Write me a Letter

rosy from the cold and she was wearing what looked like a new woolly hat, in the same colors as my drinking buddy’s.
    ”Where?”
    ”Ha-ha! You’ll find out. So we follow this guy,” she said, ”down into the depths of the metro or whatever it’s called, man, it’s neat down there, and warm, and clean, there’s no graffiti anywhere.”
    ”Shu!” I said. ”Not so loud, that juvenile delinquent posing as a bellhop might hear you.”
    ”We even get in the same car as him, it’s crowded, he doesn’t have a clue we’re there. So we get out when he does and walk along St. Catherine Street and guess where he goes?”
    ”Into a bar,” I said.
    ”Into the Forum,” Marlon said.
    ”Aha,” I said. ”Last time I heard, the score was still lions, six, Christians, nothing.”
    ”Not that Forum, stoopid,” Sara said. ”The one they play hockey in. So I buy this,” referring to the hat, ”staying out of the way, and I woulda got you one but they didn’t have one big enough, and George lines up behind the guy and gets us tickets too. They’re way up top somewhere but George says he was lucky to get even them. So that’s where we’re going tonight, if it’s public enough for you, to watch the Montreal Canadiens play who?”
    ”Washington Capitals,” Marlon said.
    ”Did you know those damned Canucks once marched south and burned Washington ?” I remarked casually.
    ”Probably started with his teeth,” Willing Boy said. ”Everyone knows they were made of wood.”
    That’s all I needed, Brando branching out into comedy.

10

    It was the end of the first period. Les Canadiens, also known as Les Habitants, were leading 2-0 on goals by Carbonneau and Naslund, and the seventeen thousand or so fans in the joint were lapping it up and living it up.
    I was sitting next to the gent we were hoping was William Gince, with the twerp, in her new cap, which was in the Canadien’s team colors, I had figured out by then, on my other side and Willing Boy next to her. The guy who had been sitting on the far side of William had just been chucked out by the Forum fuzz for fighting with the guy behind him after a ten-minute exchange of insults, spilt beer, and the like. Which altercation, however, had been mild compared to the mayhem down on the ice; fortunately the carnage was interrupted from time to time by some fast, furious, and highly skilled ice hockey. I’d never seen a pro game live before although my mom and her best chum, Feeb, who was my apartment landlady and lived below me, used to watch the Los Angeles Kings occasionally when they were in a particularly masochistic mood.
    The teams had just skated off to their dressing rooms to suck orange halves and have their wounds cauterized and munch a few uppers and get their tetanus shots. An invisible organ up somewhere in the gods like us was playing a medley of old-time chansons and a guy on a funny little water wagon was driving from end to end of the rink repairing the ice surface. William took himself up the aisle for a leak or a beer or a smoke or maybe un hot dog; he had a Canadien’s scarf wrapped around his neck and had been enjoying himself thoroughly, shouting, booing, cheering the goals, and screaming at the referee, just like everyone else, including us.
    ”That water cart is a Zamboni,” Willing Boy told me. ”Invented by a dude called Zamboni.” Sara hugged his arm and looked at him like he was Einstein.
    ”You ever play, Marlon?” I asked him.
    He curled his upper lip at me. ‘Are you kidding? Everyone in Canada played. I started in like a peewee league when I was six, then played all through high school, and on the scout team. A lean ’n’ mean left winger, I was.”
    ”I’m surprised you still got any teeth left at all,” I said.
    ”Oh, I’ve got the full complement,” he said. ‘And they’re all mine, too, I paid for them. Or at least Mom did.” He showed me most of them in a dazzling grin.
    ”I knew they were too good to be true,” I said, catching sight of our quarry who was making his way carefully back down the aisle, a large paper cup in each hand. As soon as he’d sat down again and had taken a long swig, I put on my most dazzling grin, leaned toward him, and said, ”Mr. William Gince, by any chance?” He jumped a foot in the air, which wasn’t bad from a sitting start, spilling some beer on the shoulder of the man in front of him, who luckily didn’t notice. I put one outsize mitt reassuringly on his arm and