Sudden Death Overtime
a novella of hockey and vampires
by Steve Vernon
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday night 9pm.
No one noticed quite exactly when the long black bus stole into the parking lot of the Anchor Pub. As far as anyone knew the bus just sort of drifted into the Labrador coastal village of Hope's End like an unexpected snow flurry.
Things happen that way around here.
Judith Two-Bear leaned her elbows against the wood grain of the unvarnished table top. Her cigarette glowed like a lighthouse's lonely beacon, bobbing as she nodded three beats behind the music of the static-ridden radio. She'd parked herself at the window seat since dinner time. She liked to watch the world go by from the sanctuary of the town's only pub.
Several long slow warm beers later she found herself staring vaguely at the names and dates carved and inked into the table top. She knew some of them. She could guess at others and she wondered just who the hell the rest really were. How many lonely souls had made their mark on this table and then just sat here like so many half finished glasses of warm draft beer - just waiting to be swallowed but not quite yet.
Truthfully, she didn't think of any of this. Not in those exact words, any way. She felt it, perhaps. She breathed it in with the stale pub air. Her loneliness, her growing disappointment and her unvarying boredom were as much a part of her as the blood that sludged through her tired veins. She had lived her life and had nothing but time left to her keeping. She had seen her kids grow up and run away, her lovers grow cold and run away, she had seen life pull up to the curb and wave gaily once or twice before passing her right on by.
Her hands weighed heavy on the scarred pine tabletop. Her knuckles were cracked and leathered like old alligator skin, tattooed with nicotine and age. Her eyes had grown dull and nothing that hinted of girlhood was left to her save a shotgun blast of freckles playing hide-and-seek within the wrinkles and worry-lines that troughed down her cheeks like a memory of tears.
She stared at her flat beer.
The time drifted past the hope of anyone offering to take her home for any other reason but pity. Fergus had said he'd see her here, but so far he hadn't showed. She believed he'd only told her that to be kind. Fergus was a good man, after all, although he spent far too much time out there on that damned hockey rink with old Sprague.
What did grown men see in the rattle of sticks, the slashing of steel over ice and hockey sweaters worn way beyond funk?
Judith sat there, disinterestedly listening to the soft current of gossip prowling through the pub; folks wondering just where the black bus came from. Perhaps it was a fresh oil rig crew, or perhaps a wandering rock band. Perhaps a pack of tourists, far off course, with their pockets jingling with cartwheels of American silver and the promise of better days.
Judith knew better. No one in their right mind would come to Hope's End, Labrador where the only thing that kept the town going was the influx of oil rig workers who stopped here between shifts to get drunk and fed and laid; the three weeks of seal hunters who would stop here to get drunk fed and laid; and the occasionally dangled promise of incoming government money. So many promises washed up like waves on the rocky beach, only to be pulled away just as fast.
The lights dimmed as the town generator kicked up a notch.
The last tune on the jukebox crackled out, only to be replaced by a hockey game.
Judith stood up carefully.
Fergus wasn't coming, she decided. There had never been a hope that he would.
