunnar’s body check. He was the most serious player I had ever met, and also the most pompous. Pacey passed the puck to Gunnar, who was at the blue line in seconds, and this time, I was three strides behind. The puck left a black mark on the cheesy Realtors' advertisement and ricocheted across the rink to the other side of the ice before I caught it.

  Coach threw his arms up in exasperation. The buzzer sounded and the team congregated at the bench. “Nope,” Coach shouted. He pointed to the Zamboni driver, Andy, and gave him a cutthroat signal.

  “We’re not leaving this fucking arena until you two can get this play dialed in.”

  “Coach,” Gunnar protested. “I’ve got—” he wasn’t given time to finish his sentence.

  “Somewhere to be?” Coach raised his eyebrows. “Why don’t you tell that to your right-winger?”

  Gunnar narrowed his dark eyes at me.

  Coach took the puck from Pacey and waved the rest of the team off the ice. “You guys go ahead. I’ll take care of this.” He skated past us and skidded to a stop at center ice.

  “Pull yourself together, Lion,” Gunnar grumbled. “I don’t want to be here all night.”

  I didn’t want to be there all night either. The guys were getting together for a potluck and bonfire at Kane Fitzgerald’s cottage, and I was in charge of picking up the keg. I glanced at the time clock. Showing up to the party without the beer would make me a very unpopular guy.

  Coach pursed his lips and shook his head as I skated into position. There was nothing like the prospect of missing a party to light a fire under my ass. Coach blew his whistle and Gunnar, like a robot, skated into position, just like he had done the first three times we had skated the drill. My jersey flapped in the breeze behind me, and as I glanced over my shoulder, I saw Gunnar pass the puck. It hit my stick hard, but I was ready, and my stick absorbed its momentum with the tape. Two aggressive strokes down the ice were all it took to get into position and run the first play: a faked pass back to Gunnar and a tip-in behind the unsuspecting tendy.

  The whistled sounded and I plucked the puck from the net with the blade of my stick.

  “Halle-fuckin-lujah.” Coach raised his hands and shook them at the rafters.

  Gunnar held out his glove and I gave him a fist bump. I glided directly past Coach and reached my arm over the boards to grab the metal bar to open the door.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Coach’s voice echoed through the empty arena.

  The metal bar clanged as I let it go, but I took a breath before turning to face my coach.

  “Again,” Coach shouted.

  The fog from my pissed-off exhalation clouded the plastic eye protector on my helmet. That brown noser, Gunnar, was already in position, his eyes steeled on the empty ice surface. He was probably doing his stupid visualization practice while he waited. I’d never met a player more serious than Gunnar Lockwood. He had some natural skill, but unlike some of the truly gifted players, like Gretzky, or Dylan Moss, Gunnar was where he was because he worked harder than a Clydesdale on a Budweiser commercial.

  Three out of the next five drills were a success and when Coach finally dismissed us, I flew off the ice. As I was rushing out of the rink, my hair still soaking wet from the shower, Coach yelled my name from his office. I paused at the open doorway.

  “Yes, Coach?” Even though I was pissed at him for making me stay after practice, I respected the man. I wanted to pretend I didn’t hear him and ensure that the keg was at Fitzy’s place in the next thirty minutes, but I didn’t.

  “You know, with some discipline you could go places – other than parties.”

  I had heard this speech a million times before. I had gotten this far in my career on natural ability alone. Sure, some of my teammates had been scouted to the National League before me. Fitzy, Brodie Bishop, Tanner Townsend, and soon, I would probably add Gunnar Lockwood to the list. “But that wouldn’t be as fun.” I grinned.

  Coach shook his head. “Have fun tonight, Leo.”

  “Always do Coach, always do.” I slapped the concrete wall beside Coach’s door and my hockey bag bounced against my back as I ran to my old Toyota pickup truck. The exhaust growled as I started it up, smoke belching out the tailpipe as I gave it a shot of gas. The truck sputtered and I jabbed at the gas pedal with my foot, my flip flop slapping my heel as I tried to stop the old beater from stalling.

  The truck practically wheezed out a death rattle before everything around me went silent.

  “Nooooo.” I rested my head on the steering wheel and turned the key. The truck made a sound like a dog in heat but didn’t start up again. I slapped the wheel. “Fuck,” I whispered under my breath. Then I slapped the wheel harder, only this time my fuck wasn’t a whisper, it was a scream.

  “Need some help?”

  Lockwood was at the open passenger window. The crank had broken at the end of winter, and it sat jauntily open on an angle.

  “I think it’s the alternator.” I had no idea what an alternator did, but I’d heard my buddies talk about them.

  Gunnar shrugged. He wiggled the window in its casing. “This thing looks like it should be condemned.”

  He was right, but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t have the money to buy a new bicycle, let alone a new truck. “What? She only has three hundred thousand miles on her. She’s just a baby.” As I patted the cracked dashboard the volume button for the radio fell off, bounced off the seat, and disappeared into the sea of discarded coffee cups on the floor.

  He snort-laughed and shook his head at the same time. “Well, your baby looks like she could use a tow. I can give you a ride, but I have to make a stop first.”

