March 4, 2020

McGuire

It was a cold Saturday night on a day the city had been pummelled with 10 inches of snow. The kind of snow you see on a Christmas beer commercial: big fluffy flakes that fall in the most gentle, innocuous fashion, methodically, all day long, until you find yourself digging your car out of a snow pile that had formed, almost miraculously, by late afternoon. It was on that mid-December Saturday, 20 years ago, as I sat at home watching the hockey game, that I first found out Shaun McGuire had murdered his parents.

I remember it as though it had happened yesterday.

It was the second period intermission and the Habs were beating the Bruins 3–2. I can close my eyes and picture Steve Shutt scoring the go-ahead goal with about four minutes left. I was just getting up to fix myself a snack when I heard a knock on the side door. The side door was a private entrance to the basement my Dad and I had converted into an apartment, complete with kitchen and shower, the summer before. I opened the door and found shivering before me Shaun McGuire, the torn khaki knapsack with the faded April Wine patch on the back he always lugged around in one hand, and his 10-year-old sister, Nicole, in the other.

One look told me all I needed to know.

It’s a look that I’ll never forget.

Some things you remember and some things you don’t. That’s just the way it is.

Especially tragedies.

Murders, earthquakes, plane crashes. Some people remember them and that day as if they were watching it on the six o’clock news. Go out on the street and pick a guy at random and he’ll tell you what he had for lunch the day Kennedy was shot, but he can’t remember what they served at his wedding.

Go figure.

As for me, my memory is generally a little hazy. Blame it on the drugs, blame it on indifference, I don’t know. I have little or no recollection of Bobby or Martin. I can’t tell you the score in the football game on that Monday night that John was killed in front of the Dakota. I don’t even know what year it was when the Pan Am flight met its fate over the skies of Lockerbie. As for Billie Joe McAllister, well I can’t even find the Tallahatchie bridge. But I can tell you anything you want to know about that Saturday night.

Hell, I had to tell it to the police enough times.

“Hey, kid,” he said. He called me kid cause he was two months older than me.

“Who’s winning the game?”

“The good guys,” I replied with a terse smile, “3–2 going into the third.” Shaun was a long-time Bruins fan. There could be only one reason that he was missing this game.

“Wouldn’t be so confident if I were you, Ryan,” he teased. “Your Habs have a habit of choking in the third period.” He fished a pack of cigarettes from his knapsack and lit one without saying a word. His sister was dressed in a green parka with imitation fur around the hood. Her head seemed so small and fragile in that hood. She had a red scarf around her mouth with matching mittens dangling from the end of her sleeves where they had been sewn on to prevent her from losing them. My mom had done the sewing at Shaun’s request. Her light blue eyes peering from over the scarf gave no hint as to what had just transpired.

“Need a favour from you, kid,” Shaun said as he finished his cigarette. “I want you to take care of Nicole until the police come.”

“You called the police?” I asked in amazement.

“Nope, you’re going to call them. Just give me a couple of minutes head start. I hate to do this to you, but I figure you owe me after today.” Shaun, in his typical unselfish manner, had assisted in all three of my goals in our hockey game that afternoon. The only hat-trick I would ever record in my short-lived hockey career.

He then kissed his sister goodbye and gently pushed her through the doorway. He was halfway down our front walk when he turned around and shouted, “Stick with the wrist shot, kid. It’ll make you a star.” And that was the last time I saw Shaun McGuire, until 20 years later when I caught sight of that unmistakeable walk, some would call it a swagger, near the Air Canada counter at the Ft. Lauderdale airport.

There’s a bar on the boardwalk in Hollywood, Florida that I like to hang at when vacationing down south called The Rocket, in honour of the great Montreal player Maurice the Rocket Richard. As you walk through the entrance, you suddenly feel that you are transposed, leaving sunny South Florida and walking into a tavern on St. Catherine Street. Though hot and humid on the outside, I always get the urge to stamp my feet, liberating the fictitious snow from my boots.

