One night — this would have been when the boy was already in his twenties — they were in their bedroom and heard the downstairs door slam.
“Mom,” Mikey shouted, “Daddy? I’m back.”
“Up here,” Rose Helen called out.
“Dad too?”
“I’m all right,” Druff said.
He loomed powerfully in their doorway, huge, vastly troubled. Druff had a sudden vision of burst seat belts, broken door locks.
“KMOX was fading,” their son said. “Sometimes, when it fades like that, you can pick it up better in the car. I listened out there.”
“Did we win?” Rose Helen pretended to her son she was a fan. You went along to get along.
“Afterward, they were talking to the Star of the Game? He said the owner is thinking of moving the team to Canada. Dad, is that true?”
“I don’t know, Mikey. I don’t know anything about it.”
“He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”
“No.”
“We sat in his box.”
“We were visiting firemen,” Druff said.
“But you talked with him.”
“Fireman to fireman. He wouldn’t recognize my hook and ladder today.”
“But we sat in his box. How’d we get to sit in his box?”
“God damn it, Mikey. I was barely introduced to the man. We had those seats because I was a guest of the St. Louis streets commissioner. He had an in. If he came here he could go out on the snowplows or ride up front in the trucks when they salt for ice.”
The boy had developed a curious tic. He closed his eyes when his father became impatient or said humiliating things to him. It was as if by squeezing the light from his vision he was able to hide, go so far the words never reached him. He did that now. It broke Druff’s heart, the son of a bitch.
The commissioner softened.
“Even if they moved,” he said, “you’d still be able to pick up their games on the radio.”
“If they moved to one of those states they only speak French?”
“Quebec is the only province they speak French. Don’t they already have a team?”
“The Montreal Canadiens,” Mikey said. “The Quebec Nordiques.”
“There, you see?”
“What if he took them to one of those far-off places? I wouldn’t even be able to pick them up in the car.”
“Then when they played in the States. You could hear them when they played Chicago. On the Pittsburgh station. Plenty of places.”
“Half their games are at home.”
“It hasn’t happened yet. These things are complicated. Most of the time they fall through.”
The thin reassurance seemed to settle him, but then he found out there was a newsstand downtown where they sold yesterday’s out-of- town papers. Each day the kid took their car and fought the traffic and went there to buy the St. Louis papers. He pored over details about the impending sale. Taking hope — more than hope, euphoria — when articles began to appear saying that a consortium of St. Louis businessmen was trying to put a package together to buy the team and keep it in the city. Mikey’s moods hung on these delicate negotiations. He followed the proceedings closely. He kept Druff posted. He dragged Druff in.
And Druff — this was what constituted current events for Mikey — almost felt honored, an elder statesman, a good gray eminence. He followed the proceedings himself. He sent Doug or Dick out to buy his own out-of-town papers, special-ordering the Canadian papers, not just the ones in Calgary and cities even farther west with a declared interest in acquiring the team, but the Toronto and Montreal papers, too, where the sale of the Blues was also current events. He went over the information with Mikey, parsing the various accounts and rumors like Americans in a foreign country discussing late-breaking but already outdated developments in the Cuban Missile Crisis, say, as new reports filtered down to the International Herald Tribune, and then to Americans lingering in foreign cities, waiting on every fresh detail.
In a way, they’d never been closer, more psychological with each other.
The team had gone into a slump. Mikey suggested they wouldn’t be themselves again until the issue of where they’d be playing next year was resolved.
“Most of the players are married,” he said. “They have homes, kids in school. In a situation like this they have to be under all sorts of pressure. They have to be worried about what they’ll be able to get for their houses. I mean if you’re forced to sell your house, doesn’t that mean you might have to take less for it than you could ordinarily expect? And I’ve been looking at the housing ads in the St. Louis papers. It’s a buyer’s market out there right now. They’d have to sell at a loss.”
“That’s true,” Druff agreed.
“And what about their kids? The players are young. Their children are mostly in grade school.”
“That’s right.”
“It puts a kid in a bad position. I mean, if he thinks he might be in a different city next year, let alone a different country, he’s going to have a lot on his mind. His grades are bound to suffer even if he isn’t deliberately trying to goof off.”
“There’s something in that.”
“And children can be cruel. His classmates don’t always understand that it isn’t the child’s dad who wants to move, that he’s only going where the job takes him.”
“So?”
“So maybe they’re fans, so maybe they think the team wants to leave town, that maybe they took a vote on it or something, that they’re deliberately betraying St. Louis. All right, they don’t know any better. But they could tease the kid, pass remarks. And if the kid isn’t mature enough, and doesn’t entirely understand the situation himself, maybe he feels the same way. Unconsciously, he could begin to side with his classmates. He could become depressed, even sullen. Communication breaks down. He won’t speak to his dad, he’s nasty to his mom.”
“I see what you’re driving at.”
“Sure. And meanwhile this is going on in all the houses of all the players. In the defensemen’s families, in the houses of the wings. In the home of the goalie, in the home of the center. Even in the coach’s house, though his kids are probably older and ought to know better. Pressure’s got to build up. There are going to be fights. Things will get said which shouldn’t get said. It’s in the heat of the moment, sure, but that doesn’t change anything.”
“I’m certain you’re right.”
“And aren’t we forgetting something here, Dad?”
“What’s that?”
“That no matter what we read in the papers, no matter how many St. Louis and Banff, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and other Canadian columnists and newspapers we read, we’re only getting part of the story. They’re there. They’re on the scene. They’re hearing things we can’t possibly know anything about — talk in the locker room, things they pick up on the road from opposing players.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“The latest rumors about the changing positions and attitudes of the various owners. Gee, if we think we’re confused about all the mixed signals that come in, you can imagine how they must feel!”