  A glance at my watch told me that I needed to get moving. “Can you make that two stops? There’s a keg with the Otters’ name on it, all ready to be tapped.”

  Gunnar rolled his eyes. He came to the team parties, but he never drank. I was convinced that if you cut Gunnar Lockwood open, you would find steel and wire where bones and ligaments should be. Sure, he smiled when he scored a goal, but it never looked like he was really feeling anything. Dylan joked about Gunnar being a serial killer who was hiding out in Laketown. Only Dylan could get away with saying something as absurd as that. The team clown and number two goal scorer could charm the skirt off any figure skater, or score free beer from any bartender. And he did it all with his trademark grin. Looking at Gunnar Lockwood right now, his gray eyes steeled on mine as he waited for a response, I wondered if Dylan wasn’t too far off comparing Lockwood to Hannibal Lector.

  “Get moving.” Lockwood didn’t answer my question. He tapped the wobbly window, turned and walked away.

  He was waiting in his car while I tried to wiggle the key out of the ignition, but no matter how aggressively or tenderly I jiggled it, I couldn’t coax the key from the steering column. “Fuck it.” I got out of the car and slammed the door. I couldn’t lock the doors with the keys inside, but unless a thief was also a mechanic, there was no way the truck was moving from th
is parking spot tonight — or maybe ever.

  My hockey equipment though was irreplaceable. I grabbed the bag and ran over to Lockwood’s ancient ride. “Sweet car.” I eased into the plush leather passenger seat and tossed my bag into the huge back seat. “Your grandma didn’t need it tonight?”

  Gunnar turned the key and the car roared to life. He pressed on the accelerator a couple of times and the merlot-colored car roared and shook. “Grandma likes a V8.” He put the car into drive and my head slammed against the headrest as we peeled out of the parking lot, two strips of burned rubber behind us as we fishtailed onto the street in a cloud of dust and smoke.

  “Whoa,” I whispered.

  Gunnar raised his eyebrow at me. “I like my cars like I like my women.”

  I had never heard Gunnar talk about anything other than hockey, so with cars and women in the same sentence, I felt like I was listening to my linesman speak a foreign language. “Big and comfortable?” I stretched my legs out and leaned my elbow on the leather door.

  “Understated and powerful.”

  That wasn’t what I was expecting. “I don’t even know what that means, dude.”

  “It means not like any of the women I’ve met in this town.” He pulled the car into the parking lot of the cold wine and beer store, the only one in town, and popped the trunk. “There should be plenty of room for your keg.” I hoped he didn’t notice my eyes bug out of my head when I saw that there was a tarp covering something…big in the cavernous trunk. If there was ever a murder trunk, I was looking at it.

  Back on the road, with the keg safely nestled in the corner of the trunk beside the mystery tarp, I realized that we had been driving in silence. I turned on the radio, the distinctive guitar from one of AC/DC’s songs rang through the speakers. I went to turn it up, but Gunnar’s hand beat me to it. Instead of cranking the volume, he pushed the button off. The cabin of the car went completely silent.

  “I’ve heard that song too many times in my life.”

  It was true. They played it at practically every game. “It is a touch overplayed,” I agreed. I reached for my phone. “I could put on something. Have you got Bluetooth in this boat?”

  “I don’t like music.” Gunnar gave an ambivalent shrug.

  “Like, any?” The guy was getting weirder and weirder with every passing minute.

  “Not really. I listen to motivational speakers, or games. I prefer listening to games on the radio, rather than watching them on tv.”

  “Me too,” I sighed. Finally, some common ground. “I’ll turn the game on the tv with no volume and listen to the commentators on the radio.”

  The icy smile was back and was as unnerving as ever. “I didn’t think anyone else did that. It’s the best way to experience hockey. You should come to my house when the season starts. We can watch a game.”

  “Sure.” I nodded, knowing there was no way in hell I was going to Gunnar’s musicless house to not drink beer and watch hockey. No thanks. I’d rather stay home and watch the game with my mom — at least she kept beer in the fridge. “Where are we going?”

  “I have to take care of something.” Gunnar looked ahead; the focused serial killer face had returned.

  “O-kay.” I looked out the window. The sun had just set, leaving behind candy floss clouds. Laketown was my hometown, and even though I’d grown up here, I never got tired of the sunsets. Some nights Mother Nature seemed to set the sky on fire, and after years of playing hockey and waking up with the sun, I’d come to appreciate her dawn show almost as much.

  Gunnar turned into the industrial plaza and we passed rows of faded blue storage units with rust-colored doors. Gunnar had gone from a hockey jock to a creepy, should own a windowless van, kind of dude. We pulled up to a fenced-in compound and the metal screeched as Gunnar pulled the gate open, then shut it behind us after we drove into the yard.

  “What is this place?” I had lived in Laketown my entire life and didn’t know this building existed.

  The Cadillac’s tires crunched on the gravel as Gunnar pulled up to the nondescript boxy blue building. “It’s where they keep the bad dogs.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s the Bad Dog House.” Gunnar got out of the car and I stared at him, hoping he’d turn around and start to make some sense. But he didn’t.