I came across it by chance many years ago when I was still single and visiting my parents who had retired in a condo in nearby Hallandale. My father had a morning ritual that included an hour-long walk on the boardwalk. He would wake up before the crack of dawn, flick on the television and switch it to the weather channel in order to determine how warmly to dress. They were renting a one-bedroom apartment at the time, and I would be passed out in the hide-a-bed in the living room. I finally gave up on trying to sleep through his morning preparation and decided to join him on his regular walk. It was on that walk that I came across The Rocket and its signature white satellite dish. I revisited it later that night to watch the Canadien-Blackhawk game.

The bar is owned by two French Canadians who, when vacationing down south many years ago, decided not to go back. The satellite dish in front brings in the games from Canada as one dines on local Quebecois fare while downing one Molson after another.

Though the bar is adorned with more fleur de lys than one sees on St. Jean Baptiste day, the passion of its occupants is not of Quebec nationalism; the one driving, unifying force is hockey.

Sidle up to the bar and the conversation will be familiar, if repetitive: the speed of Cournoyer, the slapshot of Lemaire, Savard’s spin-o-rama. We’ll all nod our heads in unison when recalling the time that J.C. Tremblay scored from behind his blue line. If some unsuspecting Boston fan should wander in, it won’t be long before he’s met with a chorus of “too many men on the ice,” Don Cherry’s gaffe, yes, that Don Cherry, that gave the Bruins a penalty that resulted in a Hab goal to clinch a playoff win.

And if you stay long enough, and drink enough beers, and say all the right things, you might inspire the confidence of the others. They may ask you your name as you buy them a round, but more likely, they want to know where you’re from. Ah, Montreal, they nod in unison. What part? So you tell them the name of the West Island suburb that produced so many great players and the streets where you used to hitch onto the bumpers of passing cars and trucks in order to slide dangerously down the street. And when you tell them your old high school, you will notice a flicker of recognition through the haze produced by a room full of chain-smokers. One of whom, some old-timer no doubt, who will invariably look you up and down, like the guy who tries to guess your weight at the fair, and try to assess your age. And he’ll take a long gulp of his beer, look you straight in the eye, and ask you in a forlorn, wistful way if you remember Shaun McGuire.

“Probably too young to remember McGuire,” some other will interject before you have the chance to answer.

“Could’ve been the next Lemieux,” another is sure to say.

“Don’t give me any of this Lindros bullshit,” the first would answer as they turn their attention away from me. “This kid had it all.”

I usually leave at this point. Drunk enough to wonder if I forgot my gloves before eventually realizing I’m still in Florida. I leave to avoid the hour-long speculation about how great this kid, who never even played Quebec Junior A, might have been. I leave before hearing about the two bodies found on the garage floor. I leave before hearing what a damn shame it was. And I always leave before telling them that Shaun McGuire was my best friend.

I didn’t call the police until after the game. I waited until after the three-star selection. At least an hour after Shaun took off. This is the first time I have ever admitted this, although many, including the police, have suspected it for years.

Amazingly, Nicole, who had munched quietly on chips during the entire hour, confirmed my lie about how long she had been there. To this day, I don’t know whether it was because of a 10 year old’s concept of time or some innate sense of knowing I was helping her brother. I certainly never coached her. During the entire time in the basement, we never exchanged a single word.

It took only two minutes after calling 911 that we heard sirens. Funny how quickly they come for the dead. The irony is never lost on me.

My message to the police was a cryptic one. “I think that something has happened at the McGuires,” I had shouted with the expected sense of urgency, before giving the address. Minutes later, we heard, then saw, the three cherry tops and ambulance race by our house down the street. The third police car spun out of control and hit a snowbank in front of Bobby Humphrie’s house. The tire marks it made on the snow that covered his front lawn stayed much longer, serving as a lasting memory of that night, than did the police’s yellow “scene of crime” cordon that had enveloped the McGuires’ grey bungalow for a week.

They found the bodies, face front, at the foot of the door leading to the house from the garage.

Single bullet hole to each head.

He must have been waiting for them by the door.

The McGuires had a regular Saturday night routine. Dinner at the Miller, an Anglo tavern down by the water. The food was cheap and the pitchers of beer, of which they usually shared three or four, were even cheaper. Back home at 9:30 to drop off the missus before Mr. McGuire went out for some serious drinking. Oh, I knew the routine well.

Dinner at 7:00, home at 9:30, beatings at about 2:30 in the morning. Regular as clockwork. Only this Saturday night, Mr. McGuire didn’t get to go out for his regular nightcap.

