Finnie Walsh by Steven Galloway
The next eldest son, Gerry, was involved in a drunken highspeed chase with police through the streets of Toronto, where he had been attending university. Roger had pulled some strings with his alma mater to get Gerry admitted and even more to keep him enrolled after two disastrous years, but this time there was nothing he could do. Gerry was at home now, having broken both of his legs and his collarbone in the crash that directly followed the chase. He had a court date set in a month’s time.
Kirby, the youngest of Roger Walsh’s sons to remember his mother, had always been the wildest. After graduating from high school, Kirby bought a car and embarked upon a year-long road trip. The family got the occasional postcard, but Kirby never said much. The only real contact Roger had with him was his once-a-month visit to the bank to put money into his account. He could have asked his business manager to do it, but Roger did it himself because it was the best way to keep from forgetting Kirby entirely. Even after Kirby crippled a man in a bar fight in New Orleans, receiving four years in jail for his efforts, Roger went to the bank each month, depositing money into an account that would not be withdrawn from for years to come.
Kirby’s incarceration didn’t surprise Finnie in the least. Of his brothers, Kirby had always been the most vicious. “He’s like some sort of fucked-up, sadistic hobo,” Finnie said when Kirby first left.
“Who?”
“Kirby doesn’t know when to stop. He has never known when to stop.”
“Watch out for Ahab,” I said.
“Ahab nothing. Kirby had better watch out for that whale. The whale wins in the end.”
Finnie was far closer to the members of my family, especially Louise and Sarah, than he was to his own. Having no sisters himself, he treated the girls better than any real brother would have; there was none of the sibling rivalry or petty bickering or ordinary fighting that brothers and sisters are famous for. He set awfully high standards for me and I’ll admit that if either Sarah or Louise had been made to choose, they’d have chosen him every day of the week and they would have been right.
With Sarah, Finnie was very protective, almost mothering. He somehow managed to do this in a manner that didn’t upset her. There were times when Finnie and Sarah reminded me, strange as this may sound, of an old married couple, their relationship rich in secret jokes and sideways glances. I suppose that all of us were like that with Sarah to some extent; it was hard not to be. How could you not love that little yellow girl?
Finnie’s relationship with Louise was different. Finnie had always been the only one of us to know, even to some small degree, what was going on inside her head. Louise was hard to get truly close to, but Finnie broke through.
It was a standard high school bush party. There was a bonfire, sloppy teenage drunkenness, car stereos blasting. Thanks to Finnie’s social status and the fact that I was Louise Woodward’s younger brother, Finnie and I were allowed to attend it even though we were lowly 10th graders.
Finnie and I each drank a couple of beers, both to fit in and because we had quite recently developed a taste for it. We stood around the bonfire watching people drag piece after piece of wood out of the brush and pile it on the already well-fuelled fire. Several times we were forced to talk a drunken Jim Stockdale out of running through it. Both Jim Stockdale and Frank Hawthorne had been held back so they were high school seniors in the envious position of being old enough to buy liquor. Louise was seeing Frank Hawthorne at the time, behind my father’s back of course.
I was beginning to feel a buzz and had just settled in to enjoy it when Jim Stockdale, who couldn’t have feathered one of his picture-perfect passes I remembered so well to save his life, decided that reason was in fact not the better part of valour and made a lunge for the fire. I reacted by tackling him, but he was strong and I had a hell of a time holding him down. Finnie ran off to find Frank Hawthorne.
Jim’s pyrotropic tendencies were a regular occurrence at these bush parties. His house burned down when Jim was four years old and although no one was hurt something screwy happened to his mind between the time the fire broke out and the moment Mr. Stockdale pulled him out of the house by the scruff of his neck. The part of the story that no one ever mentioned, and that neither Finnie nor I would have known if my father hadn’t told us, was that Jim didn’t want to leave the house. For a while people speculated that Jim had been responsible for the fire, a contention unsupported by the fire department investigators, who said that it had been the result of faulty wiring and insulation that had not been manufactured to code.
Whatever the deep-seated psychological reason behind Jim Stockdale’s urge to run through the bonfire, if indeed there was one beyond the fact that he was a drunken idiot, it was common knowledge that Frank Hawthorne was the only person who could talk him out of it. As I held onto Jim, my arms wrapped securely around his legs, I hoped that Frank was somewhere close at hand and that Finnie would find him quickly.
Finnie did not return quickly, but someone else grabbed Jim’s arms and helped to hold him down. A few moments later there were sounds of a scuffle behind us. Someone yelled that a fight had broken out and everybody, including Jim, strained to see who was involved. Reasonably assured that Jim was no longer interested in running through the fire, I let go of his legs and jogged over to investigate the commotion.
A crowd was gathered on the edge of the clearing, where several cars were parked haphazardly. At first I couldn’t see, so I climbed up onto the bed of a pickup to get a better view.