  “Are you going to help me or what?” Gunnar shouted from the back of the car.

  I shook my head, wondering if I should text someone my location, and then changed my mind and got out of the car, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded — the land yacht practically scraped the ground. I heaved myself out the door and held my breath as I rounded the back of the car. Gunnar had pulled the tarp back and was grunting as he tried to lift whatever it was, out of the trunk. “Here.” He handed the giant heavy bag to me. A pair of eyes were staring directly into my soul from the front of the bag. Droopy Saint Bernard eyes.

  “Is this dog food?” I shifted the heavy bag in my arms, wondering how anyone who didn’t work out five times a week could even lift it.

  Gunnar grunted as he pulled out not just one, but two bags, his arms wrapped around the Saint Bernard’s crinkled face. “What did you think it was?”

  He didn’t give me the chance to respond, and instead walked past me to the rear of the house. As he punched a code into the door, the building came alive with howling and barking. The only animal shelter I knew of was on the outskirts of town, subsidized by the state. As I followed Gunnar past the rows of cages, some dogs sat and stared me down, while others lunged at their doors, wild-eyed, with drool falling from their snarling lips.

  Gunnar opened a storage room and set down the bags on a shelf. I followed suit and brushed off my hands. “How many more bags are there?” I asked.

  “Just three,” Gunnar replied.

  We returned to the car to retrieve the last three bags. I wasn’t going to let Gunnar show me up, so I reached in front of him and tried not to let my knees buckle as I heaved the second bag into my arms. I was a fast player—a forward, not an enforcer. I didn’t need to be huge, I needed to be fast. Gunnar somehow managed to be both–big and fast.

  I heard him chuckle as he followed me into the house of rabid dogs on our second trip. The dogs had somewhat settled, but I still jumped when a giant rottweiler lunged at the chain-link door.

  “Easy, Phil,” Gunnar cooed.

  The dog tilted its ginormous head and stopped barking, but I could feel his eyes following me.

  With the bags in the storage room, Gunnar closed the door. “Thanks, Leo. That made it a lot faster.”

  “No problem, buddy. You weren’t kidding when you said this place was full of bad dogs.”

  Gunnar glanced to the linoleum floor. “I shouldn’t have said that. There is no such thing as a bad dog.”

  As if on cue, a giant brown dog started to growl behind me. A guttural, I’m-going-to-rip-your-face-off growl. “What about that one?” I pointed to the biggest dog in the place.

  “That’s Moofie,” Gunnar laughed. “He’s a big sweetheart.”

  Gunnar stuck his fingers into the cage and the big bad dog licked his hand. “See you tomorrow, Moofie,” Gunnar whispered to the dog. Moofie sat down on his haunches and started to wag his tail as if he knew what Gunnar was saying.

  “How did you do that?” I asked.

  “Do what?” Gunnar wiped his hands on his jeans.

  “Talk to that dog like that.” I pointed to the beast and his eyes flashed at me.

  I jumped as he barked again, the bass from his voice seeming to rattle all the cages in the building.

  “He likes you,” Gunnar laughed. I glanced back at the devil dog, but he looked softer. As he laid down on the threadbare towel in his kennel, I could have sworn he sighed.

  I wiped a surprise tear from my eye as Gunnar pushed the button to lock up the building. “I think someone was cutting onions in there.” My voice cracked.

  “It’s sad.” Gunnar nodded. “But I’ve been volunteering here
for months now. The rescue organization does good work. A lot of those dogs would be euthanized if they were sent anywhere else.”

  We were back at the car and when I slid into the seat, I no longer felt like I was sitting next to a possible psychopath, but one of the most interesting people I’d met in a long time. He didn’t care that he didn’t fit in. And I respected that. “What do you do here?”

  “I walk the dogs.” Gunnar put the car into reverse and when we got to the main gate, I opened the door.

  “I’ll get the gate.” I opened and closed the gate once Gunnar had driven through, and settled back in. “Have you ever been bitten?”

  Gunnar paused. “Not really. Once you learn how to approach them, they start to respect you. They’re simply scared–a lot of them have come from situations that you couldn’t even imagine.”

  The lights on the storage units shone brightly and since we’d been in the Bad Dog House, twilight had settled in. If we weren’t being blinded by industrial spotlights, the first stars would’ve begun to make their appearance.

  “What about that big one? Moofie?”

  Gunnar pursed his lips and nodded. “He was bought to be a guard dog for a gang.”

  “How did he end up here?”

  “He bit someone.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. I furrowed my brow at Gunnar. “Um. Isn’t that exactly what a drug dealer would want? A mean-ass, bitey dog?”

  Gunnar chuckled and shook his head at the same time. “Yeah, but they usually want the dog to bite the other guys, not the owner. The dog was dropped off at a high kill shelter in the middle of the night by a known drug dealer’s lackey. He had been beaten pretty badly, and I’m surprised that they didn’t just kill him, or send him off to some dogfighting ring.”

  The car’s tires hummed as we drove along the paved road. “I had a dog growing up, a mutt named Bogs. I can’t imagine someone being so cruel to an animal.”