The cops said that they had been shot with a .22 caliber pistol that they had recovered lying next to the bodies. Shaun’s prints were all over the gun.

He had once shown me that gun.

It was a Sunday afternoon and Shaun had babysitting duty while the McGuires attended the funeral of the husband of one of their co-workers. He had conned me into joining him by telling me that Elizabeth Sorenson, my fantasy girl of the week, a girl I had never said more than hello to in Chemistry class, was planning on dropping by. I remember it well because I had never seen Mr. McGuire in a suit before. His wife had splashed on too much perfume and he wrinkled his nose and made fun of her in a good-natured way as he handed me 20 bucks to order pizza and pop. I couldn’t help thinking that he seemed especially cheerful considering he was going to a funeral. It wasn’t until many years later, after attending an Irish wake, that I understood the bittersweet feelings that they awoke.

Anyway, Elizabeth Sorenson never showed up and we spent the afternoon eating pizza and playing Go Fish with Nicole. It was while we were playing cards that we began having contests as to who could hold their breath the longest. I think that Shaun was feeling guilty that he had suckered me into spending the afternoon with them, and he picked a game he knew I could win. He was smoking a pack a day in those days, and even Nicole could almost match him in that contest. I still marvelled at how he had the stamina to play double shifts during our games. The conversation then turned to one of our favourite topics: what was the worst way to die. Sex, sports, and death filled most of our waking hours. To this day, I can’t begin to understand, let alone analyze, my own particular morbid fascination with death I had at the time. Being trapped underwater beneath an impenetrable sheet of ice was my nightmare scenario. Shaun thought that being doused with gasoline and being burned alive was worse. When it came to Nicole’s turn, she shrugged her shoulders in an unconscious mirror image of her brother.

“Mrs. Davidson says that being dead is better than being alive,” she stated matter-of-factly. Mrs. Davidson was an elderly lady confined to a wheelchair who lived down the street. The little kids avoided her house religiously, particularly on Halloween, when it was rumoured that the demons which had made her sick would afflict anyone who passed through her door. My parents were amongst some of the people on the block who occasionally did her shopping. I sometimes delivered the groceries myself. She was actually a very friendly, quite lucid, gentle woman who tended to the hundreds of plants she had scattered around the house. It wasn’t really a greenhouse, although her kitchen resembled pictures of a Brazilian rainforest I had seen in National Geographic. She had contracted MS in her late 50s and was a paraplegic. Rather than sell her two-story house, she contracted two French Canadian brothers, Lacroix and Lacroix Carpenters, to renovate the house and construct a series of ramps. I never worked up the nerve to ask her if I could skateboard down those ramps.

“I wouldn’t want to live if I couldn’t walk,” said Shaun.

“Yeah, right,” I countered. In those days, most of our conversations were a series of boasts and contradictions.

He took his thumb and forefinger and formed the universal symbol for a gun and pointed it at his chest. “Straight through the heart, Ryan, my boy.”

“Tell me another one, McGuire,” I sneered, “with what gun?”

He sent Nicole to the kitchen to get more pop and with a wink led me down the stairs to the basement. I waited at the foot of a small alcove as he got down on all fours, removed the hatch of a small sliding door, and burrowed forward until all I could see were the soles of his Converse. He slid out holding a red toolbox. He fiddled with the lock for a moment and then popped the lid. He smiled smugly as he showed me the gun. He loved being able to call my bluff. I had never seen a gun before, except on television.

“The less you know, the better,” said Shaun in response to my series of questions before he returned the toolbox to its hiding place. I knew that there was no point in pressing him. Nobody could be more stubborn than Shaun. “Be careful,” was all I said. Neither of us ever mentioned it again.

I witnessed a hit-and-run across the street from my law office last year and had to spend the better part of the afternoon at the police station answering questions and signing a statement. A speeding car had clipped a pedestrian who had been crossing with the light. The pedestrian, a courier carrying a package from the building across the street, had suffered a broken leg. Apparently, I was the only witness at the scene and the police were not altogether pleased with my inability to clearly remember the car or license plate. I made my living berating witnesses on the stand for their hazy recollection of the facts and it was now embarrassing to be on the other side.

It was all a blur. I couldn’t even remember the colour.

