The Code Read Online Free Page B

I’d pay for hockey entertainment like that. For me, it’s like watching the war from a Swiss mountaintop.
    As for the other crap that goes with old-timers games, well, I’m up for shaking the hands of people I’ll never see again and signing autographs for kids who have no idea who I am. I’m game to meet people who might help me in my working days at the arenas. I’m not a people person but I can fake it.
    It’s easier for me to get out to these games than it is for a lot of guys. I’m not bound by family. My girlfriend, Sandy, is no ingenue. Hitting forty. Married once. Through the wringer variously. Scrapbooks that haven’t been opened for years. Kids nearly grown. Spooked. We’re meant for each other. She accepts me for who I am precisely because she sees all that when she looks in the bathroom mirror.
    Sandy signs off on my taking a few nights over the course of the winter because she wants me to feel young for a little bit and she can use a girls’ night too. She also knows that, on the next opportunity, the make-good is her choice of dinner, her choice of movie. Yup, she’ll trade a night away from me for future considerations.
    Reliable, relatively unencumbered, and absolutely incapable of commanding a dollar for an appearance: That’s why I’m on a list of numbers to call if the league alumni group needs aspare body or two to fill out a roster on short notice in Ontario. That’s how I ended up in a dressing room in Peterborough on a Wednesday night in March, surrounded by a lot of guys who are famous names and regulars on the old-timers circuit.

5
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    I was the last of the old-timers to make it to the arena that night. The others had all landed in P’boro the day before and been put up at the best joint in town so they could sit at the head table of a sports celebrity rubber-chicken shakedown, uh, I mean, fundraiser. They were already dressed and waiting to lace up when I was pulling into the parking lot and getting my bag and sticks out of the trunk.
    I scanned the lot for Norm Pembleton, the veteran GM from the London juniors who was the honorary coach of the all-stars and me. I wanted to at least introduce myself, maybe work him up as a source. He had one draft-eligible kid who was a mild prospect-of-interest to me.
    I figured Pembleton would be outside chain-smoking in advance of three twenty-minute withdrawal sessions. Sure enough, I spotted him in an undesignated smoking area, ankledeep in the butts of unfiltered Exports. He stamped out a bare stub and before lighting another took a long hit from a silver flask.
    Just hours before, he’d been in a hearing with the league’s commissioner. This had become an almost weekly meeting. Pembleton had been involved in several incidents this season. After a disallowed goal he’d emptied a stick rack onto the ice and would have gone over the boards and after the refs if he hadn’t been restrained by one of his players. That was eight games. He’d grabbed a player by the neck at a practice. Six more. In the most recent brouhaha, Pembleton had narrowly avoided suspension for a profane and slightly physical encounter with a fan in a hallway at the London arena. By the most believable eyewitness account, the fan had slandered Mrs. Pembleton and then spat on this coach.
    The latest episode was just another reason to restart the debate about Pembleton’s fitness to coach teenagers, a debate that played out in newspaper columns, on talk radio, and across panels in television studios. His judges and juries were guys who’d never darkened the door of a junior hockey arena. The highest and mightiest said he should be booted out for life for the next merest transgression. I thought that was extreme, and I’d bet his players would too. I’d rather have the Mean Old Bastard Who Knew Hockey as my coach than A Builder of Character Who Couldn’t Match Lines.
    I was about to wave or