The crowd had made a circle and contained within it were Frank Hawthorne and Finnie. Off to the side I saw Louise, crying, clutching her shoulder where her shirt was torn. Frank looked pretty drunk, judging from the way he was moving, and Finnie was bleeding from his lip. Frank had every conceivable advantage; he was older, bigger, stronger and the crowd was on his side. Finnie seemed to be holding his own, though, and although it was rumoured that Frank carried a knife there was no sign of any weapon.
This was not a hockey fight, nor was it like a fight on TV. Both Frank’s and Finnie’s eyes were bright with anger and their blows were wild and uncalculated. Finnie tagged Frank with a hard left and Frank looked like he might go down, but he recovered at the last second and caught Finnie solidly in the stomach. Finnie doubled over and Frank wrapped his arm around Finnie’s neck in a headlock and began feeding Finnie punches. It looked like Finnie was beaten.
I tried to work my way to the front of the crowd, pushing people aside as fast as I could. As I reached the front of the mêlée, Finnie, nose broken, lips bloody and swollen, both eyes blackened and swelling shut, still did not concede defeat. With Frank raining blows upon him, Finnie wrapped his arms around Frank’s legs, picked Frank up off the ground and began to spin him around. With an almost superhuman heave, he threw Frank over his head into the mass of people. There were cries of surprise from the people Frank landed on, then a hush from all but two people.
One was Jennifer Carlysle, a plain-looking girl in the 11th grade. I didn’t know her very well; she was shy and quiet and I was surprised to even see her at the party. As far as I knew, she didn’t usually go to these sorts of things. It turned out that this party was her first, having been coerced into coming by her boyfriend, Marty, Tom Kazakoff’s cousin. She was crying hysterically because Frank had landed squarely on top of her and her thumb had been broken. She didn’t know it was broken until almost a week later, when she finally went to the hospital. Marty kept telling her that it was fine, that she was just being a baby. She made the mistake of believing him and as a result her thumb never set properly and remained crooked for the rest of her life, as far as I know. I think she broke up with Marty after that.
The other person making noise was Frank Hawthorne. He was shrieking like a wounded animal, clutching his face and rolling around on the ground. Between Frank and Jennifer there was quite a ruckus going on, so I suppose that someone must have called the police or gone for help when it became clear what had happened. The police called an a
Because Frank had thrown the first punch and because Finnie was a minor, the police didn’t press charges, but Frank’s family sued Finnie’s dad, who settled out of court for what was a considerable sum if you were a member of the Hawthorne family, but a pittance if your last name was Walsh.
Neither Finnie nor Louise nor Frank ever publicly discussed the cause of the fight. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that Finnie arrived just in time. I would have known that anyway; Finnie always arrived just in time.
Not long after Finnie’s father gave the Hawthornes a ton of money for Frank’s eye, Joyce Sweeney and Finnie started dating. It was weird, to say the least. She had only gotten better as she’d grown older; to this day I still think she is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met. She had a way of making you feel completely at ease. You wanted to touch her, not necessarily in a sexual way, more like you would a dog or a cat. Joyce was a real catch, that much was obvious. I was happy for Finnie.
His fight with Frank Hawthorne changed the way many people looked at Finnie; he became the villain. Whereas before he was known as a mild-mannered, easygoing guy, after the fight people began to treat him like a time bomb. It didn’t matter that there had been obvious extenuating circumstances behind the altercation; Finnie was a rich kid who had blinded a poor kid in a fight. This really bothered Finnie; he’d always been sensitive about his family’s money and relied heavily on the acceptance of his peers to bolster his self-esteem. When kids avoided him in the halls at school, I think a part of him believed they were right.
While Finnie was struggling with his new image, my father and Mr. Palagopolis were busy battling the person they now only half-jokingly called the “one-arm bandit.” Pal had recently received claw number 22. After the last incident, both my father and Pal were more determined than ever to defeat their nemesis.
Their plan was to adapt the system making slight modifications. Whenever Pal took off the arm, he was to lock it up with my old bike lock, but he was no longer allowed to take it off at the school. Pal complained bitterly about this; he hated eating with the thing on and he hated going to the washroom with it on and he hated smoking with it on. Once he accidentally pinched his nose in the talons of the claw when he tried to retrieve his cigarette from his mouth.
It was smoking that made him a spectacle; he was eventually unable to smoke outdoors. One day in early January of 1988, he was outside the school enjoying a cigarette, his claw securely chained around a lamp post. He was still wearing the claw; he had only chained it up so he could smoke without fear of hurting himself. Unfortunately, some clever eighth graders discovered this made him the perfect target for snowballs. They pelted him with their icy missiles until he fell to the ground, his eyes wide with fear, unable to defend himself, unable to escape. I remembered that New Year’s Eve in 1981 when Pal had besieged us with snowballs and thought it strange that he didn’t fight back, but for some reason he seemed incapable of mounting a counter offensive. I think he was too surprised by the swiftness of their assault and the absurdity of his situation to even consider fighting back. The whole ordeal so flustered him that I was called over the PA system to the principal’s office. I had to go outside to undo the lock because Pal was too shaken up to remember the combination.