Three different detectives took turns trying to jar my memory. I must have told them that I was sorry 50 times. They were about to suggest hypnosis when a policewoman walked in to announce that the guy had turned himself in. They smiled, patted me on the back, and sent me home. That had been my second time in a police station. My first was as unpleasant.

“You were his best friend, right?”

I nodded my head.

“You plan this with him?”

“No.”

“He tell you that he was planning on killing his folks?”

“No.”

“You played hockey with him?”

“Yes.”

“Where did he get the gun?”

“I don’t know.”

“His sister. What’s her name?”

“Nicole.”

“What was she doing at your house?”

“I told you. The doorbell rang and she was standing at the door.”

“No sign of the brother?”

I shook my head.

“What did you do?”

“I called the McGuires and then the police.”

“Any idea where he might go?”

“Not a clue.”

That, in a way, was the biggest lie of all. I didn’t really know where he was going. But I did have a clue.

“Got a postcard from California today, Ryan, my boy,” he said as we shuffled along the sidewalk, kicking at the piles of recently raked leaves.

“From Chuck?”

“Yup. Picture of a couple of naked babes on the beach.”

“Yeah, right. Let me see.”

“You’re too young, kid,” he replied, punching me playfully in the ribs. “I’ll dig out the card for your 18th birthday.”

I punched him back but didn’t say anything. I had enough pictures of naked women in the Playboy I had carefully concealed in our attic. I was more interested in knowing what Chuck, an old classmate of ours, had to say about living in Los Angeles.

“How does he like living with his dad?” I asked after a while.

“He doesn’t say much,” replied Shaun. “Says that the divorce was the best thing that could happen to him. Lucky bastard.”

“Maybe your parents will divorce,” I said hopefully.

“Nah, they could never agree on how to split up the kids. You know how they love us so,” he said sarcastically. “Tell me, kid, what’s it like to have a normal father?” This was a common theme with Shaun.

“My dad’s not so normal,” I countered defensively.

“Yeah, right. How long is it to drive to California, kid?” He changed the subject without missing a beat.

“You thinking of heading out that way?”

“Figure I could visit old Chuck during Christmas. I’m tired of all this white Christmas bullshit.”

“You’ll miss our tournament in T.O. They say the place is going to be full of scouts.”

“Fuck the scouts,” he said, giving a passing car the finger, “they already know I can play. I say we hit the beach. How long do you think it would take? You’re the geography whiz.”

I decided to humour him. “L.A. is about 3000 miles from Montreal. If you figure on 60 miles per hour for an average speed, that works out to 50 hours of driving. That’s five days if you average about 10 hours a day. It’s a hell of a way to go for a swim in the ocean.”

“How long is it to fly?”

“Five hours,” I answered at once. I knew the flying times to almost any destination in the world.

“What do you say, kid, we cash in our savings and get out of here.”

“What about hockey?” I asked.

“Fuck hockey!”

“What about Nicole?”

And we never talked about going to California again. We both knew that he could never leave his sister behind with his parents.

I never mentioned Chuck or California to the police.

I always wonder how long it took him to get there.

There wasn’t anything to keep me in Montreal after the incident. Yeah, that’s what they called it, the McGuire Incident. I sort of did a sleepwalk act through the end of high school. The celebrity status—best friend of the guy who shot his parents—was short-lived. I had as little to say to my friends and classmates as I did to the police. The story had run its course by the time the snow had melted in April. Most of my graduating class were obsessed with the rites of spring. I only wanted to get out of there.

I enrolled at the University of Toronto the following fall. I was ready for a liberal arts education that would soon lead me to law school. I stopped playing hockey by the time I got to Toronto. I never really had the legs for it and the desire, well, the desire left me when Shaun walked away.

Of course there were sightings. There was bound to be. McGuire was playing for a semi-pro team in Germany or Switzerland. For a few months, there was a rumour that McGuire had had plastic surgery. Many insisted that a highly touted Swedish rookie that was burning up the league was in fact Shaun in disguise. The height and build were right, but there was no sparkle in the eyes. The police even went so far as to interview the unfortunate Swede but came to the same conclusion that I had weeks before.

Finally, most people resigned themselves to the fact that he was dead. Nobody could disappear for that long. For a while, every time they pulled a floater out of the lake, someone would suggest that it was McGuire who had flung himself in during a fit of remorse.

