The Uninvited Guest. John Degen

know. I can win it, but only you can own it. You’ve told me this before.”

      “Do those two mobsters own the Cup?” Stan asked.

      “Two-Second, no, I told you already. You own the Cup.”

      “So, look at the Cup. You will take all that money you’re making because you won this Cup, and you’ll divide it up and it will all go away into the world. All that money is long gone already, some to your family, some to these two guys, some to you. Do you think this Cup gives a shit about your money?”

      “I guess, no, I don’t know what you mean.” He was blinking now, trying to see Stan’s point through a clear vodka fog.

      “Stop thinking about these two guys. That’s just life. Everyone’s got his shit to deal with. They’re your shit, so deal with them, but don’t let them ruin this, this moment when this Cup, which you do not own and never will no matter how many fancy goals you score, this Cup is here for you. It’s a short time, believe me. Tomorrow, I take this Cup away from you, we’re back on a plane and you, my boy, you may never touch this Cup again after that. Stranger things have happened. Have you ever heard of Bill Barilko? Compared to that fact, those two big uglies mean nothing. You get my point? I see you standing around worrying about two men who will steal your money. You want to worry about someone in this room, worry about me, because it’s me who will take this Cup away tomorrow.”

      “Two-Second, you win. You are the scariest man here.” The young man smiled and slapped Stan between the shoulder blades. “From now on, I worry only about you.”

      “Some day, Berschin, trust me, you’ll be closing your eyes and chipping rocks through your fence rails out there, rather than chipping pucks past goalies in the finals. When hockey is through with you it will let you know, believe me, and then those gangsters will be through with you as well. There’s always another fucking superstar.”

      Berschin nodded and refilled his glass from one of the dozen clear, half-empty bottles on the table in front of him. “You are the wise old man of the Cup, yes Two-Second?”

      “Damn right,” said Stan, and walked away, trembling from sudden anger. It was a cruel speech in many ways, and a kindness. It made him feel briefly equal to the brilliant young player, an unfamiliar but satisfying feeling. On his way past the bar, Stan made a point of introducing himself to the two gangsters. Not caring if they understood him, he shook hands with them and looked each of them straight in the eyes.

      The next evening, on the flight from Moscow, Stan fell asleep immediately after dinner. He’d felt all day as though a cold were coming on, and was glad this would be his last trip overseas for the season. The Cup sat secured in its case and strapped in with a seat belt in the first class seat beside him. He always gave the Cup the window seat, as that kept him between it and the curious who walked by it over and over on every flight.

      Sometime between dinner and their initial landing in Montreal, over the Atlantic, Stan Cooper’s heart stopped beating. The cold and indigestion he had been feeling was, in fact, a building infarction, and Stan passed on as he’d always hoped to, in his sleep with the Cup beside him. Because he died unnoticed while crossing time zones, no accurate time of death would ever be assigned to Stan.

      The death of “Two-Second” Stan, of pulmonary infarction at the age of 72, was a problem for the airline flying his body home. The flight did not end until Toronto, but Stan’s death was discovered on the descent into Montreal, by a startled cabin attendant trying to wake him. Normally, the body of a passenger who died inflight would be removed from the seating area at the first opportunity. Bodies were then transferred into thick cardboard carrying cases, and stored with the luggage below decks.

      While there was enough room in storage for both Stan and the trophy, the airline worried about its legal and financial liability around the Cup. The trophy had boarded the plane as a passenger and was considered the property and responsibility of Stan Cooper, its keeper. This was the standard agreement the League made with airlines in order to ensure Stan kept his eyes on the trophy at all times.

      With Stan out of the picture, and no other League representative on the flight, the airline lawyers worried that liability would transfer to them, and they didn’t want it, not even for the short forty-five-minute hop from Montreal to Toronto. No one they contacted could put a price on the historic trophy.

      Stan and his beloved Cup were both carried from the airplane at Dorval Airport and stored under armed guard, in an empty hospitality suite owned by the airline. In an obituary in the Montreal Gazette, one writer suggested this wrinkle was Stan’s way of finally delivering to Montreal the Cup that was rightfully theirs, the Cup he’d stolen away with his famous two-second blunder in 1951.

      The League sent Antonio Chiello to make the pickup. Tony worked with Stan at the head office in Toronto, and had helped him prepare the Cup for travel for the last two years. Tony rode to Montreal, a passenger in the hearse the League hired to care for Stan’s remains. Childless and divorced, Stan had been the last of his line of Coopers for over twenty-five years. Tony Chiello was the closest he’d had to family.

      Six

      Only once, in August 1989, had Stan run across a situation with the Cup he felt he couldn’t handle on his own. The championship trophy had been booked for a party by a young left-winger named Dalton Gunn, in his hometown of Eganville, Ontario, a five-hour drive from Toronto. It was a standard weekend job—drive up on the Friday night and figure out the town, shepherd the Cup all the next day when an impromptu tour of the townsfolk would be begged of him, stand watch during the drunken Saturday night festivities trying not to get too in the bag himself, and sneak the trophy back out of town before sunrise and the mischievous hangovers of Sunday. He’d pulled this job countless times in countless small towns within a clear day’s drive of Toronto.

      Stan packed the Cup in a League van, and took the northern route. He left Toronto at its top end, on the two-lane Highway 7, avoiding for the most part the bung of weekend cottage traffic that plagued the major highway routes. It was a slow drive all the same and, just before sunset, Stan pulled into a provincial park to eat the sandwiches and cookies he’d packed for himself. He parked the van as close to water as he could get, rolled down all the windows and ate looking out across a short expanse of lake to a massive stone bluff. The park brochure told him the cliff was home to First Nations petroglyphs carved high above the water, but he couldn’t see any such things from his seat. The cliff face caught the last light of day, and Stan sat on after his food, enjoying the reflected heat radiating down on him.

      Eganville was two more hours to the north, and Stan kept a careful watch at the road edges for deer. Early evening was a restless time for deer, he knew, and more than once on his many summer drives Stan had been forced from the pavement by a wandering doe. Once, in thick fog, he had just missed a large buck that had lost its footing on the slick pavement and crashed to his haunches trying to escape Stan’s headlights. The desperate animal bucked and twisted in the middle of Stan’s lane and he had to watch carefully while he steered past, to make sure the poor thing didn’t bang a hoof or antler against his fender in terror. For the rest of the fog, Stan slowed the van below sixty kilometres an hour, and honked his horn at regular intervals. If he hit a mature buck at high speed, chances were they’d both be killed by the impact, and then who knows what would happen to the Cup, abandoned in favour of death on a deserted northern roadway.

      Stan reached Eganville by ten o’clock, and checked into the hotel on the main street. Above a certain latitude, the Canadian towns Stan visited for his job pretty much followed the same plan. A central main street near either a river, lake or rail line, a compact collection of local businesses and services huddled together in a clump around the central intersection, a small school, usually at least one church (sometimes as many as three even for the smallest populations), a hockey arena, some kind of local diner, a gas station, and a hotel with a tavern on the main floor. Eganville followed the plan.

      Stan secured the Cup in his room, tested the door lock several times and descended to the tavern by a creaking back staircase that smelled alarmingly of woodsmoke and grease.

      “That better be