The Green Hornet
(Dec 20/05)
The man who made the ice at the park had two fingers and a thumb on each hand. He’d wrangle the ice-making hose up under his arm, then secure it with a sock he tied round his jacket sleeve just above the crook of his elbow. He drank salted draft beer at the Miss Montreal Tavern or the Green Hornet and sometimes in the caretaker’s room in the back of the clubhouse. He was often spotted sidling down Lakeshore Boulevard with a sock still knotted in his coat sleeve drunk on salted beer and briny eggs. They said he made the best ice in the city, and never once took a day off during ice-making season, which lasted from early December to late February.
The man who made the ice at the park had two fingers and a thumb on each hand. He’d wrangle the ice-making hose up under his arm, then secure it with a sock he tied round his jacket sleeve just above the crook of his elbow. He drank salted draft beer at the Miss Montreal Tavern or the Green Hornet and sometimes in the caretaker’s room in the back of the clubhouse. He was often spotted sidling down Lakeshore Boulevard with a sock still knotted in his coat sleeve drunk on salted beer and briny eggs. They said he made the best ice in the city, and never once took a day off during ice-making season, which lasted from early December to late February.
I once saw him toss the ice-making hose like a lariat over his head then around his shoulders, then plunk it down exactly where he wanted it, on an especially gritty patch of ice or up against the boards where the slush and hard snow collected in dog turdy clumps. When I got older and could pass for eighteen, I would sit two tables away from him in the Green Hornet and watch as he regaled the other caretakers with that time back in early December 1958, when he had to water the rink 12 times before he could get the ice smoothened out just the way he liked it.
I often wondered if he’d lost his fingers in an ice-making accident, maybe had them sheared off with an edger or the spinning blades of a snow blower. The snow blower explanation seemed unlikely, as he never used one, claiming it left tire tracks and chain bites on the ice surface, and made the ice all bumpy and impossible to pass a puck on without it jumping the boards and landing in some neighbor’s backyard.
Every Spring thaw the same two kids would ferret out lost pucks and sell them back to us when the ice froze over and was smooth enough to skate on without loosing your balance and knocking a tooth clear out of your head. Last I heard the ice making man was living in an old folks home somewhere in East end Montreal, the same one where Irving Layton lives and some other poet with a hard to pronounce consonantal name.
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