I knew the only remorse he had was that he hadn’t done it sooner.

My parents never hit me. But I knew it was something which happened in a lot of homes. Some kids came to school sporting fresh bruises. “Slipped on the ice,” they would say. “Fell."

The McGuire kids slipped on a lot of ice, even in the summer. Shaun used to shrug it off. Much like he reacted to his almost weekly visits to detention or the principal’s office.

“Scares the shit outta the other team, eh, Ryan,” he said, showing off a new shiner. “Think anyone will go into the corner with me now?” We were at the rink, waiting for our skates to get sharpened. The sound of metal rubbing against metal filled the room as we sipped on our Cokes. The noise wasn’t loud enough to prevent me from hearing his next sentence which he muttered under his breath. “If that bastard touches her again, I’ll kill him.”

I never said anything then. What are you supposed to say? It wouldn’t be the first idle threat spewed from a teenager lashing out against his parents. Nor the last.

Did I suspect what was going on? Maybe. In a vague, hazy way. Shaun was more angry at his mother. The way she stood passively by. Stoic. Seemingly unmoved by the beatings taking place under her own roof. I guess it’s easy to block it out. I know I did.

They put Nicole in a foster home in Winnipeg. My parents offered to take her in, and I think she would have liked that, but the case worker decided the best thing was to send her as far away from the neighbourhood as possible. She wrote us for a few years, but then the letters slowed to a trickle. I still keep some of her Christmas cards. Last time I was in Florida, my mom showed me a postcard from Australia. It said she was married and expecting a kid. There was no return address.

They say abusive parents were abused themselves. That it can be a vicious cycle. I don’t know. I try not to think about it.

Times have changed.

My wife and I worry when the kids stray out of our sight.

Times have changed.

We used to ride our bikes all through the neighbourhood until well after dark. When we were kids, Shaun and I would ride the trails in the woods behind our suburban community. We would hunt for salamanders under big flat rocks and chase each other into the pond that lay just beyond the tree line. We would soak in the water and discuss our dreams. Shaun wanted to be a professional hockey player. He was already playing in a league of kids three years older than him. I wanted to fly planes. A few years later, we were hitching rides to Dorval Airport to watch the planes take off and land.

Take off and land.

I still like planes. I still like airports. For some reason, I wasn’t as shocked as I might have been when I saw Shaun McGuire at the Fort Lauderdale airport.

He turned around to face me as I was staring at his back. I didn’t call out his name. I didn’t wave or motion him in any way. I just stared. I guess you can sense these things. If you’re on the run, in hiding, whatever you want to call it, for 20 years, you develop a keen sixth sense.

They tell me that I’ve got the type of face that never grows old. My wife claims you could lay a hundred pictures of 10 year olds in front of her and she could pick out mine in a second. At school reunions, when old classmates slip up alongside me and announce I haven’t changed a bit, well, they really mean it. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not. It’s just what it is.

I’m not sure if I would have recognized Shaun if not for his walk. He had put on weight, his hair was thinning, he had gotten old. I guess he looked like what a 37-year-old man was supposed to look like. I had the picture of a 17-year-old kid burned forever into my brain. He flashed me a smile, recognizing me immediately, and walked over.

“Hey, Ryan,” he said still smiling, “how you doing?”

“Good,” I replied. Three or four seconds of silence came between us as I thought of what I would say next. I had so much to ask him. Where he had gone? His escape. His running. What was he doing now? We had 20 years to catch up on. I wanted to tell him about my wife. My kids. Then the intercom announced the final boarding call for the Delta flight to Chicago. He shrugged his shoulders and thrust out his hand. It was rough and callused.

“That’s me,” he said, pointing at the speakers high above.

“How you doing?” I asked, looking straight into his eyes.

He gave me the old McGuire smile and embraced me with both arms. “I’m doing good, kid, I’m doing good.”

I returned his smile, nodding my head at the same time, and watched him walk away. I waited for him to turn around and when he did, I beat him to the punch.

“Still using that wrist shot, McGuire,” I called out, “still using that wrist shot.” As he waved for the final time, I started making plans to join a senior hockey league back in Toronto. It was time to lace on those skates again.

The end.