After that, Pal refused to smoke outside and I didn’t blame him. Pal never identified his attackers. A few days later, however, a number of eighth-grade students arrived at school and found two things: someone had glued their locks permanently shut with superglue and Mr. Palagopolis, the only person on school grounds who possessed a pair of bolt cutters, was a very busy man. There was no telling when he might have time to cut their locks off.
Sadly this small victory was short-lived. One fine wintry February afternoon, Pal was feeling a bit under the weather. He decided to take a quick nap on the couch in the janitor’s room. Fearing both my father’s reprimand and an ambush from the claw, Pal locked it to the leg of the couch and settled in for a short rest. When he awoke, feeling much refreshed, the claw was gone. The lock was there, undisturbed, but there was no disputing the fact that the one-arm bandit had struck again.
My father was livid. He combed every inch of the room for clues, talked to people whom he thought might have seen something and questioned Pal over and over again. Pal’s response was always the same. “I went to sleep and I wake up and the claw is gone. How it happens I have no ideas. I am asleep.”
That night at supper my father was in a particularly foul mood. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “Why would anyone want someone else’s arm?”
“Maybe they need it,” Sarah chirped.
“For what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe they just think they need it.”
“Could you make any less sense?” Louise asked.
“Probably,” Sarah said.
“Why does he keep getting the arms replaced? That’s what I don’t understand,” my mother said.
“Because if he didn’t the one-arm bandit would win,” I said.
“But he doesn’t even like them.”
“That’s not the point, Mary,” my father said. “Someone somewhere doesn’t want Pal to have those claws and if he stops replacing them, he admits that he’s been beaten. You can’t do that.”
“I don’t see why not. It’s just a piece of metal and plastic.”
“It’s a lot more than that. It’s his arm.”
To my father and others, the claw was more than an object. I think that every time the one-arm bandit struck, my father relived the trauma of losing his arm. A part of him believed that if he could track down the one-arm bandit, he might recover his own arm.
While my father wanted his arm back, Pal wanted his arm to stay away. He clung to the stubborn conviction that the claw was out to get him. Their search for the one-arm bandit was, in some bizarre way, parallelled by their attempts to heal themselves.
On August 9, 1988, the sport of hockey changed forever. Peter Pocklington, the owner of the Edmonton Oilers, traded Wayne Gretzky, Marty McSorley and Mike Krushelnyski to the Los Angeles Kings in exchange for Jimmy Carson, Martin Gelinas, three first-round draft picks and an estimated $20 million. He sold Wayne Gretzky, the Great One, the most talented hockey player in the history of the game. He sold him like a pair of shoes, a used car or a piece of furniture. I was shattered.
Even Finnie, who had never much liked Gretzky, was angered by the news. “It’s like the day the music died,” he said.
“What?” I wasn’t in the mood for one of Finnie’s riddles.
“You know, that song ‘American Pie.’ About the plane that went down with Buddy Holly and those other two guys on board and rock and roll was changed forever.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Why not?”
“Gretzky’s not dead.”
“Not physically, but he might as well be. He’ll never win the cup again. Not in Los Angeles. They don’t even have ice in Los Angeles.”
“Yes, they do.”
“No, they don’t. It doesn’t even get cold in the winter. It’s like a fucking tropical island.”
“They have ice in the arena.”
“That’s not the same thing. How can you love hockey if you’ve never played it? How can you play it if there’s no winter? If there’s no ice? How can you be a great hockey player in a place where people don’t love hockey?
“That’s not even the worst part of it,” he continued. “The worst part of it is that it doesn’t even matter where he plays, where anyone plays, anymore, not now. They’re just commodities. They may as well be impaled on rods and put onto a foosball table. There?
“Players get traded all the time, Finnie.”
“Yeah, but players don’t get sold all the time. Not players like Gretzky. What’s the point of being as good as he is if you can still be bought and sold? Is it just about money?”
“So what if it is? Money makes the world go around.”
“No, it doesn’t. That can’t be what hockey’s about. Hockey is about Georges Vezina and Bill Barilko and Peter Stastny and people playing a game because it’s part of who they are.”
After the Gretzky trade, Finnie started to dislike the United States. It’s true that almost all Canadians share an inherent mistrust of their neighbours to the south and I think that in most cases it’s justified because, let’s face it, America is nearly always up to something. Finnie, however, was much more adamant about his anti-Americanism than the rest of us. He once remarked that the Gretzky trade was either the day the United States started to buy Canada, piece by piece, or the day it completed the purchase.
That summer Louise and Joyce graduated from high school. Joyce was planning to go to McGill in the fall, but Louise wasn’t planning anything. Her marks were good enough to get into any university in the country, but she didn’t want to leave. She said that she would go eventually, when she felt she was ready, but until then she was staying in Portsmouth. She got a job as a cashier at the grocery store and my parents were more than pleased when she offered to pay her own expenses.